Firefly is not mine. Much credit to hoperules as always.

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II. Purple Bellies The UAV Tiber was leaving the Rim for supplies and repairs, and Commander Harken found himself regretting it. He had a duty to perform at this end of space, one his superiors would never assign him, especially not now.

The Reavers were getting bolder, moving further into human territory, striking more frequently. He’d reported this fact, like almost every other border commander, but he never received a response from Central Command. As far as anyone in the Core had cared, Reavers didn’t exist.

Then the Miranda Broadcast came, and now everyone knew those godforsaken monsters did exist. But there would still be nothing from the Alliance.

“They made them, after all.” Aloud, it seemed more real. In his head, it felt like a bad dream, but of course it wasn’t. “The Alliance made the Reavers, in an effort to maintain control over the populace of Miranda. An experiment. All for the sake of bringing further order to a universe of chaos and brutality.” Hard to believe, that not too long ago, he’d thought that was a worthy goal. Now he wasn’t so sure.

His office’s intercom suddenly emitted static for thirty seconds, one of the results of a year’s continuous patrol with no maintenance. “Commander, the Intel team has arrived on board.”

Harken tapped a button on his desk to reply. “Do they want anything?” Intelligence people tended to be demanding, commandeering equipment and personnel without giving a reason.

“Access to our secure communications link and to be left alone, sir.”

“Very well then. Grant them access.” Somehow that simple request managed to be unnerving.

There was not a military officer alive who did not hate the Bureau of Intelligence. Intel had not been of much use since the war. These days, Harken was willing to bet all of its work involved destroying political dissent; it had been Intel that had tried to quiet Miranda Broadcast stirrings, declaring it fake on the Cortex, telling military officers to reassure their crew that it was fake.

Harken, however, could not lie to those under his command. It was too dishonest. Dishonest to his people, dishonest to the memory of innocent Miranda, dishonest to that woman who had been raped, skinned, and eaten alive in that recording. He wondered if his integrity had lead to the beginnings of treasonous thought on the Tiber.

He sighed as he pulled a list of supplies up on the screen. The sooner the Intel team was gone, the better.

- - - - -

Hunter drifted silently back through the team. The leader, the ‘handler’, assumed that, since all Hunter remembered was his Academy training and his work for the Alliance, there would be very little ‘handling’ involved in the job. The man often let Hunter out of his sight, allowed the teen to operate based on his own conclusions.

That supposition could be the man’s ruin, not that Hunter cared. He was going to finish this mission, and the rest of the team was dead weight.

The other six didn’t notice him, partly because he wanted it that way and partly because they never wanted to. He drifted to the back of the group, then a yard behind, then another, and another, until they had walked around a corner and out of sight.

Fear made him stop in his tracks. Once, he watched one of his classmates attempt a trick like this during a mission. She was caught and taken back to the Academy. The girl had returned a drone, incapable of real problem solving. She could only make calculations.

Hunter could not push the fear aside, so he pushed through it instead. He wanted to complete this mission, to remove the threat of River Tam, more than he wanted to be afraid.

The fear didn’t shrink, but it no longer froze him in place or clouded his reasoning. As unobtrusively as possible, Hunter walked calmly and quickly back to where the ship had docked. The soldiers at the door let him pass without comment or suspicious glance. Sometimes it was good to wear Intel black and scare people.

He took care of the computers immediately. No system in the Alliance had beaten him yet, and the Tiber’s didn’t even put up a fight. He made sure it would not detect the Intel ship’s takeoff.

The Intel ship was engineered for stealth and speed, so all he had to do to stay hidden was simply switch off the pulse beacon and change the communication channel, tasks he complete in minutes. They couldn’t find him now.

Hunter smiled as he disengaged the ship. Nothing could stop him.

- - - - - - -

“Commander!”

Harken turned, and found a tall man in black rushing towards him, pushing his way through the bustling bridge. Intel. Best to simply comply with whatever he wanted and get it done with. “Yes?”

“Find my ship and stop that freak! Destroy it, disable it, I don’t care!”

The hysteria in the man’s voice threw Harken off a little. Intel people were always inhumanly calm in his experience. This situation had to be very, very bad. “Nav-stat, are there any other ships around us?” They were several hours out from Persephone on a course directly to the repair and resupply station. Space should be dead.

The young man at the console shook his head. “No, sir.”

“It’s a stealth ship,” the Intel man muttered, stomping his way to the communications station. He shoved the woman working there out of the way and input something. “That should—what?” He turned back to Harken, eyes wide and frantic. “You have to look.”

Harken had a deadline to keep—being late wasn’t an option at Hephaestus Station, as it could set things back for days—and he did not like Intel agents. “I can’t. The Tiber must be on time. My orders are to transport you and aide you with communications. Not to give you command of my ship.”

“Then at least give me a transport so my team can find him on our own!”

If he did that, Harken would have the station’s logistics people at his throat for leaving something so large as a transport ship off their resupply request. “No. You can leave from Hephaestus. I can’t spare a transport. This ship has its own missions to complete.”

The man’s jaw tightened, and he glared. “You will pay for this.”

Harken paid him no heed. What more could the higher-ups do to him? He was already doing border patrol, having his concerns completely ignored. He couldn’t imagine a tougher job.