by Tim Lebbon
“It sounds amazing,” Simon said.
“Don’t it? I’d love to get a chance to see it all. The drives they used to travel so far, the technologies to build such big ships, the life-support systems they must’ve built. And then there’s the suspended animation stuff. It’s used in the ’verse, sometimes, but it ain’t reliable, and ain’t used that much. They put a whole world to sleep, ready to wake ’em up again when they found a new world.” Kaylee’s smile faded a little, and her voice dropped. “But that’s where some of what’s told, and some of what’s understood to be true, tend to drift apart somewhat.”
“How so?”
“Well, the shiny tales you might be told say that all the ships made it here, the ’verse was established, and humanity lived happy ever after.”
“Or not so happy, for some.”
Kaylee shrugged. “Wars and conflict and nastiness, true, but humanity survived. But the truth is a little darker, I reckon. These tales are mixed, and maybe mixed up in the tellin’. Some say only about seventy percent of the ships made it to the ’verse. Others reckon only thirteen ships in total survived the journey.”
Simon looked shocked. “No wonder such history isn’t taught. So what happened to the ships that didn’t reach here?”
“Some vanished completely, never to be seen again. Maybe they’re still travelin’ somewhere, their human cargo still sleepin’ and dreamin’. I like to think one or two of them found somewhere else to end their trips, and maybe even now there are humans far, far out there, people we’ll never see and who don’t know anything about us.”
“That’s… disturbing.”
“You think? I think it’s kinda shiny. Guess what you think about it depends on which way your mind swings.” Simon blinked and Kaylee looked away, worried that she’d offended him.
“You said some vanished,” he said. “What about the others that didn’t make it?”
“There’re loads of stories about ’em. It’s said that one crashed into one of Heinlein’s moons when it arrived. Another was hit by an asteroid close to the end of its trip. And one… this is really grim, you sure you want me to go on?”
“Only if you want to.”
“Hmm.” Kaylee pulled a face. “One ship finished the journey years after the others, and there was no one left alive on board. There’d been a war. It looked like it’d gone on for years, and the ship was a mess, inside an’ out. All battered and burnt up, and with the bodies of millions rotting in their pods or scattered around in warzones inside the ship. But the Sun Tzu is one that made it here,” Kaylee added hastily, seeing Simon’s face. “None of the other ships remain, most were broken down and used to build smaller ships back in the early days, space stations, and the metals and other materials were used to colonize the planets. It was always intended that way, to give the travelers a good shiny start. That way I guess they wouldn’t have to think too much about mining and manufacturin’ ’til they’d really established comfy homes and communities.”
“But the Sun Tzu wasn’t broken down,” Simon said.
“Seems not. And now we’re going to see if it’s still out there. It’s so exciting!”
“It sure is. I just wonder why there’s a map to the ship, with Alliance tech in it. And why only River can read it.”
“I’ve wondered that too,” Kaylee said. “And the fact it’s an Alliance map…”
“You’re sure about that?”
“I’m sure no one else I know has tech like this.”
Simon nodded slowly but said nothing more.
“We’ll be fine,” she said. “If it really is out there—”
“If it’s there, the Alliance never meant anyone to find it.”
“But you were so keen for us to come,” Kaylee said.
“Because of how animated River was. Now, the closer we get, the more agitated she gets. But I don’t think Mal’s one for turning around, do you?”
“Definitely not,” Kaylee said, and she thought, I wouldn’t be either. Not for this.
She felt a chill down her spine when Simon turned and left. She looked at the map. It was a tease, knowledge laid out before her but still unreadable, unknowable, except to River.
“It’ll all be good,” she said.
* * *
“See the sleepers!” River said. “See them walking, hear them singing. Such beautiful songs.”
One glance from Mal and Simon held his sister’s arm and guided her gently from the bridge. She was wearing them all down with her heightened state and her apparent lack of sleep. They’d been following the map—at least, following River’s open translation of the map, while linking it as best they could to their somewhat fragmented star charts for areas beyond the Outer Rim—for over twenty days, and her behavior was becoming more and more erratic. There was never anything threatening in what she did, but the bursts of excited chatter were tiresome. Sometimes they were gorramn troubling.
Now she was talking about sleepers. Considering the ship they were coming to find, such talk pricked at them all in different ways. But the ship’s old and empty, Jayne had said. There wouldn’t be anyone still asleep on board. Right? Mal didn’t see how there could be, but the girl’s comments seeded unsettling thoughts in his mind. He knew that not every Generation ship that left Earth-That-Was had made it to the ’verse, and even though the Sun Tzu was reputed to be one that had didn’t mean it had disgorged its cargo once it arrived. It didn’t mean everyone on board hadn’t died.
Maybe she’s talking about ghosts, Kaylee had said one mealtime. A ship that old, who knows what’s on board?
No such thing as ghosts, Wash had said, but for a while everyone ate in silence, thinking their own thoughts.
“According to the charts, this planet doesn’t have rings,” Wash said. Apart from Simon and River they were all on the bridge, watching through the viewing ports as Wash guided the ship toward the planet they had come to find. Uninhabited and unsettled, it orbited billions of miles distant from the Blue Sun, way beyond the orbit of the gas giant Burnham, too far out from the Core to be considered worth naming. It was almost too small to be called a planet, but too large to be an asteroid. Could be that no one had ever set eyes on this piece of space rock before.
Finding an old, dead ship in orbit here would not be an easy task, but that had just been made a million times more difficult by their discovery that the planet had a plane of debris around its equator. Overgrown asteroid, dwarf planet, fractured moon, whatever, something had broken up in the pull of its gravity and the resulting mess had settled into an uneven orbit. If the Sun Tzu was here, and had found itself pulled into that same orbit, it would be almost impossible to find. Either that, or it would have been smashed to smithereens. Maybe parts of what made up these rings were fragments of one of the legendary ships from Earth-That-Was.
“We’ve come this far,” Mal said. “Let’s get into orbit fifty miles above the widest extent of the rings, see what we can see.”
“What about the map?” Zoë asked. “Maybe there’s something on it that’ll reveal a closer coordinate for the ship.”
“We’ve been trying that for days,” Mal said. He was troubled by how much they were still relying on River’s reading of the map. Kaylee had examined it, in fact all of them had taken a look, but it was only the most unpredictable member of Serenity’s crew who could gain any sense out of it. “River’s lost interest in the map. It’s brought us this far, and she seems happy enough with that. Take us in, Wash. Nice and slow. Zoë, keep watch on the scanner for any space debris in our way.”
“Autoscan should find that,” Zoë said.
“I’d like a pair of eyes too.”
“You do realize how dangerous this is,” Wash said. “I mean, if I had to put it into context, I might compare it to jumping the ship through a star’s corona, or landing on an asteroid, or maybe—”
“Danger is your middle name,” Mal said. “Come on, show us why you’re the best pilot in the ’verse.”
“Get us through this alive and you can.” Mal tapped him on the shoulder, not too hard. Wash was already steering Serenity closer in toward the planet.
Mal, Kaylee, and Jayne stood back to let Wash and Zoë do their thing, and to observe their approach. It was really quite beautiful. Mal never grew tired of looking out into the void. In deep space the differences were more difficult to perceive, but they were there if he looked carefully—a comet tail a million miles away; an asteroid field; a star’s light pulsing through space dust or quasars spinning out their history. Closer to planets and stars there were endless things to see, and sometimes the views changed hour by hour, even minute by minute.
This close in, it changed with every beat of his heart.
The planet was small, gray, barren, and bland, lacking an atmosphere and pocked with impact craters. They were drifting in to stay ahead of the terminator once in orbit, using the natural light to help spot anything artificial that might be adrift in the scattered rings. Light from the distant Blue Sun filtered through these rings, and the closer Wash took them the more that light was split into individual wavelengths by moisture, dust, and ice. It wasn’t often Mal saw a rainbow in space, but when he did it brought home how stunning it was out here, and how small and meaningless he really was.
“Whoa,” Jayne said. No one else spoke. Mal guessed perhaps they were all feeling a differing version of the same thing.
“Taking us closer,” Wash said after a while. “Zoë?”
“I’m looking,” she said. She had her face to the scanner, hands shielding her eyes on either side. “Just a bunch of rocks.”
“There’ll be thousands of miles of these rings,” Jayne said. “How do we know the ship’s even here?”
“Map brought us this far,” Mal said. “We can scan open space while we’re followin’ the rings. Anything in an alternate orbit will be picked up once we’ve done a few adjusted orbits of the planet. My guess is, if the ship’s been hidden out here by the Alliance, this is where it’ll be.”
“Hidden?” Jayne asked. Wash also glanced at him, eyebrow raised.
“So far out here, no sense believin’ otherwise,” Mal said.
“Right,” Kaylee said. “That map weren’t made to be easily read.”
“’Cept by that headcase River,” Jayne said. “Let’s hope her freaky cleverness finds us a ship filled with riches.”
“That and more,” Mal said.
“More’n riches?”
He didn’t bother replying. The view was too stunning for small talk to detract from it. He crouched in front of his captain’s seat low to the portside viewing window, breathing lightly so that his breath did not mist the glass, and for a few moments all his small worries and concerns were swept away. The rings around the planet were ice and rock, glimmering in the splashes of rainbow light, seemingly flickering as they tumbled, turned, and spun. Serenity was still miles above the upper extreme of the rings, but they were wide enough to form the large part of their view, the individual elements mostly too small to be visible.
“Okay, we’re about sixty miles above the rings,” Wash said. “We go any closer and imminent death will be… imminent.”
“Any trace of a ship?” Mal asked.
“Got nothing,” Zoë said. “Maybe it’s on the other side of the planet.”
“Maybe it’s on the planet,” Kaylee said.
“But the Generation ships were massive, weren’t they?” Wash asked. “A mile long, or more? No way you could land something like that.”
“Not on a normal-sized planet, maybe,” Mal said. “The gravity would break it apart. But this is more like a moon.”
“If that’s the case, it’ll be tough to find,” Jayne said.
“But not impossible,” Zoë said. “Just very, very time consuming.”
“Let’s stick to the plan,” Mal said. “Now we’re in orbit, all eyes outside. Zoë will stay with the scanner, the rest of us look for anything out of the ordinary.”
From back in the mess they heard River’s voice, and it was almost as if she was singing.
* * *
They performed one orbit of the small planet and saw nothing on any of the scopes. Wash slowed them down so that they began drifting against the direction of the rings, passing above them at a relative speed of two hundred miles an hour. While Zoë remained glued to the scopes, Mal went back into the mess.
The others were still there, River and Simon sitting in easy chairs and not talking. River held her knees to her chest and stared at her hands, thumbs slowly moving to perform circles around each other. Mal watched her for a moment, then grabbed the map from the table and sat down opposite them. Simon looked at him expectantly. River didn’t even appear to notice he was there.
“We’ve come close, but we need to know more,” Mal said, holding out the map to River. “You brought us here. If we’ve got this far and we don’t find the Sun Tzu, it’ll all have been for nothin’, and my ship and crew are cravin’ something other than a wasted journey.”
Mal stood and placed the map over River’s knees and folded hands. She glanced up at him then down at the map, her fingers still describing their slow movements beneath it, causing it to rise and fall.
“Precious Sun Tzu,” Mal said.
“Yes!” River said. She dropped her legs and held the map up in both hands, presenting it up to the light as if she could see through it. A sheen of tiny sparks fizzled across its surface and fell away like shattered ice.
“If it’s anywhere close to the rings it’ll have been pulverized centuries ago,” Simon said.
“Could be you’re right,” Mal said. “But whether the Alliance placed it here or found it here, they didn’t seem to think that’d happen.” He was looking at River as he spoke. She scanned the map, moving it up and down, left and right, and her eyes were wide and filled with wonder. She saw the map differently from anyone else in the crew. She recognized something wondrous in its strange swirls and curls.
“Mal!” Zoë called from the bridge. “Better get up here.”
River changed. From excited and wide-eyed she became meek and afraid, throwing the map to the floor and curling up against Simon. He took her hand.
“Be careful,” Simon said as Mal dashed for the bridge. He thought it was strange, and perhaps he should be saying the same to Simon.
“What is it?” Mal asked as he entered.
“Got a ship,” Zoë said. She was bent over the scope, left hand tweaking a dial to adjust search parameters. “I think it’s Alliance.”
Mal caught his breath and blinked away his surprise. “Weren’t expecting that.”
“You and me both,” she said.
“This doesn’t sit well in my precious, sensitive flesh and bones,” Wash said.
“So what’s the story?” Mal asked.
“It’s a long way off. Scope picked up an old drive trail, but definitely Alliance, probably a destroyer rather than one of the big cruisers.”
“No regular Alliance patrol come out this far,” Wash said.
“I said I’d heard whispers here ’n’ there about the Alliance comin’ this far out from the Core, and in this sector,” Mal said.
“For the Sun Tzu,” Wash said.
“I reckon.”
“Oh, that’s just great,” Wash said. “Trouble follows us. It seeks us out. Trouble is my middle—”
“Wash,” Mal said. “Fly the gorramn ship.” He scanned the readings and leaned on the back of Wash’s seat. “Ease our speed, and take us in closer to the rings.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Wash said. Reducing speed, he dropped Serenity closer to the plane of smashed rock and ice encircling the mysterious planet.
“So, turns out there must be something here worth stealing,” Jayne said.
“Much as I endeavor not to agree with you most times, I agree,”
Mal said. “The Alliance has a reason for sendin’ a patrol out here. Zoë, how old’s the trail?”
“Difficult to say. I’d reckon less than ten days. After that, trace of a gravity drive tends to drop away.”
“We’re goin’ closer to the rings?” Jayne asked when he saw what Wash was doing.
“We’re more likely to stay undetected that way,” Mal said. “Meanwhile, I’ll get Simon to work on River so maybe she can—”
“Hold on to your behinds,” Zoë said. She was bent over the scope again. “Got another ship.”
“Alliance?” Kaylee asked.
“Not this one. No drive trace, either. This is close enough to see, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
“Sounds like our baby,” Jayne said.
“Ease up,” Mal said firmly. “Slow and gentle, Wash. Get us there in one piece, but gentle steps, and not too close for now. Just so we can see.”
They all huddled around Wash as, guided by Zoë, he skimmed Serenity close to the planet’s rings, aiming for a point of light in the far distance.
As they drew nearer a long, thin object manifested from the vastness of the Black, reflecting weak light from the distant star.
“Sun Tzu,” Mal said. “We found you.”
From the dining area, River screamed.
I’m where I was always meant to be, and suddenly I’d rather be anywhere else.
River reaches for Simon and he holds her. He’s her one safe place against a cruel ’verse that seeks to bind her, blind her, and make her its own, whereas in reality the whole ’verse could be hers. Simon doesn’t understand, but he helps so much. Without him she’s not sure what would have become of her. Some of the others help her, and some are sweet, Kaylee especially. Sweet and innocent of so much, every one of them.
She sees how Kaylee looks at her, though. She doesn’t like her fear, because she would rather no one be afraid of her, and she knows the crew are in danger because they protect her. After returning to Ariel and letting Simon look into her mind, she sometimes fears herself.
Sometimes, River tries her best to live in the present and make do, molding herself into something new—a full human being, a good person—even though the trips and flips her brain undertakes makes that difficult.