by Tim Lebbon
“Keep in touch,” Mal said.
“I’m watching you from on high,” Wash said, and Mal looked up toward Serenity, but the cockpit glass was opaque so he couldn’t see Wash, and starlight glimmered from its surface and turned it into a mirror. Jayne threw the pilot a rude gesture anyway.
They started along the ship, Mal leading the way. He tried to concentrate on the hull ahead of him, but his attention was drawn to the constantly changing panorama around them, and the deep, cold lure of infinity. It was a strange thought knowing that this vessel had been built trillions of miles away, and had come such an inexplicable distance on its travels. It chilled him to consider what the people who’d built and crewed it had been like. They had been humans, yes, just like him and the rest of his crew, but they’d also come from a vastly different world and background. Their histories were beyond imagining, and so desperate that they had been forced to flee those old lives and search for something new.
“Mal, over there on the left,” Kaylee said. “You see that?”
“Looks like a… blister?” Jayne said.
“Yeah,” Zoë said. “Some sort of viewing pod.”
It was difficult to discern scale with nothing to add reference. When they arrived at the protrusion it was to find it perhaps the height of a person and twice as wide. It was made of some sort of glass or polymer, and Mal was frustrated to find it was impossible to see through. Its inner surface was obscured, possibly by dust. He pressed the faceplate of his helmet against it and shielded his eyes, but he could still not see inside.
“We can’t just cut or blast it open,” Kaylee said.
“Why not?” Jayne asked.
“Because if this part of the ship is still pressurized it’ll explode outwards, pierce our suits, and we’ll fly off into space.”
“Like that Early dude,” Jayne said. “Like to think he’s still out there, floatin’ about.”
“I vote we all stand back and let Jayne blast it,” Zoë said, and Kaylee chuckled.
“Yeah, well, still waiting for your bright ideas,” Jayne said. “Should’ve gone straight for that blast zone like I said.”
They moved on, down the length of the ship toward the flared back end. And though they searched for ways in that would not risk any potential depressurization launching them into space, they found nothing.
“We should get back to Serenity and fly her around the ship,” Kaylee said. “If Wash brings us in close enough we’ll eventually find somewhere good and easy to access.”
“That’s surely the safe bet,” Zoë said.
“That ship might be full of loot, why concern ourselves with safe?” Jayne asked, and Mal turned to look at them all. Eventually doesn’t cut it, he thought. Not with an Alliance destroyer somewhere out there.
“I don’t want to tarry,” he said. “Let’s take a look at the blasted area. Maybe there is a way in.”
As they closed on the damaged portion of the ship, Mal turned over all the known facts and tried to form a theory about what had happened here. Maybe the Sun Tzu had reached the ’verse and then been struck by a meteor. Perhaps there’d been a malfunction when whatever sort of star drive those old Earth-That-Was explorers used fired to slow the ship down on their approach. A revolution on board, sabotage, an accident, or perhaps they’d arrived years or decades after the first ships, and those original settlers were keen to keep the place to themselves. Accident or intentional, the explosion had crippled the ship. But he was pretty certain it hadn’t happened here, in this planet’s rings.
The Sun Tzu was hidden away from prying eyes. Shielded within the embrace of the strange rings that encircled the planet— and he’d never seen or heard of rings surrounding such a small planet before—it was too perfectly placed, its orbit too balanced, to have ended up there by accident. Whatever the Alliance had going on here, they’d moved the ship here themselves.
“Wash, follow us over,” Mal said.
“Quick escape,” Zoë said.
“Escape from what?” Kaylee asked.
“Whatever nasties are inside the ship,” Jayne said. “You heard the girl singing her usual crazy song. Sleepers, she was saying, I heard her. Maybe she means zombies. Those people brought from Earth-That-Was all been sleeping for so long, we go in there now and wake them up and they’ll be hungry for Kaylee flesh.”
“Bottle it, Jayne!” Mal snapped.
“Guys, sounds like you’re having fun down there,” Wash said, “but meanwhile River is going pretty damn wild up here, and I’m not liking this at all. I’m shutting and locking the bridge door.”
“Sure, lock it tight,” Mal said. He understood why Wash was doing so. One nudge from the mad girl, one distraction if Simon lost control of her and she ran onto the bridge, and Wash might steer Serenity into the Sun Tzu.
They soon reached the first part of the ship’s blasted area. The hull was rumpled for a good distance, deformed by whatever impact or explosion had caused the damage, and they had to tread carefully so that their magnetic boots maintained a suitable fixing. The going became uneven, and looking at their feet was a welcome distraction from the slowly turning view from the spinning ship.
“It’s bigger than it seemed from above,” Zoë said. “Much bigger.”
Mal looked along at the ruined hull. What they’d taken to be a small zone of damage was actually hundreds of feet across, and it stretched almost the entire width of the ship’s hull at that point. He was amazed the vessel’s back hadn’t broken.
“This is recent,” Jayne said.
“You’re sure?”
“Sure I’m sure!”
None of them disputed Jayne’s opinion. He might have been a jackass sometimes, but he wasn’t always quite the fool he made himself out to be. The fact that he was still alive paid testament to that.
“That changes things,” Zoë said.
“Not really,” Mal said. “The Sun Tzu didn’t come to rest here on her own. And there’s the map. The Alliance put her here for a reason, so maybe that damage ain’t what it seems.”
“In and out,” Zoë said. “Quick as we can.”
They edged forward and soon reached the first rips and tears in the hull. It had been blown apart and peeled back, the structure turned into vicious spikes and serrated edges ready to rip their space suits at the first wrong move. Beyond the tattered and torn metal was a shallow crater in the otherwise flat plane of the ship where a chunk of the fuselage had been blown out into space. Ragged ends remained. Hollows seemed to pulse and shift as the light continued to change, shadows growing and shrinking again, and the tattered remnants of structure and superstructure appeared fluid in the stark coldness of open space. It almost looked like a wound in a shivering, living thing.
Mal was just about to order them all back to Serenity when Kaylee let out a gasp of surprise.
“What the hell’s troubling you now?” Jayne asked.
“Over there,” she said. She was pointing across the crater toward the far edge, and for a terrifying second when Mal looked, he thought she had seen something alive.
It’s moving, writhing, squirming to get out and at us, and maybe it’s one of the sleepers River is raving about. From the corner of his eye he saw Jayne’s hand going to Boo in its holster.
“That looks new,” Zoë said, and Mal realized he’d been seeing light and shadows dancing again, absorbing starlight and hiding from it as the ship slowly turned.
“Yeah, well, that’s because it is new,” Kaylee said. “Rest of this ship is old as can be. We’re walking on something built on or above Earth-That-Was, and that’s got me giddy so I can hardly see. But that over there isn’t somewhere that’s been blown up. That’s something that’s been fixed.”
Mal looked closer at where she was pointing, and it was as if knowing what he was searching for brought it into focus. Embedded in the wall of the metallic crater, fixed in and around protruding steelwork and broken pieces of ship, a dull gray surface presented a flat, undamaged facade.
“Another, over there,” Kaylee said. She moved forward toward the hole, climbing over a ridge of melted and re-formed metal, and looked around the wide pit’s edges. “And another. Four that I can see, and I’m gonna bet there’s more.”
“What the hell is this?” Jayne asked. “Someone’s been here before us? Got away with all the loot?”
Mal heard a muttered curse in his earpiece and wasn’t sure whether it was Zoë or Kaylee.
“This is more than just salvage,” Mal said. “Don’t you see that by now?”
“So what else is it?” Jayne asked.
“Someone’s made it look like this ship is dead,” Kaylee said. “Maybe this hole was an accident, maybe it wasn’t, but there’s been enough repair work done to make me wonder if we’ll even need our suits inside.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Jayne asked. “Who’d bother to repair this old hulk?”
Kaylee glared back at him. “You do realize what this old hulk is, right?”
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Zoë asked.
Mal nodded. “That the Alliance has more to do with the Sun Tzu than just checking up on it now and then.”
“Yeah.”
“Wash, need you to do a scan on the ship for us,” Mal said.
Wash’s voice crackled in his earpiece then settled down. Serenity was holding station above them, its shadow sweeping past them every few minutes as the Sun Tzu turned.
“What sort of scan?” he asked.
“Heat sources,” Mal said.
“You mean like tech or engine activity?”
“No. I mean like life signs.”
I’m as still as a point in time and traveling at the speed of light.
Simon still has her huddled up against him, and he is warmth and comfort and familiarity, but never safety. She has not felt safe for a very long time, and that is perhaps the root of everything that goes through her mind and comes out confused and befuddled. She knows for sure that the others do not understand her. She rarely understands herself.
Even when everything has a clarity that seems to outline and define the whole universe. Even when she thinks she can count to infinity with one breath, or name each star, or solve the deepest of puzzles while still laughing at one of the few memories she holds dear. Even then, she does not really understand.
Understanding is coming. It’s close. She isn’t sure how she knows this, but the knowledge is as certain as her own name, and that’s something she has never let go.
I am River. I flow from past to future. I renew.
Like a molecule of water within a river, she has spent so long moving randomly that she has lost herself a thousand times over. Simon tries to rescue her. But though he has struggled to discover what they did to her, and developed treatments and medicines, he has never managed more than to hold her on a true path for a short while. She takes those moments to catch her breath, but strangely when they occur she wishes for the randomness again. Being lost is no bad thing when reality—being found—threatens to bring her so much pain.
They found me. They did this to me.
Memories of the time before Simon rescued her are like fleeting images of a former life. When they come during sleep they take the form of nightmares; when she’s awake, they’re flashbacks filled with horror, and terror, and they propagate a rage that she hopes one day will dissipate at last.
She’s restrained in a chair. People in white coats and black masks hover around her, pushing needles into her skin, watching as she convulses. They take notes on portable computers, and when she cries they collect her tears and take them away for testing.
She is flat on a table, unable to move, and she senses the delicate whisper-touch of surgical implements in her brain. There are no nerves there, but still she feels them digging through her life.
She is alone in a room. It’s warm, there’s food and a comfortable bed, the walls are soft and white, but it is still a cell.
She hates those memories, and prefers when they’re lost in the flow.
Now, she is speeding up. Given mass and energy by the man who has drawn her here, her movements no longer feel random. Silas is real. Back in the Academy he had been a myth between her and other prisoners, a story about the first test subject who rampaged. The Academy put him down and started again, with her and with others. They took lessons from their failure. He really, really exists, and they didn’t put him down at all.
Now, he wants to be free, and I’m the one to free him. And perhaps…
Purpose is a grand thing and it has her in its grasp. Her velocity builds. Sitting motionless with Simon, her mind is traveling so fast that she can hardly draw breath.
Perhaps in freeing him, I will also free myself.
* * *
Typical, Mal thought, we finally find something that might be worth a fortune and someone’s been here already.
For him, these new structures all around the blast hole could mean only one thing—someone had already found the ship, which meant that anything of worth might have been taken.
He floated gently above and behind Kaylee, Zoë, and Jayne, tethered by his suit’s umbilical. Kaylee was convinced that the tech used to repair areas of the blast site was Alliance, and that hardly came as a surprise. It put them all on edge.
But though there were signs that the Alliance had already plundered the wreck, it would take years to search everywhere on board. Mal was still trying to get to grips with the ship’s staggering size, and he was certain that even if some stuff with salvage value had been cleared out, there would still be plenty to find. Serenity was a thousandth the size of the Sun Tzu, and she had hidey-holes and nooks aplenty. There was still hope. Once Kaylee managed to bypass the security built into the new airlock they’d be inside, and then he could get searching.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Not as easy as I hoped,” Kaylee said. She was working at a panel beside a doorway built into the new bulkhead. Loosened wires drifted and waved like a nest of worms, and she attached gadgets to them, twined and twisted, undid them again.
“Keep ready,” Mal said.
“I am ready,” Jayne said. As soon as the door opened he’d have them covered, in case there was anyone waiting for them on the other side. Mal didn’t see how there could be. Wash had scanned the ship for heat sources and found none. No life signs, no leftover radiation from working tech. Just cold, empty nothing. This ship was dead.
“Got it,” Kaylee said suddenly. “Just let me decipher the entry code and—”
The doors slid open. A surge of escaping air hit them all, and Kaylee fell back, dropping her tools and striking the broken metal behind her before ricocheting and spinning up and away, feet kicking out as she sought to stamp down with her magnetic boots.
Mal tweaked the vents on his suit and slammed into Kaylee before she could drift away from the ship and out into space, grabbing her ankle with one other hand.
“Get control of your suit,” he said.
“Got it. Got it.” She was breathing hard, and he saw her wide eyes through her faceplate.
He felt the jerk and surge as Kaylee caught herself, then he let go and she drifted back down, away from the opened door and to the right. Jayne was already covering the opening, and Mal also drew his gun. If they fired they’d have to use suit thrusters to counter the recoil.
“What’s happening down there?” Wash asked.
“Excitement,” Mal said. “That’s all. Don’t worry yourself up there in your nice warm seat, Wash.”
“Airlock,” Kaylee said. “I tripped the door before I deciphered the entry code, purging the compartment.”
“Just lucky the inner doors are closed,” Mal said.
“Lucky. Yeah.” She nodded at him. “Thanks.”
He nodded back, then engaged the motor on his umbilical to drag him back down to the ship. He landed in front of the open doors and shone his headlamp into the revealed airlock. It was barely large enough for the four of them, and it
filled him with a surge of hope. If the Alliance had built airlocks this small, they hadn’t intended to move a lot of material from off the ship.
Kaylee went first, taking out her spare toolkit, and she got to work on the inner door controls.
“Just, er, shut the outer doors first, yeah?” Zoë said.
“Thanks for the advice,” Kaylee said. “Talk among yourselves.”
Silently, Mal waited.
* * *
The artificial gravity as they entered the airlock was a strange feeling. One moment they were floating, the next their feet snapped to the floor. Mal disengaged his magnetic boots and they remained firmly set, though he felt lighter than usual. On Serenity the gravity was a by-product of the ship’s drive. On the Sun Tzu, inside the hull, the ship’s gentle spin helped keep them pulled down to the deck. It was another sign that the Alliance had placed the ship in this orbit, and location, very deliberately.
Jayne took point beside Kaylee. The outer doors slid shut, and after Mal ensured that their comms with Wash were still working, Kaylee flooded the airlock with atmosphere from inside the ship. Zoë tested the air with her suit’s onboard computer and announced it cold but safe to breathe.
“But keep suited up ’til Kaylee’s opened the inner doors,” Mal said. “Just in case there’re more defense mechanisms.”
“If they wanted no one to board, they’d have set explosives,” Jayne said.
“Maybe just a deterrent,” Kaylee said.
“Since when have the Alliance been subtle about their desire to blow people apart or blast ’em into space?” Mal asked.
The inner doors slid open, and they all swayed as pressures balanced.
“Welcome to the Sun Tzu,” Kaylee said. “We’re about to go back in time.”
“We’re about to become rich,” Jayne said.
“Wash, we’re in,” Mal said. “Hold station, but keep alert. How’s River?”
“Odd as ever,” Wash said.
“Tell us something we don’t know,” Mal said. “I meant what is she doin’?”
“Odd things,” Wash replied. “Singing a bit, shouting. Last time I asked she was folding paper into weird shapes.”