by Tim Lebbon
“I wonder what went wrong,” Kaylee said.
“Maybe nothin’,” Jayne said.
“How do you figure that?”
“Most people are gone.” He pointed at an empty pod. “Might’ve been my great-great-great grandaddy in there, and he survived and got out, went to land on Osiris to build his new life, meet my great-great-great grandmommy and plant a seed in her. And centuries later there’s me.”
“The wonders of evolution at work,” Kaylee said.
“So nothin’ went wrong for most of them,” Jayne said. “Some might’ve died during the journey. Others when they got here.” He trailed off because he knew it didn’t make what they were seeing any easier. They were looking at part of the human story from before the ’verse was populated. Deep down he knew that fact was more precious than any riches he might find on board, but back in the world he wouldn’t be able to sell stories, or make a windfall from his memories. He needed something solid to profit from this jaunt.
He wandered closer to one of the lower pods that still contained a body. The pod was likely worth a gorramn fortune, but there was no way to lug it back to Serenity, not right now. Maybe when they got back together he’d press the captain to let them stay for a while, and then he could figure a way to load up one of the empty cryo units. Looked just like a clear coffin to him, with wires and techy gizmos. But from what Kaylee said, it might be worth a sweet sum to those in the know.
The corpse inside was small and shriveled, resting on its side with one sightless eye staring out at him. Even this close he couldn’t make out whether it was a man or woman, or even a child. Unexpected sadness tugged at him. Whoever this had been back in the Solar System, they’d willingly loaded themselves into this thing with the dream of a brand-new life accompanying them down into sleep.
Then nothing.
He moved closer. Looked at the corpse’s fingers, ears, throat. Damn it, no jewelry. Maybe there was a room somewhere in the Sun Tzu filled with stored valuables from the millions of people carried within its belly.
“Jayne,” Kaylee said.
“Just wonderin’ about this one’s story,” he said.
“Jayne!” Her voice was more urgent this time. He turned around and she had her back to him, staring at the doorway they’d entered through.
Staring at the tall, thin shape standing there.
As it shifted, Jayne reached for the gun on his hip. His movement was instinctive and rapid, muscles working faster than conscious thought, and when he saw the threat in the figure’s altered position he replied in kind, squeezing Boo’s trigger even as he drew the gun from its magnetic holster, exerting enough pressure so that just as the barrel rose and pointed at the figure, the gun fired. It jumped in his hand and he stepped forward, squeezing again as he reached for Kaylee, snagged her jacket with his fingers, tugged her back and down. The figure spun and fell back, and Jayne stepped past Kaylee and crouched, firing one more time as the shape attempted to crawl back into the shadows.
This was when Jayne came alive. This was his world, his reality, his most comfortable circle of existence, and he never felt more at ease with himself than right then.
His mind started to catch up as the smell of the discharged weapon reached his nostrils.
“Jayne!” Mal shouted in his ear. “I heard gunfire.”
“Hold up.” Jayne moved forward, and without taking his eyes from the fallen shape he asked, “You okay, Kaylee?”
“I’m good. Be careful!”
Jayne grunted. He turned slightly so that the full glare from his suit lights flooded the narrow corridor. He already knew what he was going to see. The sight of light glinting on metal, the sound of soft muffled tracks, the subtle taint of spilled hydraulics on the air. A second later he was close enough to see, and his suspicions were confirmed.
“Alliance sentry drone,” he said. “Older model, but still effective, given the right advantage.”
“Drone?” Mal asked. “Wash, how come you didn’t make it out?”
“Must’ve been powered down,” Wash said through the comms. “Hang on. Oh.”
“Oh?” Mal asked.
“Yeah, oh. Or rather, erm, if you’d prefer.”
“Don’t oh and erm me, Wash!”
“Just tell us,” Jayne said as he knelt beside the drone. He’d fired three times and hit his target every time—one bullet through each of its head sensors, one shattering its composite spinal column. Its legs moved feebly, multi-way tracks scraping against the floor, but its central control hub was smashed. It leaked fluids, and most importantly its main sensors were finished. Whoever was keeping tabs on this thing wouldn’t know what had hit it. But they would know something had hit it.
“Seventeen traces now showing throughout the Sun Tzu,” Wash said. “None of them are you guys—I’ve got your suit transponders plotted. These are less friendly spots of light on my scanners.”
“Locations?” Mal asked.
“Two close to you and Zoë. Jayne, you and Kaylee look pretty clear for now.”
“Lucky us,” Jayne said. He spotted the weapon dropped by the drone. “Another five seconds and this thing would’ve pumped us with fifty thousand volts. Me and Kaylee’d be dancin’ and boppin’.”
“Can you deal with them, Wash?” Mal asked.
“I think so.”
Jayne kicked the downed drone and returned to Kaylee. She nodded to him and brushed herself down.
“Back to Serenity?” Kaylee asked.
“I can take them,” Wash said. “Confuse their onboard scanners and block any transmissions.”
“But we might still run into them,” Jayne said.
“I can keep track of you and them, and warn you if any are drawing too close.”
Jayne hefted Boo. “Rather you guide me closer to them. I’d like me some drone potting.”
“We’ve found something that looks interesting,” Mal said. “We’ll take a look-see, then back to the ship pronto. Jayne, Kaylee, you start heading back.”
Jayne snorted.
“Alliance, Jayne,” Kaylee said. “We already know this ship’s got their interest, and now the drones might’ve sent signals.”
“Which means it’s got my interest too.” He silenced his comm so that only Kaylee could hear. “I didn’t come all this way to leave with nothin’.”
It was not just another blast door. It was a whole structure, spanning the wide walkway they’d been navigating and stretching into the guts and bones of the old ship. New metalwork had been forced through old, leaving ragged, torn edges and junctions that had been clumsily welded back together. The new walls were solid and apparently without seams or joins. Upon discovering the blank wall facing them they had backtracked, heading left and right to get around it. Fifteen minutes’ exploration had revealed the core of a new structure deep within the Sun Tzu, placed roughly at the ship’s center of gravity as if to balance the intrusion of new into old.
“We can’t come all this way and just leave this all sealed up,” Zoë said.
“I concur.”
“Even though it’s pretty obvious that whatever the Alliance are hiding here, it’s behind this bulkhead.”
“It seems likely that’s the case.”
“We’d be stupid to mess with it.”
“Stupid.” Mal nodded. He stared. They both knew they could not leave this alone. He was a safe-breaker, and the structure before them looked like it was built to keep something safe.
“How long will it take?”
“Let’s stop talking and find out.”
The hidden structure was almost the size of Serenity and something about it chilled Mal to the core. But it also fascinated him, and when they found the doorway—so finely engineered that its edge was little more than a hairline crack within the sheer metal wall—he knew he had to get inside.
This was a vault. He could hardly imagine what treasures it had been built to accommodate.
He pulled a set of tools from his suit and
set to work. Kaylee was great with tech and the moving, living mechanics of a ship, but Mal had broken into enough safes in his time to have a true feel for security mech and tech. He plugged in the small sensor and hung it in his ear, tapped on the metal to test if he could hear the subtle vibrations, then examined the edges of the door. He went from the floor upwards, across the top, down the other side, then back across the floor to his starting point. At first he saw nothing. On the second time around some of the light reflected beneath the door caught his eye, and on the third circuit he saw similar places on both long edges and along the top. It was a four-way locking system.
He used his finest blade, barely the width of a hair, slipping it into the door gap along the floor and manipulating it back and forth. At the same time he pressed a magnetic cutter against the joint, finger on the button, ready to send a burst that would disrupt any magnetic lock with a repolarizing surge.
It took longer than he’d hoped. Several times he had to tell Zoë to stop pacing because her footsteps caused vibrations that interfered with his efforts. When the fourth lock snicked open he exhaled, unaware he’d been breathing so lightly, and the door let out a gentle, deep thud.
“Opening time,” he said, and he leaned against the door edge. It sank into the wall and slid back, floating almost silently into its recess.
“We need to reassess the quality of engineering on Serenity,” Zoë said.
“I like a door I can hear opening.”
They stood staring at the dark space beyond. Light from their suits penetrated a small distance before being swallowed by a haze, disturbed and drifting from the airflow caused by the opened door, moving like a living thing in pain. Mal breathed in and smelled something stale and old, like air that had been trapped for a long time. The floor just inside the door was speckled with dark patches of mold. He felt cool dampness against his skin.
“Well that’s not at all disturbing,” Zoë said.
“Reckon it’s not been opened for some time,” Mal said. “Got that feel about it.”
“I agree. And it also has a feel like, ‘Do not disturb.’”
“We’ve come this far,” Mal said. He drew his sidearm, comforted by the heft of it in his hand, and stepped forward. Zoë was by his side, her own gun drawn. He was aware that to anyone inside the closed room, their suit lights would make them an easy target, framed against the doorway. “Let’s move quick.”
He moved into the new space and ducked to the left of the opened door, sweeping his head from side to side, trying to penetrate the haze. There was no echo, which led him to believe the space might be even larger than it felt.
“Wash, any sign of more drones?” Mal asked on an open channel.
“None moving,” Wash said. “Still got tabs on the seventeen I spotted earlier. They’re stationary and not very active. If they knew you were there I’d imagine they’d be on their way to turn you into mincemeat.”
“Nice image,” Mal said. “Thank you. Jayne, Kaylee, you headin’ back toward Serenity?”
“Yep,” Jayne said.
“Right. We’ve found a locked room that might just be the center of this ship. Investigating. More soon.”
“Mal, I’m thinkin’ we keep our voices and selves low,” Zoë said. “The Alliance is all over the place, and I’m liking it less and less.”
“Yeah, right. Me too.” And what danger am I keeping us in? he thought. His responsibility for his crew sometimes weighed heavy, whether they knew it or not.
They’d have to get this done fast.
The room felt cool and damp even through their space suits, the hazy mist cold against his face. They’d already gone twenty steps from the door, and the open space seemed unbroken by walls or other interruptions. The floor was level and smooth, and when he glanced down he saw mold smeared beneath his boots. It was a slick green, something alive in this old dead place.
The further they went, the thinner the mist became, until they emerged at last from the cloud and cast their lights before and around them.
Mal gasped and heard Zoë do the same. It wasn’t only the scale and design of the room that inspired their shock, but what sat at its center—a single suspension pod from Earth-That-Was, shimmering with countless diamonds of moisture, its contents hidden from view from where they stood. The space was a halfsphere, the walls sloping up behind and around them to form the curved ceiling, every wall and ceiling surface clear and smooth apart from the speckles of moisture. The haze hung low down and close to the walls, leaving the center of the large room mostly clear.
“What is this?” Zoë whispered.
“Something unusual,” Mal said. “Maybe rich people had their own suspension room?”
“Even on a ship this big, that’d be pretty indulgent. And you’re forgetting this place is retrofitted.”
“Yeah. Right. Well, let’s go see.” They headed toward the strange pod. Mal had heard of such tech, and how the people from Earth-That-Was knew how to put people to sleep for long, long periods of time. Spooky. Unnatural. Compelling.
As they drew closer to the pod, dread grew deep in Mal’s gut.
“Zoë—”
“Look at this,” Zoë said, stepping up onto the pedestal and sweeping her hand across the clear curved surface of the pod. “Oh, Mal, look at this.” A tinkle of ice sounded a musical note through the room as shards slipped to the floor, and Zoë’s gasp echoed.
“Zoë, this doesn’t feel good.”
“I don’t know him,” Zoë said, and she sounded confused. “I don’t but… Mal, maybe you…?”
Mal stood on the pedestal beside Zoë and looked down at the sleeping man. For a moment he forgot the gun in his hand, his friend by his side, Serenity waiting for them not far away in the deep, cold silence of space. He forgot everything, and saw nothing but the man before him.
Peaceful in repose, wearing simple T-shirt and shorts, the strange tattoos on the man’s arms and neck were stark and shocking. They looked military, but Mal only recognized one or two of them, and there were no regimental insignia. He was scarred across his throat and upper left arm with injuries that obviously continued beneath his T-shirt, and the ugly knotted tissue had healed badly, stitched and slotted on either side of the wound where medics had patched him up. The injury reminded Mal of the blast site on the main body of the Sun Tzu, and making such a comparison set that deep star of dread in his chest spinning and burning.
“Who do you think he is?” Zoë asked, and Mal could find no reasonable answer. He spotted a slogan on the T-shirt, Less is More. It seemed so incongruous, a humorous statement in such a strange place.
“Someone we want nothing to do with,” he said. He went to turn and jump from the dais, but then something caught his eye, a detail that merged with other stored information to make a connection that hung heavy in his mind. The man’s face was cool and calm in repose, but there was something about his peaceful expression—confident and knowing, even while unconscious— that reminded him of River.
“River brought us here,” Mal said, and he initiated an open channel on his comm. “Wash, what’s River doing?”
“Kuáng zhè de, need you ask?”
“You saw that too?” Zoë asked Mal, and he nodded, and as she turned to jump from the raised area her empty holster banged against the pod.
Mal heard a soft, low whine, ending in an almost inaudible click.
A pause.
Then a series of lights flickered on around the room, a web of illumination stretching out from the central dais to the misty extremes of the curved ceiling and walls.
“I did nothing,” Zoë said. “Wasn’t me.” They looked at the pod and saw what she had done. The touch-panel control pad was difficult to make out beneath the layer of thin frost, but the pulsing green light was obvious. It had not been there before.
“We need to leave,” Mal said, and he glanced once more at the sleeping man. He was slight, with dark hair and delicate features. Wires were connected to his head and thr
oat, and pipes and tubes snaked beneath his body and between his legs. One tube was inserted into a slit in the side of his chest, visible through a tear in his T-shirt.
Zoë grabbed his arm. “Mal!” She pointed. All around the room, a dozen small openings had appeared in the curved wall and dark, sinister-looking objects extruded. One of them turned back and forth with a soft grinding sound.
“What?” Mal asked.
“Still,” she said. “Totally… still.” Then she eased her gun from its holster and fired from the hip. She’d always been an ace shot, and her bullet struck the slowly turning object. It shattered, came apart, and scattered to the floor.
Around the room, several other weapons zeroed in on the falling mess and opened fire. Lasers lanced across the room, something hit the damaged weapon, others appearing to miss.
“Run, into the mist!” Zoë said, and Mal didn’t think twice. They jumped from the raised dais and ran, and behind the slapping of feet against floor, Mal heard the gentle grinding of a dozen lasers tracking their movements and then opening fire.
Something snagged at his hair. Another shot passed through his suit beneath his arm. Then they were in the mist hanging around the edge of the circular room, and the weapons’ targeting must have been confused.
Zoë grabbed his arm and tugged, and Mal knew not to question. There was no time. He followed her, and seconds after she pulled him through the open doorway it slid shut behind them, silent and swift. By the time he turned around to look at the smooth metal wall, the door’s outline was almost invisible once more. Threads of mist faded away in the corridor’s stark light. Beyond the wall, the distant rumble of working machinery sent a soft vibration in the air and through his feet.
“What just happened?” Mal asked.
“Nothing good,” Zoë said.
“Who turned on the lights?” Jayne asked over an open comm, and Mal realized he could see back along the corridor. A line of light panels glowed along both walls, giving a sense of perspective that was disorientating. The corridor was so long that lights met in the distance. It was almost more disturbing than when it had been swallowed in darkness.