by Tim Lebbon
“We followed a map.”
Silas smiled weakly. “The map.” He frowned and slumped against her.
“I’ll help you. I’ll sing you back to health.”
“Singing or not, we have to do it on the move,” Mal said. “The Alliance are close.”
River seemed to understand the urgency at last. She held Silas’s hand and urged him away from the dais and the suspension pod that had been his home for an unknown amount of time. He was hesitant at first, but after taking an initial faltering step he took another, then another. He wore only the plain shorts and T-shirt, and his bare feet crunched onto debris on the floor. He gave no sign of noticing. When after a few steps he paused and swayed, River held him up beneath the arms.
When Mal caught Silas’s eye, he saw something there that reminded him of River. A hint of confusion, but deeper down a knowledge and wisdom that made all around them seem like children.
He didn’t like any of this one bit.
The pair reached the edge of the room and the open doors, and it took all of Mal’s self-control not to flinch back. Silas smelled cool and stale and he projected a strength, a power, that belied his weakened appearance.
As they left the room and headed back toward Serenity, Zoë took point and Mal brought up the rear, with River supporting a weak Silas between them. With everything getting so mixed up and troubled, he tried to put his finger on just what had changed, and what was disturbing him so much. It took until they reached the small rest room where he and Zoë had taken on the two drones before he realized.
The ship was no longer dead. Silas had woken, and the Sun Tzu had woken with him.
Mal couldn’t help thinking that neither had ever been meant to happen.
We are woken by someone pressing the buzzer on the door comm. That is unusual. It wakes us before our normal time, and we sit up and look around, confused and groggy from our disrupted rest. Our room’s dimensions seem slightly altered, the colors and shapes out of sync with reality. We feel sleep flittering away from our senses as reality settles around us, and we fold back the blankets and stand on the cold floor.
The buzzer sounds again. One of us shouts a response and goes to the door. Whoever is sounding the buzzer would never enter without our permission, and we keep our door carefully closed and triple-locked from the inside. It’s not possible to sense nervousness through the impersonal electronic buzz, but still it is there, as if the sound is a troubled exhalation or the meaningless rattle of unspoken, unwished-for words.
We open the door. There is an ensign standing there, a small man in Alliance uniform. He takes a step back when the door opens, even though he has seen and served us many times before. His name is Stannard.
We do not like being awoken before our usual time. It disrupts rhythm, and rhythm runs our lives. We wake, we eat, we wait, we sleep, and so it has been for many years. Sometimes we have tasks that disrupt us from the ordinary, and for a while we breathe different air, or experience different locations. But we are not wired to be concerned with boredom. Our main reason for being always persists—to be here, ready, in case the unthinkable happens.
The waiting is sometimes tiresome, but far better than the alternative.
Stannard looks more nervous than he should, we think, and even as his eyes flicker down to our blue-gloved hands and up again to our faces, we see that it is more than our presence disturbing him. Stannard has come to tell us some troubling news.
“Has he risen?” we ask. It is the first thing we think about. Always the first.
“No,” Stannard says, frowning. “At least, we don’t think so.”
“Think? It’s we who are here to do the thinking. You and your like do the doing. Why have you woken us?”
“The ship has come online. A signal has been sent. A security breach, but that doesn’t mean—”
“Of all the things it could be, he is the most likely,” we say. We take a deep breath, our first beyond the knowledge that something terrible might have happened. “Haven’t we told you that before?”
“No… no you haven’t.” Stannard is sweating. Thin, slight, he is wiry and strong, but in front of us he is like a child.
“We shouldn’t need to,” we say. “The ship holds him. Whatever goes wrong with the ship is because of him. Any other possibility is meaningless.”
“There’s no indication—”
“You did well to wake us,” we say. “We’ll need to open up our lab. You can take us there. Wait, while we dress.”
The ensign waits just outside the open door. He averts his eyes, but we see him glancing once or twice, catching glimpses that he might carry away with him to tell his crewmates, or his family back home, or perhaps his grandchildren if he lives long enough to sire them. We are similar, but not identical, in thought as well as appearance. One of us is taller and has reddish hair, the other strong limbs and green eyes. Head down, still he looks up and sees us both. We don’t mind.
He might be awake, we think, and a frisson of fear passes through us. It’s a strange experience, and difficult to recognize. We were not involved in his creation, because it was before our existence, but we were tasked with his incarceration. Too precious to destroy, too dangerous to hold close, the old ship from generations past was deemed the perfect place in which to hide him far away from the Core using ancient suspension devices superior to our own. The ship was made to look derelict. We hoped he would be safe.
The first of his kind, he has never been bettered. But out of sight does not mean out of mind, and the Academy has spent years attempting to create his like again, with little immediate success.
A small part of us feels a shimmer of excitement at the chance to see him once more. But mostly all we feel is fear. We have always been prepared, and now we must ensure that Silas is put back down.
Dressed and ready, we reach beneath our cots and bring out two heavy steel cases. Usually we would carry one each and make our own way to the laboratory, but this morning is different.
“Enter,” we say. Stannard steps inside and we give him one of the cases to carry.
“But…” he says.
“One of us will carry the second case. You lead the way.”
As we follow Stannard through the corridors and up and down staircases toward the lab near the destroyer’s engine rooms, we fill the time ensuring that everything is happening as intended.
Yes, we’re scanning for strange signals.
No, there’s no sign of other ships having approached the planet.
Yes, we’re activating remote scanners in the rings to search for movement other than the Sun Tzu.
“We are closing in on the ship?”
“Of course.”
“All weapon systems are online and fully functional?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“You think we might need them?” Stannard asks.
We do not answer. Not because we don’t know, but because we do.
* * *
We reach our lab and Stannard waits while we open the door. We come here every day, but this feels different. The lab smells older, more stale, as the door opens, and the lighting seems more subdued. We are concerned with how fear is coloring and tainting our senses.
We do not reveal that fear on the outside. That would be unprofessional and counterproductive.
Once we are inside he follows and deposits the case on one of two large tables. The rest of the lab is clear and clean, surfaces bare and polished, cupboards closed and locked with biomechanical security. There are screens on two walls displaying nothing, and a series of colored markers hang unused next to whiteboards.
Everything we need is in the two cases.
We each stand at a table and place our blue-clad hands on the cases’ shiny exteriors. We notice that Stannard is still inside the lab. He’s retreated to the door but is still watching us, eyes wider than usual, his stance a little more confident. He’s been inside before, but he has never carried one of ou
r cases, and has never been so close to either of us.
Maybe he thinks he’s becoming something like a friend.
“You can go,” we say, and we stare at him until he backs through the doorway and it whispers shut behind him.
We turn our attention to the cases, open them, and only then do we look at each other, and only then do we allow the inner fear we have been feeling to manifest.
“We can hold him down,” we say, as if to convince ourselves.
“Yes, if he’s risen, we can hold him down.”
We set to work.
* * *
Later, the door chimes and Stannard’s voice brings news that changes everything.
“We’ve found evidence of another ship docked against the Sun Tzu. We’re still too far away to get any accurate readings, and the rings are disturbing our sensors, but there’s definitely something there of a different construction and origin.”
“Hurry,” we say. “We need to get there quicker.”
“The commander says to tell you we’re going as fast as we can,” Stannard says. “The rings around the planet make anything but a slow approach dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” we ask. “You have no idea what that means. Hurry. Hurry!”
One of us emits a shuddering sigh of fear. We don’t know which one.
* * *
“Really, Jayne?”
“What?”
“Really?”
Kaylee was relieved that Jayne hadn’t stooped to robbing the corpses in the suspension halls. She didn’t think he was that low, but he’d worried her for a while when he’d gone looking. Some Earth-That-Was jewelry was in circulation throughout the ’verse, handed down from generation to generation and usually held as precious and private, and she knew that many of these items were worth a small fortune. She was thankful that she hadn’t seen any gleaming or glittering on any of the withered bodies in those failed pods. If she had, and Jayne had seen it too, she suspected they might still be in that great hold.
It meant that they’d left all their precious metals and stones somewhere secure when they were being prepared for their long sleep and journey. Jayne would obviously realize that, but the ship was so huge it might take weeks or months of searching to discover where these stores might be. They didn’t have weeks or months. From the sound of growing panic they’d heard in Mal’s voice, could be they only had minutes.
Jayne, ever resourceful, had still found something worth dragging back to Serenity.
“Clothes? Books? Tins of food?” Jayne carried a backpack over each shoulder, still keeping his hands free so that he could reach for his guns. Though he was strong, she could see how the bags were weighing him down. She found it difficult to understand his priorities.
“People love Earth-That-Was clothes,” he said. “Got a few items myself, over the years. And these tins of food are antiques.”
“They all look the same. You don’t even know what’s in ’em!”
“Five-hundred-year-old food, Kaylee. No one’s gonna eat that. They just like having the tins.” He frowned, shrugged. “Mayhap the mystery of it keeps them intrigued.”
“That’s pretty deep for you, Jayne.”
“I am deep.”
“Just don’t let it slow us down.” She turned and led the way, ignoring the sarcastic expression she’d seen forming on Jayne’s face. She knew what he’d been about to say. So go on ahead and look after yourself, or words to that effect. It was the last thing she wanted to do, but the first thing she would do if Jayne tried anything stupid. There were a thousand places where he could stop to top up his haul, and she had to make sure they moved quickly and safely.
Yet five minutes later, it was not Jayne that brought them to a halt.
“I’m sure this is the way we came,” Kaylee said, pointing at the closed doors.
“I’m pretty sure too.” He placed his backpacks gently on the floor and drew his gun, turning his back to the blast doors closed across the corridor in case it was the sign of an ambush. By whom or what Kaylee didn’t know, but she was glad to see Jayne still prioritizing their safety above the relics.
“Whatever’s happened to initiate these systems on the Sun Tzu must’ve caused some of these old doors to close, but…” She moved closer and examined the door control panel. It looked odd, protruding from the wall, and she realized it was not as old as she’d expected. In fact, like those new doors around the ship’s damaged area, she recognized many of the components. “Oh, shiny! This is Alliance stuff too.”
“How is that shiny?” Jayne asked.
“Because it means I know how to bypass it.” Kaylee took out her small tool pouch and set to work. “The old tech we’ve seen is weird, all those wires and junctions, and squiggly bits I don’t understand. Weird, but fascinating. But this…” The components and controls were familiar, and in moments the old doors squealed open into ungreased recesses and let them pass.
“New tech on an old ship,” Jayne said. “What’s the point in that?”
“Retrofitting,” Kaylee said. “The Alliance taking advantage of the old structures to make use of the ship for—”
“You all got your ears on?” Mal said through their comms, interrupting her.
“Here, Mal,” Kaylee said as she worked, and Wash also confirmed that he was listening.
“We found someone,” Mal said. “Someone alive. Reckon he’s the reason this ship’s here. Says his name’s Silas, and he an’ River…”
Jayne and Kaylee stared at each other. “He and River what?” Jayne prompted.
“It’s almost like they know each other,” Zoë said, quietly. “From what she was sayin’ to him, they’re from the same place.”
“Everyone back to Serenity,” Mal said. “Alliance is closing in, so let’s keep quiet ’til we’re on board and away from here.”
Kaylee and Jayne moved on and encountered several more closed doors blocking the corridors, all of which Kaylee managed to open in moments. If it had been the old, original tech controlling the doors she didn’t think she’d have been able to resolve them so quickly, although she’d have relished the opportunity to try. To have her hands on components that her ancestors might have assembled made her feel as if she occupied the same space as a ghost from the past. She wanted to touch more of the ancient tech, hold it in her hands, feel the weight, the surfaces still greasy after all these centuries.
There was no time.
She felt the greatest thing she had ever found slowly slipping away, and as they moved she did her best to take everything in. Some of the lighting panels were open, diffusion covers gone, modern glow-elements exposed and fitted into fixtures half a millennium old. She paused at one rattling air duct and shone her suit torch through the grille to see a new fan spinning on an old spindle. At one corridor junction a duct cover lay on the floor and a mass of wires spewed out like spilled guts. Fixed within their snipped and stripped mass were three modern joint boxes, multigauge devices that used a basic form of AI to track and connect relevant wires and conduits as and when they were activated. The meeting of new and old fascinated her; the knowledge required to do this was staggering. They might be Alliance, but the people who’d done this had amazing minds.
With the ship humming and vibrating, and a low level of lighting shining throughout the corridors and rooms, halls and stairwells, Kaylee saw plenty of places where this new tech had supplanted or replaced old. Jayne probably didn’t notice, and she thought most of the crew wouldn’t either. This was her treasure trove, and she was leaving it all behind.
But she already felt close to this ship. Doors opened for her, and her understanding of the new Alliance tech merged and melded with very old Earth-That-Was engineering gave her the sense that the ship was growing to welcome her. It was a strange feeling, and nothing even approaching the sense of rapport she had with her dear, battered Firefly, but it gave her some sense of comfort.
“The Alliance destroyer’s skimming the rings,” Wash said over th
e comm.
“I thought you’d shut down all non-essentials,” Mal said, meaning scopes and scanners as well as most other systems on board Serenity.
“I did,” Wash said. “My eyes are still working.”
“You’ve got visuals?” Jayne asked.
“Either that or panoramic three-dimensional daydreams.”
“Get ready,” Mal said. “As soon as we’re with you, we’re leaving. Let’s just hope the Alliance is more concerned with the Sun Tzu than with us.”
“You know what the Alliance is concerned with,” Zoë said. Her disembodied voice sounded loaded with meaning. That man they’ve found, Kaylee thought. Part of her wished she could see him, meet him. A bigger part hoped she never would. There was something spooky about a man sleeping on a ship of the dead, then waking when they arrived. As if he’d been waiting for them all along.
“Yes, but they won’t know we’ve taken him onto Serenity.”
“Wait, you’re seriously bringin’ him?” Jayne asked.
“No time for this,” Mal said. “How close are you?”
“Pretty close,” Kaylee replied. “Are you getting through corridor doors okay?”
“Silas is opening them,” Mal said.
“Silas,” Kaylee said. It had a strange, mythic ring to it. No one said any more, and the name hung over the open comms like an electronic echo. For a few seconds she heard it everywhere—in the whisper of an opening door, the vibrations beneath her feet, and the more distant rumbles of machines working in places she would never see. There was no telling what these rumbling machines were doing, nor whose calling had brought them to life.
Silas… Silas… Silas…
* * *
Mal moved from foot to foot and wished he had Kaylee with him. The four of them should have stuck together when they’d boarded, but he wasn’t a man who dwelled on regrets too much. If he did he’d have been crippled by them.
“Having trouble?” he asked.
“Leave him,” River said. “He’s been through so much.” She held Silas up with her left arm around his back, and touched the scars on her neck with her right hand as she said this.