Generations

by Tim Lebbon

  “Only four flights of stairs,” Jayne said.

  “Only four.”

  They stood in the open doorway again, readying themselves, breathing deeply. Then with a quick glance below—she could see some movement, but they must have been several flights down— Kaylee led them out and up the first fifteen steps, working hard to move smoothly in the awkward space suits.

  They made two flights and were turning on the large landing when Jayne banged his backpack on the handrail. Glass shattered. Priceless whiskey first dripped from the torn bag, then flowed, falling through holes in the sheet metal flooring and dripping down the stairwell.

  “What was that?” a voice said from down below.

  “Volk? McMahon?” Another voice.

  “No, sir, they’ve gone on ahead. There was no one coming after us.”

  “Stand down, drop weapons, on your knees!” the first voice shouted.

  Jayne and Kaylee froze, staring at each other, and she thought, I can’t blame him for that, not his fault, but what a hún dàn!

  “Go!” he said, and they started sprinting up the stairs. It was a rash move, Kaylee thought, because neither of them knew what waited for them at the top. If it was simply a closed and locked door into an airlock, they’d have no time to open it before the soldiers down below reached them. And if the troopers knew some of what awaited them in the Sun Tzu, they might be more likely to—

  The noise was deafening. She’d been shot at before, but never like this, never as if the whole world was exploding around her, the smell of violence gagging, and she could see bullets and metal fragments spinning and ricocheting from the open treads and landings. At first she thought the stairwell walls were flashing dozens of small lights, then she realized that bullets and shards were scarring the walls with countless metal wounds.

  Jayne leaned over the banister and fired Boo several times.

  “Jayne!” Kaylee shouted, grabbing his belt and hauling him back. She didn’t know whether him leaning out into the fusillade was stupid or brave, or perhaps both, but he fell back toward her easier than she’d expected, pressing his arm against his chest and holding the gun there. She saw the bloom of blood on his shoulder, and he swayed into her.

  She slapped him across the face. Not hard, but hard enough. It must have been the shock that focused his mind. He nodded and they started up the stairs again, and she could feel scores of bullets impacting the underside of the treads, hear them whipping past her as they found a way through. It wouldn’t take long until she caught a bullet too. She already knew what it was like being shot. She’d only survived last time because of Simon. This time she’d be on her own, bleeding along with Jayne onto the cold metal decking of a spaceship filled with the dead.

  Someone down below shouted and she wondered what was to come. The shooting faded as quickly as it had begun, and she expected an explosive round to slam into the landing they found themselves on.

  At least we’ll die quickly, she thought, and the shout from down below was cut off, only to rise again in a high, shrill scream.

  The shooting started again, but this time none of it was directed at them. There were a few random shots to begin with, increasing into a constant roar and rattle of gunfire. Looking through the holed metal landing Kaylee could make out shapes shifting just a few floors below. They were shooting away from the stairwell at something along one of the adjoining corridors or rooms, and some of the figures were still, silent, and bleeding their last.

  “It must be Silas,” Jayne said. “He’s bringin’ the fight to them. I’m warmin’ up to him.”

  An explosion rocked the staircase, sending a wave of heat up into their faces. Shrapnel zinged and whistled from metal. Someone screamed. Voices were confused, shouting and crying, calling and pleading.

  “Let’s make the most of this!” she said, and they hurried up the rest of the stairs to the airlock doors. Jayne held his injured arm awkwardly, but he still looked strong and determined. He’d moved his gun from his right hand to his left. He could shoot with both.

  The door was closed, though the green light beside it glowed to show it was in operation. Kaylee accessed the controls and checked the status. If the troopers had just entered, the space should still be pressurized. But it could be there were still other soldiers waiting outside to make their entry, and if so the airlock would be slowly venting once again.

  “We’re good,” she said. “But the Alliance’ll probably register the airlock being used.”

  “I’m pretty certain they know we’re here,” Jayne said through gritted teeth. The shock of his wound was giving way to pain, and too much blood was seeping out. They should be pausing to dress the wound, not running and struggling.

  How far to Serenity? Kaylee wondered. And what happens when we get there?

  “So what do we do about that big bullet-shaped hole in your space suit?”

  He looked at her for a long, silent couple of seconds. “Huh. Not to mention my arm.”

  “In the airlock,” she said. “Let’s get safely out of sight. I’ve got an idea.”

  “You do?”

  “Sorta.” Kaylee palmed the door control and the airlock doors slid open to welcome them inside. Jayne leaned against the wall, breathing hard. The possibility of him passing out was not a good one. Outside the ship she’d be able to grab him and pull him along with her easily enough, but she was relying on him once they boarded Serenity. If there was gunwork to be done, she’d need him awake.

  She opened the backpack she was carrying, pulled out the three bottles he’d stuffed in there, then tugged out a couple of the clothing items too. She flicked open a knife she carried on her belt and cut off the arm from an extravagant silk shirt.

  “Really?” he said, but she didn’t respond. She had no idea how long they had until the Alliance soldiers came after them. She had a feeling they were still otherwise engaged.

  “Trust me,” she said. She opened her utility belt and took out a small tube with a nozzle at one end.

  “What’s that?”

  “Readyfix. Used to seal holes quickly.”

  “Holes in a person?”

  “No.”

  “Wait a minute—”

  “Hey, I’ll never tie a tourniquet tight enough to seal the hole. Once we’re outside, the cold’ll get in an’ freeze your arm, or your suit’ll decompress and you’ll die slow an’ horrible.”

  Jayne stared at her for two seconds before saying, “So shut up and do it.”

  “Arm up,” she said. She saw how much it hurt, but Jayne did as he was told. She tied the sleeve above the wound and the tear in his space suit, passing it under his armpit and tying it as tight as she could over the top of his shoulder. He groaned, but the sleeve would act as a tourniquet while she did the next bit.

  She had no idea if the Readyfix contained chemicals that would kill him anyway.

  Pressing his arm across his chest, she stuck the nozzle into the hole in his suit and activated the tube. It hissed and squirted, the thick fluid quickly expanding inside and outside the suit, bubbling, then growing solid after brief exposure to the cold air. He groaned, squeezed his lips together in pain.

  Kaylee withdrew the spent tube and dropped it.

  “You good, Jayne?”

  “I’m good.”

  “Sure?”

  “I got no choice.”

  Kaylee packed the backpack and slung it over her shoulder.

  “Hey,” Jayne said. “Thanks, Kaylee.”

  She nodded. From Jayne, that was a lot.

  “You’re not going to pass out on me?” she asked.

  “Flesh wound. I’ve had worse.”

  They slipped on their helmets, sealed their suits, connected a tether between their belts, and Kaylee shouldered both backpacks. Beyond the airlock doors and beneath them, the shooting and dying continued.

  The instant between not knowing him and knowing him— being adrift, and then finding herself in his mind and dancing alongside him—wa
s one of the most terrifying moments of River’s life. Though she is with Mal and Zoë she finds herself in freefall, spiraling away from the world and everything she knows as if pulled. Some trailing part of her has been caught in the great, turning engines that power things, and she is helpless as she’s dragged toward those grinding gears and chomping wheels that hide in unseen realms. She is beneath everything, in places where human perception does not function and no human is meant to be. Breathless, hopeless, she opens her mouth in a silent cry…

  And then she is with Silas, and everything between then and now was merely a held breath.

  She can see and feel where he is, and she knows that if she shouts and he shouts at the same time they will not hear each other. But in other ways they are closer than two people can ever be.

  She always wondered if finding him would be like this. Some of the others at the Academy were close to her, but never in this way. Never so close that she felt like she could touch them. She’d always known that Silas might be different—they all had, when they talked of him in hushed tones, sharing and perpetuating his myth—and now she felt the whole truth opening up inside and around her.

  Silas is distracted and does not notice her. Not yet. But he soon will, because he and she are so similar that it’s like staring back at herself.

  She sees from his eyes, smells with his nose, feels impacts and breaking bones through his fingertips, and she hears the screams of dying men and women that sound like the most wonderful concerto. He sweeps and dances among them, ducking bullets, twisting this way and that to avoid clumsy guns being fired at him. He grabs one man by his dangling space-suit helmet and lifts him, swinging him around in a graceful arc to slam against a stairway banister. The man cries out and Silas swings him again, a broken rag doll now, legs and arms splintered and trailing as his torso erupts beneath a hail of bullets. Blood and insides spatter the treads, and Silas and River take a moment to admire the beautiful patterns the blood makes against ancient metal.

  In this moment she thinks he senses her at last, but there is no time to reflect.

  He falls to his knees as bullets strike the wall above his head. He rolls forward several times, then leaps up and pushes away from the wall with both feet, landing on a staircase and bouncing up it toward the three soldiers firing at him. Their aim tracks his progress but never quite meets it. He dispatches the first with a straight-fingered stab to the throat, the second with a hard punch that bursts her heart in her chest, and the third he flips over the handrailing, watching as he spins and falls several floors in a parody of flight. Silas’s senses are slowed so much that the man’s fall takes some time, and he imagines him evolving on the way down, growing wings and taking flight.

  Silas has evolved, never quite asleep when he should have been, becoming much more than he was when they put him down. River understands some of that.

  The man strikes the bottom of the stairwell and breaks.

  Silas moves, dodges, and kills, a balletic dance of grace and power that she watches through his eyes and experiences through his other senses. Through him she is also dancing, flowing with each movement and drifting back and forth among the death and chaos of that battle, untouched by any of it.

  She remembers the pain she felt at the Academy, and the subjects who came and went, killed by things the scientists there did to them. She remembers the fear.

  She blinks. Wrong.

  More death. More art in a spatter of blood, poetry in a final breath.

  This is wrong. She is seeing people being killed, broken, ripped apart, and in fact there is nothing graceful about their deaths, nothing to celebrate in the way their insides are spilled and their memories and histories snuffed out.

  River, she hears, and he is trying to speak to her even as he continues killing.

  She pulls back.

  River!

  As she pulls away from Silas, he tries to grab on. It is a terrifying sensation, attempting to remain herself while someone else is trying to make her theirs. She has spent years finding herself again—with the help of Simon and her friends in Serenity’s crew—and Silas is trying to change all that. She can understand his fascination, because that fascination goes both ways. She knows him and he knows her, because they were made by the same people in the same place. Yet the mistakes they made with him, their first experiment—the reason they hid him out here, away from civilization where he cannot do any harm—they tried to refine with River.

  They made many other mistakes, she thinks, and she knows the truth of that because she is in his mind and behind his eyes. They thought he was asleep, but in fact he remained partly conscious for all that time. Improving. Growing. Evolving.

  And in his mind, he was no mistake at all.

  “River!” This time it is not his voice.

  Snapping back from Silas she actually hears a tearing sound, as if a physical link between the two of them has been broken. And she feels his rage as she withdraws. He liked having her there, seeing what he was doing. He liked showing off.

  Now he knows her, he’ll want her with him again.

  “River,” Mal says kneeling by her side. Zoë is standing behind him looking fierce and angry. “You went away for a while, there.”

  “He’s not what I hoped he’d be,” she says.

  “Who?”

  “Silas. I thought in finding him I might find more about myself, but if that’s him… if that’s me… I’m not sure I want it.” She looks up at Mal. “He’s killing them.”

  Mal freezes. “Killing who? Who, River?”

  “Dozens of them have come for him, maybe more, and he’s killing them all.”

  “May be a distraction,” Zoë says.

  “Yeah, for the blue-handed freaks,” Mal says. “We don’t want to be anywhere near him when—”

  “I can’t be near him at all,” River says, and she stands, pushing away Mal. Fear has taken root in her heart. It’s a sensation she has known before, but never like this. Never so rich. “We need to go. I should never have come. He’s not what I hoped, he wants me, and with me he’ll be even more powerful than he is now. Even more powerful than…”

  “Than?” Zoë asks.

  “Than anything.”

  * * *

  They made him walk in front of them. Simon didn’t know where he was going, but the twins seemed to think he was heading in the right direction, because they followed silently behind him. As he walked through the metal guts of the Sun Tzu, up stairs, along passageways, and through large open spaces, he had time to consider what he had done. By offering up River he had put her at dreadful risk, and he knew just how deadly the blue-handed twins could be.

  Once they have Silas and River they’ll kill everyone else, he thought, and he had no doubt that was true. He had seen the blood on their shoes and legs. He was expendable to them. Everyone was.

  The idea of ceasing to be had never troubled him too much, though the nature and method of going from something to nothing did. The pressure in his head, his pulsing eyeballs and bloodied ears and the sense that he was sinking into water, deeper and deeper until his organs were set to burst and his head to implode… that had been an awful feeling. Being dead, though, would mean that he had abandoned River to all the awfulness the ’verse was still striving to throw at her. She had already been a victim of that, much more so than most people ever were, and his reason for staying alive was to help her. He would be with her forever, and there was no sadness or reluctance in that thought.

  He would do everything he could to remain alive, because if he died River would be on her own.

  All he had to do now was to ensure the Alliance did not get hold of her.

  He felt their strange, deadly weapon primed behind him. His head ached and his eyes throbbed, and the slick probings of dark fingers winnowed through his brain. If he made a break for it he’d be dead within ten steps.

  Simon had no choice but to lead them onward. There was no escaping them now, until the time came when they
encountered Silas, or River, or both of them together. Then he would have to take action that might save her life, and end his.

  * * *

  Kaylee could never get used to that moment when she moved from inside to outside.

  Inside a ship, Serenity or otherwise, she was protected by hull and inner structures, cradled within the web of mechanics and systems designed to protect a human’s frail body against the harsh rigors and dangers of the Black. Limits were applied, spatial horizons made sense of. Inside a ship, she felt safe.

  Outside, her own true nature was brought home to her by the sheer incomprehensible vastness of space.

  As she and Jayne drifted from the airlock she gasped, misting the visor of her helmet for a heartbeat before its life-support systems cleared her screen again, allowing her to peer into the depths she would never know. However long she flew, however fast, she could never reach the stars she was looking at. Indeed, many of them were no longer there. She was looking deep into the past, seeing a history when she never existed, and anyone or anything close to those distant stars looking in her direction would see her only when she was long, long gone.

  “Smashed another gorramn bottle getting out,” Jayne said. “Hope it’s not the good stuff.”

  He moved to check, groaned in pain, and Kaylee gasped as the action caused them to start drifting apart. She fired her suit’s retros and he did the same, leveling them up and turning them so that they could drop down, magnetic boots attaching to the Sun Tzu’s hull. The mental shock of space walking affected her deeply, but on a more practical, physical level it also took her a minute or two to adjust.

  “Let’s keep it slow and easy,” Jayne said. “We gotta… wow.”

  Kaylee had already seen. Directly outside the airlock their view straight ahead was into deep space, but once they’d righted themselves and clamped onto the hull, the Alliance destroyer loomed above and ahead, floating a short distance from the Sun Tzu toward the stern. In that direction also lay the damaged part of the old ship, where Serenity was now docked. Their route home lay between the Sun Tzu and the destroyer, a gap that from this distance looked almost too narrow to walk between. Kaylee guessed it was actually a hundred feet or more, but the ships hid a heavy shadow between them.