by Tim Lebbon
We take a breath, exchange a glance, and switch the immobilizer to the control nexus.
Silas stops shivering and screaming, and settles down onto his hands and knees. Blood spatters the deck.
“Stand,” one of us says, and he stands.
“Follow,” one of us says, and he follows us back toward the place where he has slept for so long. Back toward containment, and control, and safety for them and everyone else in the ’verse.
Those who have died to allow his capture will be called heroes.
“I’m going to crush you both,” he says, and we turn a dial on the control nexus that freezes his voice. He can think in threats, but we have no wish to hear them.
Now that we have him under control, we realize that the other people who were there have gone. One of them was River Tam, another fugitive from the Academy. She fled with the others, leaving the man she must have known—and who perhaps she somehow came here to find—to his fate. We cannot blame her. We cannot blame any of them, and her temporary absence does not matter. We’ll return to capture her soon, and anyone between us and her will be destroyed.
For now, we have Silas. The rest can wait.
* * *
“What the hell were they doing to him, Mal?” Zoë asked.
“Torture. Tranquilizer. Gorramn mind control. I don’t know.”
“You can control a mind like that?”
“No,” River said. “Not control. Only confuse. And his confusion… will not last. We have to run as fast as we’ve ever run before, because next time he won’t talk. He’ll kill you all to get to me.”
Something in her had changed. Mal sensed that, saw it in her face. Where before Silas had filled her with wonder, now there existed dread. Dread, and fear.
They fled that corridor as fast as they could go. Mal led the way, Simon and River behind him, Zoë bringing up the rear. He didn’t like that—if someone or something caught up to them and picked off a straggler, he wanted it to be… He didn’t want it to be Zoë—but their panicked flight steered itself. He tried to keep close to the crater, heading around the damage, taking staircases and ducking along dark corridors where condensation dripped from the ceilings now that life support had been kick-started throughout the ship.
This amazing ship that he wished they’d never found. That gorramn map he’d pored over for hours had been made by Silas, with the explicit intention of bringing people here to effect his escape. That gave Mal the creeps.
“Great,” Mal said. “He’ll kill us all. Why can’t I pick a crew with normal quirks? Smelly feet, bad eating habits, a few casual sexual perversions. How come I pick one with a mind altered by the Alliance and a monster for a brother?”
“My sister is no monster,” Simon said.
“Never said she was, Doc. And why the hell didn’t you stay on the ship like I ordered?”
“We have a normal crew,” Zoë said. “Smelly feet, bad eating habits, sex perversions.”
“Jayne,” River said, and she laughed, so unexpectedly that it made the others laugh too. Mal heard a low hysteria in the sound, but it still felt good.
* * *
They are hurting me, but I’m allowing it. They are drawing me after them, but it won’t be for long, because they have no idea what I’ve become. They think they know me, and in allowing them to think that I’m encouraging them to lower their guard. If they had any real comprehension of how dangerous I was, they would kill me here and now.
They could do that. They would do that, if they knew, if they knew, if they knew. I will not let them know.
So I allow them to draw and drag me on, freezing my voice and controlling my limbs, as I gather myself and prepare to fight back. I’ll only do so when I’m ready—soon, very soon.
I will not underestimate them as they have underestimated me. I understand my limits.
I’m still in exactly the place I’ve always wanted to be… or will be there again soon. I feel distance growing between River and me, and the hurt that courses within me cannot be denied. It hurts more than their meager controlling mechanisms, mechanical things plugged into me and through me. Physical things can have cause and effect, as I’m feeling right now, but they are so… basic.
I was basic once, like them. A physical thing. Then they took me and experimented upon me, and made me superior. They think they know me, because they know what they made of River.
If only they knew what I have become, left here alone to grow and evolve. And what River will become, given my guidance, and given time.
I shrug, and one of the wires slips from its port in my spine. The Hands of Blue do not notice. They are too confident in their ability to hold me like this.
She’s further away again, taken by those people who claim she is part of their group. Perhaps she even believes that, but the truth is that she belongs here with me. We have grown and evolved apart, and once drawn together our evolution will know no bounds.
We will be unstoppable.
I twist and another wire drops away, sparking against my skin. I cough to cover the sound. They don’t notice.
River, I say silently in my mind, and I can feel her hearing, and I open my senses to absorb her reply. There is none. It must be them, blocking my senses with their cruel, pathetic machines. It can’t be that she isn’t replying to me.
How could she want something other than me?
I say her name again, and this time I sense something in return. It’s not what I want, or hope for.
It’s fear.
Don’t be afraid of me! I think, and a shred of anger bleeds into the thought, radiating out toward River. She hears, feels, and her fear grows. Rage boils inside me.
I rip away from their control, and I surge.
* * *
We have him, and we are too knowledgeable about his potential to let our guard slip. We understand what he can do. We know every detail from those who helped create him.
We move quickly back toward the containment facility. We understand that the ship is in turmoil, but once Silas is put down again we will be able to settle the chaos, ease the trauma of the past few hours. It might take a nudge from the Sun Tzu’s ancient retros, a subtle tweak in its orbit to remove it from the danger posed by the disintegrating destroyer. We can do that. Together, we can do anything.
We look at each other and allow a smile, because our work here— to recapture him, put him back down, because the Alliance can never let go of something so powerful—is almost done. Afterwards we can decide whether to stay or, perhaps, find a way to leave.
Something changes.
We pause, frowning, and ahead of us the restrained form of Silas also pauses. We are close to a wide curving stairwell, the landing leading further along the ship, ornate stairs heading down toward one of the entertainment theaters built for the ancient crew. There are old images on the walls, people who died centuries ago dressed in strange clothes and made-up to imitate some creatures we know and some we do not.
Trying to analyze the change, we consult our instruments. One of us sees that several wires and contacts have fallen from the ports along Silas’s neck and up into his hairline, and—
“They wouldn’t simply come loose,” one of us says.
“We know that,” the other says.
Silas is already standing, but between one moment and the next he seems to grow, his slight form filling the hallway, his presence drawing the eyes of people in those faded long-ago posters, as if they are staring into the future and seeing something unbelievable. Something dreadful. He is like a nuclear core filled with such terrible, pent potential.
We try to boost the restraining signal, but he is ripping away the rest of the wires, turning, lashing out with one hand, and he catches one of us across the face, tearing skin and laying bare the pale flesh beneath. A rich red blood flows and spatters across the walls. Silas grins.
One of us cries out in pain, and the other exerts all the power she has through the weapon we always carry, directing a c
rippling signal directly into his brain. His left eye floods red as capillaries burst, but his grin only grows wider. It’s as if pain is power to him. It is sustenance.
He lashes out again, grabbing one of us and lifting, smashing us against the stair railing, inner structures breaking and outer skin rupturing and spewing life-fluids, and then he heaves and shoves and one of us falls away from the other.
We have never been so far apart. As one falls down through the stairwell and smashes to pieces far below, the other cries out.
We… I… run.
Such loss of identity is shattering. I am cast adrift. Half of my heart has been pulped, and its rapid beating is only half as strong as it has ever been before. I am made dizzy by the chaotic blood supply pumping through my veins. My mind is split in two, and though I quest, search, probe for the other part of me, there is nothing there.
We are dead. I am all that is left.
I run, and if Silas pursues me I neither hear nor sense him. I am powerless, weaponless. We should never have tried to contain him, whatever our desires, or our instructions from the Alliance’s upper echelons. He is far too strong. If I had a superstitious cell in my body I would know him as a god. Or a monster.
There is only one thing left to do. I cannot survive like this, I will not, but I might stretch myself to completing the task we should have embarked on the moment we knew of his rising.
Destroy the Sun Tzu.
Destroy Silas.
* * *
I’ll never stop loving my sister, Simon thought, but he was more afraid of her than he had ever been before. Previously his fear had been rooted in doubts about what the Academy had been trying to do to her. Altered, damaged, their experiments and treatments had scrambled her brain, and sometimes he wasn’t sure she could tell the difference between fact and reality, or even past, present, or future. She was adrift in her own mind, and since the moment he’d thrown away his own future to rescue her he’d done everything he could to be her lifeboat.
Now, in Silas, he saw what they had been trying to do. Perhaps if he’d left River with them for long enough they would have made her into a killing machine like him, brutal and cunning, vicious and merciless. Maybe she was already partway there. Kaylee had witnessed some of her skills with a gun, and she was stronger than any of them, more agile and silent. The Alliance had been recreating and remolding her for war, and though every part of him wanted to ease and soothe her into a life of peace, he now wondered whether that would ever be possible.
“I’ll look after you,” he said, and River glanced at him. “I’ll always look after you.”
“I know,” River said. The certainty in her voice might have brought a tear to his eye, if they weren’t in such a dire predicament.
He was glad that she knew that.
“I’ll look after you too,” she whispered as she leaned in close. “All of you.”
Mal had never been so pleased to hear Wash talking in his ear.
“All things considered, Captain, I think next time you win a map and suggest we all follow it in the vain hope that there might be a mountain of loot or something intangible yet valuable at its end, you can go hump yourself.”
“Agreed,” Zoë said. Mal glanced at her, eyebrow raised.
“I feel I’m voted down on this,” he said.
“Considering everything that’s happening, yes,” Wash said.
“So what’s happening?” Mal asked. He was with Zoë, River, and Simon, the four of them working their way around the artificially damaged and rebuilt areas of the Sun Tzu to a place where Wash could hopefully retrieve them. But in Wash’s voice he sensed an urgency he didn’t like.
“Nothing good,” Jayne said. “I got shot.” There was the sound of shuffling feet and Jayne’s voice raised in protest, and then Kaylee came on the line.
“That destroyer’s humped, and it’s breaking up,” she said. “It’s in a tumble and it’s already struck the Sun Tzu. Wash has had to take off and we’re circling around the old ship’s far side.”
“We felt the impact,” Mal said.
“It’s knocked the Sun Tzu into a decaying orbit.”
“How long ’til we crash into the planet?”
“Long enough. Head down through the ship away from the crater. We’re almost there, and once we identify an airlock or access hatch on the outside, we’ll direct you there.”
“Got that,” Mal said. “How bad is Jayne?”
“Flesh wound.”
“It hurts!” Jayne protested.
“Suck it up,” Mal said. “Keep all comms open.”
“You okay, honey?” Zoë asked.
“I’m good,” Wash said. “Jayne and Kaylee saved my butt.”
“And such a cute butt it is.”
“Eww,” Kaylee said. “Wash, can you just fly this ship?”
“Keep us informed on progress,” Mal said.
“What happened to…?” Kaylee asked.
“Gone,” River said. “They took him away. They want to take me away too.”
“They won’t get a chance,” Simon said.
“Right,” Mal said. “No chance.” He urged them to move, worrying about the blue-handed pursuers and their intentions, worried about Silas and how secure he might be with them, stressing about the Sun Tzu and what might happen to them before they had a chance to be taken off by Serenity. Worrying about pretty much everything, in fact. It seemed this mission was going as well as any mission they had ever embarked upon.
Mal kept his lock-picking kit to hand, and they soon came to another set of retrofitted blast doors. This time he was more careful, and instead of double-locking the doors they drifted open less than thirty seconds after he’d started work on them. He was getting better. The crew moved through and he went to follow, then he thought again. Thirty seconds to open, the same to close, and maybe that would be time well spent.
Whether or not the Alliance succeeded in putting Silas back down, someone would soon be coming after River. He wasn’t sure who he feared the most, but the blast doors might hold them up for a while.
“Go,” he said, waving them on. Simon and River went ahead, while Zoë hung back waiting for Mal. “Zoë, go! Stay with them. Wait for me at the next staircase, then we’re heading down.”
The ship shook. This was not a gentle vibration but a sudden, shattering jerk, knocking them all to the floor and reverberating between walls, floors, and ceilings, like the loudest clap of thunder caught forever within these narrow spaces. Mal sprawled and slid into the half-open doors, impacting against his side and bruising his ribs. Winded, he rolled into a sitting position. A queasiness settled in his stomach and he recognized it as motion sickness.
“We’re in a spin,” Zoë said. She stood and staggered against a wall.
“Wash?” Mal asked.
“Yeah, hi, well, that’s not too good, the destroyer’s knocked a hole in the Sun Tzu and—”
Mal felt rather than heard the decompression beginning. It was a strange tension in the metal beneath him, like a coiled spring filled with a dreadful potential.
“Zoë, run!” he shouted. He snatched up his tools and got to work. The first set of doors swung shut just as a roaring sound began and the atmosphere started flowing, then screaming past him, sucked back through the door opening toward whatever new wound the stricken Alliance destroyer had poked into this doomed old ship. The doors sealed and groaned beneath the plummeting pressures beyond, and as he stood and worked on the secondary blast doors, he glanced through the viewing portal and saw movement.
Silas was there. Further along the corridor beyond the doors, battling the hurricane of air carrying debris being sucked past him, he clung on to door openings and hauled himself along the corridor’s wall against the flow. He gripped doorframes, handles, and controls panels, then grasped on to service piping and duct routes cast into the walls. He pulled, dragged, crawled toward them, and even when several items of chunky furniture were sucked from a room and smashed into his
shoulder and head, he did not let go.
His eyes were squinted against the storm, but focused on Mal.
“Mal, what is it?” Zoë asked. The air on their side of the door still seemed to stir, as if agitated by what was happening beyond.
“We need to go,” he said. The blast doors slid shut, cutting off the view beyond, and he engaged the double-lock. He turned around.
“Him?” Zoë asked when she saw his face.
“We need to go,” Mal said again. “I don’t think there’s any fighting him, Zoë. There’s only running.”
Without saying another word, the two of them ran after Simon and River.
Wash couldn’t breathe through his nose. It was probably broken. He didn’t mind that—it had been broken before— but it was a strange point of focus for him, considering the utter chaos he was trying to fly Serenity through, the chance of matching the Sun Tzu’s crazy spin that was quickly turning into a plummet, and the possibility of ever being able to station Serenity close enough to the ship for Mal and the others to make it across. The likelihood of any one of those things happening was low. The chance of all three working out was astronomical.
Leaving behind the crater and the doomed destroyer had not removed them from any danger, because debris was sweeping along the length of the Sun Tzu, most of it small, some of it larger and more treacherous. He dodged the shards he saw, heard others impacting against the hull. Combined velocity was low so damage was hopefully negligible, but he still winced at each thud or scrape.
It stings. And I can smell my own blood. That’s weird. The Sun Tzu itself was also moving, knocked from geostationary orbit into a slow, uneven descent toward the planet. He had to match that movement, and it took delicate touches, almost caresses, on the ship’s controls to do so.
“Your nose is bleeding again,” Jayne said, and he went to perch on Wash’s control console.