Firefly: Big Damn Hero Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Coming Soon from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  Acknowledgements

  About the Authors

  BIG DAMN HERO

  COMING SOON FROM TITAN BOOKS

  The Magnificent Nine by James Lovegrove (March 2019)

  Generations by Tim Lebbon (October 2019)

  BIG DAMN HERO

  BY JAMES LOVEGROVE

  ORIGINAL STORY CONCEPT BY NANCY HOLDER

  TITAN BOOKS

  Firefly: Big Damn Hero

  Hardback edition ISBN: 9781785658266

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785658273

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: November 2018

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Firefly TM & © 2018 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  This novel is respectfully dedicated to the supremely talented artists, technicians and craftspeople who created the ’verse, peopled it with such memorable characters, and left us wanting more

  So here’s how it is…

  We’ve been flying for about a month on fumes and tears. Zoë and I are the ones hit hardest: we carried the coffin of Tracey Smith, our comrade-in-arms, out of Serenity and into the snowfall, where his folks stood in silence. We did not tell them that Tracey had run afoul of a gang of organ smugglers and taken refuge with us. Or that he had lied to us and nearly killed Kaylee, and that Zoë and I had both shot him mortally. As he died in our arms, he remembered when we were soldiers. We had fought on the right side, even if it was the losing one, and risked our lives to make sure everyone came back. Now he’s dead, and we told his folks that he was a war hero.

  War does a lot of mean, miserable things to people. Makes ’em nurse grudges. Makes ’em swear vengeance. Makes ’em tell stories about how the Browncoats went down in defeat.

  And a lot gets lost in the translation.

  The Unification War ended in 2511. It’s 2517 now, and my memories come in waves. Sometimes I’m back home on Shadow, signing up to join the Browncoats with my best friends Jamie Adare and Toby Finn. We were so young, just kids. We thought war meant freedom and glory. And sometimes I still dream about Jamie’s sister Jinny, and when I wake up, my heart is as hollow as a drum.

  That’s all in the past, and I’ve got way more than enough present to deal with. Inara gets these faraway looks—don’t know what it means, but I know not to ask. Still got the Tams on board, and Jayne hasn’t tried to sell ’em out since we got those medical supplies on Osiris, so that’s a plus. Shepherd’s still reading his book of fairytales. Zoë’s still my first officer, and I wouldn’t have any other. Kaylee keeps us running, and Wash keeps us flying.

  Is it a good life or a bad one? The answer doesn’t matter.

  It’s the only life we have.

  Captain Malcolm Reynolds

  Why can’t things just go easy for once? Mal Reynolds wondered as he ended the communication with Guilder’s Shipwrights. After a week in dry dock, their shuttle repairs were complete—just a couple-few things Kaylee could have fixed herself if they had had the right tools. But they couldn’t afford them. And the repairs had cost more than the original estimate. Of course. Still, it would be nice to have it back. The loaner shuttle Guilder’s had given them had a faulty injector regulator and guzzled fuel like a drunk guzzled beer.

  Mal was standing in the cargo bay of Serenity, and after weeks of searching for a job, any job, he was having second thoughts about taking this one, despite the hefty repair bill that loomed on his horizon. Deafening alarm bells were going off in his head—about safety and about survival.

  The roaring outside Serenity’s open cargo bay spiked to earsplitting as space transports and private craft simultaneously took off and landed on either side of them in Persephone’s Eavesdown Docks. The violence of the comings and goings shook the ship’s loading ramp and peppered the hull with a rain of dirt and small pebbles blasted into the air by thundering rocket exhausts.

  There was only one way to describe the operation of the docks: organized chaos. Well, not so organized. Burned-out hulks of spacecraft lay in craters of their own making, scattered here and there along its sprawling length. It was a gorramn miracle there weren’t more midair collisions.

  You might think with all this dutiable trade, all these comings and goings and the excise levied on them, that Persephone would be a rich planet; but you would be wrong. The Alliance taxed businesses and citizens with a gleeful rapacity. And what did Persephonians do in response? Why, they celebrated the day they signed their lives away and joined the Alliance. The anniversary of which was today.

  And how did Mal celebrate it? By taking another job from Badger.

  The sleazy minor crime lord was willing to pay them a scant bit of coin for risking their lives with a dangerous load that had to be hauled halfway across the galaxy. Actually, that sounded somewhat like the last job they took from him—transporting a herd of cattle on behalf Sir Warwick Harrow. The cows were delivered fine on Jiangyin until the gunfire commenced, and then Shepherd Book was shot and nearly died from his wounds. This dangerous cargo was different from that load, because if something went wrong with it, all of them would die.

  As a bonus, a small side-job had slid in alongside Badger’s offer. Mal, Jayne and Zoë would deal with the secondary job planetside once Badger’s cargo was loaded. Which meant Taggart’s Bar on Alliance Day, just about the rowdiest drinking establishment on Persephone, on the rowdiest day of the year.

  Talk about combustible.

  About five feet away, Zoë was saying something to Mal, or trying to, murmuring to avoid being overh
eard. Zoë was the kind of woman who spoke softly and carried a big gun. Mal motioned for her to come closer. She walked over with her arms crossed, and leaned in, so close that her breath brushed against his ear.

  “I don’t like it, sir,” she said, biting off the words.

  “Duly noted,” Mal said. He didn’t like it much either, but when the choice was bad choice or no choice, you smiled wide and said thank you.

  On the loading ramp behind the two Browncoat veterans, a forklift strained to carry its oversized burden up the slope and into the hold. The weight squashed the front tires nearly flat and made black smoke pour from the tailpipe. The metal crate was easily three times as big as the forklift and rested so heavy upon the forks that they wobbled like they were made of rubber, with the result that the load teetered precariously on its perch.

  Grim-faced, Zoë and Mal backed well out of the way. Zoë wore her curly darkish auburn hair gathered in a ponytail, her signature leather cord necklace hanging over her leather vest. Mal had let his brown hair grow out a mite longer than military regulation, and wore his trousers with the stripe, his customary suspenders, and a tucked-in red flannel shirt. Both had looped their thumbs under their gun belts, observing closely as the last of the five steel containers was carried across the ship’s deck by the woefully lurching forklift.

  On the other side of the hold’s entrance, a pair of Badger’s men likewise kept a sharp eye on Mal and Zoë, hands hovering close to gun butts. Trusting your business partners was like trusting a rattlesnake not to bite you: noble but misguided.

  Behind the wide-bodied goons stood the cocky Cockney racketeer. Badger was dressed in his own version of business casual—a black bowler, threadbare suit jacket and matching vest over a dingy white T-shirt, a jauntily arranged silk necktie, and a pin on his lapel shaped like a flamingo and made of fake gold encrusted with no-less-fake gemstones. In common with his namesake, Badger was cranky, stubborn, and tough, with something decidedly rodent-like about his face, but he was also irritatingly jovial at times. That trait seemed particularly in evidence today, which Mal couldn’t help but find suspicious.

  Though it appeared the crime boss was dutifully fulfilling his side of their bargain, Mal assumed Badger would try to cut corners somehow, in his own favor, of course. If everything was completely on the up and up, it wouldn’t be commerce as usual.

  “Pull ’er forward nice and slow, and set ’er down beside the last one,” Badger told his forklift operator. Then he beamed at Mal, showing yellow, crooked teeth. “Just about done with the hard part.”

  “Remind me again,” said Mal. “Is the hard part loading the cargo, or is it me gettin’ over the fact that you still owe us for those cows we didn’t get paid for transporting to Jiangyin?”

  “Mal, Mal, Mal.” The more genial Badger sounded, the more it made Mal’s toes curl and his trigger finger itch. “Oh mate, you still holding a grudge about that?”

  “Kinda definitely.”

  “Okay, so the deal went down the khazi. Wasn’t anybody’s fault. These things happen. Business is business.”

  “Don’t think my understandin’ of that word is the same as your understandin’.”

  “What we ’ave ’ere,” Badger said, waving an arm towards the crates, “is my way of making recompense. Your fee, in case you ’aven’t noticed, Reynolds, is well over the odds for a straightforward planet-to-planet run like this. When it’s done, you can consider the debt between us settled.”

  “Just sayin’ I’d rather it’d been settled at the time.”

  “What can I say? I ’ad cash-flow problems.”

  “So did I, in as much as the cash wasn’t flowing from you to me.”

  “But that’s all in the past. We’re chums again now, ain’t we?”

  Mal grunted. He was very picky about who he was “chums” with, and Badger would never qualify for that status.

  “Sir,” Zoë said, with urgency, into Mal’s ear. “Don’t want to come across like a worrywart…”

  “Then don’t, Zoë.”

  “But I’m going to say it again: this is a bad idea. This cargo is too volatile.”

  “I know, I know,” Mal replied.

  The crates weren’t big, maybe five feet a side, but they were mighty—jam-packed with chemicals used for mining.

  Explosives.

  Highly specialized, highly explosive explosives.

  The substance in the crates was, in fact, a crystalline compound known as HTX-20, an abbreviation that according to Badger stood for something long and complicatedly scientific with more syllables than you could count. When he heard the deal Badger was proposing, Shepherd Book had told Mal that he knew about HTX-20, and his grimace had said everything Mal needed to know about what the preacher thought of the stuff.

  “Not for nothing is it nicknamed Satan’s Snowflakes,” Book had commented, and yet again, Mal had found himself wondering how in heck a man of God knew about such things.

  Badger had assured Mal that as long as the HTX-20 stayed in the crates, snug and tight in its flame-retardant foam packaging, there was no danger of it blowing up before it was supposed to. Oh, and everything would also be fine as long as the HTX-20 didn’t get wet. Or too hot. Or was jostled unduly. But apart from that, things were just dandy.

  Mal figured Badger would be upfront about the perils of the job, since he was the one who stood to gain the most if the payload made it to its intended destination, a rhodium mining operation on Aberdeen. Still, it gave him pause to see the yellow-and-black hazard stripes on the outsides of the boxes, like a swarm of hornets, and the decals plastered every which way, saying things like:

  In other words, treat these crates like newborn babies or life would no longer be interesting; it would be over. If there was one thing Mal hated, it was surprises, and an explosion counted as one of the worst kinds of surprise he could imagine. Surprise marriages being another.

  But not to dwell on the negative. Mal watched Zoë flinch as the forklift operator almost took out their ball hoop. The vehicle’s twin metal tines had held so far, but the crates were burdensome, that was obvious. He couldn’t wait for this to be over.

  Persephone, a middling-sized planet on the periphery of the White Sun system, served as Serenity’s primary stomping grounds when it came to the face-to-face details of life. This meant shaking hands and moving cargo, mostly, though sometimes it also included inadvertently trafficking in cryogenically frozen mad geniuses. Their resident, fully thawed mad genius was River Tam, who generally bounced off the bulkheads like a rubber ball. Her brother Simon was uncomfortable on this planet, to put it mildly, and was more than usually defensive about his sister. Even out in the Black he was quick to justify his sister’s unpredictable outbursts of screams and destruction by reminding you that the Alliance had made her insane. As in, it was not her fault. Mal found this a rather odd strategy for ensuring her continued passage on his boat. He didn’t much care why River was insane. He cared that she was insane at all.

  Mal had warned Simon to keep River out of sight until Badger was gone, and Simon was happy to oblige. Alliance bulletins about two missing fugitive siblings on the run came out over the Cortex now and then, but so far Badger seemed unaware that he could make way more money turning the Tams over to the authorities than he could trafficking in cows and explosives.

  Life sure had gotten complex. No doubt about it, Mal preferred staying in the sky. The silent void of the Black was ever so much more to his liking. But such was not always practical. He had to touch down from time to time, in order to take on supplies and get paying work.

  Persephone had never been all that pleasant of a rock, even before the Alliance’s victory over the Browncoats there. In the years since, it had become immeasurably worse. The slums had spread like rot in a ripe peach, the stink of ramshackle dilapidation festering wide. Power supplies to the blighted areas were cut off when the residents couldn’t pay for the privilege. Folks began cooking on open fires and warming themselves at
burn barrels. The haze of rank smoke permanently tinged the sky a pale yellow. To survive, most people had to steal what they couldn’t barter. Decent citizens shuffled with downcast, fearful eyes, trudging sunken cheek-by-jowl beside unbearably smug rich folk in silks and satins who flaunted their wealth as it if were God-given—not that there was a God, not to Mal, not anymore.

  And if there is, He ain’t welcome on my boat, Mal thought.

  Lawlessness on a planetary scale did have a plus side, though: it encouraged and facilitated the kind of work that came Mal’s way— primarily smuggling items the Alliance forbade or taxed beyond reason, that sort of thing—and loose, corrupt enforcement allowed quick escapes in case a deal went sideways.

  Beyond the open cargo-bay door, Eavesdown Docks spread out in all its rusty, gritty glory. The yellow-tinged atmo stank so bad you could practically chew it—a chunky, inedible stew of rocket exhaust, carbonized garbage dump, spilled rocket fuel, unwashed humans and animals, and mountains of boiled protein blocks. As they set down and crawled back up into the Black, ships kicked up brittle tea-brown newspapers and foam plates slathered with plum sauce. On the verge of the field, brightly colored paper parasols twirled. Dogs of varied size and indefinable breed ran in packs through the potholed street. Horns honked rhythmically, or maybe it was someone’s donkey braying? Here and there, ship’s captains of ill repute casually bribed customs officials, and hordes of filthy folks crawled through and over the debris of civilization like ants—some looking for work, others looking for trouble. If he was being honest, Mal had to admit he currently had a foot in both camps.

  Hoban Washburne, Serenity’s pilot and Zoë’s husband, had landed them at the docks at crack of dawn shipboard time. But it was five-thirty in the evening here on Persephone. Daylight, sickly sad as it was, had already begun to ebb away and a bruise-colored dusk was setting in. Only three quarters of an hour had passed on-planet, but for Mal, each minute spent with Badger felt like an age. He didn’t know which drove him the craziest about the man—his thuggish swagger, his blockheaded stupidity, or his chirpy attitude that masked a personality so crooked it made a zigzag look straight—but Mal could feel himself getting tetchier and tetchier. With an effort, he looked away from him.