Firefly--The Magnificent Nine Read online

  CONTENTS

  The Matter of a Hat

  Taking Unkindly to Threats

  A Boy Named Jayne

  An Old Flame Can Still Cause Burns

  The Scent of a Companion

  A No-account World at the Ass-end of the Galaxy

  Welcome to Thetis

  The Inevitable Bar Brawl

  The Cavalry

  Me Jayne, You Jane

  The Path of Least Bloodshed

  Piecing it Together

  Stop the Mule, I Want to Get Off

  Hair Triggers

  Riders of the Post-Earth Age

  Boss of the Boat

  A Powerful, Primal Driver

  The Unpardonable Sin of Badmouthing Mama Cobb

  Heroic Measures

  Improvements in the Situation, or Lack Thereof

  Stanislaw L’Amour

  The Condiment Trade

  A Man With the Heart of a Mean Animal

  Clang Clang Clang

  The Fatherly Thing

  Preparations

  The Beginning of the End for Coogan’s Bluff

  Confident and Captainy

  Unleashing Hell

  Landmines of an Improvised and Somewhat Homespun Nature

  Serenity Under Siege

  Sitting Ducks Shooting at Sitting Ducks

  Taking Hits

  Bad Blood

  “I’ve Had Enough. This Ends Now.”

  Analgesics and Amens

  Brimstone Gulch

  Magic Hat

  The Dumbest, Insanest, Reckless-est Plan Ever

  Typical Political Type

  A Second Bite of the Cherry

  The Longest of Long Shots

  Serenity Valley All Over Again

  Human Pendant

  Dragonwing Protection Services Inc.

  Time For a Party

  “That Which is Most Precious…”

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  Generations by Tim Lebbon (October 2019)

  Firefly: The Magnificent Nine

  Hardback edition ISBN: 9781785658297

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785658303

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: March 2019

  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 & © 2019 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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  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The events in this novel take place between the Firefly TV series and the movie Serenity.

  That is most precious which lasts least long.

  —Old Earth-That-Was saying

  A small ship sailed through the vastness of the ’verse.

  Propelled by the twin drive pods of her trace compression block engine, the Series 03 Firefly-class midbulk transport vessel glided at quarter burn against a backdrop of steady-shining stars and the endless Black. She moved, it seemed, with barely any effort. Her forward structure of bridge and foredeck, which resembled the head and neck of a swan in flight, cleaved cleanly through hard vacuum. Her bulbous aft end gave off a gentle pulsing glow.

  She was the very picture of serenity.

  From the outside, at least.

  ***

  Inside, it was a different story.

  “That girl,” growled Jayne Cobb, “is seriously damagin’ my calm! She shouldn’t have it. Make her give it back.”

  The “girl” in question was River Tam and the “it” in question was a knitted hat with pompom and earflaps. The hat was made from yarn in a trio of unappetizing colors: cheap-diner-mustard yellow, leprous apricot and moldy pumpkin, with the pompom on top mixing all three.

  It was not much of a hat, but it was Jayne’s and he treasured it. He was irked to his very soul to see it set upon someone else’s head. Particularly the head of a young woman whom he considered as mad as a gorramn loon.

  “Make her give it back, Mal,” Jayne demanded, “or so help me, I’ll go over there and rip it off her head. Maybe rip off her head, too, while I’m about it.”

  Jayne’s blustering growl was loud enough to carry all the way across the cargo bay. It was loud enough to carry throughout the entire ship. But up on the catwalk at the far end of the cargo bay, River appeared not to hear.

  River was dancing. Lost in music only she could hear, she pirouetted and gavotted. Her every movement was a symphony of grace and precision, her legs strong, her arms flowing. Her elegance made the hat seem all the more incongruous. Where she was lithe and supple, it was lumpy and ugly. Yet somehow the hat worked. It was part of the ensemble, offsetting by contrast the uncanny beauty of River’s dance. She owned it.

  The hat’s true owner, if he appreciated this weird symbiotic meshing of headgear and choreography, would never have admitted it.

  “Mal,” Jayne said, pleading. “One last time. She don’t stop that prancin’ tomfoolery and give me back my hat…”

  Mal Reynolds heaved a sigh. He had once been a warrior. He found the role of peacemaker difficult. More often than not, though, he was required to be just that aboard Serenity. The eight-strong band of outcasts and misfits he called a crew were nothing if not argumentative. As their leader, his job seemed to involve less dishing out orders and more putting out fires. Without really trying to or meaning to, Mal had become the head of a family, and it was a family that took the fun out of dysfunctional.

  “It’s just a hat,” he said to Jayne, “and a sorry-lookin’ one at that. Ain’t as though anything she can do to it’ll make its condition worse.”

  Jayne huffed. “Girl snuck into my bunk. Stole my ruttin’ property! There’s rules about such things, or if there ain’t, there should be. Now, you gonna act like a captain, or am I gonna have to lay down the law my own way?”

  Mal heaved a deeper sigh. He liked Jayne. Even admired him for his craftiness and the way he spoke his mind and took crap from nobody. But the fella sure could be a bèn tiān sheng de yī duī ròu at times.

  ***

  Just as Mal was about to go over and confront River, Zoë Alleyne Washburne walked into the cargo bay, drawn by all the commotion.

  Jayne spun towards her eagerly. “Zoë. You’re a female.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” she replied.

  “No, it ain’t a bad thing. It’s a good thing. You go speak to the girl.” Jayne gestured at the still-cavorting River. “Talk some sense into her. Woman to woman, as it were
.”

  Zoë cocked an eyebrow at him. “Why, Jayne? You scared of her or something? Great big hulking ex-merc like you? Bitty little creature like that?”

  “I ain’t scared a’ no one,” said Jayne, puffing up his chest, but the fact was, there was something about River Tam he didn’t cotton to. It wasn’t just that the girl wasn’t right in the brainpan. There was more to it. She had hidden depths. Dark depths. Dangerous depths. The kind of depths it didn’t do a man good to go meddling in, not unless he wished himself harm.

  Didn’t even have to meddle, either. River could go off at you unprovoked, as Jayne knew only too well. Like that time she’d stabbed him with a carving knife for no good reason.

  They had a ticking time bomb on board Serenity, and its name was River Tam.

  ***

  “Quite a rumpus we have going on here,” said Shepherd Book, entering the cargo bay. With him were Kaylee Frye and River’s brother, Simon. Moments earlier these three had been in the dining area playing Tall Card, and Simon had been losing badly. For a holy man, Derrial Book was a remarkably good bluffer, while Kaylee’s winsome, heart-shaped face masked a deviousness which she wouldn’t have dreamed of using to her advantage except when it came to something harmless like a card game. It didn’t help Simon—but helped Kaylee a lot—that he was besotted with her. He had been losing hands to her pretty much on purpose, just so she’d like him that bit more.

  “What seems to be the problem?” Book continued. His warm baritone voice was so mellow and reasonable, you could easily imagine yourself sitting up and paying attention as he delivered a sermon in church, and not just that but enjoying it.

  “Her,” said Jayne. “Hat.” He had gotten himself so fired up, he was having trouble getting his words out.

  “Jayne’s got a burr under his saddle ’bout River wearing his chapeau,” said Mal.

  “You’re her gorramn brother,” Jayne sputtered to Simon. “You know better’n any of us how she works. Can’t you just, I dunno, switch her off or somethin’?”

  “She’s not some machine, Jayne,” Zoë chastised.

  “She was, we’d have dumped her out the airlock a long time ago,” Jayne muttered.

  “River? River?” Simon Tam approached his sister, hands held out pacifyingly. Much as he loved River, he was also wary of her. The sinister medical experimentation that had been carried out on her at the Academy—the Alliance’s bogus school for gifted students, from which Simon had rescued her—had left River very different from the girl he had grown up with. At times he scarcely recognized her. At times she even frightened him.

  River paused briefly in her dance to fix Simon with a penetrating gaze. Those large brown eyes of hers didn’t just look at him. They seemed to look into him, as though she knew his every secret. Then she whirled away from him, resuming the sequence of sinuous, athletic moves which, in another life, could have earned her a place in any ballet corps on the central planets.

  “River!” Simon called out, vainly. His sister was sunk in some strange fugue state, beyond the reach of his influence.

  He turned to Jayne with a hapless expression on his face. Jayne’s fingers were twitching. He looked of a mind to come up onto the catwalk and settle things with his fists. Simon gulped, thinking that in the event of him and Jayne engaging in fisticuffs, one of them would end up bruised, battered, bloodied and quite probably unconscious, and it would not be Jayne.

  To Simon’s relief, Inara Serra now arrived on the scene. It seemed that even all the way over in her shuttle, which was docked snugly on Serenity’s starboard flank, she had been able to hear the furor in the cargo bay.

  Simon felt that Inara, as a Companion, pretty much the epitome of tact and poise, would surely be able to soothe tensions in the cargo bay. Not for nothing was she nicknamed “the Ambassador” by the crew. She was as subtle in the ways of understanding people’s characters as she was skilled in the arts of bringing physical pleasure.

  Inara took in the situation at a glance.

  “River,” she said, and immediately River halted. “My love, that hat does not go with that dress.”

  “I could have told her that,” said Kaylee.

  Book looked at her.

  “What?” Kaylee protested. “Just because I wear overalls all day, doesn’t mean I don’t know fashion.”

  “Why not take it off?” Inara continued. “I’m sure, if you came to my shuttle, we could find you something more suitable.”

  River gave a quirky smile. “They can’t even look at each other sometimes. It gets so it’s what they don’t say is more important than what they do. They’re two suns in a binary system, orbiting each other. Both bright, both brilliant. But they’re going to burn out on each other if they don’t ever get together, and it may be too late anyway.”

  River was prone to making oblique announcements like this. Inara frowned, as though she did not understand what River was saying. A quick reflex glance in Mal’s direction, however, suggested that she did.

  “The hat, River,” she said. “Jayne’s upset that you’ve got it. Give it back to him, and then you can carry on dancing to your heart’s content.”

  River weighed up the proposition. Then she grasped the catwalk railing and hurdled over, landing on the cargo bay floor below as lightly as a cat. She strode across to Jayne, plucking the woolen hat from her head. She held it out to him.

  Jayne hesitated, looking at River askance, suspecting a trick. He snatched the hat off her, clutching it close to his chest.

  “‘Thank you,’” said River, like a schoolteacher reminding her class to mind their manners.

  “Thank you,” Jayne intoned grudgingly, wondering why he should be the one to have to show gratitude.

  “This is what happens when we spend too long off-planet with too little to do,” Inara said to Book.

  “Captain Reynolds says we’re ‘between jobs,’” Book replied.

  “What most other people would call ‘unemployed.’”

  Book nodded. “Let’s stick with ‘between jobs.’ We should give the man a fig leaf of dignity.”

  River was still standing in front of Jayne, staring up at him. Then, seemingly apropos of nothing, she said, “She wasn’t ever yours.”

  “Who wasn’t ever mine?” said Jayne, taken aback.

  River’s voice was soft and toneless, akin to that of someone half-asleep. “She never belonged to you.”

  “Mal,” said Jayne out of the side of his mouth. “Girl’s talking crazy. Again. I don’t like it.”

  River reached up and tenderly stroked Jayne’s cheek. “But you should treat her like she does.”

  Then she pivoted away, disappearing off to the passenger quarters as swiftly and fluidly as her namesake.

  The silence that followed was broken by a voice over the ship’s comm.

  “Good day to you all, my merry band of shipmates. This is Hoban Washburne, your dashingly handsome yet surprisingly modest pilot. We’re receiving a wave. Originating from a private sourcebox on Thetis. Recorded message. It’s been pinging back and forth across the Cortex for some while, node to node, to judge by the delivery path record. Named recipient is one Jayne Cobb.”

  “Jayne?” said Mal. “You been expecting a wave?”

  “Not as I know of.”

  “Named sender,” Wash continued, “is one Temperance McCloud.”

  “Temperance who now? I don’t know no…” Then Jayne’s face paled. “Nah. Nah, it couldn’t be.”

  “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” Zoë observed.

  Jayne nodded noncommittally, as though he had not really heard what she said.

  “Presume you’d like it patched through to your bunk,” said Wash. “Doing that now. Beep! Thank you for choosing Washburne Telecommunications Incorporated. We appreciate your custom.”

  Jayne, still clutching his hat, hurried off.

  “Sir, any idea who this Temperance McCloud is?” a bemused Zoë asked Mal.

  Serenity’s cap
tain shook his head. “Not a notion. But seeing how spooked Jayne is right now just from hearin’ that name, I got me a powerful hankering to find out.”

  Huckleberry U. Gillis was sweating.

  Hard.

  Which, being as he lived on what was perhaps the driest planet in the entire ’verse, a world where water was as precious as gold, may not have been wise.

  But it was forgivable.

  Because there was a knife with a wickedly sharp blade right next to his throat.

  And the hideously scarred man holding the knife not only looked like he knew how to use it, he looked like he wanted to use it.

  ***

  Being mayor of Coogan’s Bluff was not an easy job, but Huckleberry Gillis reckoned he did it well enough.

  Coogan’s Bluff was a tiny town, one of a couple hundred such settlements scattered across the arid surface of Thetis, a world which sat somewhere between the Border and the Rim but closer to the latter than the former.

  Thetis was an ironic name. The original Thetis was a Nereid, a sea nymph in the Ancient Greek mythology of Earth-That-Was. Only someone with a strange sense of humor—or a great deal of optimism—would have borrowed her name for a planet whose landmasses were more or less desert and whose oceans were small and so densely salty they could not support marine life.

  Terraforming sometimes took, sometimes didn’t, depending on environmental factors and the temperamental nature of the technology itself. In the case of Thetis it had failed to make much of the place, and only the hardiest of colonists chose to live there. They were people who wanted little to do with the Alliance and the Core. Not exactly troublemakers, but the type not to accept readily the yoke of authority, the type who reckoned folks could muddle along without being told by some bureaucrat how they should muddle along and without paying much in the way of taxes on the proceeds of their muddling along.

  As mayor, Gillis interfered as little as possible with the lives of the townsfolk. He confined his duties to settling disputes, smoothing ruffled feathers, and hanging out at Billy’s Bar on the corner of the town square where Main Street met Two-Mile Road. Billy’s was kinda his office-away-from-office, and a damn sight nicer place to spend time at than the glorified cowshed that was his actual office. Regulars at Billy’s would come up to Gillis, maybe buy him a drink, and either shoot the breeze or get something off their chest, or both.