The Ghost Machine Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Leave us a Review

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

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  About the Author

  THE GHOST MACHINE

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  Big Damn Hero by James Lovegrove (original concept by Nancy Holder)

  The Magnificent Nine by James Lovegrove

  Generations by Tim Lebbon (October 2020)

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  Firefly: The Ghost Machine

  Hardback edition ISBN: 9781789092240

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789092257

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London, SE1 0UP.

  First edition: April 2020

  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 & © 2020 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.

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  DEDICATION

  For Lou

  the Zoë to my Wash

  the Kaylee to my Simon

  the Vera to my Jayne

  We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on; and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.

  – Prospero

  The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The events in this novel take place between the

  Firefly TV series and the movie Serenity.

  Hoyt Koestler shaded his eyes and stared westward. Where the gorramn hell was Mal Reynolds?

  Fella was supposed to have shown up a whole half-hour ago. Would it kill him to be punctual? Hoyt had better things to do than stand out here in the blazing midday sun waiting for some low-rent Firefly captain to arrive and pick up a package.

  For Hoyt, “better things” meant, well, nothing useful. Hoyt Koestler was the kind of guy that devoted as little time as possible to work so he could have as much free time as possible to do as he pleased.

  But somebody turning up late to a meet? It was disrespectful, was what it was.

  Truth be told, it wasn’t Reynolds’s tardiness that was bothering Hoyt so much. It was his reputation.

  Badger, the broker behind this particular deal, had warned Hoyt about Reynolds. “Slipperier than a greased eel, ’e is,” he had said via wave. “You need to watch out for the bloke. Sit down to barter with Mal Reynolds, you’d best count the platinum in your pocket when you stand up.”

  The description slipperier than a greased eel could equally have applied to the Persephone-based black marketeer himself. It was funny, Hoyt thought, how people tended to deplore in others the behaviors they themselves were guiltiest of. It was even possible Reynolds wasn’t as bad as Badger claimed. Maybe a crook like Badger saw only crookedness wherever he looked.

  Reynolds was still late, though.

  Hoyt continued to scan the horizon, his horse shifting its hooves restlessly beneath him.

  The six men he had brought along with him were getting restless too.

  “How much longer are we gonna be sittin’ fryin’ our asses out here?” grumbled one of them, Callum Trinder Jr. He spat a wad of used-up chewing tobacco onto the dusty ground and thumbed a fresh chunk of the stuff into his mouth out of a leather pouch. Trinder’s fingers, lips, mustache, and teeth were stained deep yellow. His father had encouraged him to take up the tobacco habit when he was barely five years old, saying it was the mark of a real man. Callum Trinder Sr. had died of mouth cancer at the age of forty, almost certainly as a result of inserting plugs of tobacco between cheek and gum and masticating on them all day long—but that didn’t seem to have deterred the younger Trinder any.

  “We’ll be sittin’ here until he comes,” Hoyt replied firmly.

  “What if he don’t come?” said another of Hoyt’s posse, Cicero “Nine Toes” O’Malley. Given his fondness for the booze, Nine Toes had come by his nickname in a perhaps predictable way: shooting off part of his foot in a drunken sidearm-discharge incident.

  “He’ll come,” Hoyt said, thinking, He darned well better.

  All six of the men with Hoyt were heavily armed, as was Hoyt himself. That was in accordance with another piece of advice Badger had given. “Mal Reynolds can be free and easy wiv the gunplay,” he had said. “Fings don’t go ’is way, ’im and ’is crew are apt to shoot first and ask questions never. Make sure you ’ave backup when you meet ’im, plenty of it, and they’re loaded for bear and willing to get stuck in if the bullets start flying. I bloomin’ well do.”

  Now Hoyt heard a faint hiss-whine—the sound of a distant jet engine.

  “About gòu cào de time,” he muttered under his breath. To his men, louder, he said, “Look sharp, boys. We have company. Let’s do this, let’s do it right, and we’ll be back in town and hoisting whiskies at Mama Rosebud’s within the hour.”

  The Flying Mule sped across arid plains towards the prearranged
rendezvous point.

  Zoë was piloting, with Mal up front beside her and Jayne in the backseat. All three were wearing goggles against the dust-heavy air blasting into their faces. Mal could feel the dust crusting up inside his nostrils and fought the urge to insert a forefinger and pick.

  “What do we know about this Hoyt Koestler guy anyway?” Zoë asked.

  “Badger vouches for him,” Mal replied.

  “Minds me to dislike the fella already,” Jayne said.

  “Aside from that, he’s spent his whole life here on Canterbury. Fancies himself a wheeler-dealer, but really he’s just a middleman. Doesn’t greatly care who he works for, but no Alliance ties as anyone knows of.”

  “Not much to go on.” Whereas Mal was resisting the temptation to pick his nose, Jayne had given in to it shamelessly and enthusiastically. “And the cargo?”

  “Badger was pretty cagey when we spoke. ‘Technical apparatus’ is all he’d tell me.”

  Zoë said, “When Badger’s cagey about something, it fair sets my—”

  “Nutsack to shrivelin’?” Jayne cut in.

  “I was going to say nape hairs to prickling, but each to their own.”

  “Mine too,” Mal agreed. “Nutsack and nape hairs. And when I pressed him about it, you should have seen his grin. Sort of grin that means ‘You’re better off stayin’ ignorant, old chum.’”

  “Other than ‘technical apparatus’ he didn’t give you a clue?” said Zoë.

  “None. But you could tell a lot from how excited he was sounding. Whatever the item is, it’s valuable, it’s hot, and Badger can’t believe his luck that he’s going to get his grubby paws on it. Reckon people are making a fortune out of this deal all along the line.”

  “Yeah,” said Jayne. “Shame none of those people are us.”

  “We’ll be gettin’ paid the going rate,” Mal said. “It’s enough.”

  His tone was faintly forlorn, however. Mal had pushed Badger as hard as he could to increase the transportation fee, but no dice. Badger had simply said that there were any number of other ship’s captains he could go to who’d be glad of the employ. He’d come to Mal first because the two of them had history and he felt they had developed a solid working relationship, albeit one that wasn’t without its ups and downs.

  “Of course,” Badger had added, “if you don’t want the job, Captain Reynolds, you only ’ave to say. But I imagine that flying rustbucket of yours could do with a few replacement engine parts. Then there’s fuel, and your crew can’t survive on thin air, can they? Even if you’re down to seven, now that the Companion and the priest ’ave buggered off, everybody’s still got to eat.”

  How Badger knew that Inara and Shepherd Book had both quit Serenity, Mal had no idea. The man had connections, that was for sure. Lines of communication reaching everywhere, and they fed back news to him from all across the ’verse, information he used to further his own ends and, where possible, feather his nest.

  A month ago Book had departed for Haven, Deadwood’s moon, where he was now bringing enlightenment and holy succor to a small settler community. His reasons for leaving were many but boiled down to a desire to keep a lower profile. “I could tell you that, since I am but a humble, honest preacher, I want no part of the violence and criminality which we on this ship seem to encounter at every turn,” he had said to Mal. “However, as you should have gathered by now, I am no stranger to violence and criminality, and to pretend otherwise would be specious. I have a checkered past and I have been doing my best to run away from it. Unfortunately, the longer I spend in your company, the more my past is in danger of catching up with me. Therefore for my sake, yours, and everyone else’s, it’s better if I am elsewhere.”

  As for Inara, in the wake of events at the Heart of Gold bordello she had decided to return to House Madrassa and take up a position training Companions there. As far as Mal could tell, she desperately missed the closeness she had felt with her fellow Companions, the mutual understanding they had all shared. The death of Nandi, her one-time protégée, had instilled in her a need to be among her own kind again. Or at least, that was her excuse.

  “The residents of House Madrassa,” she had said, “they’re like family to me.”

  Mal had thought he and the rest of Serenity’s crew were also like family to her. Maybe not the happiest of families, but they all rubbed along together and had one another’s backs. Obviously that wasn’t enough for Inara. Not anymore.

  Could he have made her stay? He wondered what it would have taken. There were things he had wanted to tell her, had been meaning to tell her for some while. And he had tried to say them, but he hadn’t said them well enough, or soon enough, or directly enough.

  She’d given him a fair few chances afterwards to change her mind, and maybe he could have.

  Trouble was, it had hurt when Inara had told him she was going to leave. Hurt bad, like his heart had been stabbed with an icicle. And from then on until she actually did go, Mal had acted cool towards her, because he didn’t want her to see how much pain he was in.

  Pride.

  Malcolm Reynolds mightn’t have much, but what he did have, by the gallon, was pride.

  And in this instance, that pride had cost him.

  Cost him the woman he now knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he loved.

  Stupid, foolish, stubborn-ass pride.

  Zoë took her eyes off the terrain ahead to glance over her shoulder at Jayne.

  He had finished with the nose picking and had started in on gnawing at a hangnail, gazing out absently at the landscape all the while. The distracted look on his face told her that he had drifted off into his own thoughts. What those might be, Zoë neither knew nor cared to speculate. He was, however, not paying attention to her or Mal, and this gave her the opportunity for a quick heart-to-heart with her captain.

  “Penny for ’em?” she said, lowering her voice so that Mal could still just hear her above the thunder of the Mule’s turbines.

  “Doubt they’re worth even that much,” he replied.

  “You’re looking wistful. Like you’re missing someone.”

  “Book? Yep, sayin’ Grace before meals, gettin’ chided for cussing, always being reminded how the Lord is looking out for me—miss it like crazy.”

  “I’m not talking about the Shepherd, and you know it.”

  Mal pondered. “Can’t miss someone who doesn’t miss you.”

  “You honestly believe that?” Zoë said. “That she’s there on Sihnon not thinking about you every gorramn day? Woman was crazy about you, Mal. Anyone with eyes could see it. Even him.”

  She jerked a thumb behind her at Jayne, who was still oblivious to their conversation. He was really getting stuck into that hangnail, his brow furrowed like he was working out some complicated math equation.

  “And you,” Zoë continued, “were crazy about her. Don’t even try to deny it. You’ve been moping around like a dog with a broken tail ever since she left. Know how Wash described you to me the other day? ‘The dictionary definition of miserable.’ And this is coming from a man who’s so bad at reading people he can’t even tell when I’m mad at him.”

  “To be fair, you’re mad at him quite a lot of the time,” Mal pointed out.

  “But there’s mad and there’s really, genuinely, with-good-cause mad, and Wash can’t tell the difference. Anyways, this ain’t about us. It’s about you and Inara.”

  “Inara did what was right for her,” Mal said, tight-lipped. “Ain’t our place to judge. All’s we can do is accept the choice she made and move on.”

  “You first.”

  “’Sides, I don’t recall as it’s any of your business, my feelings about Inara. So I’d thank you, corporal, to keep your views to yourself.”

  “Pulling rank now, huh? War’s over, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “I’m still your captain, if nothing else. And as such, I’m inviting you to drop the subject.”

  “Inviting or ordering?”


  “Same difference.”

  “Then yessir, consider the subject dropped,” Zoë drawled, firing a sardonic salute at him.

  Mal folded his arms and stared ahead.

  Moments later, a bunch of people on horseback appeared in the near distance, shimmering into view through the heat haze. They were stationed beside a dried-up arroyo, near a large limestone outcrop that wind and weathering had sculpted into a rough facsimile of a human skull.

  “That’s them,” Mal said. “Gotta be.”

  Zoë glanced at a screen on the Mule’s dashboard and nodded. “These are the coordinates Badger gave us, more or less.”

  “Plus, big hunk of rock that looks like a skull. Badger said that’d be our landmark.”

  Jayne had finished with the hangnail, a hard-won victory, and was on the alert now. “Why do so many of these meets have to happen in the middle of ruttin’ nowhere?” he groused. “Why can’t we arrange to get together at a titty bar or something?”

  “’Cause when you’re doing a trade that ain’t wholly legit, it’s best to conduct your business well away from the public,” said Mal. “And from titties.”

  “I know that. I’m just saying, it’d be nice if we did this stuff somewhere civilized for a change. Maybe even a nice restaurant.”

  “Nice restaurant?” said Zoë. “You’ve been spendin’ too much time around Simon, Jayne. Next, you’ll be drinking tea with your pinkie finger raised.”

  “You saying the Doc’s rubbin’ off on me?” Jayne shook his head, aghast. “Uh-uh. No way.”

  As if to prove his point, he resumed his nose picking once more.

  Zoë decelerated, the Mule’s engine roar gradually diminishing. She coasted to a halt some twenty yards from the gathering of a half-dozen riders. The Mule settled to the ground, its turbines kicking up a last billow of dust, which drifted sideways in the light breeze.

  She braced herself.

  Here we go. Showtime.

  “Now, which one of you fine gents is Hoyt Koestler?” Mal said, clambering out of the Mule and pushing up his goggles. With his dust-caked face and the pale silhouette left around his eyes by the goggles, he looked like a reverse raccoon.