Firefly--Life Signs Read online

  “Who? The Feds?”

  “Yes. They’re looking for us already.”

  “You know that? Like, psychically?”

  “Logic, dummy,” River said with one of those loose, disarming smiles of hers. “You cause the Alliance trouble, they don’t stop looking for you. They never stop looking.”

  “I suppose so. That Commander Levine don’t strike me as someone who gives up easily. She must realize Serenity’s injured and can’t have gone far. She’s going to scour the area until she finds us, and there aren’t that many places hereabouts to hide. She’ll start poking around this Leviathan wreck soon enough. Question is, how soon?”

  “Why ask me? Am I an oracle?”

  Sometimes, thought Kaylee.

  “Guess we should assume we don’t have long,” she said. “Better get a move on, then.”

  “Less mouthing, more mending,” River agreed, and resumed work on the backflow conduits.

  Kaylee tried not to think about Constant Vigilance hunting for them. She tried not to think about Wash lying comatose in the infirmary. She tried not to think about the four crewmembers down on Atata, Simon among them, in the midst of those frozen wastes with no one but criminals for company.

  It was all going to be okay.

  Dear Lord, please let it all be okay.

  29

  “Okay,” said Zoë. “You can put the shiv away.”

  A hush had fallen in the refectory. Now that the Regulators had got involved and the fracas was over, the inmates resumed their previous meek, cautious state of being. They continued to look on avidly, but there was no more cheering or chanting; nothing that would be deemed unruly or disobedient.

  “You can’t make me,” the Regulator replied, hefting the crude weapon in her hand. “I take orders from only one person, and, honey, he ain’t you.”

  “I ain’t ordering, just asking.” Zoë gestured at the sprawled form of Mal, whom a few seconds ago she had punched into insensibility.

  “The man is subdued.” She poked him hard in the ribs with her toecap. “See? No need to go waving that thing around anymore. What good’s stabbing him going to do?”

  “You’re new here,” said the woman, “so you might not be up on the ground rules yet. Me and these fellas with me, we’re Regulators. That means we regulate. How we do that—the nature and extent of our regulatin’—is down to us to decide. Your friend—his name Mal? That what you called him? Your friend Mal just got into a fight, and at Hellfreeze that’s a big no-no. Soon as we heard all the fuss, we came running. We took stock of what was going on and, as Mr. O’Bannon requires us to do in such situations, we dealt with it with a firm hand. What level of force we employ is very much at our own discretion, and that entitles me to use this here knife as I so please. Makes no nevermind whether the person I use it on is resisting at the time or not.”

  “I get that, but I’ve helped you deal with the problem. Mal’s down and not getting up again any time soon. Same as that other guy.” The man with the tattooed head was, in fact, in a far worse state than Mal. The huge Regulator with the broom-handle baton had battered him so severely Zoë wasn’t sure he would recover. His head had actual dents in it. “It makes me uncomfortable that your knife is still out, is all.”

  The shiv had made Zoë uncomfortable from the moment she’d seen the Regulator draw it from her back pocket. Mal had clearly been in no fit state to defend himself against it, and Zoë had been sure he was about to get a rough-edged seven-inch blade embedded in his belly. But her stepping in would all be for nothing if the Regulator decided to stab him regardless, and the way the woman looked right now, all puffed up and hyper, she seemed set to do just that.

  “Look,” Zoë said, “I appreciate that you’re the law here. I respect you for it.”

  “You can’t do. Otherwise you wouldn’t have gotten in my way.”

  “What you may not realize—you got a name?”

  “Annie. Ornery Annie they sometimes call me.”

  “What you may not realize, Annie, is that Mal ain’t my friend. Just because I came with him from CU #22, doesn’t mean him and me are best pals. Far from it. Everything was turning to gŏu shĭ and I needed to get the hell out. Mal had a plan, and I went along with it, and so did they.” She nodded at Jayne and Simon. “And then what does he do, pretty much as soon as we arrive? He manages to irk some great big tattooed lummox, and next thing you know, they’re smacking each other around like a pair of angry walruses. Way to ingratiate ourselves with our new hosts, know what I’m saying?”

  Zoë said all this with a weary, longsuffering air. She thought she detected, if not empathy in the other woman’s eyes, then at least commiseration.

  “I mean,” she continued, “I wouldn’t go so far as to call Mal a boneheaded, dick-swinging moron, but… Well, no. He is a boneheaded, dick-swinging moron.”

  Ornery Annie with the asymmetrical hair almost chuckled at that, and her knife hand dropped a fraction. Zoë felt that at last she was getting somewhere.

  She darted a glance at Simon and Jayne. One of them seemed to understand what she was attempting to do. The other just sat there rubbing his goatee in a puzzled fashion, as if unable to fathom why Zoë was busy distancing them from Mal. Jayne was smart enough, however, to keep his mouth shut. He could at least tell she was working some kind of angle.

  “As a matter of fact,” Zoë said to Annie, reaching the point she had been building up to, “I’m wondering if you mightn’t have a vacancy for another Regulator.”

  “You puttin’ yourself forward?”

  “I’m military. Least, I used to be.”

  “Thought that about you,” Annie said. “The way you hold yourself. That take-no-crap attitude. Plus, that was some pretty neat punching you did, like someone who’s been trained to hit properly. Alliance?”

  “Nah. The other side.”

  “The losers.”

  “The ones who got screwed over, yes,” Zoë said before she could stop herself.

  Annie laughed mirthlessly. “Sore spot, huh?”

  “Little bit.”

  “Still, military’s military. So knocking your buddy Mal down, that was an audition for being a Regulator?”

  “I reckon,” said Zoë, “that a gal like you might want to have a gal like me keeping the peace alongside her.”

  Annie looked her up and down, then said, “Know what, lady? I’m thinkin’ you might be right about that an’ all.” She pocketed the shiv, to Zoë’s relief. “What do you call yourself?”

  “Zoë.”

  “Come with me, Zoë. There’s someone you should meet.”

  30

  As Ornery Annie escorted Zoë out of the refectory and across the central hall, she said, “That ‘losers’ crack I made just now…”

  “Yeah?”

  “I was just yankin’ your chain. I fought for the Independents too. Only, it doesn’t always pay to admit it.”

  “Don’t I know it,” said Zoë. “Who were you with?”

  “42nd Skylancers. You?”

  “57th Overlanders.”

  “The Balls and Bayonets Brigade. Heard things about you people.”

  “Good things?”

  “Mostly. You never backed down, that’s what folk say.”

  “And folk’d be right.”

  “Even when it cost you dear.”

  “Can’t put a price on a just cause.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “That’s a nice shiv you’ve got, by the way,” Zoë said. “How did you make it? Sharpened a piece of iron bedpost, would be my guess.”

  “Bingo. Chunk of wood for the haft, all bound together with a strip of cloth. No proper blades on Atata, not even kitchen knives. Meals are made out of stuff you pour out, add water to and stir. That and only that. Nothin’ you have to chop or pare. So a girl’s gotta get inventive.”

  “And nobody but a Regulator can carry a weapon in Hellfreeze?”

  “Not unless that person wants it taken from them and
used on them. It’s all about keeping the peace.”

  “Through violence.”

  “The threat of violence,” Annie clarified, “and the willingness to resort to violence if the threat is no longer enough. As a former Browncoat, Zoë, you ought to understand that. No point being all vocal about stuff if you ain’t prepared to back it up with action.”

  Using forceful coercion as a means of maintaining control sounded much more like the Alliance way, as a matter of fact. But Zoë didn’t argue the point.

  “I suppose you’d like to know what I did to get shipped off to Atata,” she said.

  “Ain’t polite to ask, usually,” said Annie, “but since you raise the subject…”

  “After the war, I had a hard time accepting the outcome.”

  “You ain’t alone in that.”

  “So I kind of carried on regardless.”

  “Resisting?”

  “Co-ordinated raids against Alliance property and shipping. Guerrilla attacks. Disruption.”

  Annie reflected on this. “Terrorism, in other words.”

  “I prefer ‘radical insurgency’ myself.”

  “You were one of them so-called Dust Devils?”

  “I was.”

  “They were the bunch who set off that bomb at the second Unification Congress on Beylix. And hit the Blue Sun munitions plant on Lilac. And took out the Feds’ refueling base on Bernadette.”

  “Among other things.”

  “Shoot. The Dust Devils were hardcore. You really ran with them?”

  “God’s honest truth.”

  And it was. Up to a point. Zoë had indeed been a member of the Dust Devils for a time, post-Unification. Like many Browncoats she had felt there was still a chance the outcome of the war could be changed. Or else maybe she’d simply been so angry how things had turned out that she’d wanted someone to lash out at, and the purple-bellies had been as good a target as any. Either way, belonging to the loose coalition of disaffected ex-Browncoats had fulfilled a need in her.

  After a while, though, it had begun to seem futile. The Dust Devils hadn’t been much more than a minor annoyance to the Alliance, certainly not a realistic challenge to the Feds’ supremacy, and Zoë had grown increasingly uncomfortable about the number of noncombatants—innocents—who were dying as a result of their activities. She had quit, with regret but also relief, and gone looking for something else to channel her energies into. Soon she’d fallen in with Mal Reynolds, joined the crew of Serenity and, best of all, met her future husband, and the course of the rest of her life had been set. The Dust Devils themselves had dispersed eventually, much like the short-lived little whirlwinds they derived their name from, and were now history, largely forgotten.

  “I thought I’d finished with the Dust Devils,” she said to Ornery Annie, “but it seemed they hadn’t finished with me. Or, to put it another way, that part of my past wasn’t over.”

  “Caught up with you in the end, did it?”

  “The Feds did, that’s for sure. They had special-ops squads out looking for us. Undercover agents combing the Rim, chasing down former Dust Devils. Rooting out these ‘terrorists,’ as they called us. Making arrests. I was holed up on Three Crosses, keeping my head down, but they found me anyway. I came quietly.”

  “I’ll bet you didn’t.”

  “Ha! No, you’ve got it. It wasn’t pretty. Took four of them to bring me in, and two of those four have got the scars to show for it. I wasn’t allowed a defense attorney. The judge heard the evidence against me and delivered a sentence, all in the space of about five minutes. Maybe the quickest trial ever.”

  “Know what?” said Annie. “I believe you. Every word of it.”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “I’ll tell you why. ’Cause most inmates I’ve met will never be straight with you about what they got sent down for. To hear them talk, they’re as pure as doves. It’s always, ‘Oh, I was framed,’ or, ‘My attorney was a useless lump of gŏu shĭ who didn’t know one end of a law book from another,’ or, ‘The evidence was sketchy but they busted me anyway.’ All the murderers here didn’t mean to shoot the other guy, the gun just went off in their hand. All the rapists say they could’ve sworn it was consensual. All the thieves were just taking back something that belonged to them.”

  Her tone was deeply sardonic.

  “So when someone like you comes along and says she was a victim of the Feds,” she went on, “I have a right to be skeptical. We all want to think we’re victims, not felons. Heroes, not villains. But if you actually were a Dust Devil—and I reckon you were—then there’s no reason to doubt that you got hunted down and imprisoned for it, like you say. You’re just lucky the special-ops team didn’t execute you on the spot. They could have.”

  “Lucky? When the alternative is a life stretch on Atata?”

  Annie laughed. “Got that right. Putting a bullet in you, they’d have been doing you a favor.”

  By now the two women were nearing the drywall partition Mal had mentioned earlier. There was a single Regulator guarding the doorway this time rather than two. Presumably this man was all they could spare while the other Regulators were over in the refectory quelling trouble.

  “Whozzat?” he demanded of Annie, with a nod at Zoë. His top incisors were missing, replaced with homemade steel implants which were rough-hewn and, to Zoë, looked extraordinarily uncomfortable.

  “This, Cleavon,” replied Annie, “is the woman who’s gonna take your job, you don’t smarten up and grow a brain.”

  “You’re mean, Annie,” Cleavon said, his expression registering hurt. “You’re a mean, nasty lady.”

  “And you’re dumb, Cleavon, and that’s just plain fact. Deal with it.”

  Even based on just a few seconds’ acquaintance, Zoë found it very hard to dispute Annie’s assessment of Cleavon. His slow and simple speech patterns suggested someone who was childishly dull-witted, an impression reinforced by the slight lisp his false teeth gave him. Added to that, his eyes were set too close together, and his forehead overhung them like an ape’s brow. Guarding a door was probably the most you could ask of this man. Anything more complicated than that would be beyond him, except maybe hitting people.

  “We’re going in to see Mr. O’Bannon,” Annie said to the adultsized infant.

  “’Kay, I guess.”

  “Wasn’t asking your permission, just telling you how it is.”

  Again, Cleavon looked hurt. All his life, he would have been belittled and mistreated, and he had never got used to it. He still had feelings, but no one seemed to care. Doubtless somebody had pushed him too far one day, had assumed Cleavon possessed an endless capacity for taking abuse, and had paid the penalty for that assumption. Cleavon had retaliated with a toddler’s ferocity and a fully grown man’s strength, and now he was on Atata. That, Zoë reckoned anyway, was his story.

  “Well,” he said, stepping aside from the doorway, “s’pose you can go on through.”

  “Why, how gracious of you,” Annie drawled. “Come on, Zoë.”

  As they passed him, Zoë shot Cleavon a look. It was mostly neutral but there was a hint—just a hint—of kindness in it. She added a brief smile.

  Cleavon responded by furrowing his brow. It was as if he was struggling to remember the last time anyone had smiled at him. Smiled, that is, in a way that wasn’t condescending or sneering. Then hesitantly, sheepishly, he returned the smile.

  Zoë thought it wouldn’t do any harm to get on Cleavon’s good side. It might well come in handy.

  Beyond the partition there were a handful of cells that were decked out in relative luxury. Extra pillows on the bunks, extra blankets. Convection heaters that kept the air markedly warmer than in the rest of the building. Sinks that were clean, not coated in oxidization stains. Each commode boasted plentiful amounts of toilet paper, rather than the single meager roll Zoë had seen elsewhere. Tinned food and protein bars lay all around in tidy stacks.

  “Perks of the job,” A
nnie remarked, seeing where Zoë’s gaze was straying. She gestured towards jars containing a thick reddish-brown liquid. “Even got us some homebrewed liquor, although, word of warning, you ever get the chance to drink some, go easy. Looks harmless enough, but it’s been known to make people go blind.”

  “I suppose Mr. O’Bannon gets first dibs on whatever the supply ships drop off.”

  “You could consider it fair recompense for the stability that he brings to Hellfreeze,” said Annie, “and that us Regulators ensure. Now then, he’s just down here.”

  She steered Zoë towards the last cell along, which was screened off with swags of material. This drapery, with its neat folds and variety of colors, was almost opulent, like the tent of some desert-dwelling potentate.

  “I’ll just go check how he’s doing,” Annie said. “Prepare the ground, as it were.”

  With that, she disappeared through a gap in the drapery, into the cell. Zoë heard a muffled conversation, and tried to paint a mental portrait of Mr. O’Bannon, based on what little she had learned about him. She thought of all the criminal types she knew. Did he have the wiry edginess of a small-time crook like Badger? The sinister avuncularity of a syndicate boss like Adelai Niska? The strutting aggression of a corrupt mercenary like Lieutenant Womack? To lord it over a prison full of lawbreaking delinquents, you surely had to have the qualities of all three of those men, and more besides.

  Annie poked her head out through the gap in the drapery and beckoned to Zoë.

  “Mr. O’Bannon has agreed to see you,” she said.

  Zoë straightened her spine and entered the cell, only to find that Mr. O’Bannon was nothing like she had imagined.

  Nothing whatsoever.

  31

  Simon and Jayne carried Mal to one of the two cells that had been assigned them. Nobody offered to help. As far as the other inmates were concerned, the group from Correctional Unit #22 weren’t outsiders anymore, they were outcasts. Associating with them could be risky, like they were carrying some sort of highly contagious disease. It was better to leave them be, at least until they had learned to assimilate better with the rest of Hellfreeze’s population, if that ever happened.