Firefly--Big Damn Hero Page 26

  However, no sooner did Mal see the impact site, and Jinny’s body, than he fell to his knees and uttered the sentence Toby had just quoted.

  What he didn’t grasp was why it mattered. What significance “She was supposed to be safe” carried for Toby.

  That was when Toby slid a hand into his pocket and retrieved a small, rounded lump of metal that had been distorted out of its original shape by intensely high temperatures. It was roughly the size and shape of a fob watch, and for a moment Mal could not fathom what it was or why Toby had produced it.

  Then it dawned on him.

  It was the locket. The gold locket with the ornate “J.” The one he hadn’t given to Jinny, and then, later, much later, had.

  Toby levered open the lid, with some difficulty. The hinge barely worked.

  Inside was a mass of circuitry, fused into so much silvery goo.

  “See that, everyone?” He displayed the locket to the crowd. “See that, Mal? A homing beacon. The homing beacon that you put there. The homing beacon which gave the Alliance the exact coordinates for the arms cache. Thanks to you, they couldn’t miss. Thanks to you, Jinny Adare died.”

  “Hades?” said Zoë, leaning over the comms panel on Serenity’s bridge. “You sure that’s right, Book?”

  “That’s what Elmira says,” Book replied. His voice crackled, distance distorting the signal.

  “As in the lesser of Persephone’s two moons,” said Wash. “Sibling to the larger, brighter Renao, and usually part-eclipsed by it.”

  “Sure,” said Zoë, “but what in hell are they doing on Hades? There’s nothing there.”

  “I think that’s kind of the point,” said Book. “If you take someone prisoner and have malicious designs on them, the best place to spirit them off to is somewhere remote and undesirable, somewhere no one goes.”

  “And the intel’s sound?”

  “Elmira has nothing to gain by lying. Put it this way. Hunter Covington enslaved her, abused her, threatened to kill her—it isn’t in her interests to cover for him. In fact, her exact words were, ‘If your friends catch up with him and manage to put a bullet in him, I’m not going to shed a single tear.’”

  “Well, you can tell her from me,” Zoë said, “if I see him, I’ll do just that. Him and anyone else involved in Mal’s kidnapping.”

  “I’m already plotting a course towards Hades, Shepherd,” Wash said, stabbing buttons on the control console. “Just one question. Where precisely on Hades? Any idea? Because it’s not the biggest rock in the ’verse but it’s not the smallest either, and if we don’t have any clear idea where to put down, we could be searching a long time.”

  “I asked Elmira that myself. She doesn’t know. But you’ll find the location, Wash. I’m sure of it.”

  “If I do, it’ll be some kind of miracle.”

  “Miracles happen,” said Book.

  “Not in my experience,” Wash muttered as Zoë cut the connection. He hit the ship’s intercom. “Kaylee?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How are the engines doing?”

  “Shiny… ish.”

  “Good enough, ’cause I’m about to go for maximum burn. We think we know where Mal is.”

  “Oh my God! For real?”

  “Yup. You just make sure Serenity keeps spaceborne.”

  “On it!”

  “Buckle up, honey,” Wash said to Zoë. “I’m going to give you the ride of a lifetime.”

  “Promises, promises,” Zoë said, strapping herself into a seat.

  Wash thrust the yoke forward, and Serenity’s tail end lit up like a Chinese lantern, coruscatingly bright. The ship diverted sleekly round onto her new course, Wash pouring on speed, extracting every ounce of thrust her engines could provide.

  “Shouldn’t take us more than an hour,” he said to his wife. “Assuming nothing breaks or blows up.”

  Zoë laid a hand on his arm. “Just shut up and fly, Wash. This is what you do, so do it.”

  The planet Shadow, long ago

  A week before Jinny died, Mal came over to her house and gave her the locket.

  “What’s this?” she said, staring at the trinket. “A love token?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. No. Nothing like that. I saw it in a shop in Da Cheng Shi.” He didn’t say when he’d seen it. “Saw the ‘J’ on it and thought of you.”

  “Well, that’s, er… mighty nice of you.”

  “Weren’t it just. I want you to have it, not to remember me by or any of that stuff. That’s not what this is about at all. Look inside. I’ve added a little something.”

  Jinny pressed the tiny catch which opened the locket. Inside lay a gleaming knot of technology.

  “It’s… a hearing aid?” she said, frowning at him, half smiling.

  “A homing beacon,” Mal said.

  “And why do I need a homing beacon?”

  “’Cause when the war hits Shadow, who knows where I’m going to end up? I may not even be planetside. And you may get called away too. I don’t believe for one moment that you’re going to stay put and tend to this arms cache of yours indefinitely. Those weapons’ll be gone soon enough, and the Jinny Adare I know isn’t going to be content living at the old homestead splitting logs and shoveling cow dung.”

  “You got that right.”

  “No, she’s going to become a… what are they calling us? A Browncoat.”

  “Ain’t such a pretty name, is it?” Jinny said.

  “No. And that reminds me—I need to buy myself a brown suede coat, otherwise I’m not going to fit in. But to my point. When you’re a Browncoat and I’m a Browncoat, we could be light years apart, at opposite ends of the ’verse. But that there homing beacon is linked to a matching homing beacon which I have in my safekeeping, and if ever we want to find each other, or simply know where each other is, those two little doohickeys will be able to tell us. They’re powered by thermoelectric energy, using the differential between body heat and the ambient temperature to keep them charged. As long as we’re wearing them, they’ll have juice. And if one of them stops working… Well, then the next time the other person activates their beacon, they’ll know the worst has happened.”

  “Oh Mal.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was touched or perplexed. Then he saw tears falling from her eyes, splashing onto the locket.

  He took the trinket from her hands and draped it around her neck.

  “Just wear it,” he said. “For me. Doesn’t mean we’re engaged to be wed or anything. Ain’t that at all.” No way, definitely nothing of the sort. “But know that I will always have my own beacon with me at all times, whether or not you have yours. If I want to check if you’re safe, or you me, this is how.”

  They kissed, and it was long, lingering, and over too soon.

  Then Jinny turned away from him and walked off, her head a little bowed, her step a little faltering, as though it was taking everything she had not to turn around and run back to his arms.

  * * *

  “May I speak?” Mal said. “I think it’s my turn now. I’m owed the right of response.”

  “Hear, hear,” said someone in the crowd. Mal wasn’t sure but it sounded a lot like Stuart Deakins.

  “Very well,” said Toby, with a great show of magnanimousness.

  “That homing beacon wasn’t anything to do with the Alliance,” Mal said. “Don’t even know how you could think it might have been.”

  “I had a tech expert look over it. No question, it was designed to send out a location signal. You knew Jinny was guarding the arms cache twenty-four seven. You gave her the beacon to lead the Alliance right to it. You might as well have painted crosshairs on her back.”

  “And why in hell would I do that, Toby? What would I get out of it? Jinny was my friend. My good friend. You saw me after we found the body. You saw how I was a gorramn mess. For about a week after, I could barely speak. Came close to blowin’ my own brains out several times. That’s how bad her death screwed me up.”

 
; “Oh, it was a fine display of grief you put on, that’s for sure,” Toby said. “The rest of us were feeling it genuinely and showed it in our different ways, but no one could rival Mal Reynolds when it came to the histrionics.”

  “I ain’t that good an actor.”

  “I’m not saying you were acting, Mal. I’m saying you just went over the top with it. You were torn up about Jinny, no question, but maybe you were so torn up because you knew you were the one responsible.”

  “Well, how am I supposed to argue against that kinda logic?” Mal said, exasperated. “Can’t win either way. If I hadn’t been upset, you’d be accusing me of not caring because I was her killer. Since I was upset, you’re sayin’ it’s because I had a guilty conscience. Anyways, it was Sheriff Bundy who told the Alliance about the arms cache. Everybody thought so.”

  “It was a rumor,” said Toby. “A rumor you yourself, Mal, did a great deal to spread about.”

  “Bundy hated us: you, me, Jamie, and Jinny. We’d pissed him off dozens of times, and I’d maybe pushed it too far by wounding him with a bullet that time he tried to hang Jamie, not that he didn’t have it coming. He was looking at ways to hit back at us, and he knew what’d hurt me, you, and Jamie more than anything would be killing Jinny. She was the glue that held the four of us together. If he wanted to destroy us, her death’d do it. But he wasn’t going to carry out the deed himself. Man was too cunning for that. If he could get the Alliance to do his dirty work for him, though, then his hands would be clean. Plus he’d be ingratiating himself with Shadow’s soon-to-be overlords. And it worked, didn’t it? Soon as Alliance troops stepped foot on Shadow, some of ’em came down Seven Pines Pass way, and next thing, the county governor had been executed on some spurious pretext and Sheriff Bundy was appointed in his stead. It was almost like his fee. For services rendered.”

  “Circumstantial. A theory,” Toby said. “You didn’t have any proof that that was what happened. All it was, was what you wanted everyone to believe was the case. If it was true, why didn’t you go after Bundy?”

  “Believe me, I was tempted. If I’d had hard evidence he was to blame, instead of just a strong suspicion, I’d have blown the bastard clean out of his socks. Before I could go about accumulating that evidence, however, High Command gave us our marching orders. And you know what? I was right glad to get the hell off of Shadow. Stayin’ there a moment longer might’ve killed me. I’ve got a question for you, Toby Finn. How come you have that beacon at all? Wasn’t it buried with Jinny?”

  “I found it when I helped ferry her to the town morgue,” Toby replied. “You weren’t much use in that regard. You were too busy wailing and tearing your hair out and drenching yourself in misery so’s everyone could see. Me and Jamie, we got on with the business of making sure Jinny got a decent burial. Once the ground around the cowshed had cooled enough for us to pick up the body, that’s what we did. And while we were moving her, I spied that locket and I got curious about it. Wasn’t something I’d given her, her parents neither. I asked ’em later, and even they didn’t know how she’d come by it. So I took it off her body when no one was looking. Opened it up when I got home. Saw what was inside. I didn’t know she’d got it from you, not then. All’s I knew was that someone had planted a beacon on Jinny without her knowing and had used her as a living target, and I vowed that when I found out who it was, nothing’d stop me from exacting vengeance upon that individual. And at last, the day has come. A day I’ve been waiting for, looking forward to, dreaming of, for more years than I care to think.”

  “And how can you be so sure it was me that did it?” Mal said. “I didn’t have evidence pointing the finger at Sheriff Bundy, and you don’t have none pointing it at me.”

  “Are you so sure, Mal?” Toby sneered. “I think you’ll find I have plenty of evidence.”

  “But that beacon isn’t what you think it was. Like I said, it wasn’t anything to do with the Alliance. It was—”

  Before Mal could finish the sentence, there was a sudden ripple of activity amongst the assembled Browncoats. Heads were turning. People were murmuring to one another.

  Somebody had just entered the cavern.

  Not just anyone, either, but Hunter Covington, complete with cobra-head cane. Accompanying him was a person Mal also recognized, the man from Taggart’s, the guy in the mustard-yellow duster who’d sent him outside to get bushwhacked by Covington and his goons.

  “A very good evening to you all,” said Covington. “Actually, that should be ‘morning.’ Day’s dawning out there, in case you hadn’t realized. Sky was brightening just as we came in to land. Looking like a peach of a day. And there is Mr. Malcolm Reynolds, all trussed up and set to swing. Seems we arrived just in time, wouldn’t you say, Harlow?”

  Yellow Duster—Harlow—nodded agreement.

  “You are indeed just in time, gentlemen,” Toby said. “Just in time to watch one of the vilest men in Browncoat history get his comeuppance.”

  Serenity swung into orbit around Hades. It was a smooth ball of rock a couple of hundred thousand miles from Persephone, rolling in a slow, lazy ellipse around its mother planet. There were a few mountain ranges, a few craters, but apart from those it was featureless.

  Terraforming had been attempted, but all Hades had to show for it was atmosphere. Vegetation had failed. There had been no release of water from its frozen poles. Colonization had therefore been impossible, and the moon had been abandoned as a failed project, left to carry on along its way more or less unmolested.

  Since then, prospectors had sniffed around, digging down in the search for valuable minerals such as iridium, palladium, manganese and molybdenum, not to mention platinum and gold. Yet again, however, Hades had proved disappointing, yielding nothing more valuable than iolite and ametrine, semi-precious gemstones whose retail price was not high enough to justify the cost of their extraction.

  “Nothing,” Zoë said, surveying the moon’s surface on the scanning screen. “Nothing but wasteland.” There was a note of despair in her voice.

  “If there was maybe a building of some sort,” Wash said, “some sign of civilization, then we might have something to aim at. But there ain’t. It’s just a ghost world.”

  “Can you run a sweep?”

  “Already doing that. Thermal scan in a grid pattern, with the gain turned way up high. If there’s any kind of heat signature beyond natural background, it’ll register. So far, nada.”

  Jayne entered the bridge, ducking under the lintel of the low doorway. “That it, huh?” he said, looking out at Hades through the viewing-port array. “Not much to write home about.”

  “If you don’t have anything useful to contribute…” Zoë said.

  “Just sayin’. Seen more life in a three-days-dead dog. Mal’s somewhere down there?”

  “Supposedly.”

  “Then we got no chance of finding him. Not unless we had a week to look, and I don’t reckon we got nearly that long. Vigilantes’ll probably have plugged him already.”

  “Really, Jayne, if you don’t shut up…”

  “Hey, Zoë, don’t blame me if I’m the realist round here. Somebody has to be.”

  “Here’s an idea. Let’s just assume we are going to find Mal. We ought to make preparations. So why don’t you go to your bunk, fetch out Vera, give her a good clean, and then she’ll be all ready for if she’s ever needed.”

  Jayne nodded. “That ain’t a half bad idea.” He retreated out of the bridge.

  Wash said, “Did you really just tell Jayne to go to his bunk and polish his rifle?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know he’ll never realize that was a thinly veiled insult, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “My God, woman, I so want to ravish you right now.”

  “Focus on the matter at hand, Wash.”

  “Too late. My mind has already gone down the dirty path. I’m thinking, when this is over, you and me, we— Oh wait. Wait just one xī niú second.”
>
  Something had flared on the thermal scan screen. Amidst the neutral grays and blues of Hades’s surface, there was a tiny blob of glowing orange.

  Wash tapped instructions into a keyboard to enhance the image and zero in.

  “Ohhh yeah. Attaboy.”

  “What is it?” Zoë asked.

  “Looks like the exhaust profile of a private yacht. Just landed. Engine’s cycling down and the thrusters are cooling but still radiating residual heat.”

  “Enough to get a fix on?”

  “Done. Coordinates logged in.”

  “Whose craft?”

  “My guess is Covington’s. According to Elmira, Covington headed out to join the vigilantes in a yacht, didn’t he? That’s him down there, parked wherever they are.”

  “Book said miracles happen,” Zoë murmured.

  “And so does amazing piloting,” said Wash. “I’m calculating re-entry. Every moment counts. No time for slick and smooth. We’re going in fast and we’re going in hard.”

  Zoë smirked. “Is your mind still on the dirty path?”

  Wash grinned. “Little bit,” he said, and yanked on the yoke.

  “Why’re you even here?” Mal called across the cavern to Hunter Covington. “Don’t reckon as you were ever a Browncoat.”

  “How can you tell?” Covington replied.

  “On account of Browncoats have integrity, and you don’t.”

  “For what it’s worth, I did my best to stay neutral during the war.”

  “Yeah, like most gutless, profiteerin’ streaks of xióng māo niào did.”

  “I was open to opportunities wherever they arose,” Covington said. “Still am. To nail your colors to a single mast is so limiting. Except, you didn’t nail your colors to a single mast after all, did you, Mal? In fact, you have no right to lecture me about integrity. Not if what Mr. Finn says about your past behavior is true, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t. You have earned yourself a reputation around Eavesdown, and elsewhere, as someone with a very elastic approach to ethics. ‘Give Malcolm Reynolds a job, chances are he’ll let you down or wind up screwing you over,’ that’s what they say. ‘Trust him no further than you could throw him.’”