Mal and his crew are back. Always looking for a payday, Mal accepts a job from an old nemesis and occasional client: Badger. The payoff? More than he or his crew can imagine. But with such an astounding amount of scratch comes an equally astounding helping of danger. Read on!
~~*~~
Chapter 8
Sri Lanka
~~*~~
Truth was, Mal had never been to Londinium his entire life.
Neither had Jayne, Kaylee, or Zoe. Deader told the story of how her niece had
been invited to some convention there with her school, but had to cancel when
war broke out. That was the closest Deader got to it. Only Simon and River had
ever visited the seat of the Allied Planets, and then only twice. Their father
was an Appointee of the Medical Elect and took his family to Londinium when the
annual meetings took place there.
The Alliance assassin who had tried to keep intel about Miranda from being broadcast to the Verse stood in the airlock two feet away and stared back.
Only Inara was
familiar with Londinium. Her only advice to everyone as they sat around the
galley table was: “You’re all going to stand out like sore thumbs. I hate to
say this, and don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t belong there, none
of you.”
“Personally, I take
that as a compliment,” said Mal. “I wouldn’t want to be counted among a bunch
of sniffs.”
“Damn straight,”
said Jayne, who looked like he wanted to eat his words before anyone heard
them. Lenore sat next to him; he glanced nervously at her and said, “Excuse me.
It just came out of me.”
Lenore gave him an
understanding smile and squeezed his hand. She gazed at Mal. “Captain, I have
extensive files on Londinium: its history, culture, popular restaurants, social
events, and much more. Would you like me to make them available for you and the
crew?”
Mal gave her a quick
but grateful smile in return, then shook his head. “That won’t be necessary
just yet. Thanks anyway.” He glanced at Inara. “If we’ll stand out like sore
thumbs, I suppose Serenity …”
“Exactly,” she
said. “A ship like Serenity won’t be
allowed to land during the day.”
“So the sniffs
won’t have to look up and see us.”
She nodded. “Cargo
vessels are allowed to land only at night; and that’s no doubt how they’ll
classify Serenity.” She gazed at
Deader. “I take it you know our destination?”
“That I do,” said
Deader shortly. “We’ll be touchin’ down in New Cardiff itself.”
“The capital city?”
“Last time I
checked, it was.”
Bellerophon to
Londinium was an eleven-day burn. In that time Inara and Deader had gotten to
know each other a little, and it was obvious, at least to Mal, that they hadn’t
decided if they liked each other or not. Deader was terse with Inara; and Inara
was terse in return.
A day from their
destination, nothing had changed. Mal pushed the potential problems of two
women living on his boat with claws extended at each other from his mind and
said, “It beggars belief that Badger knows anyone on Londinium.”
“As much as Capitals
like to think they are free of crime, they aren’t. It’s just hidden better,” replied
Inara.
“Do we have port
coordinates, Captain?” asked Kaylee. Simon sat next to her. He had stayed
silent for most of dinner and now this discussion. It was obvious he was
nervous about landing there, as was River, who leaned against the wall at the
galley’s entrance.
“Smack dab in the
center of Snifftown itself. Maybe two miles from Parliament.”
That seemed
impossible to everyone, and they all looked at Deader for a response. She
shrugged. “I believe the Limey’s intel. I helped him get it. We’ll be all
right.” She eyed Mal as one does a bull that might rush her any second.
“There’s one more thing.”
Everybody waited. She
kept her gaze on him. “Inara isn’t wrong about the sore thumb bit. But it’s
worse than that. Much worse.”
“How so?” demanded
Mal.
She turned to
Inara. “When was the last time you were on Londinium?”
Inara shook her
head. “I’m not sure. Maybe ten years ago? I know I wasn’t twenty yet …”
“Well,” prefaced
Deader, looking nervously back at Mal, “Londinium officials passed an
‘Acceptability Ordinance’ a few years back that requires everybody who might
show their faces to be inoculated.”
“Against what?” demanded
Zoe.
“Against unacceptability,” replied Deader.
The crew stared at
one another, confused, then back at her. “What, you have to take a shot that
makes you somehow acceptable?” snorted Mal.
“That’s exactly
what you have to do,” answered Deader. “It’s an injection of nanobots that
interact with your various body systems. Others with the injection can tell
you’ve had one, and so are acceptable to meet and interact with.”
The crew held quiet
in stunned silence for a moment, then erupted with shouts of outrage. Even
Lenore looked scandalized (she was trying to fit in, after all), though she
held quiet; and Inara, while not yelling, stared down into her lap and shook her
head. Mal was shouting the loudest: “There’s no goram way I’m letting the
Alliance get
inside my head with their injections! NO GORAM WAY
“May I finish?”
Deader said at a normal pitch. She repeated it several more times as the
cacophony continued. “May I finish? … May I finish? …”
The crew quietened.
She looked at them all, one by one, before coming back to Mal, whose face was
plum-red.
“Before you go
stampedin’ off again to the Badlands of Bad Kitchen Manners, sir, please sit
down and let me finish. Thank you. I was on Londinium not a year ago. I’ve been
injected, as you will be injected, but it wasn’t with Alliance gunk. There are mind-altering
bot-riders in the crap they give you, but not
in the injections you’ll get. We’ll be meeting with Independents and Yuns who
have modified the original solution. No Alliance
mind-alterin’ crap, but with the same bots who’ll make you look acceptable to
the sniffs, as you called them, Captain. The crap they inject their citizens
with also has trace-bots in it, which allows the government to keep tabs on
everyone’s whereabouts. The stuff we’ll get does the opposite: it makes us
invisible to their sensors. You want
to be injected, folks, believe me. Just not with the government crap.”
Inara was still
shaking her head. She looked up when she noticed that everyone’s attention had
turned to her. “I supported unification,” she sighed. “I was certain an allied
Verse was the right way to go. But look what they’re doing. They’re making
people sheep. It’s … evil.”
She gazed at River,
her eyes begging. They didn’t speak for a long time. Finally River said, “It’s
okay. You couldn’t have known.”
Mal, still cooling
down, murmured, “I suppose we’ll need the proper drapery to make ourselves
presentable, regardless of this injection.”
“Badger has that
all covered,” said Deader. “Everyone here—including you, Lenore, my dear—will
have clothing appropriate to Londinium furnished to you.”
Jayne grunted. “How
can the rodent afford that?”
“Let’s just say
that his connections have proven very valuable to the Yuns, and therefore to
the Independents as well.”
“That’s twice
you’ve mentioned Independents,” said Zoe, who like Mal looked like she was
still a couple of degrees from overheating. “You’re telling me there are active
Independents on Londinium?”
“That’s what I’m
telling you, yes,” replied Deader, taking a sip of coffee. “Right under the Alliance ’s big sniffin’
nose.”
Zoe glanced at the
captain. “All these years, we’ve never met bona fide Independents. Now we’re
being told they’re in the capital city, just two miles from Parliament—?”
Mal nodded. “That
was exactly what I was about to mention.” He turned to Deader. “Well?”
“How many folks
you’ve done business with or stuck a gun in the face of or helped out would
know you were an Independent, Captain?” shot back Deader.
Mal held his glare
on her, but it couldn’t hold. “Good point.”
“You were never
alone,” said Deader. “That’s what the Alliance
wanted you to think—that you were alone, the last of a dead movement. You
weren’t. You’re about to meet a fair few who, like you, once thought they were
alone too. The movement is far from dead.”
The crew lapsed
into silence. Deader interrupted it with: “We’re six or so hours out yet. I’ve
got Serenity goin’ into a large
standard orbit.”
“What for?” asked
Mal.
“The general
procedure for breaking atmo on Londinium is to land and then let government
officials give you that injection after they check your passport and luggage
and declare your worthiness to be there. We’ll need to be injected with our
gunk before they do that. Our
injection will destroy the government nano-bots, or use them to enhance our
gunk, but it needs half a day to assimilate, else it’ll be worthless.
Londinium’s orbit is filled with billions of tons of space junk, most of it ancient—the
abandoned spaceboats that ferried the human race from Earth-That-Was. You all
know this …”
She glanced around
at the crew; they all nodded as if it was common knowledge, which it was.
“You also know that
museums have been made of some of it …”
They nodded again.
“We’re going to
dock at one of those museums. Government oversight isn’t as oppressive aboard them
as it is on the surface. That’s our
doing and our nano-bots. There are
several agents waiting for us there with our injections and the initial port
itinerary.”
She glanced at Mal.
“With your permission, Captain, of course.”
He had been staring
down at the table. He nodded without looking up.
“I would like to
test some of that ‘gunk,’ as you called it, before we put it into our bodies,”
said Simon.
“An excellent idea,”
said Mal, gazing up at him.
“I may be able to
alter it further, if what you say about it is true. Medical nano-bots are extraordinary
bits of technology. I may be able to tweak them.”
There was a time
that Mal could scarcely tolerate Simon or his sister. River was still a royal
pain in the keister at times; but Simon … the ship’s doctor had proven not just
to be an invaluable member of the crew, but also someone Mal found he could
place his trust in to do what was right for everyone involved. He found himself
admiring Simon more and more; as a result, their friendship, years in the
making and always very gradual, had finally begun to take root and grow.
“Besides,” Simon
continued, “I’m leery of injecting River with anything that …”
He didn’t have to
go on. Everyone save Deader was staring at him and nodding emphatically, even
River.
Deader chuckled.
The museum they approached was a slowboat named Sri Lanka
Zoe snickered. So
did River. Kaylee blushed. “I guess it could be seen as symbolic,” she
commented.
When all she
received were stares, she shrugged. “Well, you know, spreadin’ life n’ all …”
She shrugged again, then looked away, ostensibly to get the attention off her.
“We’re going
encrypted,” announced Deader. She punched a few buttons. “Sri Lanka
“Enable,” came back
a cold computer voice.
“Damn strange that
voice is … so old,” said Deader, who appeared to have stopped herself from
saying something else. “Gives me the chills knowin’ it’s a voice that was
birthed on Earth-That-Was …”
Zoe nodded. Kayle
and River looked spooked.
“What’s the
latest?” said Mal, who came up behind her.
“We’ve just made
contact with the Independents,” replied Deader. “I’m just waitin’ for dockin’
instructions.”
“That’s one massive
piece of hardware,” said Mal, staring out at the tremendous ship filling more
and more of the view outside.
Kaylee and River
glanced at each other and started giggling. Zoe, grinning, shook her head.
“What’s so funny?” he demanded.
“Don’t mind them,”
said Deader. “Their minds are bent a little towards the prurient, methinks.”
“Seriously, Cap’n …
I mean, look at it!” giggled Kaylee.
Mal was about to
respond when the comm sounded out.
“Serenity delta-one-niner, approach zero
point three six; seven by eight, encrypt override; lock forty-four. See you in
eighteen minutes.”
Deader, wagon
plugged into a pilot-side port, fed the data into the program. It beeped.
“We’re good,” she
said. “They check out.” She glanced up at Mal. “The Independents will want to
check out this ship, Captain, for any Alliance
nano-tech that might be onboard.”
“There’s none,”
said Mal flatly.
Deader shook her
head. “You don’t know that. Every time you dock—it don’t matter where—you
expose Serenity to Alliance-created
nano-tech. Most of it is junk, harmless, outdated. But some of it is dormant
and will activate in the right conditions, say, breaking atmo on Londinium.”
“What does it do?”
asked Kaylee, alarmed. She’d beaten Mal to the question; he glanced at her
before gazing back at Deader.
“It’s like any
infection,” answered Deader. “Eventually it’ll overwhelm the host. Most of it
is designed to alter the minds of the crew over time. Some of it takes over
comm and navigation systems, rewriting programming to Alliance standards. All of it is designed to
inform the Alliance
of potential illegal or subversive activity.”
“Like gettin’ the
clap,” commented Zoe.
Given the shape of
the great vessel filling more and more of the front viewports, and given the
blue world they were falling into orbit of, no one found her observation
anywhere close to humorous.
Serenity bumped
gently against airlock forty-four eighteen minutes later, and once again Mal
found himself suppressing vocal admiration of Deader’s piloting skills. The
lock sealed with a distant hiss; he looked at her and said, “Let’s go meet
these Independents.”
The crew made their
way to the hatch and waited. The lock on the other side pressurized, and then
three solid knocks sounded out against Serenity’s
hull. Mal pulled the door open and stared, then stepped hastily backward and
pulled out his pistol. Inara screamed.
~~*~~
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