My Own Kind of Freedom Read online

  Fourth, Mal and Zoë had come in. He’d damn near opened fire when they’d walked through the door, figuring they’d found out what he was up to and wanted to stop him. But they’d pretended he wasn’t even there.

  Fifth, the other guy came in, the one in the fancy clothes. He could have been a fed. But then those two other guys made their move, like they were going to kill him, and Mal and Zoë had saved him. No way Mal and Zoë were going to rescue a fed.

  It didn’t make sense.

  None of it made sense.

  But he had to figure it out, because he couldn’t go into a high-risk operation like this without any idea of who was on which side, or even what the sides were.

  Well, okay. Let’s just think this through.

  Could Mal showing up there be coincidence? Well, sure; if they were stuck waiting for something, like payment for the job, how many other places were there? But what about that guy they saved? Mal and Zoë saved him, so no way he was a fed; that much he could count on.

  So, if he wasn’t a fed, who was he? And who wanted to kill him, and why?

  Why hadn’t the fed shown up, anyway? Whatever their attitude toward him, Jayne, he knew they wanted the doctor and his sister; they wanted them bad. So why didn’t they show?

  He leaned back in his chair and sipped his beer, nursing it.

  Outside Yuva

  They were nearly back to the shuttle Mal had flown.

  “Okay, sir, now we know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “At least, we might know some of it.”

  “Right.”

  “So, do we do anything about it?”

  “Yeah. We’ve been paid, so I fly you back to Shuttle One, we get back to Serenity and get off this world.”

  “Good plan, sir.”

  “Glad you approve.”

  “Only one problem with it. Do you really intend to do it?”

  The shuttle was there, and appeared undisturbed.

  “Yeah,” he said. “This is none of our concern.”

  “That’s what you said before, sir.”

  “And I was right, too.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mal punched the combination and the door opened. They went in. Mal sat down in the pilot’s chair, flipped on the comm, and found the channel for Serenity.

  “Wash?”

  “Right here, Mal.”

  “We got paid, and we’re on the way home.”

  “Uh….”

  Zoë looked at Mal, who said, “Wash? Is there a problem?”

  “Not a problem, exactly.”

  “Talk to me, Wash.”

  “Well, for one thing, Zoë went down after you.”

  “I know. She’s with me now.”

  “Oh, good. All right then.”

  “What else?”

  “Else?”

  “You said for one thing.”

  “Oh. Right. Well, that’s a little hard to explain.”

  “Wash.”

  “Sir,” said Zoë. “We might want to hold off on this.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I just caught a glimpse of something metallic out there.”

  “Wash, I’ll call you back.”

  He disconnected and drew his weapon; hers was already in her hand, though she had no memory of pulling it.

  “You only saw one?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. One glint. Shouldn’t we get out of here?”

  “Yes, unless there’s a weapon trained on the door, waiting for us to go over there and close it.”

  “You want to find out?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Should we just stand here forever?”

  “Not such a good idea either.”

  “We should have closed the door when we came in, sir.”

  “Good thinking.”

  Zoë shrugged and knelt down by the side of the door. Mal stood behind her.

  “Ready, sir? I’ll get it.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  “No, sir. I can—”

  Mal lunged across the threshold, rolling and coming up on the other side of the door.

  With a small part of her brain that wasn’t otherwise occupied, she thought, You never get used to the way bullets kick into things around you so much sooner than you hear the report.

  There was no need to speak. There were at least three of them, the weapons were semi-auto, and they were firing at three different levels. No way were they going out there.

  The door swung closed.

  “You good, sir?”

  “Didn’t even feel a breeze.”

  “Good, then.”

  “I’ll fire it up,” said Mal.

  “Let me, sir.”

  “All right.”

  She slid herself into the pilot’s seat. Bullets continued striking the side of the shuttle. She disengaged the guidance lock, engaged the power, and armed the controls. It wasn’t as smooth as Wash would have done it, but it didn’t take a lot longer.

  She put her hand on the throttle, kicked in the grav boot, and said, “Well, now what?”

  “Uh, now we get out of here?”

  “Not going to happen, sir.”

  “Uh….”

  Zoë got up and briefly inspected the area opposite the hatch, nodded, and sat back down. “One of those shots that came in through the hatch knocked out the g-line. We’re not going anywhere, sir.”

  “Ah. Well. And just when I thought everything was perfect.”

  An occasional bullet hit the hull, with a sound like a hammer hitting an anvil through a pillow.

  Mal frowned. “I wonder how long we can stay in here and just let them shoot at us.”

  “Until they realize that we’re just going to sit here, and go and get explosives.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “Or, depending on who they are, they could just bring up artillery.”

  “You’re full of good cheer.”

  “Well, they aren’t asking us to surrender, so we don’t have to worry about whether they’re going to trick us.”

  “Now that’s a good cheery way to look at things, Zoë.”

  She squinted through the window. Was that…? “I think they’re getting reinforced.”

  “Oh, that’s good. I’d hate to think we weren’t outnumbered.”

  “We wouldn’t want that, would we.”

  “If we knew where they were coming from, and who they were,” said Mal, “we might be able to guess how soon they’ll be able to get explosives.”

  “Yes sir. And something else bothers me.”

  “You mean, who it is trying to kill us?”

  “Yes, sir. If it was Sakarya, he wouldn’t have paid us.”

  “Yep.”

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “We could use a new plan.”

  “We could at that,” he said.

  Yuva: Warehouse

  The conversation with the captain and his first mate ought to have given him a lot more information than it did. He stared at the comm gear.

  What was it about that ship that had gotten Asher House so excited? There were no active warrants on the captain, just a string of dropped charges; so what else did they have? Or who else?

  Could it be a who? There had been the instructions to meet with someone and negotiate a price for information. The captain didn’t have the information, so someone else on the ship did. Someone who would what, sell out that captain? But the same problem kept returning, in new forms: what could the House want so badly that they’d blow an eight-month operation for it, just at the point it was about to pay off? And how could he have never heard a whisper of something that big?

  He turned back to his gear and pondered.

  Serenity: Bridge

  One eye on the beacon, one eye on the glide plane, he slid through the increasingly thick atmo. It was just as well that this sort of flying required almost no thought, because his mind was on everything else.

  What was going
on with Zoë?

  He knew that tone Mal had used—that too-too-calm sign-off. There was something going on.

  His hand twitched toward the comm, then back.

  Gorram it, he would not break into whatever they were in the middle of, just because he was worried. He would not. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t been in tight scrapes before. And it wasn’t as if there were anything he could do that he wasn’t doing—that is, getting back there as fast as he could.

  As fast as he could would be a good ten minutes. A lot could happen in ten minutes.

  What was going on with Zoë?

  He heard a footstep behind him, and almost lost his groove. He spared a glance over his shoulder.

  “River! Uh, hello there.”

  “You should.”

  He looked at the yoke, the I-set, the gravlock, the attitude controls, and realized suddenly how little pressure it would take on any one of how many things to send them crashing onto the world. “Maybe this isn’t the place you should be right now.”

  “You should call,” said River.

  He spared her another look. Her eyes were slightly wide, her hands were in fists at her sides, and she wasn’t moving at all.

  “I should…you mean, I should get hold of Zoë and Mal? I’m still ten minutes away, there’s nothing I can do yet. And if I interrupt them in the middle of something—”

  “You don’t fix faith; it fixes you,” she said, and turned around and left the bridge.

  He let out his breathe, not having been aware of holding it, and checked his glide path again. All was well.

  You don’t fix faith….

  Now what did that mean?

  Chapter 6

  My Own Kind of Flying

  Outside Yuva

  THE COMM crackled. “Mal? What’s going on down there?”

  “Hi hun,” said Zoë. “Nothing much. We’re being shot at.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Are you shooting back?”

  “Haven’t quite figured out how to do that, yet.”

  “Then why aren’t you out of there?”

  “Can’t. The g-line got shot out.”

  “Bei yachi yange de shuiniu de zinü. Can you get out of the shuttle?”

  “Not just at the moment. There are at least six of them, I think, and they’re sort of shooting at the door.”

  “You could turn the shuttle around.”

  “Without the grav-boot?”

  “Yes.”

  She could almost see the Captain’s ears perk up, and he silently mouthed, “You can?”

  “Wash, tell me how.”

  “Over-ride the wing controls so they don’t extend. You know how to do that?”

  Zoë looked over the controls. “I don’t—”

  “Left side, under the console. It’s a small silver switch labeled S.E. Over.”

  “Got it.”

  “Okay. Nose all the way down. All the way, like you’re doing a full power dive. Then you give it some juice. Just a little; too much and you’ll flip her.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then both bow attitude jets on full, then yank the yoke hard around in whichever direction you want to turn. You’ll have to cut the attitude jets fast when you get about forty percent of the way to where you want to be.”

  “Forty percent? How—”

  “Guess.”

  “Okay, Wash. I’ve got it.”

  She began setting it up, going over the controls carefully.

  “Hey, Wash,” said the Captain.

  “Yes, Mal?”

  “What did you call about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “It was something the Shepherd said, about believing River.”

  “You’re going to have to explain that to me later.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Ready, sir,” said Zoë.

  “Talk to you later, Wash,” said the Captain. Then, “Zoë, let’s get some outside light. I want to see if we can find some cover on the starboard side. If this works, we’re going to have to make a fast break for it.”

  She flipped on the externals while he stared out. Several more bullets thwanged into the shuttle. “Hundan are trying to kill an innocent shuttle,” he said. “Okay. See that rock, the big one?”

  “I see it.”

  “Lot of trees around it. That’s what we make for.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded and positioned himself by the door once more.

  She ran her hands over the controls she’d need, in order, twice.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  “You’d better hold on to something, sir.”

  “I’m holding. Let’s do this thing.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She pushed the yoke forward. No response, of course, beyond a little pressure. She took a deep breath, and, as she let it out, and gave it some throttle, then a little more, then—.

  The vessel shuddered, and the tail rose; she was looking hard at the ground. Behind her she heard the Captain catch his footing.

  She fired up both attitude thrusters and spun hard, and there was a lurch that couldn’t possibly have been right. She felt panic for the first time in ten years, killed the attitude jets and straightened the yoke. As she was catching her breath, she heard the door open.

  “Move!” said the Captain.

  She wanted to explain that, in fact, it hadn’t worked; that she’d panicked, they were still facing the same way, and he was about to charge out into more massed firepower than they seen since the war. There were only two problems with doing so: one problem was that the Captain was out the door already, and the other problem was that so was she.

  Outside Yuva

  He spotted the rock, right where it should be, and made for it. He took the last few feet in the air, rolled, and came up to one knee. An instant later, Zoë was next to him, also on a knee, weapon out.

  “Good job, Zoë; that was the perfect spot.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Any idea what direction the other shuttle is from here?”

  “Yes, sir. Past this one, and past all of them.”

  “I see. Long way around then.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay. Time to run.”

  They did.

  Lights occasionally flickered near them, and from time to time there were reports of shots. It reminded her too much of the aftermath of Belerophon, when defeat had first kicked her in the teeth, when she’d really learned what it was like to be on the losing side.

  She shook her memories aside, and concentrated on running; that was hard enough. A little light from a pale, thin half-moon and even less from the sliver of another gave just enough light to avoid the trees, if she was careful; her eyes told her enough to stay with the captain.

  The terrain cleared a little. “I don’t suppose that you have any idea if we’re near the other shuttle?”

  “No, sir. I landed a quarter of a mile east of you, but I’m afraid I don’t know how far we’ve gone.”

  “Okay, then… What’s that sound?”

  They both stopped to listen for a moment, then, “Horses,” said the Captain.

  “They’ll catch us easy in the open.”

  “Yes, they will. I wonder if we can make it back to the trees.”

  Serenity: Bridge

  “Zoë? Did you try that?”

  He boosted the engine a bit to slow his descent. The altimeter, calibrated for this place, said he was only about nine hundred meters from the deck.

  “Zoë? Mal? Are you there?”

  Nothing….

  He gave it more power and came to a stop, hovering just over the tree line. He turned on the floods and checked the view below. The shuttle was there, its door open. No sign of any activity. An infrared scan picked up the slowly cooling engine, the rapidly cooling electronics, and nothing else.

&nbs
p; Well, if they’d pulled it off, they wouldn’t be in the shuttle, would they? They’d be heading to the other shuttle, which was…looked like a quarter of a mile east.

  “Zoë? Mal?”

  Nothing. Well, in any case, they weren’t there yet.

  He killed the light but kept on the infrared, and headed east, slowly.

  He found them almost at once—they had to be the two bright spots, pursued by….

  Yes. They were on horseback, and those little flashes had to be gunfire.

  He hit the lights and dropped lower, then lower still.

  They scattered nicely.

  He rose, made a sharp one-eighty, and came back again. There was a group of three. He dropped toward them, and three horses were running wildly, and without their riders. The shooting had stopped.

  He went back for another pass. “Swoop,” he said to himself. “Swoop, swoop. It’s like waltzing.”

  He realized that he was smiling.

  Yuva: Canteen

  There weren’t any gorram answers.

  That’s what it came to: no gorram answers at all.

  He finished his beer, and yelled for another one. The bartender didn’t hear him, or chose to ignore him, so he pushed past the good citizens of Yuva up to the bar. He started to order another beer, then changed his mind and made it whiskey. He started to bring it back to his table, then shrugged and downed it. It was surprisingly smooth, burning just a little on his tongue, the back of his throat. He ordered another and looked around the room.

  Upright citizens, one and all. All of them polite, and none of them looking like they could be pushed into a ruckus. Sad. He’d really have enjoyed a chance to get some of his frustration out.

  He finished the whiskey, blinked, and noticed that the room was getting a little fuzzy around the edges.

  Good.

  He ordered another, drained it, wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  There were a lot of people here; there must be someone in the room who’d be willing to tussle, if pushed right. He turned back to the bar, and stumbled against it. He ordered another.