“When you’re as sick as I am,” Barbara said, “kinda doesn’t matter so much what you say or don’t say.”
“Matters to me,” said her son. “At any rate, those two guys seemed to think it wasn’t just talk. Those vigilantes were real. Both of them thought it was pretty funny, too. Browncoats getting attacked for being Browncoats. Like it was no more’n they deserved.”
“They say anything else?” said Jayne.
Allister shrugged. “That’s as much of it as I recall. Conversation moved on to other things.”
“Might be gossip,” Jayne opined. “Might just be the one guy spinning the other a line of bullcrap.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me, though, if there are Persephonians out there who’ve got a mad-on for former Browncoats,” said Barbara. “In case you haven’t noticed, Mr. Cobb, the majority of folks on this planet are misguided souls who think the Alliance winning was a godsend. They’re happy to grovel to the victors, and I guess you could say targetin’ the losers for punishment is a form of groveling. Maybe the ultimate in groveling.”
“Huh.” Jayne processed what he’d just learned in the manner in which he always processed things, which is to say slowly and tentatively, like someone picking their way barefoot over wet, slippery rocks. There was, he reckoned, the possibility of a connection between Mal’s mysterious disappearance and the existence of a group of anti-Browncoat vigilantes. Equally, there might easily be another explanation for where Mal had gotten to, and the vigilante rumors were just that, rumors. Second-hand rumors, indeed, given they were reaching him via someone else, namely Allister.
He shifted his feet. It was way past time he made tracks. “Well, been nice meetin’ you an’ all,” he said, “but…”
“But you should be going,” said Barbara.
“Yeah. I really do have business to attend to.”
“Thank you again, Mr. Cobb, for lookin’ after Allister and bringin’ him back.”
“Please,” Jayne said, “call me Jayne.”
“I think, Jayne, that you may be a good man,” Barbara said. “I think, deep down, you have compassion. That’s a rare thing.”
“I think you may be confusin’ me with someone else,” Jayne replied gruffly, but as he left the apartment there was a quiet and rather sad smile on his lips, nestled amid the rough bristles of his goatee.
He clicked his comm link.
“Zoë?”
No reply.
He clapped the device against his palm, hoping he might joggle it back into life. Then he tried calling Zoë again, with the same lack of result.
Damn contraptions. What good was technology if it didn’t work like it was supposed to?
Swiveling around to get his bearings, Jayne set off towards the dock where Serenity was berthed.
9
Cold. Cold, cold ground. And hard.
Mal’s hips, shoulders, knees, and head bounced as tremendous explosions roared, shaking the earth under him. Out in the open, where there was no cover within reach, the falling firebombs burst in successive waves. They gouged out massive pits, sending tons of rock and debris into the air. The pressure of the detonations crushed the air from his chest. He wanted to run, but his legs would not support him, and there was nowhere to go anyway. Death fell randomly from the skies, and the flashes of the explosions flickered orange against the overhanging clouds.
Serenity Valley. Where the Browncoats lost sixteen brigades and twenty air-tank squads, near as. Where the two thousand warriors Mal was leading got whittled down to a hundred and fifty. Where the 57th Overlanders, his platoon, was all but wiped out. Where High Command obliged the troops on the ground to surrender when, given air support at the crucial time, they could maybe have won.
In the deepest recesses of his brain, Mal knew he was reliving a past moment. But it sure as hell felt real. Vividly, viscerally so, like he was experiencing it for the first time. Instant obliteration lay on all sides. The terror and paralysis he felt was genuine. As falling rocks pelted him, he curled into a fetal position with hands covering the back of his head.
Then, in the midst of the hellish bombardment, the flying dirt and the dark smoke, a white chicken appeared out of nowhere. Oblivious to the danger, it strutted up close to his face and, cocking its head to one side, said, “Evenin’.”
At that shocking moment Mal concluded he had to be dreaming. In his experience, no chicken had a voice that deep. But he was sure someone had spoken because now that he was wide awake, heart hammering up under his chin, the sound of it was still ringing in his ears.
He couldn’t see anything. Everything was so inky black, it made Mal wonder if he had somehow, someway, suddenly been struck blind. He couldn’t tell if his eyes were open, nor move his hands to find out one way or another.
Then, as his brain stopped tumbling like a juggling ball inside his skull, the scratchiness at his ears and the end of his nose put the lie to that assumption. Well, damn it, there was a bag over his head. From the coarse feel of it, a burlap bag. No mistaking one thing: it smelled like… chickenfeed. He was lying on his side on a grated or ribbed surface, perhaps a metal deck.
Explosions weren’t squashing his chest; it was the shifting g-force mashing him down. And the explosions weren’t explosions at all, but the sustained din of rocket exhaust. For sure, he was on some kind of ship, maybe even his own boat, lying on the floor with his hands cinched up behind his back and his ankles tied too.
That would likely mean I’m in trouble.
Last thing he remembered, and that only foggily, was fighting Hunter Covington and his three goons outside Taggart’s. And holding his own until Covington zapped him with some kind of knockout gas from his cobra-head cane — a dirty trick if ever there was one. Whatever happened to a good old-fashioned whack on the noggin with a gun butt?
His Liberty Hammer was gone, of course. He couldn’t feel its familiar weight on his hip. Confiscated, no doubt. A sensible precaution on his captors’ part. Not that he could have reached the weapon anyway, with his hands fastened as they were. He tested the bonds, feeling the roughness of rope around his wrists. Whoever had done the tying had done it right. The knots were so tight, his fingers were numb. Same went for the ropes around his ankles.
Over the sound of the engines, Mal heard the shuffle of boots on the metal deck.
“Evenin’ to you, too,” he said affably to whoever the heck it was had spoken to him a moment ago, although it most definitely was not poultry. “Could you please remind me what I did to piss someone off so much?”
The burlap sack was yanked off his head, and a gust of sour whiskey breath hit him square in the face. He blinked from the floor, staring up into a bright light, in the middle of which was the silhouette of a man’s head with a feathery halo of sandy-colored hair. Mal squinted harder, trying to make out the man’s features, but the contrast between the head and the bright light was too extreme.
“Evenin’,” the man said again.
“Is it?” Mal said. “Hard to tell the time when you’ve got a sack over your head. Just sayin’.”
The man bent over him. When he moved his face closer, the details of it became clearer. A set of heavy jowls formed the foundation for a block-shaped head. He wasn’t Covington, or for that matter one of Covington’s trio of thugs. Mal had never seen him before.