The rig’s uppermost deck was raised about six feet from the floor. The familiar green and yellow flag of the Independents hung from the guardrail. Normally the emblem would have been an encouraging, uplifting sight to Mal, telling him he was among friends. Now he wasn’t so sure he was.
A chant began to rise from the crowd of people, low and scattered at first, then rapidly building so loud in the enclosed space that it hurt his ears — as well as his feelings.
“Trai-tor! Trai-tor!”
He blinked incredulously. Him. They were yelling it at him.
“Settle down!” a voice boomed over the crowd. “All of you, settle down!”
The Browncoat men and women immediately stopped yelling at Mal and turned to face the platform, where a man had just stepped into view. Mal’s jaw dropped as he recognized the speaker.
“Hey, Mal. Welcome to the end of your life,” said Toby Finn.
16
The planet Shadow, long ago
They were known as the Four Amigos. Their antics were legendary, at least amongst their peers, although amongst the inhabitants of their hometown, Seven Pines Pass, and most of the neighboring towns, they were considered tearaways and a liability. They drank. They got into and out of scrapes. They drank some more. They fell foul of the law from time to time. They drank even more. But they were essentially good-hearted, a bunch of kids on the cusp of adulthood who liked to mess around a bit and didn’t much care about the consequences.
There was Tobias Finn, the youngest of the four, known to his friends as Toby. Toby was pliant, going along with pretty much whatever the rest of them did, just glad to be in their company. This meant the others sometimes took advantage of him, like that time they persuaded him to shave all his hair off because they said girls found bald men attractive, or that time they dared him to steal Sheriff Bundy’s seven-point-star badge right off his lapel, which earned Toby a night in jail and a hefty fine.
There was Jamie Adare, the oldest of them, who considered himself their leader. Jamie was the one who usually came up with the harebrained schemes which the others would either agree to carry out or not, depending how much booze they’d imbibed and how reckless their collective mood was. He was a clever kid who could have done well at school if he’d made an effort but he preferred to dedicate his brainpower to having fun, and it could be argued that that was a better use for it than learning algebra and slogging through dull-as-ditchwater literary classics from Earth-That-Was.
Then there was Jamie’s sister Jinny. Beautiful Jinny, she of the long, flowing ash-blonde hair and the cute uptilted nose with the smattering of freckles across the bridge like a map of some uncharted star system. Jinny, who was even cleverer than her brother, academically speaking, but possessed just as much of a wild streak. Jamie and Jinny were the despair of their parents, two unbroken colts that would not be tamed. Ma and Pa Adare longed for their offspring to make something of themselves, maybe leave Shadow, where your life options were frankly limited, and relocate to one of the Core planets. Out here on this mudball on the fringes of the Georgia system there was nothing but arable farms and cattle ranches, and that was fine but not necessarily suitable for anyone with smarts and a low boredom threshold. There were worlds where a young man or woman with the right grades and the right attitude could prosper— and maybe send a portion of that prosperity to the folks back home.
The fourth member of the Four Amigos was a handsome devil with too-long hair and a heck of a swagger for a kid scarcely out of his teens. The twinkle in his eye and the twist of his cocksure grin had won him the hearts of countless ladies in this county and the next, and gotten him into their beds too. More than once — many times more, in fact — this incorrigible Romeo had been turfed out of a young woman’s room by an irate father wielding a twelve-gauge, and he had enough buckshot scars peppering his backside to prove it.
His name was Malcolm Reynolds, but he preferred just “Mal.”
Mal’s father was long gone, and his mother ran the family ranch, with forty hands answering to her. Mrs. Reynolds had the lined, pinched face of a woman who was, if not thriving, then at least surviving in a life that never made things easy. The skin around her eyes was heavily wrinkled, and she had a permanent squint from staring so long across Shadow’s prairie vistas. From time to time she would call on her son to help out with work — shoeing, branding, rounding up, plowing, and so forth — and he would, but she knew she couldn’t rely on him; and the older he got, the less reliable he became. Mal had too much else on his mind, namely chasing after girls and trouble. His personality seemed just too big for a small planet like this one to contain, and his feet were itchy. His destiny, Mrs. Reynolds couldn’t help thinking, lay elsewhere, out there in the ’verse. She hated the thought that he would leave Shadow but knew the day would inevitably come. It was simply a question of how soon.
Meanwhile the Four Amigos’ exploits just kept getting more and more outrageous. Perhaps the capstone of their careers in mischief came one especially hot and dusty summer when Mortimer Ponticelli rustled several head of cattle off the Hendricksons’ land, rounding the cows up as though they belonged to him and spiriting them off to his corral. Ponticelli even went to the effort of erasing the Hendricksons’ brand off the cattle’s flanks using dermal menders and replacing it with his own.
It was out-and-out larceny, and everyone knew he was guilty as sin, but there was no proof, at least not as far as Sheriff Bundy was concerned, and anyway Mort Ponticelli and Sheriff Bundy were best buddies — Bundy was actually married to one of the old geezer’s many daughters — so the idea of the theft being investigated, let alone a prosecution being brought, was laughable.
“I say we do something about it,” Jamie Adare proposed one evening at the Silver Stirrup Saloon, the one and only drinking establishment in Seven Pines Pass. “Old Man Ponticelli’s been pulling crap like this since as long as anyone can remember, and it’s about time someone set him to rights.”
“And that’s us, huh?” said Mal.
“You bet your ass it is. Ain’t nobody gonna lift a finger against him, not while Bundy’s in his pocket.”
“In his pocket?” said Jinny Adare. “Sherriff Bundy kisses Ponticelli’s ass so hard, he’s got permanent lip sores.”
“But what?” Toby Finn asked. “What can we do?”
“We can get those cows back,” Jamie said. “We can go there tonight and just take ’em.”
Toby looked dubious. “Mort Ponticelli’ll shoot you soon as look at you. Don’t know about you guys, but I value my life. I got more left to live of it than you.”
“He won’t kill us,” Jamie said. “Wouldn’t dare. Stealing’s one thing, but murder? Not even Bundy could get him off that rap. He’d hang for sure, and he knows it.”
“I don’t know…”
“Oh, come on, Toby,” Jinny said, patting his cheek. “Don’t be scared. I’ll look after you.”
Jinny was always affectionate towards him, and Toby preened at her touch. Though her junior by three years, anyone with eyes in their head could tell that he was madly in love with her. He had been since he was in fifth grade and she was in eighth. Now that he was at last old enough for the age difference not to seem such an unbridgeable gulf, it was only a matter of time before he declared his feelings towards her. He had confided as much to Mal, and Mal had encouraged him to wait at least a little while more. You didn’t just go telling girls you loved them, he had counseled Toby. If, and only if, you were completely sure that she was the one for you, did you ’fess up that you liked her deeply, rather than just in the carnal fashion. In the meantime, Mal’s recommendation to Toby was that he should play the field, just as he himself was. Get some notches on his belt and then go for the big prize. You had to have a few go-rounds on the carousel first before you reached for the brass ring, after all. Otherwise you’d grab for it and miss, and you’d have blown your shot, maybe for good.