“No problems here, I take it.”
“None that couldn’t be dealt with,” Simon said.
“Then let’s make haste. Covington seems to have an endless supply of thugs and I’ve no idea if we’ve met them all yet.”
27
Inara saw them from a window: River, Simon, and Book, with Elmira, hurrying across the front lawn. She herself had been conducting a painstaking search of the first-floor rooms, ever keeping an ear out for bodyguards or servants, to avoid any further run-ins.
It seemed she had been looking in vain. Elmira had been elsewhere.
Inara made her way back to the front door and out into the daylight. She greeted the others with a wave, joining them on the driveway that led towards her shuttle.
“A Companion too?” Elmira said. “Who are you people?”
“Right now,” Book said, “your liberators. And hopefully, in a few minutes, once we’ve made good our escape, we’re going to be the recipients of some crucial intelligence from you. Namely the whereabouts of your bondholder.”
“I can tell you that right now,” Elmira said. “Hunter isn’t on Persephone anymore. He departed last night on his private yacht, after doing some business over in Eavesdown.”
“Do you know where he’s gone?”
“Yes. He was boasting to me about it only yesterday, up there in the hayloft. He’d just been… been using me.” Her mouth downturned in a grimace of disgust.
“You mean abusing,” said Inara.
“Yes, well, same difference. And then he told me he was going away but when he came back he’d…”
“Cut you,” said River. “Cut you till you bled to death, but slow. Days-long slow.”
“Yes,” said Elmira, startled. “His exact words. How do you know he said that? Have you been speaking to him?”
“Never mind how we know,” said Book. “Where is he?”
“He was off to meet up with some associates. Bunch of renegades, I think. One-time Browncoats, now working some new angle. Hunter’s been dealing with them quite some while, providing them with intel and such. It’s what Wong wanted me to find out about, why he had me come back and infiltrate Hunter’s operation.”
“Vigilantes?”
“Yeah, I guess you could call them that.”
By now the group had reached the shuttle. Inara looked back towards the house, half expecting to see pursuers emerging. It seemed that the alarm had yet to be raised.
River climbed aboard first, followed by Simon. Inara went next, extending a helping hand to Elmira. Book was last, and as soon as they were all safely ensconced in the shuttle, Inara darted over to the controls and started the engine cycling.
“So he met the vigilantes in Eavesdown, and then what?” Book said to Elmira, raising his voice above the steadily mounting whine of power coming from the thrusters.
“Then he was going to follow them to their destination. Seems as though they had plans to take some guy captive in Eavesdown, subject him to a trial, and then hang him. They paid Hunter to help them nab the man. That’s what they’ve been doing for quite a while, all across the ’verse. They track down people they believe betrayed the Independent cause in some way or other, run them through a kangaroo court, then execute them.”
Inara’s stomach knotted. Mal…
Over her shoulder she said, “Did you just say ‘execute?’”
“I’m afraid so,” said Elmira. “Hunter’s gone to watch. They invited him along and he accepted. It doesn’t pay to turn down a client’s request, not if you want to work with them again in future. Plus, I imagine he’s curious to see the end result. In case you hadn’t appreciated, he ain’t a nice man. Got a cruel streak in him a mile wide.”
“You sound as though you speak from experience,” said Simon.
She gave him a hard, steady look. “I most certainly do. I can show you the scars, if you like. I’ll say this for Hunter. He’s a sadist but a careful one. Never leaves marks where people’ll see them. But that still means there are plenty of places where he can leave them.”
She began unbuttoning her blouse, until Simon stopped her. Mumbling an apology, he turned away. Point made, she did the buttons back up.
“Now, Elmira,” said Book, “I know you’ve been through a lot, but I want you to be very clear about this. That man you’re talking about, the one the vigilantes are going to kill, is a friend of ours.”
“Oh my God, I’m so very sorry.”
“It’s okay. All I want from you now is where they’ve taken him; wherever Covington is headed. You have to understand how important this is to us.”
The shuttle rose from the ground with a lurch, pitching forward until its nose was almost scraping the dirt. Inara corrected, too preoccupied to worry if their ascent was perfectly smooth or not.
A ricocheting bullet snapped off the shuttle’s hull with a spanggg! To the people inside, it sounded like a mallet blow. Two men were running out of the mansion, toting rifles. The alarm had been raised at last, it would appear. They were both firing at a run, which meant their shooting was far from accurate. Not only that but they must know their rounds would not penetrate the skin of a spacecraft designed with sufficient armoring to protect it from micrometeors and other small colliding objects. Presumably they thought it was better to waste the bullets than have to admit to Covington later that they had done nothing whatsoever to prevent the shuttle taking off.
Inara poured on speed. The shuttle veered away from the mansion in a wide, yawing arc.
“Hades,” Elmira said. “They’re on Hades.”
28
Kaylee looked for work to occupy her mind. There was no end of that to be found aboard Serenity, but the distraction of a simple, involving task wasn’t always sufficient. As she started lubricating a flanged coupler gasket on the transverse manipulator hose, digging her fingers into a bucket of grease, the cogs in her head resumed their unhappy, circular turning.
After Serenity had been flying for an hour with the cargo-bay door wide open, Kaylee and Jayne had donned spacesuits and gone down to check on the condition of the payload. Exposed to the -270 °C chill of the deep Black, ambient condensation now coated everything in the cargo bay — every surface, every deck plate, bulkhead and piece of machinery — with a shimmering, onionskin-thin layer of frost. It was like being inside a twinkling, multifaceted jewel.
The only objects in the entire place that were clear of ice were the crates of HTX-20 themselves. Their warmth had prevented the frost from forming on them. But a quick scan had shown Kaylee that the explosives within had cooled considerably, almost back to the temperature they’d originally been at when they’d come aboard. It had worked! And that was all the more remarkable an achievement because it was an idea suggested by Jayne Cobb.
Kaylee had closed the cargo-bay door, and atmo had slowly begun hissing back into the ship’s bowels.
Now she wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, smearing a band of grease across it. She was worried sick about Mal, and would start to sniffle quietly every time she thought about what he might be suffering — the more so when she allowed herself to entertain the notion that he might already be dead and lost to them forever. There was still no word from Book or Inara. Still no update on Mal’s likely whereabouts. And on top of that, Kaylee was afraid that the crew wouldn’t be able to survive this dangerous mission without Mal’s guidance. He had a way of seeing past trouble and finding a path to safety, even in the direst of situations.
Zoë’s voice crackled through the comm. “Kaylee, we need you to recheck the cargo, make sure it’s stopped simmering.”