He had nicked the rope rather than severed it. He readjusted his aim.
In the meantime, a couple of dozen faces had turned his and Zoë’s way. The rifle report had startled the crowd. Among them Zoë saw Harlow in his familiar — and still fashion-disastrous — yellow duster. Harlow here? And he was with Hunter Covington.
Bastard. He’d lied to her through his teeth. All along, he’d known exactly who Covington was. Her hand gripped her Mare’s Leg hard. There was going to be a reckoning between him and her.
Jayne was lining up a second shot. Mal looked as though he was just about ready to expire. He was going limp. If Jayne didn’t cut the rope this time, Mal was dead.
“Don’t let me down, girl,” Jayne muttered to his gun.
Vera roared again.
The rope snapped and Mal collapsed to the ground.
A gaunt little man up on the platform yelled “No!”
The crowd were also aghast, and now, as one, they surged towards Zoë and Jayne, the interlopers who had deprived them of their fun.
Zoë held the remote detonator switch aloft, while Jayne swiveled Vera to and fro in front of the Browncoats menacingly.
“Everybody,” she said, “stop. Know what this is in my hand? Remote detonator. Know what it’s connected up to? A crate of HTX-20. A crate that has been offloaded from my ship into the entrance to this mine. It’s sitting there right now, and all I have to do is let go of this here button, and boom! Cave-in. We performed a ground radar survey as we came in, mapping the mine layout. There’s only one way in or out, and that’s through that tunnel. The HTX-20 brings the roof down, and we’re all stuck here from now till doomsday. I am not kidding.”
The Browncoat vigilantes paused, studying her face. To them, she really didn’t look as though she was kidding.
“Shoot her!” the man on the platform cried. “One of you, shoot the bitch!”
Guns were drawn.
“Yeah, about that,” Zoë said unflappably. “If you look closely, you’ll see it’s a dead man’s switch. I told you already, all I have to do is let go of the button. Anybody shoots me, guess what? I’ll be letting go for damn sure.”
“She will,” Jayne said. “And in case you were wondering, this here’s a Callahan full-bore auto-lock. A heavy-caliber round from this bad boy hits you anywhere, even if it misses vital organs the shock of the impact’ll still kill you. So you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Am I gonna be stupid enough to take the risk?’”
“Now,” said Zoë, “somebody — I don’t much care who — is going to walk over to my friend there and loosen that rope off of him.”
She waited for a volunteer.
“Someone’s got to do it,” she said. “Mood I’m in right now, I’m more than happy just to blow that high-explosive and have done with it. You people call yourselves Browncoats? This isn’t how Browncoats act. I was one, and I’m ashamed even to be around you. Trapping you all in this mine, that’d be worthwhile even if I’m stuck along with you.”
A man raised a hand. “I’ll do it.”
Zoë frowned. “Deakins? That you?”
“Sure is, Miz Alleyne.”
“Been a while. You’re with these people? I’d have thought better of you.”
“To be honest, Corp, I’d have thought better of myself. I’ll free him.”
“Don’t you do it, Stuart Deakins,” the man on the platform yelled. “Don’t you dare.”
“Oh, hush your squawking, Toby Finn,” Deakins said. “We’ve heard enough from you. If Zoë Alleyne thinks Mal Reynolds is worth rescuing — and worth putting her own ass on the line for, what’s more — then that settles it as far as I’m concerned. Mal ain’t guilty of what you’re accusing him of. The man deserves to go free.”
Toby Finn yanked a gun from his holster. “Not another step, Deakins. I’m telling you.”
Jayne swung Vera so that the gaunt little guy, evidently the ringleader of the vigilantes, was lined up in the reticle of his gunsight. “Want I should take him out, Zoë?”
“Not if you don’t have to,” Zoë replied. “But he so much as twitches his trigger finger…”
“Gotcha.”
Stuart Deakins shoulder-barged his way through the sullen crowd and knelt beside Mal. Mal lay so still that Zoë thought he must be dead. After all this, had everything been in vain? She choked back the fear. Mal was okay. Surely he was okay.
Deakins untied the noose, then rolled Mal over onto his back. Someone else Zoë recognized, David Zuburi, joined him. Together the two men conferred, then Deakins began to administer CPR to Mal, alternately pumping his chest and blowing into his mouth.
Zoë watched, her grip on the detonator switch growing slick.
36
Outside the mine entrance, Wash drove the forklift back towards Serenity. He had just deposited—verrry carefully — a single crate of HTX-20 roughly ten yards inside.
Kaylee was standing on the cargo-bay ramp. She looked jumpy, on edge, more so than previously.
“Why the face?” Wash asked as he braked to a halt.
“We need to offload the other four crates.”
“What?”
Kaylee held up a scanner. “Just taken some fresh readings. The explosives are heating up faster than ever. They’re going critical, and there ain’t nothing I can think of to do to retard or reverse the process. I’d say we have maybe ten, fifteen minutes before they blow.”
“Fèi fèi de pì yăn. You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Wish I were. Badger sure handed us a zhēng qì de gōu shī duī. Wouldn’t surprise me if he did it on purpose.”
“What for? To piss us off? If so, mission accomplished. I’m pissed off. But I’m not sure even Badger would be that much of a crap-heel, not when there’s money involved. Okay now, let’s see what our options are.”
Wash surveyed the area. The mine entrance had been dug into a mountainside. Serenity and the other three ships were positioned on the only level space available, a broad, windswept ledge with a sheer crag towering above and a steep-sided base descending to a barren plain below. There wasn’t room to deposit the crates on the ledge a safe distance away. If they went off there, all four ships would be damaged, probably destroyed, and everyone would be stranded on Hades. But if he tipped them over the edge, chances were they would explode when they hit the bottom; HTX-20 did not like nasty surprises, after all. That, in turn, might trigger a rockslide, then there’d be a tangled mess of rubble and no-longer-spaceworthy ship at the foot of the mountain.
“No alternative,” he said. “The other four crates have to go inside the mine entrance alongside the fifth.”
“That’s insane.”
“It’s that or we lose Serenity, the shuttle, the yacht, and that Komodo heap of junk.”
“We only put the one crate there in the first place in case somebody calls Zoë’s bluff and goes to check that she can seal them inside if she wants to, like she’s threatening,” Kaylee said. “It’s all a ruse, right? That’s the plan. She’s got the detonator switch only as a prop. In fact, thinking about it, we should get that crate out of the mine right now, in case it blows up of its own accord. We shouldn’t be putting another four of the gorramn things in there.”
“If we don’t, we all die,” said Wash. “If we do, there’s a chance Zoë and Jayne can still get back out, ideally with Mal, before all the crates go up. I don’t like it any more than you do, Kaylee, but I don’t see any other option.”
Kaylee gnawed her lower lip, then slowly, reluctantly nodded. “They won’t have long. They don’t hurry, they’re dead.”