The Captain didn’t have anyone; had consistently pushed away Inara when she’d come too close to them.
And now, it seemed, she was going to have to break those lines, or jump right over them, or none of them would get out of this.
She wasn’t sure she could do it.
The Captain opened the door, and they entered the Canteen.
The cell door shut with a clang. They’d be back in a while, after “processing” him, and then it was off to the mines. Was he going to have better chances of making a break here, or from the mine itself? Well, making the attempt here didn’t mean he couldn’t try later. And getting off the world, or at least off the continent, was going to be a problem in any case.
If he had the chance, he should stop by the public lockers and pick up his bags; he wanted his guns, and the cash from selling that ginseng might make the difference. Good thing he’d nabbed it.
Out of habit, he looked around the cell for anything that might become a weapon. The chair, the bed, the toilet, and the sink were all one piece and built in. The drain in the floor was welded.
He was wearing a one-piece, light blue cover-all that closed with velcro.
On the positive side, he knew the procedure they used when opening his cell. He had a pretty good chance of taking them both out, if he was fast. Then he’d be armed. After that…
How many were there? And what gorram direction did he need to go? Maybe, from the hall, he could see. The building wasn’t all that big; how hard could it be?
He closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and tried to think.
This sort of thing just never was his strength; that’s why he’d always hooked up with someone else to do the planning, to do the figuring. That’s why it had worked so well with this last crew, up until Mal had decided to be a ru aixiao de zacao de chui xia yinjing about the gorram ginseng.
No point in thinking about that now. No point in thinking about what he wasn’t good at, he had to concentrate on what he was going to do.
The door rattled, clunked, and opened.
His idea of a sudden lunge at the door vanished at once; there was a whole crowd back there.
“Here he is,” said one of them.
A fat man stepped forward and said, “Ah. You.”
It took Jayne a moment, but he recognized one of the two security officers from when he made the call to the Feds. “What the gorram hell do you want?”
“You’re a popular man, Mister Cobb.”
“Yeah. They put up a statue of me on—”
“Pay attention. You might be able to get out of this.”
Jayne glared. “All right, I’m listening.”
“It’ll take some talking. Stand up and hold out your hands.”
He hesitated, looked at the odds again, and cooperated. They manacled his wrists, then attached those to fetters, and locked both to his belt, permitting him to take small steps, and hardly to move. They led him out of the cell, three in front of him, two behind. The two behind him held shotguns, and he could tell by their footsteps that he wouldn’t have had much of a chance to get to them even if he hadn’t been hobbled.
He kept close track of where they’d gone anyway, just in case.
They reached a small office. The fat one gestured Jayne inside, then said, “Wait here,” to the others, and shut the door.
“Go ahead, Mister Cobb. Sit down. Let’s see if we can do some business.”
“You got the guns. I’m listening.”
“Did you know you’re wanted for questioning in the murder of an Alliance officer, and aiding the escape of two fugitives?”
“What? I never killed no—”
“Maybe not, but one was found dead in a hospital on Ariel, with skin under his fingernails that matches your DNA.”
Jayne felt a scowl growing on his face, and tried his best to suppress it.
“Fortunately,” the officer continued, “we’re not Alliance. We don’t much care what you did on Ariel. We have you good for what you did right here.”
“What, getting drunk?”
“Didn’t they tell you the charges?”
“They told me.”
“So you understand your situation.”
“What’s the gorram offer?”
“Yesterday, you came into my office and demanded contact with the Alliance, and then we find you have a record of having murdered a Federal officer.”
The office had a glass window, and didn’t look like it was intended to be secure. But there were those restraints. This guy had the key. He measured the distance across the desk.
“So what’s going on with you and the Alliance?”
“What, I tell you that, and you let me go?”
“Let’s just say it’s a start.”
“What’s the rest?”
The officer shook his head. “No. Tell us what you know, then we’ll talk.”
Jayne considered his options. There appeared to be exactly two: he could tell them what he knew, and hope they kept up their end of the bargain, or he could lunge across the desk at this guy, hoping to take him down in spite of the restraints, and get a weapon from him, and get himself unlocked before reinforcements showed up, and then fight his way out.
Either way, he didn’t like it much.
He leaned back in his chair, staring at pictures of Simon and River Tam, along with pertinent facts. On another screen was the translated readout of a secure and heavily coded file detailing certain relationships between Parliament and the Blue Sun Corporation.
Special Deputies dispatched to Yuva, on Hera.
Yeah, okay, great.
Now what?
He deleted all references to his research, and certainly the results, from his machine, and then went over it again to remove the electronic traces that he’d even been looking for them. He was thorough; it took a good two hours to do, but this was something he was good at. When he was finished, all the information he’d gathered was gone.
Except that he still remembered it.
Now what?
Two by two, hands of blue.
They were coming. And if they reached her, they would take her back, and she’d never get out again.
She didn’t want to go back. More than anything, she didn’t want to go back.
But there were the ghosts, too.
She had told them about the ghosts, but they hadn’t listened. They couldn’t listen, because they didn’t have the math to understand, and she recognized that the one skill she didn’t have was that of a teacher. The Shepherd had been able to teach, but his path of probability had led to different intersections, so now there was no one to teach, and they had to learn if they were to deal with the ghosts.
She couldn’t deal with the ghosts, because they weren’t her ghosts. She could maybe help them deal with the ghosts, but if she did…
Two by two, hands of blue.
She didn’t hear him come in, but when she looked up, he was there, his face, as always, smiling, and worried.
“Mei-mei, are you all right?”
He asked it as if it were a question that could be answered, as if an infinity of variables could be encompassed in a single constant. She struggled to translate, to simplify, to determine essence, and to rephrase the question into terms that could become a single, determinate answer that he would understand, and that would be as little a lie as she could manage.