Shadow, Part 1a
Seventh story in a series that begins with A Lion's Mouth. This story follows The Trial.
The crew gets a job running cattle to Beylix, and nightmares from Mal's past come back to haunt him.
In the aftermath of the trial, the crew gets a new job.
A/N: Rating: All my stories are PG to PG-13 to occasional R. You will not find detailed descriptions of blood, gore, and sex, but you will find situations appropriate for mature readers, innuendo, implication, and (gasp) swear words. This story is PG-13.
Thanks to my sister for beta reading. Thanks to all those who have reviewed, alerted, favorited, or sent a PM. I appreciate reader feedback.
One moment he was facing two thousand years in prison and a one million credit fine, with the fate of all his crew depending on the outcome of his trial, and the next moment he was retrieving his gun and other personal effects and walking out the front door of the courthouse a free man.
It was like being handed a get-out-of-jail-free card.
He'd asked about the ex-slaves—his passengers—guests—whatever the 地狱 dìyù the legal profession felt it was proper to call them. Their prospects didn't look to be so bright. It seemed that while River had uncovered a number of their true identities and histories, acquiring certified documentation of their status was another problem altogether, and he didn't trust the Alliance bureaucracy to get things sorted out expeditiously. With a few exceptions, the people would stay incarcerated at the immigrant detention center until their documents came through—could be weeks, months, or even years down the line. Mr Houghton had sworn to Mal—or he would have sworn, 'cept his religious beliefs didn't accommodate swearing—that he and his organization were on the case and they would see it through. Mal did not doubt the man's sincerity at all, but he knew he had the entrenched customs of Persephone society as well as the slow-moving Alliance bureaucracy to deal with. The man was just too earnest and too honest to speed up the process with a few well-placed bribes or threats. Of course, Mal knew he himself weren't exactly well-placed for bribes or threats either. He couldn't risk a single run-in with the law at this point, and he had barely more than two coins to rub together.
He'd thanked Melissa Draper for her expert help. He didn't know how to pay her, but she had assured him that the fees were waived. He didn't argue the point. What little coin he had left was badly needed to outfit the ship for the next job.
For a job they had. When Mal had retrieved his sidearm at the courthouse, he'd found a note inside the barrel with an encoded but easily understood message. It was unexpected, but it didn't particularly surprise him. The job was to transport—well, actually to smuggle—forty head of cattle from Persephone to Beylix.
It was a job he couldn't turn down.
'Course, it was going to be a problem taking this job, too. He had a crew that hadn't been paid, his ship was low on fuel, food, water, and medical supplies. The perpetual mechanical issues required the usual expenses for replacement parts. Outfitting the ship to transport cattle was going to require an outlay of platinum he just didn't have. Cattle required fodder, bedding, water—did he mention lots of fodder?—especially for a journey as far as Beylix was.
Mal sighed. He didn't suppose Sir Warwick Harrow had any notion of the financial burden he'd just dumped on Mal's head. After all, last time the deal had been brokered by Badger, who—for all he was a penny-pinching, double-crossing, dirty-playing low-life who'd as soon sell you out as pay you for a job—had at least fronted the money for an advance. Eliminating the middleman always had a cost, and Badger, psychotic low-life or no, was an expert middleman. Harrow had no idea how many practical details Badger had taken care of last time.
Or had he? Huh, Mal thought. Maybe that get-out-of-jail-free card weren't so free after all.
. . .
"Discuss it with Harrow, sir," Zoe said, when Mal had explained the job. "Tweak the deal."
"You know very well I'm in no position to bargain with Harrow."
"Well, sir, right now we don't even have enough coin to re-fuel."
"Didn't the cargo containers fetch nothing from the salvage yard?" Mal asked.
"They were seized as 'evidence'," Zoe replied.
"该死 Gāisǐ. Little as they're worth, I was counting on it to cover fuel costs. Can't we get them released somehow?"
As usual, Zoe had the needful information at her fingertips. "You can fill out a form, pay a processing fee, and they'll be released after a twenty-day waiting period."
"Ain't planning on sittin' dirtside for no twenty days. We need a Plan B—a supplemental job."
"Badger?" offered Zoe.
"No good. Harrow's workin' an end-run around Badger. We need to get gone before Badger figures it out."
"Holden Brothers? They still owe you, sir."
"Holden Brothers don't deal on Persephone, Zoe, it's Wuo's territory. I can't jeopardize the Holden contact to deal with Wuo."
"Horowitz."
"I'll have to. He ain't likely to have much of a job worth having—but I reckon it's our best chance. You stay with the ship, Zoe. I'll take Jayne."
"Sir, Horowitz was in my unit when we were on Verbena—I should come with you."
"No. Too much likelihood of gunplay." Zoe started to launch another protest, but Mal overrode her objection. "You got another life to think on, Zoe."
. . .
Mal and Jayne were off trying to rustle up some work out of Horowitz. He was another luckless ex-Browncoat, even more luckless than Mal and Zoe, which was saying something. He'd been part of Zoe's unit when they'd been detached from the 57th Overlanders for some stealth operations. Zoe was always good at stealth. Mal hadn't participated in the detached operation—he'd been with the main unit breaking in the new lieutenant, something that happened far too often over the course of the war. Horowitz wasn't a bad sort at all, but Zoe was right—she knew him much better than Mal did. These days, Horowitz scraped by running a sort of junk shop that doubled as a fence operation. Occasionally he needed transport for his goods (usually the hot ones), which was why they were even paying him a visit. His operation was in one of the worst parts of town and made Badger's shop look upscale. If he had any work for them, it wouldn't amount to much, unless he'd caught a lucky break somehow. But good luck and Horowitz were rarely seen together.
Zoe welcomed the return of Simon, River, and Inara. Zoe and Kaylee had spent most of their time since returning from the jail cleaning up after the thirty-two guests. The biggest chore was septic vac, which took far longer and was far more unpleasant than at anytime in Zoe's memory. Simon, River, and especially Inara would do just about anything to avoid septic vac duty, and Zoe fully intended to exploit it. She'd get them to do all manner of other chores that remained undone. She especially wanted to free up Kaylee to assess the ship's mechanical needs and make a list of necessary replacement parts. There was no way they'd be able to afford Kaylee's full wish list, but ever since the failure of the compression coil catalyzer had nearly cost all of them their lives, Mal had put a higher priority on maintenance, and Zoe wanted to be ready with the list as soon as the coin was available.
To Zoe's chagrin, Inara informed her that Ip Neumann was intending to pay them a visit. Zoe regarded their former supercargo with caution. He seemed harmless enough, a young scientist on the loose, researching terraforming accidents and writing up papers for publication in the scientific journals, but the fact that he had worked for Blue Sun Corporation just a few short months ago rang all sorts of alarm bells in her. River Tam had been a fugitive ever since her arrival on board Serenity. She'd been pursued by the Alliance, bounty hunters, and creepy men in suits wearing blue gloves—the infamous Hands of Blue. The Operative had said he'd arrange for the Alliance to rescind River's fugitive status, and apparently he'd been as good as his word. But the Blue Hands—Blue Sun's private operatives—were still after River. Anything that could connect River and Serenity to Blue Sun worried Zoe, and so she was still reserving judgment on Neumann. The funny thing was, River herself seemed to have taken a shine to the young man.
As it happened, even Zoe was ready for a break when Ip Neumann showed up bearing containers of take-out food from one of Persephone's finest Chinese restaurants. Inara, Simon, and River all seemed to have bonded with Neumann during the last week—they'd worked together to get the charges against the Captain dropped, with Neumann running point, as he was the least obviously affiliated with the crew of the Firefly. Neumann also seemed to have worked his own contacts in the Captain's favor. This should have made Zoe regard him more positively, but the suspicious part of her (it was a healthy portion, and it had saved her 屁股 pìgu many a time in the war and afterwards) wondered just why Neumann was so interested in turning favors for the crew of Serenity. She didn't believe it was simply out of the goodness of his heart. Kaylee, on the other hand, clearly did.
"Ip! You brought Szechuan string beans! My favorite!" Kaylee gushed. Everyone was appreciating the bamboo shoots, bitter gourd, snow peas, and straw mushrooms abounding in the food, but Kaylee was the only person who could attain a state of spiritual ecstasy over fresh vegetables.
Zoe thanked Neumann for his role in springing the crew out of jail.
"I just couldn't believe they'd throw the book at the Captain like that," Ip said. "After what he did, rescuing those slaves—to be accused of slave trading—that must have been really galling."
"Captain's never really put a lot of trust in the system—Alliance often doesn't know well enough to do the right thing, in my opinion." Zoe had a lot of opinions about the Alliance, most of them unprintable, but she wasn't about to share them with a Core-bred youngster like Neumann.
"The Captain acted on his ideals," Inara put in. "He has a noble heart, although he tries to hide it." Zoe was surprised to hear Inara praising Mal this way, knowing as she did that they'd quarreled just before the slave rescue, and had barely spoken to each other since. She just knew the Captain had gone and called Inara "whore" again—the 傻瓜 shǎgūa couldn't manage to lose that word from his vocabulary—and got himself in the doghouse with Inara. Now she was calling him noble. Maybe there was hope for him yet. Of course, Inara might have a harder time hanging on to that notion of "noble" when confronted with the reality of Mal—especially if he returned in one of his gloomy, grumpy moods. Zoe reckoned that a near certainty, given that he was visiting Horowitz.
"They say no good deed goes unpunished," Neumann said.
"So, do we have a job?" Simon interjected. Zoe scowled inwardly. The Doc had no sense, discussing private business in front of a stranger. But she answered Simon's question.
"It happens we do. One that we cannot afford to do."
"So why are we doing it, then?" Trust Simon to ask the obvious question.
"We can't afford not to." Zoe wasn't about to mention that it was a smuggling job. Neumann didn't need to know about any of Serenity's less-than-legal activities. "Transport job to Beylix," she added.
"I thought jobs were supposed to pay," Simon continued.
Zoe answered, "It does pay—after the fact. But no advance."
"Do we need an advance?" For top three percent, sometimes Simon was quite slow on the uptake.
"You are such a boob," River said, rolling her eyes.
Zoe answered Simon's question. "Yes. We can't afford to re-stock food stores or even a complete load of fuel. Plus this cargo requires some special fittings and stores, all of which require cash up front." She anticipated Simon's next stupid question. "Captain expended all his reserve funds on this slave rescue operation. Got no more 'n a credit to his name."
"Surely the Captain has business contacts here on Persephone—someone he could ask for a job," Neumann suggested.
"Captain already used up all the good will he got on this planet and then some," Zoe replied. She didn't add that the Captain could hardly go seeking a legitimate transport job when he knew his hold would soon be filled with smuggled cattle.
"What about the Abolitionist Society?" Kaylee asked. "They seemed like good folk. Mayhaps some one of them has a job we could do."
"Can't export abolition."
"I suppose we could take on paying passengers," Inara suggested.
This time it was Simon who responded. "Passengers to Beylix? I can see it now: 'Take a sight-seeing tour to Beylix, Garbage Dump of the Kalidasa System'."
"All right, point taken," Inara responded.
"One man's trash is another man's treasure," River announced.
"I know I'm not part of the crew…" Ip Neumann began.
"No, you ain't," Zoe responded, but her reply was overwhelmed by Kaylee's simultaneous one. "As good as!" she exclaimed, enthusiastically supported by Simon and Inara.
"…but I have an idea," Neumann continued. He gathered himself up and took his leave. "I'll be back later."
. . .
glossary
地狱 dìyù [hell]
该死 Gāisǐ [Damn]
屁股 pìgu [ass]
傻瓜 shǎgūa [fool]
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