Title: Away Team
Author: A Crazy Elephant
Summary: Reavers weren't the only secret buried on Miranda.
Category: General/Tragedy
Spoilers: Major spoilers for the Big Damn Movie, so if you've still not seen Serenity you best be movin' on now, you hear? Nothing for SGU, though.
Disclaimer: Alas, it is not mine. *sniffle*
Author's Notes: Look! I wrote a Crossover that has nothing to do with Dead Like Me! =) This assumes the worst for the Destiny, but Eli was right about those Kino databanks- someone might see them. Happy Thanksgiving!
Away Team
They'd been here all of an hour and this godforsaken planet was all ready giving Annie Lee Portho the creepin' willies.
It wasn't the dead folks; she'd seen plenty of them before now and most of these were all so far gone they were literally skin and bones anyways.
It wasn't the constant threat of a Reaver Raid; everyone living from the Mid-Planets on out worried about those these days, what with them ruttin' bastards pushin' in farther every season.
It wasn't the uneasy banter between the team, even though it was clear as day most the civilians were ready to run off home and half the military boys was ready to shoot something if they got spooked.
It was the gorram quiet.
Jesus, she'd never heard anything like it. No birds, not bugs, nothing. Just them. They were the first squad to touch down since the Browncoat boat had picked up the chip and streamed the Miranda Feed to every gorram screen with a Cortex link in the 'verse. Just a little band, mid-ranked military with private civilian researchers from the Core and the Boarder Moons and everywhere in between to keep the masses happy, make them look more impartial; nothing too fancy for the official military inquiry. The Alliance were tryin' to make nice with the public after the firestorm of bad publicity from the Feed's wide release and average soldiers just tryin' to make a livin' along with a small team of researchers from this Acad and that Uni would do the trick.
At the very least it wasn't so eerie out here in the countryside. No empty streets, no sealed buildings and no newsfeeds echoing through the empty city if someone tripped a reserve generator out this far. They'd set up their ship and base camp in what had once been a federal park, just outside one of the major cities. An ideal spot to be sure- heavily forested for cover should a Reaver party get extra curious like about the planet and respectful of the dead, plus they didn't have to worry about any auxiliary power systems kicking on before they could identify them and give away their position to Reavers or particularly brave packs of pirates.
The quiet was nearly tolerable here in the park. It was almost like back home on Jiangyin during the wintertime when the snow had drifted thick and all sounds just came out muffled, except here it was hotter than Ezra on a summer's day and it was the trees doing the mufflin' instead of the snow.
"Portho!"
"Yes Captain?" Their stalwart leader, Captain Timothy Barkov, was tryin' to pretend like he wasn't jumpy as all hell. He was a military man; a dinky little pilot doing an Outer Rim tour until brass decided he was everyman enough to be their poster boy for this recon assignment. Just like she was an osteology graduate student with a cute little smile off a loyal boarder moon until Parliament requested she join the team and put that cute little smile to work in their news feeds.
"Tech Sergeant Macalister's scouting the surrounding scrub; I don't want anyone going out alone. Take a firearm and tag along." Now he was just getting her out of the way. No bones for her to analyze or cameras to smile for, so she got to babysit one of the jarheads who was either a first class actor or too thick to understand why he ought to be a might agitated.
"Yessir," The firearm was a joke; some sort of high tech Alliance crap. Her grandaddy had better weapons than that one and he weren't nothing but an accountant. Not like a gun would do much good if they got caught by Reavers anyways.
"You know how to shoot one of these, miss?" Macalister was some Neanderthal from the Core. Londinium, most like. Boy had that clean-cut look to him that came from years of finishin' school before bein' packed off to a command uni. No doubt his daddy was career military man wantin' Junior to follow in his footsteps. Probably wouldn't know a Reaver if it chewed his ruttin' leg off.
"Point, shoot, wait for the recoil, I know how to use a gun, Tech Sgt." Annie assured him as they set off through the under brush along what had once been a hiking path. Left untended for the past decade or so, the trail was overgrown and shabby in the forest scrub, the trees thick and close with no creatures to control them. "What is it we're lookin' for here, Macalister?" she asked once they'd hiked a fair piece off from camp.
"Nothing in particular, Miss Portho. Captain Barkov just wanted a sweep of the surrounding area."
The sounds of running water crept into the silence of the dense trees. A small river was near by. When the planet was alive, it'd probably been set up for recreational stuff; fishin' and canoeing and the like for the city folk on weekends. Now it was rough, the beaches and boat launches washed away. Even some of the trees had come down. Storm most like had ripped through, pullin' down trees and eroding the banks into little cliffs as the water cut deeper into the planet's surface. They lost path the closer they came to the water, with some of the drops getting a might steep- not deep exactly, but down right troublesome to get out of if one were to trip over the edge- before things flattened out into a wide muddy shore line.
"What's that?" Macalister pointed ahead to shore. There, half buried in the mud was a ring, like and arch or a hoop. It was clearly old, the triangular designs that ran around the edges were scraped and the metal dented. It wasn't the only non-biodegradable bit laying around either- the closer they came, the more stray hunks of what might have once been a ship or a shuttle peeked out of the mud. "Terraforming crew have an accident, you think?"
"Dunno." Annie shrugged as Macalister moved nearer the ring. "Hey, look at this." Annie tugged at a small metal sphere, mostly buried in the loose sediments some yards from the hoop, closer to the shore. The mud made a sucking sort of sound before it gave way around the ball, leaving a sharp corner of what like a hand link exposed in the crater below. This too she pulled free with a wet sort of pop as the muddy and scratched screen crackled weakly into life at her touch. The picture was grimy and not particularly easy to make out under the deep scratches and dents, but the sound was clear as a newsfeed.
"Hi! I'm Eli Wallace, I'm twenty three years old and this is Destiny."