Shadow, Part 6a

Spacewalk. Catharsis.


Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Neumann had heard of it, of course, and had thought he understood what it meant. But in the face of the graphic demonstration he had just witnessed on the bridge, he had to admit to himself that he had had no clue. The Captain hadn't been avoiding his questions about Shadow out of pure cussedness, after all. He'd just been trying to avoid opening a Pandora's box of trauma, the scope of which Neumann could only just begin to comprehend. Neumann realized that he'd been approaching the terraforming disaster on Shadow all wrong. It wasn't just an academic question, a logical sequence of A leads to B yields C. It was a human tragedy of epic proportions. An entire world had been wiped out. An entire way of living. He tried to imagine what it would be like to have his entire home planet, his family, his friends, his childhood, everything he had grown up with, everything he had lived with and regarded as stable and permanent, all taken away in a single disastrous event. He found he couldn't. Yet it was something the Captain lived with every day. He felt sad beyond sadness, bleak beyond bleak.

Neumann wondered how the Captain had survived the blow. Survived so well as he had. Neumann thought that he himself would be driven crazy, if he had to live with the knowledge of such an event. Now he found himself marveling, not at why the Captain was such a closed-off, ornery, cross-grained 混蛋 húndàn on occasion, but at how the man managed to retain any sense of humor at all. For Captain Reynolds, despite having his dark and brooding moments, did not spend his life in a black funk. He smiled, cracked jokes, told funny stories, and he loved his crew. He had even managed to reminisce fondly about his childhood home. Neumann wondered how he could do it. The Captain was far more resilient than anyone he had heard of, living or historical. He had retained his humanity in the face of stresses that would break a lesser person.

No wonder the crew of Serenity was so loyal. Who wouldn't fight to protect such a remarkable person? Neumann looked back with disgust at his ham-fisted attempts to get information about Miranda and Shadow. It wasn't amazing that they'd circled the wagons and left him on the outside. It was amazing that they'd allowed him to stay within sight of the circle. He wondered he hadn't gotten himself tossed out the airlock on the first voyage.

Time to lend what skills he could to the fight. He was going to find out what killed Shadow—how and why. It was the least he could do for his Captain.

. . .

The time for the spacewalk was fast approaching, and Ip Neumann had made enormous changes to his plans in the last twenty-four hours. He would conduct the gravitational anomaly study as planned, but he wanted to add an entirely new suite of instruments as well. He had some portable equipment with him in the small crate he had been hauling around with him since leaving Blue Sun. He opened the crate and began pulling out the scientific instruments it contained—a spectrograph, particle detector, magnetospheric sensors, laser range finders, as well as instruments that measured and recorded sections of the electromagnetic spectrum from ultraviolet through visible light to infrared. He wanted to be able to measure chemical composition, shifts along fault lines, ground pressure waves, magnetic and radiological anomalies. Simon's portable diagnostic lab was pressed into service as well, and Kaylee, River, Simon, and Ip worked feverishly in the infirmary prepping and modifying the scientific instruments.

Ip had a focus. Something about the Shadow terraforming accident had always bothered him, and he felt that if he could find the key to that one element, he would crack the case. He didn't understand how the chance hit to the terraforming station by an Alliance bomb could possibly have set off a chain reaction that could destroy the planet. The terraforming station should have been more robust than that, especially with the inherent redundancies built into system. Shadow had had multiple terraforming stations, with overlapping functions. It should have taken more than one bomb—more than one bombardment, in fact—to cause any problem at all, let alone a problem on a planet-wide scale. The instrument suite was designed to sweep a broad spectrum of areas for anomalies.

In addition, Ip prepped a small capsule with detectors that would sample the atmosphere, rock, soil (if any), rainfall, and gather seismographic and other data on the ground. If there were signs of any life-forms, even bacteria or blue-green algae, the samplers might find them. He would have liked to rig these instruments with a transmitter to send data back to the ship, but there wasn't time to get that elaborate, so he included a locator beacon of the type he had commonly used when he worked at Blue Sun, in the event that he had the opportunity to return to Shadow and retrieve the capsule. Kaylee rigged the capsule with an expendable thruster and a heat shield built of scrap, and River programmed the trajectory. He wanted the capsule to land somewhere in the Northside area of the northern continent, because that was the nearest landmass to the terraforming station that had taken the hit.

River didn't tell him, but she programmed the capsule to land at the coordinates of the Captain's former house.

. . .

Mal made a last-minute change to the spacewalking team. Although Zoe had intended to go out with Ip and River, at Mal's request she stayed inside, and Jayne took her place. Mal didn't say much, but Zoe knew her role was to standby on the bridge. The smashed console on the pilot's side was a reminder of what might happen, and she understood that she was to disable him if he did anything that might endanger the ship. Inara also claimed a place on the bridge, ready to assist as might be needed, whether it were calling for medical assistance or pinch-hitting as pilot or simply soothing Mal. The bright curve of Shadow filled the entire upper half of the bridge window.

. . .

The spacewalk was incredible. The bright disk of Shadow filled the entire sky above their heads. A quarter of Shadow was in the dark, but the reflected light from the bright portion lit their work area with a yellow glow. River worked seamlessly with Ip. She seemed to know exactly what he needed and exactly when he needed it. It was amazing to have all his needs anticipated. He and River set up the suite of instruments, securing them to the hull of Serenity, and then proceeded with the experimental protocol for the gravitational field anomaly study.

She always enjoyed being out in the Black. The first time, when she and Simon were hiding, Simon had felt sick, but River had felt joy. Later, when she donned a suit to escape Early—even then, with the ship in peril—the joy of the freedom of the Black had touched her. When her plan succeeded and the bounty hunter became another object in space, she had flown—no, floated—back to her home in perfect Serenity. Now, working side by side with Ip, she felt the joy again, the joy of the Black, and the anticipation of results. The light reflected off Shadow was only partly responsible for the glow she felt.

Science doc and River were completely absorbed in placing the blinky boxes around Serenity's hull like flowerpots. Then they were busy taking measurements, and considering that it was all supposed to be about measuring stuff on Shadow it was funny how they weren't hardly even lookin' at the planet. Jayne wasn't interested in the measurements, so he figured it was his job to look around.

It was an awesome sight.

Jayne didn't figure he was the kind of fella who awed easily, but he'd never been on a spacewalk this close to a planet before. It felt kinda strange, the great big presence of the thing overhead, taking up what felt like the whole sky, so that space wasn't black and empty, but full of great big yellow planet. He turned himself over for a better view, and gazed at the thing. Couldn't see the land forms so well on account of the grayish clouds and yellow haze, but he could see the black patches he reckoned were where the lava flowed out, and bright yellow spots where the sulfur vents must be. He looked from one edge of the planet clear to the other—it was like looking from horizon to horizon, 'cept it was a weird inside out way of doin' it—and that's when he saw something that shouldn't be there.

"What was that?" Jayne asked.

"What was what?" River and Neumann answered together, looking up from their machine.

"I saw a ship," Jayne said, pointing. "Who else is out here?"

River and Neumann looked in the direction Jayne indicated, toward the horizon of Shadow that Serenity was pursuing.

"There are too many," River said, and then Jayne spotted them.

Not just one ship. Many ships. Huge numbers of ships. Transports, by the look of 'em.

"No ruttin' way there should be so many ships out here. Zoe said it was an embargo zone. Say, Doc, you got anything there can scan those ships, see what they're carrying?"

. . .

Mal stared up at the surface of Shadow, not recognizing a single feature of the landscape. Longitude and latitude said it was the Northside above them, and he couldn't recognize a thing. It wasn't just the altered shoreline, or the lack of greenery. Grey patches and black patches covered the land where it was not tawny brown or lurid sulfur yellow. Ash falls and lava plains, he reckoned. Sulfur exudations. There were no words, no words to say or think or feel, no words in any language, no words that could possibly express it—no actions either. At that point he noticed moisture dropping on his hands as they rested on the console before him, and he realized he had been crying for some time. Zoe, bless her, hadn't said a word, nor given any sign that she noticed. But he knew she had. She understood.

. . .

Inara also understood. She didn't approach Mal or even signal her presence. This was his private grief. She knew something about loss, far more than Mal suspected she knew. But her loss didn't compare to the loss of a world. She had expected that Mal might have another flashback, that he would react with violence or anger as he had a few days ago in his bunk. She had thought that he might swear, in Chinese as he typically did when he was greatly moved. But he sat perfectly still. He was shocked to a point well beyond swearing. She noticed that he was silently weeping, cathartic tears streaming down his face unheeded as he stared, unmoving, up at the remains of his home. Her sympathy would be an intrusion. She sat perfectly still. She understood.

. . .

Mal wiped his face and blew his nose. It was then he noticed something that shouldn't have been there at all. Right at Shadow's edge, the edge they'd been chasing. Shoals of transports—thick as a shoal of herring, right in the embargo zone, where there shouldn't have been a single vessel.

. . .

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glossary

混蛋 húndàn [bastard]


Shoals of reviews...or at least a few...would be nice. Thanks!