Ghost Ship

Fourteen

Mal and Kaylee threaded their way through the tables and chairs around the dance-floor while Jayne walked on top of the tables, jumping from one to the next. Mal went to the front and marched hard with intent dragging a stumbling Kaylee behind him like a cart-horse pulling a trap with a buckled wheel.

They went through one of the arches at the end of the ballroom and moved quickly along the ornately decorated corridor beyond. It was curved and if followed to its end would lead back to the other side of the ballroom. At the midway point a set of wide steps led up to a pair of metal doors each emblazoned with a blue and gold crest: an azure sun impaled on three swords spaced so that the pommels and points protruded from the circle like the points of a star.

The doors were hanging open and held onto the wall by only by a few remaining hinges. The metal exterior was scorched and the doors themselves were contorted and deformed as if they had been subjected to some sort of explosive discharge that had forced them inwards against their frame before they had recoiled outwards. Mal stood in the empty space between them and checked the slab in his hand.

'We're there,' he said, 'how you doing Kaylee?'

'I would very much like not to be here,' she said.

'Nearly done. Just hang in there for a little while longer. Jayne, you good?'

'Sweet to the beat.'

'Okay,' said Mal, 'let's get River and get the Hell off this ship.'

He stepped though the doors and started to climb the stairs. Each of the steps was constructed from a different colour or texture of stone, as if each one had been sourced from a different planet; walking up them was like striding across the solar system. Mal came to a halt at the top of the stairs. The room he was standing in was enormous, a cavernous arboretum filled with skeletal tree-trunks long past being able to sustain greenery. Panoramic images from many worlds decorated the walls; twin-suns rising into a scintillating dawn above a nascent savannah, a boiling wall of ocean water forced back by the heat of a spitting black volcano, a mighty swarm of nocturnal jungle bats silhouetted against the luminous rings of a gas-giant, gargantuan terra-forming factories casting long shadows across a deserted mountain-range, a circular rainbow crowning a blob of proto-planet seen from space in its first moments of atmospheric integrity; but the only thing Mal was looking at was the line of bodies hanging by their necks under a long mezzanine balcony.

There were six atrophied corpses hanging from the landing; a man, a woman and four girls of close age. Mal left Kaylee in Jayne's arms and walked between the dead trees towards the family treading over a carpet of desiccated leaves as he went. He stood before the body of the man and looked up at his sunken face. Curly yellow whiskers framed the man's gray, fibrous jowls and one of his feet was bare; his lost slipper was on the floor below him, glued to the floor by a dark resinous puddle of fluids that had run out of him after his death.

He was dressed like an aristocrat and although dead for a century he would not have looked out of place in a contemporary gathering of the elite. To Mal it seemed as if the upper-class possessed an understanding of dress that transcended the mercurial whims of fashion and in some way he could not describe cemented their position at the top of the social hierarchy. Mal experienced a feeling of jealousy; he wanted a piece of their integrity for himself, but knew that by fact of his common birth he never would.

This was a source of resentment that he had learnt on the ranch during his childhood. At first he had embraced it for the same reason all young boys do anything; because it drew acceptance from the older men that had taught it to him. But over time Mal had made it his own conviction and had incorporated it into his identity. Now, he could no more remove this ingrained anger than a steer could will away the mark of the brander's hot metal. To aspire to be accepted as an equal by the aristocracy was to fail before you began. They never would see men like Mal as being anything more than useful; convenient to have at your disposal, like a stray dog eager to be put to a purpose, but never accepted, merely tolerated. The aristocracy was forever; commoners were transitory and therefore expendable. It was a realization that people like Badger, so eager to be regarded as equals, would, to their eternal tragedy, never comprehend.

And yet, despite his deep-felt animosity towards those born into privilege, Mal found that he bore this family no ill-will. During his life he had experienced many great indignities; some funny, most not. As he had grown older Mal had come to believe that all people were entitled to the benefit of doubt when it came to the level of respect they were accorded and he could imagine with more clarity than he wished just how undignified this family's final minutes had undoubtedly been. It was hanging in the air for any right-minded person to see.

'Don't ferget t'check the women-folk for jewelry?' said Jayne through the earpiece.

Mal shook his head within his helmet and stared at the bodies of the five females; such a waste of life so callously extinguished. Mal could feel the need to shed tears start to burn his eyes. He tried to remember the last time he had cried for another person's misfortune and realized that it had been before the war. Even the day they had carried Wash's bloody body from Serenity's cockpit on Mister Universe's moon had not brought forth such an emotional reaction. He hadn't even cried when he had lost his arm.

Mal tried not to hear the girl's voices in his head but life had taught him the sounds people make when they see their deaths coming; children as well as adults. He could hear the family crying as rough-men put ropes around the adults' necks. Their mother tried to placate them, told them to turn away, not to look, that all would be well and they would see one another in heaven. Their father was silent, stoic in the face of oblivion. Then the parents were thrown over the balcony and disappeared from view as the ropes went tight. There was no laughter from the men; they were professionals, here to the job. The sisters were holding onto each other as hands pulled them apart and nooses were tied round them one by one. The youngest went over the balcony first, so light she went high into the air when thrown. Her sisters heard the sound of her body swing under the mezzanine and hit the ceiling under their knees. She was not heavy enough for the fall to break her neck and she was still trying to call out to her dead parents swinging beside her as her next two sisters went over the balcony in flurries of skirts and screams of terror.

The oldest sister went last. This was the order in which the men had been instructed to carry out the job. She did not resist like her younger siblings and the men took their time talking to her as they tied her arms behind her back. Mal could feel the noose going round her throat. He could smell it as it passed her face, oily, as if it had come from an engine-room. There was breath in her ear and stubble on her neck as they spoke to her. Their leader explained to her why this was happening in words he had been forced to memorize. He told her why she had to be the one to die last as he slipped a stick he had broken off one of the trees below between her skin and the rope and began to turn it in a circle. Mal felt the noose contract and the blood being squeezed into his head. His hand went to his throat and he scraped at the collar of his suit. He tried to breath but he could not force air down his throat.

They suffocated her with the improvised garrote before tossing her down to join her family. As she swung back and forth her unconscious body took longer than the others had done to expire. It shut down more slowly than those that had struggled as they dangled. She was serene; unaware that she was in a state other than a dreaming sleep. Her thoughts drifted as she slid slowly into death. They became more diffuse; became intangible and incoherent until all that remained was a spark, a glowing ember in the ashes that continued to smoulder for a long time after the men had completed their job and left the ship.

In the same way that the receding waves of a falling tide leave a pattern of lines in the sand at the waters' edge her evaporating life left behind the dry matrix of connected neurons that had been home to her sense of self. A century of silence and stillness passed and the empty template in her head was preserved, a vacuum, yearning to be filled by a similarly special consciousness. The greatest mutant the 'verse had ever known had been born a reader and it was only another reader that would be pulled in to fill the space left behind.

'One mind into two heads don't go,' said Mal.

TBC