Chapter Two

"I'm sorry I got you into this, Mal," Inara said quietly, slowly rubbing her hands together. As soon as she was up, she'd found a nail kit in the refresher and finished cleaning them out. They were now as clean, sharp, and elegant as if she were going to an embassy dance.

"Didn't exactly have a choice, did you?" he replied, rubbing his chin where the stubble was beginning to show. "You find out one of your client's buddies has plans on our River, not much else you can do."

"I wasn't certain. I could have told the authorities."

"Right, and then the Alliance digs through Morado's stuff, finds out that he knows River is on Serenity, and comes straight for us, and there's no way we can hide Simon and River quick enough. You did the right thing."

She turned her face away from his, all too aware that the right thing was probably going to get them both killed.

"What's up, Wash?" Mal asked as he clambored into the bridge.

"Communication for you, Cap, from Inara," Wash answered, for once the soul of deadpan discretion.

Mal paused, not quite baffled, but not far from it either. "I'll … uh, I'll take it in my quarters."

He climbed back through the hatch to the causeway and started down the ladder to his quarters. Inara's exit from Serenity had been hard on everyone. The sun of Kaylee's mood had been hidden behind a bank of gray clouds for more than a week. Book had been even quieter and more profound than usual. Even Jayne snarled a bit more and smiled a bit less, and Inara had been far from his favorite person. It had been nearly a month, and they were only just starting to regain their equilibrium.

Once in his quarters, he sat down at the desk in front of his console and flipped the vid switch. After some initial static, Inara's lovely face coalesced. Maybe he'd gotten better at reading people, but her smile seemed a little strained, and her gracious welcome was a little off pitch.

"I'm sorry to bother you, Mal, but I came across something I needed to talk to you about."

"The security deposit you put on the shuttle was wired to your account last week. Any difficulties with it?" he asked.

"Not at all." Again, her smile was not quite what it should have been. "It's just … I've heard something in the course of my work."

"Oh, the whoring?" He could have kicked himself the moment it came out of his mouth. Where another woman would have flinched or teared up or snarled in anger, there was only a moment's pause from Inara. Somewhere behind that carven ivory façade, she decided to set aside his words without comment or comeback. Whatever it was, then, it was important.

"One of my clients began to talk after he'd had a bit much to drink. He's been trying to convince me to take an exclusive contract with him, so I suspect he was trying to impress me. A colleague of his, who wasn't named, is in the process of acquiring a very valuable tool – one that can read minds, enter buildings without being seen, act as the perfect spy or even the perfect assassin."

The wheels in his head spun for a moment before the cogs caught. Not even Companions had access to the highly encrypted, impossible to eavesdrop on communication systems of the Alliance. More, she was on Persephone, an Alliance core world. While neither of them was interesting enough to keep under full time surveillance, it wasn't very long odds that this communication was being monitored.

"Considering the research work the Alliance has been doing," he said slowly, putting his thoughts together, "there must be quite a few of those tools out there."

"The context my client gave is that this tool was no longer owned by the government. It's outside of their purview just now, and his associate is going to great lengths to attain it, especially considering what it could do for his business." Inara's expression was grave.

"No idea who this business man is?"

"None," she replied. "Only that he operates between the border and the center worlds."

"That's half the population of the Alliance," Mal answered, chewing on his lip. "All right, Inara. I take your meaning. Thanks for the heads up. If I learn anything from this end, I'll keep you posted."

"Please do," and she signed off without further ado.

"Simon," Mal called, poking his head into sickbay, "how's River doing these days."

As always, Simon paused a moment before answering, trying to shuffle the exacting terminology of his profession into terms a layman could understand. As always, the process meant that he couldn't communicate exactly specific details, the details that meant the difference between an accurate prognosis and a sloppily painted picture.

"She's more stable than she's been in a while. I think I've found a balance to her meds, so she's having fewer side effects."

"Is she any more in touch with reality?" Mal asked, a little impatiently.

"The problem, captain," Simon replied a little stiffly, "is that she's a little too much in touch with reality. You and I can focus on one thing at a time, screening the rest of the verse out as we need to. River experiences everything, all the time. I think the only thing that's spared her from going completely catatonic is that her intellect can usually keep up with all of it – even if she's not always able to articulate what she's experienced."

"Tell me about it," Mal said, thinking back to what Kaylee had told him of Trojans and boxes that didn't like him. "Here's the problem: I've gotten word that someone may be working on grabbing River and using her…unique perspective, let's say."

"That can't happen," Simon protested. "She's barely able to function with the support we can give her. She loves Serenity. It's the main reason she's doing so well."

"I don't intend to let it happen. That's the reason I'm telling you now. Stay on your guard. Keep River as close as possible, until we get a handle on what's going on."

"Yes, sir."

Mal left the sickbay, deeply discontented.

"So," Mal said, peering into the wiring he'd uncovered by removing a service panel, "what drew you into whoring? The benefits? The travel? Having sex with strange men?"

Inara refused to rise to his bait. "I don't whore," she answered in an even, friendly tone. "I'm a Companion."

"You companionate?"

She closed her eyes briefly, as though his grammar caused her some internal pain. "I accompany, and I choose those whom I accompany, not the other way around."

"Right," he agreed. "That makes all the difference in the world."

"It does."

"Because every man that's ever contemplated going to a whore – excuse me, Companion – has the greatest respect for her and would never even think of treating her like a piece of meat he's bought for the night."

The look she turned on him was a combination of mild contempt, disinterest, and boredom, as though she saw a particularly poorly trained dancing bear had piddled on the floor. "Strangely enough, Malcolm, aside from the one man you ended up punching to defend my honor, you're the only man who's treated me with disrespect for what I am."

"Inara!"

The reprove in her instructor's tone was the equivalent of a slap in the face from one of her childhood teachers. Her instructor stopped in front of her, peered into her face with laser accurate attention, then picked up Inara's left hand and inspected the cuticles. She had doctored away the tear streaks on her face and put ice bags over her eyes to reduce the swelling, but there were still telltale signs of crying. She hadn't even thought to look after her cuticles. It never occurred to her that she still had the habit of chewing on whatever loose skin her nails my have. As a result, three of her cuticles were pink and swollen.

"You are in no wise ready for instruction today," the instructor said, the smallest note of harshness like a lash.

"Yes, ma'am."

It would do no good at all to beg forgiveness or explain why she'd been crying that morning. A Companion would never let such trivialities affect her comportment. A Companion was always ready, always in control, always serene and smiling gently. Missing a day because she was unable to meet those standards was a black mark on her record. Two more like it, and she would be removed from the Academy's program. That could not happen.

"It's just as well now as later," the instructor said with a sigh and gentle tilt of her head. "That way, you can learn to maintain yourself before the pressures on you increase even more. You're excused for the day, Inara. We will see you tomorrow morning."

Inara curtsied deeply, though the instructor had already turned away from her. Then she floated to the door and let herself out, determined to show with the tiniest motions that she was composed, dignified, and ungrieved by the events of the day.

The wiring system was not a weak point, Mal decided. It hardly surprised him, seeing that he was able to access it from the inside. Either the systems were single, and the slightest tweak could cause them to fail – leaving them in a dark, increasingly cold and stuffy tomb – or they had triple and quadruple redundancies, meaning that any change he made would be overridden.

"I don't disrespect what you are," he corrected Inara and handed her the coin he'd used to pry the panel off the wall. "I disrespect what you do, because it disrespects you."

He pulled himself out of the wall and sat up on the floor, extremely dissatisfied.

"Really?" Inara asked. "Or is it that, like many men, you cannot stand being unable to control your desires or the object of your desire, and because of that, you've decided to convince yourself that what you desire is no good? Foxes aren't the only creatures that suffer from sour grapes."

"You've a pretty low opinion of men," Mal replied, trying to decide how many panels he could pull off before the security system kicked in or time ran out.

"As do you of Companions and whores," Inara answered.

"Kaylee, what've you got?" Zoe called out.

"It don't make no sense!" Kaylee yelled back. "That's what I got. Ain't no reason for the hydrospanner to give out like it did, but it has, an' I definitely don't like the looks of the backup."

Zoe stepped through the hatch to the engine room and ducked down to where Kaylee had crawled under the engine. Kaylee pushed herself back out, her hair a cloud of worry, and two greasy parts clenched in her left fist.

"Look," she said, holding up the first one. "Feel that spot there?"

Zoe laid a finger on it and felt a subtle roughness where it should have been smoothed to a mirror polish.

"That there's metal fatigue. Fatigue that wasn't there two weeks ago when I last stripped down that module. It's got maybe another three day's heavy use before it goes, and it better not be in when it goes, because if it does, it'll take half the engine chassis out with it."

Zoe's jaw clenched and her lips tightened. "What about the backup?"

That was the second part Kaylee held up. "It should be good. I inspected it those two weeks ago when I worked on this module, but it's not good."

"How so?"

Kaylee pulled out another part, a micrometer wrench, and measured one point and then another of the second hydrospanner. "Its tolerances are off. Just by a percent or so, but it's enough. I put this here part in, and the next time the captain calls for a full burn, it'll either freeze up the entire engine or fly apart into a bajillion pieces and take out half the crew."

Zoe studied Kaylee's unhappy face. If Kaylee said she'd inspected the parts and found them good two weeks ago, then two weeks ago, the parts were good. They were just lucky she'd spotted this problem before it sent critical. How did the parts go from fine to bad in that space of time? She didn't like it. Not one bit.

"Three days on the first one?" she asked Kaylee.

"Three days, if I get to take the engine offline every few hours and inspect the part."

"Okay, I'll tell the captain."

The captain had been none too pleased. It didn't help that on her way down to the bridge, Zoe had come across River, lying sprawled out on the deck and patiently counting the minute ridges of texture the prevented slips and falls when people ran back and forth. She looked up at Zoe, and said, "the boxes are arguing now. It's not orange, not at all. It's purple. Tell the captain I said so."

"Whatever you say, kiddo," Zoe answered.

"We'll have to stop at B'gard's," Mal decided, looking over charts with Wash. "That'll give Kaylee a chance to find replacement parts or remachine what we've got on hand. We might even get a chance to take on new cargo for Elysium."

Zoe's expression changed a tiny bit. "What about what we've already got?"

"What about it?"

"We still never opened up Morado's crates like you said we should. What if there's something in there we should know about."

"Kaylee come up with something to get by those electronic signature locks?"

"She was still working on it when she said Serenity called her attention to the hydrospanners."

"Soon as she's got that squared away to her satisfaction, tell her to get back on those locks. [This stinks like weekold hagfish, and I don't like it.]"

"Yes, sir."

"Wiring's a complete [motherless toad humper]," Mal said, sitting back on the bed. There were floor, wall, and ceiling panels piled all around them. Inara had watched him quietly, helping out where she could by staying out of his way or finding him things he asked for. "The only systems I can touch are the ones we absolutely cannot risk fiddling with. Morado's one sadistic customer."

"What about that?" Inara asked, pointing to the vid screen.

"What about it? Doubt we get the feelies broadcast all the way out here," he answered.

"No, that's not what I mean. If it's here for any reason, it's here to pick up something broadcast at us. Maybe Morado's final message where he tells us exactly what his plan is before he kills us by feeding us to piranha."

"No piranha," Mal answered. "And it'd be tons easier to kill us by letting the air out, turning off the heat, or just plain old starvation."

"But that's still here," she pointed out.

"And?"

"Is the equipment necessary to receive a broadcast of some sort all that different from what you need to send a broadcast?"

He sat for a moment longer, taking that into account, then sighed the heavy sigh of one whose work is not even close to being done and stood up again. "You know for a whore, you're awfully clever."

"Well, one of us has to be, and I'm not a whore."