Part 2
Ever since Jubal Early had found his way on to Serenity, Kaylee had trouble sleeping at night. Just as she started to drift off, some little noise would yank her back to wakefulness – heart pounding, eyes wide as saucers. It was silly, as there wasn't a noise Serenity might make she wouldn't know, but there it was. She'd thought of asking Simon for something to help her sleep, but . . . she shied off at that and refused to put her finger on exactly why she didn't want to go that route with him. Instead, she twirled her hair, chewed on her lip, hummed that fancy dance tune to herself, and tried to relax back into sleep.
Just as her eyelids had started to close, there was a tiny little creeeeaaaaak, followed by an even softer thump. Neither of those noises fit her catalog of Serenity sounds. Frozen, she held her breath. There, on the floor past her bed, nearer the ladder. Something was there.
There was a scurry, then a couple of medium size bangs. If it were an intruder, he must have had an epileptic fit on the floor. With that thought, Kaylee plucked up the courage to throw her legs over the edge of the bed and reach for the light with her right hand. Before she reached it, something small and dense landed on the bed beside her. She turned on the switch.
It was a cat.
The cat was purring.
It took a few deep breaths before Kaylee could find her voice. The cat watched her with indolent, curious eyes, blinking at her. It was a beautiful tortoiseshell with markings of cream, orange, brown, and black. It licked its paw and proceeded to clean first one ear, and then the other.
"Well . . . hey, puss . . ."
She put her index finger out, and after a moment's deliberation, the cat sniffed it, nuzzled it, and gave it a quick, approving lick. When Kaylee held out her whole hand, the cat poured itself along the underside, getting a good, solid stroke in. Kaylee sat and stared, blinking.
"MMmmmrrOOW!"
"Oh, sorry 'bout that," she apologized, and began stroking the short fur. As she worked, the cat turned from side to side, getting the best coverage possible, pausing to have a particularly scritchy spot worked on. "How'd you get here, sweetheart?"
"RRRrrrrrRRRR," the cat answered.
"Cargo bay door while we were planetside, I expect," Kaylee nodded, taking a moment to direct her attentions to that spot behind the ears that turned all cats of her acquaintance into purring wrecks. "Cap'n won't like it a bit, I'm afraid."
"Rrreh."
The cat climbed halfway into her lap, settled down, and began to make biscuits. The volume of purr rose until it made her ears vibrate. Strangely enough, Kaylee found herself yawning – not a problem she'd had in a long while.
"I guess I'll have some explainin' to do in the morning," she told the cat.
Very carefully, she held the cat against her as she pulled her legs back onto the bed, arranged her blanket, and then reached up and turned the light out. As soon as she had herself horizontal, the cat snuggled up to her chin, purring the whole time. Kaylee tried to keep up with the stroking, but in no time at all, her eyelids closed and her hand stilled. The purring didn't stop, though.
Of course, it wasn't until the morning – when the cat had disappeared – that she found the corpse of one of the white mice on her floor, just under the ladder. Its neck had been neatly broken, and its little tongue hung out of its mouth. Kaylee looked at the furry white body and wondered how in the verse she would explain this to the captain.
"How we doin'?" Mal yelled, poking his head into the cockpit.
Wash's snore cut off mid-vibrato, and he jerked upright. "Fine! Fine! Just resting my eyeba . . ." he trailed off, caught Mal's twitching smile and relaxed. "Will you stop fucking with me? That's my wife's job."
"Anything on the agenda for today?"
"Naw, just a couple of minor things Kaylee wanted to play with. You know how she is."
"That I surely do," Mal agreed. "See if you can't-"
He was cut off by a light on the control board that began blinking and softly bleeting "boop boop boop". Wash tapped it a couple of times, got no response, reached over his head to throw a series of switches, and still got nothing.
"Everything okay?" Mal asked.
"Yeah, I . . . think so. Wiring malfunction, looks like. Guess I'll be doing a little work of my own."
"Shiny. Keep me posted."
Mal stepped down from the cockpit and glanced down the corridor to see Simon coming his way. The doctor had an unhappy expression.
"What's she done now?"
Simon stopped, about to answer, when hatch to Kaylee's quarters opened, and she came climbing out.
"River hasn't done anything," he replied, offering a hand to Kaylee. "It's the mice. Someone let them out of their box last night."
"Someone? Where was your sister?" Mal's face tightened. What had been a simple job had just become logarithmically more difficult.
"In her room all night long," Simon answered, his shoulders tensing up. "As far as I know, no one went into the infirmary. The doors were locked."
"But?" Mal prodded.
"But the box was opened, not chewed through, and there was no sign of the mice."
Mal grimaced. "How I do not need this dyspeptic water buffalo shit right now. Great. Kaylee, roust the rest of the crew. We're going to have to pull a full search of Serenity and lay down some sort of live-capture traps. You up to puttin' together a few of those, doc?"
"Uh . . . cap'n?" Kaylee began. "I found one of the mice in my quarters this morning."
She held out a handkerchief, into which was tucked a very dead mouse. Its tiny eyes were glazed over, and its tongue still hung out of its mouth. Simon frowned at it.
Mal took a deep, calming breath. "Damn me to the hell of carnivorous grammar school teachers, I never should have taken this job."
Wash put the screws that held the panel in place up on the radar readout and set the panel to the side. From the lights, he expected to find some sort of glitch in the auxiliary nav board. It didn't square with what he and Kaylee had been working on. If anything were to go south, it would have been the main communications board. They'd been expecting it to go out any day.
What he found was totally different. Instead of a couple of wires with insulation rubbed off or a crack in the board, when he pulled the panel he looked straight into a pair of small, red, extremely insane eyes. They were accompanied by twitching whiskers and a long, slender, naked tail.
"What the . . . aw, geez, the Captain's gonna be pissed you guys got out. Come 'ere."
He reached in to pick up the mouse, cupping his hand to keep it from running further back into the wiring.
"Can I see that?" Simon asked.
Kaylee handed it over and chewed on her bottom lip.
"What?" Mal demanded.
"Its neck is broken," Simon noted, holding the corpse by its tail. "And there's something funny about the size of its skull."
"Well, cap'n, you know how I go on askin' for a cat," Kaylee said with a please-don't-yell-at-me expression of unease.
"Kaylee . . . you didn't."
"I think I'll take this back to the infirmary and do a necropsy," Simon nodded. "If that's all right with you, Captain."
"Fine. Whatever. Kaywinnet Lee Fry, you best not be tellin' me you brought a cat onto my ship without my express permission. I run a tight ship. I don't like surprises like this, especially not from my best mechanic."
Kaylee opened her mouth to explain when she was cut off by a scream. A high pitched, manly scream.
"AAAAAAAAAAHHHH! GET IT OFF! GGGAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAAH!"
For the better part of a second, all three of them stood there with their mouths hanging open – Simon still holding on to the dead mouse.
"GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF! AAAAAAHHHHHH!"
Mal made the cockpit in two bounds, tailed by Simon, who passed the body to Kaylee.
Mal threw himself into the cockpit only to find Wash by himself, all the way in the corner, nearly standing on his head, frantically waving his arms in the air. With both hands and a huge yank, Mal pulled Wash to his feet.
"What is it?!" Mal demanded.
"Look out!" Simon yelled as a second – this time quite lively – mouse ran hell-for-leather over Mal's boots, under the control board and out of sight.
"AAAAH!" Wash screamed.
"WHAT?" Mal yelled back, holding Wash by the lapels of his coverall and shaking him a couple of times. Wash caught Mal's shoulders to steady himself, gasping for air.
"It tried . . . it tried to KILL me!"
"What did?" Mal asked, trying to get some sense out of his pilot.
"The mouse!" Wash gasped. "Did you see it? It's crazy!"
Mal released Wash so abruptly, he nearly fell over.
"The mouse," Mal repeated. "Tried to kill you."
"You had to have seen it!" Wash insisted. "It had teeth like this-"he held his hands nine inches apart. "I tried to pick it up, but it jumped right at my face."
"He does have some lacerations," Simon noted, leaning forward to get a better look.
"The mouse. Tried. To kill. You," Mal repeated again.
"Those are definitely bite marks," Simon added.
"That was the most foul-tempered rodent in the verse!" Wash shouted.
"I think you should come down to the infirmary with me," Simon pursed his lips thoughtfully. "We need to get those injuries cleaned."
"While you've got him down there, doc, how about somethin' that'll put him back in his right mind," Mal suggested.
"I'll see what I have."
On his way out, Simon paused to take the dead mouse from Kaylee once again.
"We've got a lead!" the second technician announced as he ran into the staff room. His partner looked up from her tea.
"What?"
He slapped the readout down on the table before her. "From that second bounty hunter – you know, the one that smelled so bad. He says Devastate was signed on to a cargo ship down dockside. Firefly class. He's trailing it to Liang Ho."
"Tell him to keep his eyes peeled for Obscuris," she responded, picking up the readout and looking closer at the text. "You can bet it went after Devastate, given the chance. And tell him not to let his guard down. Those things'll kill him soon as look at him."
"What's this about Wash being attacked?" Zoe asked, stepping into the infirmary.
Wash sat on the examining chair, his face plastered with stitch-strips and antibiotic ointment. He broke out into a dazzling smile when he saw her and winced as cuts, scratches, and bites were stretched.
"It's a long story," he told his wife.
"He was attacked by a mouse," Simon mentioned, working on something laid in a tray on the counter.
"Okay, not so long," Wash shrugged.
"A . . . mouse?" Zoe asked
"If it's anything like this one," Simon continued, "I wouldn't be surprised that his face is in such bad shape."
"Hey!" Wash protested, then turned to Zoe. "It's not that bad, is it?"
Zoe put a hand to her husband's chin and turned his face from one side to the other. "You do look like you picked a fight with a drunken weed trimmer."
"Huh."
"What is it?" Zoe looked over at Simon.
"This is one very strange mouse."
"Well, it hated me," Wash insisted. "That's pretty strange. All the rodents I've ever met seemed to at least tolerate me."
Zoe patted his hand and stepped closer to Simon, peering over his shoulder.
"I once had a rabbit. It was practically affectionate."
"See here," Simon pointed with his scalpel. "The brain case is nearly twice as large as you'd expect to see. Plus, there are implants all through the motor core. Its eyes face forward more than they should. Normally, that's a mark of a predator. I'd take odds that its muscle fibers are denser and more elastic."
"What you're saying," Zoe tried to translate, "is that this is a strange mouse."
"What I'm saying," Simon corrected, "is that this mouse was designed for a purpose. I'd better go talk to the captain."
As he left, Zoe and Wash stared at each other.
"Well, I feel vindicated," Wash said.
"But, Cap'n, I didn't bring the cat on board," Kaylee insisted. "It just showed up in my quarters last night. I'm fairly sure that it killed that mouse."
Kaylee didn't lie. If she said she hadn't brought the cat on board, then that was the way it was. Unfortunately, that left Mal with a problem. He had an excellent mad going on, and no one to take it out on.
"For now, just get busy repairing that control panel. You see a mouse, sing out. You see that cat, grab it before it can kill more of our profit."