"I just know I saw a bug in here somewhere." Wash mumbled, wracking his ghostly brain. "I thought I could exploit it last time we were locked."
River sat at the console staring intently at a block of streaming numbers, running her cursor up and down through Serenity's critical code block, desperately looking for a way to remove the port lock.
"Did you try going around, maybe to a back-door channel?" The ghost said.
"Only one channel open. All the others are locked." River replied.
"Try routing it through the Nav computer then back out to the auxiliary life support." Wash pointed to the screen with a transparent hand. "Maybe the critical priority will override the lock."
"Transitive privilege." River retorted, identifying the vulnerability as if to say 'don't you think they would have thought of that?'
"Well - maybe."
"How well did it work last time?" She said.
Wash just looked at River mouthing 'How well did it work last time …' with a smug look. She took from his dejected blue eyes that it hadn't worked at all.
"Main life support might work better." River offered more to apologize than anything else.
"Oh Honey I don't think you want to do that. Your gonna need that when you launch."
"We've gone without it before. I can reboot it when we're away." River argued.
"Ok, what if it doesn't come back."
"Then 'we' come back." She replied. "We won't be any worse off."
"Well, I won't." Wash agreed. "It does carry higher privilege and you'd have to be crazy to do it."
River paused for a moment. Her expression softened and her eyes filled with doubt.
"Why are you here?"
Wash read through the code on the screen, looking for an angle, an error of some kind. Perhaps an unchecked field that he could exploit in the locking code. "I'm helping you escape." He replied idly.
"No." River looked away from the console and directly at Wash. "Why are you here?"
Wash's face got all mushy and concerned, as he looked down the hall at Zoe. She was rechecking her ordinance and racking firearms in the hallway in preparation for the firefight that she knew was coming.
"I need to know that she – all of you will be OK."
River scrunched up her face and looked at him sideway with an, 'I can't believe you expect me to swallow that' expression. He was, after all, a figment of her own imagination.
"Ok, Ok." The ghost moved around to face her directly and knelt in front of her. "I'm going to level with you. I'm here because you need to know that they will be alright."
River looked confused.
"You're worried about them, not about yourself, you can handle this kind of trouble. Frankly sometimes I think you'd be just as happy dead."
River studied his sincere face and ghostly blue eyes. He'd always been so kind to her when he was alive. Always looked at her like she was a person, even when the others were afraid of her, when they thought of her as a lunatic or a weapon. He always looked at her like she was just a girl, a sweet child. She missed him. As she looked into his ghostly eyes, her own eyes started to well and her voice choked.
"But you love these folks, almost as much as I did." Wash continued. "They might not all make it, River. Like I didn't make it. You need me here to help you deal with that."
"I don't want them to die." River argued, quietly crying.
"I don't either."
"How do I keep them safe?"
"You can't, Honey. You can't"
She pulled her knees up close to her chest, rocking slowly, tears now tracing down her cheeks. She buried her face in her arms.
"Then what do I do?"
"I don't know." Wash replied. "I don't know."
River choked back her tears, searching for a solution, for a way to find her answers, but it didn't come.
"How come Sheppard Book isn't here?"
"Because you're afraid of him." Wash answered, "And afraid of what he would say."
The girl knew her figment was right. She had to face the fact that she couldn't protect these people that she loved. Not forever. She had to have faith that they would find their own way through. She could only do so much and that wouldn't be enough. Not this time. All she could do was wait and hope.
"What would he say?" River asked after a long tearful pause. "What would Book tell me?"
"Tell them how you feel." Wash said, thoughtfully. "Tell them you love them. That's what he'd say."
Zoe met Mal halfway down the engineering hall, her face stern and mildly upset. She held a gun in each hand and looked ready for a fight.
"It happened again, sir."
"What?" Mal replied, looking up from his work.
When Zoe had learned that River was communing with her dead husband her didn't know, but she seemed to be taking it well. That is if he ignored the large caliber weapons. Mal had been rigging the engine room hall with a remote control grenade to block it off. He wanted to keep any intruders from shutting down the engines. When it came time to leave the captain didn't want anything standing in his way. Right now, however, his first mate seemed to be a more pressing problem.
"She hugged me. Just out of the blue. Hugged me, told me she loved me and then she walked away."
"Just like that?" Mal asked.
"Just like that." Zoe nodded.
"Think she's falling for you?"
Zoe's face dropped in shocked disbelief at her captain's willingness to flirt with death.
"I just may have to kill you, sir."
"I'm just saying."
3