Chapter Three
Mal looked round. The Hunters were staring at each other in wide-eyed panic. Hatton rubbed his hands together, a film of sweat glistening on his pale forehead.
"There never were any Reavers," Mal said.
Hatton shook his head. He looked as if he wanted to speak but could not force the words out.
"Where are they?" Mal asked the Hunter who had brought the news. The man shrugged helplessly and pointed to the door he had just come through.
Mal pushed past Hatton's men. They did not try to stop him. Past the door he found a ladder leading up to a clear dome built on top of the ship. From here Mal had a panoramic view of the nebula.
It was not difficult to spot the Reavers' ship. It was above the convoy, a little ahead on the port side, and closing fast. It reminded Mal of a squid he had once seen in an aquarium: a sleek, cone-shaped body, the prow covered in grasping metal tendrils. It was a predator: a true Reavers' ship.
"Wuh de ma, it is them."
Mal turned. Hatton was standing just behind him.
"This ship got any real guns?" Mal asked. Hatton shook his head.
"No: just fireworks."
"Tah mah duh hwoon dahn!" Mal cried.
"Do you have a shuttle?" he asked, slowly and deliberately. He restrained himself from striking Hatton there and then, his arm trembling with the effort.
"Yes… yes of course," Hatton said.
"Has it got a tow cable?"
"No… no, I don't think so."
"Mine has," said Mal, starting towards the ladder.
"Listen up!" he shouted to the Hunters as he emerged on the gun deck, his voice slipping effortlessly back into that of an army sergeant, "I want you to start gathering all the spare fuel, gasoline, cooking oil; anything that'll blow up, an' I want you to load it all into a shuttle."
The Hunters stared blankly at him, still frozen by their fear.
"Do as he says," Hatton ordered.
The Hunters exchanged some confused looks but they obeyed nevertheless. They worked slowly at first but quickly gathered speed as Mal strode among them, shouting and cursing with all the eloquence that six year military career can confer.
"Move it, you niao se duh doo-gway! We ain't fitting out a pleasure yacht here!"
A small pile of canisters and barrels had been heaped in the shuttle cockpit when the lookout returned:
"Cap'n, the Reavers are less than two hundred clicks away."
Mal sighed. He would have liked more time to prepare. This would have to do. He turned to address the two closest Hunters:
"You stay here. When you see me pass by you're to use the manual release on this shuttle. No one is to go aboard, you understand?"
The men nodded mutely.
"And you're coming with me," Mal continued, grabbing Hatton's arm and steering him towards his shuttle.
"I don't see why..." Hatton protested as Mal pushed him through the airlock.
"Because I need someone to man the tow cable while I pilot this thing," Mal explained, "And because I wouldn't trust you out of my sight for a second. Keeping you here is the only way I've got to ensure that your crew won't turn run for it."
Mal took Hatton to the stern and showed him the tow cable. It was a very basic machine, resembling an oversized rocket launcher. It used compressed air to fire a thick steel cable from the shuttle's stern, tipped with a large magnet shaped like a clawed foot. Normally a computer guidance system would be used to aim it but the nebula's radiation field meant that Hatton would have to do it manually.
Leaving Hatton crouched nervously over the cable gun, Mal took the pilot's seat. He wanted Wash there, as what he was about to attempt was far from simple, but he did not have time to reach Serenity.
Mal disengaged his shuttle from the Hunters' ship, came about and eased forward. He came about again in a long arc and saw the Hunters' shuttle floating free from the ship. Mal raised his shuttle's nose and passed above the unmanned shuttle. He heard the hiss of the gun behind him and the whirr of the cable drum.
"Got it!" Hatton called.
"Good," Mal replied, "Keep the line tight; as far as she'll go."
The drum whirred again as the cable played out behind the shuttle.
Mal turned his attention ahead, focusing on the Reavers' ship. The convoy had reformed into a tight little knot of ships and changed course to run ahead of the Reavers. The Reavers' ship was clearly much faster and was devouring the ground between them. The chase had leveled out, with the Reavers moving on the same plane as the convoy. Mal pushed his shuttle's thrusters to their fastest setting and headed straight for the Reavers.
The convoy passed beneath him in a blur of grey and brown. Now there was nothing but empty space between him and the curling metal tendrils of the Reavers' ship. Mal glanced down at the pilot's console to check the distance between them. He cursed: he had forgotten that the scanner would not work. He would have to guess as best he could.
"Stand by to release tow cable," he called.
"Ready," replied Hatton.
Mal's plan had suddenly become a lot more dangerous. If he acted too early he might give the Reavers time to come about. If he acted too late the Reavers might latch on to his shuttle. He wished he had Wash with him.
The ships closed. Mal's hands were tight on the shuttle's wheel, his eyes focused on the swarming tendrils on the prow of the Reavers' ship. This was another lethal game of chicken. Only this time it is real, he reflected grimly.
An sudden twinge of gut instinct told Mal they had reached distance. He wrenched the wheel back, pushing the shuttle's nose as high as it would go.
"Let go tow cable!" he cried.
"Tow cable detached!"
Hatton's reply was underscored by a deep, metallic thump as the clamp holding the tow cable was released. Mal kept the shuttle's pitch as high as he could. Out of the corner of the cockpit window he saw the unmanned shuttle hurtling towards the Reavers, hurled through empty space like a baseball from a pitcher's arm.
The tentacles on the Reavers' prow clustered together, hoping to envelop the tiny ship, but it was moving too fast for them to get a firm grip. The shuttle's nose struck the Reavers' hull. There was a flash of bright light as the explosives heaped in the shuttle cockpit detonated, followed by an even brighter flash, tinged with violet, as the engine exploded. Mal, blinded by the first light, was hurled from his seat by the shockwave that followed the second. His head struck the ceiling and he lost consciousness.
It was dark in the cockpit when he came to. The primary lights had gone out, leaving only the dull red from the emergency strips around the consoles. Mal was lying on the floor, just behind the pilot's seat. As he tried to recollect what had happened he realized how quiet it was. The engines had stopped. The air was cool, certainly colder than it had been before the explosion.
Using the pilot's seat as a support, Mal slowly got to his feet. The bump on his head was throbbing painfully and he could feel bruises on his arms and shoulders but he did not seem to have broken any bones. He turned to examine the pilot's console but was interrupted by a melancholy voice:
"Don't bother; I already tried. The engine is dead. We are running on emergency power."
Mal turned. Hatton was sitting with his back against a bulkhead, head tilted back as if he was examining the ceiling. Even in the cabin's ruddy half-light Mal could see how pale and sweaty he had become.
"There is enough food for a week, water for two and air for a month," Hatton continued in the same slow, mournful way, "And we're going to need every bit of it. Look out the window."
Mal frowned and turned to the cockpit window. The golden clouds of the nebula soared before him. There was no sign of the convoy or the Reavers.
"How long was I out?" Mal asked. Hatton shrugged.
"A few hours? I don't know. You were still out when I came around."
"And no ships? No sign of anyone?"
"No," Hatton shook his head slowly, "Do you expect one?"
Mal's affirmation froze on his tongue. Would he have gone looking for a tiny shuttle in this vast dust cloud, not knowing if a Reaver ship might be lurking just out of reach? Would he abandon a convoy of ships to go after two men? Was anyone else still alive? The Reavers might have survived the explosion; he and Hatton had.
"Accept it, captain, no one is coming for us," said Hatton with a grim smile.
Mal slumped down against the bulkhead facing Hatton.
"Someone might," he mumbled defiantly, "They might spread out an' search for us. They might come on us by accident. It's not impossible."
"What do you think stopped me taking that pistol of yours and putting a bullet through my brain?" said Hatton. His expression made his face seem almost skeletal. Mal suppressed a shudder and turned away.
The silence in the shuttle dragged out, turning the minutes into hours and the hours into days. Eventually Mal could not stand it any longer.
"So tell me," he said at length, "were there any real Reavers? I mean, before?"
Hatton sighed.
"Yes," he said, eyes fixed on the deck, "This place was crawling with them, once. It was too dangerous to travel through; you would have needed a battle fleet as an escort."
"So what happened?" Mal asked.
"Hunters came. Real Hunters, I mean," said Hatton with a grimace, "Nasty buggers; hard as steel and too crazy to be afraid. They went into the Woods, fought the Reavers like they were Reavers themselves. Hunted like them; killed like them. I met some of the older ones; I can't imagine there was much difference between them and an actual Reaver."
"How'd you end up here?"
"Living the high life without the high credit rating to maintain it. I have too many debtors back in the Core, so I came out to the Black. That's when I heard about this place. Most of the old Reaver Hunters had been killed or gone mad or drank themselves to death by then. There were only a few old timers left, guarding the occasional convoy."
"And you saw some easy money."
"It wasn't difficult," said Hatton with a shrug, "The Hunters thought they had driven the Reavers off for good. I bought them off, recruited a lot of toughs who looked the part and set to work."
"You put on a good show," said Mal sarcastically.
"It's all about looking the part," said Hatton, "Give the dupes some daredevil heroics, a few fireworks and they're eating out of your hand."
"But ships still went missing."
"Oh the nebula had to keep its reputation or people would start to think they could do without us. It wasn't as bad as you think," said Hatton, seeing Mal's expression, "Most of them were inside jobs: ships that 'fell behind' while the convoy ran away or something like that. And if we couldn't find someone to do that… All I can say is, we made it quicker than if Reavers really had got them."
"And no one saw through it?"
"Before you? No. Some had their suspicions but they were so grateful to make it out the other side they didn't say anything. We relied on it. Besides, not many people have ever seen a real Reaver attack and lived to talk about it. Not many of them choose to risk it twice.
"You saw through us. How do you know so much about them?"
Mal turned away, hoping to end the conversation there.
"Oh come on, Captain, what's the use in keeping secrets now, when you know you're about to die?" Hatton asked bitterly.
Mal kept his head turned away but he could feel the pressure of the silence on his chest. The temptation to say what he had left unsaid for so many years was suddenly very great. Hatton was probably right; he was going to die in that shuttle. It would be no different to speaking into a void.
"Nine years back," he began, choosing his words with great care, "my regiment was posted to the first moon of New Atlanta, in the Taiping system. There was an old Alliance space port there that central command wanted to use for an offensive. If we took it, we could get right around the Alliance's forward defenses and hit 'em in the flank. No Alliance presence there for months. No human life of any kind.
"Y'see, just after the war broke out, a Reaver ship crash landed on that moon. The Alliance garrison had been redeployed somewhere else. The militia couldn't contain them. They wiped out every man, woman and child that didn't reach a ship in time. They say the port commander was more worried about savin' the ships than he was about savin' the people. Guess I don't need to tell you that he was on the first boat out of there. He left two hundred thousand civilians to be slaughtered like rats.
"So that was what we found when we got there; a space port covering half a moon, infested with Reavers. The navy couldn't bomb them without damaging the facilities. That would cost money. So they sent the footsloggers in to flush them out; me and my regiment were some of the first.
"They said later that there weren't more than a hundred Reavers on that moon, yet by the end we had to deploy an entire division to destroy them. Whole battalions were wiped out; thousands killed.
"It was like a jungle but made of metal; all dark corridors and ladders and great empty spaces. They'd torn the generators to bits, so we fought by flashlight. You'd hear the screams of other companies coming out of the dark around you. That's how they fight: they come out of the dark, to capture and mutilate and then retreat before you can turn a gun on them.
"Of course, as it dragged on, ammo began to run low. You'd use your bayonet but then it'd break and you'd use your gun like a club. I saw some men tearing at the Reavers with their fingernails.
"You want to know how I know about Reavers? 'Cause I spent a month crawlin' through the darkness with them; fighting them; watching my friends being torn to pieces by them. That's how I made corporal. I was the only one of my unit who came back when we got jumped half a dozen of them in a sewer. That's how I know Reavers."
There was silence in the cabin. Hatton just stared at Mal, his expression was one of terrified respect. It made Mal uncomfortable. He rose, intending to take the pilot's seat for a change of view. He turned to the window just in time to see a shadow pass over the shuttle.
Mal froze. He could hear the blood rumbling in his ears. The shuttle lurched as something grappled with it.
"A ship?!" Hatton gasped, looking up.
"Question is, who's is it?" Mal murmured.