Godliness and Deviltry... Part 4: ~ THE DEVIL'S NAME ~

Three hours and some later found Kaylee on a makeshift ladder at one of the three main pillars in the room. She was wired directly into the communication arrays outside (which, thankfully, were all still intact), and she was manually calibrating the newly repaired and retuned automation system as it ran.

Her system was reconfiguring the satellites to assume a new positioning scheme to compensate for one destroyed satellite and one nonresponsive one that she'd already managed to get its maintenance drones to power down and crash into the atmosphere so that there'd be no chance of it suddenly coming online again on day and doing something... unfortunate.

Her last command entered, she carefully got down off her ladder and went back to the central console, bringing up the holographic display again to monitor the results as they occurred. A pleased and glowy sense of accomplishment started to spring up in her chest as she watched the satellites smoothly move into their positions and seamlessly integrate into the new web configuration. It was a model of efficiency in design, if she did say so herself.

The satellites would function at only about one and a half percent reduced capacity. So... a few more cloudy days every year, maybe. If that.

She frowned though as she noticed storm clouds starting to form. Starting to form fast. She reached to start furiously checking things over to see where she'd gone wrong (and things had been going so well, too) when River's hand covered hers. She stopped and looked over, meeting her wife's eyes. "River?"

"They're invited." River explained, her voice serene and... kind of a little deathly.

"By... you?" Kaylee asked quietly, her hands coming to a rest as she gazed at the holographic display before her. "Do I... want to know what you've been up to these past hours?" She questioned. She really should have asked, she realized belatedly. If only so she'd have known what to expect. She hadn't though. She'd let herself get caught up in being a mechanic again... It had been comforting and familiar and needed. It had felt good to really be in her element again.

"It's a good thing for us." River offered. "While you were being godlike... I decided to try imitating the devil."

Kaylee looked at her then. She saw a sort of quiet stormy madness in River's eyes, and, though it would have been very sensible to be, she still wasn't afraid. She still had trust.

There was a slowly growing roaring in the air, and Kaylee shivered. It wasn't the storm.

She brought up the nearby exterior surveillance cams and saw Reavers swarming through the streets, converging on them from both directions. They'd run out of time.

She looked up at the holographic display, saw the angry storm, felt the air tremble as thunder crashed above them, matching the roars of the Reavers all around them, almost making them sound small.

"And lo, the devil did work her will amongst the heavens, that all her enemies might be swept from her beloved's sight... She cast them down into the fire, and burned them all in the radiant light." River spoke, turning to meet Kaylee's eyes at last. "Did you know? The devil? The one from the ancient stories...? His very first name? It meant light-bringer." She told her.

And Kaylee jumped as thunder made the room tremble. She looked up at the surveillance feeds then, heard the crash and explosion from outside as the first lightning strike hit. She saw the carnage on the monitors.

One strike was followed by another. She heard wails and screams drift through the now riotous winds to her ears.

She watched on, and soon realized... The lightning strikes were targeted. How had River done it? The system wasn't designed to do that. As far as Kaylee had ever heard, no weather control system had ever been designed to do that. Never been successfully weaponized on such a precise scale like this. Oh, they'd been used as weapons of mass destruction a few times throughout history, in the wars most recently... She tried to imagine how to possibly invent a way to do it, but she couldn't even arrive at an educated guess. Not right now at any rate. But River must have just... sat herself down and programed the system to do this all on her own. Had it set up to start as soon as Kaylee got everything online and working again... Kaylee practically itched to look over River's programming code to see how she did it...

After all she'd seen River do, she'd got to thinking nothing her wife did would surprise her anymore. Apparently not so, that. Because this was just... godlike... or devilish, she supposed, if she were going with the analogy. River wasn't either of those things though, Kaylee knew. She was just River. And that, apparently, was more than enough. Even against an army...

Kaylee and River both watched on in silence though the vid feeds as the storm raged and killed. It seemed to Kaylee too solemn a thing to talk over anymore. River took her hand though, and Kaylee squeezed it back in reassurance as they watched.

Those people out there... Those things that had once been people... It was a mercy, it really was, if you thought on it at all. Anyone... Anyone at all, even the worst, most disturbed people ever born, Kaylee doubted that even one of them would willfully wish to become what those people out there had somehow become. If it were her out there, she'd want lightning form the sky to strike her down, sure as anything she would. Still and all, it... was a massacre. You couldn't see it and not wish it wasn't. Wish, at least, that it didn't need to be the way it was...

Long minutes later, the storm died down, apparently having run out of targets, and, slowly, Kaylee watched as the holographic display showed the weather turning back to idyllic. The vid feed showed no motion besides the wind. Charred, dead bodies and smoking ruination around them were what was left.

Kaylee stepped forward, letting her hand fall from her wife's, and zoomed in the holographic display on the site of the Reavers' shipyard they'd seen. It was annihilated. The ships all burned to useless slag, not a bit of salvage left that Kaylee could see.

How many lightning strikes would it have taken to do that?

She panned out over the surrounding woods, over the colony town. No forest fires, no buildings aflame, hardly any collateral damage in the city at all. The lightning had only struck the Reavers, nothing else. "Wow..." Kaylee praised, looking over at River who seemed trance-like. "When you want a body dead, you don't mess around, do you?" She asked.

River sighed. "They call it a warrior's passing sometimes, when the bodies are burned. Do you think they would have liked that?" She asked. "Do you think it might have helped their souls to move on, or find some kind of peace?"

Kaylee thought about it a moment. "Maybe?" She offered.

River looked to her. Sad eyes.

Kaylee moved in and kissed her, closing her own eyes as she did.

The kiss wasn't romance. It was solace and comfort and River held her in her arms, and Kaylee held her right back, and Kaylee felt River start to relax some against her, to give in to what she offered.

Kaylee ended the kiss in stages, giving River a choice at each one. When they parted, River's shy, hopeful smile made Kaylee feel like all could be right in the universe again one day. If only there were more honest kissing going on out there, and less of the dishonest kind...

"Let's go dig Inara out of that mountain, alright?" Kaylee asked.

"...Can we eat first?" River asked hopefully, if also a little wistfully.

Kaylee considered that a moment. "Probably a good idea, yeah." She admitted, though she truthfully didn't feel all that hungry at the moment.

to be continued

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