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Legacy 1:01, Reaved, Part 1
"Here's how it is. While back, some idiots got it in their head to stand up against something a lot bigger than themselves. Didn't work out so well, and took down a bunch of us with them. I guess I understood what they fought for, but I couldn't fight for it m'self. The Alliance figured war'd be a fine thing, and they brought it with them. The Independents decided to fight'em. Bad choice. It was a massacre.
Thing's been tough the last few years. Every month, the Parliment closes its fist a bit tighter. The good men in government get spat out, and cookie-cutter conservatives took their place. Things got tough, and folk had to get tougher. Like me, for example. I had a gravy contract, before the War, but thing's gone south. I ain't getting any younger, and the 'Verse is getting a bit darker.
Course, then the Wave hit. Working for the Alliance for ten years, and they pull this. The very day they take my ship, the signal goes out that the Parliment created those monsters... those Reavers. Genocide on the order of thirty million, and monsters besides. Couldn't work for them after that."
Zane let out a laugh. "Couldn't work for them? You don't have a ship!"
Tony scowled at the young man, shoving an empty bottle toward toward him, "You know what I'm getting at, kid. Can't find work, and don't want it from them."
"Which means we slog around hauling water from one seedy asteroid miner to another seedy water-poor rock," Zane finished. A grin spread across his youthful face. "Really, Tony, do you really need to do this every time somebody new joins the crew?"
"Set's the stage," Tony ran a hand up his widow's peak. Story was, his hair started receding when he was ten, forming a sharp spike that gave him a predatory look. When he grew older, filled out, the spike contrasted sharply with his pudgy face. Sometimes, it was downright disorienting.
"Hey," Syl asked. "You never did mention what happened to my predo... prede... the guy before me."
"Got reaved," Zane replied, his youthful grin dropping away into a deathly palor.
"Reaved?"
"Got took on Whitefall when the Reavers sweapt through about two weeks back," Tony faced the doorway, not-wanting to relive the memory, but unwilling to leave. "See, we never found Verna's body. Weren't for lack of looking neither."
Tony's broad shoulders fell with a sigh. "I only hope she died off the take. We know what Reavers do to the living, both the men and the women, and thing's are getting worse."
Sylvia drew inward, small shoulders sinking into overstuffed chair, like she was trying to make herself dissappear.
"Shouldn't be tellin' the new hires those ghost stories," came the clipped speach of Jacob. Greyson was as close to a captain as could be found on this ship, since nobody seemed to own the tub. "It'll scare them away. Not good for business."
Not good for business, Sylvia laughed to herself. No problems scaring the wits out of somebody, so long as it don't get in the way of the all-mighty credit.
"'Sides we've got ourself a real job this time," Jacob smiled. "As in, working for a certain Zekeal Fredesa."
"Zekeal Fredesa the liberal activist? The man who literally came to blows with his half-brother on the floor of parliment?"
"The very same. That should appease your sensibilities," Greyson gave Tony a sharp jab in the copious gut. "You gave the 'Here's how it is' speach, didn't you?"
Tony gave a wan smile. "What's the job?"
"You remember that Alliance taskforce they sent out after Whitefall?" Greyson pulled up a chair, swinging his boots up onto the table. It was the first thing the Parliment did after the word came out. Four months after. Until that point, it was a storm of figure-pointing and accusation, most warranted, some not. Parliment had ground to a rather gruesome halt, giving the Reavers more than enough time to regroup and attack. If there remained any support for the Alliance, it likely vanished with the entire population of Whitefall.
"Yeah, heard about that," Zane said, grin still on his face, despite the gravity of the topic.
"Well, y'heard how they haven't been seen nor heard since their deployment? Like they gorrammed vanished. Well, our boy there wants us to find the whereabouts of those ships. Humanitarian, he called it. My guess, he just wants this to be another nail in the Sitting Parliment's coffin."
The group sat quiet for a long moment, waiting for him to continue. It became appearant that he wasn't going to. "Then," Tony stepped into the silence, "when do we leave?"
The transit to the Miranda Ring (as the region had been recently dubbed) was as funereal as a grave. There was always a little laughter in the Black Jack, no matter the situation. Not now. Something was different. Even if folk couldn't quantify it, they could feel it. The cold touch of a dead hand falling into one's own.
Tony paced, as was his habit, in the long cockpit that graced the front of the rather strikingly unattractive vessal. They'd cleared the orbit of Whitefall days ago, beyond all of the worlds beyond it. Seventy odd Earths spinning in the 'Verse, and sixty-nine of them to the Jack's back. But it was not the sheer aloneness that set him on edge. He pressed the button again. First in English, then again in Chinese, a simple message.
"There be Dragons here."
Nobody had ever mentioned these bouys before. Not the crazies that burn hot along Reaver territory for kicks and thrills, not the explorer companies sending out people they didn't particularly like. Not even Reynolds, the only man in ten years to make the round trip, made any indication of these signals. They were new. And from the look of them, not made by any man of whole mind. Again he checked the scopes for any sign of movement defying solar gravity. Nothing.
But there was hardly nothing to see. The deeper a fellow went into Reaver territory, the more one sees, in fact. That does nothing for one's sanity, however. Very few things had ever made Tony quite so afraid before, so afraid as these slowly spinning corpses of the ships of yesteryear. Every now and again, the sun, so distant, lit up one of the hulks, showing the damage done. Much of it was simply collision, grinding of two hulks against each other with nothing but gravity to blame. Some, on the other hand, were far too... precise.
He'd passed the third stripped down hulk when he noticed the trend. A great many craft with busted engines drifted whole in the field. In fact, he saw such a diversity in devastation as he'd never have seen otherwise, but once the engines reached some certain threshold of salvagability, the engines seemed missing. Stolen. Some of the better, newer craft were found split just forward of the end, the engines surgically removed. He tried to tell himself it was just the junkers, taking their chances for a quality engine amongst the slag. He couldn't convince himself of that. Not by a long shot.
He paused just long enough to overlay his course with the course of the taskforce. Still identical, but no sign of the other ships. Every few moments, he thought he saw something vanishing around a hulk of a derelect, but it was gone long before he could look again. What he wouldn't give for a single missile launcher.
"So empty," came the woman's voice, throaty and rich. Tony cast a smile to its owner, a small woman who should, by all rights, be asleep right now. Still, this was more her place than anywhere else. "I could stare at it forever. All it does is make me think of what's due for us."
"Come again?" Tony scowled.
Anne smiled, a lopsided affair that made her seem more a mischieveous pixie than an able pilot. She slid into her seat and tilted it back, to face wholely the starscape above and beyond. "This is what our struggle amounts to, in the end. We struggle, and we scrape, and we build, and it ends up here, drifting in the black. No purpose, no life. Just... drifting."
"Talking 'bout this ship, or its crew?"
Anne let out a laugh. It sounded too loud in the spacious room, too loud in the deadness of the Miranda Belt. "Sometimes, Tony, I don't know what I'm gorram saying. My luck, that. Barely out of the cradle and my brain's already fallin' to mush."
They sat, in an awkward sort of silence, staring at the stars. What could be said, here in the face of mankind's greatest evil? No god was needed to create these monsters, mankind could do it all on its own. Create something it had neither the strength to control nor the will to fight. All because of a single strand of recombinant DNA inserted into bacterium. The Pax, Peace, in the Latin. And it created peace, alright; the peace of the grave.
Anne heard Zane's approach, but couldn't break the silence any more than could the fat man standing next to her. Zane would be up, at this time in the night. He never seemed to sleep, that kid. The ship slipped silently through the field of death and desecration, the furthest fringes of the wild-places in the 'Verse. They had yet to truely try to cut into the heart of darkness, but already, the ship was awake.
"You know," Zane said finally. "Even now, I'm glad to be here."
Tony grunted. Zane ignored him, stepping closer to the transparent protective pane separating them from the void of space. "I grew up on a world without a sky. Lot of folks my age would already be in hospitals with tuberculosis, lung cancer. The Alliance doesn't even give us a second glance, unless we even whisper about holding back on the fuel-cell quota. Just weren't ruttin' worth it to them, I guess. Blacklung weren't even the worst of it. That place was a prison. Worse than!" Zane reached out, pointing at several of the stars that dared to peek through the mass of wreckage.
"Cause even in a prison," he continued. "Folk can see the sky, know that there's something out there. Not us. Sky was brown in the morning, yellow in the noon, brown again at supper, and black at night. Never really saw the sun, just had a general idea of where it was. When I stowed on that Firefly, I just wanted to get someplace I could see the sky."
"And here comes the best part," Tony muttered to himself. Louder he asked. "And what ship was that?"
"Serenity," Zane replied. "Was her second trip anywhere, and I was hiding in a crate headed anywhere. I open it up when the ship broke atmo, and I spent the next few weeks sliding around in the crawl-space. Met a pretty little mechanic on that ship," Tony made a yappy gesture with his hand, and Anne grinned.
"And she taught you everything you know. And then the Valiant Captain Reynolds stormed Londinium and you took your rightful place as king," Greyson interrupted. Everybody looked back to the entrance; he was rather closer to them. Nobody ever heard him enter a room, especially if he didn't want them to. "We've all heard the story, Tony here's probably gotten it five times, as I figure it. Only one who hasn't on this boat is that little one Sylvia or maybe that bay-worker we picked up that don't know no English."
"You just delight in interrupting reverie, don't you?" Zane volleyed a sarcastic barb, which achieved nothing. Greyson was not a man easily taunted. Jacob gave the young mechanic a condescending smile and turned to face the oldest of the group.
"How far are we along their projected line?" He asked. Tony sighed and brought the overlaid image onto the main viewer, an over-grandiously named piece of technology that measured barely thirty centimeters to a side. "We've about reached were they'd be at the end of day two. Call the purple-bellies what you will, stupid isn't in it. Hell, we should've hit their Wave bouys hours ago." Greyson paused for a moment as Zane let out a low whistle and pointed up into the black. "What's among the interesting?"
"I think I saw an intact ship," Zane said, quietly and fingers flying across the consoles.
"Tzao gao," Greyson muttered.
"What's your thinking?" Tony crossed his arms across his barrel chest.
"Boss says we gotta give aid. Wasn't particularly specific as to who, and my luck, he'll haul us in if he catchs wind to this," Anne explained. Redundantly, as none on the bridge didn't remember that particular standing order. It was not a popular one, and ended once with Tony getting shot. "And Niska has a way of knowing these things."
The aid they would give would be in no way humanitarian. They would incur a debt on the poor hwoon dahn's behalf to Adelai Niska, and Niska was not a man who suffered debts easily, nor for very long.
"Got no time for that now," Greyson said slowly. "We'll hit it on the way back. Drop a Baby."
Anne hands flashed along the controls, activating a device that should, if the 'Verse was perfect, not belong on a civilian ship. A panel slid back about half way down the spine of the ugly craft, letting a device stored inside an old coffee can pop out into the vaccuum of space. "Cry, baby cry," Anne whispered.
"Make your mamma sigh," Greyson muttered. "Get us back on the line. We still have a job to do."
"Uh, boss?" Tony said, squinting into the maelstrom of twisting metal.
"What is it now?"
"How far are we along the line?"
Anna arched an eyebrow at him, but pulled up the picture again. As they watched, the BlackJack eclipsed the marker called 'first waypoint'. Tony had gone very pale.
"What's the problem with that?"
Tony pointed out the main window again, this time to a mass very close, a shadowed hulk that slowly spun its quiet way in the dark. Anne helpfully targetted it with an external light.
"Bars and Stars," Greyson said. "She's Alliance, but that don't mean..."
All was silent as she swung the lettering that ringed the ruined form just forward of the engines. Hannibal. IAV HANNIBAL, an Alliance Corvette, dispatched with the taskforce.
"Anne," Greyson managed to pick up. "Check for escape pods."
She shook her head hopelessly.
The craft continued to spin, showing that not far past the engines, the craft simply ceased to be, as if half of the craft were summarily ripped off. Corridors were naked to the harsh nothing, rooms and even a pair of showers.
"Where are their emergency beacons? Why aren't they talking to us?" Zane whispered.
"Not a clue. Any residual heat?" Greyson asked. Anna's hands returned to their flurry of movement.
"Lots," She said. "Whatever happened here, happened recently. Within a few hours. Jakob!"
"What?"
"It's still leaking O2. That means that at least some of the ship is still holding atmo."
"Tzao gao," Greyson murmured himself. "Survivors. Worse than damned paperwork."
"And the Alliance will be onto us like Bowden's on a Paradison." Tony grunted.
"Residual heat?" Jacob asked.
"Everywhere," Anne responded carefully.
Jacob frowned, dark eyes darting around the spinning hulks. His hand ran nervously through his hair as he paced back and forth.
"Wake up the bay-crew and find us a place where we can lock onto that hull," Jacob said.
Tony scowled. "Fredesa paid us to find out what happened to the taskforce. We know. They got Reaved. Let's just get out of here before we join them."
"Don't question me on this one," Greyson said, eyes almost striking sparks. "Something's telling me..."
"Remember last time 'something told you' to do something?" Zane said quietly, ostensibly to nobody but Jacob fixed him with a glare anyway.
"This ain't then, and there ain't any vicious little freaks to put a sword through me, this time. Find a place to dock, and get the medical bay ready. My guess is that there'll be more than a fair share of injured."
Greyson was once again struck by how horrible his space-suit smelled. He supposed it wouldn't be quite so bad, if somebody actually took the time to clean it... or if it wasn't being shared out between five people who it happened to fit.
"Soft seal confirmed. Cutting in." Zane intoned as his plasma torch burst to life, eating away at the metal. The hearty plating of the military ship took far longer to melt than Greyson would have originally suspected, but eventually the section dropped away with a barely audible bang. Obviously there was still atmo, or there would have been nothing to hear. Still, no use in getting yourself killed when you can avoid it.
The corridor they'd breached into was pitch black, no sound dared enter into it after the original clangor of the outside finding a place to rest on the inside. Jacob clicked on his light.
"See anything?" Zane called.
"Not so much," Jacob answered. He stepped into the middle of the passageway, a cramped affair that two men could not walk abreast in. It was painted a rather unpleasant shade of brown. "Are IAV's usually painted like this?"
Tony's stocky frame wedged its way through the opening and took a place by Jacob's side. "Not that I've ever seen."
Tony turned to walk away, but Greyson quickly reached out and grabbed the device dangling on his back. "Je shr shuh muh?"
Tony pulled the thing away, grasping its grip and heaving the body of the large military shotgun over his shoulder. "What is what?"
"What exactly do you expect to find here? The blue devil of Ariel?"
"Expect nothing. This is just a contingency," Tony laughed.
"Well, in the event that we need to storm the ship, I'll let you know. Zane, which way into the engineering deck?"
Zane's lithe form was the last through the breach. He paused for a moment, then tipped back his face-plate. "Oxygen's a bit thin, but our seal covered the hole. It'll hold until we leave."
"One day, you're going to open that thing up and get sucked right out," Greyson muttered. "Where's the engine room?"
"Just follow me. I've looked over the specs for the Trinidad, and the Trafalger isn't too different," Zane said brightly as he stomped carelessly along the grating. The passageway Zane led them to was almost identical to the one they left. Even the color wasn't altered in the slightest.
Jacob was about to turn another corner when he felt Tony's restraining hand on his shoulder. "Dung-ee miao," the large man said quietly, stooping down to pick something up off the floor. He held it close, turning it this way and that.
"What is it, Tony?" Jacob asked.
"Looks like an entire fingernail. Tip to quick, right off. Must have hurt like a hwoon dahn loosing this," Tony dropped the fingernail and let go of the rail he'd balance himself with. Where his hand was, the rail became blue.
Jacob and Tony shared a quick glance, then both pairs of eyes returned to Tony's hand, which was now covered in semi-solid rusty chunks. Greyson reached out and rubbed his hand against the nearest wall. It too was blue, just under the brown.
"Makes me wish I had a gun," Greyson muttered.
"Got that covered," Tony replied, equally as quiet, gripping tightly now the grip of his shotgun.
"Zane, where is that gorram engine room?!"
Zane's blonde head popped back around the corner. He'd taken his gorram helmet off again. "Do you guys smell that?"
"The engine!" both Tony and Jacob managed to yell as one. Zane shrugged and motioned them to follow. One falsely-brown corridor led to another, this one's 'paintjob' rather decidedly incomplete. It was here that Zane ran a gauntleted finger through one of the many sweeps of brown.
"What in the hell?" Zane managed to say.
"It's blood," Tony confirmed. He was quite pointedly looking in all directions at once.
"But... but where are all the bodies? This would have been..." Zane struggled with the words. Jacob helped him.
"A gorram slaughter."
"Is anybody besides me not liking this job anymore?" Zane asked shakily.
"Sooner we find the survivors, or lack of," Jacob spoke flatly, as if anything more would be an affront to the dead, "sooner we can get the hell out of this fay-fay duh pee-yen, dong ma?"
"Come again?" Zane's face screwed up into a bewildered rictus. Greyson stared blankly for the moment it took to remember that the young engineer never picked up so much as a word of Chinese.
"You haul ass, we haul ass, savvy?" Tony interpreted. Zane chewed hard on his lower lip, but continued his way down the haul, the the places where the military blue finally overtook the sickly brown as the dominant coloration of the surroundings. Still, the sweeps of discoloration were always there. A constant reminder of what transpired so recently. Still, something beyond the admittedly catastrophic scope of this massacre clung hard to Greyson's thoughts. He simply couldn't puzzle out what it was.
He had been mulling it over for what seemed a rather substantial time when Tony caught him up short, motioning him to listen. Jacob heard it almost immediately, a dull wet thump, repeated every few seconds. He stared towards its source, noting with extreme dismay that it came from the room helpfully labled 'Engineering Room' in both English and Chinese.
A gun was pressed hard into his thick gloved hand, and he spared just a moment to wince at Tony. "You remember what happened last time?" he muttered, trying to pass off the firearm. As good as it felt to be armed, he knew what was likely to happen. Tony shook his head and stood beside the door that Zane was working hard at hacking. Locked from the inside. Whatever was in there was trapped for hours. Raising the weapon into what Greyson hoped was the appropriate stance, he positioned himself opposite Tony, awaiting the door's breach.
Zane gave both men a nod, then wisely got the hell out of dodge. The door swung open silently, exposing another layer of darkness that the two men attempted in vain to fill with their meager hand-lights. The first thing the beams fell upon, a very thing obstructing the door from opening fully, was a body. It was torn and savaged, wearing the tatters of an Alliance uniform. Both men entered the room, casting the light around trying to suss out the source of that damned unnerving noise.
Everywhere they looked there were the dead. Fully and just over a dozen wore the greys of Alliance service, bodies and faces torn, played with as long as possible before put down so their killers could do as they did best; reave. Here and there, though, were the remains of something else. Far more mutilated than the bodies that surrounded it in a virtual bubble. The Reavers themselves. They wore uniforms that were anything but, leathers and spikes and bones. Jacob felt himself going numb in a very special way that usually precedes unconsciousness.
Tony's offhand smack to the front of his shoulder brought Jacob back into coherence. He struggled to fight down the bile as he moved toward the source of the regular thumping. As he did, he tripped over another body. This one caught him, for some reason. It was a woman, but not clad in the Alliance uniform, nor mutilated in any way aside from the rather large hole where her neck used to be. She was sheathed from head to foot in blood-red leather, almost like that worn by the Reavers. Tony kneeled down just a second, then shook his head.
"Son of a bitch," was all Jacob had to offer to the situation. Tony heartedly agreed. Matching almost step for step, the pair pushed farther, into the tiny room that held the craft's escape pods. A mound of bodies, all Reavers, blocked the door, and Tony had to haul the topmost off before they could make their entrance. A wet thump sounded the moment Jacob's foot reached the grating, and his light swung up toward it.
It was covered in blood, as if it bathed in it, and several angry wounds stood out upon its skin. Its arms raised again, slamming down to bludgeon the remnants of a Reaver's skull into the deck plating. She (and he was sure, now, that it was a she) had been doing this for hours, it seemed, with no pods left to escape in and nothing but fear and adrenaline to guide her.
"Good God," Tony muttered. As if the words shocked her out of her desperate trance, she whipped her bludgeon into its proper conformation, one side down, a barrel facing forward. The slide was locked backward, its magazine long, long emptied. Still, she pulled the trigger six times.
Then she released a terrified sob.
"Zane!" Jacob screamed "Get a medical kit down here now!"
Dark brown eyes met desparate blue, and her mouth twitched slowly, finally corralescing into words. "Help me."
<End of Part 1>
Legacy 1:02, Reaved, Part 2
Zane vomitted the instant he stepped into the engineering room. Seeing him do so prompted the elderly bay-hand to follow suit, sending another fluid sluiceing through the grating this foul day. Greyson still felt that something was terribly amiss, and this terrified, wounded, and crying woman was no source for it. The Reavers, by virtue of nobody wanting to touch them, remained on the deck.
The bay crew had worked for more than an hour pulling everything of even moderate worth from what remained of the Hannibal's rear-most cargo bay, a task made all the more difficult by the almost lethally thin atmosphere. Jacob now paced in the mess hall, the closet thing the BlackJack had to a medical bed being the mess table with a sheet atop it. There being only one patient made it both all that was needed, and particularly sad.
Greyson waited while Jing washed out the last of her wounds and pulled the sutures closed. Just getting the blood off of her flesh ruined four towels and several dozen liters of water. It still bent the mind a bit to think that she was the sole lucky one.
"What happened?" Greyson asked, when he could force himself to wait no longer. Her wonderously blue eyes fluttered open, and she could not stop shaking, as if the coveralls that had been found for her were entirely insufficient to keep her warm.
"They came in the window and walked away with the house," she answered in a small voice. "They carried away the gunrack and ate the dinner in the oven."
Jing leaned over close, "Kwong-juh duh."
Greyson shook his head. "Try surviving what she saw with a whole head," to the woman, he asked, "What did they do? How did they overwhelm your ship?"
"We walked in autumn through the trees with dagger-leaves. A puff of wind and a thousand shining blades fell upon our heads. They never sleep. They just run and scream and fight. An army of dolls, with glass eyes and nasty toys."
"I'm starting to think she was seriously unhinged," Jacob whispered to Jing, who shrugged and finished winding a bandage over a long weal running up the side of her head. To her, he posed another seemingly simple question, "What is your name?"
"No power in the 'Verse can stop them. No power," she rambled on, shaking and staring off into nothing. He pulled Jing aside.
"She might have been Reaved. Keep something handy 'case you need to be killing her. The Alliance might not be happy with that, but that's the way it is." Jing pursed his lips and nodded. Jacob didn't waste any more time. He stepped out of the mess and made his way to the top of the ship, to the command deck. Anne was already in her chair, leaning back and waiting whatever word she needed to get out of this tumbling hell.
"Plot a course, we're getting out of here," he said, and the words had not even cleared his mouth before her hands grasped the controls and began making the large craft turn about. He watched as the corpse of the Hannibal was carried out of sight, as the sun came back into focus. He cast a casual glance at the course. "What the hell is that?"
She didn't even glance up from her work. "We left a Crybaby out there. Very least we should pick it up. Hell, that ship might even fly if you love it a'right."
"Job's over, Anne, we know exactly what happened."
"And this is side-action. More money is good, dong ma?" It was hard to argue with her special kind of lunacy.
"Fine, but if you get me killed, I'm gonna haunt you," Anne grinned in her special way as Jacob went back to the bay-deck. This time, he was going to wash that gorramed suit!
<>
"Soft seal," Zane called. "Locked. Opening inner airlock doors."
The four crew in four suits stood in the airlock waiting for the tug of atmosphere being pulled into a vaccuum. It didn't come, and four people stood unable to think of what was happening.
"I thought you said that this thing was cold?" Anne asked snidely. Zane shot her a look and stepped forward into the cavernous hold of the relatively small craft. Four beams of light swept about, slowly defining the shape of the bay, flaring upwards from the floor, giving a strong impression of space. A stairway started on either side of the bay, joining in the middle with a platform to form a sort of suspended 'X'
"Told you," Zane quipped, unfastening his face-plate. "Firefly."
"Zane, what did I tell you last time? Put your gorram helmet back on," Jacob growled.
"There's air in here, and the temp is registering at about 280 Kelvins. Nippy, but a lot warmer than we left it," Zane set his helmet on the floor and moved to one of the large cylinders that dominated the floor. "I figure there's another pair of these under the thrust-pods. That'd make this a... '09 maybe? Less cargo for more longevity. Commissioned by asteroid surveyors to find valuable metal in the belts, loved by pirates. Last run was almost twenty years ago," Zane's eyes took on a reminiscent glaze as he turned back to the others. His breath misted around his chin as he grinned. "You ever sail in a Firefly?"
Jacob noted that Anne had broken into a full grin. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the pistol Tony had forced on him. Suddenly, he felt a great deal better at being armed. Something didn't add up.
"If you're going to the cockpit," he said to Anne, knowing he'd have to be stupid to believe anything else, "take this with you. Never know what you'll find."
Sylvia was already wandering the holds, taking stock of what the crates piled around the massive fuel drums. "Boss?" she called.
"What is it, Syl?" Greyson joined her. Zane pounded his way up the stairs to tackle the engine, heading in the opposite direction of Anne. Sylvia rapped hard on the drum, and its echo was muted. Full. She strode over to the other tank, and rapped hard on it as well. Dull thud. Full. She then pulled him over to one of the crates that filled the hull. "Ai ya, wo mun wan leh."
"My sentiments exactly," She nodded.
"Who abandons a ship with full fuel tanks and more'n a years worth of food, food that'll catch a high price on any planet out of the Core?" Jacob asked.
"Maybe a question you should ask is why is there no dust," Sylvia offered. "This air was pumped in here within the last few hours, if Zane has it right, but this place is clean. As in, there's been no settling. Like someone just scoured this ship with soap to within an inch of its existence, then up and left it."
"This eerie-ass day just keeps getting eerier, don't it?" Greyson shook his head. As if cued by his words, he heard Anne scream from above.
Jacob didn't wait an instant; he pulled off his helmet and let it drop to the floor in his haste to lighten himself for the vault up the stairs. He'd already exposed his hands to the chill of the ship when he turned the corner and pounded down the central hall that led nowhere but the cockpit.
When his eyes fell upon Anne, standing to one side of the room, he felt a wave of relief, which was immediately extinguished when he saw the bulky form gesticulating madly inside an armored space suit marked boldly with the bars and stars. The man surged forward, but Jacob let his momentum carry him right into the man's abdomen, carrying both of them down into a depressed veiwing deck. The landing set a network of cobweb cracks into the man's helmet.
"I won't be fooled again!" the man screamed, eyes bugged out and bloodshot. "They walked among us, but we didn't see them. I know them now. There's no escape. Not for you," The soldier said. Jacob was shocked when he felt a gauntleted hand pull his pistol out of his pocket. "And certainly not for me."
A loud bang sounded, and the cracked helmet began to fill with red.
<>
She was glad to be free of them, she decided. That farce had gone on long enough. Just wait, she'd been directed, until the next ship comes. They'll send another ship. Not exactly what she expected, but it would do for her purposes. She unbuckled the other clasp and let the coveralls fall to the floor, leaving her toned legs to glisten in the over-ample lighting. She never was anywhere so bright in her new life, until she returned to the Motherland to be Raised. A dull ache worked its way into her temples, but she disregarded it. Only men felt pain. Only men felt weak.
A few steps further, she shucked her shirt, letting it fall onto the grating. She felt positively dirty having to wear those clothes even an instant, let alone the hours it required for her to make her move. They were just remnants of her mission, now. Convert. Yes, they bade her convert. Her undergarments were not long in joining the rest of her old clothing on the floor.
She wondered if men felt flustered at walking about naked? The idea came and went, and she was almost sure they did. Weak. All of them. Convert them. Only thing to be done. Last to be discarded where the heavy boots. It was almost a baptism to feel the cool metal under her soles again.
Naked, she strode into the room where these weaklings took to stacking the bodies. Those they found were only the basest of the chaff. So many more this day had been converted. And the rest, discarded, much like the chaff. A single asian woman looked up from her task, a glance of bewilderment at seeing this attractive blonde woman, with her many angry wounds, striding nude and with great purpose into her cargo bay. The asian woman sucked in a breath, as if to raise a shout, but that would not be allowed. Being nude has one distinct disadvantage, she pondered; one cannot be armed. That said, she made the best of her situation, driving a viperous foot deep into her stomach. Her intake of breath terminated with no real prize to show for it. She sadly missed not having an edged weapon handy. Or better, something blunt. Still, she made do with what she had. Her teeth closed hard on the woman's neck, tearing into tissue and ripping away until they could go no deeper. She felt waves of wet warmth falling on her, and she remembered that day, ten years ago, when she discovered the nature of God. She had been something entirely different then, a housewife to some business executive living on Miranda, when God presented Himself to her. She accepted Him with a whole heart, offering her entire family unto him as a sacrifice to His magnificence. She was one of the first, it was said.
Her moment of age long past came and went, and she went about the task of finding that body. She knew they had brought her in here... Ah! There she was. She smiled lightly looking at the Eye of Pax, with a hole through her neck and her pale leather bathed in the blood of the blasphemers. It was a worthy and fitting death. Ordinarily, to earn the right to wear the Armor of Flesh, she would have to create it herself, of her own offerings, but she was a Priestess, now. She had risen high. She slipped the Eye out of her garments and began fastening the cuirass of man-flesh tight about her. It was special, this, a symbol of her faith. A symbol of God. She ran her fingernails through the dried blood, laughing as it sloughed away exposing the pale leather beneath. It felt good to be herself again. It would have been better if she had some Males to assist her, but as she had established, one must do with what one has. She laughed to herself when she found a box-knife hiding under a crate.
"What the hell?" a voice came from the doorway. She turned to face this man with a wide smile on her face, for she beheld the majesty of Pax.
"The wheat shall be culled from the chaff," she intoned, waiting just an instant before smashing his jaw shut with a fist, then catching his hair twixt her fingers and drawing up his neck, "and the cattle shall be lead to the slaughter."
<>
Zane came in to see Jacob pacing the width of the cockpit, suit laying discarded in the copilot's seat.
"Why in the ruttin' hell'd he have to go and do that?" he muttered, and from the way he said it, it probably wasn't the first time. Anne tried to comfort him, but he could tell she was getting tired of pacing.
"The'll be all over us," Jacob laughed bitterly. Reavers, no problem, but he just had to go and die on this ship, he just had to go and use my gun. Registered to Tony, lot of good that'll do, now."
"Look, we can dump him out into the field," Anne offered.
"This thing ain't any problem of ours, 's I see it," Zane said nearly atop her.
"Am I the only one who sees a problem in leaving a soldier who offed himself spinning through space?" Sylvia demanded.
"Nee mun bee-jway!" Jacob shouted. He panted, now, and his hands ran through his hair in a sort of mania. "I need time to think about this."
"Don't know if it matters, boss, but the engine's spinnin' like it never saw a day off the production line. Can't explain it," Jacob gave a look so level a fellow could run a laser along it. "Like somebody left it for us."
"Don't talk like that," Greyson said quietly. "Not again, ever."
Finally, he stopped his frantic back and forth. "Fine, our boy here is dead, no use frettin' on it. Drop him out the bomb-doors and get everything squared away. This thing'll be moving back on its own power. Hell, that'll be something good coming out of this fahng-tzong fung-kwong duh jeh."
It took both of the men to heft the overweight Fed into the cargo hold, even with the him tumbling down the stairs when Zane lost his footing. They opened the inner doors that dropped straight down and into space, running parallel to the Jack. Jacob released a sigh of relief when the outer doors swung shut and the hiss of decompression filled the chilly air.
"There," he said. "Done with. All his blood and chunkies were caught in the helmet. No mess, no questions. Tried to run, got a bullet to him. Easy as that."
"Not so much," Sylvia said, gripping the guardrail with white-knuckled hands, looking positively ready to be noisily ill.
"You feel like sharing with the class?" Anne said flatly.
"Something is wrong, I mean, don't you all feel that. Like something waiting in the woods, something bigger and meaner than we'll ever be. Something lookin' to eat us."
"As I said, you know something, state your piece," Jacob offered. She went another shade paler and dropped to a squat.
"I don't know, boss... but I can feel it. Something is dangerously sideways up a hoe-tze duh pee goo."
Jacob leaned over to Anne, speaking softly. "Why did we hire her again?"
She gave him a smile, "You didn't. Niska loaded us with her."
Greyson nodded. To the woman above, he said, "I'll take it under advisement. Zane?" The younger man nodded. "The radio working."
"Everything else on the ship is, wouldn't surprise me if it was too."
Jacob smiled again. "Good, I'll tell Tony to decouple the Jack, and we can take this thing back to Ezra under its own power. Zane, make sure nothing fong luh happens with the engine. Remember, we are all kinds of alone out here."
This time, Jacob made a more measured pace up the stairs toward the cockpit, Anne sticking close to his side. She had a particularly devious smile stretching 'cross her face. He raised an eyebrow.
"Always wanted to fly a Firefly, not that jing-tzang mei yong-duh garbage scow. I figure when we get unhooked," she leaned very close whispering into his ear, "you and I are going to have to sit face to face and have a little flight."
Jacob couldn't help but laugh at the sheer inappropriateness, and at the fact that it was probably going to happen. She had a smutty mind, Anne, and not afraid to express herself when the need took her. He was contemplating all of the naughty little things she would pull when he felt himself being carried toward the back of the bay by a rather substantial force. He came to stop just short of teetering over the guardrail, Sylvia's body pressed hard against his. Despite the fact that their noses almost touched, there was a look of adject horror in her eyes. Her shaking hand reached out and fingered an invisible line that ran from his cheek up through his right eye and ended just above the brow.
"Hands off, jien hwo!" Anne screamed, ripping the taller woman away and throwing her to the opposite rail. She stood between them, her unimposing stature making her seem even more unlikely a protector.
"Anne, let it go. Sylvia, today's got us all leanin' hard over the raggedy edge. Go find a bunk and get some sleep. Think you'd need more of it than any of us."
Sylvia was a portrait of confusion, but she seemed to take the hint. With a great deal more alacrity than the situation warrented, she bolted up the stairs headed for the crew compartments. Anne opened her mouth, but he forstalled her with a finger. "Not now, please. Just let this one slide, dong ma?"
She smiled and nipped his fingertip with her teeth. Rather hard. That was one good thing about her. Fellow always knew where he stood. He didn't speak another word as they went to the cockpit, and Anne took it upon herself to fill the silence. Really an accomplished speaker, he thought to himself. When she gets her mind on it.
Jacob casually dropped himself into the copilots seat and pulled down the radio. He flicked the machine on, and was greeted by the low, but steady hum of a working system. "Tony, uncouple the dock-sock, we're ready to fly."
"Tony, did you hear me? Uncouple the ship."
"Tony, are you listening?
"Tony?"
"Something's wrong, I take it," Anne said grimly.
Jacob ground his teeth for a long moment before rising from his seat. "Gorram it, can't anything go right today?" he shouted as he went down to retrieve his forsaken firearm. As he hauled himself back up to the flight deck, Zane walked in. "Anne, give him that gun. We've got problems on the Jack."
"Don't it go to figure?" Zane chuckled, a sound which was so awkwardly out of place that it sickened and died before he was even done voicing it. "Fine, bu'you know what happened last time I had a gun."
"I'll be makin' sure my buttock ain't between you and your target, 'f that's what you mean?" Jacob said, striding out of the cockpit. He saw an arm reach out of one of the crew compartments, an arm with a brutal looking shotgun clutched in it. Sylvia hauled herself out of the bunk, now clad in a flak-jacket of all things.
"It's like they just upped and left, didn't even take any of their effects. This thing was just sitting there, fully loaded," she indicated the weapon.
"Look..." Jacob began.
"No answer, going back, maybe Reavers?" she summed the situation in far fewer words than would have expected. He nodded, then motioned her to follow. They all went down to the belly of the ship, Greyson motioning her to a stop just in front of the large inner airlock doors.
"This is your spot for now. This is it. We loose this spot, we lost the war, dong ma?" she nodded. "If it don't look much like a man besides his choice of apparel, you put a bullet to him. Better, you put a bullet to the sock and blow him out."
Greyson activated the doors, and they slid open with almost painful deliberateness. As he grasped the handle of the door leading to the sock, he paused. Looked back. "If you don't hear from us in ten minutes," he said slowly, "you take that fine weapon, and you come and get us. Don't feel much like being a Reaver butt monkey."
"Or a Reaver stew," Zane offered. Syl shook her head and pushed the button that began to close the massive bulkheads. Zane turned to Greyson. "Where do we start looking?"
"Number two bay is right through there. Good a place to start as any, and the lift takes us right to the bridge. Come on," Jacob noted that Zane was always about a step behind. He didn't blame the kid. Were it him and Tony, he'd be a step behind too. Jacob opened the door and stepped into the bay they'd used to collect the bodies of the Feds.
It contained a great many more than when he left.
"Wuh de tyen, ah," Greyson whispered, eyes drifting upward despite his better judgement. He'd played with the Barrel-o-Monkeys as a child. He never thought he'd see it played like this.
"Good God," Zane muttered as he entered the room. At least he didn't let out a technicolor yawn. "How long were we over there?"
"'Bout an hour."
"What could have done this?" he asked, eyes locked on the gruesome fetish that hung, skinless, connecting cieling to floor with sewn-together limbs.
"Who else would? We've got Reavers on the ship. Get on the lift," he said. "Now!"
Jacob half expected the lift to not work; when it did, he had to stifle a panicked laugh of relief. Still, the thing moved at about the speed of smell, and he felt very vulnerable hanging in space as they moved up the first bay, and into the second. More bodies of friends. Old Jing, wiht his kind words and vast wisdom. That cute mechanic Zane had his eye on. These were scattered about the bay, as if whatever did this hadn't had time to get creative with them. He caught himself thinking that the... thing... below was creative, and shuddered. The lift finally got around to lifting him clear of the mess and into the upper decks. He took the first ladder he saw, climbing higher on the ship until he reached the nose, where the cockpit lay. The first thing he saw when he hauled himself into the bridge was Tony's arm. Then he saw the rest of Tony, leaning against the instruments, bleeding profusely. His legs were lashed with a cord of pale leather, and his arm was strapped behind his head. His remaining arm.
"No," he said weakly, "run away."
"Son of a bitch," Jacob murmured as he moved closer to his old friend. "Don't worry, we'll take care of you."
"Ain't no takin' care, now. Just get out. She's coming back."
"Who's coming back?"
"She's a Reaver, boss. Always was. We should'a put a bullet in her brainpan when we found her on that ship."
"The Fed? The Fed's a Reaver?"
Jacob recieved no answer, for Zane let out a strangled shout that went gurgly at the end. He turned with his weapon before him, taking in Zane thrashing on the floor, hands clutching his neck. At least, Greyson saw, the fingers were not wet, let alone soaked in pulsing red. Just a fist to the throat. When did a fist to the throat become a 'just', he pondered? As his gaze fell upon the blond woman in the pale leather armor, he remembered. Jacob didn't offer her so much as a word. He did, however, extend the courtesy of offering her some bullets. He pulled the trigger over and over, five times as he shouted his curses. She smiled when he finished, having not moved an inch. Five shots, and not so much as a graze.
He guessed he should'a spent more time at the firing range.
With a wide, almost innocent smile on her face, the Reaver surged forward, her left arm arcing down toward him. He felt something cutting, but it wasn't really pain. Pain he expected, but not this selective numbness. He remembered that strange moment where Sylvia ran her finger up his face, wondering if this was the exact same thing, but in the opposite direction.
Half of his world went dark. And still, there was no pain. With a shout of rage, he pressed the barrel of his gun to her chest and fired again. She fell backwards, trying desparately to stay alive long enough to get one final kill. Despite her best efforts, she pitched backward onto the deck.
"Boss. It's all gone. They've got us dead." Tony said as Jacob numbly cut the strap holding his arm. He moved to cut the staps at his legs, but Tony pushed him back. "Ta ma duh, boss, that's a cruel blow."
"What are you talking about?"
"Your eye... she got your eye," to explain far better than words ever could, Tony waved his hand from Jacob's left to his right. As soon as the hand crossed the nose, the hand immediately vanished. "Least of your problems. They were waiting out there, the whole gorram time. They knew more would come."
"Don't talk, we've got to get you..." Jacob began.
"Ain't nothin' you can do for me!" Tony shouted. "The Reavers got all of those IAVs. They've got three gorram warships, boss! And they're all out there. See?"
Tony pointed out into the field. Many of the hulks that had been drifting aimlessly now settled out, moving toward them from all angles with a sort of single-minded purpose.
"That Firefly can go, we can escape." Jacob pressed. Zane finally managed to catch his breath, rise to a sit.
"Ain't no escape for me, kid," Tony whispered. "I lied about a lot of things, Jacob. I fought in the War. I was a Browncoat. I was part of the Seventeen Hundred, the survivors of Serenity Valley. I should'a died out there. I guess my time just caught up with me."
"Tony," Jacob shook his head, unable to come up with anything more.
"Save yourself, kid. That's an order."
Jacob stood up, giving this tired old veteran a salute as best he could considering he couldn't see his right hand. Tony returned the salute, then turned back to the panel. The very first thing he did was destablize the sock, so any movement of that Firefly would rip the damned thing off.
"Boss?" Zane asked hoarsely. "Where'd she go?"
Jacob gave a quick glance around the cockpit as he brought Zane to his feet. "Son of a bitch, why won't she die?" The Reaver was nowhere near her pool of blood.
They found her at the end of the corridor, guarding the way out. Her ching was coated in expectorated blood, and her hand still clutched the box-knife which gashed deep through Greyson's numb face.
"Die you crazy bitch!" he shouted, leveling his pistol at her. He pulled the trigger.
Click.
The Reaver smiled a bit wider. "No mercy," she intoned.
A startling blast came from just behind her, tossing her helplessly to the ground at Greyson's feet. Sylvia pulled herself onto the plating and planted her foot on the Reaver's ruined back.
She looked up at him, that mad grin still wide across her face. "No mercy," a second blast sounded from Sylvia's weapon, and the Reaver lost the ability to say anything ever again. She looked at Jacob's face and winced, then nodded over her shoulder.
<>
Tony watched as the Firefly zipped away, defying logic and common sense to navigate the field at highest possible speed. He felt very cold, despite the tourniquet he'd fashioned around the stump of his left arm. He watched as the mishapen freaks of ships drew closer to him, and as he drew closer to them. There, the IAV DORTMUNDER, the cruiser, now under Reaver control. It was trying to follow the Firefly. He adjusted his course to ram it. He felt very faint, now, as the Dortmunder slammed on its brakes, tried to change position, then caught wise to the fact that it was armed. Missiles began to pound into the metal skin of the BlackJack, and Tony watched as that Firefly dimmed down to a dot against the black, to even less, to nothing.
"This time," he said, trying very hard to stay conscious, to look the devil in the eye. "This time, we win."
And the dying was glorious.
<>
Greyson was screaming.
That wasn't the only thing that slammed together as the ship careened through the black, but it was the most pressing. He'd held his pain at bay with astounding restraint, to Zane's eyes, until he'd reached the safety of the Firefly's cargobay. It was then that his legs gave out and he began to clutch at the right side of his face and wail. It took both Zane and Syl to drag him into the medical bay.
"Damn it, they're still on us, they've sent out one of the Dort's gunships!" came Anne's voice over the intercomm
"The Alliance is back?" Zane shouted hopefully into the nearby speaker.
"That's a big negative. That gunship is running without core containment."
"Gorram Reavers!" Zane croaked. Syl had already begun ransacking the medical bay for gauze, but found a box with morphine first. She tossed him the injector, and he gave the boss a good pop of it. Greyson finally went silent, hands falling away from the gruesome gash running down his face and tearing through his right eye. Old Jing might have been able to do something, he wasn't sure exactly what, but as it was, that eye was going nowhere but out. But not now. Now, he needed to stop the bleeding.
"Gorram it!" Anne shouted. "They're gaining on us. They'll be able to tangle us if they close much further. I'm overburning, see if that gives us a bit more thrust. Hold on."
Greyson clutched the table for a moment, but the lurch of acceleration didn't come.
"Something's wrong with tank one; Zane, check it out. Switching to tank two," This time the lurch was severe, almost throwing Zane from his feet and dumping Jacob's legs off the table. He paused just long enough to haul Greyson back up onto the table, then vaulted out into cargo bay. He pulled an omni-rachet from his tool belt and began to unfasten the bolts in the curved side of the vessal. The surface swung down, and he immediately saw why she couldn't overburn on tank one.
"Huh," was all he could think to say as he beheld the tank's contents.
As soon as his paralysis began, it vanished, and he bolted through the common area, up the stairs and into the cockpit. Or at least, he would have, if the ship hadn't lurched again, sending him flat on his back. He scrambled back up, reaching the cockpit just as Anne screamed again at her intercomm
"We've only got one more burst. After that, we're lunch."
"Not so much," Zane felt a distinct smile come over him as he pulled down on the paneling above the copilot's seat. As he expected, it came free easily. "I told you this was a pirate ship. Turn us around."
"Why?" she demanded.
"The '09 was commissioned by miners, and had a mechanism to launch drones at attractive meteors. Pirates loved the '09 because that system was easy to jury-rig into an anti-ship missile tube," Zane explaned as he popped the false back off of the steering controls. As he expected, there was a trigger set almost flat against the stick. "Independants back in the war used to make merchant fleets out of '09s. When the Purple-bellies attacked, they'd open fire then run. Q-ships, they called them. Alliance called to scrap all '09 model Fireflys after the war was over."
"So you're saying?" Anne smiled broadly. Zane took his seat.
"Turn us around."
<>
The light was far too bright, Greyson thought. Far too bright, and his face hurt rather badly. He turned his head to the side, and smiled, if painfully, when he beheld Anne perched on the counter a few feet away.
"We still alive?" he asked. His voice seemed to come out a bit wrong.
"Still alive," she beamed broadly.
"Still flying?" she moved to him and took up his hand in hers, kissing the back of it.
"We're still flying, baby."
Greyson sighed then. She stooped down closer to him. "What's wrong, bao bei?" she asked.
"Now," he said slowly, "we need to deal with another sort of monster."
And in his head, he wondered how the hell he was going to explain this to Niska.
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Title: Legacy 1:01 / 02, Reaved, Parts 1 and 2
Series Name: Legacy
Author: James the Dark [email]
Details: Series | PG-13 | gen | 53k | 01/13/06
Characters: Other - Jacob Greyson and crew of the BlackJack
Pairings: N/A
Summary: Jacob Greyson and the crew of the BlackJack are hired to discover the whereabouts of a missing Alliance taskforce. What they find are Reavers.
Notes: Spoilers for Serenity Movie, some violence.
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