Big Damn Hero

33

Serenity swung into orbit around Hades. It was a smooth ball of rock a couple of hundred thousand miles from Persephone, rolling in a slow, lazy ellipse around its mother planet. There were a few mountain ranges, a few craters, but apart from those it was featureless.

Terraforming had been attempted, but all Hades had to show for it was atmosphere. Vegetation had failed. There had been no release of water from its frozen poles. Colonization had therefore been impossible, and the moon had been abandoned as a failed project, left to carry on along its way more or less unmolested.

Since then, prospectors had sniffed around, digging down in the search for valuable minerals such as iridium, palladium, manganese and molybdenum, not to mention platinum and gold. Yet again, however, Hades had proved disappointing, yielding nothing more valuable than iolite and ametrine, semi-precious gemstones whose retail price was not high enough to justify the cost of their extraction.

“Nothing,” Zoë said, surveying the moon’s surface on the scanning screen. “Nothing but wasteland.” There was a note of despair in her voice.

“If there was maybe a building of some sort,” Wash said, “some sign of civilization, then we might have something to aim at. But there ain’t. It’s just a ghost world.”

“Can you run a sweep?”

“Already doing that. Thermal scan in a grid pattern, with the gain turned way up high. If there’s any kind of heat signature beyond natural background, it’ll register. So far, nada.”

Jayne entered the bridge, ducking under the lintel of the low doorway. “That it, huh?” he said, looking out at Hades through the viewing-port array. “Not much to write home about.”

“If you don’t have anything useful to contribute…” Zoë said.

“Just sayin’. Seen more life in a three-days-dead dog. Mal’s somewhere down there?”

“Supposedly.”

“Then we got no chance of finding him. Not unless we had a week to look, and I don’t reckon we got nearly that long. Vigilantes’ll probably have plugged him already.”

“Really, Jayne, if you don’t shut up…”

“Hey, Zoë, don’t blame me if I’m the realist round here. Somebody has to be.”

“Here’s an idea. Let’s just assume we are going to find Mal. We ought to make preparations. So why don’t you go to your bunk, fetch out Vera, give her a good clean, and then she’ll be all ready for if she’s ever needed.”

Jayne nodded. “That ain’t a half bad idea.” He retreated out of the bridge.

Wash said, “Did you really just tell Jayne to go to his bunk and polish his rifle?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know he’ll never realize that was a thinly veiled insult, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“My God, woman, I so want to ravish you right now.”

“Focus on the matter at hand, Wash.”

“Too late. My mind has already gone down the dirty path. I’m thinking, when this is over, you and me, we— Oh wait. Wait just one xī niú second.”

Something had flared on the thermal scan screen. Amidst the neutral grays and blues of Hades’s surface, there was a tiny blob of glowing orange.

Wash tapped instructions into a keyboard to enhance the image and zero in.

“Ohhh yeah. Attaboy.”

“What is it?” Zoë asked.

“Looks like the exhaust profile of a private yacht. Just landed. Engine’s cycling down and the thrusters are cooling but still radiating residual heat.”

“Enough to get a fix on?”

“Done. Coordinates logged in.”

“Whose craft?”

“My guess is Covington’s. According to Elmira, Covington headed out to join the vigilantes in a yacht, didn’t he? That’s him down there, parked wherever they are.”

“Book said miracles happen,” Zoë murmured.

“And so does amazing piloting,” said Wash. “I’m calculating re-entry. Every moment counts. No time for slick and smooth. We’re going in fast and we’re going in hard.”

Zoë smirked. “Is your mind still on the dirty path?”

Wash grinned. “Little bit,” he said, and yanked on the yoke.