Big Damn Hero

1

Why can’t things just go easy for once? Mal Reynolds wondered as he ended the communication with Guilder’s Shipwrights. After a week in dry dock, their shuttle repairs were complete — just a couple-few things Kaylee could have fixed herself if they had had the right tools. But they couldn’t afford them. And the repairs had cost more than the original estimate. Of course. Still, it would be nice to have it back. The loaner shuttle Guilder’s had given them had a faulty injector regulator and guzzled fuel like a drunk guzzled beer.

Mal was standing in the cargo bay of Serenity, and after weeks of searching for a job, any job, he was having second thoughts about taking this one, despite the hefty repair bill that loomed on his horizon. Deafening alarm bells were going off in his head — about safety and about survival.

The roaring outside Serenity’s open cargo bay spiked to earsplitting as space transports and private craft simultaneously took off and landed on either side of them in Persephone’s Eavesdown Docks. The violence of the comings and goings shook the ship’s loading ramp and peppered the hull with a rain of dirt and small pebbles blasted into the air by thundering rocket exhausts.

There was only one way to describe the operation of the docks: organized chaos. Well, not so organized. Burned-out hulks of spacecraft lay in craters of their own making, scattered here and there along its sprawling length. It was a gorramn miracle there weren’t more midair collisions.

You might think with all this dutiable trade, all these comings and goings and the excise levied on them, that Persephone would be a rich planet; but you would be wrong. The Alliance taxed businesses and citizens with a gleeful rapacity. And what did Persephonians do in response? Why, they celebrated the day they signed their lives away and joined the Alliance. The anniversary of which was today.

And how did Mal celebrate it? By taking another job from Badger.

The sleazy minor crime lord was willing to pay them a scant bit of coin for risking their lives with a dangerous load that had to be hauled halfway across the galaxy. Actually, that sounded somewhat like the last job they took from him — transporting a herd of cattle on behalf Sir Warwick Harrow. The cows were delivered fine on Jiangyin until the gunfire commenced, and then Shepherd Book was shot and nearly died from his wounds. This dangerous cargo was different from that load, because if something went wrong with it, all of them would die.

As a bonus, a small side-job had slid in alongside Badger’s offer. Mal, Jayne and Zoë would deal with the secondary job planetside once Badger’s cargo was loaded. Which meant Taggart’s Bar on Alliance Day, just about the rowdiest drinking establishment on Persephone, on the rowdiest day of the year.

Talk about combustible.

About five feet away, Zoë was saying something to Mal, or trying to, murmuring to avoid being overheard. Zoë was the kind of woman who spoke softly and carried a big gun. Mal motioned for her to come closer. She walked over with her arms crossed, and leaned in, so close that her breath brushed against his ear.

“I don’t like it, sir,” she said, biting off the words.

“Duly noted,” Mal said. He didn’t like it much either, but when the choice was bad choice or no choice, you smiled wide and said thank you.

On the loading ramp behind the two Browncoat veterans, a forklift strained to carry its oversized burden up the slope and into the hold. The weight squashed the front tires nearly flat and made black smoke pour from the tailpipe. The metal crate was easily three times as big as the forklift and rested so heavy upon the forks that they wobbled like they were made of rubber, with the result that the load teetered precariously on its perch.

Grim-faced, Zoë and Mal backed well out of the way. Zoë wore her curly darkish auburn hair gathered in a ponytail, her signature leather cord necklace hanging over her leather vest. Mal had let his brown hair grow out a mite longer than military regulation, and wore his trousers with the stripe, his customary suspenders, and a tucked-in red flannel shirt. Both had looped their thumbs under their gun belts, observing closely as the last of the five steel containers was carried across the ship’s deck by the woefully lurching forklift.

On the other side of the hold’s entrance, a pair of Badger’s men likewise kept a sharp eye on Mal and Zoë, hands hovering close to gun butts. Trusting your business partners was like trusting a rattlesnake not to bite you: noble but misguided.

Behind the wide-bodied goons stood the cocky Cockney racketeer. Badger was dressed in his own version of business casual — a black bowler, threadbare suit jacket and matching vest over a dingy white T-shirt, a jauntily arranged silk necktie, and a pin on his lapel shaped like a flamingo and made of fake gold encrusted with no-less-fake gemstones. In common with his namesake, Badger was cranky, stubborn, and tough, with something decidedly rodent-like about his face, but he was also irritatingly jovial at times. That trait seemed particularly in evidence today, which Mal couldn’t help but find suspicious.

Though it appeared the crime boss was dutifully fulfilling his side of their bargain, Mal assumed Badger would try to cut corners somehow, in his own favor, of course. If everything was completely on the up and up, it wouldn’t be commerce as usual.

“Pull ’er forward nice and slow, and set ’er down beside the last one,” Badger told his forklift operator. Then he beamed at Mal, showing yellow, crooked teeth. “Just about done with the hard part.”

“Remind me again,” said Mal. “Is the hard part loading the cargo, or is it me gettin’ over the fact that you still owe us for those cows we didn’t get paid for transporting to Jiangyin?”

“Mal, Mal, Mal.” The more genial Badger sounded, the more it made Mal’s toes curl and his trigger finger itch. “Oh mate, you still holding a grudge about that?”

“Kinda definitely.”

“Okay, so the deal went down the khazi. Wasn’t anybody’s fault. These things happen. Business is business.”

“Don’t think my understandin’ of that word is the same as your understandin’.”

“What we ’ave ’ere,” Badger said, waving an arm towards the crates, “is my way of making recompense. Your fee, in case you ’aven’t noticed, Reynolds, is well over the odds for a straightforward planet-to-planet run like this. When it’s done, you can consider the debt between us settled.”

“Just sayin’ I’d rather it’d been settled at the time.”

“What can I say? I ’ad cash-flow problems.”

“So did I, in as much as the cash wasn’t flowing from you to me.”

“But that’s all in the past. We’re chums again now, ain’t we?”

Mal grunted. He was very picky about who he was “chums” with, and Badger would never qualify for that status.

“Sir,” Zoë said, with urgency, into Mal’s ear. “Don’t want to come across like a worrywart…”

“Then don’t, Zoë.”

“But I’m going to say it again: this is a bad idea. This cargo is too volatile.”

“I know, I know,” Mal replied.

The crates weren’t big, maybe five feet a side, but they were mighty — jam-packed with chemicals used for mining.

Explosives.

Highly specialized, highly explosive explosives.

The substance in the crates was, in fact, a crystalline compound known as HTX-20, an abbreviation that according to Badger stood for something long and complicatedly scientific with more syllables than you could count. When he heard the deal Badger was proposing, Shepherd Book had told Mal that he knew about HTX-20, and his grimace had said everything Mal needed to know about what the preacher thought of the stuff.

“Not for nothing is it nicknamed Satan’s Snowflakes,” Book had commented, and yet again, Mal had found himself wondering how in heck a man of God knew about such things.

Badger had assured Mal that as long as the HTX-20 stayed in the crates, snug and tight in its flame-retardant foam packaging, there was no danger of it blowing up before it was supposed to. Oh, and everything would also be fine as long as the HTX-20 didn’t get wet. Or too hot. Or was jostled unduly. But apart from that, things were just dandy.

Mal figured Badger would be upfront about the perils of the job, since he was the one who stood to gain the most if the payload made it to its intended destination, a rhodium mining operation on Aberdeen. Still, it gave him pause to see the yellow-and-black hazard stripes on the outsides of the boxes, like a swarm of hornets, and the decals plastered every which way, saying things like:

In other words, treat these crates like newborn babies or life would no longer be interesting; it would be over. If there was one thing Mal hated, it was surprises, and an explosion counted as one of the worst kinds of surprise he could imagine. Surprise marriages being another.

But not to dwell on the negative. Mal watched Zoë flinch as the forklift operator almost took out their ball hoop. The vehicle’s twin metal tines had held so far, but the crates were burdensome, that was obvious. He couldn’t wait for this to be over.

Persephone, a middling-sized planet on the periphery of the White Sun system, served as Serenity’s primary stomping grounds when it came to the face-to-face details of life. This meant shaking hands and moving cargo, mostly, though sometimes it also included inadvertently trafficking in cryogenically frozen mad geniuses. Their resident, fully thawed mad genius was River Tam, who generally bounced off the bulkheads like a rubber ball. Her brother Simon was uncomfortable on this planet, to put it mildly, and was more than usually defensive about his sister. Even out in the Black he was quick to justify his sister’s unpredictable outbursts of screams and destruction by reminding you that the Alliance had made her insane. As in, it was not her fault. Mal found this a rather odd strategy for ensuring her continued passage on his boat. He didn’t much care why River was insane. He cared that she was insane at all.

Mal had warned Simon to keep River out of sight until Badger was gone, and Simon was happy to oblige. Alliance bulletins about two missing fugitive siblings on the run came out over the Cortex now and then, but so far Badger seemed unaware that he could make way more money turning the Tams over to the authorities than he could trafficking in cows and explosives.

Life sure had gotten complex. No doubt about it, Mal preferred staying in the sky. The silent void of the Black was ever so much more to his liking. But such was not always practical. He had to touch down from time to time, in order to take on supplies and get paying work.

Persephone had never been all that pleasant of a rock, even before the Alliance’s victory over the Browncoats there. In the years since, it had become immeasurably worse. The slums had spread like rot in a ripe peach, the stink of ramshackle dilapidation festering wide. Power supplies to the blighted areas were cut off when the residents couldn’t pay for the privilege. Folks began cooking on open fires and warming themselves at burn barrels. The haze of rank smoke permanently tinged the sky a pale yellow. To survive, most people had to steal what they couldn’t barter. Decent citizens shuffled with downcast, fearful eyes, trudging sunken cheek-by-jowl beside unbearably smug rich folk in silks and satins who flaunted their wealth as it if were God-given — not that there was a God, not to Mal, not anymore.

And if there is, He ain’t welcome on my boat, Mal thought.

Lawlessness on a planetary scale did have a plus side, though: it encouraged and facilitated the kind of work that came Mal’s way— primarily smuggling items the Alliance forbade or taxed beyond reason, that sort of thing — and loose, corrupt enforcement allowed quick escapes in case a deal went sideways.

Beyond the open cargo-bay door, Eavesdown Docks spread out in all its rusty, gritty glory. The yellow-tinged atmo stank so bad you could practically chew it — a chunky, inedible stew of rocket exhaust, carbonized garbage dump, spilled rocket fuel, unwashed humans and animals, and mountains of boiled protein blocks. As they set down and crawled back up into the Black, ships kicked up brittle tea-brown newspapers and foam plates slathered with plum sauce. On the verge of the field, brightly colored paper parasols twirled. Dogs of varied size and indefinable breed ran in packs through the potholed street. Horns honked rhythmically, or maybe it was someone’s donkey braying? Here and there, ship’s captains of ill repute casually bribed customs officials, and hordes of filthy folks crawled through and over the debris of civilization like ants — some looking for work, others looking for trouble. If he was being honest, Mal had to admit he currently had a foot in both camps.

Hoban Washburne, Serenity’s pilot and Zoë’s husband, had landed them at the docks at crack of dawn shipboard time. But it was five-thirty in the evening here on Persephone. Daylight, sickly sad as it was, had already begun to ebb away and a bruise-colored dusk was setting in. Only three quarters of an hour had passed on-planet, but for Mal, each minute spent with Badger felt like an age. He didn’t know which drove him the craziest about the man — his thuggish swagger, his blockheaded stupidity, or his chirpy attitude that masked a personality so crooked it made a zigzag look straight — but Mal could feel himself getting tetchier and tetchier. With an effort, he looked away from him.

“Sir,” Zoë prodded. “All the ‘danger’ decals, sir.”

“What danger decals? Don’t see none.”

“The ones you’ve been giving the evil eye since the moment the crates arrived.”

“Oh, those danger decals. Well, folks sometimes exaggerate. On account of the legal liability. Coverin’ their asses.” Mal tried to sound credible, but even he wasn’t buying it.

“Yes, sir,” Zoë said. “But regarding liquids, sir. If the contents of the crates come in contact with water, they’ll blow. Says so right there. And last week that toilet up by the rec area backed up…”

“Kaylee put it all to rights,” he reminded her. “And nothing got as far as the cargo bay.”

“That’s true, but even so—”

“And the crates look solid and watertight,” Mal cut in. Still not sounding entirely credible.

“Easy does it, now,” Badger cautioned as the forklift crept across the deck with its suspension-crushing load.

Everything was going according to plan, then suddenly, not so much.

Whether the temper of the right-hand fork’s steel had been damaged on a previous job or more recently compromised by the combined weight of the three other containers, it suddenly gave way, bending downward towards the deck with a hair-raising shriek. That end of the huge crate abruptly dropped, sliding off the edge of the intact fork. It smashed hard onto its nose, then toppled full length onto the hangar deck with a resounding crash that rattled Mal’s bones. As the operator leapt from the vehicle in panic, Badger dropped into a crouch, squeezed his eyes shut, and clapped his hands over his ears.

“Tā mā de!” Mal bellowed.

Seconds passed.

Then a few more.

Nothing happened.

“Oops, sorry about that,” Badger said breezily as he lowered his hands from his ears. “Why don’t we leave it there, then? Meanwhile I’ll just wait for my sphincter to unpucker.” He nodded sharply at the forklift, and the driver climbed back in, hit reverse, and quickly backed away. From under his coat, Badger pulled out what appeared to be a manifest and began pawing through it.

Zoë sighed.

“The HTX-20 isn’t supposed to explode unless it gets bumped around too much. Right, Badger?” Mal pressed.

“That’s right. Or gets wet or hot or all that other gubbins. We went over it, didn’t we? You need a refresher course?”

“No, it’s just, that crate got bumped. How do we know things are still all right?”

Badger looked at him as if Mal was the stupid one. “We’re not dead.”

Hard to argue with that.

At that moment, as if Mal didn’t have enough to contend with already, River Tam appeared on the catwalk overlooking the cargo bay.

“The box wants to dance,” she announced as she trotted down the stairs. She was holding a bamboo flute and wearing her pink sweater, ruffled skirt, and calf-high boots.

“Best go back up,” Mal said, careful not to address River by her given name in front of Badger and his employees. “Cargo bay’s going to be off-limits for a spell. Dŏng ma?”

River thrust out her lower lip in a pout. Mal supposed life on a spaceship had its dull moments for a teenaged girl. Or dull days, or even duller weeks. Still, she wasn’t just any teenaged girl. She was a kid who made her own fun, and her idea of fun wasn’t necessarily the safe, happy kind. More usually it was the “What the hot holy hell just happened?” kind.

Mal darted a glance towards Badger, who was observing the exchange with bemusement as he cleaned under his fingernails with a corner of a document.

“’Ere, I thought the little tart ’ad an accent like mine,” Badger said. “Bit of the old Dyton patois, know what I mean?”

“Oh, I does, guvnor, and no mistake,” River replied, switching to the aforesaid accent. “I ain’t seen you in ages, me old china. Mind the dirt,” she added, gesturing to Badger’s hand. “Don’t want no contamination, do we now?”

“Oi, bint, none of your lip,” Badger retorted, but truth was, he had a soft spot for River, cultivated last time they’d met, when he’d held the crew hostage. “I washed before I come ’ere today. Clean as a whistle.”

“No, luv, what I’m saying is that’s your DNA, innit?” River said. “If we’re investigated, it’s you what’ll show up, not us.”

“Well, that’s right thoughtful of you to take into account,” Badger said, with a chuckle. “But my side of this exchange is above board and legitimate.”

Mal said to Badger, “You know the drill. Half now and half on delivery.” He held out his hand. Badger plunked a leather bag full of jingling coin into his palm.

“Feels light,” Mal said as he hefted it. It actually felt just about right. Tricky customers like Badger expected you to put up a fight even when there was no call for one.

“It’s all there,” Badger said, puffing himself up indignantly.

“Maybe I should count it all out, just to be sure,” Mal said. “Anybody can make a mistake.” He didn’t dump out the coin. He just stared Badger straight in the eye. Although the crime boss didn’t blink, after fifteen seconds or so a muscle in his left cheek started to twitch.

Satisfied that he’d made his point, Mal slipped the pouch in his pocket, money uncounted.

Badger grinned, displaying those rickety, off-color front teeth again. “So,” he said, “if we’re all done ’ere, I’ll be ’eading back to town. Today being Alliance Day, I do a brisk trade in moonshine, float, angel tears and other such recreational substances. I gather you lot ’ave other things to attend to in town as well?”

“Where exactly did you gather that?” Mal said. He figured Badger was just fishing. No sense giving him information he didn’t need.

“Well, I just assumed.” Badger stuffed the manifest back in his pocket.

“Better see to your ’shine,” Mal said. “And also to mindin’ your own business.”

Unruffled, Badger strolled to the edge of the loading ramp, waving for the forklift operator to accompany him. The forklift itself was Serenity’s own and remained on board. Then Badger and the other two minions descended. One of the goons got behind the wheel of a battered land speeder parked near the foot of the ramp. Badger climbed into the seat beside him, waving at Mal and Zoë like he was the crowned king of Londinium.

“Perhaps we’ll run into each other in town,” Badger said as the speeder’s engine noisily started up. “Over a libation celebrating the end of a completely unnecessary and yet ultimately obscenely profitable war.”

“I’m thinkin’ probably not,” Mal said.

“War’s over, Captain,” Badger reminded him. He grinned at Mal. “Officially, anyway.”

Mal didn’t respond. Lot of folks enjoyed reminding him of what he already knew.

Then Badger and his lackeys putt-putted off, the gray clouds of exhaust drifting up into the haze. Mal knew he had a tendency to underestimate Badger because the man seemed so gorramn stupid. But stupid and dangerous weren’t mutually exclusive.

Look at Jayne.

“Well, that’s over,” Zoë said, the relief in her voice. “Time to chase up that other job.”

“We’re not gettin’ investigated or arrested today,” Mal told Zoë sternly. “Not calling attention of any sort to ourselves.”

“Of course not, sir,” Zoë said.

“Good,” he said. “Now let’s go into town and bust up a bar.”

She gave him a look.

“Just kidding,” he said. “Jayne, you coming?”

Jayne Cobb had just sauntered into the cargo bay. He tugged down the earflap chin ties of his yellow and orange woolen hat, seating the thing on his skull and centering the pom-pom atop it. His adoring, semiliterate mother had designed and knitted the fetching item of headgear, and it was one of Jayne’s most prized non-lethal possessions. The sidearm strapped to his leg in a tactical black nylon holster fell into the other category. Jayne had pet names for all his weapons. There was his Callahan full-bore auto-lock rifle, of course, which he had christened Vera, and there was the massive.38-caliber Civil War-styled wheelgun he was toting now, known affectionately as Boo. Scooting around River, Jayne joined Zoë and Mal at the top of Serenity’s loading ramp.

“I don’t know why you two hate Alliance Day so much,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for the war, we wouldn’t be here.”

Mal didn’t say a word. Explaining irony to Jayne was like teaching a fish to bark.

“Make us proud, you guys!” a voice called down cheerily from the catwalk. It was Kaylee, Serenity’s resident ray of sunshine, as well as a prodigiously gifted engineer. Then her eyes got huge. “Gŏu shĭ! How many gorramn warning signs are there on those things?”

“The boxes are busy,” River said in a matter-of-fact tone.

Kaylee cast a stricken look at Mal, then looked back at the crates. Then back at him. “Uh, Captain?” she said.

“We keep that powder cool and dry and it’s all good, you hear?” he said.

Kaylee nodded and returned her gaze to the crates one more time. Mal had a feeling she was counting how many decals there were. And not liking the total.

As if to distract herself, she turned to River. “Hey, River, Shepherd and I are making casserole for dinner. Wanna help?”

“Okay,” River said brightly, skipping up the stairs to join her. “I’ll do the chopping.” She made a brisk slicing motion with the edge of her hand.

“Do not let her near anything with a blade,” Mal cautioned. He beckoned to Jayne and Zoë. “You two, duty calls. Got less’n a half-hour to get to Taggart’s Bar. Better hustle.”

“Get there early, maybe we can have ourselves a little japery first,” said Jayne.

Mal shook his head. “I know what your idea of japery is, Jayne, and it ain’t gonna happen. We’re there to work, not punch folk.”

“Not even a little?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Awww.” Jayne sounded as petulant as a child. “Remind me again why I come with you on these trips.”

“’Cause you’re so damn handsome.”

Jayne frowned, puzzling it out. He decided his captain was being sincere, and grinned. “Yeah, I am at that, ain’t I?”