My Own Kind of Freedom, Steven Brust [android based ebook reader TXT] 📗

sudden lunge at the door vanished at once; there was a whole crowd back there.

“Here he is,” said one of them.

A fat man stepped forward and said, “Ah. You.”

It took Jayne a moment, but he recognized one of the two security officers from when he made the call to the Feds. “What the gorram hell do you want?”

“You’re a popular man, Mister Cobb.”

“Yeah. They put up a statue of me on—”

“Pay attention. You might be able to get out of this.”

Jayne glared. “All right, I’m listening.”

“It’ll take some talking. Stand up and hold out your hands.”

He hesitated, looked at the odds again, and cooperated. They manacled his wrists, then attached those to fetters, and locked both to his belt, permitting him to take small steps, and hardly to move. They led him out of the cell, three in front of him, two behind. The two behind him held shotguns, and he could tell by their footsteps that he wouldn’t have had much of a chance to get to them even if he hadn’t been hobbled.

He kept close track of where they’d gone anyway, just in case.

They reached a small office. The fat one gestured Jayne inside, then said, “Wait here,” to the others, and shut the door.

“Go ahead, Mister Cobb. Sit down. Let’s see if we can do some business.”

“You got the guns. I’m listening.”

“Did you know you’re wanted for questioning in the murder of an Alliance officer, and aiding the escape of two fugitives?”

“What? I never killed no—”

“Maybe not, but one was found dead in a hospital on Ariel, with skin under his fingernails that matches your DNA.”

Jayne felt a scowl growing on his face, and tried his best to suppress it.

“Fortunately,” the officer continued, “we’re not Alliance. We don’t much care what you did on Ariel. We have you good for what you did right here.”

“What, getting drunk?”

“Didn’t they tell you the charges?”

“They told me.”

“So you understand your situation.”

“What’s the gorram offer?”

“Yesterday, you came into my office and demanded contact with the Alliance, and then we find you have a record of having murdered a Federal officer.”

The office had a glass window, and didn’t look like it was intended to be secure. But there were those restraints. This guy had the key. He measured the distance across the desk.

“So what’s going on with you and the Alliance?”

“What, I tell you that, and you let me go?”

“Let’s just say it’s a start.”

“What’s the rest?”

The officer shook his head. “No. Tell us what you know, then we’ll talk.”

Jayne considered his options. There appeared to be exactly two: he could tell them what he knew, and hope they kept up their end of the bargain, or he could lunge across the desk at this guy, hoping to take him down in spite of the restraints, and get a weapon from him, and get himself unlocked before reinforcements showed up, and then fight his way out.

Either way, he didn’t like it much.

Yuva: Warehouse

He leaned back in his chair, staring at pictures of Simon and River Tam, along with pertinent facts. On another screen was the translated readout of a secure and heavily coded file detailing certain relationships between Parliament and the Blue Sun Corporation.

Special Deputies dispatched to Yuva, on Hera.

Yeah, okay, great.

Now what?

He deleted all references to his research, and certainly the results, from his machine, and then went over it again to remove the electronic traces that he’d even been looking for them. He was thorough; it took a good two hours to do, but this was something he was good at. When he was finished, all the information he’d gathered was gone.

Except that he still remembered it.

Now what?

Serenity: River’s room

Two by two, hands of blue.

They were coming. And if they reached her, they would take her back, and she’d never get out again.

She didn’t want to go back. More than anything, she didn’t want to go back.

But there were the ghosts, too.

She had told them about the ghosts, but they hadn’t listened. They couldn’t listen, because they didn’t have the math to understand, and she recognized that the one skill she didn’t have was that of a teacher. The Shepherd had been able to teach, but his path of probability had led to different intersections, so now there was no one to teach, and they had to learn if they were to deal with the ghosts.

She couldn’t deal with the ghosts, because they weren’t her ghosts. She could maybe help them deal with the ghosts, but if she did … .

Two by two, hands of blue.

She didn’t hear him come in, but when she looked up, he was there, his face, as always, smiling, and worried.

“Mei-mei, are you all right?”

He asked it as if it were a question that could be answered, as if an infinity of variables could be encompassed in a single constant. She struggled to translate, to simplify, to determine essence, and to rephrase the question into terms that could become a single, determinate answer that he would understand, and that would be as little a lie as she could manage.

“I’m torn between probability vectors with mutually exclusive benefits and the likely destruction of different targets and I can’t find a trajectory that avoids all of the negative outcomes without a radical shift in the entire matrix, which we haven’t the capability to carry out anyway, and I have a headache.”

Simon hesitated. “I’ll get you something for the headache,” he said.

Yuva: Canteen

Mark gave them their beers and then acted as if they’d never met. Mal led Zoë to a corner table and sat down.

“It’s a bad idea, sir,” she said.

“Most like it is.”

“Okay. How are we going to do it?”

“I guess we should see if Wash can find us a layout of the local lockdown.”

He felt Zoë studying him. “You don’t like this either, do you sir?”

“Not all that much.”

“Is it really necessary?”

“Your beer’s getting warm.”

“Thank you, sir. I wouldn’t want to get killed with the taste of warm beer in my mouth.”

“Zoë—”

“Maybe I should order a raw egg.”

“Zoë—”

“Think they have raw eggs here? I mean, real ones?”

“Zoë—”

“A fake egg in my beer before dying wouldn’t be at all the same thing. Don’t you agree, sir?”

“Zoë, what the gorram hell are you doing?”

“Trying to figure out what the gorram hell you are doing, sir. I can’t back your play if I can’t see it.”

“Zoë, I can’t—”

“You need to let me in, sir. I can’t help from the outside. Not this time.”

Mal leaned back in his chair and stared at his beer, trying to keep all expression off his face, so Zoë wouldn’t see that he was feeling the walls closing in. She waited, silent, with all the patience she’d learned in the war, waiting for attacks that they knew were coming, but never knew when or what form they’d take.

Patience was a powerful force. They drank their beers and waited for each other.

Eventually, Mal started speaking.

Serenity: Bridge

The alarm never went off.

The first warning he had, less than a minute after disconnecting with Mal, was when Serenity shook and pitched about three degrees to starboard before righting herself again.

“Wang ba dan,” he said, his hands already finding the emergency warm-up sequence. With his first spare fraction of a second he punched the intercom and said, “Kaylee!” and checked to see which indicators were blinking red, which were solid red, and which were green.

The gravboot was still good, the engines would fire, and—

In less time than it took to think about it, Serenity was off the ground. She wasn’t happy about it; she moaned, and the controls fought him and complained, and he didn’t dare leave atmo. But they were airborne before whatever it was that had happened had time to happen again.

Kaylee’s voice came back. “I’m looking.”

“Hull integrity is breached, so we can’t get too high, but I can go up. I need to know if I can count on all my attitude adjusters.”

“Top of the list, then. Ninety seconds.”

“Go.”

Her voice sounded icy calm.

Serenity fought him; a sensation he liked not at all; somewhere not too far below the surface was the panic you feel when you try to open your eyes but they’re already open; when you reach for a glass and your arm doesn’t move. And not too far below that was the memory of the one other time he’d felt controls act like this; and the knowledge that there was no ejecting from Serenity.

Three kilometers up the air was noticeably thinner; the ship tried to grasp and claw at what there was, and hated it that there was nothing to hold on to.

Kaylee’s voice came back. “I found your control problems. Half the starboard extender is gone.”

“Copy that, Kaylee.”

Damn. If it was the whole extender; or, better yet, both extenders, this would be much easier. No wonder she was fighting herself.

“I’ll get you more when I have it.”

He didn’t dare take her any higher. And he wasn’t terribly excited about trying to land her. And he couldn’t keep control of her of this way for much longer.

His whole body was committed to keeping her in the air; leaving his mind free to reflect on which way to go, when all the ways led the same way: down, and much too fast.