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Chapter Five: Morning

In Which there are Uncomfortable Encounters, Real Coffee, and the Planning of Activities of an Illegal Nature

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A/N: meant to get this out yesterday, by my dad’s in hospital for heart stuff, so I was there all night. Finished this today in a massive effort to stop thinking about it. Worked pretty good too!

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Serenity slumbered quietly, her interior lights lowered to simulate night. It helped keep the crew’s circadian rhythms in order. Wash woke often during the ‘night’ to check on the auto-pilot now and then, but when they were waking for the day, the crew woke in odd shifts. Zoe was an early riser by habit, although the lure of her warm bunk and soft, cuddly husband frequently triumphed over years of training. Jayne was one to sleep as late as he could, and the Captain clung to no set pattern. Kaylee was often the first up, some irregularity in the hum of the engines, or just a need to check on her girl driving her from sleep. This morning was no exception, and by the time she started tinkering with the air filter behind an access panel in the skinny aisle between the passenger dorms, she’d already cleaned the port condensers, which had collected some carbon, and rewired the co-pilot’s console, hopeful that the warning light that kept popping up every time they went to full burn would shut off. Nothing wrong with the engine, so it had to be in the console. And now she was wriggled half-in and half out of the tiny crawlspace in the bulkhead, trying to figure out where that funky smell was coming from.

“Has Jayne been smokin’ those nasty stogies again?” she muttered to herself as she wrestled the filter panels from their casings. When they finally popped free, she heard the captain’s voice yellin’ for her and she was thrown back, surprised, and cracked the back of her head on cold metal. “Aw, jingcai, Kaylee. Ow!”

She wriggled backwards out of the hole, clutching her skull with one hand, two filter panels in the other and crawling on her knees and one elbow.

“Oh, hell.