'He's In Fashion'

To the sound of a voice dragged over rough ground, Wash tapped his feet. He reclined in his flight chair, his bare feet upon the edge of the flight console. Aside from the deep throated blues music the only sound that greeted Mal as he entered the cockpit were the turning of glossy magazine pages and the occasional blip from the console.

"Time was when a pilot sprang to attention when approached by his captain," said Mal, clipboard in hand.

"Yeah, well times sure do change, don't they cap'n?" replied Wash, not bothering to look up. "Call that a moustache?" he added under his breath, staring at the page ten profile on Captain Pete.

With deft cruelty Mal whacked Wash with the clipboard.

"Ow!"

"I pay you for your piloting skills, not for your fashion criticism. Put the 'Gentleman's Piloting Monthly' away and get cracking on the gorram programming; this sector requires four plane shifts before we hit New Wales."

"Aha, ordinarily, yes. But look at this shiny new slip of equipment." Wash turned the music off and lazily swung his leg over to prod a little flat square of metal and glass console with his foot.

"I thought that was a drinks tray," said Mal, eyeing it critically.

"To the untrained eye. From a distance. Look more carefully. See the fine tracery of lines within the depths of the glass, the delicate ornate silver styling of the control toggles? Note the exquisite beauty of the sliding nav-discs, delicately poised on the refraction-glass surface... they are hollowed out to enable fresh data cylinders to be slotted in, meaning that..."

"Where did you get it?" Mal interrupted Wash's enthusing.

"The scrap yard."

"And what does it do?"

"Merely slide the control discs to manipulate the 3d map, line in your co-ordinates with the slide toggles and viola! You have an auto-pilot mapped out for the next four plane-shifts. State-of-the-art Nav-Pilot, and a pretty damn shiny one at that."

"Call me old fashioned, Wash..."

"You're old fashioned, Cap'n. Quit living in t