Since Miranda, the Alliance knew to stay out of things. They learned not to meddle with people’s lives… At least that’s what everyone thought.

Smitty was a an older man who owed more than he’d like to say to the Alliance. They ordered him to go to the outer planets to find something that he found quite disturbing…a body. A dead body to be exact. And why they wanted it he didn’t really know. They just needed someone other than a person from the Alliance to take care of it so it couldn’t be linked back to the government. After Miranda all they needed was more trouble.

He ended up on a small deserty planet that he’d never even heard of and started to wonder. Mostly it was just sand and very little else. But finally, he came to a cliff and found exactly what the Alliance had been looking for. Three head stones. Only one of the people he had heard of before. Mr. Universe. It was his systems that caused the Alliance all of that trouble. He couldn’t be an option--he was too well known. The next stone was that of an older gentleman. Book was his name. The Alliance said they wanted a younger person, so this man was also out of the question. He looked at the last stone and smiled.

******

“River, you can’t go around saying stuff like that!” yelled her brother. “You haven’t said anything to Zoë, have you?”

“No,” she replied. She knew he would treat her like this. Even though she proved herself in more ways than one her brother would always treat her like a child.

“Look I know you miss him. We all do. But you can’t make someone not dead anymore.” She rolled her eyes at him. “Don’t give me that look. I’m a doctor and I looked at him myself. I did. Do you remember?” She shook her head.

He thought she had gotten better since the battle at Mr. Universe’s, but it seemed that she was still a little…well, unstable.

“Don’t you breathe a word of this to anyone else, you hear me?” She shook her head again and wondered out of the room.

******

Atticus Smith had worked in the Alliance hospital for over 2