Mal mouths ‘Please?’ to Zoe. She shrugs, non-plussed.

Rest of the crew come tumbling up onto the bridge to find out the game plan. Last up are Jayne and Ilargia. Jayne is doing his shirt up, scowls at Mal.

“You pick the worst gorram moments to go finding trouble...”

Mal stares at him. Then he looks at Ilargia. She glares back.

“Just performing one of my useful functions, Captain.”

Mal winces.

“You ain’t gonna let that go in a hurry, are you?”

“No.” Looks out of the window. “But I’m prepared to suspend hostilities for the moment.”

“Don’t suppose you know these folk?” Mal asks. She takes him seriously.

“Sorry, Captain. My contacts are all admin or customs.” Takes a longer, considering look. “That’s a new ship, but an old design. They mothballed that class about ten years back.”

River allows the usual surroundings to fade out around her, puts away the familiar feel and sound of them. Very gently, she stretches out her new senses, a tentative reaching. She’s expecting a weight and clamour of minds, but finds instead vast emptiness, small knots of cognition. There are barely two hundred people aboard that leviathan. Part of her mind begins to ruthlessly devise a scheme of elimination, and she wrestles it down. Some of those minds are scared, young and unformed. They feel like Tyler. A handful are more complex, stronger. She searches for the mind in charge, follows the tendril of consciousness back to the source. A worried man, mind a jumble of concern, juggling ship and crew and mission. She knows this kind of mind, though it lacks the bleak darkness that threads through Mal when he allows himself to relax...

0000

Treutlen, who remembers when you didn’t need an electronics degree to operate your own radio, prods distrustfully at the buttons some more.

“Do you think they got that, Upson?”

“I expect so, Sir.” Upson, one of whose degrees is in electronics, fights the urge to bat his superior’s hands away from the sensitive cont