Unfinished Business

Chapter One

“Cargo’s stowed. Port fees are paid, everyone’s aboard, hatch is buttoned up. Take us out of the world, Albatross,” Mal said as he entered the bridge.

“We got the release from navcom – guess we didn’t break any laws on this one,” River remarked as she checked the monitor, then started heating up the turbines.

“Nah,” Mal disagreed. “Didn’t get caught breaking any laws. A subtle but important distinction in our business.”

“I stand corrected,” River said absently as she cycled the gravity drive up. “What are we hauling this time?”

“The cargo or the contraband?” Mal asked as he took off his great leather browncoat and laid it folded in half on the back of the pilot’s chair. The consoles in front of it were still festooned with plastic palm trees and a motley assortment of toy plastic dinosaurs, a memorial to the late Hoban Washburne, Serenity’s former pilot. Technically River sat in the co-pilot’s chair. No one save Mal would consent to sit in the chair where Wash had been killed. Since she had begun her tenure as pilot after the deadly Miranda incident, River had taken up residence in the co-pilot’s chair. It duplicated the controls of the pilot’s station – but not the history.

She had only been flying Serenity for a month, now, but she had slowly been making the left-hand chair all her own. A few of her drawings had appeared taped to the console, and the hat she had picked up on Whitehall – a war-surplus leather cap with goggles, reputed to be a Independent’s tanker’s cap but similar in form and function to the traditional pilots’ caps from the ancient days of biplanes – hung on the back of her chair until needed. She donned it now, tucking her thick brown hair up under it. Sometimes she pulled the goggles down. Mal had never given in to the temptation to ask why.

“Both.”

“Lessee, we got six thousand pounds of premium industrial grade chalk in the hold, in lovely twenty-two pound blocks. Then in the super secret smuggler’s compartment we go