Unfinished Business

Chapter Twelve

Rachel Chambers walked up the ramp into Serenity’s cargo bay with just a hint of anxiety about doing it. It had been a long time, after all, and Mal Reynolds had changed. A lot.

She hadn’t expected their reunion to be smooth – she was wiser than that. What both of them had been through had made them far, far different people than the kids who’d joined up together. They had seen too much death and destruction and stupidity and human misery to be anything close to those starry-eyed young ‘uns. Still, she had hoped that Reynolds’ roguish charm and Christian charity might go a ways to bridge the gap between who they were and who they once were.

Instead she had found a gritty, hard-edged man who was bitter and resentful. Just how resentful she hadn’t guessed until she had spoken to him. Just how bitter she hadn’t guessed until she saw how he reacted to Duncan McKlintock. Most men could put the War behind them and at least try to move on with bearing the shame of defeat in civilian life. Some couldn’t, and ended their despair by chewing on a barrel, or emigrating to some godforsaken outpost and changing their names, or at least having the good grace to crawl into a bottle.

Not Reynolds. He wore his defeat like a cloak of pride. He was angry at the Alliance for winning, and at the Independents for losing, and had no constructive way to express that anger. All of his once-profound belief in the Cause had faded, now, had been kicked out of him by Fate. But he had eschewed the bottle – so far as she’d heard – and wasn’t the barrel-sucking type – when Reynolds went down, he’d take a fair escort to hell with him. He was too arrogant for suicide, at least not the ordinary way. Like many of his peers he had bought a heap of scrap pretending to be a ship and had skulked off to the Black, playing at being pirates and rogues, while the relentless wheel of the Alliance ground every world in the ‘verse into the same course meal.

She couldn’t well blame him, she