“It weren’t my rutting fault, dong ma? I told you! I was in the grav lift on the way down, minding my own damn business and this woman got on.” And they all just sit there--Mal, Wash, Zoe, Kaylee and the Doc--staring like he’s just grown another head or some gorram thing. “She just, just...” Jayne pauses, casting about for the exact words to fully explain the delicate nuances of his experience, “Jumped me!”

He feels the weight of their varying amusement in their eyes on him, and it pisses him off. Especially when that smartass Wash looks at him soberly and says, “Attacked. You. So she was an Amazon then?”

Frowning, Jayne picks up his mug, swallows some of the hot dark boar-piss-tasting swill that passes for coffee in this particular corner of the 'verse. “Nah. She was a blonde.”

The grav lift is empty except for Jayne, most of the way down to the hangar bays and a shuttle ride back to Serenity. It’s been a simple enough operation--he’s just met with some big buyer's middle-man for directions he’s supposed to deliver to Mal about a job that should make them some coin without costing them much in blood, sweat or tears for a change. But at level 274 the grav servos shift gears and the lift slows; Jayne swears under his breath.

He swears aloud when it stops at level 273 and the doors slide open soundlessly to admit someone. Jayne hopes it isn’t some mudfooted goober who wants to yammer on about hog futures or some gorram thing.

But the someone who walks through the grav lift doors is a woman; that’s a help anyway. Because he has nothing else to look at but the lift walls and she’s a whole sight better-looking than those cheap grade interior-construction polymers, Jayne looks at her.

She sure is shiny, exactly the kind of woman who’d never speak to a guy like Jayne unless it was to beg him not to bust her rich old hwundan husband’s other knee in a debt collection matter. Her hair is loose and the same color as the gold edging on that book Book always seemed to be reading when h