While I have a minute, here's chapter 8. For Jetflair, who has seen this before: I've revised this version just a little from the one you saw.

8. What the tyen shiao duh is going on in there?!

After Miranda

For two days after the Miranda broadwave, Coles could find out nothing. Everything was shrouded in high-level security. All he had to work from was what he already knew, and what he could guess: there had been an operative-level operation involving Serenity, and it had gone terribly wrong. The Miranda broadwave was how wrong it had gone; that information had never been meant to be public.

After two days of fruitless and frantic attempts to discover what might have happened to Van Soren, Coles received a terse message from one of his friends at Intel. It read simply: “KIA.”

Coles stewed. He’d invested a lot in that operation, and it had been pulled out from under him and botched. Right thoroughly botched – his deep-cover agent was dead, and Serenity’s crew, Coles guessed based upon the fact that their faces were all over the Cortex with the word “Wanted” underneath, was not in custody. Botched. By a Parliamentary operative. Coles fumed. For two days after the message from Intel, Coles could not focus past his anger.

Then one morning he woke with the memory fresh in his mind: he had not ordered Serenity’s pilot killed, but held. The man was still alive somewhere. And on the heels of that memory came a notion: perhaps he could accomplish what Parliament’s own operative had not. And what a career coup that would be.

Coles rose, dressed, and ordered an aide to ‘wave the local thug who had assisted him on Beaumonde.

**

It took longer than it should have for Coles to secure a ship to take him to Haven. No one was forthcoming as to why, but the implication seemed to be that pretty much every ship assigned to that quadrant had suffered enough damage to make them unsuitable for his purpose. Recently. Coles finally called