10. Ow?

After Miranda

“I’m going back out to Number Three,” Wash called, and heard Balch grunt acknowledgement. Wash’s work had identified and helped to correct a number of problems on that line, but Number Three still gave Balch headaches, and he had tacitly let the responsibility for keeping after it fall to Wash. Which was fine with Wash; it gave him something to do besides sit in the block-walled building all day, nursing his wounds and fretting over what the Alliance might be plotting to do next.

As Wash was leaving, Balch appeared at his office door. “Toupin tells me you sent somebody to tune up the front-end loader,” he said.

“Yeah; it was overdue,” Wash said, stopping next to his desk. “I started tracking maintenance records, too, since I was going out picking up stats off the machines. Nobody else seemed to be doing it.”

Balch shook his head. “Anybody told me a week ago that what this mine needed was a man with a head for numbers, I woulda laughed.”

“You did laugh. A lot,” Wash reminded him. The ginger cat jumped onto the desk and pressed its head into Wash’s hand. Wash rubbed its ears absently.

Balch chuckled. “So I did. You are an odd one, Professor. Never would have thought I’d find any use for a man like you, and here you’ve turned me right around.”

Wash thought of Zoe. “You’re not the first person to say something like that,” he admitted, smiling sadly down at the cat.

“So it worries me some that the Alliance seems to have some personal interest in you,” Balch said. “Normally, I wouldn’t ask a man a question like this, but normally I don’t have Alliance officers falling out of the sky on my head. What do they want with you?”

Wash sighed, and sat on the edge of the desk. “Wish I knew,” he said. The ginger cat climbed into his lap, purring. “Yesterday, seemed a sure thing they’d space me. But they put me back down here instead.”

“What kind of trouble you in exactly that landed you here?”

For all Balch’s kindnesses, Wash wasn’t reall