AN: The moon boat song is a Chinese lullaby.

25. Strongest Person I’ve Ever Met

“The female of the species is more deadly than the male,” Coles muttered.

Polyphemus’ captain gave him a sidelong look. The two men stood shoulder to shoulder over the vid screen, watching the same five snippets of security footage play in an endless loop. The footage was of four reavers – two groups of two – who had torn through the station in a killing frenzy. Each pair was male/female, and in each pair, the female racked up three times the death toll of her male partner. The footage was all they had been able to recover; most of the station’s records had been destroyed by the explosion that had torn it in two, half an hour before Polyphemus’ arrival.

“Kipling,” Coles said, in answer to the captain’s inquiring look. “From Earth-that-was.”

“We created these monsters,” the captain said softly.

Coles nodded. I created these monsters. He had not spent all that time staring at Malcolm Reynolds’s face, at Zoe Washburne’s face, at River Tam’s and Jayne Cobb’s faces, only to fail to recognize them when he saw them again, however mutilated.

Their eyes hadn’t changed. He knew them when he looked in their eyes. And he was astonished by their deadly fury.

Coles considered whether it would be necessary to remind the captain that all information regarding reavers, including video footage like this, was classified information. He decided not.

“I’ll be in my quarters,” he said. He left the bridge and walked to his assigned room. The envelope inside his uniform jacket had shifted, so that one corner poked him in the shoulder with every step. The more we try to do, the worse it gets Coles reflected. What’s next? This Reynolds fellow forges the reavers into an army and attacks parliament?

Before the Tams, before the operative, Reynolds had been a petty thief operating on the fringes of space. An ex-Browncoat, certainly, but that wasn’t an insi