"Please, mei-mei, don't kill the hwoon dahn!" Simon called across Serenity's cargo hold.

River Tam looked back at him for a moment, not entirely withdrawing her attention from the two space-suited goons who were the subject of discussion. "I wasn't *going* to do anything fatal," she told him in her best witheringly sisterish voice. "Just beat on them a little while."

"Hmm." Simon considered that, coming closer. "Beating is okay. Maiming is not."

Just at this point, one of the goons seemed to have come to the notion that even though this little slip of a girl had managed to take him and his friend by surprise the first time around, there wasn't any chance that she really COULD bring the beat-down now that he was ready for her tricks, and pulled out a knife from a small opening in his trousers, under one thigh. River actually smiled a fierce little smile as she jumped into an arcing roundhouse kick, dashing his face to one side. The sharp blade slid across fingers, drawing blood, before it clattered away on the deck.

By a few minutes later, most of the crew were gathered around the prone bodies of the two mercenary bounty hunters, and River was nearly beaming at the fact that they weren't trying for any more rematches. "Well, umm, that's mighty impressive," Zoe pointed out. "But we're not out of trouble yet. Serenity is tethered to the ship that they came in on, their boss has a small magnetic rail gun at the ready, and I doubt that even you can pilot us out of here well enough to avoid getting the ship riddled with holes, girl."

"Yes, that's a problem," Mal Reynolds said in a low tone. The ship was two days out of Persephone's dockyards, where they'd repaired an awful lot of damage, and only about a day away from the Heinlein planetary system, to return Inara Serra to the Paquin Companion training house where she was an instructor. Mal had been keeping an eye out for trouble, but by the time anybody had spotted the bounty hunter's ship it had been too late - their efforts to evade its intercept cour