“Cap, I gotta say, there’s no guarantee it’ll work.” Kaylee held back on her anger at Mal hitting her husband, for whatever reason, or however warranted it may have been.

“Don’t have a choice. And Wash was convinced it would.”

“I been looking at it, checking out what he did.” She shrugged. “Maybe it will. But it’ll mean turning everything off. Literally. We ain't got main life support now, and there’s no guarantee anything’ll come back on. And I’m gonna have to use the power from auxiliary life support to push through Wash’s system, make it boot up, and –”

Mal put his hands on her shoulders, made her look into his eyes. “Kaylee. If the auxiliary goes down anyway we’ve got maybe, what, two hours air left? Then we’re gone. Doesn’t matter if the ship blows up, or the airlocks open. We won’t be around to feel it. And Zoe and the kids’ll be stranded. If you can come up with another option, fine, I’ll be mighty glad to hear it. But right now, this is it. And we don’t have time to be putting this to a vote.”

She stared into his face, seeing the determination there, and it seemed to transfer from his skin to hers. “ Hao de ,” she said quietly.

“Good girl.”

She pushed past him and started flicking switches on the panels above her workstation, muttering to herself under her breath. “Need to invert the polarisation in case it tries to … then block the …”

“Anything I need to be doing?” Mal interrupted.

She didn’t even look round. “Get to the bridge. If this works, you’ll be able to power up, stop us. I’ll have to stay here, get her running again by hand.”

“You want Simon?”

“Better,” Kaylee conceded. “There’s more’n I can do alone.”

“Doc,” Mal ordered.

“In all honesty I think I’d rather stay with my wife anyway,” Simon said, rubbing his jaw, the bruise beginning to show already. “I wouldn’t want to get punched again.”

“That?” Mal smiled. “Just a love tap, doc.” He put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder and squeezed gently before striding for the bridge