The Return – Part 1

Hoban Washburne had thought he had seen everything possible from the cockpit of spacecraft. Stars, planets and moons were old hat for him, asteroids something to be admired but avoided at all costs, comets best observed from a fair distance, and supernova from an extremely fair distance. Nothing as dramatic as a supernova had ever happened in their little quadrant of space, but with so much unknown about the ‘verse in general, one never knew what could suddenly appear and in a blink of an eye you, your ship, and shipmates would be just a memory. More than one of Wash’s classmates from pilot training had met such a fate. Small asteroids could breach a hull and in less than a minute all the air was gone and everyone turned blue and puffy faced. Solar flares mucked up the nav system and all comms, leaving you blind until repairs could be rendered or you drifted into something solid. Get too close to a star and you’d burn up or its gravity would suck you into its fiery maw. And these were just the things the verse threw at you.

Mechanical failings on any spacecraft were a might more serious than those on any planet side vehicle. You couldn’t just pull over and get out and see what the matter was. Well, you could, but that meant spacesuits and a walk in the void to find the problem, which more than likely couldn’t be fixed anyway. Air locks could and did fail, engines exploded, nav computers went haywire and sent you into a big fat moon, and a million and one other things could go wrong. And then there was the human, or, in the case of the Reavers, the not-so-human element to deal with. A crewman could go mad and sabotage the ship. Someone could just plain screw up and then they’d be adrift. Or you could have a cheap ass captain who scrimped and scrapped so much that every piece of gear in the boat was older than crew’s age, combined. Not that Wash was thinking of any particular captain, but of late Kaylee had complained more about the engine than the fact that Simon wasn’t taking the hints s