River’s Run – Part 4

“It’s too big,” Mal said into his spacesuit helmet comms to Wash. “Could drive a team of horses right through it. “It” was the big damn hole in the rear of Serenity II. Mal was standing where a couple of passenger dorm rooms on the rear right of the ship had been and now they were nothing but jagged metal and plastic and a big damn hole.

“It can’t be patched up?” Wash asked from the bridge, where he was alone. Trapped on the bridge when the ship had been hit by space scavengers, Wash was the only crew member without a spacesuit. Jayne and Zoe and Mal had put suits on when they knew they were about to be boarded. After a brief and victorious fight against the intruders, the ship that had attacked them hit Serenity II with two missiles, one of which breached the hull and sucked out all air from the lower deck. Now they were stuck on a lifeless moon without any atmo.

“Not a chance,” said Mal as he looked across the grayish, rock and ash looking moonscape and the deep nothingness of the black beyond the horizon. “Not even if Kaylee were here.”

“Let’s just hope she got that message,” Wash said. “Still nothing on comms. I think it might be the antenna. Care to go for a walk and take a look?”

“Sure. Need to stretch my legs anyways,” Mal replied as he walked out the hole and dropped a few feet to the surface. He took this route because he didn’t relish walking through the airlock where five dead people were. He had checked them first when he had come down from the shuttle, hopping that maybe their oxygen tanks had survived three grenade blasts. They hadn’t. Three of the tanks had holes in them, another one had its hose cut, and the last one the helmet faceplate was crack and all the air escaped before they thought of checking the suits. Farnsworth was gone, sucked out the hole when the lower deck depressurized. Mal could now see his body lodged against some rocks and a quick check reveled his tank was damaged and mostly likely empty, too.

He stepped further back from the ship and l