Part H

"Okay." Mal sat back in the armchair, moaned softly, and then fixed Inara with a hard stare. "Talk me through it again."

"Mal?"

"I need to know that you understand it for yourself."

Inara sighed a bit huffily, but nodded and continued. "Jorge's crew on the 'Santiago' have already broken atmosphere, heading right this way. We're not sure on the details, but this head-on dive approach seems to suggest that they have some hardware that's meant to get them past whatever anti-air defences the Alliance is counting on to prevent a fly-by-night robbery. Wash and Zoe's guess is that they won't be stupid enough to fire on the main house or the south wing. Casualties would be too high here at the central building, and in the south, they'd risk crushing the engine that they've come for."

"Right," Mal agreed, keeping one eye on his chrono.

"So they're probably going to land on the roof of the South wing, or next to it, and go in, heavily armed, from there. We can't outfight them ourselves, so if we want to get the thing, we're going to have to beat them to it, and use their approach as an extra distraction. When we move, we move in two teams. You and Simon are going to go south, and slip through one of the supposedly blocked-off passages through to the South wing, timing it so that you go through there just as the Santiago approaches the building. I'm to meet up with Kaylee, get out via the West entrance to the main house, get my shuttle, and land it outside a door on the southeast corner of the South wing."

"Yep," Mal said, smiling at her.

"Kaylee's got the blanking routine with old footage set up to cover all of our movements on the security cameras, but because we're going to have to move early, and we don't want to create an enormous diversion right away, there's a chance that they'll notice that something's wrong with the cameras. To cover things as simply as possible with little chance of an escalation out of hand, Simon has got something prepared that will cause a little bit of disruption