Part Five

(River):

"Okay, let's see." I adjusted the computer controls, then smiled as a little numeric display started counting backwards. (It was one of those primitive readouts with seven straight bars in a figure-eight pattern for each digit.) "Little over two minutes now."

"Cool!" Inara decided, looking out at the front window of Serenity. Simon nodded in agreement, but he was looking straight at me, and after a moment, he reached down to casually rest his hand on my shoulder.

"What's cool?" Jayne said, poking a little bit of his head into the room. "Two minutes?"

Simon sighed just slightly. "Until we pass the orbit of Londinium again, from the inner side. It'll mark the end of our close approach with the sun, and the true beginning of our climb back up the gravity well to Hera, in a way."

"Well, 'climb' isn't exactly the right word, err... or at least, it might convey the wrong impression," I pointed out. "You can think of the whole trip like a crazy V-shaped roller coaster, more or less. We've fallen down the one side and looped around the bottom, and are proceeding back up the other side at pretty much top speed. That'll reduce as we get further out of the core of the 'Verse, but still it's not like we're going to have to push ourselves upwards. In fact, soon I'll have to start retro-thrusting - firing the engines to slow us down so that we don't crash into Hera fast enough to dig out a crater."

"Because we were thrusting downwards as we fell, right?" Inara said, and I nodded. "Well, whether we make it out alive or not, this has really been something."

"Oh, come on, Inara," I told her. "All the really dangerous part has already finished. Seriously. The rest of our course is pretty much free of established space travel lanes and mapped out debris fields."

"Imagine how much that reassures me," Inara shot back. "Ever since I got onto this ship, it's been the un-established and the poorly mapped that seems to get us all in trouble."

"Umm..." Well, there was no denying that she ha