Coles went to the med bay himself to check on his two guests. He touched the pad that cleared the one-way window, and looked in on them, where they lay side by side on two of the medical bunks. They were sleeping, and might have been dead, except that their faces were uncovered, and the monitors over their bunks showed strong vitals, at least as nearly as Coles could tell. He frowned at the readings on the Washburn woman's monitors; there were some indicators there that Coles couldn't parse. And of course, none of the readings could tell him what the pair were doing here. Last he'd known, Mal Reynolds had his crew together on Serenity, trying to deliver Coles's, er, puppy. It couldn't be a good sign that Reynolds' first mate and his ship's doctor were worlds away aboard an Alliance battlecruiser.

But he didn't dare ask them what they were doing here. Just having them aboard was a terrible risk, and Coles was walking a wire every instant. The steps he had taken to obscure their identities were tenuous; a wrong word from either of them could bring down the whole house of cards.

Dr. Vincent stepped up beside him. "I hope I never come up against whatever did that damage," the doctor said.

"How are they?" Coles asked.

"They'll recover," Vincent said. "But they were very lucky. A few more seconds' exposure to whatever-that-was, and I don't think I would be able to say the same." He held out a datapad to Coles.

Coles took the datapad and glanced at it. Medical reports on Tam and Washburne, much of it irrelevant -- just a matter of the medical staff being thorough. He clicked through to the identifications, and suppressed a sigh of relief. The switch had worked. Simon Tam might look just like Simon Tam from the fugitive bulletins, but his DNA scan revealed him to be someone else entirely.

Vincent glanced at the datapad. "Strange, that," he commented. "Why have these two been altered to look just like dead criminals?"

"Dead criminals have their uses, Doctor," Coles