A/N: My job, which had been becalmed (allowing me to finally finish this thing) has gone from "not a breath of wind to ruffle the sails" to "TYPHOON! Batten down the hatches!" this week. In order to clear the decks, I will probably post the remaining three chapters of this story as quickly as I can get to them - today and this weekend, I hope. Y'all please enjoy!

The explosion registered on the Nightrunner's sensors, even though Inara had taken the small scout around to the far side of the planet. Her intent had been to hide out until Jerrode left, or until something else happened to force her from hiding, or to make it safe to emerge. While she waited, she tried to figure out what Jerrode had done to her comms; they weren't working. He'd overridden them remotely, making it impossible for her to contact Mal.

But when the explosion registered, the comms suddenly cleared. The "comms locked" message she'd been getting disappeared, and the ready screen came up.

Inara felt a sudden dread. An explosion, and then Jerrode unlocked her comms?

She couldn't stand it. She had to know.

When she came around the planet, the explosion had faded to a roiling dust cloud on the world's surface. Jerrode's yacht was nowhere to be seen. The battlecruiser was still there. Another ship, a transport nearly as old as Serenity and possibly even more disreputable-looking, waited in a nearby orbit. As Inara watched, Serenity's engines lit briefly, and Mal's ship coasted smoothly into the battlecruiser's docking bay.

"Oh, dear," Inara murmured.

Something lit up on her sensor array. Inara could not tell what the reading was; it didn't appear to be another ship. She fumbled with the unfamiliar controls, finding and bringing up the short-range sensor display, so that she could figure out what she was seeing.

She ran through the options until she found the one that matched. "Sagua. Mal Reynolds, what have you done now?"

Inara touched the controls, clumsily slewing the Nightrunner