A shudder ran through them, and if Kaylee didn't know better, she'd have thought that the result of the doomsaying instead of the ship. Someone was trying to steal Serenity out from underneath them. She felt the engine object like a skipped heartbeat as they flubbed the start-up sequence, and then she wasn't shaking so much from fear anymore but outrage. The gall of them, touching the helm controls, sitting in Wash's chair, mucking about with the workings. Now they'd gone too far, couldn't just leave them alone.

Zoë waved them back into the passenger commons while she and Jayne covered for them. Their guns glinted, distracting and dangerous. There'll be more shootin' soon , Kaylee thought. River in a jumper dress, Kaylee in her overalls, Inara in silks, Jayne in a t-shirt, Zoë in her usual leather vest, not a stitch of armour and a few pistols and rounds between them against a fully armed SWAT team.

"Please, Zoë. Let me go out there. It will buy you time," Inara argued. Maybe she wasn't thawed out all the way. Kind of bedraggled, wasn't making sense and didn't have all her usual reserve. There was her grace though, all manners and gestures like a storybook princess in golden robes asking help to slay some monster.

Zoë gritted her teeth, frazzled and frizzy-haired and the soldier looking like she was trying to keep her focus and not slap the other woman. "They'll just kill you."

Once the purplebellies had River they were all dead. The shadows cast by the scaffolding and superstructure around the sparse-lit lounge seemed to hide all kinds of trouble. Some of the shapes were moving even, soldiers around the nook at the top of the stairs closing in.

Simon was talking to his sister, soothing, looking kind and handsome and wonderful but River didn't seem all there until she snapped at him. "It'll be all right, Simon!" River said, unconvincingly grumpy, then her face cleared. "Trust