Serenity settled into the good, clean earth of Lazarus, and sank twelve inches on her starboard side.

“Uh ... Mal ...” Hank half-turned then grimaced and stopped. It was his first day back in the saddle, or pilot’s seat, and he was feeling sore.

“Did that feel right to you?” Mal asked, his arms crossed, standing behind him and leaning slightly off centre.

“Rain.” River said, in the co-pilot’s seat with her knees up to her chest and sitting on her hands so she didn’t reach out and usurp Hank’s place. “It has been raining for the past eight days, and the ground is waterlogged.”

Mal peered at the water still lashing down on the bridge windows. “On one side?”

“The stratigraphy of the terrain suggests a spur of igneous rock some eighty centimetres below the surface, which extends ...” She stopped, mainly from the look on Mal’s face. “Yes.”

“The house in any danger?”

River shook her head. “It sits on the rock. The rock I mentioned before. Where the spur comes out under our port side.”

“Okay, captain-dummy-talk aside, you don’t have to be quite so ... River.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “You asked.”

“That I did.” Mal surreptitiously eased his stance, putting his weight onto his right leg to relieve the pressure on his own healing wound. “And you answered.” Frey had offered him one of her old sticks that she used when recovering from what Xavier Wing did to her, but he’d given her one of his looks and she’d subsided, just watching him awkwardly climbing the ladder from their bunk and shaking her head gently.

“Don’t be snarky.”

“ Xiao nu , if I snark, you’ll know it.” He leaned on the back of the pilot’s chair, attempting to look nonchalant. “We likely to sink any further?” he asked Hank.

The pilot studied the screens, keeping a surreptitious eye on River as he did so, knowing she was itching to do it quicker. “Nope,” he finally said. “Looks like we’re okay for the time being. If it rains much more, though, I don’t care what River says about igneous rock – w