A legendary officer of the St. Albans Northwest Mounted Police is mysteriously murdered. Bent on finding the killer, his son seeks passage on Serenity to Beaumonde, where he meets a big-city police detective who reluctantly joins him in his search....only to find out that Serenity's crew has their own special interest in finding the culprit.

X-posted to AO3.

If you're going nuts wondering how I plan to cross Firefly with Due South, all I ask is that you read on - and join me in specially thanking my fellow Browncoat-DueSer ButterflyGhost, for both beta-reading and bouncing ideas around like beach-basketballs!

(To translate the Chinese phrases, hover your mouse over the phrase for the translation to pop up as alt-text.)

Cold, white, and clouded, the unforgiving landscape sprawled around the old man as far as his eyes could see. It mattered not where he walked, where he stood, where he went to sleep or where he awoke - nothing but rugged mountains, broad plains, and frozen lakes, all covered with an impenetrable blanket of snow to greet him when he reopened his eyes. He'd spent all fifty-seven of his years on this planet, and even he questioned why people chose to live on St. Albans, knowing that the terraforming process had gone so far awry as to plunge the small world into perennial freeze. Some came to get away from the heavy hand of the Alliance, no doubt. Others came to hide from federal law enforcement, even less doubt. Hardly the concern of the local police - whose forces he had served for the past three and a half decades of his life - as long as they kept to the letter of the local laws, they somehow eked out a living trying to find new and inventive ways for vegetation to survive in the harsh wintry conditions. By and large, St. Albans was a mining planet, but its more daring inhabitants made a go of living on the surface, many of them using the ubiquitous snow to their advantage to melt, distill, purify,