Firefly: "The Race"

Disclaimer: If I weren't just a poor college student and could finance the series myself, I would, but I can't. So all I can do is just play around in Joss Whedon's 'verse. Also, I don't know a lick of Chinese so I haven't bothered to put the translations because they're probably horribly wrong. If it were Japanese or Latin, well, that'd be another story...

Episode 3 in my second season of Firefly: The crew of Serenity finally take a vacation on a pleasure world. Things look fine, until they uncover a plot that threatens Inara's friend, and are forced to enter Serenity into a race to save her.

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Captain Malcolm Reynolds stepped up onto the flight deck of his Firefly-class transport, Serenity. Kyo Nagiama, the ship's pilot and an old war buddy, sat in the pilot's chair. He was steering very lazily, with a slouched posture and one hand at the dip in the U-shaped control yoke. Wasn't Mal's way of flying, but he knew Kyo could snap alert in an instant.

"How're we doin'?" Mal asked Kyo, bracing himself on the upper bulkhead and the back of Kyo's chair. Rather than looking at the scopes himself, he choose to peer out into the black of space, which wasn't so black at the moment. Three planets were rapidly growing larger in their field of vision, spread out in a loose sort of triangle, with a moon swaying uncertainly in the center thanks to the gravitational pull of the three large planets.

"Smooth," said Kyo, reaching out with his left hand to turn on the Cortex connection. Mal looked down at the round, green screen as information flickered across it. "There were three Alliance cruisers in the area, but they got called off on an emergency signal."

Mal's jaw involuntarily clenched as he looked at the Chinese characters that scrolled by the screen. Ever since Wu Yo a few days back, Mal had an increasing dread of Alliance warships in orbit. It was one thing to know that Alliance played by the rules, but in the last few months th