Disclaimer: Firefly belongs to Joss Whedon.

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CHECK MATE: White pawn takes black queen.

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“Tamade!”

Matron Lenna Jeffries almost never swore these days. The Corporation frowned on senior staff using coarse language. So she had worked hard to keep the colourful phrases from the past from escaping her lips and had been rewarded by a steady rise up the corporate ladder. But sometimes the only appropriate response was a curse.

And the go se was certainly piling up this evening. Two ward security men were dead in the corridor and here was her best nurse, unconscious and bleeding from the temple under the girl's bed. But it was worse than that. The girl was gone. And not just any girl. The girl. The one that was only half-finished.

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The torrential, incessant rain had seeped through his clenched fingers, turning the scrap of paper they held into mush. Just as well really, since the men who'd given it to him had ordered him to memorize the information it carried and then destroy it. As if his life depended on it. Somehow, he couldn't bring himself to do it. It was as if this little piece of paper was a talisman, a guarantee that this time he really would succeed in rescuing her. Proof that it wasn't just him against the monolithic power of the Alliance. That there were still good people out there.

Shielding his eyes against the beating raindrops, Dr Simon Tam – until this afternoon a senior trauma surgeon at the best hospital on Osiris – scanned the street in vain for any sign of his new 'friends'. His face was pale and thin, his eyes by turns wary and haunted. He'd certainly chosen a good day for it, he thought bitterly as the cold water droplets trickled down the back of his shirt. The meterology contractors would probably never work again after today's downpour. People on Core planets demanded predictability from all their services, including the weather.

Suddenly he thought he glimpsed them, emerging from a bar at the top end of the street. There was something