The Ghost Machine, page 26
part #4 of Firefly Series
“PROXIMITY ALERT. PROXIMITY ALERT. EVASIVE MANEUVER REQUIRED.”
She picked herself up off the floor. She didn’t know how long she had until Serenity hit Luna Minor. There might not be enough time left for her idea to work.
Still, she had to try.
“Kaylee…”
“Simon?”
Simon was standing in the engine room doorway. He looked as awful as Kaylee felt.
“What’s going on?” he said. “Are we crashing?”
“Not if I can help it. Simon, are you real?”
Strangely enough, he didn’t seem surprised by the question. Kaylee could only assume that whatever she had just been through, Simon had had a similar experience.
“I couldn’t feel this bad and not be real,” he said. “Are you?”
“Real? Yeah. Pretty sure.”
“Oh God, Kaylee. I saw you… I saw…”
“Not now, Simon,” she said. “Right now, you’re going to just have to do as I tell you. It’s a good thing you showed up. What I’m planning is tricky for one. It’ll be a darn sight easier with two.”
“Okay. What do you need?”
Time was precious, and it would have taken too long to explain. Instead, Kaylee simply pointed.
“See that lever over there on your left?”
Simon gestured vaguely.
“No, your other left. That’s the one. You’re gonna throw it. Not yet! When I tell you.”
As Simon grasped the lever handle, Kaylee walked groggily over to the main interface console. She felt thick-headed, operating at about a tenth of capacity. Just putting one foot in front of the other took every ounce of concentration.
She was going to initiate a forced shutdown of the master piloting system. That would free Serenity from the autopilot for approximately five seconds before a failsafe kicked in and the autopilot reassumed control, as it was programmed to. During that brief interval the ship’s energy matrix would be governable from right here in the engine room. Throwing the distribution lever would divert power away from one thruster, rerouting it to the other thruster. This would veer Serenity to one side.
Question was, would the ship change course soon enough, and sharply enough, to avoid plunging into Luna Minor?
Kaylee began logging into Serenity’s mainframe. Her fingers prodded the screen clumsily. She just wanted to sleep.
Her father was beside her, looking over her shoulder.
“Sure this is what you want to do, pumpkin?” he said. “Wouldn’t you rather come home to New Virginia with me? We’ve dealt with Caleb Dahl. He won’t be botherin’ nobody no more.”
Out of the corner of her eye Kaylee saw the shotgun wound in his belly.
She refocused her attention on the screen. She had accessed the mainframe, the ship’s nervous system. Her fingers bounced over the screen as she keyed in the shutdown command.
“PROXIMITY ALERT. COLLISION IMMINENT IN SIXTY SECONDS. EVASIVE MANEUVER URGENTLY REQUIRED.”
“Sixty seconds,” said Aloysius Frye. “That ain’t long at all.”
“Please,” Kaylee said. “Would you pipe down just for a moment?”
Shutdown ready to commence, the screen prompted. Are you sure?
“You bet your sweet ass I’m sure,” Kaylee said, and hit Enter.
“Now,” she said to Simon. “Throw the lever.”
Simon’s head was hanging, his stare vacant.
“Simon, I said throw the gorramn lever!” Kaylee yelled in a voice so strident, she scarcely recognized it as her own. “Do it now!”
He snapped to attention. He tightened his grip on the lever handle. He pulled.
Just in time.
Kaylee heard the shift in the tone from both of the actual thrusters. Through the soles of her feet she felt the output differential between the starboard one and the port one.
An instant later, the autopilot re-engaged. Kaylee knew there was a good possibility that her plan would fail. Serenity would register the power rerouting as an inappropriate action and would correct this apparent error by resuming their previous course.
Then…
“EVASIVE MANEUVER INITIATED,” said the automated voice.
“Smart girl,” Kaylee said softly. “I knew you’d get it.”
“Did it work?” Simon asked.
“I think so.”
“COLLISION IMMINENT IN FORTY-FIVE SECONDS.”
“Then why are we still going to crash?”
“Because we’re dangerously near the surface of Luna Minor,” Kaylee said. “But she’s trying. I know she is. Serenity’s trying hard as she can to get us out of this.”
The ship’s hull was groaning under the sudden, violent strain of the turn. A low vibration ran through her from bow to aft, increasing in intensity.
“Come on, come on,” Kaylee murmured under her breath.
“COLLISION IMMINENT IN THIRTY SECONDS. TWENTY-FIVE SECONDS. TWENTY SECONDS.”
The vibration deepened. Shipboard artificial gravity insulated those inside from sensations of pitching, yawing, and rolling, but nonetheless Kaylee had a clear impression of Serenity slewing sideways, to starboard. It was the spaceship equivalent of a handbrake turn. She pictured Serenity’s underside flaring above Luna Minor’s surface. The ship laboring to bring herself about, away from the moon. Her nose gradually, gradually lifting, striving for the stars.
“FIFTEEN SECONDS. BRACING FOR POSSIBLE IMPACT IS RECOMMENDED.”
Kaylee looked across at Simon. He looked at her.
Her father was gone—not that he had been there in the first place. It was just her and Simon in the engine room, and the ship reorienting herself, battling her own momentum.
Just Kaylee and Simon, their gazes locked, and Serenity valiantly endeavoring to save herself and all those on board.
“EVASIVE MANEUVER INITIATED. COLLISION IMMINENT IN FORTY-FIVE SECONDS.”
No sooner did Mal hear this message than he understood that Kaylee had succeeded. He could feel Serenity shuddering. The ship was turning.
The Reavers closed in on him, fore and aft.
The door to Jayne’s bunk lay just a couple of yards away. Mal dived for it. He plunged through. Clinging to the ladder, he slammed the door shut and pounded the switch to engage the lock.
As he shinned down to the floor, the Reavers began hammering on the door.
Mal crossed the room. Vera was still in the corner, like before.
“COLLISION IMMINENT IN THIRTY SECONDS.”
It was getting harder and harder for him to recall River’s instructions. He dimly remembered her saying that the thing he was looking for, the machine, was beneath the floor.
Was that true? Did Jayne have a secret hiding place under the deck plates?
Who was he kidding? This was Jayne. Of course he did.
Mal scanned the floor. Nothing looked out of the ordinary.
“COLLISION IMMINENT IN TWENTY-FIVE SECONDS.”
Then his eye fell on one deck plate whose screws all showed signs of having been worked on more often than the others. Their cross-head drive slots had fresh, shiny scratches.
Mal searched around for a screwdriver. The Reavers kept hammering on the door.
“COLLISION IMMINENT IN TWENTY SECONDS.”
Jayne’s chest of drawers yielded a screwdriver. Mal set to work.
“COLLISION IMMINENT IN FIFTEEN SECONDS. PREPARATION FOR POSSIBLE IMPACT IS RECOMMENDED.”
It sounded as though the Reavers were about to break in. Mal couldn’t think about that. He couldn’t think about the collision warning either.
“Ignore ’em,” he said to himself, gritting his teeth. Every instinct he had was screaming at him to protect himself, his crew, his ship. “Ain’t real. The Ghost Machine. River’s ‘siren.’ That’s real.”
He worked fast.
The first screw came out. He started on the second.
“COLLISION IMMINENT IN TEN SECONDS. NINE. EIGHT. SEVEN.”
The second screw was out.
“SIX. FIVE. FOUR.”
The warning voice fell silent.
Mal couldn’t help but hold his breath and count down the last three seconds anyway, in his head.
When nothing happened—no impact—he exhaled the breath and started on the third screw.
The door was giving way under the force of the Reavers’ assault. Mal didn’t have to look at it to know this. He could hear it creaking as it began to bend away from its frame.
The third screw was tricky. It didn’t seem to want to come out. Mal’s palms were slippery on the screwdriver handle. He wiped the sweat off on his pants and resumed his efforts.
The screw popped free.
Mal dug his fingertips beneath the deck plate. He levered up the edge and heaved the plate to one side, using the last remaining screw as a hinge to swivel it around.
In the crawlspace below sat the flightcase. The very same gorramn Blue Sun flightcase they had been supposed to transport for Badger. The one Mal thought Jayne had abandoned somewhere out in the badlands of Canterbury.
“Jayne, you fèi fèi de pì yan,” he murmured.
He didn’t know the code number for the flightcase, but he already owned a key that could open most locks.
He drew his Liberty Hammer, shielded his face against debris with his free hand, and shot the lock three times until its clasp sprang open.
Lifting the lid of the flightcase, he found a device nestled within.
The Ghost Machine.
It sat snugly cocooned in its purpose-cut foam insert. It was a matt-black cube, featureless apart from the Blue Sun logo embossed on top and a green operating light that glowed steadily. From it came a buzzing like a swarm of angry hornets.
Mal could not immediately see an on-off switch. He hoisted the Ghost Machine out of the flightcase. It vibrated in his hands.
The Reavers were nearly through the door.
There, on the side. A simple power switch. All he had to do was flick it.
He did.
The operating light continued to glow. The Ghost Machine continued to buzz.
He flicked the switch back and forth a couple more times. No dice.
“Of course it wouldn’t be that easy,” Mal sighed.
Some kind of glitch inside the machine. A short circuit, a bust contact, rendering the power switch irrelevant.
The bunk door broke loose. The Reavers were coming in.
Just as Mal’s gun could open locks, it could also stop machinery.
He emptied the rest of its cylinder into the Ghost Machine.
The final bullet did the job. The light winked out. The buzz was hushed.
Mal threw a glance over his shoulder. He fully expected to see Reavers piling into the room. At the same time, he knew he would not. The notion all at once seemed preposterous. More so when he looked at the door and saw that it was still in place. There were no Reavers on board. Never had been.
Mal sat back on his haunches, closing his eyes.
He caught a flash of a memory that was not a memory. Inara. Their children. Life on Sihnon. It was like a phantom of happiness haunting his brain. He tried to hold on to it. Cling to it. This impossible fantasy. Just a moment more.
It slipped through his fingers. Vanishing. Gone, leaving no trace except a faint, yearning ache.
He sat like that for several minutes, feeling wrung out and almost inexpressibly sad.
Then Wash’s voice sounded over the intercom.
“Ahem. Everyone. This is your pilot speaking. It appears we… we’ve narrowly avoided front-ending ourselves against a moon.” Wash was trying to sound upbeat, but on this occasion it wasn’t coming naturally. “I, ah, I have reassumed full control. I’m not saying it was a close-run thing. All I’ll say is, if spaceships wore underwear, Serenity’d be needing a clean pair of panties right now.”
Mal had words with Jayne in the infirmary. They were not all of them very nice words. Some, indeed, were downright unpretty.
Zoë and Simon were present at the altercation, and for a time they just let Mal rant and rave. So did Jayne, although he put in the occasional protest when he could.
“I realize you’re mighty peeved, Mal,” he said, “but when we get down to it, it weren’t my fault. I didn’t turn the gorramn thing on. I’d’ve knowed if I had.”
“You brought it onto my ship,” Mal said.
“Well, wasn’t that what we came to Canterbury to do?”
“Originally. But then I changed my mind.”
“Even so, you said I was allowed to bring the flightcase aboard if I wanted to badly enough.”
“That… That was just talk. I never for one moment thought you’d actually manage it.”
“Obviously you underestimated me.”
“Still doesn’t change the fact that you sneaked the flightcase on board and stashed it in your bunk without my knowing.”
Jayne’s smile was smug. “You didn’t want what was in it. Why shouldn’t someone else have it?”
“We nearly died, Jayne,” Zoë felt moved to point out. “That device—that Ghost Machine, as Mal says it’s called—it had us in its clutches and it ended up almost killing us.”
“And I keep tellin’ you, weren’t my fault.”
“You’re sure you didn’t turn it on?” Mal said.
“How the hell could I? I couldn’t even open the ruttin’ flightcase. And what would’ve been the point anyway, turning it on? I’ve no idea how that happened.”
Mal mused for a moment, before deciding to come clean. “When I waved Badger, he did mention something…”
“Something…?” Simon prompted.
“About not dropping or jarring the flightcase.”
“But didn’t you do just that, sir?” said Zoë. “When you shot the float-sled it was on?”
“That is indeed true, Zoë. Thank you for pointing that out and saving me the trouble of saying it.”
“And when it was dropped…”
“I guess somehow the mechanism was tripped. Badger said it was delicate. A spark jumped a gap in a circuit, most likely, and the Ghost Machine started up. It would’ve done its job much more quickly if it hadn’t been in the flightcase. That was like putting mufflers on a horse’s hooves to dampen the clip-clop.”
“Hah!” Jayne snorted. “So it was your fault, Mal!”
Mal tipped his head to one side, doing all he could to hide his chagrin. “Let’s agree to call it an unfortunate chain of events, and leave it at that.”
“What you mean is I’m off the hook because you’re letting yourself off the hook too.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
Jayne deliberated. “Guess I can live with that.”
“And speaking of ‘off the hook,’” said Simon, “your vitals are fine, Jayne. I don’t need to keep you for observation anymore. You’re free to go.”
“Like I needed you to tell me that,” Jayne muttered, sliding off the med couch. “I’m going to my bunk, to wave home. Anyone needs me—don’t bother.”
As Jayne left the room, Mal caught Zoë looking at him. There was something in her expression, an unfamiliar suspiciousness. It was almost as though she was wary of him. As though he had done something to earn her mistrust.
“Zoë? Anything you’d like to share?”
She glanced away, looked back. The suspiciousness was gone. Buried.
“Not a thing, sir.”
“We all had those hallucinations, didn’t we? The Ghost Machine makin’ us imagine stuff.”
“That’s right.”
“Care to talk about what yours was like?”
“Can’t hardly remember,” Zoë said.
“Simon?”
Simon shook his head. “Me either.”
They were both telling the truth, Mal was sure. He himself could no longer recall the specifics of the imaginary life in which he had been embroiled by the Ghost Machine. But he had a strong sense of its overall shape. Outline not detail, like an object seen through frosted glass.
Zoë and Simon, Jayne too, had been lost in worlds of their own. Whatever had happened to them there, it was over, gone—but it lingered. Mal wondered if they were glad to be back to reality or if, like him, they still felt a vague pang of loss.
Mal was still asking himself that question later, as the crew gathered around the dining table for lunch. On their faces he saw fleeting shadows of confusion, as if they were still adjusting to things as they were rather than as they weren’t.
He noticed that Simon was being more than customarily solicitous towards Kaylee. She, in turn, seemed in a melancholy mood, not the bright, talkative Kaylee everyone was used to.
Wash was snuggled up to Zoë, hugging her with one arm as though he would never let her go. Jayne, meanwhile, munched his food more contemplatively than was his habit—in the normal course of events, he was more a wolfer than a chewer. Mal asked him if there was any news from his mother and brother on Sycorax. All the big mercenary would say was that everything was fine, although there’d been no improvement in Matty’s condition. After that, he clammed up altogether.
It was River who was acting no differently, and for some reason, to Mal, this seemed anomalous. Solemn, big-eyed, she shunted her food around her plate, making patterns out of it and occasionally eating. She kept directing looks at the other crewmembers, too, as if expecting them to ask her a question.
Nothing untypical about any of that. This was often how River behaved.
However, Mal could not shake the feeling that she was seeking acknowledgment for something.
And that she deserved it, as well, although he couldn’t rightly think why.
He canvassed opinion from the others regarding what to do with the bullet-wrecked remains of the Ghost Machine. Zoë proposed tossing it out of the airlock. The move was enthusiastically seconded by Wash, and a show of hands made it unanimous.
“Glad we’ve all agreed on that,” Mal said, “’cause it so happens I jettisoned the gorramn thing already. It’s so much space trash now.”
“Then why put it to the vote?” Simon asked.
“Gotta give the impression I care what the rest of you think,” Mal replied with a grin.
After the meal was over and the dishes cleared away, Mal drew River aside for a private chat.
