Firefly--The Magnificent Nine, page 3
He duly went to the address she gave him, broke in, pulled her louse of a spouse from his bed, and dished out the kind of drubbing nobody would forget in a hurry. He stopped short of breaking any bones, and when he was finished he told Kelvin that if he ever laid a finger on his wife again, or any other woman, he’d get the same, only twice over.
At that point Kelvin spat out three words, along with a lot of blood.
Three words that rocked Jayne down to his boots.
“I ain’t married.”
Jayne knew he wasn’t lying. What reason would a man have to lie after he had just had seven shades of gŏu shĭ beaten out of him? Before, maybe. After? No.
Jayne went straight back to the bar to demand his fee from Temperance and an explanation.
She laughed. “Would you have done as I asked if I’d told you that Kelvin screwed me out of my cut on a deal?”
“Yes. Maybe. But what about that shiner? Who gave you that?”
Temperance Jones touched a forefinger gently to her bruised eye. “Me. Or rather, the door edge I slammed hard into my face to make it look like someone hit me. One or other. Depends how you look at it. Made my sob story credible, didn’t it? Thing is, Kelvin and me, we had a consignment of protein bars which just kinda happened to fall into our laps. No government molecular stamp. Weren’t a mighty huge payday but weren’t nothing to be sniffed at neither. The gorramn hún dàn offloads them onto some bowler-hat Limey kid from Dyton—Weasel or Badger or somethin’—then tells me the Feds caught up with him and confiscated the loot afore he could sell it. Like I wouldn’t find out! You don’t pull that crap with me and not expect repercussions.”
“Well, that there is a sentiment I can get behind,” Jayne said. “What I don’t condone is lying.”
“Honey, I am all about the lying,” said Temperance. Sliding closer to him in the booth they were sharing, she added, “Speakin’ of lying, there’s another kind I’m partial to. Handsome buck like you I reckon’s well built not just in height and breadth. I reckon he’s well built in every department.”
Her hand went where a lady’s hand should not go without permission, but Jayne, if a tad startled, did not ask her to remove it. Least of all because the stroking, caressing motion Temperance started using left him more or less incapable of speech.
He never did get paid for the Kelvin job.
But in the weeks that followed, there were other jobs, ones he and Temperance carried out together. Money came in. He sent most of it back home. The rest he spent freely.
It was the time of his young life. Scrapes with the law, heists, scams, and all of it anchored by his association with Temperance Jones, which was business partnership and torrid affair in equal measure.
There was the bank hold-up on Beylix.
There was the bounty they earned from hauling a people-trafficker off Parth and taking her back to face the music with the crooks on Santo whom she had unwisely stiffed.
There was the theft of military skiff parts from a Blue Sun manufacturing plant on Verbena, which netted the couple the price of a luxury vacation on Pelorum. There they earned a little extra pocket money fleecing wealthy, horny male tourists with a classic “not as single as she looks” con.
There was the Silverhold caper, about which the less said the better, although Jayne had a bullet-wound scar on his triceps as a permanent memento.
And, finally, there was Temperance’s desertion of him, a wound that left a deeper, albeit invisible scar.
***
Jayne winced as he thought of what Temperance Jones had meant to him, the pain her jilting him had caused. It still hurt, deep inside. For some time afterward he had had trouble trusting anyone, women especially. What good was falling for a member of the opposite sex if all she was going to do was betray you eventually? Better to love ’em and leave ’em. That was his philosophy when it came to intimate relationships with the opposite sex, even now. Dip into that pot of water and jump out again quick before it started to boil.
Unbidden, River’s words came back to him. She wasn’t ever yours. She never belonged to you. But you should treat her like she does.
The girl had been doing that witchy hoodoo of hers. Jayne hated that witchy hoodoo of hers. The way she seemed to know things that others couldn’t hear or see, things that others simply couldn’t know.
Always, though, what River said turned out to be spookily accurate, and in this instance she could only have been talking about Temperance. Who, now that Jayne thought about in retrospect, hadn’t ever really been his. There had always been a part of her she kept to herself, out of his reach. They had been together but, even in their most intimate moments, he had sensed her withholding from him. She couldn’t seem to commit herself to their relationship as fully as he wished she would and as wholeheartedly as he himself did. Maybe it was the age gap, the distance and disconnect that those few extra years of maturity gave her.
Jayne sat in front of the videoscreen brooding for several minutes. A part of him wanted to turn Temperance down. Send her a wave back telling her to go hump herself. That’d learn her.
But, for all that, he already knew what his answer was going to be.
You should treat her like she does.
He snatched a rifle from the small arsenal he kept in a wall recess above his bed, concealed behind a strip of fabric. Shouldering the gun, a Callahan full-bore auto-lock, he swung up the ladder to re-join his comrades in the cargo bay.
“Best not be firin’ that thing in here, Jayne,” said Mal, “in case it has the unfortunate by-product of you ending up full of bullet-holes.”
Mal’s gun hand twitched beside the pistol holstered at his hip, known as the Liberty Hammer. Likewise Zoë’s gun hand strayed towards the cut-down Mare’s Leg lever-action carbine repeater strapped to her thigh. Jayne was a loose cannon at the best of times, and to see him come storming into the cargo bay brandishing his rifle was a cue for extreme caution.
Jayne glanced down at the weapon in his arms as if he’d forgotten he was carrying it.
“Oh, hey, no.” He lowered the chunky customized rifle to the deck.
Mal and Zoë relaxed—although not completely.
“No, this is just… Look, I got something I gotta ask you people. Kind of a favor. Now, you can turn me down, or…”
“Or you’ll shoot us?” said Simon.
“No, Doc Smart-Britches.” Jayne looked about as uncomfortable as any of them had ever seen him, even more uncomfortable than when he had discovered he was idolized as a hero by the mudders of Canton on Higgins’ Moon. “I was going to say, ‘Or I’ll go it alone.’ I don’t got any right to ask you to accompany me. But there’s people who need aidin’, and I figure we’re the ones best placed to offer that aid.”
“There money in this?” Mal enquired.
“Nope. It ain’t paid work as such. But there’s Vera.” Jayne nodded at the rifle at his feet. “She’s yours, Mal, if you’ll agree to come with me. And the rest of you, you’ll get equal shares of whatever credits I got stashed away, which is maybe a bigger sum than you might reckon.” This was pure sophistry, since Jayne suspected they thought he had next to nothing stashed away. And they would be correct in that assumption.
“Vera?” Mal could not hide his disbelief. “You’d be willin’ to part with Vera?”
“If it comes to it, yeah.” Jayne looked pained but resolute.
“But you love that damn gun. More’n life itself, some’d say.”
“Should show I’m in earnest, then. Mal, this ain’t a thing I’d do lightly, comin’ to you cap in hand.”
“Don’t see no cap. Nor no butt-ugly woolly hat either.”
“Figure of speech.”
“I did realize.”
“I got a friend in need, you see.”
“This friend called Temperance McCloud by any chance?”
Jayne nodded. “Old friend. She’s in trouble.”
Briefly Jayne summarized Temperance’s message—Coogan’s Bluff, water rights, Elias Vandal, and so on—omitting any mention of his former close relationship with her.
“Well now,” said Mal. “You already told us it ain’t paid work.”
“You’ll all still get some platinum.” Just not a lot.
“And,” Mal continued, “paid work is pretty much a priority right about now. Food stores are runnin’ low.”
“Ammo stores too,” said Zoë.
“The compression coil in the steamer keeps acting up,” said Kaylee. “It wouldn’t hurt to buy a brand new one instead of some reconditioned piece of junk that’s been around the ’verse a couple hundred times.”
Mal glared at her.
“I’m just saying, Captain.”
“The ship’s infirmary isn’t exactly abounding with medical supplies,” Simon chipped in. “We burn through weaves and blood plasma like there’s no tomorrow. If only you people would refrain from getting wounded quite so often.”
“We’ll make a start on that,” Jayne said, balling a hand into a fist. “Right after I’ve done with you.”
Simon blinked but kept his nerve. “There could be a little less gunplay around here, that’s all I’m suggesting.”
“It sounds to me,” said Shepherd Book, “as though gunplay is very much in the offing on Thetis. Isn’t that so, Mr. Cobb?”
“Mightn’t be out of the question.”
“Gunplay and more besides. A savage like this Elias Vandal isn’t the sort simply to turn tail the moment he runs into opposition. Your friend Miz McCloud must know she is asking a lot.”
“I would say she was asking for an army,” said Inara. “And, with the best will in the world, the handful of us are hardly that.”
“Ain’t your fight anyways, Inara,” said Jayne. “Thetis ain’t no place for a Companion.”
“It’s up to a Companion to decide where is and isn’t suitable for a Companion. At House Madrassa we were taught techniques for fending off aggressive clients. I also know how to use a gun. And a sabre for that matter, as Mal well knows.”
“We’ve done crazier stuff,” said Zoë.
“But not stupider,” said Mal.
“I’d debate that,” said Simon.
Book nodded. “But sometimes there’s a moral rightness in stupidity. Ever hear of a holy fool?”
“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” said Mal, patting the air with both hands. “How come everyone’s started talkin’ like this is a foregone conclusion? Like we’re already halfway to Thetis? Nobody’s going nowhere ’less I say so, and I ain’t said so.”
“But Mal,” said Inara, “if what Jayne’s telling us is true, we can’t turn our backs on these people.”
“Turning my back on a bunch of folks I’ve never met is precisely what I aim to do,” Mal replied curtly. “I’m sorry for Jayne’s lady friend and all, but we don’t have a nag in this race. All gettin’ mixed up in this will do is bring a passel of trouble down on our heads. This Vandal individual’s bad enough, but we face off with him and raise a whole ruckus, we could draw Alliance attention, and you don’t need me to tell you that that’d be a whole heap worse. More to the point, it could be a trap. Come on, I can’t be the only one thinkin’ that. Alliance have pulled tricks just as sneaky in the past. Old flame of Jayne’s pops up outta nowhere, flutters her eyelashes…”
“Never said she was an old flame.”
“Didn’t have to. She wasn’t, we wouldn’t even be havin’ this conversation.” Mal’s jaw was set firm. “You all need to remember one crucial fact. Last I checked, I’m captain of this ship. And I’m sayin’ we ain’t going to Thetis and sticking our noses where they don’t belong, and that’s final.”
Mal spun on his heel and strode out of the cargo bay.
“Sir…” Zoë began, in vain.
Kaylee leaned in towards Book confidingly. “You know how I sometimes call him Captain Tightpants? Occasions like this, I wonder whether Captain Tightass wouldn’t be more accurate.”
The Shepherd feigned pious disapproval. “I would call that comment highly disrespectful.” His scowl eased. “If I didn’t agree with it.”
Zoë patted Jayne’s shoulder. “Leave this with me, Jayne. I’ll go talk with him.”
Jayne tried to say, “Thank you.” What came out was a grunt that sounded like, “Okay.”
Inara moved to intercept Zoë. “Listen. With your approach, Zoë, you can sometimes back Mal into a corner, and that’s where he becomes least receptive. I like to think I’m a little less blunt. No offense.”
“None taken,” said an offended Zoë.
“I know you two go way back. But he and I don’t have your shared history. So it’s less complicated for us.”
“Keep telling yourself that, Inara.”
The Companion gave one of her gracious smiles, something she often did to deflect barbs. “Can I at least have first try?”
Zoë mulled it over, then made an ushering gesture. “Ladies first.”
“Mal?” said Inara, entering Mal’s bunk in a shimmer of flowing patterned silk and a glitter of elaborate jewelry. She was so innately graceful, she made even an everyday action like clambering down a ladder seem a gift to the beholder.
“Am I behind on the rent?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“When I’m behind on the rent, you can enter unasked.”
“Oh. That’s a thing I said to you once. Now you’re using it back against me. Clever.”
“Weren’t it?” Mal leaned against the washbasin, folding his arms. “I guess you’ve come to talk me round. The crew thought, ‘Send in the Companion. Her wiles’ll work on him.’”
“I volunteered. Zoë was all set to tongue-lash you into seeing sense.”
“So you’re gonna use your tongue some other way. One of them fancy Companion tricks they taught you.”
Inara did not rise to the bait. Mal Reynolds was never more ornery than when he was under pressure. Especially emotional pressure.
Calmly she said, “You know deep down that we have to go to Thetis. You’ve made up your mind. You just can’t admit it. Not even to yourself.”
“And here was I thinkin’ it was River who was queen of not making sense.” He bowed elaborately, twirling a hand at his forehead like some minion to royalty. “Your Majesty.”
“That woman, Temperance, must be desperate if she’s reaching out to Jayne.”
“Now there I can agree with you. Anyone who reaches out to Jayne is by definition desperate.”
“There’s obviously some kind of bad blood between them. You can see it in Jayne’s eyes. Whoever Temperance McCloud is, whatever she was to him, she did something that hurt him. He hasn’t recovered. Now, out of the blue, she’s back, and Jayne doesn’t know how to deal with it. Yet it speaks volumes that, in spite of everything, she’s been able to touch something inside him, something noble.”
“You’re still talking about Jayne Cobb, right?”
“Yes.”
“Only you used the word noble.”
“He has nobility. Buried deep but it’s there. And the same is true of another man I know.”
“You know a lot of men.”
Inara took a couple of steps across the narrow room. She wore a fragrance that was like some sort of floral incense—could be it was the incense she regularly burned in her shuttle—sweet, with just the right amount of sharp notes. Kaylee was forever saying how great Inara smelled. Mal could not disagree with that. He associated Inara’s perfume with everything that was right and perfect. Unconsciously, unwillingly, he half-closed his eyes and breathed it in.
“Mal,” she said, laying a hand softly, tentatively, on his chest. “Jayne is your friend. He’s stood by you through countless tough situations.”
“Ratted me out in a number of ’em, too.”
“But when it counts, you know you can rely on him.”
“Rely on him to do what’s best for Jayne Cobb.”
“This rescue operation, or whatever it turns out to be, means a lot to him. It took courage for him to stand before us all and humble himself the way he did. All that pride he had to swallow. Can you imagine how hard that was? I reckon you can. I’ve seen you do it more than once.”
“This still ain’t winnin’ me over, Inara.”
“No? How about this, then? Not so long ago there were those whores who needed our help. My friend Nandi. The Heart of Gold bordello. Ring any bells? You didn’t need much convincing to step up then. The situation on Thetis isn’t so different. Maybe it’s on a larger scale but the essentials are the same: big, bad aggressor taking advantage of the vulnerable. And if there’s one thing I know about Mal Reynolds, he hates aggressors, whether it’s gangsters or the Alliance.”
“You say that like gangsters and the Alliance are two different things.”
“Exactly. You can’t stand them, so you stand up to them.”
“If you think I’m just gonna—”
“I think, Mal, that you can do the right thing, and you will. Usually you need time to get to that point, but time’s something we don’t have much of. How far is it to Thetis?”
“From here? Three days’ flyin’. Two if we push the engine to its limit. Kaylee’ll be cussin’ every step of the way, but two’s doable.” Mal said this, not able to believe he was even considering making the journey.
“According to Temperance, Coogan’s Bluff doesn’t have long. If we’re to get there in time to make a difference, we’d have to leave straight away. So you need to decide now. No pondering. No leaving it to your conscience to catch up with the rest of us. Listen to what’s here.”
She pressed her palm more firmly onto his chest, in such a way that she had to be able to feel his heartbeat through his ribcage.
Mal looked deep into her dark eyes and hated himself for thinking how beautiful they were. Inara would be leaving the ship soon. She had told him that was her intention and he had no doubt she meant it. And this had come just when he’d finally screwed up the nerve to try to tell her how he felt about her. Now any interaction between him and Inara bore a tang of bitterness—bitterness directed at himself, mostly.
