My Own Kind of Freedom

Chapter 14 My Own Kind of Clever

It wasn’t over yet.

There was no way to know what was coming, how it was coming, or when, but it wasn’t over.

That had always been the problem with the gorram Alliance: they just couldn’t leave a man alone. And they kept coming. They’d found a way to put a man on the inside, but he’d been exposed, making him useless; so now they’d come up with a new way.

He turned around, facing out at his pond, and watched the ducks.

Now that was the question, really: why had they let their man blow his cover? The Alliance had never been sneaky: just big, clunky, big, determined, and big. It rolled over you, it didn’t try to outfox you. If they had pulled their man, it wasn’t a trick, it was because they needed him for something else.

Question one: What was the something else?

Question two: Did he actually need to know?

The ducks swam in single file, around and around the pond. Occasionally the mother would turn her head, and was maybe giving out an instructional quack. He should get some microphones installed out there, so he could hear them. Duck sounds would be pleasant, from time to time.

A direct attack?

Probably not; that isn’t how agents work. But then, there were things going on that he hadn’t figured out, yet. He needed to plant someone in with them so he could find out. He’d have done it long ago, if he’d had any idea they were interested in him. But that was for later; for now, he’d put his security forces on alert, just to be safe.

And that ship, Serenity. It was a wild card. Had they slipped off? No, he just didn’t think so. If they couldn’t be found in the sky, it was more likely they’d…

Yes, gorram it. They’d landed. They’d come back. Not the Alliance, but Sergeant Malcolm Reynolds, that was what had been bothering him all day.

Yep. No doubt about it: he needed his security forces on high alert, and he needed to be hunting for that gorram ship. The only way to stop someone like Reynolds was to get to him first, and hit him hard.

He pushed a button on his desk, and began giving the necessary orders.

“Okay,” he said. “Kit, let’s see those plans.”

The fed nodded and unrolled a sheaf of paper on the table.

“Here are the entrances,” he said, pointing to five spots, “plus ground floor windows here, here, here, here, and here.”

“Where do we go in?” said Jayne.

“We don’t know yet, Jayne” said Mal. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. You know, make a plan and all that.”

Kit continued, “The perimeter guards are here and here, a pair each, and another two pair making a circuit, covering every point every two minutes. Any given spot might be out of sight of live guards for thirty seconds, max, though there are still cameras.”

“Looked at where?”

“Guard station in the house, here, and also in the security office, though there’s a fair chance no one in the security office is bothering to look at them.”

“Can’t count on that,” said Mal. “Sakarya’s probably putting them on alert.”

“Think he knows we’re coming?” said Kit.

“I’d count on it.”

“All right.”

“How are they armed?”

“The guards have rifles, sidearms, and shockrods. The rest of the force on duty, about forty a shift, are quartered here, between the house and the security office. They can deploy and be anywhere in the house or on the grounds within about three minutes after the alert is given.”

Wash said, “Are they Locals, or private security?”

“Both,” said Mal and Kit at the same time.

“Forty,” said Jayne.

Kit nodded.

“Let me think. Forty of them, four of us. That’s… uh, more of them.”

“Can’t get one past you, Jayne,” said Mal.

“So, we blow up the barracks?”

“Don’t think that’s like to happen,” said Mal.

“Why not?”

Zoë said, “Jayne, we’re not going to blow up forty Locals. We’re not at war with the Locals. The Alliance won’t take to us blowing up forty Locals. They’ll notice. They’ll—”

“The Alliance? Now we’re worrying about the Alliance? If we were worried about the Alliance, why did we invite a gorram fed to this party?”

“In fact,” said Kit, “it’s the gorram fed inviting you to his party, and he isn’t entirely sure why he’s doing it, but he promises you it’ll be a bad idea to blow up forty Locals.”

Jayne said, “Not if we start out by blowing up the fed.”

“Jayne,” said Mal. “Your question’s been answered.”

“All right,” said the big man. “So what do we do?”

“We could give up,” said Wash. “Surrender. Throw ourselves on their mercy and beg forgiveness. Maybe if we sound really sincere—”

“How do they get word?” said Mal.

“Hmm?” said Kit.

“If the manor gives an alarm, how does the barracks get it?”

“Oh.” Kit frowned. “I have the frequency, if you’re thinking we could jam it.”

“Was thinking that. They have a backup system?”

“Don’t know.”

“Could you jam it, Wash?”

“Yep. Course, someone figures it out, he could work around it.”

“How long would that take?”

“Depends how good he is. Thirty seconds? Five minutes? An hour? There isn’t any way to know.”

“All right. Let’s say we can keep them reinforcements out. We still need to get past the guards on the perimeter, and in the house.”

Jayne said, “Can we, like, shoot somebody? Or we just going in waving our guns around hoping to scare ’em to death?”

“Disarm them and immobilize them,” said Mal. “Defend yourself if you have to. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I’d rather get past as many of ’em as we can.”

“You could take the shuttle,” said Wash.

First Jayne, now Wash. Sometimes his crew could be really dense. “We’re going to take the shuttle, Wash,” he said patiently. “The point is, how to find the right place to set it down, and then the right way in, and then how we—”

“No, I mean, you could take the shuttle all the way.”

“I don’t get what—”

Wash stabbed at a place on the plan. “That’s the office, right?”

“Yes…”

“So, take the shuttle right in.”

“Wash, the windows are only—”

“Niao zai the windows. Look at the plans. The walls are eight centimeters thick where the studs are, and hollow everywhere else, and you said the place is built of cedar. I could land on top of his desk, if you can tell me where the desk is.”

No one spoke for a long moment.

“You know,” said Kit, “that’s not a half-bad idea.”

“Wash, can you really bring us through a wall?” said Mal. “With you flying, there will be five in the shuttle. It’s going to be sluggish.”

“He can do it,” said Zoë before Wash could answer. Wash just nodded.

“How much weight will the floor take?”

“What does the shuttle weigh?”

“With five of us in it? About eight tons.”

` “What about getting out again?” said Mal.

Wash shrugged. “Spin, go out the way we came. If the floor will hold.”

Kit frowned and looked over the plan some more. “Reinforced cedar. Eight tons distributed over…I think we’ll be all right.”

“There’s something to be said for it,” said Mal. “You can’t figure they’re looking for it. Kit?”

“I’m good with it.”

“Jayne?”

“What, smashing through the wall of a guy’s house? What part of that could I not like?”

“Okay, sounds like a plan. Kit, what do you know about timing?”

“You mean, when are we likely to find him sitting at his desk?”

“Yes.”

“He does most of his work early morning, or early afternoon.”

“What is local time right now?”

“Almost eleven,” said Kaylee.

Kit said, “I’ve got some numbers. Give me a few minutes to run them, and I’ll give you an ideal time.”

“Good. Wash, can you show Kaylee how to jam that signal?”

“Easy. I can set it up so she just has to hit the power.”

“Good, then. What else?”

“Sir,” said Zoë. “What are we going to do when we get in there?”

Kill him, he thought. “We’ll see,” he said.

He sat on his bunk, and was not entirely happy with the state of the ’verse.

It was a hell of a time for Vera to be locked away in a gorram storage locker. And all of his other hardware with her. All he had were two pistols, one with three spare magazines, one with four. And with this sort of work, a rifle could make all the difference.

On the other hand, if they were all killed crashing through the wall, it wouldn’t matter what sort weapons he was carrying. That was comforting.

He stripped, cleaned, and re-assembled both weapons, enjoying going through the motions his hands knew so well.

That was comforting, too.

But if things went wrong—

No, that was stupid. Something like this, how could things not go wrong? The only questions were, how many things would go wrong, and which were they? And that sort of figuring, he knew, was not his particular skill.

He put the spare magazines for the Century Marauder VI in his right-hand coat pocket, and the ones for the Devtrex SI-4 in his left. Right Century, he repeated. Right Century. It’s the right century. Heh. That’s funny. The Marauder went into his belt, the SI into his left-hand pants pocket. He’d use the Marauder first, of course. They built a good weapon; you could drive nails with the butt, then drive more nails with the barrel, and you’d still have a weapon that would fire clean and hit what you aimed at. The Devtrex, well, it would fire most of the time, if it was kept clean.

Mal had a plan. The Fed had a plan, too. Okay, then. Fine. If they landed alive, and got out of the shuttle alive, he’d just start shooting, and stop when everything in sight was dead.

There, he thought. Now I have a plan, too.

It’s all in the details, he reminded himself.

He was looking over the shuttle, studying the position of the seats, and the distance from each to the door. There was the door control itself, and that’s where someone would be standing to operate it. Therefore—

Gorram it. There were too many variables; too many unknowns; too many things that could go, if not wrong, then at least different. And that would be plenty to upset any plan he could come up with more general than, take any opportunity to make things work out right.

He checked his sidearm.

In the seven years since the end of the war, he had never fired a shot except at the range; had never come close to needing to. And now…

He’d always thought of himself as a plodder.

There were field agents who could go into situations where there was liable to be shooting and stabbing and close escapes. And there were field agents who could appear at a crime scene and put together what had happened like rolling a vid. He had never thought of himself as either of those types: he went in, took as much time as was needed to establish a good cover, took as much time as needed to gather the evidence, assembled the information in neat, clear, and precise reports, and then, if necessary, testified in court.

You don’t fire up an ASREV to jump from the core to the border. You don’t pull the pin on a grenade to tap into someone’s Cortex transmission. You don’t use a tranq-gun to search a database for signs of tax fraud.

He was a tool of the Alliance, and he was fine with that; but he was the wrong tool for this job. Only, if he didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done. And if it didn’t get done, he’d not only wasted eight months of his life, but he’d blown the first assignment he’d ever actually cared about.

Gorram those rutting bastards to hell. Why couldn’t they have just let him do his job, instead of bollixing the whole thing just to rip over some poor girl who had yet to be even suspected of a crime?

He couldn’t save her, of course. The Special Deputies were coming, and he knew something of how they worked. They didn’t get stopped. All he could do, as a salve for his conscience, was to try to complete his mission before they arrived. Once they were here, he wouldn’t be able to…

Now there is an interesting thought. I wonder if that could work.

He looked around the shuttle again, and considered.

He took a close look at the comm equipment.

Yes, it just might work.

He left the shuttle and went off in search of River Tam. When he knocked on the door of her room, she said, “Come in, Agent Merlyn.” The captain was right, she was a bit “creepifying.”

He said, “River Tam… may I call you River?”

She nodded, watching him closely, as if he were a peculiar object; not something to fear, but something to study. He wasn’t entirely certain he liked it.

“I have a question for you. Do you already know, or shall I ask it?”

“Both,” she said.

“You said they’d be showing up in the afternoon. Can you tell me more precisely—”

“They’ll hit lower atmo, near enough to pick up on Serenity’s gear, at 13:18 local time, which will put them seventeen point three minutes from nearest landfall.”

“Thank you.”

He stood up and got out, because, gorram it, she was creepifying. He went off to find the pilot. Then he had to talk to the captain, now that he knew what to tell him.

“And that,” he said, “ought to be all you need. When it’s time, hit this. If that light goes green, it’s working.”

“What if it doesn’t go green?” asked Kaylee.

“Then it isn’t working.”

“But what do I do?”

“Call me.”

“You’re going to be able to tell me how to fix it while you’re in the middle of landing a shuttle through a wall inside a building?”

“No, but I’ll know to panic.”

“Wash, are you worried?”

“Worried? No, not at all. So scared my sphincters have slammed shut, but not worried.”

“Wash—”

“Kaylee, I know you want me to say something reassuring. And believe me, I’d love to. But this is the most insane thing we’ve ever done. And what with one thing and another, that bar has been set pretty high.”

Kaylee sat down in the co-pilot’s seat, and turned away. Her shoulders shook.

“Kaylee—”

“I just don’t want you to die. All of you. And I don’t want you to die when I’m not there. What am I supposed to do if you all get killed in there? And what are you doing it for?”

“Why did you say you were in?”

“Because… I don’t know. I just did. I am. I’m not going to say I’m not in.”

“Well, if things go bad, I’ll bet River could learn enough to fly Serenity out of here.”

“Wash!”

“I know. That isn’t what you mean.”

“You’ll be in touch, won’t you?”

“Of course I will.”

“If things get bad, will you let me know?”

“Why?”

“Cuz.”

“Kaylee, what are you going to do?”

“If you die, I can put River and Simon into the other shuttle and… what do you care, anyway? You’ll be dead.”

Wash stared at her for a moment. He knew what she meant to do; the question was, how to talk her out of it?

“Actually,” said someone whose voice he didn’t recognize at first, “I have an idea for something that would be much more useful, and leave you alive at the end of it. Maybe us, too.”

Wash looked up and saw the Alliance agent, just entering the bridge.

“What are you doing up here?”

“Looking for you. You’re Hoban Washburne, right?”

“Wash,” he said. “And what were you looking for me for?”

“Like I said, I have an idea.”

“I’ll have to ask the captain, whatever it is.”

“How about if you listen first, and then decide what you want to do about it. And you—Kaywinnet Frye?” Kaylee nodded. “You listen too, because if it works, you’re going to have to do it.”

Kaylee nodded again, and they listened.

Three minutes later, Wash looked at Kaylee. She looked back at him with an unusually serious expression; her eyes were just a little red, but they were dry.

“On the other hand,” said Wash. “Maybe we don’t have to ask Mal after all.”

“That sort of puts it on me, don’t it?”

“Well,” said Wash. “In a manner of speaking, from a certain perspective, I suppose you could say that your rôle—”

“Yes,” said Kit.

“I was getting there,” said Wash.

“Can you do it?” asked Kit.

“Oh, easy.”

Wash stared at her. “Kaylee, sometimes you… all right. I’ll set it up.”

“And,” said Kit, “I should get back to the shuttle.”

“I’ll walk with you,” said Kaylee.

She felt Wash’s puzzled look on her back, but didn’t want to take the time to explain. Besides, she had no idea what the explanation was.

When she hadn’t said anything by the time they passed the dining room, Kit said, “What’s on your mind?”

“Why do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Work for the Alliance.”

“Oh. That. I thought you meant why do I betray them by not reporting that I know where a pair of badly wanted fugitives are.”

“No. Well, that too.”

“I think it’s a good idea that people like Sakarya be stopped. Don’t you?”

“Well, yes, but does that mean people like Simon and River have to be hunted down, when they never did anything?”

“Seems like it does.”

“Well, that’s wrong!”

Kit didn’t say anything.

“You know it is,” she continued. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? That’s why you’re doing this. Because you know what they’re doing is wrong.”

Kit still didn’t say anything.

“You know, they grind people up. People like Simon and River, and people like you. That’s what they do. They grind people up.”

“I know,” said Kit.

The others had left to go about their business, except for Simon, who sat with her, but was lost in his own thoughts. She stared at the tabletop and waited for what had to be coming. It took several minutes.

“Couldn’t you have said something to stop them?”

She’d been expecting the question in some form, but the way it came out was, well, it added levels of complexity that she knew her brother couldn’t have considered. Stopped them? Who was them? What sort of “stopped” did he mean? Was he asking if they were programmed with safewords? Was he asking if they could be held motionless by her voice?

It took her some time to sort through the possible meanings to come up with the highest probability interpretation. And once she had, it only raised more questions: what was he actually afraid of? And, if he thought their intended activity was such a bad idea, why had he agreed to it?

Going past all of that, she pulled another meaning out: he trusted her, and wanted to be reassured that everything was going to be all right. He was frightened.

Well, but there were so many things to be frightened of.

There were men coming to get her, and they would be here very soon, and they were terrifying. And there were so many ways things could go wrong between what Mal wanted to do and what the agent wanted to do. And there were always the fluke occurrences that, in a plan as intricate as theirs, could so easily, at so many points, make it all go bad. There were missed shots and jammed weapons. There were sudden gusts of wind while the shuttle was up. The chance Serenity would be found too soon. And so much more.

By the time she could give her brother all the probabilities for all the mishaps, whatever was going to happen would have happened a long time before, at least for the most useful definition of “long time” in this context.

But he was her brother, and he was frightened, and he needed reassurance, and she didn’t want to lie to him. So, she determined which high probability event had the greatest chance of making what he feared come true, and she considered it carefully, and was pleased to be able to give her brother the answer he wanted.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Wash and the Alliance agent talked Kaylee out of crashing Serenity into the house.”

It was strange, judging from the look on his face, how little that appeared to reassure him.