Fic: From Here to Serenity PG-13, 15/?
Okay. Finished this up a couple days ago, got it read over, and now here we are. Told you it would be a lot less time between chapters.
From Here to Serenity
Disclaimers, etc., in prologue.
“This is what we know,” Mal said. He had gathered the whole crew in the mess and was updating them on the situation. They’d pulled out a bunch of cortex readers, one for every other person. Mal pressed a few buttons on his cortex reader, and an animation sprang to life on everyone’s screen. “There’s a station in orbit around the planet. Far as we can tell, it’s got no kinda power, and ain’t nobody on it. There’s a couple shuttles going back and forth between it and the Earth, about every three hours. Best guess says they’re automated. Zoë?”
Zoë stepped forward and Mal tapped another couple of buttons. The picture on the screen zoomed in on a large mountain, getting close enough to show a low resolution image of a large concrete slab, with what appeared to be a number of vehicles parked on it. “As an entry point, they follow a pretty good route. Further scans of the planet show they put down on what appears to be a shipping dock of some kind, up high on some mountain. “
“From where it’s located, I’d say it looks like Denver,” Willow said. “It’s a um… fairly large city on a plateau in the Western United States. Or, well, it… was, I guess.”
Zoë nodded. “There doesn’t appear to be much activity of any kind around there, other than these shuttles. That’s not the case in a lot of other places, but for now, it looks like we can at least set down there, get an idea of what’s going on. Much of the rest of the world ain’t so great.”
She nodded to Mal, who pressed a few more buttons. The picture zoomed out to orbit, showing a spinning Earth. Little red dots popped up across the surface, focusing mainly on the East coast of the US, both the European and African coasts of the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia.
“Far as we can tell, this is where there’s a lot of action,” Zoë continued. “There are fires burning pretty constantly, and every few hours there seems to be some pretty heavy clashes. It looks like there's been a lot of progress made in these areas in the last few months.”
“So,” Xander interrupted, “there’s still fighting.”
Zoë nodded. “There’s still fighting. And from the destruction, it looks like these are battles that have been raging for decades, that only recently turned in one direction”
“Of particular interest is the one on this coast here,” Mal said. The picture zoomed in on the East Coast, and highlighted a line that ran from the Chesapeake Bay to the Hudson.
“Why that one?” asked Simon.
“It looks like one group - can’t tell which from this distance - has made some progress within the last few months.” Mal tapped the pad again and the view spread out. Part of the area looked as if it had been recently rebuilt. “Obviously we can’t be sure of this, but that looks like new construction, and that don’t happen if one side or the other’s givin’ ground, just if one side is holding ground.”
“If it’s the humans pushing,” Xander said, “that’s where you’ll find Buffy. Guarantee it.”
“How can you be so sure?” asked Inara.
Xander licked his lips. “Imagine Simon could fight like River,” he said. “And now imagine that he’d been trained by Shepherd Book for the last five years.”
“Still an awful lot of headway,” Jayne said.
Xander nodded. “Now imagine that a Hellgoddess has just tossed Simon through a portal, leaving River to be taken care of by you guys. And imagine Simon wakes up and the only thing to do is fight, and he pours all of his energy into that.”
The whole crew sat stunned.
“So like I said,” Xander continued. “If that’s the humans making progress, along that line is where we’ll find Buffy. Can we get better images of that area?”
Mal nodded. “Next few passes we can refocus, get some real detail. We'll find out sure enough if that's humans down there.”
* * * * *
When Xander found Willow, sitting alone on the floor of the cargo hold, her eyes were closed and her head resting against a container, with a soft smile on her lips. She looked almost euphoric.
“Will?” Xander asked. She looked up at him, her eyes shining brightly.
“I know what it is,” she said. “This feeling I'm getting. Why I feel so good. I know what it is.”
“What is it?” Xander asked, taking a seat next to her on the cold floor.
“It's Earth,” she said. “Earth and her magic. I don't know how I know this, but I do. Xander, when Buffy showed up here, when she fell through that portal, Earth ramped up her magic and started fighting back against the demons.”
“Earth did?” he asked.
“The demons... they're an abomination. We know that. They're from Hell dimensions, and they don't belong here. But the demons and the forces of good... maintain a balance. Right?”
“That is my understanding,” Xander said.
“But when the demons took over again, the balance was disrupted. And I think... I think all of the Champions must have died. All of the Slayers. And for hundreds of years, humans were alone on Earth, fighting against the demons, doing what they could, but with no Champions, nobody to lead the fight. For hundreds of years, Xander, Earth basically had nobody to defend her. And so she went dormant.”
“Dormant?”
“Earth... is the source of magic in the world. Everything that I do, all of my magic, comes from her. And when Shepherd Book says, rightly or wrongly, that I'm very powerful, it's basically because Earth's magic... chose me. Or I have a big tap into it, or something like that. The point is, the power... comes from her.”
“Okay,” Xander said. “So the Earth basically isn't producing magic for, call it, four and a half centuries. And then Buffy shows up,” he said.
Willow nodded at him. “And then Buffy shows up. A true, fire tested Champion of the Powers That Be. And Earth wakens from her slumber and has all that magic stored up, and now that she has someone to fight for her, she lets loose in a flood.”
“How sure are you of all this?”
“As sure as I've ever been about anything. I can feel it in my bones, Xander. And there's more.”
“Oh?”
“The barrier,” she said. “The one that kept me from opening the portal here, so we could retrieve Buffy? Earth raised it. It's not just a magical barrier, Xander, it's a dimensional one. No magic can get to Earth from anywhere. And that means -”
“No demon reinforcements,” Xander said.
Willow nodded.
“So Buffy shows up. Earth wakes up, and floods the planet with magic. She puts up a barrier stopping anymore demons from showing up.”
“Right.”
“Assume that wherever the numbers are at that point, they've been in stalemate for a while, with no change. But now, all of a sudden, the demons can't replenish their losses.”
“Xander,” Willow said, grasping his hand, “Earth is ready for humanity to come home.”
Xander looked down at their hands. “Then we've got to give it all the help we can,” he said. “I think I have an idea.”
* * * * *
“I would love to know how those shuttles are still working,” said Kaylee’s voice.
“You and me both,” said Mal. “We could get equipment lasted that long, we might could save a penny or two.”
He, Jayne and Xander were dressed in environmental suits, standing in Serenity’s airlock and waiting for Wash to dock with the station. They had sat near Earth for a few hours, monitoring as much satellite traffic as they could. There wasn’t much to find, and what there was showed no indication that anyone or anything inhabited the space station. That made it the first stop on their journey to the ground.
“We’ve got hard seal,” Wash’s voice said in Mal’s helmet. “You should be go for entry.”
“Understood,” said Mal. He nodded to Jayne, who stepped up and opened the outer door. The next step was accessing the airlock door on the station and getting it to open. The problem as Mal had seen it was they wouldn’t be able to open the airlock door without some sort of familiarity with the system - familiarity they didn’t have. Fortunately, another option was presented.
“Willow,” Xander said, “you’re up.”
“Just a minute,” Willow replied. The three men stood there for a few moments, waiting. Then, slowly, the station’s airlock door creaked open a few inches, before suddenly shooting wide open. Air flowed past Mal, but not so fast that he was worried about a vacuum on the other side.
Mal could see Xander grinning through his helmet. “That’s great, Will. You still got enough juice to do that locating spell?”
“Absolutely,” she answered. “I feel like I could do this all day.”
“Okay, well, I don’t think that’s necessary. Just take it a little easy, you’re still gonna be our big gun when we get down there.”
“Yes, sir,” Willow said. Mal could almost picture her mock salute.
“All right, enough chatter. Let’s go check this place out,” he said. Mal stepped into the station and walked through the airlock to the room on the other side. As he swept his light around the cabin, he saw nothing. Nothing was working, nothing was moving, and there was nobody there. He looked down at his the atmospheric sensor on his arm. “There's air here, but it's not what I'd call breathable.”
Jayne and Xander stepped forward into the room, the clanking of their boots echoing loudly against the metallic floors, Jayne's bag of supplies thumping against his leg.
“The shuttles appear to be docking about two hundred feet below you,” Wash's voice said over their radios.
“We'll get down there as soon as we can find some stairs,” Mal said as the three of them stepped into a long hallway that went off to the left and right. He pointed to his left. “Jayne, you look over that way. Harris, you're with me.”
Jayne nodded and headed down his corridor., and Xander followed the captain off to the right. As they moved, they checked each door they past. The first few were full of equipment that neither of them recognized. One was a bathroom, another some sort of lounge. Then came what appeared to be an open elevator shaft. A glance upward showed the car was a few levels up.
“Last resort,” Mal said. Xander nodded. They moved on and started finding bedrooms, some with a few bunks in them, a couple with just one. The last door, at the end of the hall, was heavier than any of the others. It seemed to be reinforced in some manner, but between them they were able to force it open.
Inside was what had to be the main control center for the station. Computers and terminals lined every wall, the whole place had the feel of a command center. It was laid out around a large, raised dais from which a person could have an excellent vantage point of the entire room. Many of the stations had large screens above them, presumably to show the person on the dais what was happening.
Mal and Xander both inspected the dais, but neither could make out what anything did.
“Mal,” Jayne's voice said, “I think I found a couple things we might be interested in.”
Mal and Xander hoofed it back to the other side of the station. They came upon Jayne standing between two rooms with a shit-eating grin on his face.
“What'd you find?” Mal asked.
“This here's the weapons locker,” Jayne said, nodding to the door on his right. Mal poked his head in and saw an arsenal of weapons, none of which he had ever seen before. Locked in a cage were what looked like explosives of some kind.
“That could be very useful,” Mal said. “This it?”
Jayne shook his head and nodded to the door on his left.
Mal raise an eyebrow and looked inside. He saw treasure.
“I believe,” Xander said, looking over Mal's shoulder, “that you've just found yourselves a library.”
“We'll come back for this later,” Mal said. “Jayne, you find any stairs?”
Jayne shook his head. “Just a door opened onto an open shaft, though it looked like there was a elevator car about fifty feet down.”
“We found one too,” Mal said, “and I think we'll go back over there. The shaft was clear below us.”
“What about the weapons?” Jayne asked.
Mal shook his head. “We got no way to test them out,” he said. “We head down to the surface, we'll take them, get them figured out down there. This place is bad enough with no breathable air. I got no mind to make it a vacuum.”
“Anyway we could fix it?” Xander asked, as they started to make their way back to the other elevator shaft. “Make this place usable?”
Mal shrugged. “Could be. I don't think we wanna take the time to give it that close an inspection, though.”
“What if it's simple?” Xander asked. “If we can even make the air breathable, the people on the planet could maybe figure out some sort of advantage, right? Like if they got these stations up and running, maybe they could get some spy satellite intelligence or something.”
“You think folks who've been under siege for five hundred years are gonna maintain courses in advanced computing?” Mal asked.
“That,” said Xander, “is something I didn't think of.”
They got to the elevator shaft and propped open the doors. Jayne reached into his bag and pulled out a length of rope, measuring it out as he went.
“Got enough?” Mal asked.
“Nope,” said Jayne. “Someone's gotta go back and get more.”
“I'll do it,” Xander said. “Not used to breathing in these things anyway, I could use a break.”
Mal nodded.
Xander headed back to the ship. “Hey Will,” he called into his radio as he reached the airlock. “Cycle it for me, I'm coming back through.”
Ahead of him, the airlock doors slid open, then closed again behind him. He stepped back onto Serenity.
“Kaylee said she'll be back in a moment with the rope,” Simon said, approaching Xander to help him remove his helmet.
“Man,” Xander said. “It can get warm inside that thing.”
“Mmm,” Simon said by way of agreement. “At least you've got yours on correctly.”
“I imagine that helps,” he said.
Simon leaned in close. “Willow spoke to my sister and I,” he said quietly. “I can't say I like it, but if the situation is what it appears to be, I'll support it.”
“Mal's gonna hate it,” Xander murmured. “But if we can get - Hey, Kaylee.”
“Hey, there yourself,” she said, smiling as she walked up with a long length of rope. “That should do ya.”
“Thanks,” Xander said. He sighed and leaned down, and Simon replaced his helmet
Xander nodded and headed back to meet Mal and Jayne. Mal was waiting for him
“You're up,” Mal said. “Take the rope with you, I'll come last with Jayne's bag of crap.”
“Sure thing,” Xander said. “Mind if I poke around while Jayne gets us set up to keep moving?”
“Just don't break anything,” Mal said.
Xander nodded, grabbed the rope and started climbing down. When he reached the level Jayne had set up on, he handed the large man the rope and started to look around. The first few doors he found opened into storage rooms, one of which looked like it held nothing but boxes. He reached the end of the hall and had to put his shoulder to the door to open it.
“Harris, get a move on,” Mal's voice said in his ear. “We're just about set up.”
“Uh, Captain,” Xander said, staring at one of the consoles in front of him, “I think you might want to see this.”
Xander heard the Mal muttering in what must have been Chinese, but a minute later he showed up nonetheless.
“What is it that's so important that I... have to... is that blinking?”
Xander nodded. “I think so.”
Mal stepped up to the console where a small green light was blinking steadily. A layer of dust had settled over it that must have been left over from the last time anybody had been on the station.
He tapped the light. It blinked.
“Captain,” Xander said from another station in the room. He held up a binder with papers in it. Mal raised an eyebrow at him. “I think this is a manual.”
“We don't know what this console does,” Mal said.
Xander flipped open the binder and started leafing through it as well as he could with his massive gloved hand. He skimmed each page as he went, until he found a line drawing of a station that looked like the one in front of them.
“Environmental control,” Xander said. “May I?”
Mal stepped back. “Jayne,” he said into his radio, “we might be a minute or two.”
Xander looked from the manual to the console and back. He pressed one of the buttons, and the green light clicked on and stayed that way. A few seconds later, the small screen on the console flickered to life and presented Xander with a warning message.
“No kidding,” Xander said as the words on the screen flashed red, “the atmosphere's unbreathable.” He looked at the manual again, and pressed two more buttons. “They really dumbed this thing down,” he said, as the screen flashed another message. “Yes, I really do want to start the air scrubbers. Let's hope this doesn't blow up.” Xander pressed another button. A moment later, the pages of the manual vibrated a little as, somewhere in the room, a fan came on.
“I think that's about it for the moment,” Xander said. “But if the scrubbers work, then hopefully sometime soon, the air will be breathable. At least some of the rest of the crew could help us look around. Maybe Kaylee could find the... I don't know. Does a space station have an engine room?”
“Power plant,” Mal suggested.
“Fair enough.”
“We've done enough here for now,” Mal said. “Let's get down to those shuttles.”
* * * * *
Twenty minutes later, they found where the shuttle was docked. The doors to the shuttle were open, and the shuttle itself was empty of anything other than air. Mal's air monitor, however, showed that the atmosphere was slightly less horrible in that immediate vicinity.
“Wash, how much longer we got until this shuttle leaves?” Mal asked.
“About half an hour,” Wash's said over the radio.
Mal nodded. “Okay, let's check it out then.”
The three of them stepped into the shuttle. Jayne headed for the back as Mal and Xander headed for the cockpit. Xander, unfamiliar with flying craft of any sort, stood back while Mal looked at the controls.
“Looks fairly standard,” Mal said. “I guess it makes sense. There's only so many configurations you can have for a ship's controls that are gonna make it usable for humans. Got everything needed to fly. Autopilot's gotta be a thing of beauty.”
“She can hold maybe thirty people,” Jayne said, stepping up and poking his head into the cockpit. “And there's plenty of cargo room for if we were to want to bring some extra weapons with us.”
“Captain,” Zoë's voice came over the radio. “We've got our high res images of the planet. You're going to want to see this.”
“All right, we'll be out in a few minutes,” Mal said. He turned to Jayne. “You got that camera?” At Jayne's nod, Mal said, “Good. Set it up somewhere it's got a good view of the doors. I wanna see if there's anything outside the door where this ship sets down.”
When Jayne had set the camera up and secured it, they headed back to Serenity.
* * * * *
Willow sat with the rest of the crew, waiting impatiently as Mal and Zoë went over the images they'd gotten of Earth. Almost an hour passed as they looked over the photos, and the others grew more and more anxious. Eventually, they entered the kitchen, and she could read barely anything from their faces.
“It's not pretty,” Mal said. “The truth down there on the surface is that humanity's taken a beating. They are not in good shape. But they've made progress. Good progress. And things are looking up.”
“In addition to the hot spots we mentioned earlier, we've been able to find some other things. Humans are largely in control of these two continents in the southern hemisphere.”
“Australia and South America,” Xander said. Mal nodded.
“As far as we can tell,” Zoë said, “These areas are where the bulk of the human population is, as well as some in the far north, in an area that looks barely habitable.” Zoë put a photo down on the table. “Also, there's a fight going on right now, on the east coast of this continent.”
“North America,” Xander told her.
“Right,” she said. “It's a large battle. The humans appear to have an entrenched position in what looks like the ruins of this city, at the top of this large bay.” She looked at Xander, who looked at Willow.
“Baltimore,” Willow said. “Is the city.”
Zoë nodded. “The...” she paused and shook her head. “The demons don't appear to be making much headway. We think that a large force of humans decided to push, and decided to do it from here.” She pointed to a picture.
“New York,” Xander and Willow said together.
“There's probably been hold-outs on this continent for years,” Zoë said, “And now they're finally able to do something. And they've made good progress.”
“And if your friend can do what you say she can do,” Mal said, “then we agree that this is the most likely place to find her. Which raises a problem.”
“What's that?” Book asked.
“Well, the intelligence of taking an unarmed freighter into a combat zone aside,” Mal said, “We can't see as there's a place to put down a ship this size without being damned obvious about it. And that's more attention that we want to attract.”
“What about the shuttles?” asked Willow.
“They appear to be sturdy enough, certainly. Problem being, I don't want to leave my ship just sitting up here, either, unattended.”
“Well, at the least,” Xander asked, “how does the pad where the shuttles land look?”
“We can't see any sign of movement,” Zoë said. “Although that doesn't mean there isn't any.”
“Are there any other ships there?” Inara asked.
Zoë shook her head. “The shuttles are all we can see.”
Willow looked to Xander and nodded, encouraging him.
“Uh, Captain,” Xander said, standing up. “I kind of have a plan that might... um... might solve this.”
“Oh?” Mal asked.
“Yeah,” Xander said, glancing to Willow and then back to Mal. “You're not going to like it.”
----------
End Chapter 15
<<< [15] >>>
Okay. Thanks for reading. Good to go. Hope to have more before the end of the month. So long, folks.
From Here to Serenity
Disclaimers, etc., in prologue.
“This is what we know,” Mal said. He had gathered the whole crew in the mess and was updating them on the situation. They’d pulled out a bunch of cortex readers, one for every other person. Mal pressed a few buttons on his cortex reader, and an animation sprang to life on everyone’s screen. “There’s a station in orbit around the planet. Far as we can tell, it’s got no kinda power, and ain’t nobody on it. There’s a couple shuttles going back and forth between it and the Earth, about every three hours. Best guess says they’re automated. Zoë?”
Zoë stepped forward and Mal tapped another couple of buttons. The picture on the screen zoomed in on a large mountain, getting close enough to show a low resolution image of a large concrete slab, with what appeared to be a number of vehicles parked on it. “As an entry point, they follow a pretty good route. Further scans of the planet show they put down on what appears to be a shipping dock of some kind, up high on some mountain. “
“From where it’s located, I’d say it looks like Denver,” Willow said. “It’s a um… fairly large city on a plateau in the Western United States. Or, well, it… was, I guess.”
Zoë nodded. “There doesn’t appear to be much activity of any kind around there, other than these shuttles. That’s not the case in a lot of other places, but for now, it looks like we can at least set down there, get an idea of what’s going on. Much of the rest of the world ain’t so great.”
She nodded to Mal, who pressed a few more buttons. The picture zoomed out to orbit, showing a spinning Earth. Little red dots popped up across the surface, focusing mainly on the East coast of the US, both the European and African coasts of the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia.
“Far as we can tell, this is where there’s a lot of action,” Zoë continued. “There are fires burning pretty constantly, and every few hours there seems to be some pretty heavy clashes. It looks like there's been a lot of progress made in these areas in the last few months.”
“So,” Xander interrupted, “there’s still fighting.”
Zoë nodded. “There’s still fighting. And from the destruction, it looks like these are battles that have been raging for decades, that only recently turned in one direction”
“Of particular interest is the one on this coast here,” Mal said. The picture zoomed in on the East Coast, and highlighted a line that ran from the Chesapeake Bay to the Hudson.
“Why that one?” asked Simon.
“It looks like one group - can’t tell which from this distance - has made some progress within the last few months.” Mal tapped the pad again and the view spread out. Part of the area looked as if it had been recently rebuilt. “Obviously we can’t be sure of this, but that looks like new construction, and that don’t happen if one side or the other’s givin’ ground, just if one side is holding ground.”
“If it’s the humans pushing,” Xander said, “that’s where you’ll find Buffy. Guarantee it.”
“How can you be so sure?” asked Inara.
Xander licked his lips. “Imagine Simon could fight like River,” he said. “And now imagine that he’d been trained by Shepherd Book for the last five years.”
“Still an awful lot of headway,” Jayne said.
Xander nodded. “Now imagine that a Hellgoddess has just tossed Simon through a portal, leaving River to be taken care of by you guys. And imagine Simon wakes up and the only thing to do is fight, and he pours all of his energy into that.”
The whole crew sat stunned.
“So like I said,” Xander continued. “If that’s the humans making progress, along that line is where we’ll find Buffy. Can we get better images of that area?”
Mal nodded. “Next few passes we can refocus, get some real detail. We'll find out sure enough if that's humans down there.”
* * * * *
When Xander found Willow, sitting alone on the floor of the cargo hold, her eyes were closed and her head resting against a container, with a soft smile on her lips. She looked almost euphoric.
“Will?” Xander asked. She looked up at him, her eyes shining brightly.
“I know what it is,” she said. “This feeling I'm getting. Why I feel so good. I know what it is.”
“What is it?” Xander asked, taking a seat next to her on the cold floor.
“It's Earth,” she said. “Earth and her magic. I don't know how I know this, but I do. Xander, when Buffy showed up here, when she fell through that portal, Earth ramped up her magic and started fighting back against the demons.”
“Earth did?” he asked.
“The demons... they're an abomination. We know that. They're from Hell dimensions, and they don't belong here. But the demons and the forces of good... maintain a balance. Right?”
“That is my understanding,” Xander said.
“But when the demons took over again, the balance was disrupted. And I think... I think all of the Champions must have died. All of the Slayers. And for hundreds of years, humans were alone on Earth, fighting against the demons, doing what they could, but with no Champions, nobody to lead the fight. For hundreds of years, Xander, Earth basically had nobody to defend her. And so she went dormant.”
“Dormant?”
“Earth... is the source of magic in the world. Everything that I do, all of my magic, comes from her. And when Shepherd Book says, rightly or wrongly, that I'm very powerful, it's basically because Earth's magic... chose me. Or I have a big tap into it, or something like that. The point is, the power... comes from her.”
“Okay,” Xander said. “So the Earth basically isn't producing magic for, call it, four and a half centuries. And then Buffy shows up,” he said.
Willow nodded at him. “And then Buffy shows up. A true, fire tested Champion of the Powers That Be. And Earth wakens from her slumber and has all that magic stored up, and now that she has someone to fight for her, she lets loose in a flood.”
“How sure are you of all this?”
“As sure as I've ever been about anything. I can feel it in my bones, Xander. And there's more.”
“Oh?”
“The barrier,” she said. “The one that kept me from opening the portal here, so we could retrieve Buffy? Earth raised it. It's not just a magical barrier, Xander, it's a dimensional one. No magic can get to Earth from anywhere. And that means -”
“No demon reinforcements,” Xander said.
Willow nodded.
“So Buffy shows up. Earth wakes up, and floods the planet with magic. She puts up a barrier stopping anymore demons from showing up.”
“Right.”
“Assume that wherever the numbers are at that point, they've been in stalemate for a while, with no change. But now, all of a sudden, the demons can't replenish their losses.”
“Xander,” Willow said, grasping his hand, “Earth is ready for humanity to come home.”
Xander looked down at their hands. “Then we've got to give it all the help we can,” he said. “I think I have an idea.”
* * * * *
“I would love to know how those shuttles are still working,” said Kaylee’s voice.
“You and me both,” said Mal. “We could get equipment lasted that long, we might could save a penny or two.”
He, Jayne and Xander were dressed in environmental suits, standing in Serenity’s airlock and waiting for Wash to dock with the station. They had sat near Earth for a few hours, monitoring as much satellite traffic as they could. There wasn’t much to find, and what there was showed no indication that anyone or anything inhabited the space station. That made it the first stop on their journey to the ground.
“We’ve got hard seal,” Wash’s voice said in Mal’s helmet. “You should be go for entry.”
“Understood,” said Mal. He nodded to Jayne, who stepped up and opened the outer door. The next step was accessing the airlock door on the station and getting it to open. The problem as Mal had seen it was they wouldn’t be able to open the airlock door without some sort of familiarity with the system - familiarity they didn’t have. Fortunately, another option was presented.
“Willow,” Xander said, “you’re up.”
“Just a minute,” Willow replied. The three men stood there for a few moments, waiting. Then, slowly, the station’s airlock door creaked open a few inches, before suddenly shooting wide open. Air flowed past Mal, but not so fast that he was worried about a vacuum on the other side.
Mal could see Xander grinning through his helmet. “That’s great, Will. You still got enough juice to do that locating spell?”
“Absolutely,” she answered. “I feel like I could do this all day.”
“Okay, well, I don’t think that’s necessary. Just take it a little easy, you’re still gonna be our big gun when we get down there.”
“Yes, sir,” Willow said. Mal could almost picture her mock salute.
“All right, enough chatter. Let’s go check this place out,” he said. Mal stepped into the station and walked through the airlock to the room on the other side. As he swept his light around the cabin, he saw nothing. Nothing was working, nothing was moving, and there was nobody there. He looked down at his the atmospheric sensor on his arm. “There's air here, but it's not what I'd call breathable.”
Jayne and Xander stepped forward into the room, the clanking of their boots echoing loudly against the metallic floors, Jayne's bag of supplies thumping against his leg.
“The shuttles appear to be docking about two hundred feet below you,” Wash's voice said over their radios.
“We'll get down there as soon as we can find some stairs,” Mal said as the three of them stepped into a long hallway that went off to the left and right. He pointed to his left. “Jayne, you look over that way. Harris, you're with me.”
Jayne nodded and headed down his corridor., and Xander followed the captain off to the right. As they moved, they checked each door they past. The first few were full of equipment that neither of them recognized. One was a bathroom, another some sort of lounge. Then came what appeared to be an open elevator shaft. A glance upward showed the car was a few levels up.
“Last resort,” Mal said. Xander nodded. They moved on and started finding bedrooms, some with a few bunks in them, a couple with just one. The last door, at the end of the hall, was heavier than any of the others. It seemed to be reinforced in some manner, but between them they were able to force it open.
Inside was what had to be the main control center for the station. Computers and terminals lined every wall, the whole place had the feel of a command center. It was laid out around a large, raised dais from which a person could have an excellent vantage point of the entire room. Many of the stations had large screens above them, presumably to show the person on the dais what was happening.
Mal and Xander both inspected the dais, but neither could make out what anything did.
“Mal,” Jayne's voice said, “I think I found a couple things we might be interested in.”
Mal and Xander hoofed it back to the other side of the station. They came upon Jayne standing between two rooms with a shit-eating grin on his face.
“What'd you find?” Mal asked.
“This here's the weapons locker,” Jayne said, nodding to the door on his right. Mal poked his head in and saw an arsenal of weapons, none of which he had ever seen before. Locked in a cage were what looked like explosives of some kind.
“That could be very useful,” Mal said. “This it?”
Jayne shook his head and nodded to the door on his left.
Mal raise an eyebrow and looked inside. He saw treasure.
“I believe,” Xander said, looking over Mal's shoulder, “that you've just found yourselves a library.”
“We'll come back for this later,” Mal said. “Jayne, you find any stairs?”
Jayne shook his head. “Just a door opened onto an open shaft, though it looked like there was a elevator car about fifty feet down.”
“We found one too,” Mal said, “and I think we'll go back over there. The shaft was clear below us.”
“What about the weapons?” Jayne asked.
Mal shook his head. “We got no way to test them out,” he said. “We head down to the surface, we'll take them, get them figured out down there. This place is bad enough with no breathable air. I got no mind to make it a vacuum.”
“Anyway we could fix it?” Xander asked, as they started to make their way back to the other elevator shaft. “Make this place usable?”
Mal shrugged. “Could be. I don't think we wanna take the time to give it that close an inspection, though.”
“What if it's simple?” Xander asked. “If we can even make the air breathable, the people on the planet could maybe figure out some sort of advantage, right? Like if they got these stations up and running, maybe they could get some spy satellite intelligence or something.”
“You think folks who've been under siege for five hundred years are gonna maintain courses in advanced computing?” Mal asked.
“That,” said Xander, “is something I didn't think of.”
They got to the elevator shaft and propped open the doors. Jayne reached into his bag and pulled out a length of rope, measuring it out as he went.
“Got enough?” Mal asked.
“Nope,” said Jayne. “Someone's gotta go back and get more.”
“I'll do it,” Xander said. “Not used to breathing in these things anyway, I could use a break.”
Mal nodded.
Xander headed back to the ship. “Hey Will,” he called into his radio as he reached the airlock. “Cycle it for me, I'm coming back through.”
Ahead of him, the airlock doors slid open, then closed again behind him. He stepped back onto Serenity.
“Kaylee said she'll be back in a moment with the rope,” Simon said, approaching Xander to help him remove his helmet.
“Man,” Xander said. “It can get warm inside that thing.”
“Mmm,” Simon said by way of agreement. “At least you've got yours on correctly.”
“I imagine that helps,” he said.
Simon leaned in close. “Willow spoke to my sister and I,” he said quietly. “I can't say I like it, but if the situation is what it appears to be, I'll support it.”
“Mal's gonna hate it,” Xander murmured. “But if we can get - Hey, Kaylee.”
“Hey, there yourself,” she said, smiling as she walked up with a long length of rope. “That should do ya.”
“Thanks,” Xander said. He sighed and leaned down, and Simon replaced his helmet
Xander nodded and headed back to meet Mal and Jayne. Mal was waiting for him
“You're up,” Mal said. “Take the rope with you, I'll come last with Jayne's bag of crap.”
“Sure thing,” Xander said. “Mind if I poke around while Jayne gets us set up to keep moving?”
“Just don't break anything,” Mal said.
Xander nodded, grabbed the rope and started climbing down. When he reached the level Jayne had set up on, he handed the large man the rope and started to look around. The first few doors he found opened into storage rooms, one of which looked like it held nothing but boxes. He reached the end of the hall and had to put his shoulder to the door to open it.
“Harris, get a move on,” Mal's voice said in his ear. “We're just about set up.”
“Uh, Captain,” Xander said, staring at one of the consoles in front of him, “I think you might want to see this.”
Xander heard the Mal muttering in what must have been Chinese, but a minute later he showed up nonetheless.
“What is it that's so important that I... have to... is that blinking?”
Xander nodded. “I think so.”
Mal stepped up to the console where a small green light was blinking steadily. A layer of dust had settled over it that must have been left over from the last time anybody had been on the station.
He tapped the light. It blinked.
“Captain,” Xander said from another station in the room. He held up a binder with papers in it. Mal raised an eyebrow at him. “I think this is a manual.”
“We don't know what this console does,” Mal said.
Xander flipped open the binder and started leafing through it as well as he could with his massive gloved hand. He skimmed each page as he went, until he found a line drawing of a station that looked like the one in front of them.
“Environmental control,” Xander said. “May I?”
Mal stepped back. “Jayne,” he said into his radio, “we might be a minute or two.”
Xander looked from the manual to the console and back. He pressed one of the buttons, and the green light clicked on and stayed that way. A few seconds later, the small screen on the console flickered to life and presented Xander with a warning message.
“No kidding,” Xander said as the words on the screen flashed red, “the atmosphere's unbreathable.” He looked at the manual again, and pressed two more buttons. “They really dumbed this thing down,” he said, as the screen flashed another message. “Yes, I really do want to start the air scrubbers. Let's hope this doesn't blow up.” Xander pressed another button. A moment later, the pages of the manual vibrated a little as, somewhere in the room, a fan came on.
“I think that's about it for the moment,” Xander said. “But if the scrubbers work, then hopefully sometime soon, the air will be breathable. At least some of the rest of the crew could help us look around. Maybe Kaylee could find the... I don't know. Does a space station have an engine room?”
“Power plant,” Mal suggested.
“Fair enough.”
“We've done enough here for now,” Mal said. “Let's get down to those shuttles.”
* * * * *
Twenty minutes later, they found where the shuttle was docked. The doors to the shuttle were open, and the shuttle itself was empty of anything other than air. Mal's air monitor, however, showed that the atmosphere was slightly less horrible in that immediate vicinity.
“Wash, how much longer we got until this shuttle leaves?” Mal asked.
“About half an hour,” Wash's said over the radio.
Mal nodded. “Okay, let's check it out then.”
The three of them stepped into the shuttle. Jayne headed for the back as Mal and Xander headed for the cockpit. Xander, unfamiliar with flying craft of any sort, stood back while Mal looked at the controls.
“Looks fairly standard,” Mal said. “I guess it makes sense. There's only so many configurations you can have for a ship's controls that are gonna make it usable for humans. Got everything needed to fly. Autopilot's gotta be a thing of beauty.”
“She can hold maybe thirty people,” Jayne said, stepping up and poking his head into the cockpit. “And there's plenty of cargo room for if we were to want to bring some extra weapons with us.”
“Captain,” Zoë's voice came over the radio. “We've got our high res images of the planet. You're going to want to see this.”
“All right, we'll be out in a few minutes,” Mal said. He turned to Jayne. “You got that camera?” At Jayne's nod, Mal said, “Good. Set it up somewhere it's got a good view of the doors. I wanna see if there's anything outside the door where this ship sets down.”
When Jayne had set the camera up and secured it, they headed back to Serenity.
* * * * *
Willow sat with the rest of the crew, waiting impatiently as Mal and Zoë went over the images they'd gotten of Earth. Almost an hour passed as they looked over the photos, and the others grew more and more anxious. Eventually, they entered the kitchen, and she could read barely anything from their faces.
“It's not pretty,” Mal said. “The truth down there on the surface is that humanity's taken a beating. They are not in good shape. But they've made progress. Good progress. And things are looking up.”
“In addition to the hot spots we mentioned earlier, we've been able to find some other things. Humans are largely in control of these two continents in the southern hemisphere.”
“Australia and South America,” Xander said. Mal nodded.
“As far as we can tell,” Zoë said, “These areas are where the bulk of the human population is, as well as some in the far north, in an area that looks barely habitable.” Zoë put a photo down on the table. “Also, there's a fight going on right now, on the east coast of this continent.”
“North America,” Xander told her.
“Right,” she said. “It's a large battle. The humans appear to have an entrenched position in what looks like the ruins of this city, at the top of this large bay.” She looked at Xander, who looked at Willow.
“Baltimore,” Willow said. “Is the city.”
Zoë nodded. “The...” she paused and shook her head. “The demons don't appear to be making much headway. We think that a large force of humans decided to push, and decided to do it from here.” She pointed to a picture.
“New York,” Xander and Willow said together.
“There's probably been hold-outs on this continent for years,” Zoë said, “And now they're finally able to do something. And they've made good progress.”
“And if your friend can do what you say she can do,” Mal said, “then we agree that this is the most likely place to find her. Which raises a problem.”
“What's that?” Book asked.
“Well, the intelligence of taking an unarmed freighter into a combat zone aside,” Mal said, “We can't see as there's a place to put down a ship this size without being damned obvious about it. And that's more attention that we want to attract.”
“What about the shuttles?” asked Willow.
“They appear to be sturdy enough, certainly. Problem being, I don't want to leave my ship just sitting up here, either, unattended.”
“Well, at the least,” Xander asked, “how does the pad where the shuttles land look?”
“We can't see any sign of movement,” Zoë said. “Although that doesn't mean there isn't any.”
“Are there any other ships there?” Inara asked.
Zoë shook her head. “The shuttles are all we can see.”
Willow looked to Xander and nodded, encouraging him.
“Uh, Captain,” Xander said, standing up. “I kind of have a plan that might... um... might solve this.”
“Oh?” Mal asked.
“Yeah,” Xander said, glancing to Willow and then back to Mal. “You're not going to like it.”
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End Chapter 15
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Okay. Thanks for reading. Good to go. Hope to have more before the end of the month. So long, folks.