Fic for manicmarauder88 part 1 of 2
Title: Shipwrecked with you, or: Beware the wrath of the gear-jockey skirt
Author/Artist: thegiantkiller
Recipient's name: manicmarauder88
Fandom: Firefly
Characters/Pairings: Kaylee/Simon, Bester, OC pirates
Rating and Warnings: PG-13; violence and colourful language
Summary: Part one: Kaylee is abducted by a former acquaintance and Simon attempts to come to her rescue. ~2700 words
Notes: Precedes/precludes the Big Damn Movie. Hover for translations. Mandarin’s cobbled together from a few different sources; corrections are welcome. Thanks to hadespuppy for the beta.
“That one looks like a turtle,” Kaylee said.
“Which one?” Simon asked, squinting. They were lying side by side in the shade of a heavily slanting palm tree, but the sun was high and the sky itself almost painfully bright.
“Next to the compression coil.”
“That really doesn’t help me.”
“That one,” she raised her hand to point out a bulbous shape among the slowly drifting and deforming clouds, “right there.”
“Huh,” he said, peering up at it. “Looks more like a tortoise to me.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“Not really. Tortoises live on land, so they have feet rather than flippers. And their shells are more steeply domed.”
Kaylee rolled her eyes. “Okay then, Doctor Smartypants, it’s a tortoise. Your turn.”
Simon sighed and raised a hand to his face, adjusting the damp rag he was using to cool the lump, not unlike a tortoise shell, blossoming on his forehead. When he last asked after the bruise’s colour, Kaylee had informed him that it was “rainbow.”
“Are you sure that beacon is working?”
“It’ll work. I mean, the signal’s pretty weak and this rock ain’t exactly tiny, so it might take ‘em a bit to spot it. But they’ll find us, don’t you worry.” Kaylee’s brow crinkled, but she kept her voice confident. This plan of course assumed that Serenity was in fact searching the surface. They’d been gone long enough that their absence must have become suspicious, but there was really no reason for the crew to believe that they were even still on the moon.
“I’m in no rush to leave,” Simon said drowsily.
Kaylee, dabbing the blood from her split lip, rolled her head over in the sand to look at him. “No?”
“Well,” he equivocated, eyes focused past his feet at the rolling surf, “it’s not exactly the Sihnon Astoria, but the company’s hard to beat.”
Kaylee let her hand creep like a spider across the cool rough of the sand until it found the warm smooth of his arm. Simon glanced down at the source of the touch, then raised his hand to intertwine his fingers with hers and rolled his throbbing head back up to face the sky.
She grinned. “You’re sweet when you have a head injury.”
Simon raised his free hand to point out a squishy blob of floating vapour. “There’s a pancreas,” he said.
---
The last job had gone remarkably-well, perhaps “smoothly” was an overstatement, but the total number of stitches required to repair the damage was under forty, which was better than usual, and they had actually been paid, which was almost miraculous. Mal, in a gesture of Demerol-enhanced magnanimity, had endowed Kaylee with a wadge of credit and told her to fix his damn ship. That was two days ago. Today Mal (now sober) had taken Zoe and Jayne with him to secure the next job, River was helping Wash with some general cleaning and maintenance around the ship, and Simon had been enlisted to help Kaylee with the shopping (more precisely: to help carry her plunder home from the hardware emporium). At this particular moment, that meant standing amidst a bewildering array of mechanical whatsits, in front of a wall of enormous spools of wire and cable in various materials and gauges, watching her evaluate the flexibility of a length of copper.
When he noticed the tall blond man striding determinedly up the aisle towards them, Simon instinctively turned his face away in case the stranger was a habitual reader of wanted posters.
“Hey!” the man called as he approached. “It’s Kaylee, right?”
“Bester, hi!” Kaylee exclaimed, acknowledging the man with a megawatt smile of recognition.
He flailed his arms exultantly. “Man, I thought that was you! How’ve you been?”
“Great, really great! Well, pretty good anyway, I mean things can’t always be shí quán, but, you know, I’m doin’ okay. What about you?”
He nodded, chomping loudly on a wad of gum. “Oh, shiny. You still workin’ on that Firefly?”
“Serenity, yeah, it’s goin’ pretty good. And you, what are you doing?”
“I got a gig. It’s goin’ pretty sweet. As a matter of fact we got a job on for this afternoon, and the cap’n’s actually letting me help with the plannin’ on this one-hey! Would you mind taking a look at what I’ve got and tellin’ me what you think? You were always real smart with that machine stuff-I mean, you stole my job! Not that I mind or anything, that Mal was a real buzzkill.” He smiled again, flashing white teeth and what Simon supposed must pass for charm in these parts. “You got a minute?”
“Um, yeah, okay.” Kaylee turned to Simon. “You’ll be okay here by yourself for a bit?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, and the man looked him over, apparently noticing him for the first time.
Kaylee gasped, embarrassed. “Oh, I’m sorry, that was so rude. This is S-“ she caught herself on the brink of revealing his real name “Sam. Sam, this is Bester.”
“How’s it hangin’, brother?” Bester grinned and raised his hand for Simon to slap, which he did hesitantly, then frowned as Bester caught the eye of a grizzled older man standing near the warehouse’ entrance. Kaylee, busy handing her shopping basket and pinkly-scribbled lists over to Simon, did not observe the exchange.
Bester led Kaylee away towards the entrance, placing his hand familiarly on her hip (Simon frowned again). He steered her through the bar of dusty sunlight and out into the scrapyard in front of the store, and the grizzled man followed.
Outside, Bester drew Kaylee into the head-high piles of debris speckling the yard, out of sight of either the warehouse or the street. “Lemme just find a flat spot to spread out the sketches,” he said, glancing over his shoulder, then wheeled and caught hold of both her wrists.
“Hey!” Kaylee cried, giggling, “what are you--!?” She squeaked in fear when other hands-veiny, with fingers like hairy sausages-lunged into her field of vision, pulling a sack over her head and tightening it around her throat. “Sim-“ she tried to scream but a palm clamped down over her mouth through the coarse fabric, a strong arm pinned her own to her ribs, and her feet were hoisted off the ground before her lips could form the word.
Simon, who was already creeping uncertainly towards the door, broke into a run at the sound of her raised voice. He dropped the basket, which tipped on its side and spilled its bounty of accumulated clanky things musically across the cement floor.
“Kaylee!” he shouted as he burst into the bright light, but she was nowhere to be seen. He heard an engine rev, and ran for the gate at the end of the yard, skidding to a stop in the alley beyond just in time to see an olive-green mule round the far corner, with Bester’s peroxide-treated curls bobbing in the driver’s seat. He ran after the vehicle, knowing he had no chance of catching it on foot but hoping to keep it in sight until it stopped.
He pursued the kidnappers through narrow streets, taking every shortcut he dared, until he reached the seawall above the coastal settlement’s crowded marina. He stopped at the railing, lungs burning, fearing for a moment that he’d lost them, then saw the mule bumping over the planks of a slip towards a waiting zodiac. The legs of Kaylee’s jumpsuit were visible in the back, protruding from the shadow cast by the grizzled man from the hardware store. Still panting, Simon found the nearest access stairs and descended quickly to the harbour level. He dodged human and mechanical obstacles, trying to cut a direct path to the boat and head them off (what he’d do then, he wasn’t sure). Unfortunately the mule was faster; when he reached the slip it was too late, and the scoundrels were skimming across the sparkling waves with Kaylee still in their custody.
Cursing as loudly and crudely as he could, Simon cast his eyes about for some way to pursue the huài dàn. Spying an unmonitored speedboat he threw himself bodily into it, splashing water onto his clothes. He fumbled the ropes loose from the dock and gunned the engine, and the boat lurched forward into the open ocean.
---
Kaylee started cursing in every language she knew from the moment Bester and his cohort carried her off, her blue streak interrupted only momentarily by an “umf” when she was thrown roughly against a hard surface like embossed metal. She struck out blindly with her fists, but sausage fingers caught her wrists and bound them together with a strip of sharp-edged plastic. She fully intended to keep on cursing until they let her go, but a hard slap across her mouth (inside the bag she couldn’t tell if it was luck or honed skill) shocked her into silence. “Any more chatter,” a man-not Bester-growled, his breath hot on her ear even through the heavy material, “and I’ll have to put a proper gag on ye. ‘Course, all’s I’ve got for gaggin’ is the socks I’ve been wearin’ for nigh on a month, an ye wouldn’t like that, now, would ye?” She suffered the rest of the ride without a word.
The rough road and poor shocks of the mule (she assumed, from the chug of the engine) tossed her around like a loose washer, and she squirmed to avoid touching the brute who’d bound her each time a sharp corner sent her lurching into his solid, sweat-smelling frame. Neither he nor Bester said a word.
Choking back her terrified rage, Kaylee tried to still her mind and concentrate on the route the mule was taking so that she could find her way back to Simon if she managed to escape. She bumped into the back of the seat as the mule’s nose tilted steeply down, then leveled out and rattled steadily over a bumpy surface. The smell of salt, which pervaded the entire town, was particularly acute here and she heard splashing beneath the rumble of engines. A harbour?
Her suspicion was given support when the mule stopped and she was once again lifted up and deposited bodily on a hard surface, because this one rocked violently and sent a sloshing of water over the side to soak her tank top and the bag on her face. The boat rocked again as each of the two men climbed on board and continued to wobble as a voice she hadn’t heard yet grunted irritably. “The rut is this?”
“Some gear-jockey skirt Bester said ter grab. Says we need her to do the job.”
“That so? I thought you said you could do this, Bester.”
“No, I can!” The boat wobbled as he hedged, and there was a scraping noise of rope on wood. “Just there’s this one tricky bit, and I can’t be in two places at once, and you and Garth’ll have your hands full. Besides, this girl knows engines, I mean really knows ‘em. With her on board we can be in and out in no time flat.”
“Captain?” The sausage-fingered man asked, and during the pause before the new man spoke again a gull screamed.
“Bring her along. If we have to, we can always dump her.”
---
It took a couple of near-spills for Simon to get the hang of the primitive motor boat, but soon he was skipping lightly over the waves in a targeted pursuit. His original plan was to overtake them, but logic prevailed (he was outnumbered and unarmed, and while he used to be a strong swimmer he was out of practice and didn’t know Kaylee’s skill level, and either way they were now well beyond reach of land) and he was now intent on tailing the zodiac to its destination and attempting to retrieve Kaylee by stealth.
It wasn’t long before the sparkling bulk of a luxury cruiser rose into view above the curve of the horizon. The zodiac adjusted their course to come in at a more obtuse angle, taking advantage of a calm stream in the turbulent froth of the ship’s wake. Simon did the same. The kidnappers appeared to give no thought to being followed.
The cruiser was tall and monstrously fat, easily equal in size to the town from which they’d just come, and the zodiac slipped quietly into its sprawling shadow. Simon squeezed the throttle, urging the boat into the darkness after them-but the engine balked, sputtered and went dead.
Drifting suddenly without power, Simon tried irritably to restart the engine but to no avail. He checked that every line and wire that he could see was properly connected (this was not the anatomy he knew), then tapped his knuckles against the rusted metal fuel tank. It rang hollowly. He looked for a spare container. There wasn’t one. There was, however, a single cracked wooden paddle. Sighing, Simon picked up the paddle and settled himself in the bottom of the boat, where he could most easily alternate his strokes to maintain a steady course.
He paddled into the gap between the hovering ship and the ocean’s surface, drawing close to where the zodiac, now unmanned, had been tethered beneath the mouth of one of the massive fans that kept the vessel aloft (now blessedly silent). He tied his boat to the cruiser independently, then stepped unsteadily over the inflated wall of the zodiac to its rigid floor and hauled himself up gingerly between the stationary blades into the bowels of the yacht.
Simon found himself in a circular horizontal channel, slightly too short for him to stand upright, curving gently upwards at the far end. Water was pooling on the floor and the walls were spotted with rust. Hearing a muffled echo of voices, he crept down the damp passage and then navigated a series of open doors and hatches, pausing at every mechanical clank. A whoop of triumph rang ahead and Simon advanced more quickly, freezing with his back against the wall of a loudly whirring room. From inside, a gruff and commanding voice called for quiet. “Bester, get this stuff loaded up. Garth, close up the grate. Let's hit the waves.”
“What about the girl?”
“She’ll get what she deserves.”
At that moment Bester came around the corner, a heavy crate in his arms. Instinctively Simon threw out a fist, connecting with the bridge of his sun-bronzed nose and sending him staggering back against the far wall, but not before the inept mechanic had time to bleat a startled “Hey!”
In the space of a heartbeat Simon was sprawled on his knees, a meaty hand crushing the tendons in his neck and forcing him to arch backwards in pain. From here he was dragged through the door into the room where they’d been talking earlier and thrown onto the floor, landing hard on his forearms. He tried to push himself upright, but a solid kick just below his sternum crumpled him up again.
“Simon!” Kaylee cried, a mixture of concern and disbelief.
“Zhè shì shénme làn dōngxī?” A voice above him inquired suspiciously. “Who is this hùndàn?”
“He was in the hardware place when we grabbed Kaylee,” Bester said, caressing his swollen nose. “He must have followed us.”
“What did I tell you?”
“Cap’n, I didn’t-“
“Load the ruttin’ boat. Garth, get him up.” The thug hauled him to his feet to face the speaker, a man about his height with a dark ponytail and gold earrings as thick as pencils. “What’s your name, stranger?”
“ Nǐ qù sǐ!” Simon spat.
“Leave him alone!”
The thieves’ leader cast Kaylee a warning glance. “Don’t start. You’ve been very helpful and I’d hate for our relationship to go sour now.”
“If you hurt her-“
“You’ll what? No really, what will you do?” The captain laughed and punched him in the face. Garth let go of his shoulders as he swung, so the blow knocked him reeling . . . right into the steam-slick doorframe, where his forehead connected with a fleshy smack before he slid to the floor. He saw the pirates’ boots shuffle and heard Kaylee shriek-then he saw and heard nothing at all.
Conclusion
Author/Artist: thegiantkiller
Recipient's name: manicmarauder88
Fandom: Firefly
Characters/Pairings: Kaylee/Simon, Bester, OC pirates
Rating and Warnings: PG-13; violence and colourful language
Summary: Part one: Kaylee is abducted by a former acquaintance and Simon attempts to come to her rescue. ~2700 words
Notes: Precedes/precludes the Big Damn Movie. Hover for translations. Mandarin’s cobbled together from a few different sources; corrections are welcome. Thanks to hadespuppy for the beta.
“That one looks like a turtle,” Kaylee said.
“Which one?” Simon asked, squinting. They were lying side by side in the shade of a heavily slanting palm tree, but the sun was high and the sky itself almost painfully bright.
“Next to the compression coil.”
“That really doesn’t help me.”
“That one,” she raised her hand to point out a bulbous shape among the slowly drifting and deforming clouds, “right there.”
“Huh,” he said, peering up at it. “Looks more like a tortoise to me.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“Not really. Tortoises live on land, so they have feet rather than flippers. And their shells are more steeply domed.”
Kaylee rolled her eyes. “Okay then, Doctor Smartypants, it’s a tortoise. Your turn.”
Simon sighed and raised a hand to his face, adjusting the damp rag he was using to cool the lump, not unlike a tortoise shell, blossoming on his forehead. When he last asked after the bruise’s colour, Kaylee had informed him that it was “rainbow.”
“Are you sure that beacon is working?”
“It’ll work. I mean, the signal’s pretty weak and this rock ain’t exactly tiny, so it might take ‘em a bit to spot it. But they’ll find us, don’t you worry.” Kaylee’s brow crinkled, but she kept her voice confident. This plan of course assumed that Serenity was in fact searching the surface. They’d been gone long enough that their absence must have become suspicious, but there was really no reason for the crew to believe that they were even still on the moon.
“I’m in no rush to leave,” Simon said drowsily.
Kaylee, dabbing the blood from her split lip, rolled her head over in the sand to look at him. “No?”
“Well,” he equivocated, eyes focused past his feet at the rolling surf, “it’s not exactly the Sihnon Astoria, but the company’s hard to beat.”
Kaylee let her hand creep like a spider across the cool rough of the sand until it found the warm smooth of his arm. Simon glanced down at the source of the touch, then raised his hand to intertwine his fingers with hers and rolled his throbbing head back up to face the sky.
She grinned. “You’re sweet when you have a head injury.”
Simon raised his free hand to point out a squishy blob of floating vapour. “There’s a pancreas,” he said.
---
The last job had gone remarkably-well, perhaps “smoothly” was an overstatement, but the total number of stitches required to repair the damage was under forty, which was better than usual, and they had actually been paid, which was almost miraculous. Mal, in a gesture of Demerol-enhanced magnanimity, had endowed Kaylee with a wadge of credit and told her to fix his damn ship. That was two days ago. Today Mal (now sober) had taken Zoe and Jayne with him to secure the next job, River was helping Wash with some general cleaning and maintenance around the ship, and Simon had been enlisted to help Kaylee with the shopping (more precisely: to help carry her plunder home from the hardware emporium). At this particular moment, that meant standing amidst a bewildering array of mechanical whatsits, in front of a wall of enormous spools of wire and cable in various materials and gauges, watching her evaluate the flexibility of a length of copper.
When he noticed the tall blond man striding determinedly up the aisle towards them, Simon instinctively turned his face away in case the stranger was a habitual reader of wanted posters.
“Hey!” the man called as he approached. “It’s Kaylee, right?”
“Bester, hi!” Kaylee exclaimed, acknowledging the man with a megawatt smile of recognition.
He flailed his arms exultantly. “Man, I thought that was you! How’ve you been?”
“Great, really great! Well, pretty good anyway, I mean things can’t always be shí quán, but, you know, I’m doin’ okay. What about you?”
He nodded, chomping loudly on a wad of gum. “Oh, shiny. You still workin’ on that Firefly?”
“Serenity, yeah, it’s goin’ pretty good. And you, what are you doing?”
“I got a gig. It’s goin’ pretty sweet. As a matter of fact we got a job on for this afternoon, and the cap’n’s actually letting me help with the plannin’ on this one-hey! Would you mind taking a look at what I’ve got and tellin’ me what you think? You were always real smart with that machine stuff-I mean, you stole my job! Not that I mind or anything, that Mal was a real buzzkill.” He smiled again, flashing white teeth and what Simon supposed must pass for charm in these parts. “You got a minute?”
“Um, yeah, okay.” Kaylee turned to Simon. “You’ll be okay here by yourself for a bit?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, and the man looked him over, apparently noticing him for the first time.
Kaylee gasped, embarrassed. “Oh, I’m sorry, that was so rude. This is S-“ she caught herself on the brink of revealing his real name “Sam. Sam, this is Bester.”
“How’s it hangin’, brother?” Bester grinned and raised his hand for Simon to slap, which he did hesitantly, then frowned as Bester caught the eye of a grizzled older man standing near the warehouse’ entrance. Kaylee, busy handing her shopping basket and pinkly-scribbled lists over to Simon, did not observe the exchange.
Bester led Kaylee away towards the entrance, placing his hand familiarly on her hip (Simon frowned again). He steered her through the bar of dusty sunlight and out into the scrapyard in front of the store, and the grizzled man followed.
Outside, Bester drew Kaylee into the head-high piles of debris speckling the yard, out of sight of either the warehouse or the street. “Lemme just find a flat spot to spread out the sketches,” he said, glancing over his shoulder, then wheeled and caught hold of both her wrists.
“Hey!” Kaylee cried, giggling, “what are you--!?” She squeaked in fear when other hands-veiny, with fingers like hairy sausages-lunged into her field of vision, pulling a sack over her head and tightening it around her throat. “Sim-“ she tried to scream but a palm clamped down over her mouth through the coarse fabric, a strong arm pinned her own to her ribs, and her feet were hoisted off the ground before her lips could form the word.
Simon, who was already creeping uncertainly towards the door, broke into a run at the sound of her raised voice. He dropped the basket, which tipped on its side and spilled its bounty of accumulated clanky things musically across the cement floor.
“Kaylee!” he shouted as he burst into the bright light, but she was nowhere to be seen. He heard an engine rev, and ran for the gate at the end of the yard, skidding to a stop in the alley beyond just in time to see an olive-green mule round the far corner, with Bester’s peroxide-treated curls bobbing in the driver’s seat. He ran after the vehicle, knowing he had no chance of catching it on foot but hoping to keep it in sight until it stopped.
He pursued the kidnappers through narrow streets, taking every shortcut he dared, until he reached the seawall above the coastal settlement’s crowded marina. He stopped at the railing, lungs burning, fearing for a moment that he’d lost them, then saw the mule bumping over the planks of a slip towards a waiting zodiac. The legs of Kaylee’s jumpsuit were visible in the back, protruding from the shadow cast by the grizzled man from the hardware store. Still panting, Simon found the nearest access stairs and descended quickly to the harbour level. He dodged human and mechanical obstacles, trying to cut a direct path to the boat and head them off (what he’d do then, he wasn’t sure). Unfortunately the mule was faster; when he reached the slip it was too late, and the scoundrels were skimming across the sparkling waves with Kaylee still in their custody.
Cursing as loudly and crudely as he could, Simon cast his eyes about for some way to pursue the huài dàn. Spying an unmonitored speedboat he threw himself bodily into it, splashing water onto his clothes. He fumbled the ropes loose from the dock and gunned the engine, and the boat lurched forward into the open ocean.
---
Kaylee started cursing in every language she knew from the moment Bester and his cohort carried her off, her blue streak interrupted only momentarily by an “umf” when she was thrown roughly against a hard surface like embossed metal. She struck out blindly with her fists, but sausage fingers caught her wrists and bound them together with a strip of sharp-edged plastic. She fully intended to keep on cursing until they let her go, but a hard slap across her mouth (inside the bag she couldn’t tell if it was luck or honed skill) shocked her into silence. “Any more chatter,” a man-not Bester-growled, his breath hot on her ear even through the heavy material, “and I’ll have to put a proper gag on ye. ‘Course, all’s I’ve got for gaggin’ is the socks I’ve been wearin’ for nigh on a month, an ye wouldn’t like that, now, would ye?” She suffered the rest of the ride without a word.
The rough road and poor shocks of the mule (she assumed, from the chug of the engine) tossed her around like a loose washer, and she squirmed to avoid touching the brute who’d bound her each time a sharp corner sent her lurching into his solid, sweat-smelling frame. Neither he nor Bester said a word.
Choking back her terrified rage, Kaylee tried to still her mind and concentrate on the route the mule was taking so that she could find her way back to Simon if she managed to escape. She bumped into the back of the seat as the mule’s nose tilted steeply down, then leveled out and rattled steadily over a bumpy surface. The smell of salt, which pervaded the entire town, was particularly acute here and she heard splashing beneath the rumble of engines. A harbour?
Her suspicion was given support when the mule stopped and she was once again lifted up and deposited bodily on a hard surface, because this one rocked violently and sent a sloshing of water over the side to soak her tank top and the bag on her face. The boat rocked again as each of the two men climbed on board and continued to wobble as a voice she hadn’t heard yet grunted irritably. “The rut is this?”
“Some gear-jockey skirt Bester said ter grab. Says we need her to do the job.”
“That so? I thought you said you could do this, Bester.”
“No, I can!” The boat wobbled as he hedged, and there was a scraping noise of rope on wood. “Just there’s this one tricky bit, and I can’t be in two places at once, and you and Garth’ll have your hands full. Besides, this girl knows engines, I mean really knows ‘em. With her on board we can be in and out in no time flat.”
“Captain?” The sausage-fingered man asked, and during the pause before the new man spoke again a gull screamed.
“Bring her along. If we have to, we can always dump her.”
---
It took a couple of near-spills for Simon to get the hang of the primitive motor boat, but soon he was skipping lightly over the waves in a targeted pursuit. His original plan was to overtake them, but logic prevailed (he was outnumbered and unarmed, and while he used to be a strong swimmer he was out of practice and didn’t know Kaylee’s skill level, and either way they were now well beyond reach of land) and he was now intent on tailing the zodiac to its destination and attempting to retrieve Kaylee by stealth.
It wasn’t long before the sparkling bulk of a luxury cruiser rose into view above the curve of the horizon. The zodiac adjusted their course to come in at a more obtuse angle, taking advantage of a calm stream in the turbulent froth of the ship’s wake. Simon did the same. The kidnappers appeared to give no thought to being followed.
The cruiser was tall and monstrously fat, easily equal in size to the town from which they’d just come, and the zodiac slipped quietly into its sprawling shadow. Simon squeezed the throttle, urging the boat into the darkness after them-but the engine balked, sputtered and went dead.
Drifting suddenly without power, Simon tried irritably to restart the engine but to no avail. He checked that every line and wire that he could see was properly connected (this was not the anatomy he knew), then tapped his knuckles against the rusted metal fuel tank. It rang hollowly. He looked for a spare container. There wasn’t one. There was, however, a single cracked wooden paddle. Sighing, Simon picked up the paddle and settled himself in the bottom of the boat, where he could most easily alternate his strokes to maintain a steady course.
He paddled into the gap between the hovering ship and the ocean’s surface, drawing close to where the zodiac, now unmanned, had been tethered beneath the mouth of one of the massive fans that kept the vessel aloft (now blessedly silent). He tied his boat to the cruiser independently, then stepped unsteadily over the inflated wall of the zodiac to its rigid floor and hauled himself up gingerly between the stationary blades into the bowels of the yacht.
Simon found himself in a circular horizontal channel, slightly too short for him to stand upright, curving gently upwards at the far end. Water was pooling on the floor and the walls were spotted with rust. Hearing a muffled echo of voices, he crept down the damp passage and then navigated a series of open doors and hatches, pausing at every mechanical clank. A whoop of triumph rang ahead and Simon advanced more quickly, freezing with his back against the wall of a loudly whirring room. From inside, a gruff and commanding voice called for quiet. “Bester, get this stuff loaded up. Garth, close up the grate. Let's hit the waves.”
“What about the girl?”
“She’ll get what she deserves.”
At that moment Bester came around the corner, a heavy crate in his arms. Instinctively Simon threw out a fist, connecting with the bridge of his sun-bronzed nose and sending him staggering back against the far wall, but not before the inept mechanic had time to bleat a startled “Hey!”
In the space of a heartbeat Simon was sprawled on his knees, a meaty hand crushing the tendons in his neck and forcing him to arch backwards in pain. From here he was dragged through the door into the room where they’d been talking earlier and thrown onto the floor, landing hard on his forearms. He tried to push himself upright, but a solid kick just below his sternum crumpled him up again.
“Simon!” Kaylee cried, a mixture of concern and disbelief.
“Zhè shì shénme làn dōngxī?” A voice above him inquired suspiciously. “Who is this hùndàn?”
“He was in the hardware place when we grabbed Kaylee,” Bester said, caressing his swollen nose. “He must have followed us.”
“What did I tell you?”
“Cap’n, I didn’t-“
“Load the ruttin’ boat. Garth, get him up.” The thug hauled him to his feet to face the speaker, a man about his height with a dark ponytail and gold earrings as thick as pencils. “What’s your name, stranger?”
“ Nǐ qù sǐ!” Simon spat.
“Leave him alone!”
The thieves’ leader cast Kaylee a warning glance. “Don’t start. You’ve been very helpful and I’d hate for our relationship to go sour now.”
“If you hurt her-“
“You’ll what? No really, what will you do?” The captain laughed and punched him in the face. Garth let go of his shoulders as he swung, so the blow knocked him reeling . . . right into the steam-slick doorframe, where his forehead connected with a fleshy smack before he slid to the floor. He saw the pirates’ boots shuffle and heard Kaylee shriek-then he saw and heard nothing at all.
Conclusion