The roar of retro-thrusters shut off his line of thought. The shuttle was breaking atmo at a seriously flawed angle. The too-steep re-entry made Mal’s cheeks go saggy and flutter wildly against his clenched teeth. Buffeting. Buffeting. He hoped to blue blazes someone had taken the time to check the heat shield before they started the descent. One crack could turn to two, and two to ten, and before you knew it you were a gorramn meteor. More buffeting. Harder. It was like being trapped inside a cocktail shaker without the booze.
Then the vibration stopped and the welcome pull of real gravity replaced the ship’s artificial. Mal’s ears popped. He still had to pee, and thanks to the sudden appearance of normal grav, with considerably more urgency. The vessel settled down on the ground with a resounding crunch, and the engines cut out.
Then he was pulled brusquely to his feet, maybe by Philips, maybe by Someone New. He flexed his hands over and over, trying without much luck to bring the feeling back into his fingers. There were other people around him, aside from Philips and Someone New. From the combined body warmth and parts per million of sweat odor, he knew he was well and completely surrounded, as though being escorted by an honor guard. As they dragged him off, he couldn’t come up with a single stratagem that could turn the tables and save his life. He was plumb out of imaginary heroics.
After a heap of clanging boot soles on metal deck plates, the path they were taking angled downward. He felt a rush of cool air and realized he was being herded off a gangplank. Then the footing under him got soft. Sand or fine soil, maybe. Earthy odors penetrated the chickenfeed stink of the burlap sack — mud, dirt, rock.
Down they walked, or rather, his escorts walked and Mal stumbled. After a bit, their breathing and grunts of effort suddenly got louder and their footsteps began to echo. Mal’s right shoulder scraped something hard and sharp, like chiseled rock. The air was noticeably damper and clammier and they were traveling on a shallow downward incline. He rationalized that they were taking him into a cavern or a tunnel. Something sizzled on the right side of his body, and he sensed a rush of heat, which quickly passed. He smelled burning rags and oil. A torch, most likely, stuck in the wall in a sconce.
The angle of their descent grew steeper, and it became even more of a challenge not to trip and fall. Mal didn’t want to give these guys any excuse to hit him. They were already a bit too fond of the exercise and he figured he might need his every speck of brains later.
Without warning the group stopped.
“That him?” someone double-new asked. The question echoed into the distance. That him… him… him…
Who else might it be? Mal wondered. A feeble hope fluttered in his throat that the kidnappers had somehow grabbed the wrong person outside Taggart’s, confused one Mal Reynolds with another of similar features and identical moniker. And then the hood was yanked off Mal’s head. Moldy subterranean air hit his face. Torches, dozens of them, flickered against the gloom of dark rock walls and ceiling.
The man glaring at him from arm’s length looked familiar to Mal. He had biggish ears, smallish eyes, and a decidedly crooked nose. It was the singular beak that tapped at Mal’s memory. There was no forgetting that narrow blade with the sudden dogleg to the right. Or the downright marvel that the two holes at the drippy end hadn’t by force of momentum ended up somewhere on his opposing cheek. That busted-to-hell nose had fought beside Mal’s own nose in the war, Mal was sure of it. He and the other man had taken on the Alliance nose to nose, as it were.
The man said nothing, only watched him with a calculation in his eyes.
The rows of torches on the walls hissed and sputtered, and gave off ribbons of black smoke.
“Help me out here,” Mal said. “I know you, right?”
“You’ll get it,” the man assured him. “Just take your time.”
After a few seconds it all came rushing back.
“Deakins,” Mal said, triumph and relief flooding his voice. It was Stuart Deakins, late of the so-called “Balls and Bayonets” Brigade. For two years that at the time seemed like a hundred and twelve, Stu Deakins had been a ground pounder under Sergeant Malcolm Reynolds’ command. Mal had half-carried, half-dragged the wounded man to safety in a firefight during the New Kasimir offensive, running a gauntlet of Alliance gunfire. He was glad to find his soldier still alive and, hopefully, on-scene to set straight whatever terrible misunderstanding had arisen. “Deakins — Stu — it’s me. Malcolm Reynolds. Sergeant Reynolds, as was.”
“Yeah, Sarge, I know who you are,” Stu Deakins said, “and who you were.”
With that, he dipped a shoulder and swung hard for Mal’s gut. The punch seemed to come at Mal in slow motion, and Mal tensed to absorb the blow. Surprise more than pain doubled him over. But the impact still knocked the wind out of him.
As he struggled to catch his breath, Mal looked up at Deakins in disbelief. Before he could speak, the men surrounding him caught him under the arms and steered him onward. Mal looked back to see Deakins spitting on the very ground where he had just stood. That utterly dumbfounded him.
I saved his life. That’s not something normally makes a man hit you, then hawk and spit in the dirt. Not unless the etiquette for gratitude has changed some since the war.
His captors led him on down a tunnel hewn from virgin rock. There were cavities in the walls and ceiling that marked where timber braces had at once time provided support. An old mine of some sort, then.
The tunnel split in two after a ways and his escorts shoved him down the right-hand fork. After a bit more walking, the rock corridor ended, opening onto a cavern whose floor was twenty feet lower. When Mal and his captors stepped to the edge, they were met by a chorus of shouts from below. Lit by torches and oildrum fires, a group of forty or so people stared up at them. Even in the flickering light, he could see the men and women all wore the traditional Independent outerwear: a knee-length coat of brown suede. It made his heart swell to see folks thus decked out, honoring the side for which he’d fought and bled, and would do again if given the opportunity. It wasn’t a costume party. They all looked to be roughly his age, certainly of a vintage that he could have served with — veterans of the war.
He thought he recognized a few of the faces. There was “Panda” Alcatraz with the wine-colored birthmarks around his eyes, and that guy Lucas, the sly bastard who had traded the now-deceased Tracey Smith a can of beans for what turned out to be the ’verse’s bluntest bayonet. Mal wondered if this whole shindig was some kind of elaborate Alliance Day practical joke, starting with a hazing and ending in a reunion of old comrades-in-arms. If so, it had been a little on the sadistic side, but all was well that ended well, right?
“Hail, Browncoats,” he called down happily.
As the echoes of his greeting faded away, the yelling stopped. Pins could have dropped in the cave and he would have heard them plink.
Mal then realized the people were all glaring up at him, not a smile or a friendly wink from the lot. Swallowing down any other felicitous words he might have spoken, he felt the force of gazes brimming over with anger and hatred and was baffled by it. What had he done to warrant such a reaction?
On the far side of the vault, he saw a raised wooden platform. Next to it stood what looked like the tower of an oil derrick, only about a tenth-scale version. It was, Mal thought, the remains of a drilling rig the miners would have used. It looked old. Somebody had prospected here once. Somebody had gone home empty-handed, doubtless having sunk some capital into the enterprise and bankrupted themselves. That would explain leaving equipment behind. No point throwing good money after bad.