Steven Brust - My Own Kind of Freedom

“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.