Steven Brust - My Own Kind of Freedom

“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.

He ran through the preliminary checklist a second time before he started warming up the shuttle. He thought about running through it a third, but there was an old saying to the effect that you shouldn’t start getting paranoid when time was running out.

Actually, there wasn’t any such saying, but there should be. Wash decided that if he lived through this, he’d have to come up with one. Meanwhile, he started the warmup process, again checking each step carefully.

It wasn’t like this would be the trickiest flying he’d ever done. Quite. No reason to be nervous.

He felt an obscure disappointment when the warmup sequence was completed, because now he had nothing to do except wait until it was time to move.