Simon sees River first: at the look on her face, his heart starts hammering. “Mei mei?”
They’re all still shouting, Mal louder than most.
“Everyone shut the hell up. You too, sir.” Zoë’s command gets through where even Mal’s couldn’t. “River? What is it, honey?”
“Oil. Underwater.”
They exchange bewildered glances around the table as she steps into the room. “Deep sea oil, off the coast. It’s a protected marine habitat, though. Communal property. He’s only governor; couldn’t just claim it.” She frowns, as if trying to penetrate fog. “Serenity showed me. He wants that oil. Wants it so much.”
***
Saffron listens with a growing sense of the creeps. Mal’s told her what the girl can do, but damn. Whether it’s her or the ship don’t make it any less uncanny.
“There’s a glitch in the code he had someone send to Jayne. There’s location data there. Depth, projected volume. A lot of money.” She pauses, swallows. “Just little people in the way. He needed something to burn through them. A flashfire. The virus is an ancient one from Earth-that-was; we’ve all got perma-vaccine patches at birth. He must too. They don’t. He just needed someone to deliver the spark-”
***
“…so he could wipe out a whole community to get some gorram oil and hang the whole infected cargo thing on me.” Jayne rises slowly, filled with a blazing, astonished fury that slowly settles into a deeper, grimmer rage. He don’t much care if a man goes after some illicit fortune, but he’s seen people dying all week. Kids, families, oldies. Little girl what looked like River.
He swallows bile. “Guess it’s time to see a man about a deal.”
“Yeah?” Across the table, Mal eyes him sharply. “For your rep or them sick folks?”