Episode 512: Unusual Alliances, Part Four

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Joshua: (wry) I’m shocked.
Kiera: Well, no. All of us, actually.
Joshua: Once again, I’m shocked. So?
Kiera: That we might be used for something. That we might be useful to her.
Rina: (soft) Makes sense.
Kiera: She might have a mission for us. An act of kindness. Y’all go for the acts of kindness.
Nika: The Operative heard that and she showed zero interest.
Kiera: Yeah, but you probably didn’t give the full truth of what you guys are. Big giant soppy hearts. All she’s gotta do is give you a reason to go and y’all’ll go. You’re talkin about it with her like a business person, that you have something dangerous that you gotta do that y’all’re going to say no to. But if it was like … I don’t know … cute bunnies somewhere that needed to be saved, y’all will go.
Nika: What?

Rina starts to laugh. She slides to the floor and just dies.

Nika: I’m not saving bunnies.
Joshua: Why not?
Kiera: See?
Joshua: Why not?
Kiera: You’re gonna be savin’ bunnies cuz they like bunnies, don’t you?
Joshua: Well, yeah, I like bunnies.
Kiera: See?
Rina: (gasping) Especially with mushrooms on the side, yeah. (dies some more)
Kiera: See? You might wanna eat bunnies.
Joshua: We can’t let the bunnies become—wait! Bunnies?

Joshua sighs and lets the matter drop even as Nika nails Kiera with a look.

Nika: So, which part of the conversation ‘we are not the only crew leaving’ did you miss?
Kiera: (sighs) Can’t help the other one right now.
Nika: Not leavin’ them.
Kiera: I don’t know anything about them. They also may be the biggest bleedin’ heart saps of all time, but right now you all are accorded that title.
Joshua: All righty then.
Kiera: Well, no. Y’all are very useful as the king and queens of the Bleedin’ Hearts Society.
Rina: (sobering) If we’re to rescue bunnies out in the Verse, she has to let us out of here and once we’re out of here we have more options, yes?
Nika: (to Rina) You know my terms.
Rina: I know your terms. Can we just call the other crew the bunnies?
Nika: Okay, fine.
Joshua: So we’ll leave seven.
Kiera: Frankly don’t wanna leave any of them. Cuz your old high school girlfriend buddy pal whatever that short little woman is, is not gonna—
Joshua: River.
Kiera: Yeah. That short ugly one’s definitely not gonna. Left to her own devices and she’s still has control of the Reader she’s got, she’s going to go back to her old ways. I do not see her being reformed unless they put her in jail.
Nika: Kappa?
Johsua: Mm-hm.
Nika: I wasn’t referring to Kappa.
Kiera: Well no. What I was saying is that you got to make it clear that you’re willing to do something. Because if Kappa gets left behind with any of these Readers, she’s going to start this up again.

The door opens. We fall silent. The Operative slips inside. She looks nervous.

The Operative: Well, I’m in the unfortunate situation of having to trust you for something. It appears that Agent Kappa has disappeared.
Nika: How do you lose track of your Readers? (off Joshua’s look) Never mind.
Joshua: I was about to say, does not the history of my—
Nika: Never mind. I can think of two you’ve managed to lose track of.
Joshua: (to the Operative) Go on.
The Operative: I’ve also lost contact with my security detail … that was at the surface.
Joshua: (ouch!) Ooh.
Kiera: That’s not good. So your big giant ‘I can call my ship and destroy us all’ is not going to work.
The Operative: I do have that option but if at all possible I would prefer not to.
Nika: She doesn’t want to be obliterated.
Kiera: I wouldn’t either.
The Operative: I don’t see how that would serve any useful purpose, if we can manage this.
Rina: Can’t you just call them on the radio?
The Operative: Call who on the radio?
Rina: If you’re worried about the ship—
Joshua: No. She’s not worried about the ship.
Kiera: She’s worried about the security detail that she’s lost contact with.
The Operative: I can call on my ship. Perhaps, actually, I may need the repeater on my shuttle.

Does this mean that communications is out too? Whatever. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Rina: So, Kappa’s missing and so are your guards. How many of them are there?
The Operative: I had six guards.
Joshua: It’s a takeover.
Nika: Kappa doesn’t like the Operative.
The Operative: Yes, she may have felt put upon by my criticisms of her work.
Joshua: Yeah, she doesn’t take criticism very well.
Kiera: We saw her crying. She went into the bathroom and cried. All that time in the bathroom ought to give her a chance to—
The Operative: I suspect she has decided to take matters into her own hands and perhaps—
Nika: Oh great. So you’ve got a rogue Reader running loose. Again.
The Operative: Yes. That makes it a little more difficult.
Joshua: There’s a lot of us running around.
Nika: Clearly.
Joshua: So—
Rina: Where do we come in?
The Operative: Well … It’s in all of our interests to not be killed here.
Nika: I’ll buy that argument, yes.
The Operative: I thought perhaps you might assist in …
Rina: (smiling) Taking over the base.
The Operative: Retaking the base, yes.
Kiera: Well, we were good at that before.
The Operative: Yes, you seem to have done fairly well.

The Operative looks around the cell we’re in with a sarcastic lift of her brow.

Kiera: Well, we had helpers.
Nika: That required a few more of us, though.
The Operative: Yes, that’s why I’m thinking we’ll talk to the others as well. You seemed most likely to compromise on this issue with me and so with your … assistance I think we can convince them all that this is the best course of action and perhaps we can … reconsider our alternatives once this is over.
Kiera: I say, Captain, that you need to talk to the other Captains and see if you could get them—
Joshua: That’s the idea.
Nika: I’ll speak to them.
Kiera: I’m all for taking the base over cuz I don’t like that li’l thing.
Nika: Oh, I can’t stand her. I can’t stand her worse than I can’t stand this one, so …yeah, all right. I’ll talk to the Captains. The Operative: (brow rising) I thought I’d been—
Nika: Yeah. You’ve been polite. don’t’ get me wrong but the whole being held prisoner thing, I don’t like.
Joshua: And to be fair, I haven’t had a long quality history with any of the Operatives I’ve run into.
Nika: Except for the one who gave her life, you know.
Joshua: Well, but I …
Nika: But anyway.
Rina: She had style that one.
Joshua: I know. She went out great.
Nika: I do not wish to have a rogue really-likes-violence-and-blood Reader on the loose.
Kiera: A sado-masochistic Reader is not good.
Nika: So yes, I will talk to the other Captains.
Rina: I think she was just a sadist.
The Operative: I’ve been guarding my thoughts against any Reading but perhaps she was able to ascertain even without Reading that her future was dim, once I were to get out. So ...
Kiera: Well, you made her cry. She doesn’t seem to be a girl who likes to do that.
The Operative: Yes. So. All the more reason we should probably activate—I seem to recall looking over the plans of this lab that there were certain failsafes involved in case of a … contamination issue and I’m concerned she might take advantage of those to attempt to … escape.
Rina: So. Contamination issues. They lock down the facility. People escape. And then the entire thing goes firebomb or something? The Operative: Something like that. I believe it’s poisonous gas.
Kiera: Where’s your weapons at?
Nika: All right. Take her. Show her the plans and I will talk to the Captains.
Kiera: Your security people. Do they know what you’re doin’?
The Operative: I’ve been unable to get in touch with my security detail.
Nika: What about the security detail of the base itself?
Joshua: They’re Kappa’s.
The Operative: I believe they are in her service, yes.
Nika: So they are there as well. So we have no security personnel whatsoever?
The Operative: I found … two of my men … killed. I can only assume the others are either captive or are also… dead. The weapons were removed from this floor, I assume, and redistributed to her crew.
Kiera: So the man who escorted me from your office is not yours?
The Operative: No. They had mysteriously left this floor. Which is why I decided to contact you.
Kiera: This is us against her, then. Where’d our weapons get put?
The Operative: I assume they were taken—
Joshua: We don’t—they’re redistributed.
Nika: Redistributed.
The Operative: (continuing)—away from us.
Kiera: Damn. All right. I got a scalpel.
The Operative: I have my weapon. But … I’m not sure that melee combat is how this is going to be resolved.
Kiera: Does your magic words work on her also?
The Operative: Perhaps.
Kiera: All right …
The Operative: Yes, if there’s a chance. Of course—
Kiera: (getting it) It immediately disables ours.

Meaning Joshua. Which Joshua is all too bitterly aware of, thanks.

Joshua: Remember I’m just a useless piece of flesh so it’s okay if you disable me.
Kiera: Okay, all right. If you could possibly position yourself so you could trip people up when she does it, that would be awesome.
The Operative: It’s not my words that have special powers, it’s their training and unfortunately, she can just—
Nika: How well trained are the guards that she had on this base? Previous to your arrival?
The Operative: I don’t really know. They seem to be ex-mercenary, ex- … us. Probably special forces people. Probably as good as my Marshals if not better.
Kiera: That’s nice to know. (to Joshua) I’ve stuck my fingers in your ears at least twice. I’ll have to remember that.
Nika: Woman! (nails Kiera with a look) No. Look, get my engineer on the plans and yes, I will talk to Captain Reynolds and Captain … what the heck was her name?
Rina: Captain LaSalle of IAV Nelson.
Nika: But if you want all of them to cooperate with saving your behind, they’re gonna wanna be let loose when we’re done with this.
Kiera: How much of this is on the camera?
The Operative: At this point I think it is an acceptable tradeoff. Not just for my own protection, of course, but to prevent this person from—.
Kiera: Escaping the planet. Either she’s gonna go for our ship or for her ship.
Nika: Oh, stars!

Nika looks like she’s just bitten into something indescribably bad. She’s practically spitting her disgust.

The Operative: She might get my shuttle but she won’t get far. So hop to it.
Nika: We need a comm array as well. Our ship should at least be locked down but I don’t know about the other one.
The Operative: A comm array? You mean like the one upst—we don’t have … She has control of the basement area. The power’s off, so we don’t have any…
Nika: Yeah. D’uh. We cut the power. Sorry. (sighs) Anyway. Captains. Deal with one thing at a time.

Rina’s thinking to herself: if we last saw Kappa on our level and the power’s out, she’s not taking the elevators. How’s she getting around? Is she using the ladders in the elevator shafts? She tries to picture the pudgy woman hoisting herself through the elevator roof hatch … and pulls her head back on task. She can mull it over later. If there is a later.

Nika leaves the cell to talk to Captain Reynolds first. Joshua goes with here. She doesn’t make it far into her presentation before someone takes offense at her strident tone and slams her against the wall. It’s Zoë, Reynold’s First Mate, and the woman leans in and says soft and low in Nika’s ear:

Zoë: Now, that’s not the way we talk to our captain. I think you might want to reconsider your approach. Dong le mah?

Everyone starts, then freezes, poised between diplomacy and donnybrook. Reynolds stands with arms crossed, giving Zoë an inscrutable look. Nika goes still. Arden, kneeling at Simon’s side, is torn between his patient and the woman he loves, who he knows can handle herself. Kaylee gasps and clutches N.J. Joshua maintains calm demeanor, not wanting to set off the powder keg. It’s Jayne who takes one look at the girl-on-girl action and settles the matter.

Jayne: I’ll be in my bunk.

Everyone breathes.

Jayne: So we gonna see fightin’?

Nika slants a look at Jayne and addresses Zoë, her face still against the wall:

Nika: Not if I can help it, cuz I owe your crew quite a lot and I am doing the best I can to get you out of here. Joshua: It’s a starting point. Captain?

All eyes turn to Reynolds. Nika catches his gaze.

Nika: I owe your crew more than I can ever repay. I am doing my level best to get you out of here. If that means I have to cooperate with her, that’s what I’ll do.
Reynolds: The way I see it is this. If cooperating with the Operative means we have a chance of getting that xīnlǐ mǔgǒu out of commission, even if it’s a trap, it would be worth it.
Nika: Oh, it’s definitely a trap.

And just like that, the mood of Reynolds’s crew changes. They relax and you get the feeling that yeah, they’ve got some experience with this. Zoë eases off Nika. Nika tugs her jacket straight and nods at the far corner.

Nika: Is Dr. Tam okay?
Simon: Yeah … Yes. I think … I’m okay. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right.

The mood in the room changes a little bit more and Joshua thinks Nika’s turned the tide. He thinks: well played, Captain. He’s careful to keep the approval from his face however, and moves to stand by Nika again. It’s not long before everyone piles out of the room to gather in the red gloom to discuss the options with everyone else—the Operative, Captain LaSalle and her group, the rest of us. The situation doesn’t look promising.

Reynolds: We’re unarmed. We’re facing a dozen armed mercenaries.
Nika: We were doing that on our way in.
Reynolds: They might have poison gas.
Joshua: What’s your point?
Reynolds: Do we have a plan?
Joshua: (snorts a laugh) When do we ever have a plan?
Kiera: All things go to heck when that happens.
Nika: Well, the power is out, so most of the security systems are going to be down.
Rina: Including the cameras. They can’t see us coming.

River stirs at Simon’s side.

River: (quietly) But we’re all still alive.
Nika: And?
River: So … whatever self-destruct they have may activate when the power goes out.
Nika: Which surely makes sense. Which means her first priority is to be getting off here and finding either your ship or my ship and …
Kiera: And then turning the power back on.
Nika: And then getting the bombardment started, because that was an automatic thing if the Operative didn’t get hold of her own ship within a certain amount of time. And they were just going to bombard the place and just assume she was taken out.
Joshua: I would also assume, and maybe I’m wrong, but the self-destruct sequence in a biological laboratory would have its own power supply. It would be separate from—if the power was bad and things need to get wiped, you’d want a separate power supply for your failsafe. (a beat) You know, River, you have a monastery named after you.
Nika: What?
Rina: Santa Ria. On Shepherd’s Moon.
Joshua: (off Nika’s look) I’ve been wanting to say it to her.
Kiera: It’s okay. In the middle of danger they have these sweet moments, you know that. You should’ve been more used to it that I was, Captain.
Nika: (recovering) Yeah, I … yeah, okay.
Rina: (to River) You’ve got an unusual fan club.

Focus, people. Focus.

Rina: So. Do we want to get out of here before the self-destruct sequence starts? Or do we try to cut the power to the self-destruct sequence? Do we even know where the power to it is? Does it even matter? Why don’t we just get out of here?
Nika: No. We need to take Kappa out of the equation.
Rina: She’s outside—
Nika and Joshua together: We don’t know she’s outside.
The Operative: I suspect that Kappa will take out our side of the operation, too. She won’t just flee. If we survive, she’s a marked person.
Nika: How long do we have before your ship assumes you are—in being out of contact, that you are also out of commission and therefore commences to bombard the place. Because I’m assuming you set that up as a failsafe: ‘If I don’t contact you within a certain amount of time’ …

For an answer, the Operative opens her suit jacket a bit. Underneath we can see she’s wearing a heartline vest—a vest with a body monitor silently blinking away.

Nika: So as long as you’re alive, we’re okay.
The Operative: If she cut all signals from my shuttle, then they’re probably not getting my signal, in which case they would begin the bombing sequence. But since they haven’t bombed us yet, I assume—.
Nika:' Either she hasn’t gotten to the shuttle yet or … ?
Rina: Does she even know where it is?
The Operative: The shuttle is parked right out there in the bay.
Nika: But she might not have the savvy to cut the signal.
The Operative: Either that or she knows she shouldn’t do it.
Nika: So here’s the question—does this facility need to remain intact?
The Operative: I have no desire to remain intact.
Rina: Then I say we get everybody the hell out and let it go.
Nika: Then we get everybody the hell out and get you in contact with your ship from our ship and then they can just orbital bombard the place.

Sounds like a plan.

Kiera: Mm-hm. But that still won’t let us know where Kappa is. Whether we got her or not.

Not that any plan is without its flaws.

The Operative: What I’m saying is, we might not find it so easy to just take out Kappa.
Joshua: Yes.
Nika: That’s a given.
Joshua: Can we get moving? Please?

Which way? The vent we originally entered the facility from? Or should we take the elevator shaft, hit the ladders there?

Nika: How many ways up are there from here? The way we came in originally. The elevator shaft. Does the way we came in originally have an outlet on the other levels, do you recall?
Rina: No. It directly emptied out into a horizontal vent that fed into this spot right here. (Puts her finger on the plans)
Nika: That was the only place it went.
Rina: There was, however, at the intersection—it was a four-way intersection—we did not go that way or that way. (runs finger along two arms of the four way) I suspect it would have gone to this one right here but I couldn’t say. So it’s possible we can get out of the elevator shaft into the horizontal shaft that we entered and were captured in. I don’t know.
Nika: So again, it begs the query—are we going out or are we going up the levels to take out the guards and Kappa?
Rina: We first have to find her. We have to ascertain if she’s in the base to take out.
Nika: All right. (taps map) Let’s hold that back as our final egress.
Kiera: That does make it awkward to get out.
Nika: Right. We’re gonna have to get straight up that pipe. No, no. Essentially if we go up the levels and take out the guards, we should be able to walk right out the front door.
Kiera: Exactly.
Nika: But holding that in reserve as our final egress point if we should need it to retreat and try to just get out and let the ship bombard the place orbitally.

Of course, if we’re in any of the vents when the bombing starts, it can go badly for us. And speaking of going badly … Rina recalls that torture device, the one that Simon had been strapped to, what if Kappa straps some random person down and throws the switch. Wouldn’t that make things very bad for the Readers in our party? We know that Readers are affected by anyone who’s tortured on that device, right? Simon shakes his head and clarifies the matter for the engineer. It only works against a Reader and the people the Reader is connected to. Furthermore …

Simon: It wasn’t just me. It was the whole crew. They were tortured in different ways.
Kiera: but she said very much that that machine could feed it, could focus that pain toward that person.
Rina: Could we use that against Kappa? She’s a Reader too.
Kiera: Yeah but who do we have that she likes?

One of the men we’d released before, Sorren Mueller, speaks up.

Sorren: That’s true. I was tortured on it too, as well.
Nika: To get to … ? To her? (points at River)
Sorren: My wife. The last I heard, she was on Boros.
Nika: Wife. (thinks) Okay.

And aside from the fact we’re contemplating torturing someone on the damned thing, Joshua points out the obvious.

Joshua: No power.
Kiera: Joshua’s said it. There’s no power to power it and we who’s special to Kappa to use against her.
Nika: Yeah, no. We have no idea who could be used to get to Kappa, because she’s a complete sociopath and there’s nobody—
Joshua: Speaking of no power, does that mean the front door won’t open when we get to it?

There is usually a manual method for opening the door in case of a power outage and Rina tells everyone that they could hook up the snowcat engine to provide the power to run it if the manual device won’t work. Then again, if the door can’t be powered open, then it also means the opposition can’t get out or fly the shuttle out of the bay. That gives us some room to move, to plan, to turn the tables around.

There are six of us, six in Malcolm Reynolds’s crew plus Zoë’s child N.J., plus Captain LaSalle and the professor, and the three men Emmet, Sorren, and Ben. And the Operative brings the total number to 19. We get moving for the elevator shaft. From there, we’ll climb the maintenance ladders up into the levels above.

Joshua goes up first, Rina goes after him. Then Nika and Kiera. The rest linger behind on the level below, waiting for us to confirm the coast is clear. We get 30 feet up, about 20 feet from the next level when Nika’s sharp eyes spot something falling through the murk toward us.

Grenade.

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