Generations Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Leave us a review

  Copyright

  Silas

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  GENERATIONS

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  Big Damn Hero by James Lovegrove (original concept by Nancy Holder)

  The Magnificent Nine by James Lovegrove

  The Ghost Machine by James Lovegrove

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  Firefly: Generations

  Hardback edition ISBN: 9781785658327

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785658334

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London, SE1 0UP.

  First edition: October 2020

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Firefly TM & © 2020 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  THIS ONE’S FOR THE NEWTS

  Even asleep, he is more awake than most people. His body is suppressed, but his mind is extraordinary and can never be controlled. While he is held in suspended animation between one moment and the next, his mind still ranges beyond the confines of his prison. He plans and schemes, and every moment brings freedom that much closer. He has arranged for it to be this way. Once captured, and knowing that he would be put into suspension, he always intended to be found.

  Set free.

  The map leading back to him is out there, though Silas has some trouble trying to remember how long it has been since he sent it. His moments sometimes feel like seconds, sometimes years. He experiences a certain frustration, because he has so many things to do.

  Once free he will better himself. He will bring his fury to bear upon those who sought to open his skull and stir his mind. He was their first subject—their lab-rat—and he is sure that more came after him. Maybe they were more perfect, but he thinks not. He is the original, and though changed for the better, still he wants his revenge for what they did.

  Only someone like him—one of those who came after—will be able to read the map and lead others here. Then he will awaken.

  A thin, hungry spider at the center of its web, Silas waits for the darkness and stillness to end. Once freed, he will wreak havoc.

  With his precious future held close to his heart, Private Heng Choi watched from a viewing port of the Alliance destroyer Peacebringer as doom closed in on them. Sirens wailed. Warnings echoed through gangways, ward rooms, and battle stations, and into escape pods there was no time to use. Service personnel ran back and forth, most carrying out their emergency duties as they had been trained, but in a barrack room across the wide hallway he saw several people crawling beneath bunks and curling themselves into the fetal position.

  Heng laughed. They were following imminent crash protocol, as if hiding under a mesh bed would protect them from explosive decompression, the frozen draw of deep space, fire, crushing, crashing, pressure-blast, or one of the hundred other ways in which they were about to die. Put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye, he thought, but gallows humor turned to sadness when he pressed his hand to his chest.

  He felt it there, just inside his jacket, folded and vacuum-sealed within an airtight bag. He’d always known it was precious. He feared that so close to the end of his time, its knowledge and potential would never be fulfilled.

  The terrorist ship, spewing atmosphere and beautiful, dancing fire from several holes in its hull, rolled toward them. A few optimistic cannon operators were pouring fire at its bulk, but the small explosions did little to halt its inexorable, terrifying advance. Heng couldn’t help but feel a grudging respect for the terrorist ship’s pilot, committing his vessel to a collision course as his final courageous act of defiance.

  He closed his eyes, only opening them when the impact countdown broadcast to the Peacebringer’s crew reached ten seconds. He wanted to witness his final moments.

  The impact sent him crashing against the viewing port, falling to the floor, then bouncing from wall to wall as the Peacebringer shuddered, ruptured, and broke. He expelled all the air from his lungs, yet the feared decompression did not come. His senses were in chaos. There were explosions and crunches, the screech of tearing metal and the screams of the dying. He smelled rancid air as the ship’s treatment and recycling plant was shattered. Heng was knocked over again as several crew members were thrown against him by a nearby explosion. Their bodies shielded him from much of the blast, but he felt the warm kiss of blood spatter across his exposed face and arms.

  He heard the repeating message to abandon ship, but he guessed that anyone who did go for the escape pods would be torn to pieces as soon as they launched. Outside, his whole field of view was filled with parts of the broken ships, blooming flowers of flame spewing from rents in the hull, and spinning, wretched corpses.

  Heng stood again and hauled himself against the viewing port, one hand still pressed against the package in his uniform’s inner pocket. Is this all about me? he wondered, and the idea struck him with the force of a disabled ship on collision course. He had been handed the map by a dangerous prisoner on his first ever posting as an Alliance soldier. It was his one and only journey beyond the Outer Rim, as part of a unit accompanying two unnerving blue-gloved Alliance science-types onto a strange, abandoned ship. The prisoner had caused a distraction, manufactured a chance encounter. It’s precious, he’d whispered into Heng’s ear, pressing the folded paper into his hand. Young, impressionable, afraid, Heng had not had any reason to doubt those words. He’d always kept it close, and realized now that it likely had a meaning and value way beyond money.

  He heard more screams, more rending metal, and he realized that the Peacebringer had been
knocked into a rapidly decaying orbit around the small planet they had been orbiting for several days. Their mission had been to broker a peace between warring clans on the planet, but what if that was simply a cover?

  “What have I done?” he asked, but there was no one to offer a response. His heart beat faster, as if giving life to the strange map that he had never been able to decode. He had always kept it secret, hoping to profit from it one day. Perhaps that secrecy had been a mistake.

  The ship began to spin.

  The view from the port alternated between deep space, planet, and debris fields that spread and burned before his eyes.

  Whatever questions he had left, he would die without knowing the answers.

  * * *

  Kathryn and her family watched the blazing ship spinning down through the scant atmosphere, shedding parts of itself that streaked away at differing angles, spewing flames and smoke as it roared its final, deafening scream of rage at whatever had brought it down.

  “There’ll be dozens seeing this,” her father said. “We need to get there first.”

  Kathryn nodded and her brother did the same, but they all knew that the likelihood of them striking lucky was small. They never did. If there was an abandoned ship ripe for salvage, they’d arrive in time to pick over the dregs that were left. If there was a gas strike down in one of the deep ravines, they would get there in time to fill a few bottles of weak, crude stuff before the well ran dry. They roamed the surface of the planet looking for luck, but luck always remained one step ahead.

  “It’ll take too long to go home for the overlander,” Kathryn said.

  “We’d better run, then,” her brother said, and to begin with they did. In the thin air, it didn’t take long for them to slow, gasping and panting, to a fast walk.

  The blazing ship had left a widening trail of smoke in the dark sky. It blotted out stars like a fresh brushstroke reimagining that part of the heavens. As they slowed from their optimistic run they heard the impact as the ship crashed into the distant Meadon mountain range. The horizon lit up with fire, casting a muted yellow glow across the mountainsides.

  “Might not be much left,” Kathryn said.

  “There’s always something,” her father said. “Things we can trade or use ourselves.”

  “But the mountain gangs will reach the crash site long before us!”

  “Then we’d better start running again!” They did as her father said, and although the thin air made their lungs strain, and her vision swam and became fluid, they ran through the pain toward what might be a source of much-needed salvage.

  By the time they reached the crash site the fires had died down, the smoking wreck was all but silent, and the Meadon mountain gangs had indeed been and gone, taking with them anything worth salvaging from the remains of the Alliance ship. The debris field was crisscrossed with footprints, and laid out in a neat line away from the ship were the corpses of almost fifty Alliance crew. The survivors had been pulled from the wreckage and then executed.

  She stared at the bodies. Some of them showed signs of terrible trauma from the crash—broken bones, severed limbs, bloodied wounds and burns—but every single one had holes in their upper torso from where they had been cut down by gunfire.

  Her brother was the first to approach. He went to his knees and started rifling through the first corpse’s clothing.

  “No!” Kathryn said. “You can’t! That’s—”

  “She won’t care,” her father said. He nodded toward the next corpse. “Neither will he. They might have money, ID tech, guns, even food. We leave it here to rot into the ground, or perhaps it benefits us for the next few weeks. It’s really no choice at all.”

  “Even the mountain gangs don’t steal from the dead.”

  “They made them dead!” her father said. “Only reason they don’t take from them is they think the Alliance are unclean scum. Me… I just don’t like them all that much.”

  Kathryn watched her father and brother searching the dead for ten minutes before joining in. Hunger had a way of winnowing through her morals.

  The fourth body she searched was a middle-aged man, battered and broken from the crash and with three bullet holes in his chest. He had his right hand tucked inside his uniform, and as she pulled it out a vacuum-wrapped package came with it, clasped tight between his thumb and fingers.

  She glanced around at her father and brother. They were immersed in their own searches, neither of them watching what she was doing. They think I never find anything useful. She started unwrapping the packet and it opened with a soft sigh.

  Something inside sparked, just for a moment. It startled her. On first glance she thought it was folded paper, a last letter to his loved ones perhaps, but it seemed to contain tech. Maybe it would be worth something. She peeled the clear cover open and extracted the item, sitting in the mud and unfolding it across her knees. More sparks sizzled across its surface before dying down, and then it was just a piece of thick, waxy paper. The etched and inked designs were strange and difficult to make out.

  “What you got?” her brother called.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Old drawing.”

  “Look for stuff worth something!” he said, before going back to searching another corpse.

  Kathryn waved a hand his way without looking, frowning as she tried to make sense of what she had found. There was no obvious power source to the limp sheet—it must have been static from the crash—and the markings across both surfaces meant nothing to her.

  She shoved the packet into her back pocket, then closed the dead man’s eyes before moving on. His story was over. She wondered who he was.

  * * *

  Three days later Kathryn traded the packet for a pair of leather boots. They were far from new, but they were solid and fit her well. The weird old map had been worth nothing. She decided she’d made a good trade, and she felt smug when she told her father and brother so.

  The man she’d traded with was called Martynn, and seventeen days later he was dead. He never heard the shot that killed him. The woman who pulled the trigger, Marcine Rume, had done so because she was paid to kill, and Martynn was the latest in a long line of men, women, and children—some of them bad people, some unfortunate innocents—who had died at her hand.

  On the dead man’s body she found three gold rings on his fingers, one silver tooth in his head, and a leather satchel containing a folded sheet of yellowed paper. Useless. She discarded the satchel and paper, and turned and walked back toward her ship. His body would rot into the land, and she had business elsewhere.

  A few steps away from the body she paused, frowning. Just because she couldn’t read what was written on the thick paper didn’t mean it would not be valuable to someone else. Some people who’d never left the surface of a planet collected old rubbish like that.

  She went back to collect it. The man’s body was already attracting vermin, and high above circled three carrion birds.

  * * *

  Marcine Rume spent the next week at a brothel on one of the small moons of Bellerophon. She had money to spend, so the whores gave her plenty of time. They plied her with drink too, and when she fell into a drunken coma they went through her belongings. They were very careful about what they touched and stole. It was never wise to take money, because if they kept the woman happy she would give it to them soon enough. Personal effects would be missed. It was the small items that seemed to hold no importance that they looked for.

  The whore who found and took the map was called Gemma. It was stolen from her a week later by a miner who worked the asteroid fields. He lost it in a fight with a fellow miner, and it dropped out of sight between two loose floorboards in a tavern.

  Three weeks later a child found it, one of several who sometimes lived beneath the tavern scavenging for food and drink and gathering the few coins and notes that fell through the gaps. The child liked the map, and in his uncorrupted view its strange markings and symbols were quite beautiful, not befuddlin
g. He didn’t understand what it showed—in truth, he didn’t realize that it was a map at all—but he appreciated the smooth silky feel of it, the old stale smell, and he was young and open-minded enough to see that though it meant little to him, to someone else this might mean the world.

  Seven weeks after finding the map and hiding it away in a place only he knew, the child used it to buy food from a traveler passing through the town. His name was Deacon, an old man who had taken to wandering to preach his lessons of kindness. He showed this child kindness by giving him food of far greater value than the tattered, unreadable shred of paper he used to buy it.

  Later that same day, camping just outside town and examining his new acquisition by the revealing light of a campfire, Deacon began to change his opinion.

  In one of his distant past lives he had been a mercenary.

  He knew a star map when he saw one.

  “Why is it always me who gets to scrub the gorramn floors?” Jayne asked.

  “Because you’re best at it,” Mal replied.

  “Best? At scrubbin’ floors?”

  “It’s those muscles you’re building up from you and the Shepherd liftin’ weights.”

  “Huh. Right. I guess that’s a joke.”

  “I’m having no part of this,” Book said.

  “No joke, Jayne.” Mal leaned on the walkway handrail and looked down into the depressingly empty cargo bay.

  “So why can’t Book do it? He’s got the same muscles.”

  “Book’s busy.”

  “Doin’ what?”

  Mal sighed.

  “I’m busy filling my time with study and contemplation,” Book said. In truth he was going through a case of books they’d ended up with after their last real job, moving a rich family from one moon to another. Mal had communicated with them following the job to say that a crate had somehow been left behind, but the reply had been as he’d expected—“fifty million miles is a long way to go for some books.” The Shepherd had been delighted, and ever since he’d spent an hour or so each day going through the case. He claimed he was looking for volumes worth money to collectors. Mal was pretty certain he was just reading them all, leaning back against the crate with a contented smile on his face. He didn’t mind. Anything that kept a member of his crew busy in this painfully slack period was fine by him.