Firefly: "Stakes Are High"

[jain]

Title: Stakes Are High
Author: Jain
Rating: PG
Word count: 4750
Warnings: Graphic descriptions of miscarriage.
Summary: Serenity had had a string of four or five nice, easy delivery runs; they were about due for more trouble.
Author's notes: Written for petitchouette for apocalyptothon.


The town was quiet in a way that felt wrong, and Mal was hyperaware of the people around him, the places where a man or woman might be concealed, the shadows cast on the ground, with an extra tick of awareness charting Zoe's path. He knew she was doing the same: watching for a possible threat while staying out of his line of fire.

They'd had a string of four or five nice, easy deliveries; they were about due for more trouble. Smart thing to do would be to keep their eyes open and get out fast, but Mal never claimed to be smart all the time.

"It seems mighty quiet around here," he said, feeling the glare Zoe directed at his back, the one that said, What are you doing, and why haven't I taped your mouth shut yet?

"Nothing to do with you," their contact, a man by the name of Ellis, said. "One of the women in town's expecting, but a couple of days ago, the baby stopped moving."

Mal nodded, even though he didn't quite follow. A miscarriage was bad, yeah, but it wasn't generally reason for an entire community of two hundred-odd people to get weepy. Especially not to the extent that their sadness was still almost tangible two days later.

"Sorry to hear that," he said, Zoe's voice joining his with her own expressions of sympathy.

"Has she gone to the doctor?" Zoe asked. "Might not be what she thinks it is."

Ellis shook his head. "Doc's dead this four months. That's how we know: the doctor was the second woman in town to have her baby die inside her this past year. The first pulled through okay, but the doc developed some sort of infection and it killed her."

Zoe glanced at Mal, and he nodded minutely. Unless the woman with the dead baby had a lot more ready money than this town seemed likely to have, she'd probably be trying to decide right now between taking her own chances with natural childbirth or having the local vet perform the abortion. Neither of those looked very good from where Mal was standing, and he wasn't anywhere near her position.

Before he started offering up his own doctor and medical facilities, though, he had a few more questions. "Have there been any healthy babies born in the past year?"

"Last healthy baby was born five months after we settled here," Ellis said.

"And you've been here a year and a half?" Zoe asked.

"That's right."

Another glance from Zoe, and Mal nodded again. The new information made taking the pregnant woman on board Serenity out of the question, but didn't alter his basic plan. Regardless of how he felt about helping the poor woman, now it was in his best interests to get her treated by Simon, so that he could let them know if Serenity's crew had put themselves at risk just by stepping foot on the planet.

"I've got a man on my ship who's had some medical training," he said. "Maybe he can help your neighbor out."

Ellis's face lit up with a terrible kind of relief. "We'd much appreciate that, Captain. The town hasn't got much money, but we can try to scrape together something to pay you."

Considering that they were paying for their shipment with ethanol, Mal wasn't surprised. He waved Ellis's concerns away. "We can work out an exchange later. There are some supplies that we need more than cash; I'm sure we can find something that you folks have a surplus of that we need." He turned to Zoe. "I'll go fetch the doc. You can join us after you've finished brokering the deal."

The implications: Mal couldn't say what he needed to say to Simon over the radio for fear of eavesdroppers; he didn't want Zoe boarding Serenity until they knew what was causing the town's health problems; he trusted Ellis to not screw them over now that they had something he wanted even more desperately than water purifiers. "Yes, sir," Zoe said, and he didn't need to look in her eyes to know she'd heard everything he was trying to say, and then some.

"What's the word, Doc?" Mal asked when Simon closed the clinic's door behind him. It had been kept in decent shape since the colony's doctor died; obviously the townspeople had used medical supplies as necessary and preserved the rest in the hopes of attracting another doctor to the colony someday. Between that and the bag that Simon had brought with him from Serenity, Mal hoped the woman--Maya, she'd introduced herself as--could be taken care of without resorting to Serenity's medical facilities.

Simon leaned in closer to speak quietly into his ear. "The fetus is definitely dead. Maya's showing no signs of infection yet, but I want to perform an abortion soon. The fetus is starting to decay inside her uterus--its skin's already sloughing off--and that presents a serious risk to her health."

Mal hid a wince and said, more brusquely than usual in an attempt to cover his faint horror at the description, "So, why're you talking to me instead of operating on her?"

Simon's eyes flashed. "Two reasons. First, I need you to get me a nurse or two from the town to help me with the procedure. If there isn't anyone with medical training, then veterinary training would do. Second, I want someone to either talk to Maya's husband for me or bring him here so that I can talk to him. She's given permission for me to autopsy the fetus, but she wants him to have a chance to weigh in. He should be told, if he hasn't already realized this, that an autopsy would be invaluable in determining the reason for Maya's miscarriage and helping to prevent future miscarriages among his neighbors."

Mal nodded, trying not to show his contrition. "You've got it. Are you set for equipment?"

"Yes," Simon said, annoyed. "Your instructions were quite clear on that point earlier."

Which wasn't quite what Mal had meant--he'd wanted to know if Simon needed any of the heavier tools in Serenity's medical facilities, not whether Simon had packed his bag correctly--but it answered his question well enough. "Okay, good," he said. "I'll be back soon with your nurse."

A block from the doctor's office, Zoe fell into step beside him. "The townspeople think it's the Alliance," she reported. "There's a well that they all use for their water that Alliance engineers dug for them; the Alliance is getting two hundred tons of ore a year from the colony, which explains their generosity. The townspeople aren't sure if the Alliance sickened them on purpose or if they just didn't test for contaminants properly, but that's their best guess for what's going on."

Mal nodded before getting her up to speed on what Simon had told him. "I don't suppose you ran into anyone who could fill in as nurse during your reconnaissance," he added.

"Vet's place is down this road," Zoe said, pointing. "Do you want to take him or Maya's husband?"

"The husband might be more amenable to hearing the news from a woman."

"No problem. Three doors down on the left, I think. There's a sign," Zoe said, before turning to go to Maya's house, where her husband was watching their five year-old son.

The vet answered Mal's knock in fewer than twenty seconds, and Mal could see his packed bag on a table in the front hall. Either he was a habitually prepared man or he had been waiting for this call. "I've got a doctor who needs a nursing assistant for Maya's operation," he said without preamble.

The vet nodded and grabbed his bag, which Mal liked--no questioning the circumstances he was being requested to assist in, but preparing for the worst--and pulled the door shut behind them. "The name's Hiram," he said as they walked at a brisk pace.

"Mal," Mal responded.

"I'll get the full rundown from your doctor in a bit, but it's certain the baby's dead, then?"

"Yeah," Mal said, not thinking of decaying flesh stripping off its bones in Maya's womb. "It's dead."

Hiram let out his breath in a long sigh. The rest of their walk was conducted in silence.

They set up camp in the doctor's office, using Simon's desire to be near Maya should there be any complications from the abortion as an excuse. None of the townspeople pointed out that Mal and Zoe weren't necessary for that task. Either they were used to strangers being wary, or they were too grateful for curiosity.

For their part, Mal and Zoe kept out of the room where Simon was conducting the autopsy. They made arrangements for dinner to be brought to the clinic later that night, and then settled down for a game of cards and a strategy discussion. It was difficult to make plans on so little information, but they could at least get on the same page regarding their options.

Mal had just finished saying, "Kaylee could probably rig up a quarantine chamber for the three of us," when Simon came out to join them, smelling strongly of soap and antiseptic.

"It's not environmental pollutants," he said. "I identified an unknown virus in a blood sample I took from Maya, and it looks as though that could be our culprit. I won't know more until I study the virus further."

"The townspeople think their wellwater has something to do with it," Zoe volunteered.

Simon's expression turned considering, and then he shook his head. "I'll want to look at samples from the well, just to be sure, but it seems unlikely based on my preliminary research. The virus is incredibly targeted in its effects. It would be highly improbable for it to develop these particular properties in the absence of human hosts, and it doesn't look as though it's very adaptable."

"Zoe and I will get those samples for you, in any case," Mal said. They waited while Simon disappeared in search of a few test tubes, and received instructions on how to gather the samples.

"Any leads on how the virus is spread?" Mal asked when Simon had finished his brief lecture.

"Not yet."

Mal nodded. "Okay. Just keep me posted," he said.

Zoe fingered the latex gloves Simon had given them as they made their way to the well. "You think these are meant to protect us, or to keep us from contaminating Simon's samples?"

Mal shrugged. "No reason they can't do both."

If being in the resistance had taught Mal anything, it was how to wait. He and Zoe got the water samples for Simon--Mal took them into the lab where he'd performed the autopsy, averting his eyes from the small, bloody mass on the table--and then they had a whole lot of nothing to do.

They played cards until Ellis brought them a dinner basket, at which point they called Simon out of the lab and shared roasted chicken and cold amaranth salad with him. They talked. They sacked out on the cots they'd set up in the main office whenever they felt tired and slept, catching up on a backlog of missed hours.

The third time Mal woke up, he saw Simon sprawled out on the cot next to him. "He's been sleeping for almost two hours," Zoe said quietly.

Mal nodded. Two hours out of thirty-six wasn't a lot, and he wasn't about to begrudge the man his rest. He visited the restroom and then returned to sit beside Zoe. "Any news so far?"

"He's pretty sure the virus is manmade."

A chill ran down Mal's spine; Zoe looked at the expression on his face and nodded grimly.

"Alliance?" he asked.

"Probably, but he's not willing to commit himself yet."

"Can't imagine what they thought they were making this time," Mal said.

Zoe shrugged. "Who knows? Could be a weapon: I can't think of a better longterm strategy for taking out your enemies than not letting them be born in the first place. Could be a eugenics experiment gone wrong. Either way, it's our problem now."

"You know, I don't think I ever heard you talk about having kids," Mal said. It would have been the worst time possible to begin this conversation with anyone else...but, in the army, you got used to talking out your horrors and regrets until they stopped having quite the same power over you.

"We were waiting," Zoe said, as dry-eyed as she'd been every time she discussed Wash. "Living hand to mouth wasn't what either of us wanted for a kid, and neither of us was ready to settle down someplace civilized. We wanted them eventually, though. Two, unless they both turned out boys or both girls, and then we'd try once more. No more than that."

"It sounds nice," Mal said. A good size family, without being too big to care for monetarily or emotionally.

Zoe let out a breath of laughter. "Wash had names picked out for them already, though he changed his mind every year about what they should be called. The only thing I cared about was that we didn't name any for people who'd died."

So there weren't likely to be any Hoban Washburnes in the future. There was something comforting in the fact that he'd only have to look past that particular stupid name once in Mal's lifetime.

"What about you?" Zoe asked, and Mal snorted.

"To have kids, I'd need a wife, and I don't see that happening for me anytime soon."

Simon stirred and slid out of his cot at that point, eyes snapping open as though he'd gotten a full night's rest. "You're awake," he said to Mal.

"I'm more surprised that you are," Mal said, and Simon shrugged. "You hungry for breakfast?"

"Ravenous," Simon said. "I'll take eggs if they're available."

"Seems unlikely they wouldn't be, considering last night's dinner," Mal said, and watched Simon visibly attempt to cast his mind back to what he'd eaten twelve hours before only to come up blank.

"Waffles for me," Zoe said, already sliding her pack of cards out of her pocket.

Mal made a face--he hadn't been offering to play errand boy to anyone in the vicinity, just Simon, who needed it if he were going to solve their most recent problem. He'd look a fool if he tried to argue the point, though, so he headed out with a brisk step.

The town's single restaurant had a breakfast menu that matched the hearty simplicity of the dinner: eggs and waffles were no problem, and Mal got his own serving of waffles, drenched in honey, and three cups of hot tea. On further thought, he asked for an additional cup of tea; Simon could probably use it.

Simon drained both cups of tea and polished off half his plate before wandering back to the lab. Mal raised an eye at his leftover eggs and then split them with Zoe. They could get more food for Simon whenever he asked.

Another three and a quarter hours, five games of poker, and one nap later, Simon emerged from the lab looking even more painfully exhausted than he'd been over breakfast.

"You found something?" Mal asked.

Simon nodded. "The virus isn't of Alliance manufacture."

"Where's it from, then?" Zoe asked, frowning.

"Highgate."

Mal felt a chill run through him. Serenity hadn't stopped there in the past several years, but it had visited several nearby worlds, including more than one that had a tense political relationship with Highgate.

"You want me to get blood samples from the crew?" Zoe asked, still looking at Simon, though the question was directed at both of them.

"Please," Simon said, and Mal added, "Have them slide the samples down the ramp to you. I don't want to risk them contracting the disease from one of us if there's any chance that they haven't already been exposed."

"Yes, sir."

Mal turned back to Simon. "Have you tested yourself yet?"

Simon shook his head. "I was just about to. Let me take blood from you and Zoe, too, and I'll do them one after another."

Mal submitted to the quick prick of the needle in Simon's skilled hands as he took a bare eighth of a vial, then watched him do the same to Zoe before she headed off for Serenity. He could feel the restlessness begin to settle into his muscles and he followed Simon into the lab and said, "You hungry again?" just for something to do.

"Not yet," Simon said absently, squeezing his blood into an eyedropper. "I wouldn't mind some more tea, though. Or coffee, if they have it. Or both."

"Coming right up."

There was a rush at the restaurant, and it seemed like half the people in there wanted to either thank Mal for his part in helping Maya or to ask him how the doctor was doing in his diagnosis. Mal put them off with vague assurances that he had a lead but hadn't come to any final conclusions yet. By the time he returned with a large mug of coffee and an equally large cup of tea, Simon was sitting on a lab stool and staring into space.

Mal approached cautiously and slid the restaurant tray onto the table. "You find something," he said, not quite a question.

Simon blinked at him, eyes refocusing, and dredged up a ghost of a smile. "You and Zoe are both clean."

Shit. "What's that mean, since you're not exactly equipped to get pregnant?"

"I'm not sure yet." Simon shrugged. "It's possible that the virus has affected my sperm cells and any zygotes I help create would suffer the same consequence as Maya's, or it's possible that I'm just a carrier." His eyes sharpened on the space between him and Mal. "Speaking of which, you should really move back a bit."

"You think it could spread that easily?" Mal said, even as he followed Simon's suggestion.

Simon shrugged again. "Three out of three pregnant women affected by the disease in the past year makes it substantially less likely that the disease is spread by something other than casual contact. Until the town reveals that they're participating in a monthly orgy, we need to be very cautious."

"Fair enough," Mal said. "So what happens now?"

"Now we wait until Zoe comes back with the rest of the crew's blood samples. If we're lucky, everyone else is clean, at which point I imagine that I will be left behind and the rest of you will be on your way, taking care to avoid trade with certain planets, including this one." He paused in his dispassionate recital to fix Mal with a hard stare. "If that's the case, I would appreciate your giving River the option of staying here with me. I can't make this choice for her, but I think the short-term help I can give her is more important than preserving her fertility."

Mal nodded sharply; he wasn't going to be pushed into either leaving Simon behind or taking him with them--that decision would require more deliberation, and hopefully more information on the virus--but he could promise Simon that much, at least.

"If multiple members of the crew are affected, then the best thing to do would be for me to test the rest of the town and get everyone's medical history, particularly over the past year or so. If we can get information on the ships that might have arrived from Highgate or its neighbors, that would also help. All of that, by the way, I'll be doing regardless of whether I've been ejected from Serenity's crew. It's only that you won't be a participant in the first set of circumstances."

"You've got it all figured out, huh?" Mal said.

"Everything except for how this virus works, who has it, how it's spread, for what purpose it was created, and whether there's any way to create a vaccine," Simon agreed with bitter sarcasm. "I'm a veritable fount of knowledge."

Zoe chose that moment to stride through the door and placed the box of vials on the table.

"Thank you," Simon said. "Now back away from me, please."

She exchanged a look with Mal, and her face tightened to match his. "Anything else you need?" she asked.

"Not right now," Simon said. "Give me half an hour, and I can tell you more."

"Sure," Zoe said, and she and Mal retreated to the other room. Twenty minutes later, Simon joined them.

"Kaylee, Inara, and Rawling are all infected," he said.

Mal was stabbed by a strange feeling of mingled nausea and relief. He couldn't wrap his mind around what this meant for his crew, but at least they were all in it together. At least he wouldn't have to leave Simon behind and deal with Kaylee's and River's resultant fury and despair. Bad enough to lose a doctor, but Serenity wasn't going anywhere without her engineer and her pilot.

"You want me to start getting the townspeople in here?" he asked.

Simon shook his head. "I'm going to need some sleep first. There's no great rush now; the disease isn't immediately fatal, and if it spreads that quickly, it's already had time to make its way through the town several times over."

"Okay," Mal said. "Any reason I should wait to tell the rest of the crew?"

Simon's jaw tightened a little, and then relaxed with visible effort. "No. Just make sure you tell them everything."

Meaning he wanted Kaylee to know that she and Simon were both affected, so that she wouldn't worry about him leaving her for a woman who could give him healthy, live babies. "I've gotcha," Mal said.

Simon smiled faintly before curling up on his cot and falling instantly asleep.

"You coming with me?" Mal asked Zoe.

"I think I'd better."

The truth of her statement became very evident half an hour later as they sat around the kitchen table, most of the crew staring at Mal with pained, frightened eyes. Inara looked numb in the way that meant there would be tears in the future, when she'd found privacy. Rawling looked too stunned by the news for it to sink in; the boy was only twenty, and he'd probably only considered fatherhood as something to be avoided.

Kaylee was the one who really broke his heart. She was trying to put on a brave face, but her eyes were already swimming. She'd never really talked to him about wanting to be a mother, but, a girl like Kaylee, it didn't take a genius to figure out that that's what she wanted.

Jayne was shocked into silence and River was about as useful to the conversation as she ever was, which meant it was up to Zoe to add her own commentary to Mal's debriefing: we're going to stay until Simon learns more about the virus. There might still be a cure. There are other people in town who need our help.

And Mal could see it in Kaylee and Inara's eyes, the realization of what it meant that Zoe in particular was saying that. That, if anyone on the ship knew about loss, it was she, and they could pull through this just as she had.

"Simon's sleeping now," Mal told them. "But when he's awake, he could use our help."

Five hours later, Mal had taken enough notes on delivery runs made to the inaptly-named New Prosperity that his hand had begun to cramp. It was better than helping poke townspeople with needles or jotting down often repulsive descriptions of people's various ailments and diseases, though, so he kept at it with as much good will as he could muster.

The twenty-two hours of sleep he'd gotten while planetside was helping with that. Finally, he'd gotten as much information as could be reconstructed from inventories and people's memories. He took his notes back to Simon, wading through townspeople lined up five deep.

"I thought you were trying to take them in shifts," he said after handing over his notes.

Simon shrugged. "News spread about the virus, and there was a rush on the clinic. I had Jayne sorting them into lines for me, but he's disappeared."

Probably taking advantage of the restaurant. Either that, or attempting to make it with a woman who had a greater than average chance of not saddling him with a kid as a result. Mal would have to straighten him out later, but for now it was more important to sort the townspeople into some type of order, moving first from Zoe, Kaylee, and Hiram who were taking blood samples that they passed to Rawling to label, and then to Simon, who took their medical histories while River took notes.

The bloodletting wasn't bad, but the medical histories were taking forever. Not that it could be helped: Simon was the only one with sufficient knowledge to ask the right questions.

The townspeople were amenable when he organized them into a line, trying to stagger the ones who looked nervous or sickly with a vague idea of preventing bottlenecks from forming. He avoided looking at their dumb, trusting faces as much as possible; Simon might be a talented doctor and too smart for his own good, but he had limited resources at his disposal. Their trust and hope might be born of desperation, but it wasn't in the least likely that they'd receive an even halfway acceptable return.

In the end, the result was staggering. Over ninety-five percent of the population had contracted the virus in the fourteen months since Simon estimated it had spread through the community. Mal stood beside Simon as he broke the news to Ellis, a hand in obvious view on his gun should Ellis get any bright ideas about taking it out on the messenger.

Ellis looked more disbelieving than angry, though; Mal knew how he felt.

"What do we do?" he asked, his voice thick with despair.

Simon shrugged. "There's not much point in trying to contain the disease at this point. It spreads too quickly, and the likeliest planets for the first cases are involved in a lot of trade. The best I can tell you is to continue testing any prospective parents among the uninfected; I've shown Hiram how to identify the virus. There's not much indication when someone's contracted it--most of the infected people mentioned having a slight fever and a rash that lasted a couple of days during the past year, but that could be unrelated. Either way, you'll want to do blood tests to know for sure."

"And there's no chance of a cure?" Ellis asked. Mal could hear his vision of a ghost town, as the original colonists died and no new ones took their place, in the man's voice.

"I'll be doing my own research, but the chances that I could come up with a cure by myself are very slim," Simon confessed. "Honestly, the best chance any of us has for a cure is if your planet did have enough infected people when the Alliance engineers came that some of them contracted it and have begun spreading it to Alliance worlds. That's the only scenario I can think of in which an entity with enough monetary and scientific resources would devote its energies towards a cure."

"I see," Ellis said. "Thank you."

He was contemplating his ability to send an infected person on a tour of Alliance planets just to make sure, Mal could tell, even as he knew that Simon had no realization of what was running through Ellis's mind. It was a plan terrifying in its potential effects: all of humanity could be wiped out if the Alliance couldn't come up with a cure, and, in pursuing one, they would no doubt consign thousands of people to what would amount to state-endorsed torture. But, measured against the slow crumbling of the outer rim, the fading spark in Kaylee's and Inara's eyes, Mal couldn't swear he didn't understand Ellis's desire to take that gamble.