A body still and cold on sleek deck plates. An Alliance soldier, purple and grey armor bloodied.

Captain Malcolm Reynolds eased his revolver from the holster slung low at his hip. Memories from a war lost flickered, before the spaceship airlock in front of him slid back into focus. Gleaming hatches and control panels. All well maintained ... except for russet smears.

Preliminary system checks had shown no problems with the drifting vessel. Functional life support. No obvious damage.

At least, not to the Qiang-class transport.

Mal stepped from his ship's corroded deck to crouch by the 'purple belly' desecrating the Qiang-class's fancy flooring.

Torn throat—not shot or cut.

Not good.

Mal looked to the woman standing sentinel behind him. "Given the state of this fellow, I'm thinkin', there should be a tad more blood." While no doctor, he knew killing. Ripping a person's jugular open would empty them quick—body and soul.

His first mate, Zoe Alleyne Washburne, tilted her head back to eye the corpse, dark curls held loosely back from high cheekbones and warm brown skin. "It's a bite wound, sir, and Alliance armor it's bloodying. Is this business you want to step into?"

Mal repressed more of the past's ghosts. The Alliance had won the war and the right to mess with other folk's business—so they believed. This far out in the Rim worlds, the Core planets' interference stretched thin.

Looking past wayward brown hair, Mal cast his first mate a look of mock reproach. "Now, what kind of man would ignore a distress call this far out in the black? 'Specially, a signal coming from a vessel transporting valuable antiquities?"

"A smart one."

"Or one whose ship ain't running on fumes and a half-broke booster." Mal rose to his feet, unfolding long legs and the worn red-brown leather of his calf-length coat. "This ain't something we got a choice in."

"Damn straight. There's ruttin' whiskey on the manifest." Jayne Cobb bowled into the airlock, past Zoe, Vera, his favorite rifle, on one shoulder. A smug-toothed smile split his goatee—until his gaze fell on the dead soldier. "Gorram!" On the curse, he jerked his weapon down, sighted it on the far hatch. "Reavers."

Mal laid a hand on the mercenary's arm before he could turn tail or shoot. While happy to entertain a case of psychopathy on the regular, Jayne had his head straight when it came to the outer system's least neighborly spacefarers, Reavers. Being raped, cannibalized, and skinned for someone's leather negligee was a tad less appealing than general shooting, looting, and whoring—a few more of Jayne's favorite things.

"There ain't no other ship nearby." Mal tried to believe his own reassurance. "Whoever gnawed on this fellow's long gone."

Jayne's wild stare stayed on the far hatch. "I hate Reavers."

"That's a rare lick of common sense you got, my péngyǒu." Mal patted his friend's shoulder and turned to Zoe. "Tell your husband to keep an eye peeled for company. I ain't in the mood to get bushwhacked." Reavers were known to set traps, and a Core-planet ship made shiny bait.

As Zoe triggered her com, Mal glanced back to the bolt-bucket he called home: Serenity. Zoe and Jayne were seasoned fighters, used to facing and dealing death, but the rest of his crew? His mechanic, Kaylee, could beat another parsec out of an engine, but ask her to take a wrench to someone's skull and the sweet girl turned green. Add in a preacher, a doctor, a moonstruck girl with a lab-broke brain, and the tumble-weed-headed pilot who'd somehow stolen his first mate's heart, and a man had himself a box of scattered birds as backup. As for the woman currently painting her lips red in one of his shuttles...

Mal scowled, the unease circling his gut taking an extra hard turn. Inara could skewer a man as well as she could screw him—verbally and literally. The Companion, with her high-class looks and dark reproving stare, wouldn't be pleased if she missed her upcoming appointment with her client Mr. Pool. She was a professional. She took her whoring seriously.

Mal grimaced. Companion business weren't his business. Smuggling and thieving was—though, he was inclined to call it 'salvage' today.

Irritation fled as he eyed the corpse at his feet. He'd a bad feeling about this distress call, but he also had people relying on him to get them places and keep them breathing. Whatever his misgivings, he needed 'bills' to keep his boat afloat.

That meant walking into the cargo bay just beyond the next hatch, only a few steps away.

Steps someone else had walked before him, leaving bloody footprints.

Thinking better of ordering Jayne to take point—the mercenary's eyes looked as jumpy as his trigger finger—Mal moved to the hatch and released it.

Darkness greeted him.

Keeping his weapon up, Mal reached in to switch on lights, half expecting to lose fingers to Reaver teeth.

Illumination. Sterile grey bulkheads and rows of cargo winked into existence.

Along with gore.

Scattered bodies and weapons.

Mal let the barrel of his Frontier Model B lead the way, Jayne's hissed curse and Zoe's silent stoicism following him into the carnage.

Not all the dead were Alliance. A naked woman lay beside what looked like an old cryo unit, a long-handled axe jutting from her gut. Scars covered her body. Metal glinted, embedded in skin. The self-mutilation typical of a Reaver.

Not typical was the tube in her neck, as if she'd received a transfusion.

Mal slid eyes over the cryo unit—over the pale corpse slumped half out of it. No soldier. No Reaver. Death and time had turned skin to wizened leather.

"That a gorram mummy?" Jayne bared his teeth. "What in ruttin' hell?"

"Sir." Zoe stepped up. "That's old tech. First-generation-ship old."

The bad feeling in Mal's gut took another hard turn. "What's our ship owner collect again?"

"Antiquities."

"Goramit." Jayne snarled. "There better be real treasure on this boat, not just prehistoric stiffs."

Mal held his own oath. "History's worth something to some, I guess." But not to him if the only buyers were Core-planet academics or—more disturbingly—the Alliance military.

Why had soldiers been escorting this cargo?

As Jayne and Zoe moved to clear corners and check cargo, Mal sidled up to a second cryo unit.

Another ancient corpse. A near skeletal male dressed in a long black leather coat, his skin as ashen as his bleached hair.

He wasn't alone. A Reaver lay curled beside him, a medical tube running to—

Mal recoiled. Blood dribbled from the mummy's withered lips.

The Reaver had bled out, right down the ancient corpse's throat. "What the—?"

"Sir!"

Mal snapped about on Zoe's warning—saw the first Reaver lift her head from the deck.

The ruined woman eyed the axe in her gut, patted it as if perplexed why it was there—then yanked it out and threw it aside.

In a scramble of limbs, she was on her feet, teeth bared—fanged teeth.

A concussive bang. An explosion of meat.

The Reaver went down, one of Vera's armor-piercing rounds enlarging the hole in her gut.

She didn't stay down.

With a screaming lunge, she slammed Jayne down to the deck.

Zoe moved to help—froze as every body in the hold came to snarling life, foreheads misshapen, fangs bared.

The first mummy launched itself at her.

Mal jerked his weapon up—

A blur of black knocked him clear off his feet.

He hit the deck; rolled, gun up—

Disbelief stilled his trigger finger.

A whirl of dark leather and violence. The second mummy, axe in hand, leapt over cargo, taking off heads and driving the weapon's handle through chests, disintegrating everyone in his path.

In mere heartbeats, bodies were dust.

Mal stayed frozen, Jayne and Zoe prone a few meters away, alive but looking as confounded as he felt.

The mummy in the black coat swung about, his thick arched brows smoothing into something more human again. Glittering blue eyes swept the hold, a fanged snarl becoming a sneer. "Bloody hell." Heavily accented words. "What year is this? Twenty-three hundred?" He cast Mal a derisive glance. "Or eighteen bloody forty? Nice coat, cowpoke." Flashing fangs, he flipped up the collar of his own. "It's badder in black."

Mal eased to his feet, gripping his weapon. "Twenty-five seventeen."

Acute blue eyes narrowed ... then rolled extravagantly. "This is the future? Bleeding cosplay space cowboys? Bloody hell. I should've stayed dead."

Mal silently seconded that. "Who or what are you?" A warped Alliance experiment? The man was no Reaver—way too chatty.

The man swaggered forward, twirling the axe, smile one part charm, two parts threat. "Been called many things in my time. William the Bloody, Demon Lord ... the Big Bad. But you galactic horse-shaggers can call me Spike, your humble savior."

Mal drew in air; nodded. "Dickhead it is."