Ring Around the Moon | Prologue. After finding actual Colonial Navy vets on his annual Unification bar-brawl-tour, Mal anticipates doing nothing else with his day.

Prologue set during the BSG Miniseries and post-series Firefly, but pre-BDM. Persephone has been promoted to the primary location of most of Firefly history that cannot very easily be transported to BSG mythos, i.e. the war for Independence. Serenity Valley would therefore be on the terra-formed moon of Persephone, whose placement is now in geosynchronous orbit of Caprica and Gemenon. Other things, such as Simon and River's birthplace, can be easily transposed to BSG, i.e. Osiris is now a major city on Caprica, Sihnon is a city on Gemenon, etc. More specific history to come later, but this is a generalized short-hand. Firefly mythos has been molded into BSG more so than BSG to Firefly, in terms of the make-up of the universe/engineering/history.

THE CYLONS WERE CREATED BY MAN. THEY WERE CREATED TO MAKE LIFE EASIER ON THE TWELVE COLONIES. AND THEN THE DAY CAME WHEN THE CYLONS DECIDED TO KILL THEIR MASTERS. AFTER A LONG AND BLOODY STRUGGLE, AN ARMISTICE WAS DECLARED. THE CYLONS LEFT FOR ANOTHER WORLD TO CALL THEIR OWN. NO ONE HAS SEEN OR HEARD FROM THE CYLONS IN OVER FORTY YEARS. HUMANITY RETURNED TO ITS OWN SQUABBLES. WAGED WAR AMONGST THEMSELVES. A REBELLION ON THE MOON OF PERSEPHONE, STUCK IN GEOSYNCHRONOUS ORBIT WITH CAPRICA AND GEMENON, WAS MET WITH BLOODY AND SWIFT RETRIBUTION. ON THIS, THE SEVENTH ANNIVERSARY OF VICTORY OVER THE INDEPENDENTS, THE PRESIDENT OF THE COLONIES SPEAKS FONDLY OF UNIFICATION. OF PROLONGED PEACE.

High Atmosphere and climbing, Persephone.
Firefly Class ship: Serenity.
Sickbay.

"Just a having a quiet brew, huh?"

Malcolm Reynolds hissed and wrenched away from Simon Tam's grasp, staring wide eyed at the young doctor in a manner he hoped adequately conveyed, you should not harm your Captain in such a way. Simon, growing a little too flippant now that he was sure Mal wasn't going to toss him out the airlock, merely rolled his eyes and held to Mal's arm more firmly, giving his Captain bruises under the guise of holding him still. "A nice, quiet brew," Mal protested, not at all appreciating the way Simon huffed. He was making a list of indiscretions to repay later, and the list only grew longer by the moment. "It's not my fault some less than reputable gentleman wanted to start something."

From across the infirmary, his second Zoe Washburne gave a snort of a laugh. His glare was tempered only by the sight of the rag she had pressed to the cut on her forehead, though she seemed less than troubled by it. "You'd think I'd know better than to go out drinking with you on Unification Day," she said, and Mal clapped an exaggerated hand over his heart. Simon smacked his shoulder lightly and muttered a reminder to be still. "I should've left with Jayne. When even Jayne figures it out, remembered what day it was and willingly leaves half a beer behind... what's that say about me, that I stayed?"

"That you know it was all just good, clean, beating-some-drunk-Colonials-on-leave fun," Mal rebutted, trying to urge her to agree with him through the sheer force of his smile.

Zoe was too sensible to take that bait. "Think they did most of the beating, sir," Zoe told him, with a grimace.

"Hey!" he let out, in mock-hurt. His body actually hurt, throbbing from hits that suggested Zoe might be right. Simon finished stitching that cut by his ear, and was surely saying something important about taking it easy as he taped a bandage into Mal's hair, but Mal had more important things on his mind. "I will have you know that we - "

Mal lost whatever else he had been about to say to the cacophony of the proximity alarm (doubling as a temporary all-purpose alarm), blaring it's ear-shattering, echoing warning through the hull. Mal was on his feet in moments, just in time to be knocked back against the counter as the ship rattled roughly, rocked as if by an explosion. Mal was back on his feet as the aftershocks rattled, stumbling just after Zoe through the ship, knowing exactly where she was going. Simon was behind him, something Mal would not have noticed had something else not rocked the ship and sent him knocking backwards into the doctor. Zoe had already made it to the cockpit when Mal had reached the hallway, needing to push past an irritable Jayne woken from his nap, and stepping a little more roughly than intended past Kaylee in the back of the cockpit.

It was only belatedly, as he came to grab onto Wash's control panel, that he realized that Kaylee was crying with a hand pressed over her mouth. It did not take more than a second standing there to realize why.

The sky was falling. Perfectly good ships without power, crashing into each other on the way down, screaming through the high Persephonese orbit, with only Wash's piloting keeping Serenity from joining them. Why do we have power? Mal wondered distantly, adding it to the list of things he needed to find out. First on that list was, "What happened?"

"Don't know." Wash's face was ashen. His muscles were taunt, his eyes focused on the view before him: ships, fancier vessels than Serenity, falling out of the sky, into one another, and which Wash was weaving in and out of, trying to plot a safe course through the usually crowded Persephone skies to the Black while the ship rocked from the effort. "It just happened, I was talking to Persephone Control and then there was screaming and the transport above us started falling and Mal it's everyone, everyone not out of orbit yet, they're falling back onto the spaceport," Wash said, his words jumbling together given the speed at which he said them. Through the corner of his eye, Mal saw Zoe slide up to grab her husband's shoulders, and at that moment Mal wasn't sure who was more the anchor. The Captain hung onto the control panel, tight, unable to make sense of what he was seeing, both out the window and in the screens.

The radio, though. The radio spoke the truth his eyes refused to see, refused to know, overlapping voices screaming for attention.

"- mayday, mayday, we need - "

"- ships just falling out of the sky, can anyone reach them, oh god, oh by god - "

"- control, this is ground control, what's happening - "

"- explosions in the main city, reports of mushroom clouds, does anybody know - "

"- under attack, there's fighters here, they're not - "

"- gods help us, we're under attack! They're killing us, they're killing - "

"- can't get through to Caprica, can't reach anyone, where's the military?! Where's the frakking - "

"Oh my God," someone was saying behind him. "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God."

He wasn't waking up. Mal wasn't waking up. His head was throbbing, a stabbing pain that stung through the haze and cemented this as real. He gave himself to the count of two to wake up, and when he didn't, Malcolm Reynolds forced himself to act. "Is it the military?" he snapped, turning to look at Wash. The pilot didn't look back at him. "Did you see a Battlestar?!" Mal pressed, because it couldn't be but it had to be. Mal didn't have any other explanation, he didn't know what else it could be. Didn't make any frakking sense, but there it was.

No one was answering him. Mal's eyes snapped up to the rest of the assembled crew, feeling the ship sputter through the remains of Persephone's atmosphere and into the Black. His first target was Kaylee, tears streaming down her face. Mal surged forwards, and grabbed the girl by her biceps, giving he a tiny shake so that she would look at him. "Kaylee, I need you in the engine room," he said, firmly, and waited until he got a very slow nod from Kaylee before releasing her. The girl stumbled out of the cockpit, and before she was even on the first stair, Mal had turned to Jayne Cobb, and told him, "Go with her."

"I ain't gonna be any kind of help in - " Jayne started to say, his fingers curling protectively around Vera, as though the gun was going to protect him.

"Just do it!" Mal snapped, not even taking a moment to glare at the man, surging back towards Wash's side. Behind him, he heard the thundering of feet on metal that said Jayne had gone to do as he was bid. Mal claimed the computer closest to Wash, an antiquated thing as old as Serenity herself, and urged it to life. "Zoe, Simon, I need to know what's going on," he said next, not looking up from his console. Wash was close enough that he could have manned this one, but Mal wanted his eyes on the sky. He didn't know what was going on and that made them vulnerable. He heard Zoe sit behind them, and after a small "oh" noise, Simon moving towards the other side of the cockpit.

When the screen did crackle to life, Mal typed in a quick search. Radar of the area showed... no ships with power. There was one large enough to be a Battlestar, closer to Caprica than to Persephone, but it did not have power. Several smaller blips he took to be Vipers swarmed towards it, and then the Battlestar was gone, no longer even a blip on the radar. The smaller ships remained, a swarm, and Mal checked quietly to ensure that they were a ways away. He tried to bid himself to think, to think past the throbbing in his skull, but all he could come up with was to tell Wash to put as much distance between them and Persephone as possible. No other grand idea graced him in the minutes before someone else spoke over the cacophony of the unhelpful radio that was growing fewer and fewer in overlapping voices as time ticked on. Or was it the further they pulled from Persephone?

"Gemenon's on fire, Mal," Zoe said lowly, her words as stiff and as numb as he had ever heard them. Mal tried to push down the pang of agony that shot through him, shoving it down way low so that he could keep his head. His heart pounded frantically nonetheless, his calm slipping further each second he did not know what he was up against.

Across the way, Simon was not so composed. Mal could hear him hissing breaths, frantic things that sounded wet even across the cockpit. "Caprica - " Simon said, and then nothing else. Mal didn't need to hear more to know that Caprica shared a fate with Gemenon. Persephone, Caprica, Gemenon...

"Who's doing it?" Mal asked, the only question that mattered at this moment, typing in frantic commands only to be met with sudden snowing static. The computer had shorted, again, at the worst possible moment. "Who the frak is doing it?" Mal kicked the console. The static remained, even as he shouted at it, "What the frakking hell am I fighting?!"

"Cylons."

Mal's head snapped around, to see River. Barefoot, face as ashen as Wash's, she stood frozen there in the doorway just long enough for Mal to gape at her, before she had moved to the co-pilot's chair. "Cylons," she said again, breathless this time, her hands flying over the controls. Behind him, Mal heard someone say something of it, but Mal wasn't sure what it was. River kept speaking, "Battlestars burning out. Shipyards at Scorpion burn. Bodies without mourners, didn't know, no one knew. Woman in the red dress. Machines like us. Red dress, red dress. Heels click on the floor as she kisses/kills you."

Mal was nearly knocked over by the rocking of the ship, a sudden jarring like a explosion not far off. He heard Wash curse behind him, but Mal did not dare look away from the teenage girl. She was crying, even as her hands flew over the controls. When had Simon come to stand behind her? That felt like something Mal should have noticed. "A flock, a flock of..." River's eyes snapped up, bored into Mal's. "Happening everywhere," she said, and her voice did not shake. Mal felt numb, frozen, as though pinpricks pressed in on him from all sides. He knew the symptoms of shock well enough, knew that he needed to move, and yet he was frozen as the teenage girl spoke. "Metal kills flesh, crushes the bugs. Gone, gone, it's all - it's gone. We have to jump. Have to jump."

"Where?" Mal asked. His voice sounded far away. River jabbed her finger against the screen on her side of the cockpit. Numbly, Mal wondered if Kaylee had ever gotten the FTL drive working again, or if it remained a causality of never getting paid for this last job...

"Jump!" River screamed, clapping her hands over her ears with a second wail. She slumped in Simon's arms, no longer able to hold herself up. Weeping.

Not a second later, another explosion rocked the ship, a shockwave that set alarms trilling. For a mad moment, Mal thought they had been hit by something, that the crackling was the air hissing from a hull breech, but River kept wailing in sorrow, not pain. Someone breathed out a prayer behind him, was it Zoe? The ship had swung back around, Wash positioning them better for the jump that Mal had not told him to execute, but also affording them with a view of Persephone. Mal was far enough away that he could see when an entire corner of the planet shifted against the black, inward, fire and circular clouds swirling across the surface of the terra-formed moon.

Persephone was imploding in on herself.

"Do it!" Mal snapped to Wash, the words wrenching out of his mouth like a torn tooth. Wash, who had frozen, jumped badly in his seat, but snapped back to action without a backward glance at the wife holding tightly to his floral shirt. Mal already feared they were too late, that he had watched River too long. Wash did not ask a single question, turning roughly in his seat to program the coordinates River had found for them, and fumbled through the corresponding controls. For the very first time since Mal hired him, he saw Wash's hands shake.

He did not allow himself to relax as he heard the FTL engine whir to life, counting the seconds before the actual jump with terrifying slowness. Mal kept his chin up, his eyes fixed on the crumbling moon below him and, God, there was no guarantee that they could even break away from the crumbling moon now. From here, he could see deep cracks ratcheting through the main continent, explosions of what could only be the Capital City where he'd fought just an hour ago, less than. Forty more minutes on that terra-formed surface, and Mal and his whole crew would be dead. Every contact they had, Shepard Book in his northern Haven, Caprica and Gemenon and everywhere, everyone. River had spoken it aloud, and Mal took her word as law. He had no other explanation but hers, and hers was... Everywhere. Everyone.

Seconds before he felt the pull of the FTL jump, Mal saw a distant silvery spider do the same, a ship whose make and model he knew nothing of save immediate and irrational loathing.

Next: Chapter One. Captain Malcolm Reynolds is made to allow officers of the Colonial Fleet aboard Serenity, so that they may fix Serenity's antiquated and faulty FTL drive. Tensions rise steadily when Mal is faced with none other than Captain Lee "Apollo" Adama.

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