Into The Second Aether

Full summary: Set after the events of the movie. Badger has a job for Mal: to steal the Golden Orrery that is due to be presented to the King of Londinium at the U-Day celebrations. Mal is more than happy to do anything that might disrupt those wanting to celebrate unification, but his seemingly straightforward plan is disrupted when Kaylee finds some rather unusual passengers to bring on board for extra income. Serenity becomes the temporary home to three Core Worlders who have found themselves stranded on the Rim: a terraforming tycoon, his wife and an eccentric hat maker. Their presence on board raises some questions as to why Badger would want to get his hands on the Orrery, and could there really be terrible consequences for the 'Verse if a certain missing hat is not recovered? And what of the mysterious phantom ship that Rim Worlders have reported seeing sailing between the outer planets? Inspired by the Doctor Who book "The Coming of the Terraphiles" by Michael Moorcock.

A/N: This is largely my attempt to write a Firefly AU equivalent of the Doctor Who tie-in book "The Coming of the Terraphiles" which was written by Michael Moorcock and features the recurring character Jerry Cornelius from his other works. Like Moorcock did with Cornelius in creating an alternative version of him for the Doctor Who universe, I wanted to create alternative versions of his characters for the Firefly universe, and many of the non-Firefly-canon characters in this are adapted from Moorcock's book. For anyone who has read the book, you may recognise some of the plot elements in this story, although they have also been adapted and altered. The overall composition of the story will be approximately 50% original content, 50% adaptations.

Disclaimer: Firefly is owned by Joss Whedon. All elements from The Coming Of The Terraphiles are owned by Michael Moorcock and the BBC.

Prologue – A Charmed Ship And Her Captain

Catching the solar winds, the vessel brakes and turns
Upon the brane and all the multiverse is hers
The yearning void calls out, gloriously perverse
She spurns a dozen planetary advances
-The Epiconeon

They were out in the black. They'd been here a long time, in space so dark that there wasn't sufficient light to fill the solar sails. The ship's auxiliary colour engines had run almost to empty from trying to get them across that final void, traversing dimensions and braneworlds to reach the 'Verse. But at long last they were here. This isolated little portion of space, where humankind had fled to after abandoning their planet as lost, believing it to be bled dry of all resources.

It was here that Captain Cornelius would find what he was looking for.

What that might be, nobody knew. The Captain was a mysterious man, as distanced from his own crew as he was from everyone else he encountered. The sailors on board the Paine knew no better than anybody else what had driven the Captain to throw all caution to the wind, sailing across treacherous time streams and colour pools and the multiverse's vast gravitational fault lines to get here, but they feared him enough not to ask.

Cornelius now stood at the helm of his ship, gazing out at the array of stars and planets before him. It was impossible to tell whether his expression was one of satisfaction, disappointment, or something else entirely, for his face was concealed entirely behind an iron mask. No one had ever seen what he looked like behind it, and the green orbs that peered through the narrow eyeholes never gave anything away. He seemed emotionless and timeless…much like the ship itself.

The Paine was at once both archaic and futuristic, being shaped like an old Elizabethan galleon and at the same time being far larger than one in size. She sailed through time and space with her own localised atmosphere and shields, allowing the crew to walk out on deck and look up at the open sky, with only a thin membrane of dark matter to shield them from the vacuum beyond. Her primary source of power was light itself: her sails catching the momentum of photons that streamed through the quantum vacuum and being swept along by the tides of solar winds. To absorb as much light as possible the hull had been painted black, keeping the photons' energy stored in internal converters and giving the ship maximum manoeuvrability through subluminal space.

She truly was a beauty of engineering, the Captain thought. A rare thing to find in the multiverse, and certainly unique among this colonised solar system. In open space only the buccaneer ship Remembered Lombardy could possibly be a match for her, but in this isolated little portion of the galaxy she was far beyond compare.

Light from the system's protostars caught the ship's sails, spurring her on just a little bit quicker as they passed through the belt of rock and debris at the edge of space. Slowly, they were moving forward into civilisation again, but there were other obstacles still to come.

It was the bosun, Peet Aviv, that called out the warning first, having spotted the ships that were fast approaching them. Cornelius turned towards her and then looked out into the distance, seeing that indeed there were several boats sailing from among the debris in their direction. They were crude vessels, he thought; clumsy chunks of metal powered by loud, inefficient engines, completely lacking the speed and graceful power of the Paine. Their constituent parts seemed clumsily thrown together; assembled at sharp, awkward angles with obscene proportions that gave them the appearance of Frankenstein ships. The armament of one ship alone wouldn't come close to being a match for the Paine's force cannons.

But there were a great many of them, and Captain Cornelius knew enough about the history of the 'Verse to know what they were: Reavers.

Stories had abounded throughout time of the savages that inhabited the Lost Colony of Earth. Creatures that had once been men, but were driven to madness by a chemical experiment gone wrong. Tales were told of the insane beings that patrolled the edges of space, who would eat you alive and make clothing out of your flesh. Frightening enough, Cornelius thought, but these creatures weren't invincible. He'd heard stories too of how they'd once been defeated. By a seventeen year old girl, nonetheless, who'd felled a whole hoard of them.

Behind his mask, Cornelius smiled to himself. Sheer force and violence couldn't win out against well-honed precision and power, and that was exactly what the Paine had in abundance. As he gave out the orders for the crew to arm the ship, he tried to recall more of the story.

A boat named Serenity, he remembered, had sailed through Reaver space and come out unscathed. Again, Cornelius smiled. Her captain had done that by disguising the boat as a Reaver ship. Putting on a mask of sorts, much like his own. But Cornelius had no intentions of hiding and slipping away. The names of their ships seemed almost prophetic in that sense: Serenity had aimed to slip quietly under the radar, whereas Cornelius intended very much to inflict Paine on their attackers.

The Captain had never encountered Reavers before. He didn't know quite what to expect of them or how they would fight, but he did know full well what his own weapons were capable of. As the approaching ships came up along their broadsides he told the crew to hold steady on the guns. A harpoon was fired from one of the oncoming ships, but its path was deflected in the Paine's dark matter shields and it sailed harmlessly above the deck.

It wasn't until the first of the grappling hooks flew from the Reaver ships that Cornelius finally gave the order. "Unleash hell."