Max Vasser pulled her rented hovercycle alongside the old warehouse beneath a long row of grime-covered windows and switched off the engine. She unfolded herself from the cockpit, pulled off her helmet, and gave the area a quick visual once-over. This was the address Rick the ruggedly handsome El Taco manager had told her belonged to the Boojum, but the place looked like it hadn't been used in a century. Quite a trick considering that Serenity City was only twenty years old.
Aside from the gibbous, silvery moon partially hidden behind tattered clouds, a lone yellow streetlight at the far end of the block was the only illumination. The only sounds in the night air were the distant hum of any modern city, and beneath that, the crashing of ocean waves along the breakers down by the docks.
Max was alone.
That simple thought evoked a brief flash of regret over her sharp words to West and her hasty departure from the Rocinanté, but she angrily beat at the unwanted emotion with a solitary vengeance until it was banished from her conscious thoughts.
Max suddenly felt old, but she had no time for such frivolous distractions. She was here to do a job, albeit a self-appointed one -- to get to the bottom of the mystery of the Snark's strange and seemingly contradictory actions. Why had he given her that weird marble? Why he had asked her to 'help the Boojum' even though he had seemed intent on killing him? And even more importantly, was the young boy, Danno Chimeron, safe?
The quick application of a phaser beam set on narrow-beam disrupt defeated the lock on the door and she was inside the ramshackle building. She stayed in the shadows by the door for the few seconds it took for her eyes to adjust to the gloom, but as soon as she could see, she realized that the building wasn't as abandoned as it appeared on the outside.
The floor was free of accumulated dust and debris, the storage shelves were in perfect repair and lined up in straight rows along the entire length of the ground floor, the catwalk that circumscribed the upper level above her head looked sturdy. Large nondescript crates of imports and exports were stacked in orderly groups throughout the warehouse. This place was obviously in current use.
Phaser held at the ready, Max stealthily penetrated further into the structure. She could hear the blood pounding in her ears, feel the adrenaline pumping through her veins, heightening her senses until her nerves felt like they were on fire. The thrill of the hunt always filled her with such intense euphoria, whether she was in a starfighter cockpit or on a ground mission made no difference.
Suddenly and without warning, the lights above her came on, momentarily blinding her in a flood of white light. She instinctively froze in place like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle, but her esper sense screamed for her to move! That subtle yet unmistakable glimmer of precognition, that mystical yet scientifically documented prescience that warned her of danger and had saved her life on so many occasions in the past, was yelling at her to move her feet or die.
Max dove to the side into a smooth shoulder roll and wound up back on her feet just as a disruptor beam whined past her ear and into the warehouse floor blowing a small crater into the plasticrete. She spun and whipped her phaser around to point at the source of the attack and came face to face with the villain himself -- the Boojum.
He was at the top of a flight of stairs leading to the upper level storage areas, sitting placidly in his old-fashioned wheelchair as though he were taking in a nice spring day or listening to a light opera instead of trying to kill her. His hands were folded in his lap and his head was slightly lowered, his face hidden by the dark glasses and fedora he always wore.
And there, standing behind the Boojum, was the young Danno Chimeron. The boy's face was calm, but otherwise inscrutable.
Max bristled at the sight, righteous indignation welling up inside her at the Boojum's callousness. Her fury was a raging floodwater assaulting a dam with primordial ferocity, but she forced the waters to calm. The Boojum wasn't making any hostile moves, and she guessed that his first shot had only been meant to get her undivided attention.
To Max's surprise, it was the young boy who called down to her, and not the man in the wheelchair. In a high-pitched voice whose ingenuousness matched the cherubic face yet at the same time was as hard as steel, he asked, "Who are you?"
"Someone with a lot of questions for your father," called back Max.
"What are you doing here?" Again it was the boy who spoke while the Boojum just sat and watched in silence.
Max decided there was nothing to be gained by deception. "Right before he died, the Snark asked me to help the Boojum."
There was no visible reaction from the Boojum, so Max decided to press her luck and see how far it would get her. She didn't lower her phaser or adjust its aim, but she held out her other hand to the boy and said, "There's nothing to be afraid of, Danno. Why don't you come down here and we'll talk."
The reply from the top of the stairs was a disruptor blast aimed at Max's gun hand. She would have lost a limb in that instant, but once again her esper ability warned her. She dodged aside, but not fast enough. The searing lance of energy struck a grazing blow on her hand burning and blistering skin. The edge of the disrupt effect deadened the arm's motor nerves, but had the opposite effect on the pain receptors. Max strangled back a scream of pure agony and jerked her hand away. She caught a glimpse through the pain of her phaser flying across the warehouse and skittering to a stop behind a pile of crates far out of reach.
She spun to face the stairs again, ready for the next shot, but once again the Unexpected froze her muscles by sheer force of confusion. The disruptor that had just nearly sheared off her arm was not in the hands of the Boojum, who still sat unmoving and silent in his wheelchair, but by Danno Chimeron, the young boy she had come to rescue!
There was a thin smile on the boy's face, and his black eyes were like two open graves. The big disruptor looked absurdly huge in his small hand, but it never wavered from the bull's-eye painted on Max's chest. Max didn't need her esper sense to know that something was horribly wrong with this entire situation.
"You should've minded your own business, lady," chided Danno in a voice as cold as death. "People who come looking for the Boojum usually wind up floating out in the asteroid belt."
Max grimaced in pain and cradled her wounded arm with the other. "Don't gimme that crap, kid!" she spat in defiance.
"I'm not a kid."
"Yeah... all kids say that!" retorted Max.
Danno appeared to consider Max's words for a moment, then said disdainfully, "I know what I look like, but I was alive when this planet was nothing but an insignificant El-Aurian farming colony and humans still crawled on the face of only the Earth."
Max's eyes narrowed. El-Aurians had farmed Serenity 300 years ago. Humanity had left the Earth 400 years ago. What was the kid telling her? That he was 500 years old? Ridiculous! But the malevolence and hatred she saw in his eyes was something no mere boy of twelve could harbor. She remembered the Snark's dying words: *Don't be fooled by him... by the way he looks...*
"I was born on Earth in the year of our Lord 1349 in the great city of Constantinople," Danno Chimeron intoned decorously. "Humanity was dying off by the millions in Europe and Asia. The Black Death lay over the land like a funeral shroud. I had nine brothers and sisters. They all died. As did my mother, as did my father... as did I.
"Only I didn't stay dead. I arose from the ashes. But were my remaining relatives and friends happy I survived? No, they abandoned and betrayed me! Those ignorant, superstitious peasants branded me a demon and tried to stone me to death! I didn't understand at the time, of course -- I was only twelve years old -- so I just ran.
"The years went by, but I never grew any older. I lived on and under the streets of the world's most crowded cities. It was a hard life and I was mortally hurt many times, but I always recovered. Earth's unique magnetic fields and environment gave me eternal youth and instant cell regeneration. I outlived everyone I ever knew, everyone I ever loved, everyone who had betrayed me. I was immortal.
"So I preyed on the weak to survive, relying on humanity's foolish and misplaced compassion for a poor little orphan boy with big sad eyes, taking what I needed from those around me, killing anyone who got in my way, slowly building my secret empire--"
"How can you be so callous?" hissed Max through her pain.
"Callous? How?" Danno Chimeron seemed genuinely surprised by her question. He shrugged. "An ordinary human's life is so short and filled with disease and suffering, it hardly seemed like a crime to me! I was simply putting them out of their misery -- I did them a great service!"
Danno's eyes took on a faraway cast and his voice became momentarily more melancholy. "Besides, what do short-lived humans know of life and death -- of losing loved ones to the great enemy Time? Of being left alone? Their lives are so short, they have no concept of what death truly is, since they barely experience life. Don't feel anguish for them. The death of a mortal is no great woe to those he leaves behind. You cannot begin to fathom the truly worst of woes as only I can know it..."
Being a mere mortal, Max had no idea what the hell Danno Chimeron was talking about, but she felt herself torn in opposite directions, pulled on the one side by compassion and sympathy for the tortured, lonely child that had suffered so much, and on the other by horror and disgust for the vile, lonely monster that had committed such evil.
The Snark's voice rang in her ears. *He's not what he seems...* She suddenly felt a chill hand grip her heart and squeeze as a few of the puzzle pieces fell together.
"*You're* the Boojum!" whispered Max in horrible realization.