Okay, I couldn’t resist. I have, in fact, resurrected the Chuck/Firefly crossover-verse, and I have thrown Torchwood into the mix.
I swear to God, I really, really am going to finish Chuck vs. the Pie-Maker and Sarah vs. the Vortex. I’m just having creativity issues with those.
Friday, April 5th, 2030
4:42 PM
Annapolis Junction, MD
The man exiting the Boeing complex in Annapolis Junction, Maryland, was over sixty years old but looked to be perhaps forty. It was occasionally a point of contention with his wife, who despite being nearly twenty years younger than him, looked just as old as he did. She still looked damn good, though.
He had become somewhat of an environmentalist in the last few years. After moving to the East Coast from Los Angeles, he had driven his old Ford Super Duty from home to work most of the time, but eventually, he had come to the conclusion that he was helping kill the environment by driving it fifty miles a day. The husband of one of his oldest friends had been instrumental in convincing him to stop – a fact that he sometimes found odd, given the husband’s conservative nature and his military position.
So now, he would take the bus from Boeing to the Savage MARC station, catch the bullet train down to Greenbelt, pick up his hybrid Corvette from the park and ride lot, and drive the four miles to his home near the University of Maryland. Not only did it take up less fuel and cause less pollution, but it took less time as well. Nonetheless, it practically took an act of Congress to ever get him to admit that he was better off using mass transit.
As he rode the train through Maryland suburbia, he couldn’t help but smile at the excitement around the Boeing complex lately. Five Mars missions had been successfully completed now. American Airlines was going to introduce commercial moonflight service soon – using Boeing products, of course. Never mind that the Moon was still pretty much like the Wild West, and might as well have had Al Swearengen running the show – by God, people wanted to go!
None of this was particularly novel to him. Sure, it was interesting to see the Moon being colonized, and missions to Mars becoming almost a regular occurrence – after all, he hadn’t grown up anywhere near the Moon, or Mars, or even Earth. Of course, given how much of space he’d seen, it wasn’t really a novelty for him, either – in fact he’d almost single-handedly caused two gigantic space armadas to ravage each other, all so he could broadcast a message to billions of people living on numerous planets and moons.
But then, the cruel hand of fate – helped by a couple of very nasty individuals – had dropped him and his crew into Los Angeles in 2018. His ship destroyed, they had decided to stay put and become part of modern society. He’d even married one of the government agents who had been put in place to work with his crew.
Along the way, he’d become a consultant for Boeing, and then gotten his Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Ph.D from Virginia Tech, Virginia, and Georgetown, respectively, all in fairly short order. He’d rocketed through the ranks, and was now one of Boeing’s top people on the east coast.
That didn’t keep him from feeling nostalgic sometimes. There were days when he missed the freedom of space, the downright adventure of being on the run from the government. He missed his crew – they had long since scattered to the four winds, his first officer moving to Minnesota with her husband, his engineer, doctor, and, well, muscle-for-hire staying in Los Angeles, and the doctor’s sister moving to Idaho with her husband, an Air Force general who had been tapped for command of Mountain Home Air Force Base.
He’d been happily married for eleven years. He had two wonderful children, a great job, and a beautiful home. It would’ve been difficult for his life to be better. But there were days when he wanted nothing more than to hear the rumble of the turbines vibrating through his ship, see the residual glow as the reactor lit up in its tail.
His daydreams continued all the way home. His trip down memory lane was interrupted, however, when he pulled into his driveway. A black Range Rover was parked in front of his house, a crappy government car parked behind it.
“Sarah! I’m home!” he called out as he entered the house.
“In here, Mal,” she replied.
Confused, Mal headed into the living room. He found his wife sitting on the couch, two men sitting in chairs opposite her. One was dressed impeccably in a three-piece suit, the other in what looked curiously like a World War II era pseudo-military outfit. Both men looked to be in about their mid-forties.
The one in the suit rose. “Dr. Malcolm Reynolds?” he asked.
“Yeah, that’s me,” Malcolm Reynolds, Ph.D, former captain of the Firefly-class transportSerenity, replied. “And you are?”
“I am Dr. Ianto Jones –“
“Sir Ianto,” the man in the WW2 garb cracked.
Dr. Jones rolled his eyes and sighed. “Dr. Ianto Jones…” He shook his head. “K.B.E., director of the Torchwood Institute.”
The other man jumped to his feet. “Captain Jack Harkness,” he said with a smile. “Section commander, Torchwood Three. Not a Knight Commander of the British Empire myself, but I can pretend!”
Mal raised his eyebrows, almost in disbelief. He turned to his wife. Sarah Reynolds, née Walker, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, just shook her head. Mal turned back to Dr. Jones, who seemed to have developed a look of tolerating exasperation on his face.
Mal backed into his La-Z-Boy – a piece of furniture his wife BARELY tolerated – and sat. “Ain’t Torchwood some sort of high-falutin government outfit from England that don’t really exist?” he asked. Sarah looked at him in astonishment – he delivered lectures at universities across the country, and spoke with nary a flaw in his speech, but when it suited him, he dropped back into the speech patterns he had used back in his days as an Independent.
“That’s correct,” Dr. Jones stated, as he and Captain Harkness returned to their seats. “We investigate alien presence on Earth and have a vested interest in space technology – something which you, of course, are intimately familiar with.”
Mal sat forward, holding his hands up. “Now, look, fellas, you should know better than I do that I can’t say a word about what I do at Boeing. That’s classified beyond classified, and if I spoke a peep about it, the US Government would fricassee me over the Patriot Act – that is, if my wife didn’t draw and quarter me herself first.”
Captain Harkness leaned in. The smile was gone from his face, replaced by a look of deadly seriousness. “We’re not talking about what you do at Boeing… Captain Reynolds.”
Mal kept his composure, but he felt like he had gone cold on the inside. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” he replied emotionlessly.
“Captain Malcolm Reynolds, age 66,” Ianto Jones began. “Born on the planet Shadow. Enlisted in the Independent Army at the age of 32. Rose to the rank of platoon sergeant. Became a for-hire ship captain following the Alliance victory at the Battle of Serenity Valley. Purchased the Firefly-class transport Serenity.”
Captain Harkness took over. “Crew consisted of first mate Corporal Zoe Alleyne Washburne, pilot Hoban Washburne, engineer Kaywinnit Lee Frye, mercenary Jayne Cobb, Doctor Simon Tam, Shepherd Derrial Book, civilian River Tam, and Companion Inara Serra.”
“Inara Serra left your crew some time ago,” Dr. Jones said. “Hoban Washburne and Shepherd Book are both deceased. Zoe Washburne is now married to General John Casey, United States Air Force, and is living in Minneapolis. River Tam is married to General Michael Tweedum, commander of Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. Simon Tam has a private practice in Los Angeles, California. Jayne Cobb owns Playboy Enterprises and lives in Bel-Air. Kaylee Frye is married to CIA program director Chuck Bartowski and lives in Redondo Beach, California.”
Jack Harkness sat back, a large smile enveloping his features. “Did we get everything right?”
Mal was stunned. He was silent for a very long moment, before he finally managed to speak. “How… in the ruttin’ hell did you know all that?” he croaked.
Ianto Jones steepled his fingers, looking at Mal over his fingertips. “Captain Reynolds… we know everything. Everything, about everybody. There is nobody on Earth who has any secrets from us.”
“Oh really,” Sarah interrupted, speaking for the first time since Mal had arrived home. “If you know everything, then what’s my real name?”
Jack Harkness looked Sarah directly in the eye. Without a word, he withdrew a business card from his breast pocket, pulled a pen from his coat, wrote something on the back of the card, and handed it to Sarah. She read the back of the card, and her eyes widened.
Then, without warning, she sprang to her feet, and had her gun out and pointed at Captain Harkness’ head. Acting on instinct, Mal followed suit, his gun aimed at Dr. Jones before he even realized what was going on.
“Alright,” Sarah spoke in a low, dangerous voice, “you have ten seconds to tell me what’s going on here.”
“Why don’t I just show you,” Ianto said in a quiet voice.
Very carefully, acting so as to not spook Sarah or Mal, he dipped two fingers into his pants pocket, and withdrew a small disc between his fingertips. When he placed the disc on the coffee table, it activated, creating a holographic image. The image was enough to cause Mal’s eyes to widen and his gun to drop.
“This Firefly-class transport fell through a time-space rift in Cardiff, Wales, last week,” Captain Harkness informed them. “We thought it was abandoned, but we eventually found about a dozen corpses stuffed into a smuggling hold. According to our chief medical officer, they had been mutilated in ways unimaginable.”
“Then we got reports from the Welsh countryside of people turning up murdered, mutilated in the same fashion,” Dr. Jones continued. “We know that you’re very familiar with the ship design, and so we figured you might know what’s going on here.”
Mal didn’t speak for a while. He was trying to figure out how to communicate to these men from Torchwood exactly how horrific a situation they had. Finally, he found it easiest to just use four simple words.
“You’ve got a Reaver.”
