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eye_of_a_catSinclair's Five Things That Never Happened To..., which ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
grey_bard was interested in seeing. And will quite possibly be horribly disappointed in, now I've re-read this. It's... patchy.
PG-13. Sub-chapter-titles are Tennyson quotes, poem in Thing 1 is A. E. Housman (you can have too much Tennyson), things 3 and 4 go together. Should be fairly easy to work out which alternate bit goes where. And if Thing 1 seems a little confusing in light of the Sinclair/Valen thing, I tried getting about five different explanations in, but it felt really clunky, so feel free to think up your own. (Ditto with certain Delenn stuff.)
I. Souls that yearn for light.
"Stay in formation. Hold the line. No-one gets through, no matter what!"
The light of the sun was on his face, the same sun that his ancestors had fought and died under, the same sun that his descendants would never see if this battle was lost. He turned his Starfury around into the blackness of space, where more Minbari fighters swooped and dived through space, beautiful and deadly at the same time. Nobody would grow up under that sun any more. Even if they fought the Minbari off for longer than any of them were expecting, the best they could hope for was a few days more to evacuate the planet.
A few days. And even then, what would the future hold? The Minbari would hunt them down if they had to tear the galaxy to shreds to do it. Even the other alien races were surprised by this bloodthirsty fury, this determination to kill every last human alive; evacuating Earth would only postpone the inevitable. But right now, even with probably half of his squadron dead, they were doing better than he expected. The Minbari fighters were being more cautious, darting around to avoid fire before returning it, trying to draw them out of formation before attacking.
"Understood," Bill Mitchell’s voice came through over the comm, still shaken even through the professionalism. Mitchell hadn’t been able to react quickly enough to stop Orozco’s ship getting hit a few minutes before. That was unlikely to matter much in the long term, but seeing a friend die right before your eyes was always going to hit hard, especially for a pilot who hadn’t even been old enough to fight until two months ago.
He saw the enemy fighter out of the corner of his eye, and was about to give the command when Mitchell’s voice came through again. "Alpha Leader! There’s a Minbari on your tail!" And before Sinclair could say anything, Mitchell had already broken formation to loop around overhead, half the squadron following him. "I’m on him."
"No! Mitchell! Stay in formation! It might be a -"
That was why the Minbari weren’t fighting like they usually did. No reluctance to finish the job they’d started, no sudden caution when they brought the war to Earth; just a delaying tactic. The jump-point opened right before him, and even the largest EarthForce ships were dwarfed by what came through.
A Minbari war cruiser, far bigger than anything he’d seen them use before. They weren’t challenged, not remotely; they hadn’t even brought out their best ships until now, when the fight was nearly over. He heard himself screaming something about a trap, and ordering Mitchell to break off, but it was too late. The other pilots were heading straight at the Minbari ship, and it cut them down one by one as if it was swatting flies. He watched them die in fire, like suns, like distant stars, and even though he closed his eyes the light still burnt behind them.
His ship started to spin as a beam from the Minbari cruiser hit an engine, and he waited for the end as the computer squawked out damage reports: weapons system at zero, Minbari targeting locking on. This was an end, then. Fitting, almost, now there was no hope for Earth and no hope for any of the other pilots in his squadron. He could have accepted it, if he hadn’t realised where the spin was taking him. Wheeling away from the sun to die among the stars, as if even in death he’d be no significant problem for the Minbari.
With sudden rage, he wrestled his ship back under control and turned it towards the Minbari cruiser. "Not like this! Not like this! If I’m going out I’m taking you bastards with me!" All the military training and experience he’d ever had kicked back in, and he gave the order to head straight for the Minbari ship, feeling the force of the thrusters immobilise him in his seat as the blue and white of the enemy grew larger and larger in his screen. For the first time in years, he felt alive.
~*~
"Choose quickly, Delenn."
There was barely concealed irritation in his voice. They had never liked her, although she had not taken a place on the Grey Council to gain the friendship of her fellow Satai, and Dukhat warned her long ago that they would resent her. But they had supported her in all her decisions since his death, until yesterday, when she stood before them and told them that this war was a mistake.
One of the workers laughed. Another looked at her with dark eyes and said, "You tell us now this is a mistake? You?" And Coplann sighed, and said the Council had better things to do than indulge the whims of a child who thought nothing was thought until she had thought it. She felt neither angry nor ashamed, only apart, suddenly; the centre of a circle which splintered into fragments as she watched.
Now, she no longer felt like Delenn who was hardly more than an acolyte, Delenn who stood in a place among the Nine that was Satai Kadroni’s and not her own, Delenn who started this war and now found herself watching mutely as the other Satai discussed battle plans as though they had been doing it for a lifetime. And neither did she feel like Delenn who called for vengeance with Dukhat's voice. Instead, she saw again what it was to be part of something greater, the Council seeing and thinking and moving together just as all Minbari should, and she understood. Whatever her thoughts about this war, she knew it could not go wrong if only they stayed together like Valen told them, and she found comfort in that.
But then there was the Vorlon, and questions she did not know how to answer. The Council members had agreed to her suggestion to capture one of the human pilots, but reluctantly, as if they were only humouring her for Dukhat’s memory. They knew as well as she did that there would be nothing on Earth that could stop the final phase of this war, and that the humans were planning no more than to stay alive long enough to evacuate their ships.
It could break them apart. Such a simple thing, to look at her once again as if she was a child dressed in robes too big for her instead of a Satai like them, and yet it could break them apart and damn all of Minbar with it if they no longer had that unity to redeem them for genocide. The Vorlons were right, of course, if Dukhat trusted them, but Dukhat also trusted in the prophecies and teachings of Valen and she knew that she could not follow one at the expense of the other.
She had only to choose a pilot, one of the few remaining human fighter ships among the growing field of debris. And yet, if she made the wrong choice, she could destroy the Nine and fail the Vorlons and Dukhat both. She scanned the field of ships around them, the human fighters seeming so primitive against the backdrop of Minbari ships, and tried to clear her mind long enough to pray for guidance. Only a moment, to choose. Only a moment.
She did not see the Starfury flying directly at their cruiser. It only caught her eye as a brief flare, a candle-flame against the blackness of space, as the energy beams incinerated it.
Something inside her began to weep, for the human pilot and for herself and Dukhat and all of Minbar, and she did not know why.
~*~
It was early evening, the sun sinking into the horizon and lighting up the sky in glowing muted flame in the way that always reminded her of Minbar. Satai Delenn watched the park begin to empty of visitors, as they finished paying their respects to the memorials of their loved ones. Some of the humans glared at her as they passed by, and one girl who was crying quietly muttered something under her breath.
Delenn said nothing. The very fact that the Minbari government which still controlled Earth had provided this place was testament to their regret over the war, and the brutal occupation which followed it, led by a warrior caste that the Nine either could not or would not prevent from acting as they did. But so many people had lost those close to them, and it was not her place to punish them for blaming her, the Minbari woman who sat on a low stone bench watching the sun set behind a wall inscribed with names. It had been bad, after the battle of the Line and the final conquest of Earth, and she had prayed for forgiveness both for what they had done to these people and for what she had done to Dukhat’s memory by allowing it.
Now, ten years later, with the Grey Council finally reformed and listening to the advice of the Vorlons, the humans would have their world back. It could not happen immediately, but it would come, in time, and as a symbol of that the Minbari government built this park for Earth to remember its dead. There were memorials as far as she could see, placed here by friends, partners, children, parents. Some were elaborate and ornate, with long epitaphs for the one lost; some contained only a name and dates of birth and death. She had once heard a fellow Satai say that all the proof anyone needed that humans were uncivilised could be seen in their refusal to conform and their love of chaos, but here it seemed almost beautiful.
She could not know what the future would hold for them, even acting under the guidance of the Vorlons. They said that humans and Minbari would need to fight together against the Enemy, but with such a history, she doubted any alliance would hold for long. There was hope, though. There would always be hope.
There was so much to regret, here, in a place of loss and pain; but there was a world to rebuild, and a galaxy to change, and the other Satai would be waiting for her. Before leaving, she found herself standing by a black marble plaque that caught her eye. The words inscribed meant nothing to her, but the reflection of the setting sun blazed in it like a flame against darkness in a long-ago memory, and as she traced the letters with a finger she found herself murmuring an almost-forgotten prayer for peace.
JEFFREY DAVID SINCLAIR
2218 - 2247
DIED A HERO, DEFENDING EARTH DURING THE
BATTLE OF THE LINE
~
Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live, and shame the land from which we sprung;
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.
II. Cast in endless shade.
"I apologise for not being able to meet you any earlier." Sinclair glanced up from the pile of reports with a well-rehearsed regretful expression, and hoped that would do it. He’d been on duty for thirteen hours straight, and the only thing he was sorry for right now was that he hadn’t managed an extra ten minutes of sleep that morning. At least this was a businessman and not a diplomat. Right now, the last thing in the universe he wanted was another minute in the company of Londo or G’Kar.
The man smiled, pleasantly enough. "Not a problem," he said. "You must be a very busy person."
Sinclair puzzled over that one for a moment before smiling back. A few too many minutes spent in the company of Londo and G’kar, evidently, if he was at the point when politeness surprised him. "Comes with the job," he said. "I’ll be with you in a moment."
His visitor shrugged and took a seat on the other side of the desk, opening the folded copy of Universe Today that he’d been carrying. Sinclair eyed the reports in front of him wearily. Maintenance readouts that would take hours to go through, although they could go to the bottom of the pile. Reports to make for EarthDome on the pilot who’d died in the confrontation with the raiders earlier. More reports to make for EarthDome, and probably the Centauri government as well, on that mess with Lord Kiro and the Eye. Appointments to arrange for tomorrow, crew rotas to check, meetings to organise, and requests from about half the non-aligned worlds about something or other. Everything here was going to take a long time, and he was about to give up on all of it and get back to the businessman sitting quietly in his office when he saw the message from Garibaldi.
Jeff,
Sorry, but I haven’t been able to find out anything else concerning our mutual headboned friend. Are you absolutely certain it was her? Don’t mean to doubt you here, but they all kind of look the same, and it was a long time ago. You know how unreliable memory can be.
Damn it. It had been Delenn he saw on that Minbari cruiser, he was sure of it. They’d taken him on board, tortured him, and... and that was all he knew. If he couldn’t find out anything, and Garibaldi couldn’t find out anything, maybe there was just no way he could know.
The Soul Hunter hissed at him from some dark place in his memory. "Don’t you understand? She is Satai. She is Satai! They’re using you!"
He crumpled up the message, threw it into the recycler, and turned to address his visitor. "It can wait until tomorrow. Now, what can I do for you?"
The man neatly folded his newspaper, and smoothed it with a hand as he placed it on the only empty space on Sinclair’s desk. "What do you want?" he said.
Sinclair realised he was tidying the messy heap of reports, as if he had something to be ashamed of, and forced himself to stop. The man smiled at him over steepled fingers, looking like every atom of him belonged there, fitting in as perfectly as his charcoal-grey suit matched the rather unusual colour of his eyes. "Well," Sinclair said, "Babylon 5 was founded to provide opportunities for all kinds of businessmen and diplomats. We can offer -"
"No." He held up one hand, just briefly, cutting Sinclair off mid-speech. "Not what the station wants, or what the ambassadors want, or what the bureaucrats want back home. What do you want, Commander?"
"I’m afraid I don’t understand," Sinclair said. "Is this some kind of sales pitch?"
"No, nothing like that. I’m genuinely curious. What do you want?"
Sinclair waited for a few seconds, long enough for the man to elaborate further, but he’d evidently said all he wanted to. "I think we may be talking at cross-purposes here," he said eventually, just to break the chillingly amiable silence. "I was led to believe you’d come here on business."
"Oh, I have." The man leant forward, as if he had some monumental secret to share. "But ‘business’ encompasses many things, wouldn’t you say? My question isn’t meant to imply that I want to buy or sell anything. I’m only looking for an answer. What do you want?"
Another long pause, before Sinclair started to laugh. "Nothing I’m likely to get," he said. "Now, if that’s all you wanted, I have a lot of things to do." His office no longer seemed like a good place to do them, though, and almost before he realised it he was out of his chair and halfway to the door.
The man turned his chair to follow Sinclair, unruffled. "You might be surprised," he said. "There is very little in this universe that can’t be gained if someone wants it badly enough."
There, the bastard was trying to sell him something. Annoyed though he was at that revelation, Sinclair felt strangely comfortable in finally knowing what was going on, and took some pleasure in proving his visitor wrong. "I want to know what happened to me during the Battle of the Line," he said. "I want to know why I was given command of this station, and why the Minbari insisted that I got it. I want to know what they’re planning for me. That’s what I want." And whatever else you might be, he added to himself, you’re not going to be able to give me that.
But the man was smiling, again, as though that was exactly what he’d wanted to hear. "Funny you should say that," he said as he gestured for Sinclair to sit down again. "I think I just might be able to help."
~*~
It was the early hours of the morning by the time he got to Delenn’s quarters, but that didn’t register as more than a flicker on the white-hot fury of his mind. If she wouldn’t speak to him he’d tear the door down himself. He was just about planning to when she didn’t answer at first, but by the second time he’d hammered against the door chime until he could hear its echoes out in the corridor, she was there.
She had evidently just woken up, and she was blinking in the harsh light of the corridor as she realised who he was. She looked smaller, somehow, less threatening, surely nothing that could have been the cause of eleven years of nightmares and a life that no longer had anything left. She was dressed in a simple loose-fitting grey garment instead of her usual robes, and she looked younger, almost childlike.
She did, that was, until she took a step backwards into her quarters, and he saw the colour she was wearing. A grey robe, light and dark, her face hidden, circles of light all around them and the other hooded figures standing silently watching him -
He was inside her quarters before he knew what he was doing, and only her startled gasp as he caught hold of her shoulders brought him back to reality. Close to reality, anyway. Close enough to watch it happen as if he was someone else, as if all the nightmares and the memories and the anger had fused into one and taken over him. "I know who you are," he hissed, his face inches away from hers. "I know what you did. I know what you did to me."
"Commander," she said, her voice almost managing not to sound shaken. "I... I do not understand."
"Oh yes you do. You were there during the Line. You took me on board your ship, you tortured me, you -"
"Then," she said, somehow stepping out of his grip, "we will discuss this. I understand that you may... have become confused in your memories."
"I’m not confused. Not any more." He followed after her until her back was pressed against the wall, only the force of her gaze keeping any distance between them. "I’m not confused, Satai Delenn. I know it was the Grey Council who tortured me. I know what you did to me. I know you wiped my memory because none of you dared kill me, and I know why you let me go. I know what you think I am. Do you understand me now?"
"Who - who told you this?" she said, and if he’d had any doubt at all, it vanished when he saw everything confirmed in her expression.
"It does not matter who told me!" He saw the fear in her eyes as she tried to back away, and for a second he was horrified with himself as he realised his hands were around her throat, pressing into soft flesh. He could feel her breathing, in short, ragged gasps, feel her pulse racing underneath his fingers. And why do you care, Jeff? Didn’t you spend a decade after the war wanting to kill every Minbari you saw with your bare hands?
She can fight, he thought. They’re strong. They’re always strong, too strong, she can fight me. But she didn’t, and as his grip tightened, she only closed her eyes and let her head fall further back.
But you never wanted to kill her, did you? Every other Minbari, but not her. She got you just where she wanted you. God, Jeff, did you really believe you meant anything to her? Did it even matter? All the friends you saw die at Minbari hands, and she was behind it all, and you never even noticed because you fell for her just like she wanted you to.
And he couldn’t kill her. Not like this, not without any explanation, not if she wouldn’t even try to stop him. Gradually, he loosened his hold on her throat. As he stepped back, she began to cough, drawing in in great gulps of air. He watched her in silence for a few seconds. "You said you were my friend," he heard himself saying, as if the voice came from a great distance away. "You nearly wiped out my species and you said you were my friend."
"I..." She was still struggling to breathe, but that wasn’t why she seemed so different, so unlike the Delenn he thought he’d known. She seemed almost broken, as though everything she’d had was ripped away, as though from that point on she’d truly know what it was like to have your life nothing more than shreds that you tried to piece together into something of substance. "I accept what I have done, Commander," she was saying. "But in all the time I have known you in this place, I swear to you that I have done nothing to cause you harm."
"Yes, because you think I’ve got Valen’s soul."
"No," she said, and there was a pleading in her eyes that he’d never seen before, but he only needed to recall the Line and his friends dying around him to ignore it. "There is... it was not intended that you should find this out so soon, but now you have I will tell you the rest. There is a darkness ahead of us, and you need to know how to prepare before it reaches us."
He was tempted, for a second. If she’d finally tell him everything, if he could trust her, he’d - but no. No, he couldn’t trust her, not now, not ever again. "I don’t want to hear it," he said. "There aren’t many people around here who tell me the truth about anything, and I think I’ll stick with the only one who has so far."
He expected her to ask again who it was, but even before he’d finished speaking he saw that she already knew. She caught hold of his arm as he turned to leave, pressed his hand between both of her own, begged him with her words. "You cannot," she said. "I know who he is, and I know who he represents. You must not trust them, Commander. I... I know that we have failed you, that I have failed you, but you must believe that this is nothing compared to what they will do. They are dangerous, very dangerous. You do not know who they are. Please, do not go to him. I will tell you. I will tell you everything."
"It’s too late," he said, and he knew it was true. There were tears in her eyes as he shrugged her arm off, and he was vaguely aware of her calling after him as he left her quarters, but none of it registered.
He looked back once and saw she had already lost hope, only a small and broken figure half-hidden in shadow, keeping a hand on the doorframe to stay upright. "It is here," she said quietly.
He couldn’t bear to look at her any longer, but as he walked away he found himself murmuring "Goodbye, Delenn," softly, like a prayer.
III. The Year’s Last Hours
It was almost a perfect moment. The Fresh Air restaurant was more peaceful than most places on the station were at this time on New Year’s Eve, and two of his best friends had just congratulated him and Catherine on their engagement. He’d been half-expecting to wake up from a dream ever since she said yes. Either that, or he’d find some way to mess things up between them again, like last time and the time before and the time before that. A memory came back to him suddenly, of Catherine curled up on a tiled floor crying, her hands pressed over her ears so she wouldn’t have to hear any more of his excuses. He pushed it to the back of his mind, and forced a smile as he concentrated on what Garibaldi was saying. It might not be a completely perfect moment, but it was damn close, and he wasn’t about to let anything ruin it.
This time, of course, he didn’t get a choice. The all-too-familiar bleep of someone’s link interrupted the brief moment of peace. For a split second Garibaldi looked relieved, as if he’d bared a little too much of his soul in his last words, and then he grimaced. "Never fails," he said. "Garibaldi, what?"
The voice on the other side of the link wasn’t loud enough for Sinclair to hear clearly, but he caught a few words - prisoner, Devereaux. "Missing?" Garibaldi said. "The hell do you mean, he’s missing?"
Sinclair strained to hear the reply this time. "I don’t know, sir, he’s just gone, along with the two men who were with him."
"On my way," Garibaldi said, ending the connection. "I knew there was more to that Devereaux guy than meets the eye."
Sinclair sighed. Garibaldi always expected the worst, but it would have been nice, just this one evening, if he’d been wrong.
~*~
Catherine studied the dessert menu for a long time, tapping her fingers on the laminated surface. He already knew what she’d say if he tried to hurry her. It was true her work didn’t give her much opportunity to eat out at restaurants like this, and it wouldn’t be fair to make her just damn well choose something and get on with it. Still, after the waiter came and was sent away twice, he couldn’t help but get a little impatient.
She smiled without taking her eyes off the menu. "You want to share this?" she said, tracing a fingernail over something that sounded like it could bring on Babylon 5’s first case of chocolate overdose. He cringed.
"I’m, ah, just going to have a coffee," he said.
She nodded as if she’d been expecting that, and the corners of her eyes wrinkled as her smile spread. "Which you’ll finish as quickly as possible, so you can go find out what Garibaldi’s doing. Right?"
It never failed to surprise him that she could see straight through him so easily. "He’ll call in when he’s found something," he answered, and tried to take the dessert menu off her.
She twisted it out of his grasp. "Go and find Garibaldi," she said. "And if things ever do calm down around here, there’ll be plenty of opportunities for you to take me out for a more peaceful meal."
He wasn’t sure there would be, but that evening it seemed like anything was possible.
~*~
Garibaldi was in one of the loading bays with his aide, prising the lid off a large crate. The bays were strange places when they weren’t full of workers and passengers, empty and echoing. Garibaldi didn’t appear to mind, but Sinclair himself always found them a little creepy. Judging from the way his aide kept glancing around at the shadows, he wasn’t the only one.
"You’re hoping to find Devereaux in there?" Sinclair asked, nodding towards the now-opened crate.
"Chance," said Garibaldi, clearing the top layer of foam packing materials from the crate’s interior, "would be a fine thing. I’m thinking that whatever’s in here might explain why he went walkies in the first place."
"And what is in there?" Sinclair stood closer, so that all three of them were peering at the crate’s contents.
"It’s supposed to be medical supplies," Garibaldi’s aide provided.
"Medical supplies?" Garibaldi broke one of the plastic cases open to reveal something metallic that gleamed in the dull light of the loading bay. "Don’t think so. That’s a transmitter. Set to broadcast static. And hey, look what else we’ve got! More transmitters, and some sort of triangulation device. These are for setting up a jamming device, I think. What frequency’s that one set to?"
Jack tipped it slightly and peered at the screen. "Ah, I can’t make it out."
Sinclair took it off him and held it closer to the light, but the numbers were surprisingly clear anyway. "One-zero-one-zero..." he began, and then blinked and forced himself to read it again - and again, and again. "One-zero-one-zero-one-zero-five," he finished, his voice hardly above a whisper.
"Earth Force One." Even Garibaldi’s face was frozen, as if he’d finally discovered something more terrible than he could have expected. "Someone’s trying to jam the frequencies for Earth Force One. And this thing’s set for just off the Io transfer point."
Sinclair hit his link without realising it, but Garibaldi clapped a hand over it, cutting him off. "Not over the link, Jeff. Not this. Get back up to C and C and warn them."
"You -"
"I’ll take a different route up there." He threw the transmitters back into the crate. "Stay here and guard these," he barked at his aide. "Don’t let anybody come near them, you understand? Jeff, what are you waiting for?"
He ran.
~*~
There was a stunned silence in C and C. He waited impatiently, feeling like he should be doing something, anything, as Ivanova tried again and again to send the warning message. After the fourth attempt, she snarled something in Russian and looked up from the console. "It’s no use, Jeff. We’re being jammed on all military channels."
"Re-route to civilian channels and see if we can reach Earth Central," he snapped. Behind him, someone confirmed the command, but Ivanova was shaking her head. "I can’t get anything except that recorded message."
"Damn. Where the hell is Garibaldi?" He paced over to Ivanova’s screen as if it was going to show him anything other than what she was saying, and then an idea hit him. "Can you get through to ISN?"
Her fingers flew like lightning over the control panels. "Yes. Should I send the existing message?"
"Send it and keep sending it until we get a reply. And bring up ISN on the monitors." Screens behind him blinked into life, showing a montage of clips from President Santiago’s career so far. If something had already happened, they’d be showing it, wouldn’t they? Would they? By his reckoning, Earth Force One was still too far out for them to hit it, but if they’d already started jamming transmissions then it couldn’t be long. And Garibaldi should be here by now, unless something had happened to him as well.
He tried Garibaldi’s link, but it was switched off. Something had definitely happened. There was no way he’d be out of contact at a time like this, even if he was on his way here.
Ivanova finished a brief and angry conversation with whoever she was speaking to at ISN, and twisted round in her chair again, looking relieved for the first time. "They’re going to warn them. They can still get through. We might be in time."
It was the last thing anyone said for a while. They watched in silence as ISN broadcast the evacuation of Earth Force One, with what seemed like a dozen interruptions to say that Earth Central still had no comment. The shuttle finally blazed off from Earth Force One, leaving it spinning and empty in space. Sinclair found himself half-tensed for an explosion then, but it didn’t happen. As ISN blinked back to the news anchor at her desk, confirming that all staff had been successfully evacuated, he heard a collective sigh of relief from the other staff on the command deck.
Ivanova let out a low whistle, sounding amazing like Garibaldi. "Well," she said, "either we’re heroes, or we just got ourselves in a whole hell of a lot of trouble."
Sinclair smiled and collapsed down into his chair. "Either way -" he began, and then everything fell silent again as the ISN anchor broke off mid-sentence and put a hand to her headset. "We’re getting an emergency signal from the President’s shuttle," she said. "I... we don’t know whether this is related to the earlier threat, but..."
The screen once again showed the Io transfer point, with Earth Force One in the foreground. The shuttle was almost too small to make out against the blackness of space, at first; and then, in ornate showers of fire, it exploded.
There were several gasps of horror and surprise from the command deck, and the ISN anchor whispered "Oh, my God," but all Sinclair could see was the burning ship.
~*~
"...and we have no word yet on when the Senate will be recalled. In related news, President Clarke has voiced his own suspicions that whoever was behind the false alarm to evacuate Earth Force One may have done so in order to engineer the assassination attempt, rather than in an attempt to avoid it. Commander Sinclair’s speculation that the shuttle explosion was the result of a contingency plan set in place by the murderers was described by the president as ‘highly unlikely’. In a press conference given earlier today after his inauguration, President Clarke vowed to get to the truth of this matter and bring the people responsible to justice. Senator Hidoshi confirmed -"
"Off," said Catherine, without lifting her head from his shoulder.
He knew he’d been staring at that screen for hours, as the same reports played over and over again. Catherine had sat with him in silence for most of that time. He felt like he should be saying something, but there wasn’t anything to say.
Catherine leant across to hug him. "It’s going to be okay," she said.
But it wasn’t, and she knew it as well as he did. With Garibaldi in medlab, Delenn in that cocoon, and the President dead, it felt like nothing was going to be okay ever again.
"Happy new year," he said.
IV
"I see you have your appetite back."
Garibaldi shrugged and kept eating. "Best way to heal," he said, through a mouthful of macaroni cheese. "If I had to put up with one more week of that cardboard on a plate they have in Medlab, I’d have withered away and died."
Sinclair took a seat opposite him, nodding thoughtfully. Medlab food wasn’t exactly the best on the station. "Have you decided when you’ll be ready to start work again? We’re kind of short-handed around here." He tried to smile, but he knew himself it was forced.
Garibaldi placed the fork he was holding back on the plate, and sighed. "No. Not yet. My second-in-command shot me in the back, Jeff. I’m going to need some time to think about things, you know?"
"As long as you need." Sinclair glanced down at the food on his own tray, none of which looked remotely appetizing. The past week, it felt like he’d been living off cheap caff which tasted less and less like coffee every day. He made a mental note to corner Ivanova and ask about the possibility of some real coffee when he had some spare time.
Garibaldi speared another clump of pasta with his fork. "I take it this sudden interest in my career means you’re going to be sticking around in this sector, too?"
Sinclair had been asking himself that question every minute of every day for the past two weeks, and still he didn’t have an answer. Three days after President Santiago’s death, an official from Earth Central had told him the Minbari were asking for a human ambassador, and he’d be perfect for the role. When he’d refused to take the position, he’d been contacted by a long succession of more officials, each increasing in rank, all suggesting the same thing. The one that morning, Peverell Meugnot, had said he was a personal aide to President Clarke. At this rate, Sinclair fully expected the president to call at some point in the afternoon, and God Himself to schedule a meeting by the end of the week.
He’d surprised even himself by refusing to go to Minbar. True, he didn’t want to leave the station, and he really didn’t want to leave it for an alien planet, but you didn’t get anywhere in the military by only doing the things you liked. If they’d given him an order, he’d probably have put aside all his problems with the idea and agreed to go. Only nobody had actually ordered him to go, as yet; the implication was plain, but they wouldn’t actually make it an official order. So he’d said no, every single time, to everyone who’d asked.
He could see what was going on, and it troubled him. President Clarke had stopped hinting that someone on Babylon 5 might be responsible for Sinclair’s death, but the accusation still hung in the air like a particularly toxic cloud, and nobody had forgotten. They couldn’t directly order him off the station, because that would be as good as saying it was his fault, and for whatever reason they didn’t want to accuse him outright just yet. Sending him to Minbar, though, when President Clarke had been hinting at off-worlder involvement in Santiago’s death since practically the day it happened, seemed like setting him up for something big. He didn’t much like being a pawn in someone else’s game.
"So far," he said after a while, and Garibaldi didn’t look surprised. "Did you hear who they want to replace me with?"
"Nope," Garibaldi said.
"Captain John Sheridan."
Garibaldi raised an eyebrow. "That John Sheridan?"
"That John Sheridan." Sinclair sighed, and downed half a mug of caff in one gulp. "Which I assume means the Minbari aren’t getting a say on who runs this place any more."
"Yeah, no kidding." Garibaldi shook his head slowly. "Speaking of which, any news on Delenn?"
"Nothing." He drank the rest of the caff, grimacing at the metallic taste it had started to get recently. "I’ll stop by her quarters today if I get a moment free," he said as he got to his feet, but he already knew he’d be there whether he had time or not.
~*~
The only light in Delenn’s quarters came from the dozen or so candles flickering around her chrysalis. As far as Sinclair could determine, from what Lennier said and what he could work out from what Kosh would tell him, she was still alive in there. He couldn’t help thinking that it looked like a shrine, even so.
Lennier was kneeling in front of the chrysalis, his head bowed, chanting softly. Although he’d called for Sinclair to come in only a few moments before, he paid no attention to the commander now he was there, and Sinclair resigned himself to waiting patiently until Lennier had finished whatever it was he was doing. Knowing Delenn for three years had given him a deeper respect for Minbari spirituality than he’d ever expected to have. Lennier’s prayer wasn’t loud enough for him to hear more than a few words, but he recognised some of them regardless: hope, future, devotion.
Maybe it was knowing Delenn for so long that let him pick up on the indications that Lennier was not happy to see him. He knew that whatever Lennier was chanting was important, and he didn’t take it personally that he carried on doing so with Sinclair there, but there was something distinctly frosty about him. A few days ago, when it became obvious that Sinclair was refusing to listen to Earth Central’s suggestions, Lennier had taken him aside after a meeting to tell him about Delenn’s instructions. Apparently, she’d known all about this plan to parcel him off to Minbar, and she wanted him there as well. In another time, Sinclair might have found some comfort in that, but then it just felt like two governments wanted him off his station rather than one. He’d thanked Lennier rather brusquely and made it clear he wasn’t changing his mind.
At the time, Lennier had bowed and said that it remained Sinclair’s decision, only a slight flicker of surprise showing in his expression. Now, in the angry set of his shoulders and the sharp edge in his voice as he prayed, Sinclair knew that he’d been expecting a very different reaction. Perhaps it was difficult for Lennier to understand why anyone would do the opposite of what Delenn wanted. Perhaps it was some Minbari equivalent of a dying wish, although Lennier didn’t seem any more certain of Delenn’s current state than Sinclair was.
Lennier got to his feet, and Sinclair waited for him to bow to Delenn’s chrysalis, as he’d seen him do before. Instead, Lennier stood motionless for a few moments, almost as if he was expecting something to happen. Then he pressed one hand to his chest, and held the other palm-outwards towards Delenn, bowing his head and murmuring something too quietly for Sinclair to catch. Sinclair realised he’d been half-expecting something to change, for Delenn to appear and reassure him everything was working the way it should be, but the chrysalis stayed the same.
"You still have no idea how long she’s going to be in there?" he said when Lennier turned away, half to make conversation out of the suddenly threatening silence.
Lennier’s irritated glance reminded him that he’d asked that before, that he asked that every time he was here, and the answer was no different now. "No," he said.
"Is she in pain?"
"I..." For a second, Lennier was shaken. "I don’t know," he said, sounding a lot younger than the aide who had chanted prayers with such certainty in his voice a few minutes before.
Sinclair nodded, slowly. Reassurance seemed desperately needed, for both of them, but there wasn’t much to provide.
Lennier looked back at the chrysalis in silence for a few moments before speaking again. "My government wishes you to reconsider your decision," he said.
Sinclair sighed. "No. Tell them I’m flattered they would consider me for the honour of this position, but no. My place is here, and I have a lot of work to do."
"There is a great deal of work to do on Minbar also," Lennier said, still not moving his eyes from Delenn’s chrysalis and its flickering candles.
"And there are any number of people better qualified to do it than I am," Sinclair replied, wondering if it was possible for this situation to get any stranger. "Why does it have to be me? I know why my goverment wants me gone, but why would the Minbari need me? Tell them they’ll have to get someone else."
Lennier did not look surprised to hear that. "It must be you," he insisted, but there was tired resignation in his voice. "There are things you have not been told, Commander. About why we surrendered during the war, and about the darkness that is coming. Delenn intended to explain this to you before undergoing this transformation, but there was no time." His eyes flicked across to her chrysalis, and then returned to Sinclair. "Do you remember what happened to you during the war?"
He remembered... what? Being taken aboard their ship, being tortured. A circle of grey, hooded figures. Delenn. "A little," he said.
Lennier nodded, and began.
~*~
Sinclair couldn’t speak for several hours after Lennier finished telling him everything. For most of that time, he could hardly even think, and he just sat unmoving as remembered memories flooded through his mind. He was aware, at some level, of Lennier going back to kneel and chant in front of Delenn’s chrysalis, and of the flicker of candle-flame in the darkness, but for a long time there was nothing else.
Eventually, he said "I can’t go to Minbar."
Lennier, still kneeling by the chrysalis and facing away from Sinclair, did not react.
"I understand Minbari have different beliefs about this sort of thing," Sinclair continued, "and obviously I’m glad you ended the war, for whatever reason. But I don’t believe this part about souls and prophecy. I don’t even know if I believe in souls, and I certainly don’t believe I can have Valen’s. I... I think there probably is another powerful race out there, and maybe it is these Shadows you described, but if that’s the case then I have to stay here. My place is with my own people, whatever you think about my soul. You have to see that."
Lennier nodded, slowly, as though he was bearing a huge weight. "Yes," he said. "But in this war, we must fight together, as prophecy tells us. If the threat of the Shadows divides us, then we cannot hope to fight them. You must believe this. Delenn came here because of this, her transformation..." His voice trailed off as he looked back at her chrysalis.
"What if I stay here?" Sinclair said. "What if I agree that I’ll work together with the Minbari, and find out as much as we can about these Shadows, and I’ll do whatever you need me to do with this... this anla’shok organisation, but I do it all here?" Lennier didn’t reply, but there was something in his eyes in the moment before he bowed his head once again, and Sinclair pressed ahead. "You know something, don’t you? From Delenn, or your own government? From Kosh?"
"Your government will not allow you to stay," Lennier said.
He’d been guessing that, but damned if he’d leave because of their own embarrassment over Santiago’s death. Not if they didn’t even have the guts to make it an official order. "They’ll have to drag me off here," he said, and meant it.
"Then I do not know what will happen," Lennier said. "Maybe Delenn, or Kosh. I only know that they want you to go to Minbar. I do not know whether we can fight the Enemy if you will not." He looked stricken, as young and uncertain as he did when Sinclair asked him whether Delenn was in pain.
"Well," Sinclair said, forcing a smile, "Valen was Minbar’s greatest war leader, wasn’t he?"
Lennier nodded, a little uncertainly.
"If I have his soul, and I want to fight this war from here, it can’t be that bad an idea."
Lennier pondered that for a few seconds, and then he smiled. "Maybe not, then," he said. "Entil’Zha Veni."
Oddly enough, and for the first time in weeks, Sinclair felt as if he knew his place in the universe again. Valen’s soul or no Valen’s soul, ancient Shadow race or no ancient Shadow race. He nodded.
The soft cracking sound of Delenn’s chrysalis breaking open seemed perfectly in place, like a third voice swearing an oath.
V
In a city that would one day be called Yedor, wind whistled a high note through the crystal spires of the tallest buildings. A figure halfway across a bridge, silhoutted against the setting sun, stopped and turned towards the sound. His new aides, staying a respectful distance back, watched him kneel and bow his head and say something in a language they did not understand. They exchanged looks, but said nothing; it was well known that Valen sometimes spoke these strange words, and that they were not meant to understand. They understood his gesture to follow once he had got to his feet, though, and they walked back in silence, as the wind chimed and sang in the towers.
"We will return to Tuzanor tomorrow," Valen said, once they returned to the temple. Around him, white-robed acolytes flitted like birds as they completed the arrangements for the ceremony. The warriors had wanted to hold the ceremony for Valen, in honour of the victory they had won against the Shadows, but Valen refused. His aides were surprised by this, although of course they had accepted his wish. Valen was very wise.
The warriors knew that Valen was wise, but even they questioned his decision to have his most trusted aides being worker caste. Valen said that the worker caste were to be slaves no longer. He had even appointed three of them to the Grey Council when he created it, and the warriors and the religious had been concerned, asking him if it was truly wise to allow the workers this when they were not accustomed to having such power. Valen said that the workers had built Minbar’s cities and starships, and power did not always come from war or prayers. He chose two aides from the workers to show his faith in their caste, and when the others asked if he did not deserve the honour of having warriors at his side, he only smiled.
His new aides accompanied him back to Tuzanor, and although the warrior and religious clan leaders stared at them in confusion, they did not say anything. Before Valen, it would have been unthinkable for them to be given a place of such importance. Then they would have been fearful of their lives, for although members of the warrior and religious caste hardly ever killed each other even before Valen, an exception was made for the workers. If a member of one of the other castes was killed, there would be war between the clans, and even the warriors did not want that. But the worker clans were no threat.
When Valen made the workers equal with the other castes, and told all the world that from that moment on no Minbari would kill another, the workers had been unsure what their place was. They could not compete with the warriors in strength, or with the religious in knowledge, so instead they vowed to serve Valen with all their strength. The worker caste anla’shok fought the hardest and longest in Valen’s name, and the worker caste ships that were now flown by the caste which built them sailed the furthest among the stars.
Valen’s aides knew that they must honour their caste in all things, and they tried to do this as best they could, but there were moments still when they did not understand what Valen wanted of them. There were times when he sat for hours in the small garden outside the temple, staring out at the sky, talking in a soft voice to someone that was not there. They did not understand the words he spoke, but grief and loss have voices loud enough to be heard across such barriers. They were unsure whether he would want them to offer their sympathies, and they did not understand how a legend could cry, and so they said nothing.
In most things, though, they served with honour, and Valen told them he was pleased by that. In time, even the warrior clans grudgingly accepted them, and did not refuse to hear Valen’s wishes and commands spoken by worker caste aides. The day that the warriors told them of the strange alien, Valen was resting, and they went alone to see what could be done. The warriors bowed to them, and led them to the place they had taken the alien. No warrior had ever bowed to one of the worker caste before. They looked at each other, surprised, and then one of them smiled and the other followed. Minbar was proud of their caste, and Valen was proud of their caste, and all would be well.
The alien was of a species none of them had ever seen before, and which did not appear in any of their records. She seemed to be female, of a similar size and build to a Minbari, but with no headbone and a strange material covering her head. Her face was not unlike a Minbari’s, although the bone over her eyes and forehead sloped away like a child’s. For a moment, something in the way she looked reminded the aides of Valen, but the moment soon passed. She was shivering, although due to fear or cold or something altogether alien they could not tell.
The warriors explained that they had found her small ship drifting in space, damaged, when escorting a transport to one of the newer colonies. There were no other ships in the sector, alien or Minbari, and her ship did not seem capable of hyperspace travel by itself. When they found her, she was unconscious and hardly breathing, but when they brought her on board their cruiser she recovered and seemed able to breathe the on-board atmosphere. She could not speak or understand their language, or any other language they knew, but the warriors said she had spoken the word ‘Minbari’ when she had woken up on their ship.
It was strange, and the warriors were afraid that she was an agent of the Enemy. Valen’s aides thought this unlikely, but they could not offer any better suggestions of what she was or how she had arrived in an empty sector. They questioned her, as slowly and carefully as they could. Sometimes she seemed as if she almost understood them, but then she would shake her head in tearful frustration. The strange material on her head fell across her face, wet with tears. It seemed to be part of her, but no alien species they knew looked like this, and she could not tell them any more. They decided to take her to Valen.
On hearing Valen’s name, she looked up again as if she understood, and the warriors and the aides exchanged glances. This was all very confusing. But Valen was wise, and with the Vorlons gone away, Valen was the only one who might understand who she was and where she had come from.
The warriors insisted on accompanying them back to the anla’shok training compound, in case the alien was dangerous. Since she did not seem anything more than afraid and confused, the aides left them outside Valen’s personal living quarters when they took her inside. She seemed glad of that, at least, and said something that might have been ‘thank you’ in her own language. Valen’s aides bowed, and were pleased when she bowed back.
Valen was reading on a bench outside, trying to catch the last of the setting sun’s light. His aides greeted him, and began to explain about the alien, but after only a few seconds it became clear that he was not listening. He stood up, without taking his eyes off the alien, and the book in his hands fell to the ground, forgotten. He said something in a language they did not know.
The alien was also behaving strangely, almost as if she knew who Valen was. She opened her mouth as if she was going to scream, and then clapped a hand over it, so that the sound was cut off before it could begin. She also began to shake again, so much so that the aides supported her to make sure she did not fall. Her eyes were wide and terrified. Throughout all this, Valen kept speaking, softly, in a language she seemed to recognise.
After some time had passed, the alien seemed to recover slightly, and the aides stepped back from her, watching carefully to be sure she could stand. They watched, confused, as she began to laugh, and then she ran to Valen and threw her arms around his neck.
Valen’s aides looked at each other, then at him, but Valen did not even seem to know they were there. He was crying, too, and holding the alien close to him, and saying the same words over and over and over again: "My God, Catherine, I thought I’d lost you."
The aides knew, of course, that Valen was wise, but this was something stranger than wisdom, and they thought that a lifetime of study would not help them understand what they were seeing. In time, though, they remembered their training as anla’shok, and Valen teaching them delight, respect and compassion. They had seen Valen demonstrate the last two in his every move and every word, but this was the first time they had seen Valen himself experience delight.
grey_bard was interested in seeing. And will quite possibly be horribly disappointed in, now I've re-read this. It's... patchy.PG-13. Sub-chapter-titles are Tennyson quotes, poem in Thing 1 is A. E. Housman (you can have too much Tennyson), things 3 and 4 go together. Should be fairly easy to work out which alternate bit goes where. And if Thing 1 seems a little confusing in light of the Sinclair/Valen thing, I tried getting about five different explanations in, but it felt really clunky, so feel free to think up your own. (Ditto with certain Delenn stuff.)
I. Souls that yearn for light.
"Stay in formation. Hold the line. No-one gets through, no matter what!"
The light of the sun was on his face, the same sun that his ancestors had fought and died under, the same sun that his descendants would never see if this battle was lost. He turned his Starfury around into the blackness of space, where more Minbari fighters swooped and dived through space, beautiful and deadly at the same time. Nobody would grow up under that sun any more. Even if they fought the Minbari off for longer than any of them were expecting, the best they could hope for was a few days more to evacuate the planet.
A few days. And even then, what would the future hold? The Minbari would hunt them down if they had to tear the galaxy to shreds to do it. Even the other alien races were surprised by this bloodthirsty fury, this determination to kill every last human alive; evacuating Earth would only postpone the inevitable. But right now, even with probably half of his squadron dead, they were doing better than he expected. The Minbari fighters were being more cautious, darting around to avoid fire before returning it, trying to draw them out of formation before attacking.
"Understood," Bill Mitchell’s voice came through over the comm, still shaken even through the professionalism. Mitchell hadn’t been able to react quickly enough to stop Orozco’s ship getting hit a few minutes before. That was unlikely to matter much in the long term, but seeing a friend die right before your eyes was always going to hit hard, especially for a pilot who hadn’t even been old enough to fight until two months ago.
He saw the enemy fighter out of the corner of his eye, and was about to give the command when Mitchell’s voice came through again. "Alpha Leader! There’s a Minbari on your tail!" And before Sinclair could say anything, Mitchell had already broken formation to loop around overhead, half the squadron following him. "I’m on him."
"No! Mitchell! Stay in formation! It might be a -"
That was why the Minbari weren’t fighting like they usually did. No reluctance to finish the job they’d started, no sudden caution when they brought the war to Earth; just a delaying tactic. The jump-point opened right before him, and even the largest EarthForce ships were dwarfed by what came through.
A Minbari war cruiser, far bigger than anything he’d seen them use before. They weren’t challenged, not remotely; they hadn’t even brought out their best ships until now, when the fight was nearly over. He heard himself screaming something about a trap, and ordering Mitchell to break off, but it was too late. The other pilots were heading straight at the Minbari ship, and it cut them down one by one as if it was swatting flies. He watched them die in fire, like suns, like distant stars, and even though he closed his eyes the light still burnt behind them.
His ship started to spin as a beam from the Minbari cruiser hit an engine, and he waited for the end as the computer squawked out damage reports: weapons system at zero, Minbari targeting locking on. This was an end, then. Fitting, almost, now there was no hope for Earth and no hope for any of the other pilots in his squadron. He could have accepted it, if he hadn’t realised where the spin was taking him. Wheeling away from the sun to die among the stars, as if even in death he’d be no significant problem for the Minbari.
With sudden rage, he wrestled his ship back under control and turned it towards the Minbari cruiser. "Not like this! Not like this! If I’m going out I’m taking you bastards with me!" All the military training and experience he’d ever had kicked back in, and he gave the order to head straight for the Minbari ship, feeling the force of the thrusters immobilise him in his seat as the blue and white of the enemy grew larger and larger in his screen. For the first time in years, he felt alive.
~*~
"Choose quickly, Delenn."
There was barely concealed irritation in his voice. They had never liked her, although she had not taken a place on the Grey Council to gain the friendship of her fellow Satai, and Dukhat warned her long ago that they would resent her. But they had supported her in all her decisions since his death, until yesterday, when she stood before them and told them that this war was a mistake.
One of the workers laughed. Another looked at her with dark eyes and said, "You tell us now this is a mistake? You?" And Coplann sighed, and said the Council had better things to do than indulge the whims of a child who thought nothing was thought until she had thought it. She felt neither angry nor ashamed, only apart, suddenly; the centre of a circle which splintered into fragments as she watched.
Now, she no longer felt like Delenn who was hardly more than an acolyte, Delenn who stood in a place among the Nine that was Satai Kadroni’s and not her own, Delenn who started this war and now found herself watching mutely as the other Satai discussed battle plans as though they had been doing it for a lifetime. And neither did she feel like Delenn who called for vengeance with Dukhat's voice. Instead, she saw again what it was to be part of something greater, the Council seeing and thinking and moving together just as all Minbari should, and she understood. Whatever her thoughts about this war, she knew it could not go wrong if only they stayed together like Valen told them, and she found comfort in that.
But then there was the Vorlon, and questions she did not know how to answer. The Council members had agreed to her suggestion to capture one of the human pilots, but reluctantly, as if they were only humouring her for Dukhat’s memory. They knew as well as she did that there would be nothing on Earth that could stop the final phase of this war, and that the humans were planning no more than to stay alive long enough to evacuate their ships.
It could break them apart. Such a simple thing, to look at her once again as if she was a child dressed in robes too big for her instead of a Satai like them, and yet it could break them apart and damn all of Minbar with it if they no longer had that unity to redeem them for genocide. The Vorlons were right, of course, if Dukhat trusted them, but Dukhat also trusted in the prophecies and teachings of Valen and she knew that she could not follow one at the expense of the other.
She had only to choose a pilot, one of the few remaining human fighter ships among the growing field of debris. And yet, if she made the wrong choice, she could destroy the Nine and fail the Vorlons and Dukhat both. She scanned the field of ships around them, the human fighters seeming so primitive against the backdrop of Minbari ships, and tried to clear her mind long enough to pray for guidance. Only a moment, to choose. Only a moment.
She did not see the Starfury flying directly at their cruiser. It only caught her eye as a brief flare, a candle-flame against the blackness of space, as the energy beams incinerated it.
Something inside her began to weep, for the human pilot and for herself and Dukhat and all of Minbar, and she did not know why.
~*~
It was early evening, the sun sinking into the horizon and lighting up the sky in glowing muted flame in the way that always reminded her of Minbar. Satai Delenn watched the park begin to empty of visitors, as they finished paying their respects to the memorials of their loved ones. Some of the humans glared at her as they passed by, and one girl who was crying quietly muttered something under her breath.
Delenn said nothing. The very fact that the Minbari government which still controlled Earth had provided this place was testament to their regret over the war, and the brutal occupation which followed it, led by a warrior caste that the Nine either could not or would not prevent from acting as they did. But so many people had lost those close to them, and it was not her place to punish them for blaming her, the Minbari woman who sat on a low stone bench watching the sun set behind a wall inscribed with names. It had been bad, after the battle of the Line and the final conquest of Earth, and she had prayed for forgiveness both for what they had done to these people and for what she had done to Dukhat’s memory by allowing it.
Now, ten years later, with the Grey Council finally reformed and listening to the advice of the Vorlons, the humans would have their world back. It could not happen immediately, but it would come, in time, and as a symbol of that the Minbari government built this park for Earth to remember its dead. There were memorials as far as she could see, placed here by friends, partners, children, parents. Some were elaborate and ornate, with long epitaphs for the one lost; some contained only a name and dates of birth and death. She had once heard a fellow Satai say that all the proof anyone needed that humans were uncivilised could be seen in their refusal to conform and their love of chaos, but here it seemed almost beautiful.
She could not know what the future would hold for them, even acting under the guidance of the Vorlons. They said that humans and Minbari would need to fight together against the Enemy, but with such a history, she doubted any alliance would hold for long. There was hope, though. There would always be hope.
There was so much to regret, here, in a place of loss and pain; but there was a world to rebuild, and a galaxy to change, and the other Satai would be waiting for her. Before leaving, she found herself standing by a black marble plaque that caught her eye. The words inscribed meant nothing to her, but the reflection of the setting sun blazed in it like a flame against darkness in a long-ago memory, and as she traced the letters with a finger she found herself murmuring an almost-forgotten prayer for peace.
2218 - 2247
DIED A HERO, DEFENDING EARTH DURING THE
BATTLE OF THE LINE
~
Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live, and shame the land from which we sprung;
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.
II. Cast in endless shade.
"I apologise for not being able to meet you any earlier." Sinclair glanced up from the pile of reports with a well-rehearsed regretful expression, and hoped that would do it. He’d been on duty for thirteen hours straight, and the only thing he was sorry for right now was that he hadn’t managed an extra ten minutes of sleep that morning. At least this was a businessman and not a diplomat. Right now, the last thing in the universe he wanted was another minute in the company of Londo or G’Kar.
The man smiled, pleasantly enough. "Not a problem," he said. "You must be a very busy person."
Sinclair puzzled over that one for a moment before smiling back. A few too many minutes spent in the company of Londo and G’kar, evidently, if he was at the point when politeness surprised him. "Comes with the job," he said. "I’ll be with you in a moment."
His visitor shrugged and took a seat on the other side of the desk, opening the folded copy of Universe Today that he’d been carrying. Sinclair eyed the reports in front of him wearily. Maintenance readouts that would take hours to go through, although they could go to the bottom of the pile. Reports to make for EarthDome on the pilot who’d died in the confrontation with the raiders earlier. More reports to make for EarthDome, and probably the Centauri government as well, on that mess with Lord Kiro and the Eye. Appointments to arrange for tomorrow, crew rotas to check, meetings to organise, and requests from about half the non-aligned worlds about something or other. Everything here was going to take a long time, and he was about to give up on all of it and get back to the businessman sitting quietly in his office when he saw the message from Garibaldi.
Jeff,
Sorry, but I haven’t been able to find out anything else concerning our mutual headboned friend. Are you absolutely certain it was her? Don’t mean to doubt you here, but they all kind of look the same, and it was a long time ago. You know how unreliable memory can be.
Damn it. It had been Delenn he saw on that Minbari cruiser, he was sure of it. They’d taken him on board, tortured him, and... and that was all he knew. If he couldn’t find out anything, and Garibaldi couldn’t find out anything, maybe there was just no way he could know.
The Soul Hunter hissed at him from some dark place in his memory. "Don’t you understand? She is Satai. She is Satai! They’re using you!"
He crumpled up the message, threw it into the recycler, and turned to address his visitor. "It can wait until tomorrow. Now, what can I do for you?"
The man neatly folded his newspaper, and smoothed it with a hand as he placed it on the only empty space on Sinclair’s desk. "What do you want?" he said.
Sinclair realised he was tidying the messy heap of reports, as if he had something to be ashamed of, and forced himself to stop. The man smiled at him over steepled fingers, looking like every atom of him belonged there, fitting in as perfectly as his charcoal-grey suit matched the rather unusual colour of his eyes. "Well," Sinclair said, "Babylon 5 was founded to provide opportunities for all kinds of businessmen and diplomats. We can offer -"
"No." He held up one hand, just briefly, cutting Sinclair off mid-speech. "Not what the station wants, or what the ambassadors want, or what the bureaucrats want back home. What do you want, Commander?"
"I’m afraid I don’t understand," Sinclair said. "Is this some kind of sales pitch?"
"No, nothing like that. I’m genuinely curious. What do you want?"
Sinclair waited for a few seconds, long enough for the man to elaborate further, but he’d evidently said all he wanted to. "I think we may be talking at cross-purposes here," he said eventually, just to break the chillingly amiable silence. "I was led to believe you’d come here on business."
"Oh, I have." The man leant forward, as if he had some monumental secret to share. "But ‘business’ encompasses many things, wouldn’t you say? My question isn’t meant to imply that I want to buy or sell anything. I’m only looking for an answer. What do you want?"
Another long pause, before Sinclair started to laugh. "Nothing I’m likely to get," he said. "Now, if that’s all you wanted, I have a lot of things to do." His office no longer seemed like a good place to do them, though, and almost before he realised it he was out of his chair and halfway to the door.
The man turned his chair to follow Sinclair, unruffled. "You might be surprised," he said. "There is very little in this universe that can’t be gained if someone wants it badly enough."
There, the bastard was trying to sell him something. Annoyed though he was at that revelation, Sinclair felt strangely comfortable in finally knowing what was going on, and took some pleasure in proving his visitor wrong. "I want to know what happened to me during the Battle of the Line," he said. "I want to know why I was given command of this station, and why the Minbari insisted that I got it. I want to know what they’re planning for me. That’s what I want." And whatever else you might be, he added to himself, you’re not going to be able to give me that.
But the man was smiling, again, as though that was exactly what he’d wanted to hear. "Funny you should say that," he said as he gestured for Sinclair to sit down again. "I think I just might be able to help."
~*~
It was the early hours of the morning by the time he got to Delenn’s quarters, but that didn’t register as more than a flicker on the white-hot fury of his mind. If she wouldn’t speak to him he’d tear the door down himself. He was just about planning to when she didn’t answer at first, but by the second time he’d hammered against the door chime until he could hear its echoes out in the corridor, she was there.
She had evidently just woken up, and she was blinking in the harsh light of the corridor as she realised who he was. She looked smaller, somehow, less threatening, surely nothing that could have been the cause of eleven years of nightmares and a life that no longer had anything left. She was dressed in a simple loose-fitting grey garment instead of her usual robes, and she looked younger, almost childlike.
She did, that was, until she took a step backwards into her quarters, and he saw the colour she was wearing. A grey robe, light and dark, her face hidden, circles of light all around them and the other hooded figures standing silently watching him -
He was inside her quarters before he knew what he was doing, and only her startled gasp as he caught hold of her shoulders brought him back to reality. Close to reality, anyway. Close enough to watch it happen as if he was someone else, as if all the nightmares and the memories and the anger had fused into one and taken over him. "I know who you are," he hissed, his face inches away from hers. "I know what you did. I know what you did to me."
"Commander," she said, her voice almost managing not to sound shaken. "I... I do not understand."
"Oh yes you do. You were there during the Line. You took me on board your ship, you tortured me, you -"
"Then," she said, somehow stepping out of his grip, "we will discuss this. I understand that you may... have become confused in your memories."
"I’m not confused. Not any more." He followed after her until her back was pressed against the wall, only the force of her gaze keeping any distance between them. "I’m not confused, Satai Delenn. I know it was the Grey Council who tortured me. I know what you did to me. I know you wiped my memory because none of you dared kill me, and I know why you let me go. I know what you think I am. Do you understand me now?"
"Who - who told you this?" she said, and if he’d had any doubt at all, it vanished when he saw everything confirmed in her expression.
"It does not matter who told me!" He saw the fear in her eyes as she tried to back away, and for a second he was horrified with himself as he realised his hands were around her throat, pressing into soft flesh. He could feel her breathing, in short, ragged gasps, feel her pulse racing underneath his fingers. And why do you care, Jeff? Didn’t you spend a decade after the war wanting to kill every Minbari you saw with your bare hands?
She can fight, he thought. They’re strong. They’re always strong, too strong, she can fight me. But she didn’t, and as his grip tightened, she only closed her eyes and let her head fall further back.
But you never wanted to kill her, did you? Every other Minbari, but not her. She got you just where she wanted you. God, Jeff, did you really believe you meant anything to her? Did it even matter? All the friends you saw die at Minbari hands, and she was behind it all, and you never even noticed because you fell for her just like she wanted you to.
And he couldn’t kill her. Not like this, not without any explanation, not if she wouldn’t even try to stop him. Gradually, he loosened his hold on her throat. As he stepped back, she began to cough, drawing in in great gulps of air. He watched her in silence for a few seconds. "You said you were my friend," he heard himself saying, as if the voice came from a great distance away. "You nearly wiped out my species and you said you were my friend."
"I..." She was still struggling to breathe, but that wasn’t why she seemed so different, so unlike the Delenn he thought he’d known. She seemed almost broken, as though everything she’d had was ripped away, as though from that point on she’d truly know what it was like to have your life nothing more than shreds that you tried to piece together into something of substance. "I accept what I have done, Commander," she was saying. "But in all the time I have known you in this place, I swear to you that I have done nothing to cause you harm."
"Yes, because you think I’ve got Valen’s soul."
"No," she said, and there was a pleading in her eyes that he’d never seen before, but he only needed to recall the Line and his friends dying around him to ignore it. "There is... it was not intended that you should find this out so soon, but now you have I will tell you the rest. There is a darkness ahead of us, and you need to know how to prepare before it reaches us."
He was tempted, for a second. If she’d finally tell him everything, if he could trust her, he’d - but no. No, he couldn’t trust her, not now, not ever again. "I don’t want to hear it," he said. "There aren’t many people around here who tell me the truth about anything, and I think I’ll stick with the only one who has so far."
He expected her to ask again who it was, but even before he’d finished speaking he saw that she already knew. She caught hold of his arm as he turned to leave, pressed his hand between both of her own, begged him with her words. "You cannot," she said. "I know who he is, and I know who he represents. You must not trust them, Commander. I... I know that we have failed you, that I have failed you, but you must believe that this is nothing compared to what they will do. They are dangerous, very dangerous. You do not know who they are. Please, do not go to him. I will tell you. I will tell you everything."
"It’s too late," he said, and he knew it was true. There were tears in her eyes as he shrugged her arm off, and he was vaguely aware of her calling after him as he left her quarters, but none of it registered.
He looked back once and saw she had already lost hope, only a small and broken figure half-hidden in shadow, keeping a hand on the doorframe to stay upright. "It is here," she said quietly.
He couldn’t bear to look at her any longer, but as he walked away he found himself murmuring "Goodbye, Delenn," softly, like a prayer.
III. The Year’s Last Hours
It was almost a perfect moment. The Fresh Air restaurant was more peaceful than most places on the station were at this time on New Year’s Eve, and two of his best friends had just congratulated him and Catherine on their engagement. He’d been half-expecting to wake up from a dream ever since she said yes. Either that, or he’d find some way to mess things up between them again, like last time and the time before and the time before that. A memory came back to him suddenly, of Catherine curled up on a tiled floor crying, her hands pressed over her ears so she wouldn’t have to hear any more of his excuses. He pushed it to the back of his mind, and forced a smile as he concentrated on what Garibaldi was saying. It might not be a completely perfect moment, but it was damn close, and he wasn’t about to let anything ruin it.
This time, of course, he didn’t get a choice. The all-too-familiar bleep of someone’s link interrupted the brief moment of peace. For a split second Garibaldi looked relieved, as if he’d bared a little too much of his soul in his last words, and then he grimaced. "Never fails," he said. "Garibaldi, what?"
The voice on the other side of the link wasn’t loud enough for Sinclair to hear clearly, but he caught a few words - prisoner, Devereaux. "Missing?" Garibaldi said. "The hell do you mean, he’s missing?"
Sinclair strained to hear the reply this time. "I don’t know, sir, he’s just gone, along with the two men who were with him."
"On my way," Garibaldi said, ending the connection. "I knew there was more to that Devereaux guy than meets the eye."
Sinclair sighed. Garibaldi always expected the worst, but it would have been nice, just this one evening, if he’d been wrong.
~*~
Catherine studied the dessert menu for a long time, tapping her fingers on the laminated surface. He already knew what she’d say if he tried to hurry her. It was true her work didn’t give her much opportunity to eat out at restaurants like this, and it wouldn’t be fair to make her just damn well choose something and get on with it. Still, after the waiter came and was sent away twice, he couldn’t help but get a little impatient.
She smiled without taking her eyes off the menu. "You want to share this?" she said, tracing a fingernail over something that sounded like it could bring on Babylon 5’s first case of chocolate overdose. He cringed.
"I’m, ah, just going to have a coffee," he said.
She nodded as if she’d been expecting that, and the corners of her eyes wrinkled as her smile spread. "Which you’ll finish as quickly as possible, so you can go find out what Garibaldi’s doing. Right?"
It never failed to surprise him that she could see straight through him so easily. "He’ll call in when he’s found something," he answered, and tried to take the dessert menu off her.
She twisted it out of his grasp. "Go and find Garibaldi," she said. "And if things ever do calm down around here, there’ll be plenty of opportunities for you to take me out for a more peaceful meal."
He wasn’t sure there would be, but that evening it seemed like anything was possible.
~*~
Garibaldi was in one of the loading bays with his aide, prising the lid off a large crate. The bays were strange places when they weren’t full of workers and passengers, empty and echoing. Garibaldi didn’t appear to mind, but Sinclair himself always found them a little creepy. Judging from the way his aide kept glancing around at the shadows, he wasn’t the only one.
"You’re hoping to find Devereaux in there?" Sinclair asked, nodding towards the now-opened crate.
"Chance," said Garibaldi, clearing the top layer of foam packing materials from the crate’s interior, "would be a fine thing. I’m thinking that whatever’s in here might explain why he went walkies in the first place."
"And what is in there?" Sinclair stood closer, so that all three of them were peering at the crate’s contents.
"It’s supposed to be medical supplies," Garibaldi’s aide provided.
"Medical supplies?" Garibaldi broke one of the plastic cases open to reveal something metallic that gleamed in the dull light of the loading bay. "Don’t think so. That’s a transmitter. Set to broadcast static. And hey, look what else we’ve got! More transmitters, and some sort of triangulation device. These are for setting up a jamming device, I think. What frequency’s that one set to?"
Jack tipped it slightly and peered at the screen. "Ah, I can’t make it out."
Sinclair took it off him and held it closer to the light, but the numbers were surprisingly clear anyway. "One-zero-one-zero..." he began, and then blinked and forced himself to read it again - and again, and again. "One-zero-one-zero-one-zero-five," he finished, his voice hardly above a whisper.
"Earth Force One." Even Garibaldi’s face was frozen, as if he’d finally discovered something more terrible than he could have expected. "Someone’s trying to jam the frequencies for Earth Force One. And this thing’s set for just off the Io transfer point."
Sinclair hit his link without realising it, but Garibaldi clapped a hand over it, cutting him off. "Not over the link, Jeff. Not this. Get back up to C and C and warn them."
"You -"
"I’ll take a different route up there." He threw the transmitters back into the crate. "Stay here and guard these," he barked at his aide. "Don’t let anybody come near them, you understand? Jeff, what are you waiting for?"
He ran.
~*~
There was a stunned silence in C and C. He waited impatiently, feeling like he should be doing something, anything, as Ivanova tried again and again to send the warning message. After the fourth attempt, she snarled something in Russian and looked up from the console. "It’s no use, Jeff. We’re being jammed on all military channels."
"Re-route to civilian channels and see if we can reach Earth Central," he snapped. Behind him, someone confirmed the command, but Ivanova was shaking her head. "I can’t get anything except that recorded message."
"Damn. Where the hell is Garibaldi?" He paced over to Ivanova’s screen as if it was going to show him anything other than what she was saying, and then an idea hit him. "Can you get through to ISN?"
Her fingers flew like lightning over the control panels. "Yes. Should I send the existing message?"
"Send it and keep sending it until we get a reply. And bring up ISN on the monitors." Screens behind him blinked into life, showing a montage of clips from President Santiago’s career so far. If something had already happened, they’d be showing it, wouldn’t they? Would they? By his reckoning, Earth Force One was still too far out for them to hit it, but if they’d already started jamming transmissions then it couldn’t be long. And Garibaldi should be here by now, unless something had happened to him as well.
He tried Garibaldi’s link, but it was switched off. Something had definitely happened. There was no way he’d be out of contact at a time like this, even if he was on his way here.
Ivanova finished a brief and angry conversation with whoever she was speaking to at ISN, and twisted round in her chair again, looking relieved for the first time. "They’re going to warn them. They can still get through. We might be in time."
It was the last thing anyone said for a while. They watched in silence as ISN broadcast the evacuation of Earth Force One, with what seemed like a dozen interruptions to say that Earth Central still had no comment. The shuttle finally blazed off from Earth Force One, leaving it spinning and empty in space. Sinclair found himself half-tensed for an explosion then, but it didn’t happen. As ISN blinked back to the news anchor at her desk, confirming that all staff had been successfully evacuated, he heard a collective sigh of relief from the other staff on the command deck.
Ivanova let out a low whistle, sounding amazing like Garibaldi. "Well," she said, "either we’re heroes, or we just got ourselves in a whole hell of a lot of trouble."
Sinclair smiled and collapsed down into his chair. "Either way -" he began, and then everything fell silent again as the ISN anchor broke off mid-sentence and put a hand to her headset. "We’re getting an emergency signal from the President’s shuttle," she said. "I... we don’t know whether this is related to the earlier threat, but..."
The screen once again showed the Io transfer point, with Earth Force One in the foreground. The shuttle was almost too small to make out against the blackness of space, at first; and then, in ornate showers of fire, it exploded.
There were several gasps of horror and surprise from the command deck, and the ISN anchor whispered "Oh, my God," but all Sinclair could see was the burning ship.
~*~
"...and we have no word yet on when the Senate will be recalled. In related news, President Clarke has voiced his own suspicions that whoever was behind the false alarm to evacuate Earth Force One may have done so in order to engineer the assassination attempt, rather than in an attempt to avoid it. Commander Sinclair’s speculation that the shuttle explosion was the result of a contingency plan set in place by the murderers was described by the president as ‘highly unlikely’. In a press conference given earlier today after his inauguration, President Clarke vowed to get to the truth of this matter and bring the people responsible to justice. Senator Hidoshi confirmed -"
"Off," said Catherine, without lifting her head from his shoulder.
He knew he’d been staring at that screen for hours, as the same reports played over and over again. Catherine had sat with him in silence for most of that time. He felt like he should be saying something, but there wasn’t anything to say.
Catherine leant across to hug him. "It’s going to be okay," she said.
But it wasn’t, and she knew it as well as he did. With Garibaldi in medlab, Delenn in that cocoon, and the President dead, it felt like nothing was going to be okay ever again.
"Happy new year," he said.
IV
"I see you have your appetite back."
Garibaldi shrugged and kept eating. "Best way to heal," he said, through a mouthful of macaroni cheese. "If I had to put up with one more week of that cardboard on a plate they have in Medlab, I’d have withered away and died."
Sinclair took a seat opposite him, nodding thoughtfully. Medlab food wasn’t exactly the best on the station. "Have you decided when you’ll be ready to start work again? We’re kind of short-handed around here." He tried to smile, but he knew himself it was forced.
Garibaldi placed the fork he was holding back on the plate, and sighed. "No. Not yet. My second-in-command shot me in the back, Jeff. I’m going to need some time to think about things, you know?"
"As long as you need." Sinclair glanced down at the food on his own tray, none of which looked remotely appetizing. The past week, it felt like he’d been living off cheap caff which tasted less and less like coffee every day. He made a mental note to corner Ivanova and ask about the possibility of some real coffee when he had some spare time.
Garibaldi speared another clump of pasta with his fork. "I take it this sudden interest in my career means you’re going to be sticking around in this sector, too?"
Sinclair had been asking himself that question every minute of every day for the past two weeks, and still he didn’t have an answer. Three days after President Santiago’s death, an official from Earth Central had told him the Minbari were asking for a human ambassador, and he’d be perfect for the role. When he’d refused to take the position, he’d been contacted by a long succession of more officials, each increasing in rank, all suggesting the same thing. The one that morning, Peverell Meugnot, had said he was a personal aide to President Clarke. At this rate, Sinclair fully expected the president to call at some point in the afternoon, and God Himself to schedule a meeting by the end of the week.
He’d surprised even himself by refusing to go to Minbar. True, he didn’t want to leave the station, and he really didn’t want to leave it for an alien planet, but you didn’t get anywhere in the military by only doing the things you liked. If they’d given him an order, he’d probably have put aside all his problems with the idea and agreed to go. Only nobody had actually ordered him to go, as yet; the implication was plain, but they wouldn’t actually make it an official order. So he’d said no, every single time, to everyone who’d asked.
He could see what was going on, and it troubled him. President Clarke had stopped hinting that someone on Babylon 5 might be responsible for Sinclair’s death, but the accusation still hung in the air like a particularly toxic cloud, and nobody had forgotten. They couldn’t directly order him off the station, because that would be as good as saying it was his fault, and for whatever reason they didn’t want to accuse him outright just yet. Sending him to Minbar, though, when President Clarke had been hinting at off-worlder involvement in Santiago’s death since practically the day it happened, seemed like setting him up for something big. He didn’t much like being a pawn in someone else’s game.
"So far," he said after a while, and Garibaldi didn’t look surprised. "Did you hear who they want to replace me with?"
"Nope," Garibaldi said.
"Captain John Sheridan."
Garibaldi raised an eyebrow. "That John Sheridan?"
"That John Sheridan." Sinclair sighed, and downed half a mug of caff in one gulp. "Which I assume means the Minbari aren’t getting a say on who runs this place any more."
"Yeah, no kidding." Garibaldi shook his head slowly. "Speaking of which, any news on Delenn?"
"Nothing." He drank the rest of the caff, grimacing at the metallic taste it had started to get recently. "I’ll stop by her quarters today if I get a moment free," he said as he got to his feet, but he already knew he’d be there whether he had time or not.
~*~
The only light in Delenn’s quarters came from the dozen or so candles flickering around her chrysalis. As far as Sinclair could determine, from what Lennier said and what he could work out from what Kosh would tell him, she was still alive in there. He couldn’t help thinking that it looked like a shrine, even so.
Lennier was kneeling in front of the chrysalis, his head bowed, chanting softly. Although he’d called for Sinclair to come in only a few moments before, he paid no attention to the commander now he was there, and Sinclair resigned himself to waiting patiently until Lennier had finished whatever it was he was doing. Knowing Delenn for three years had given him a deeper respect for Minbari spirituality than he’d ever expected to have. Lennier’s prayer wasn’t loud enough for him to hear more than a few words, but he recognised some of them regardless: hope, future, devotion.
Maybe it was knowing Delenn for so long that let him pick up on the indications that Lennier was not happy to see him. He knew that whatever Lennier was chanting was important, and he didn’t take it personally that he carried on doing so with Sinclair there, but there was something distinctly frosty about him. A few days ago, when it became obvious that Sinclair was refusing to listen to Earth Central’s suggestions, Lennier had taken him aside after a meeting to tell him about Delenn’s instructions. Apparently, she’d known all about this plan to parcel him off to Minbar, and she wanted him there as well. In another time, Sinclair might have found some comfort in that, but then it just felt like two governments wanted him off his station rather than one. He’d thanked Lennier rather brusquely and made it clear he wasn’t changing his mind.
At the time, Lennier had bowed and said that it remained Sinclair’s decision, only a slight flicker of surprise showing in his expression. Now, in the angry set of his shoulders and the sharp edge in his voice as he prayed, Sinclair knew that he’d been expecting a very different reaction. Perhaps it was difficult for Lennier to understand why anyone would do the opposite of what Delenn wanted. Perhaps it was some Minbari equivalent of a dying wish, although Lennier didn’t seem any more certain of Delenn’s current state than Sinclair was.
Lennier got to his feet, and Sinclair waited for him to bow to Delenn’s chrysalis, as he’d seen him do before. Instead, Lennier stood motionless for a few moments, almost as if he was expecting something to happen. Then he pressed one hand to his chest, and held the other palm-outwards towards Delenn, bowing his head and murmuring something too quietly for Sinclair to catch. Sinclair realised he’d been half-expecting something to change, for Delenn to appear and reassure him everything was working the way it should be, but the chrysalis stayed the same.
"You still have no idea how long she’s going to be in there?" he said when Lennier turned away, half to make conversation out of the suddenly threatening silence.
Lennier’s irritated glance reminded him that he’d asked that before, that he asked that every time he was here, and the answer was no different now. "No," he said.
"Is she in pain?"
"I..." For a second, Lennier was shaken. "I don’t know," he said, sounding a lot younger than the aide who had chanted prayers with such certainty in his voice a few minutes before.
Sinclair nodded, slowly. Reassurance seemed desperately needed, for both of them, but there wasn’t much to provide.
Lennier looked back at the chrysalis in silence for a few moments before speaking again. "My government wishes you to reconsider your decision," he said.
Sinclair sighed. "No. Tell them I’m flattered they would consider me for the honour of this position, but no. My place is here, and I have a lot of work to do."
"There is a great deal of work to do on Minbar also," Lennier said, still not moving his eyes from Delenn’s chrysalis and its flickering candles.
"And there are any number of people better qualified to do it than I am," Sinclair replied, wondering if it was possible for this situation to get any stranger. "Why does it have to be me? I know why my goverment wants me gone, but why would the Minbari need me? Tell them they’ll have to get someone else."
Lennier did not look surprised to hear that. "It must be you," he insisted, but there was tired resignation in his voice. "There are things you have not been told, Commander. About why we surrendered during the war, and about the darkness that is coming. Delenn intended to explain this to you before undergoing this transformation, but there was no time." His eyes flicked across to her chrysalis, and then returned to Sinclair. "Do you remember what happened to you during the war?"
He remembered... what? Being taken aboard their ship, being tortured. A circle of grey, hooded figures. Delenn. "A little," he said.
Lennier nodded, and began.
~*~
Sinclair couldn’t speak for several hours after Lennier finished telling him everything. For most of that time, he could hardly even think, and he just sat unmoving as remembered memories flooded through his mind. He was aware, at some level, of Lennier going back to kneel and chant in front of Delenn’s chrysalis, and of the flicker of candle-flame in the darkness, but for a long time there was nothing else.
Eventually, he said "I can’t go to Minbar."
Lennier, still kneeling by the chrysalis and facing away from Sinclair, did not react.
"I understand Minbari have different beliefs about this sort of thing," Sinclair continued, "and obviously I’m glad you ended the war, for whatever reason. But I don’t believe this part about souls and prophecy. I don’t even know if I believe in souls, and I certainly don’t believe I can have Valen’s. I... I think there probably is another powerful race out there, and maybe it is these Shadows you described, but if that’s the case then I have to stay here. My place is with my own people, whatever you think about my soul. You have to see that."
Lennier nodded, slowly, as though he was bearing a huge weight. "Yes," he said. "But in this war, we must fight together, as prophecy tells us. If the threat of the Shadows divides us, then we cannot hope to fight them. You must believe this. Delenn came here because of this, her transformation..." His voice trailed off as he looked back at her chrysalis.
"What if I stay here?" Sinclair said. "What if I agree that I’ll work together with the Minbari, and find out as much as we can about these Shadows, and I’ll do whatever you need me to do with this... this anla’shok organisation, but I do it all here?" Lennier didn’t reply, but there was something in his eyes in the moment before he bowed his head once again, and Sinclair pressed ahead. "You know something, don’t you? From Delenn, or your own government? From Kosh?"
"Your government will not allow you to stay," Lennier said.
He’d been guessing that, but damned if he’d leave because of their own embarrassment over Santiago’s death. Not if they didn’t even have the guts to make it an official order. "They’ll have to drag me off here," he said, and meant it.
"Then I do not know what will happen," Lennier said. "Maybe Delenn, or Kosh. I only know that they want you to go to Minbar. I do not know whether we can fight the Enemy if you will not." He looked stricken, as young and uncertain as he did when Sinclair asked him whether Delenn was in pain.
"Well," Sinclair said, forcing a smile, "Valen was Minbar’s greatest war leader, wasn’t he?"
Lennier nodded, a little uncertainly.
"If I have his soul, and I want to fight this war from here, it can’t be that bad an idea."
Lennier pondered that for a few seconds, and then he smiled. "Maybe not, then," he said. "Entil’Zha Veni."
Oddly enough, and for the first time in weeks, Sinclair felt as if he knew his place in the universe again. Valen’s soul or no Valen’s soul, ancient Shadow race or no ancient Shadow race. He nodded.
The soft cracking sound of Delenn’s chrysalis breaking open seemed perfectly in place, like a third voice swearing an oath.
V
In a city that would one day be called Yedor, wind whistled a high note through the crystal spires of the tallest buildings. A figure halfway across a bridge, silhoutted against the setting sun, stopped and turned towards the sound. His new aides, staying a respectful distance back, watched him kneel and bow his head and say something in a language they did not understand. They exchanged looks, but said nothing; it was well known that Valen sometimes spoke these strange words, and that they were not meant to understand. They understood his gesture to follow once he had got to his feet, though, and they walked back in silence, as the wind chimed and sang in the towers.
"We will return to Tuzanor tomorrow," Valen said, once they returned to the temple. Around him, white-robed acolytes flitted like birds as they completed the arrangements for the ceremony. The warriors had wanted to hold the ceremony for Valen, in honour of the victory they had won against the Shadows, but Valen refused. His aides were surprised by this, although of course they had accepted his wish. Valen was very wise.
The warriors knew that Valen was wise, but even they questioned his decision to have his most trusted aides being worker caste. Valen said that the worker caste were to be slaves no longer. He had even appointed three of them to the Grey Council when he created it, and the warriors and the religious had been concerned, asking him if it was truly wise to allow the workers this when they were not accustomed to having such power. Valen said that the workers had built Minbar’s cities and starships, and power did not always come from war or prayers. He chose two aides from the workers to show his faith in their caste, and when the others asked if he did not deserve the honour of having warriors at his side, he only smiled.
His new aides accompanied him back to Tuzanor, and although the warrior and religious clan leaders stared at them in confusion, they did not say anything. Before Valen, it would have been unthinkable for them to be given a place of such importance. Then they would have been fearful of their lives, for although members of the warrior and religious caste hardly ever killed each other even before Valen, an exception was made for the workers. If a member of one of the other castes was killed, there would be war between the clans, and even the warriors did not want that. But the worker clans were no threat.
When Valen made the workers equal with the other castes, and told all the world that from that moment on no Minbari would kill another, the workers had been unsure what their place was. They could not compete with the warriors in strength, or with the religious in knowledge, so instead they vowed to serve Valen with all their strength. The worker caste anla’shok fought the hardest and longest in Valen’s name, and the worker caste ships that were now flown by the caste which built them sailed the furthest among the stars.
Valen’s aides knew that they must honour their caste in all things, and they tried to do this as best they could, but there were moments still when they did not understand what Valen wanted of them. There were times when he sat for hours in the small garden outside the temple, staring out at the sky, talking in a soft voice to someone that was not there. They did not understand the words he spoke, but grief and loss have voices loud enough to be heard across such barriers. They were unsure whether he would want them to offer their sympathies, and they did not understand how a legend could cry, and so they said nothing.
In most things, though, they served with honour, and Valen told them he was pleased by that. In time, even the warrior clans grudgingly accepted them, and did not refuse to hear Valen’s wishes and commands spoken by worker caste aides. The day that the warriors told them of the strange alien, Valen was resting, and they went alone to see what could be done. The warriors bowed to them, and led them to the place they had taken the alien. No warrior had ever bowed to one of the worker caste before. They looked at each other, surprised, and then one of them smiled and the other followed. Minbar was proud of their caste, and Valen was proud of their caste, and all would be well.
The alien was of a species none of them had ever seen before, and which did not appear in any of their records. She seemed to be female, of a similar size and build to a Minbari, but with no headbone and a strange material covering her head. Her face was not unlike a Minbari’s, although the bone over her eyes and forehead sloped away like a child’s. For a moment, something in the way she looked reminded the aides of Valen, but the moment soon passed. She was shivering, although due to fear or cold or something altogether alien they could not tell.
The warriors explained that they had found her small ship drifting in space, damaged, when escorting a transport to one of the newer colonies. There were no other ships in the sector, alien or Minbari, and her ship did not seem capable of hyperspace travel by itself. When they found her, she was unconscious and hardly breathing, but when they brought her on board their cruiser she recovered and seemed able to breathe the on-board atmosphere. She could not speak or understand their language, or any other language they knew, but the warriors said she had spoken the word ‘Minbari’ when she had woken up on their ship.
It was strange, and the warriors were afraid that she was an agent of the Enemy. Valen’s aides thought this unlikely, but they could not offer any better suggestions of what she was or how she had arrived in an empty sector. They questioned her, as slowly and carefully as they could. Sometimes she seemed as if she almost understood them, but then she would shake her head in tearful frustration. The strange material on her head fell across her face, wet with tears. It seemed to be part of her, but no alien species they knew looked like this, and she could not tell them any more. They decided to take her to Valen.
On hearing Valen’s name, she looked up again as if she understood, and the warriors and the aides exchanged glances. This was all very confusing. But Valen was wise, and with the Vorlons gone away, Valen was the only one who might understand who she was and where she had come from.
The warriors insisted on accompanying them back to the anla’shok training compound, in case the alien was dangerous. Since she did not seem anything more than afraid and confused, the aides left them outside Valen’s personal living quarters when they took her inside. She seemed glad of that, at least, and said something that might have been ‘thank you’ in her own language. Valen’s aides bowed, and were pleased when she bowed back.
Valen was reading on a bench outside, trying to catch the last of the setting sun’s light. His aides greeted him, and began to explain about the alien, but after only a few seconds it became clear that he was not listening. He stood up, without taking his eyes off the alien, and the book in his hands fell to the ground, forgotten. He said something in a language they did not know.
The alien was also behaving strangely, almost as if she knew who Valen was. She opened her mouth as if she was going to scream, and then clapped a hand over it, so that the sound was cut off before it could begin. She also began to shake again, so much so that the aides supported her to make sure she did not fall. Her eyes were wide and terrified. Throughout all this, Valen kept speaking, softly, in a language she seemed to recognise.
After some time had passed, the alien seemed to recover slightly, and the aides stepped back from her, watching carefully to be sure she could stand. They watched, confused, as she began to laugh, and then she ran to Valen and threw her arms around his neck.
Valen’s aides looked at each other, then at him, but Valen did not even seem to know they were there. He was crying, too, and holding the alien close to him, and saying the same words over and over and over again: "My God, Catherine, I thought I’d lost you."
The aides knew, of course, that Valen was wise, but this was something stranger than wisdom, and they thought that a lifetime of study would not help them understand what they were seeing. In time, though, they remembered their training as anla’shok, and Valen teaching them delight, respect and compassion. They had seen Valen demonstrate the last two in his every move and every word, but this was the first time they had seen Valen himself experience delight.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-26 09:08 pm (UTC)My place is with my own people
and, in a subtler way,
"It does not matter who told me!"
The Morden-Sinclair conversation snapped along wonderfully. Now that is something I would like to have seen.
Which reminds me. A friend's idea for One Thing that Never Happened to Delenn (or Lennier) was premised on L not running for Sheridan's help in "Comes the Inquisitor" but staying himself. Perhaps I can convince her to write it...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-27 12:06 am (UTC)premised on L not running for Sheridan's help in "Comes the Inquisitor" but staying himself. Perhaps I can convince her to write it...
If she doesn't, will you? That's a seriously interesting idea.
Awww..
Date: 2004-09-28 04:35 am (UTC)Re: Awww..
Date: 2004-09-28 01:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-22 02:25 am (UTC)