ISAS SHARD OF NIGHT, near Langrange Point between Sinzar and its primary satellite.
"You slept, I trust?" Klairika inquired, as her captain arrived on the bridge, her black-and-silver Ranger uniform now overlaid by the thigh-length charcoal and silver-trimmed cloak that was hers to wear as commander of the SHARD, when she saw fit, that was.
"No more then you, and no less." she informed the Brakiri, sinking into the captain's chair with a frown and a blink, as Klairika moved away to her own station behind. "And not enough...I'm sure you understand the reasons why. This is going to be the first time we've taken this ship into battle; the first time *any* Ranger has ordered the use of an arsenal this big."
"It's a great responsibility, I will admit." her first officer admitted. "But a necessary one. And it seems likely we're about to teach our enemies a lesson similar to the one taught by those we have been ordered to protect."
"You have more details on the battle they conducted with the EXCALIBUR, then?"
"Indeed. After the Drakh attacked Captain Gideon's ship, we received a more detailed report of that battle from the pair of remote sensors that Larieken assigned to chase the EXCALIBUR...and Gideon's response to their attack was no different then the one you plan...perhaps even a little *calmer*, shall we say. Three Drakh medium carriers attacked them, and with the aid of his crew, Gideon was able to defeat the enemy soundly, destroying them all. We must now stand by the side of the humans defending Sinzar, and do the same."
"Your arguments have merit." she responded, a small smile coming onto her face, "As always. For now, though, I find myself a little out of date with respect to what the Drakh are up to, and what forces stand ready to defeat their aims. Is there any chance you can correct this?"
Klairika nodded. "A short time ago, a single Drakh carrier entered Sinzar system and launched a squadron of recon vessels; we entered the system in the shadow of their point, thus concealing ourselves from the Earthforce ship already on station, and hopefully confusing the Drakh sensors, as well. Just afterwards, those vessels came within firing range of the destroyer and its fighter squadrons before retreating..."
"That's curious behaviour for Drakh." she muttered.
"Perhaps only intelligent, instead. The first units of the Drakh main force we detected approaching Sinzar will shortly be making their transition to normal space...while an Earthforce battlegroup consisting of almost a dozen Omega Class Destroyers and an equal number of smaller escort vessels will arrive soon thereafter. The advance group may choose to exit the field of battle during the chaos that will result when those two groups engage."
"So. Sinzar nearspace is about to become a killing zone, then."
"Unless we intervene, that is." Larieken pointed out, from his station on the other side of the bridge.
"And that we shall. Klairika...since this is going to be the first *major* test of our stealth capabilities, I want you to keep the drive shields tight the whole time we're in there and the Drakh in between us and the Earth destroyers...just in case."
"Understood."
"Tactical." Julia continued, turning her attention to Warren Holm, Sheynell's tall, short-bearded second at that station, "When the Drakh jump in, you're going to be the main player in this party we're about to crash...are you ready to do what we have to?"
"I am." Holm replied with a nod, his face steady, his voice stern. "The Drakh are shortly about to realize their day's just became a *whole* lot worse."
Everyone fell quiet, then, mentally readying themselves for the trial ahead as the background thrum of the SHARD's main drive began to grow louder, the secondary reactors running up to full power in preparation for the conflict to come. And then, rather suddenly, Larieken was standing at her side...as always, her confidant. "The battle draws near," the Minbari observed, "And yet, I sense that you still have your attention on other matters. Is this wise?"
She shook her head, almost regretfully. "I wish I could focus completely on the Drakh problem, Larieken...but I can't. The saboteur's going to surface again sooner rather then later, I think...and what if he moves during the battle and manages to upset or destroy something critical, or reveal our presence both to the enemy and to the Earth military? He *must* know how important this first battle is to the crew, and if something goes wrong..."
"Remember that Sheynell is a better hunter then any other member of your senior staff." the Minbari reminded her. "If anyone can find the saboteur, it is her. And when matters become difficult, as no doubt they will, Engineer Dawson will be there to assist her in detaining our 'unpleasant' guest."
"She should have been here on the bridge for this battle!" she insisted. "Both her *and* Dasouri should have been here."
"We have trusted someone we should not have." was Larieken's final comment, as he moved back towards his own station. "We can only hope that we have already paid the price for that mistake."
To that, Julia did not...no, *could* not reply.
* * *
Below...in the brig.
In the saboteur's first movement, a locked door had been revealed, a door behind which her target was hidden. It had not taken too long to sift through the surface thoughts of the crew, looking for...abnormalities, worries where there should be none, thoughts that strayed where thoughts weren't meant to go. And while the individual sitting in front of her wasn't the main target, he was a *beginning*, a key to be used in unlocking that door.
Sheynell smiled, then. The time had come, yet again, to play the game; a game she hadn't played for a very long time, and for very good reasons. A game that Alfred Bester had taught her to play, in some great detail. The game was the means by which her former master had hurt or killed a great many people in his time; a time before the world had changed and the Psi Corps had been shattered. A time before the shadows that still haunted her had receded beyond the visible horizon.
And while the rules that Bester had followed had now been replaced with something far more honourable, the game remained the same, and always would...
"Look!" Damon Jeffries began again, his face agitated, "I said it before, and I'll say it again, I don't know what you're talking about! I don't have a clue who this saboteur you're searching for is, and I don't know where he's hiding, even if he *is* hiding! For all you know, he could even be right out in plain sight, working at the Captain's side, right? This crew is still in its formative stages, and we don't even really know each other well, just yet..."
"Mr. Jeffries." she coolly intruded, taking slow, measured steps around his chair, her long blonde braid shimmering behind her, "While all of this may be true, we all wear masks...and the masks we wear always have cracks...cracks that *I've* been trained to exploit."
"You can't do that, you know." Jeffries informed her, a trifle smugly. "You're a telepath...don't you have to follow the rules?"
"Oh, really?" She leant down towards him, allowing a vicious smile to come onto her face. "And pray tell, what rules would *those* be? I left the Psi Corps of my own free will to become a Ranger, and now, Mr. Jeffries, I do what I do because I MUST. Because there's a man on this ship who nearly killed someone good and decent, someone who's dedicated himself to changing the history of his race for the better.
This man must be stopped, Mr. Jeffries, and so, now we've concluded the necessary preliminaries, I have a few questions to ask you...questions you *will* answer."
She allowed her gaze to harden, then. "Who are you?"
"What?" her target exclaimed.
"Answer the question!"
"Damon Jeffries, Anla'shok!"
"What do you want?"
"To help protect the EXCALIBUR, and find a cure for the plague...before it kills those I know, and those I love."
"How very admirable." she whispered, leaning down to fix him with the gaze *he* had taught her, so long ago now, it seemed. "Who do you serve?"
"The One. Are we coming to the point any time soon?"
And then...the kicker. "As you wish. *Who are your friends*?"
Surprise flashed to the surface of his mind, then, and with barely a pause, she stepped in behind that surprise to drew out a mental 'file' that wasn't even all that deeply buried...but then again, secrets were *seldom* as deeply buried as most people believed. The probe she used was both gentle enough to not inflict lasting harm, and sharp enough that he *knew* what was going on...a finesse she had learned the hard way, over the past decade.
"I didn't want to do it that way..." she told him, as Jeffries' hands went taut with shock at her touch, "But you didn't give me any choice, now did you? You see, I knew almost before you walked in the door that you were the one our saboteur contacted after we left Minbar...and your response in the here-and-now confirms all of my suspicions. You are a friend of his, and even though you were smart enough to refuse his initial advances, you should have still come to one of of us with this information...immediately! That you did not, says *much*."
"You're seeing this...the wrong way." Jeffries croaked, still trying to defend himself. "He's not out to get us, he only...wanted the Drazi out of the way."
"That is, you know," she mused, "A curious way of defining *murder*, Mr. Jeffries. You are Anla'shok...and I do NOT count keeping your silence as a defence!"
"But, I tried to get him not to..."
"Enough!" she interrupted, her voice fierce with necessary anger. "I'm not the one you have to convince...your captain, the next Ranger to step through this door, will be, however! Consider carefully how you will explain this divided loyalty to Val'na Tikopai, Mr. Jeffries.
Very carefully. And if you present your case well enough, perhaps she will be merciful."
"I...I understand." the downcast Jeffries finalized, after another moment of internal struggle.
"Do you really?" she finalized. "I guess we'll just have to see, now won't we?" She stepped out of the brig, then, leaving the now-despondent Ranger behind her.
"I trust..." Dawson inquired, as Sheynell emerged into the corridor and secured the door behind her, "That you didn't damage him *too* much?"
"He's going to have a Hell of a headache tomorrow...and while I doubt that Jeffries will enjoy the tongue-lashing Klairika and Julia will give him after all of this is over, he'll survive, and maybe even learn something from the experience. But enough about him, for the moment; if we move quickly enough, we may actually be able to deal with this problem of ours before the source suspects we're coming after him."
A short time later, they arrived at Dawson's office, and after the door closed, and she ordered the ship's computer to erect a privacy 'net' around the room, the conversation continued. "Okay..." Dawson began. "Now how about some details?"
She nodded briskly, and began to reveal the secret she'd sifted from Damon Jeffries' mind. "Nicholas, the saboteur's a human named Rohan Klavait, one of the new additions to your staff that we picked up on Minbar. He and Jeffries once shared a friend named Vicenz Rakele, a man who had the bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rakele ended up being killed by the Drazi in the fall of 2263..."
Dawson whistled. "Well, I'll be damned. So *that's* why he attacked Dasouri! It was revenge, plain and simple!"
"That might explain part of this puzzle, but not all of it, I'm afraid. Just how was he able to manipulate the engineering systems of the SHARD so easily? Klavait's supposed to be a novice assistant, Nicholas!...he shouldn't have been able to mess with advanced Minbari tech that easily. Something's going on here that we need to find the answer to, and quickly, before Klavait does something a little more drastic then taking revenge for the death of his friend!"
"You'll get no arguments from me on that score." Dawson replied, as he glanced briefly down at his deskpad to check out the duty roster. "The question is, how do we nail this guy without tipping him off that we're after him, while making damn sure he's in good enough condition to answer our questions afterwards? He's on duty in engineering right now, Sheynell...and if things go badly, there's always the chance he could damage something critical, right in the middle of this big battle with the Drakh that our Captain's taking us into *any* time now.
So how do we pull this off?" he asked her.
"I have a few ideas." she told him.
"They go like this."
* * *
Sinzar. The Northern hemisphere, Erenn Planitia. Maigleith Town.
When mankind had first come to Sinzar, drawn by the ample supplies of ore the planet contained, the more curious-minded of the explorers had decided to name its great plains and deserts after the realms inhabited by those mythical warriors of Irish lore, the Sidhe. And when the first colonists had built their compounds on the edge of the desert sea those explorers had named Maigleith, their stand between water and sky began, as they began to pay the price in heat and wind endured, for the wealth they extracted from beneath their world's ruddy sands.
Others, of course, later suggested that mankind had overreached itself by coming to this place. During the War that had begun when the military had killed their great leader Dukhat, the Minbari had brought their fleets to Sinzar and savaged it before moving on to other targets and other battles. Later on, during the Earth Civil War, great pieces of the heavy cruiser AKAGI, a Loyalist ship that had been shattered in a fierce battle with rebel forces, had fallen out of orbit to gouge great craters in the mountains north of Maigleith, gouges that could still be seen today, even after the haz-mat teams had done their work.
And now, as he stood beneath the sunset skies of an alien world, on this day so soon after the tragedy at Earth, Shiall McNaughton thought how sad it was that another battle was about to be fought in the skies of his world. Would it never end? Would the world his parents had come to never know peace?
Who the winner of this battle would be was surely in doubt as well, as always seemed to be the case. Shiall had heard the reports of how many Earth destroyers had been been crippled or blown to bits when the Drakh had brought their weapons of war into Earth's skies...and now, if rumours were to be believed, the same was about to happen here. His friends had darkly spoken of only a single Earthforce destroyer in high orbit, facing the approach of the alien fleet that was surely coming to wreak havoc on them all. He knew damn well that one wasn't enough, given the Drakh's reputation...and yet, surely the generals and captains knew what was going on. Surely they could do something?
Shiall's eyes narrowed beneath his fuzz of blonde spiky hair, then. Maybe they were setting a trap for the baddies. Maybe...
It was *then*, of course, that a twinned spark of light warned him that the light show was about to begin, and he raised his eyes to the sky and grimly nodded, as the by-now familiar blue swirl of a jump point sprang into being above and beyond Fairther Moon's thin evening crescent.
The Drakh had come. Now the dying would begin in earnest.
* * *
In ordered yet menacing progression, the seven fleet carriers of Palakz's core assault group emerged from hyperspace, and immediately spread out to begin their approach to the planet in front of them. Almost immediately, Raeznon barked a command, and after a brief return acknowlegement from the warrior commander on the belly of his warship, the tiny, maneuverable and *well* armed attackships began to detach and move away from the carriers, quickly forming up into clouds of moving death. Palakz knew that some of his warriors would inevitably die in the performance of their tasks...but the warriors accepted this as inevitable. To protect their leaders and captains, and above all, to *fight* in the memory of the Dark Ones, to continue their work, was all the reward they usually needed.
But enough of such thoughts, for the time being. For now, there was an offensive to conduct. "Raeznon..." he inquired, casting a sharp glance in his Favored Claw's direction, "Does the tactical situation remain as before?"
"There are, as of yet, no noticable changes." his Vaarliht reported, a moment later. "Our advance group has engaged the human fightercraft and suffered minimal losses...while the human destroyer is well out of the gravity above the planetary defense grid, and will shortly be coming under attack by the lead elements of our attackship groups."
"As it *should* be. Prepare to..." At that moment, the harsh glissade of an enemy transmission sounded through the command-bridge, and Palakz rose to his feet and whirled towards Aeillok, his Speaker-between. "The transmission!" he snarled. "What was the destination, and who was the sender?"
"The human destroyer has just sent a message into hyperspace." Aeillok replied, after a moment's examination of the transmission. "They are requesting assisstance, Vekh'shivalht. As you suspected they would, once we had arrived."
Palakz paused for a moment, and then inclined his head in acknowledgement. "As we thought, then. The battle is about to become...more interesting."
A moment passed, and then, the expected harsh chime of jump warning sounded, and Raeznon nodded, her sharp teeth now bared. "Indeed! Three jump points forming...both near to the planet, and also behind us."
"Vessel types?" he inquired, even as the by-now familiar shapes of Earth warships began to darken the skies around them.
"Destroyers of nominal human class, lesser escorts and fightercraft."
"Number?"
"Almost five hands of warships." her reply came, a moment later. "They challenge us..."
"So be it...our target has not changed, however." Palakz sank back into his seat-of-command, his decision made. "As soon as the enemy behind us draws close enough, you will summon our reserves from hyperspace, Raeznon. At the same time you are doing this, the lead elements are to locate the weakest part of the enemy's planetary defence line, break through it, and move on to bombard the human holdings below. Is this clear?"
Raeznon merely inclined her head at this, even as the moment of battle's beginning drew closer. While it now seemed likely they would be unable to take this world, the humans would pay dearly to stop them, as they had at Earth. Eventually, he would give the order to retreat, but only once the human's greatest holdings, and as large a portion of their fleet as could be managed, was damaged beyond repair.
And who knew what could result? If this was done enough times, perhaps the humans, what little remained of them after the plague had finished its work, could yet be conquered!
Nevertheless, even after all had been examined and accepted as fact, a doubt still remained in his heart, the faint belief that all was not as it seemed. It did not seem possible that the shak'vez Sheridan had shown all of his secrets, quite yet. He still believed there was a fezah't stone on the board he had not yet seen.
Now, however, was not the time for deliberation. He and his command were bound to the path, for good or ill. And *now*, only now, as battle was joined, would he find out whether he was right or not about his...concerns.
A beginning, it was. But moments later, the tide of battle would turn, heralding the very thing that Palakz had been worried would involve itself from the start.
The unknown.
* * *
Between the two just-engaged juggernauts of the Drakh and human forces, the SHARD moved as if a shadow in the darkness...but a shadow created with the help of light. Julia smiled at that thought, but true it was. A balance between order and chaos, they could be, if they played the game right. And a Seeker of truths, Galen had called her, when in her sleep he had summoned her to his side to reveal what might be. But on this day, in this place, she knew only one truth, however.
That the Drakh had to be stopped, and that she had to help her fellow humans to *live*. And for that to occur, something had to happen, something very important. And a command had to be given, as well. And after that command was issued, there could be no turning back.
"Val'na." Klairika announced, her face grim above the flickering light of her station's crystalline controls. "We have reached attack velocity, and now stand within range of the rearmost Drakh fleet carrier. All weapons are fully charged, and I can detect no damage or problems with the hull. We are as ready for this battle as we will *ever* be."
She nodded, briefly meeting the gaze of every Ranger on the bridge before saying what had to be said...what was necessary. "Mr. Holm," she began, "Bring all weapons to bear on that Drakh carrier. And helm?...prepare evasive maneuvers to avoid the smaller Drakh ships we will shortly be encountering, as well as *any* of the Earthforce units who may be in the area."
"Ready." the Rangers at both stations announced, a moment later, as the Drakh cruiser grew large in front of them.
"Mr. Fenric."
A hologram sprang into view in front of her, of the fighter squadron commander already in his cockpit, ready to go. "Captain...your orders?"
"Make ready to launch your squadron and engage the enemy." What more needed to be said? "Mr. Holm..." she softly concluded, "You may open fire...