The BABYLON 5 Short Stories
The Shadow of His Thoughts
Amazing Stories #597 (Summer 1999)
Genius Loci
Amazing Stories #599 (Winter 2000)
Space, Time, and the Incurable Romantic
Amazing Stories #602 (Summer 2000)
Hidden Agendas
Official Babylon 5 Magazine #22 (May 2000)
by J. Michael Straczynski
True Seeker
Official Babylon 5 Magazine #23 (Jul 2000)
by Fiona Avery
The Nautilus Coil
Official Babylon 5 Magazine #24 (Aug 2000)
by J. Gregory Keyes
Table of Contents
Hidden Agendas
The Shadow of His Thoughts
Genius Loci
Space, Time, and the Incurable Romantic
by J. Michael Straczynski
The Nautilus Coil
by J. Gregory Keyes
True Seeker
by Fiona Avery
Hidden Agendas
by
J. Michael Straczynski
~January, 2262~
Captain Susan Ivanova watched as the familiar image of Babylon 5 filled the viewscreen of the Titans, one of the first Warlock class destroyers to come off the assembly line. The command deck screen filled most of one wall, with every imaginable readout and scanner system.
Her first officer, Commander William Berensen, looked up from his console. His voice was sharp, clear, efficient. "Establishing contact, Captain."
"Put it on screen, Commander."
A moment later, Sheridan — President Sheridan, she reminded herself — appeared on screen. He had grayed a bit, the result of his experiences during the recent Earth Civil War, but the smile was classic John.
"Susan, this is a hell of a surprise," he said. I didn't think we'd see you again for some time."
"I'm like a bad penny, I show up whenever no one's looking for me."
He laughed. "Believe me, I know. Even so, we usually get some advance warning whenever a warship decides to stop over."
"I'm keeping a low profile." She smiled thinly, hoping he would get the message from her tone of voice and stop asking questions that could be difficult for her right now. No, John, I didn't file a flight plan with Earth Central, they don't know I'm here, and I'd really rather not have to say that in front of the crew.
His expression changed subtly, enough for her to decide he'd figured it out. "All right, well, you're more than welcome to come aboard. I'll have Captain Lochley clear your shuttle for docking—"
"Actually, Mr. President, I was hoping you could come aboard here." She looked up to see his expression going from bemused to puzzled. "I... just thought that, since you've never been aboard a Warlock class destroyer before, you might welcome the opportunity to check her out."
"Of course," he said, taking a moment to process the request. He would know that she wouldn't waste his time with a ship tour unless there was something more important going on. That was the benefit of having gone through war and pain and suffering with friends: after a while, you know each other under the skin as well as you know yourself.
"All right," he said at last, I accept your invitation. Stand by, I'm coming aboard."
The signal blipped off, and Susan realized her muscles were so tense that they hurt. At least he got the message, she thought. He'll be here soon, and then I'll know one way or the other if I have a big problem on my hands.
Susan waited in the pressurized central landing bay as Sheridan's shuttle moved through the space locks, finally coming to rest in the main secure bay. There was a hiss of equalizing air, then the shuttle door popped open, and Sheridan appeared in the opening. He nodded to her as he stepped down the steps—
—and stopped just before reaching the deck. He looked down, almost as if he couldn't figure out why he had stopped, why he felt reluctant to step onto the flight deck.
"You okay?" Susan asked.
"Yeah... fine," he said, "just had... an odd feeling, that's all."
"What kind of feeling?"
"Like someone walked over my grave."
He shook it off, took the final step down to the flight deck, and looked around. Starfuries — atmospheric and traditional — filled the launch bays.
"It's quite an operation you've got here," he said, rubbing his arms.
"Cold?" she asked.
"A little." He smiled. "Must be a window open somewhere."
"Maybe so." She nodded toward the airlock that led back into the command section. "This way."
They walked across the metal flooring into the red tinted hallway that led to the command deck at one end, and the crew quarters at the other. They walked in a silence that was becoming increasingly uneasy. She glanced back from time to time, and found him looking around them, as though nervous.
When they reached her quarters, she stood aside to let him enter, then closed the door, coding it shut. He turned to her as soon as the door was shut. "What the hell is going on, Susan?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that from the moment I came on board I've been fighting the impulse to run back to the shuttle and take off."
"So you don't feel you're among friends."
"I feel ... " He struggled for words. "Look, Susan, you know I trust you, but... no, I don't feel I'm among friends. I know it's illogical, I don't have any reasonable basis for it, but something inside me is saying to get the hell out of here as fast as I can."
"Interesting," she said.
"You sound like you expected this."
"I was hoping for a different reaction, but as is pretty standard with my life, it seems I never quite get what I hope for."
She crossed to a com station at the other side of the room, the access screen dormant, dark. "Computer, stand by to archive guest data: Sheridan, John J. President, Interstellar Alliance."
The screen flared to life with the Titans crest beneath an Earthforce logo. "Standing by."
She looked at Sheridan. "One last thing and we're done. Put your hand on the screen so the computer will recognize you."
"Susan, what the hell is this—"
"I can't tell you until I know I'm right. Please, John, I know this doesn't make any sense, but I need you to trust me on this."
He hesitated, then with his expression set, he walked across the room and held his hand in front of the screen. She could see the reluctance to touch it in his eyes, but he fought it down.
He touched the screen.
The screen flared with colors that gave way to a swirl of darkness and unrecognizable symbols before shutting down altogether.
She glanced at Sheridan, who looked like a man waking up from a nap. He focused on her, and struggled for a moment before he could say the one word that she was hoping he would not say, the word that would confirm the fears she had been trying to dismiss ever since the day she'd taken command of the Titans.
"Shadowtech," he said.
Nothing more was said in Ivanova's quarters. With only a nod between them, they returned to the shuttle bay and took off for Babylon 5, where Sheridan quickly convened a meeting with Captain Elizabeth Lochley, Michael Garibaldi, the newly appointed head of covert intelligence for the Alliance, and Dr. Stephen Franklin.
It was the first time Ivanova and Lochley had met since the latter had been appointed Commanding Officer on Babylon 5, and where Ivanova had expected some awkwardness as they waited for the others to arrive, she was pleasantly surprised to find Lochley a friendly and welcoming presence. Her command style was clearly different to Ivanova's, which was built around the notion of "when in doubt, kill something." But since taking command of the Tit
ans, she had learned that sometimes a quiet voice can be far more effective, and dangerous, than a loud one.
After the rest had arrived, Sheridan recounted his experience on the Titans, after which the room was quiet for what Susan considered a very long time, especially with this crowd.
Garibaldi, typically, was the first one to speak. "We just can't leave you alone for five minutes without you getting into trouble, can we?"
"Blow it out your butt, Michael," Ivanova said, and smiled. It was good to be back.
"You're sure it's shadowtech?" Franklin asked.
"I think so... I mean, it sure as hell felt like it."
"That's why I wanted him to come aboard," Ivanova said. "After having a Vorlon inside him for so long, I figured if anyone could sense latent shadowtech, it would be him.
"It started pretty much the first day I took command of the Titans," she continued. "We had a telepath on board, teep security for an Earthforce senator on a VIP tour of the facilities and he couldn't bring himself to stay for more than ten minutes. He kept saying he felt something was wrong, somewhere in the ship. When he said he could hear something screaming in his thoughts, I figured, okay, we've definitely got trouble."
Lochley had remained quiet during the discussion, listening carefully to the exchange before finally leaning forward in her chair. "I wasn't involved in the Shadow War, so you'll have to excuse my ignorance here. What's shadowtech?"
"Organic technology," Franklin said, "far in advance of anything we've got, courtesy of the Shadows. Telepaths in particular are extremely sensitive to it."
Sheridan stood and began pacing. "We know Earthforce was working on adapting shadowtech for their own purposes, because they wanted a technological edge in dealing with the other races. We even came across a secret base off Jupiter trying to take apart a Shadow vessel and figure out how it worked. Unfortunately they woke it up while they were poking around, and it sliced the place into a million pieces before we finally blew it out of the sky."
"But they clearly got something out of it," Ivanova said, "because they threw some massive shadowtech hybrids at us during the civil war, when..." She stopped and looked at the rest, unable to finish the sentence, when Marcus was killed.
"We thought that was all they had," Ivanova continued, pushing past it. "So you can imagine my reaction when I discovered I was practically sitting on the stuff."
She didn't tell them about the dreams she had had ever since taking command of the Titans, violent and disturbing nightmares, which she attributed to the small, latent telepathic ability she had always concealed from the rest of the world as it reacted violently to the ship around her.
There was no need, not with Sheridan's confirmation of her hunch.
"I find it odd that something so far in advance of our own technology can be adapted that quickly," Lochley said.
"Shadowtech can interface with any other kind of tech it encounters. We had an incident here a year or so back when a telepath that had been altered to function as the central processing system of a shadow vessel woke up in medlab. It invaded the station computer system and would've taken control of the whole thing if we hadn't stopped it in time. My guess is that it was designed so that it can adjust to any kind of technology, however advanced or simple, and grow there, the way a weed infests a garden and takes it over unless you're on guard enough to pluck it out fast."
"So it seems to me that we have several problems here," Lochley said. "One, if this was done by EarthForce, it's a damned good bet that they know this stuff is there, so nothing's going to be served by telling them except to let them know that we know... which would almost certainly result in Captain Ivanova here being transferred to another command.
"Two, if this shadowtech is an integral part of the ship's main computer system, we can't just go in there and yank it out."
"Agreed," Ivanova said. "Without saying too much, I've had engineering go over every inch of the ship looking for anything out of the ordinary. Wherever the Shadow interface is, we can't find it."
"And even if you could find it," Lochley said, "if we try and remove it and we fail, which I think is almost a certainty, the system would almost certainly red flag the intrusion into its database. Then the next time it linked back to the EarthForce main relay system for instructions and updated clearances, that information would find its way back to the Powers That Be, and—"
"And I'm out one command again," Ivanova said.
"So we're right back where we started," Garibaldi said. "Now that we know this stuff is here, what do we do about it? More to the point, what can the Alliance do about it?"
This time it was Sheridan who had remained quiet, listening to the discussion before chiming in with his own thoughts. "We're in a delicate position right now with Earthgov," he said at last. "They've joined the Alliance, but we all know that there was just a hint of pressure there."
"Yeah, I'd call about a thousand fully armed White Stars flying over the capital a hint of pressure," Garibaldi said.
"Exactly my point. They see the benefits of cooperating, but they're still suspicious. If we go in guns blazing and tell them to rewire their new, top of the line warships to our specs, they'll use this to say we're trying to weaken their defenses for our own purposes, that we're interfering with their internal affairs."
"In short, we'll be crucified," Franklin said.
"So what are you saying?" Lochley asked. "That we should do nothing?"
Ivanova shook her head. "I vote against that idea right off."
"I'm not saying that at all. I'm only saying that we have to proceed cautiously. In the best of all worlds, over the next few years, as the Alliance grows, and as those who were involved in President Clark's shadowtech program are eased out, better people will take their places and we can influence them to remove what should never have been put in those ships in the first place."
Garibaldi snickered. "Yeah, and then we can all hold hands and sing Kumbaya and everybody in the Earth senate will give us a warm hug and a teddy bear before bedtime."
"You want to go to war over this, Michael?" Sheridan asked, his face sober. "We just came through the hardest fight of our lives. You want to start another one?"
"Not really. I just don't think we can rely on optimism. It's sure as hell never done me any good."
"I agree. Look, the number one danger of having shadowtech in these ships is that they can be compromised. Their systems can be taken over by someone using a stronger shadowtech system, which leaves whoever's commanding them vulnerable. For the moment, at least, the best thing we can do is to make sure that Susan doesn't have to deal with that problem. lf the other Warlocks should fall, we need to ensure that she can remain in command of her own ship, and act as she feels appropriate."
"Best idea I've heard all day," Ivanova said. "But how do we do it?"
The room was quiet. Everyone else in the room suddenly seemed to find their shoes to be of tremendous interest.
Finally, Sheridan looked up. She caught his gaze, and recognized the expression behind his eyes, what she would've once called the light behind his eyes except for the fact that when Sheridan had a Vorlon inside him previously his eyes did light up and she didn't much like remembering that part of it.
But she knew this look — half tactical brilliance and half mad genius — and she smiled, knowing he had something in mind.
"Where's Lyta?" he asked.
Lyta Alexander stood on the metal bridge that spanned the Zocalo, oblivious to the crowds eating and shopping below, her attention elsewhere. She watched as several more of the newly arrived telepaths met up with their leader, a man whose name she had learned only this morning, though she had felt his presence ever since his arrival six days earlier: Byron.
She had heard the name before; there was little involving telepaths that didn't end up on the teep grapevine after a while, and Byron was an almost mythic figure in the telepath underground. There were rumors that he had once been a Psi Cop, charged with the
task of running down rogue teeps. According to another story, he was the illegitimate son of one of the most feared of all Psi Cops, Al Bester, but Lyta couldn't even start to wrap her brain around that particular rumor. The idea of Bester mating with anything higher on the food chain than an armadillo was almost more than she could handle on a full stomach.
Whoever Byron was, wherever he had come from prior to his discovery of non-violence as a tactic for teep independence, there was no denying that he was charismatic, even attractive in a moody, dark, ascetic eighteenth century poet sort of way. The runaway telepaths who had begun to filter into Babylon 5 flocked to his side like faithful children, hanging on his every word like a—
She shook her head, pushing away the attractiveness of the word that she had come to hate when it came to the Psi Corps, and long for in her real life: family. But that's what it looked like to her down there, what had been promised to her by the Corps but never delivered.
Babylon5: The Short Stories Page 1
