Dalshon

This is a sequel to Whitestar 97. Story sequence: 1. The Loribond; 2. Dark Horse; 3. Whitestar 97; 4. Dalshon.

"Who taught you to run a loader, you b—bumbling—fools!" Carla caught herself just in time. Whose idea had it been to teach the whole crew to 'speak human', again? Ah, Khunnier's, that was right. Carla had no problem communicating in the Minbari warrior caste language, even if she did sound like a dalshon pirate with her Coastline accent. But in English it was hard not to throw in Marine-style epithets that would really not be good things to say to a Minbari.

"Sorry, Captain," said the young warrior who had knocked over the supply piles. Except for herself and Firuun, the whole crew was young. Nearly all of them had come to Whitestar 97 straight from school.

His friend, another young member of Firuun's clan, tried to defend him. "No one taught us to run a loader, Captain. It's worker caste work. We were only trained to fight."

"And how exactly does a warship fight without supplies? Hmm? Do you see any worker caste crew members?"

"No, Captain." The one who had spoken dropped his gaze, bowing his head slightly. In a Minbari, the gesture did not signal guilt but submission.

It still felt weird to see a Minbari make that gesture to her.

Carla tromped up the ramp back onto her ship. They had been forward-deployed at the edges of known space for months, ostensibly looking for unknown threats. In reality they had been scattering Dilis's factories around in secret locations. Dilis was gone now, and so was the isolab, its walls removed from the ship. Carla thought she had felt the ship sigh in relief when they were taken out.

Now they were coming back to civlilization. If one could call this freewheeling port civilization. The official name of this station orbiting a cold rock in a star system claimed by no race was Untika, a Brakiri word for marketplace. Its unofficial name was Teeknab, a Drazi word meaning cobbled-together.

Untika was a child of the Interstellar Alliance, an instant city-state created by a multiracial commercial consortium. It was built on the cheap by using the hulls of ships wrecked in various wars. As a free port open to all races, it was a sort of poor being's Babylon 5. Without all the ambassadors and government regulations. It did not even have a customs check. It was a smugglers' paradise, with possible ties to piracy, but the Whitestar was not here to shut it down. Rangers came here to gather intelligence, but they did not interfere with Untika's sovereign independence.

Carla found Firuun in the engine room, as usual. He was still the chief engineer in addition to being first officer.

"I think we need to draw up a training regimen for the crew," Carla told him. "In addition to the weekly den'bok matches. We'll put language instruction on hold for now, it's not really mission-critical and I'm more comfortable speaking Minbari anyway. We can put operating commercial cargo equipment at the top of the list."

Firuun chuckled. "What did they do now? Never mind, I can guess."

"Have you gotten a chance to look at the ship-hull we're locked onto?" Carla asked. "I'm told it used to be a Dilgar warship."

"Yes. It's too bad Dilis didn't get to see it. I know manufacturing is what she chose to do, but I feel like I've lost both my children."

Carla clapped a hand on his shoulder pauldron in sympathy. She never knew the right thing to say to people in emotional pain, despite all the practice she had gotten at it in the loribond victims' support group. So she focused on distraction instead. "When we're done with the resupply, let's go pub-crawling and forget our troubles."

"Sure. Too bad I can't get drunk."

"Well, you could, but then you might forget you're on my side when the bar fight starts."

Whitestar 97 finished its resupply and minor repairs the following day, and Carla and Firuun led a large group of the ship's company to a local nightspot, a hollowed-out, echoing chamber still known by the name of the ship it had once been, Earth Alliance warship Persephone. It was under Centauri management, and would have been better known as the Bacchus.

Carla had selected it precisely because it was Centauri-owned and attracted a lot of their kind. Even in recreation, she was still toughening herself in the Anla'shok way, pushing herself to deeper levels of courage.

The evening seemed uneventful until they headed back. Carla had tried her best to pick a fight with a few different people, for the sake of stress relief, but nobody seemed interested in having a nice little fistfight with the weird human who was backed by a couple of dozen black armored Minbari warriors.

Carla was as thoroughly sloshed as she could get with her partial stomach, leaning heavily on Khunnier for balance, on the way back to the ship when the bomb exploded.

Boom!

Everything went dark. People screamed and ran into each other.

Shrapnel tore into Carla's arm and something heavy knocked her off her feet.

Pressure doors slammed shut, sealing compartments off from air loss, as they had been designed to do on the various types of ships from which Untika was built.

Firuun yelled into his comlink, but could not raise the ship. They were cut off.

Carla reached up with her undamaged right arm and tried to push off what had fallen on her, and felt cloth. Red emergency lights came on, and she saw it was Khunnier, unconscious.

The crushing weight of a heavy Minbari body over hers…

Carla tried to shake off the sudden panic. She told herself she ought to be concerned for Khunnier instead of wallowing in fear of the past. She was ashamed of herself. Her first time on Tifar had been seventeen, no eighteen years ago now. Every time she thought she was finally over it, something stirred it all back up again.

Someone pulled Khunnier off of her and she sat up. "Is he alive?"

"Yes." It was one of the young Windswords, Firuun's little cousins. "What's happening, Captain? Are we under attack?"

"I don't know." Carla looked around for cover and spotted an open door. "In there. Off the street."

They bundled themselves into the corridor, leaving the door open just a little to see out. They set Khunnier in a sitting position against a wall. One of the Windswords took up a guard position by the door.

"You and you," Carla ordered. "Go to the bend in the corridor and hold it." Two young warriors set off. "Firuun, any ideas what caused that?"

"It didn't sound like a blowout from a malfunction, although I can't be certain without looking at it. But this section of Untika looks like Minbari construction. Maybe part of a wreck from the Shadow War. And I know all the sounds a Minbari war cruiser can make. I think it was explosive ordinance."

"A bomb," Carla said. "See if you can get through to the ship. If not, try the local emergency channels."

The warrior at the door reported, "Local security forces approaching."

"Alright, open the door slowly, don't present any weapons. I'm going out to talk to them."

She waved at the five beings of differing races in the grey uniforms of the local constabulary. "We have wounded. Also we're offering assistance."

One of the them peeled off to speak to her, asking for details on the injured and ordering medical help for them. "Who are you and what kind of assistance are you offering?"

"Captain Carla Punch of Whitestar 97. Military assistance, crowd control. Local space blockade, if I can get through to my ship."

"We'll get you a channel. Have your ship intercept any outgoing traffic. Then get your wounded to the evac center, the med assistants will show you." He pointed over his shoulder at the medical team that was following the police team. "We don't need any assistance with on station security. This is a local matter."

"Understood," Carla said. There were few things more annoying to local police forces than interference from military busybodies. The last thing she wanted was to step on anyone's jurisdictional toes.

Carla got on the police comm and gave the orders to her ship. Then she moved her men out to the emergency evacuation center, a smallish hull of Drazi origin which served as a temporary hospital when the main facility was closed off because the pressure doors were down.

Firuun carried Khunnier with rather more effort than that with which he had carried Sheridan. Khunnier was short and slight, but he was Minbari; he had the dense Minbari skeleton. He massed a lot without appearing massive to human eyes.

When they had gotten Khunnier onto a gurney—flat and unlucky, but there were no slanted Minbari style platforms available—Carla and the others who had taken minor hits lined up to have their shrapnel removed. Firuun spotted something that riveted his attention, and picked his way between the wounded in a surprisingly nimble way for such a large, tall person.

He was graceful. She had noticed his fluidity of motion in the sparring ring when he had a Fighting Pike in his hand, but during the weekly shipwide den'bok matches, she had never just looked at him without thinking about combat.

Carla thought, 'I wonder if he's proportionately large all over.' Then she looked away. 'In Valen's name, you have to live on that ship. Don't mess up your nest. You don't want to become an "intolerable situation" like his first wife. Oh no, no, I meant, his late wife. He's only ever had one wife. Gah.'

Carla turned her attention to her uninjured crewmen, standing around looking like they wanted something to do. "Go get some rest. If you can help with anything, I'll let you know."

It was Carla's turn. "Embedded shrapnel." The Brakiri doctor spoke to her in English. It felt weird; she had just been speaking Minbari, and she felt like her brain was shifting around uncomfortably inside, adjusting itself to the differing mindset of human language. He continued, "Fairly small pieces. Some of those will just lift out, others will have to be surgically removed. There's a problem. We've run out of anesthetics that are safe to use on humans. There wasn't much stored here. But it could be tomorrow before pressure is restored and this section regains free movement with the rest of Untika."

"Just do it," Carla said. She almost added, 'I have a high tolerance', but that was not precisely true. She had learned to live with constant pain, once, but that had been a long time ago. And she had not tolerated it; it had broken her.

The doctor started picking the shrapnel out of her left arm, and Carla looked around for something to distract herself with. She saw Firuun speaking intensely to an elderly Minbari she did not recognize. Firuun gave the other Minbari a heart-touch, something she had only ever seen him do with his daughter. Who was that guy?

End of chapter 1