Author's Notes: This is a pre-series story which begins my AU epic "A Minbari Courtship". As in that series, events are occuring as in canon timeline with a few notable exceptions. I have moved the Dilgar War forward about ten years, placing it only two or three years before the Earth/Minbari conflict. I have also moved Marcus' birthdate back by about 5 years, so that he is 36 when he first appears on B5 instead of 32. Spoiler warning for "In the Beginning" and any episode involving Talia Winters.
THE CAGE
A slim, gangly, slightly pimpled form tumbled down the ramp of a battered transport ship, bag clutched tight in its bony arms. Thick wavy black hair hung at that awkward, midway length that was too long to be practical and too short to be controllable. He was dressed in a generic sort of way, dark canvas trousers and a dark t-shirt underneath an equally dark over shirt. If it had been colder the figure would have been in trouble, but fortunately the temperatures were quite mild. Summer had just begun to think about turning to fall, and the sun still shone down warmly on her little blue-green third planet.
A tall, black-uniformed man waited at the end of the exit ramp for the teenager. He waited until the transport had closed up and flown off before breaking the silence.
"Is that all you brought with you?" he asked indifferently.
The teenager nodded shortly. "You said not to pack much," he defended sullenly.
"Good. I'm glad you can listen to instructions. It bodes well for your future here. Come." The man whirled with military precision and led the way down a nearby paved walkway, making for a nicely designed and appointed building not too far off. The teenager hurried to keep up.
"Why am I here, exactly?" he wondered. "I mean, I know I answered the draft, but this isn't a military barracks."
"No," the man agreed shortly. "It isn't. You are here because your test scores in certain areas are far above the norm, and you show promise to be part of a special task force. Give the current situation, I'm sure you won't mind being selected for special training?"
The teenager grimaced, but remained silent. Current situation indeed. Who did this guy think he was, talking about Marcus' life like it was a 'situation'? So maybe the mining on Arisia hadn't been going quite as well ever since his dad had died three years ago. So maybe he didn't really know what he was doing. So maybe they desperately needed earth protection from the invading Dilgar forces. So maybe it was a choice between him coming here to serve his country, as it were, or sending Will. And there was no bloody way, war or no war, Marcus was ever going to stand aside and let baby Will join the armed forces. If anyone was going to go get his brains blown out like an idiot, it was going to be him. He was the oldest, he was the owner of the colony, and he was responsible. That's all there was to it.
"This will be your room," the man told him as they entered a dim hallway at the side of the building and paused about five doors along. Marcus' room was evidently the one on the left. It looked pretty much like what he'd expected; military-style bed, desk, and dresser. Some hangers on a rod in one corner that were evidently meant to function as a closet. A small window; that at least made a nice change from arid Arisia. He could see trees through it. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad.
"You will be assigned as part of beta group," the man went on. "You'll meet with your group after breakfast tomorrow, and be given your schedule at that time. Training will encompass the next year or so, depending on how well you progress. After that, beta group will be sent out into the field. I suggest you apply yourself."
With that, the man left, and Marcus narrowly resisted the urge to stick his tongue out at him as the door swung shut. Pompous ass. He set about unpacking the few possessions he'd brought; everything really important to him was still in the family vaults on Arisia. All he had here were clothes and some books and data crystals containing music and journals of various kinds. It didn't take long to put it all away, but with his warm colourful winter cloak thrown over the bed and clothes hanging in the 'closet' it wasn't quite so barren. He could probably be quite content here for a year.
A knock on his door startled him and he opened it cautiously, relaxing when it revealed a slight blonde girl maybe a year or two younger than he was. He opened the door and gestured her in.
"I'm your neighbour across the hall, sorry," she apologized, entering quickly. "I remember from my first day, they forgot to tell me where the dining hall and everything was, so I thought I'd come offer in case they did it again."
"How long have you been here?" Marcus asked curiously.
"I've lived in this complex since I was five," she admitted. "But this is the secondary hallway; you come here when you turn fifteen and stay till you're twenty."
"Ah." Marcus supposed that made sense. "Sorry, I'm Marcus. Marcus Cole."
She smiled shyly, but didn't take his outstretched hand, keeping hers clasped behind her back. "Talia Winters," she introduced herself, then stepped back. "I have homework, though, so I won't stay. I'll come get you for dinner." She fled the room, and Marcus was left to settle in as best he could.
Life in the complex – which Marcus quickly learned was part of the Psi Corp training school – was rigidly controlled, but not actually all that bad. Within the first few weeks Marcus had settled into a routine, and he was quite content with that. It wasn't terribly different than his early life on Arisia in terms of his daily activities, although it lacked anything resembling familial warmth and comfort.
His mornings were devoted to study on a surprising variety of subjects. Interstellar politics, languages, geology, geography, physics, chemistry, human and xeno biology, history, logic, and what he'd taken to calling 'mayhem'; the art of confusing an opponent and dealing injuries and death in a variety of improbable ways. Marcus absorbed it like a sponge; it was fascinating stuff, and what eighteen-year-old boy doesn't love being given official permission to study wars and bloodshed and chaos? He'd always been aware that he memorized things quicker than the other children on Arisia, but now he had a name for it. Eidetic memory, or perfect recall. And the people here understood; understood that since he didn't have to study for hours to remember things, he could pass through the material quickly and easily. They fed his mind as fast as it could absorb their lessons.
The afternoons were equally amazing. He'd learned a wide variety of martial arts and physical activities living on Arisia, but now he was learning faster and more advanced forms, becoming a deadly expert with whatever weapons they chose to give him. He was a naturally athletic young man, and had been born on a colony where hard work was a daily expectation. He moved ahead by leaps and bounds, and soon only the teachers could stand against him for any length of time in most forms of combat.
There were ten of them in beta group, and although he was probably the best at some of what they were taught, it wasn't by much. The other youths – six boys and three girls, aside from him – were as eager and as able to learn as he was. They'd been hand-selected, so they were told. No one ever said what for, but they were all intelligent children. It was clear before more than a couple of weeks had passed that they were being moulded into an elite special operations unit, intended for reconnaissance and spy work behind enemy lines.
They learned how to lie, how to cheat, and how to steal. They learned how to kill quickly and efficiently, or silently in the dark, or loudly and messily depending on what the moment called for. They learned how to identify the Dilgar's poisons without coming into contact with them. They learned how to get themselves into and out of any situation their trainers could think of – and their trainers, they all agreed, were pretty damn twisted sometimes. They learned how to torture, and how to be tortured. They learned about pain and death even as a warm sun shone down on them.
They learned other things in the evenings when their trainers left them. They gathered in one of the common rooms, away from the student telepaths they shared the building with. The telepaths didn't quite know what to make of ten normals invading their space; many of them were resentful. For their part, beta squad couldn't quite figure out why they were being housed here either, unless it was just that most of their teachers happened to be Psi Corp. instead of EarthForce regulars.
In those evening chats, they learned about each other. They all quickly established their own personalities and areas of expertise, and they functioned well together. Marcus himself was nicknamed 'mayhem' after an illicit bar excursion had ended in a brawl and he'd laid every person in the place flat in less than five minutes. For sheer unexpected chaos he was unmatched; he could go from sleeping to deadly faster than the rest of them put together.
Tony, their putative leader, hailed from some tiny colony world much like Arisia. His people apparently had a more breathable atmosphere, though; it was primarily an agricultural world. He had an uncanny knack for holding them together when the unexpected came up and adapting plans on the fly.
Sarah, from South Africa by way of Mars, was tiny and blonde and looked like a stiff breeze could blow her over. That impression usually only lasted until you got a look at her flint-hard blue eyes, and realized that the breeze would have more luck moving mountains. She spent her spare time learning magic tricks and was an absolutely expert thief, both on a small pickpocket level and on a larger roof-walking level.
Li, a martial arts expert from China. They'd nicknamed him Jackie Chan after they'd turned up some ancient films in the library archives, mostly because of his tendency to use random household items during fighting drills. It was a habit they all picked up before too long, and it wasn't uncommon to see them sparring with mops, feather dusters, ladders, and kitchen utensils.
Cheerful Xavier from Brazil, who wanted to open his own capoeira studio. He kept them sane, cracking jokes whenever possible. He was also a mathematical genius with an annoying habit of computing odds in a tight situation.
Siobhan, a dark Irish beauty who spoke as little as possible and tended to throw people into walls if they tried to touch her. She was their resident tech expert, and not quite as accomplished as the rest at the more physical side of their training. She tended to be assigned a role as the central control, fielding communications and monitoring computer systems as they completed mock assignments.
Sam from Beta Colony, their expert in everything that went boom and some things that they hadn't thought could explode, but evidently could with the proper incentive. Marcus had seriously had no idea that pocket lint could be a weapon.
Rob from Austria, who could drink them all under the table then get up and trounce them all in training the next morning. He ended up leading their group in infiltration and extraction, able to come up with the craziest ways to get into and out of a place. The rest of them could only sigh and accept that no place was safe, even if it was locked, because they often returned to their rooms or exited the shower only to find a rude drawing and a note reading 'Rob was here'.
Mizumi, who floated through life with the poise and manners of a geisha and could kill someone as easily with her delicate lady's fan as with a PPG. She was amazing at stealth and disguise; Tony had actually thought she was a shrub once, she'd pulled it off so well.
Finally there was Santan from the Indian subcontinent, who knew more about poisons than anyone really should and enjoyed pulling pranks on people during mealtimes. The rest of them had sort of gotten used to checking their food with chemical detectors before they ate, which pleased their instructors to no end. All of them, with their various forms of pranks and heists, were teaching the others better than a class ever could how to take care of themselves in the field.
Some of them, like Marcus, had signed a deal with EarthGov that would offer aid and supplies to their small colony worlds if they answered the draft and came to join the military. Some had been picked out of school after rounds of standardized testing and offered scholarships if they served their world for a couple of years. Some had family, some didn't. Some were rich, most poor. All feared the Dilgar; they'd heard the stories and seen the news. Their trainers insisted that they could make a difference, and as their training neared its end a year later they believed it, too.
They were young, they were healthy, they were deadly, and they believed they were immortal. They were going to conquer the universe, and nothing would be able to stop them.
On Marcus' last night in the Psi Corp headquarters his shy hallway neighbour came by and offered him a data crystal.
"What's this?" he asked, taking it and inviting her in.
"Music," Talia answered. They hadn't talked a lot, moving in completely different circles, but living across the hall from one another they hadn't been able to avoid striking up a tentative acquaintance. "I thought you might like it."
Marcus slipped it into his player, and was surprised by the almost harsh sounds that emerged. "What is this?" he asked, listening some more. "It sounds like an orchestra almost, but it's… wow. It's pounding."
Talia smiled a little. "It's old-style symphonic rock. It reminds me of you, a bit. Fast and harsh and deadly, but unexpectedly complex underneath."
"Is that how you see me?" Marcus wondered.
"Your mind," she answered. "What I can see of it. I've never met anyone I didn't have to work to block out before, but you're like trying to get a reading off a boulder most of the time."
Marcus shrugged. "My family has a history of being somewhat mind-blind. Maybe there's just nothing there for you to pick up on."
Talia shrugged. "Maybe. I've never met someone even a little bit mind-blind before. Doesn't matter. Look, I barely know you, which is crazy because we've been running into each other in our bathrobes for a year, but good luck. Try not to die out there?"
Marcus smiled. If he'd had more time to get to know her, he almost might have adopted her. Like a kid sister, or a stray puppy. "I'll try. You be safe in here, too."
Talia snorted. "What could happen to me? I'm in the heart of Psi Corp."
Marcus, whose studies had ranged perhaps a little farther than his instructors intended, only snorted. "What indeed."
"Situation FUBAR!" A shrill voice screamed over Marcus' tiny headset. The things had been specially designed for their unit, embedded in the skin just under their ears so they wouldn't be seen by the casual observer. They were on a scrambled, hidden channel as well, and a real bitch when you wanted to sleep on that side of your face.
"Who yelled that?" Tony's voice came through a moment later. The ten of them had been assigned to this planet, coming in on separate transports to different regions. Their mission: terminate certain highly placed Dilgar scientists as quietly as possible and then move on to the next assignment. It seemed like they never ended these days. It had been a year and a half since their training days on earth; they'd seen and spoken to pretty much no one except each other and their superiors in all that time.
"Sarah did," Li confirmed a moment later.
"Guys, you've got to pull out," Siobhan put in, her voice tense. She was coordinating this effort from a hacked computer console half a planet away from where Marcus was located. "They've figured us out. Abort mission."
"We can't just leave with nothing," Sam objected.
"Repeat, abort mission," Siobhan insisted. "They know where you are. Get out and rendezvous at point Chuckles the Clown."
Marcus shook his head. It made sense that they should use the most non-descriptive codenames possible for everything, but whoever had decided to let Xavier pick the codes for their escape routes should've been a bit clearer about appropriate nicknames.
"Chuckles the Clown?" Santan sighed, aggrieved. "Really?"
"Just abort," Siobhan snapped. "Sarah, do you copy?"
Static crackled over the headset, followed by screaming.
"That's a no," Tony muttered. "Siobhan, give me her position."
"Negative," Siobhan argued. "Orders are to abort if an operative is compromised."
"Look, I'm not leaving her behind!" Tony objected. "Location!"
"Tony, you're nowhere near her. She's about three blocks south of Li in one of the government buildings. Her transponder's malfunctioning or something, I'm trying to clear the signal up."
"I'm on it," Li promised. "I'll need her location in approximately ten minutes."
Marcus had exited the building he'd intended to stake out for his part of the assignment casually, as if he were simply a tourist. No one gave him a second look as he strolled down the street. Sarah's whimpers echoed in his ear.
"Siobhan, can we cut her transmitter?" Rob asked through clenched teeth. He and Sarah had started seeing each other in the last few months, and were talking about settling down together when they all got out of this.
"Not without cutting her signal entirely, sorry," Siobhan said. "It's the interference again. Working."
They all shut up, tensely waiting for word as they made their way through a combination of planetary transport trains and twisty side streets to the children's park in the capital city. Marcus thought it was a terrible place for a group of assassins to meet, but at least it was unexpected. Hopefully they'd be gone before anyone thought to look for them there, and anyone who saw them would just think it was a bunch of student types meeting up to go somewhere.
"Got her," Siobhan said nearly fifteen minutes later. Sarah's sounds of pain had trickled off to the occasional whimper. Marcus couldn't even imagine what had happened. "Li, here are the coordinates." She rattled off a string of numbers that meant very little to Marcus, since he had no idea what the layout of the building was.
"Right, I'm going in." Li was silent for another several minutes, during which Marcus arrived at the park and nodded to Rob and Santan before taking a seat and attempting to look casual.
"Found her," Li whispered into their ears. "Can't tell what happened. Looks sort of like those pain-givers the Narn have, but not quite. Don't read any strange chemicals, so I think she's okay to be taken out of here. Siobhan, I need an escape route that doesn't involve a lot of climbing, and I need a safe transport when we get out of here."
"I've rented an aircar," Mizumi put in. "I'll be to you in five minutes, then we'll swing by Chuckles."
They waited while Siobhan walked Li through exiting the building and Mizumi rendezvoused with them. They all breathed a sigh of relief as the rest of the group arrived at the park moments ahead of the rescue party. They got on and took a circuitous path back to the hotel they'd designated as central command to meet up with Siobhan.
Se looked grim when they came in. "It's bad, guys," she said, shutting and bolting the door behind them before setting up a variety of highly technical jamming devices.
"What happened?" Tony demanded as Rob and Xavier bent over Sarah to do a medical assessment.
"We've got a leak somewhere," Siobhan answered soberly. "They knew we were coming, exactly who to look for, where we'd be hitting, everything. Someone sold us out."
Silent stares met that pronouncement.
"Wasn't one of us," Santan said decisively.
"Of course it wasn't one of us," Tony snorted. "But who else knows about our assignments?"
"Have a look at this," Siobhan said, turning one of her computer screens to them. "Psi Corp and EarthGov are disagreeing about certain issues at the moment…"
"Wait, which do you think is on our side?" Li asked. "Who should we trust?"
"Ourselves, obviously," Sam snorted. "Although given the choice between the other two…"
"Give the choice," Marcus put in, "EarthGov is probably the more honest. They like to pretend units like ours don't exist, but the Psi Corp… who ever really knows what they're up to?"
"There's more," Siobhan told them, pushing a few keys and bringing up a different screen. "Do you know who our targets were?"
"We had descriptions," Marcus reminded her.
"No. I mean, do you know why these people?"
"They're Dilgar scientists," Santan pointed out. "That should be answer enough."
"They were a fringe group working on antidotes," Siobhan stated bluntly. "Someone we answer to wants to keep the war going. If we hadn't been sold out… their work could save millions of lives, if they can get it past their own military blockades."
They all sat down, stunned by the enormity of that revelation.
"What do we do?" Li asked.
"The only thing we can do," Tony sighed, rubbing his hands over his face in weariness. "We scrap the mission and go home."
"Where's home?" Marcus countered. "I have another idea."
"I'm open to suggestions," Tony sighed.
"We turn the tables. These scientists need to get their antidotes past the military blockade, yes? And we're experts at that kind of thing. It's what we do. What if we contact them and smuggle the antidote through the war zone and turn it over to Earth Gov?"
"How do we contact them if they know we were sent to kill them?" Rob demanded, swearing as the metal bands around Sarah's wrists shocked him.
"Don't know," Marcus admitted. "But if they're renegades they might just take a chance on us."
"I'll go," Sarah coughed, twitching a bit. Marcus hadn't even realized she was awake, let alone following the conversation.
"What?" Rob objected. "You'll do no such thing! We can't even get these off you!"
"Try now," Siobhan said, fiddling with yet another gadget from her endless stash. "I think I've blocked the electrical field they're generating for a moment."
Sam didn't even bother trying to find an opening; he took some of his lower-level explosives and detonated them against the metal, blowing the circuitry entirely.
"Why you?" Tony asked her as she sat up, rubbing her wrists weakly. "I don't like that they took you out so easily."
Sarah shook her head. "Part of that was an act; I wanted them to think they'd knocked me out pretty quickly so they'd leave me alone. I'm fine. And I think I can get a couple of us back in and interrupt their meeting."
"All right, then," Tony decided. "It's the best plan we've got. Let's figure out the details, people."
The plan worked better than they'd hoped, but the trip back in the shuttle the Psi Corp had given them for field work – Siobhan usually piloted it under a commercial trader's licence when the rest of them had to enter a system on different transports to stay inconspicuous, or when they had to split up for assignments – was far too easy.
"Where are the blockades?" Tony asked as he and Marcus took a turn in the cockpit. "Where are the destroyers?"
"I don't know," Marcus answered, unnerved by the empty space about them. This sector was hotly contested; there should have been military vessels everywhere. He flipped on the sophisticated communications equipment, scanning channels until he came across the official EarthForce bulletin channel.
"I don't believe it!" he yelped, bringing the others forward from the kitchen.
"What?" Sam demanded impatiently.
"We won!" Marcus gasped, disbelieving. "The war's over. The Dilgar fleet is destroyed, and they've been quarantined on their homeworld!"
Cheers filled the small cockpit.
"But their diseases," Mizumi murmured after a moment of celebration. "So many dead… this is not a victory."
They all sobered. "No," Marcus sighed. "It isn't. But it's an end."
"Do you think we'll be decommissioned?" Rob wondered.
"I don't know," Tony admitted. "They never said what would happen once the war ended. I don't know what else I'd do with myself; how do you put 'special forces assassin' on a resume for a job at an accounting firm, or something?"
"I think there will always be a need for those who walk in shadows," Siobhan stated quietly. "So that others may feel the light. If that is our destiny, so be it."
It would be nearly two decades before Marcus met anyone else in whom that attitude resonated so strongly.
Marcus had thought that, given what they'd discovered on their last mission, they'd investigate their own teachers thoroughly. But somehow once back on earth, once back in the training facility, their suspicions just seemed to fade. The men were Dilgar scientists, after all. It had probably been an honest mistake. And so there was a leak; no system was one hundred percent secure. Marcus remained uneasy somewhere in the back of his mind, but no one else seemed to share his worries, so he gradually put them aside.
As Siobhan had predicted, there remained a need for their services when they reported back to their superiors. The antidotes they brought with them were seized by the medical research hospitals and saved more lives than they'd have been able to otherwise, giving all of them the sense that what they had done was both necessary and good.
Given the political situation, that was probably a bad thing. They were turning twenty-one and believed that the acts they committed – acts which, by most moral standards, were entirely reprehensible – brought better things. They were like the fire that cleared the chaff from the forest. And used well, used by those with consciences and compassion, they would have been.
They trusted their teachers, the black-clad men and women who had taught them about pain and terror and death in such a way that it was a competition to them, a game. Those same teachers had been careful to keep their assignments away from worlds where the war had hit hard; they'd been set against rich scientists in glittering towers and generals in decadent restaurants, never against ordinary people. They were one of earth's deadliest secrets but they were innocent, unaware of many of the harsher realities of the universe. They'd begun their training at just the right age; old enough to begin putting things together in an adult manner but young enough to be malleable and easily manipulated into seeing exactly what their teachers wanted them to see.
Rob and Sarah left; Rob's parents wanted their son home to take over the family business. They were released after a lengthy interview and when Marcus bid them goodbye he thought they felt slightly off, but he couldn't determine exactly why. Whatever it was, it gave him the creeps.
Xavier left a few months later, heading home to start the studio he'd always dreamed of. He, too, left Marcus feeling that something wasn't quite right.
He started watching and listening, paying attention to things he'd never noticed overly much before. It was hard; he wasn't a telepath, and very few of the people he was trying to spy on spoke out loud when communicating with each other. But as time went on and the war receded farther, he became ever more certain that something wasn't right.
It wasn't until he bumped into his old hallway neighbour again that he solidified any of his suspicions, however.
The intervening two years had been good to Talia; she'd grown out of the last bit of awkward teenager and into an attractive young woman.
"You finally graduated, huh?" Marcus asked when he ran into her in one of the gardens.
She smiled tightly, her eyes haunted. "I'm commercial now."
"You don't look like you enjoy it much," Marcus observed.
"No, it's good, it's… Do you still have that music I gave you?" she asked abruptly.
Marcus blinked. "Yes. Somewhere. Why?"
"Use it," she said. "Listen to it as much as you can. You'll need it."
"Talia?" he asked, concerned. "What's wrong?"
"I can't… oh, I can't tell you!" she exclaimed. "I just don't know yet. I don't know enough of the specifics to explain it to someone who isn't a telepath."
Marcus looked at her, seeing the strain she tried to hide. "Are you in danger?" he asked.
"No," she answered confidently. "The Corp will take care of me. It's just that… oh, I don't know. Sometimes I think something's going on that isn't. Maybe I'm just paranoid. I had to look into a killer's mind; you know what that does to a telepath."
Marcus nodded. "I do. I'm sorry." Privately, he thought that wasn't the only thing wrong, but he kept that to himself. He had nothing but suspicions and vague feelings of unease to go on, but given the way he'd been trained that was more than enough to make him remain on constant alert.
"When are they sending you out again?" Talia asked, regaining control of herself.
"Day after tomorrow," Marcus told her. "I'm bound for one of the border sectors. Information gathering, mostly."
"Be careful, Marcus," she begged.
"I will," he promised. "You too."
"I will."
Months turned into years, and Marcus was twenty-three before the next time he set foot on earth soil. He'd spent the intervening time almost entirely alone, slipping from one trouble spot to another and relaying information back to his superiors. But he was also getting an education in the way things were done out from under the thumb of the Psi Corp, and what he was hearing was disturbing. Nothing but rumours and hysterical accounts of telepaths who wouldn't join the Corp being hunted down, but Marcus didn't like the bits of the puzzle he was gathering. It made him uneasy.
He had to put his suspicions on the backburner, though, in the face of a new threat. An alien force vastly superior to EarthForce, heading their way and destroying as it went. It didn't matter that humans had fired first; these aliens seemed determined to destroy everything in their path. Beta group was re-assembled, three members short but still able to function as well together as they ever had against the Dilgar.
This time, try as their superiors might, there was no way to keep them from seeing the devastation. They were older and wiser and a lot more hardened; most of them, like Marcus, had spent the past two years immersed in some of the shadiest, ugliest regions of the galaxy. They had blood on their hands now, and it was not all righteous blood spilled in the defence of their homeworld. In fact, Marcus was coming to the uneasy conclusion that the hundreds of lives he'd taken, silently, in the dark, were none of them the right thing to have done even if they were necessary.
"Does the end justify the means?" he wondered as they slipped a shuttle through the battle lines, avoiding weapons fire as well as they could. They intended to mimic shrapnel and crash on a moon nearby, waiting for the new enemy in their strangely beautiful ships to pass beyond them before infiltrating various points behind the line of battle.
"What?" Tony asked.
"Our jobs. Does what we accomplish justify the methods we use?"
"You had to think of this now?" Li complained. "If we don't act, then people die. That's clear enough for me."
"But what if we're wrong?" Marcus asked. "What if we kill the wrong person? What if our methods just make things worse?"
"We're given targets by our superiors," Santan explained, as if to a child. "They've got a lot more information than we do; they wouldn't tell us to hit the wrong person."
"Oh, like the Dilgar scientists?" Marcus reminded them.
"They were Dilgar scientists working on unknown chemical compounds," Santan defended. "What, we were supposed to wait until they tested them to see if they were deadly?"
"That's just my point, though," Marcus countered. "What if we waited? If we hadn't been brought up short on that mission, millions of people would have died. How do we know which missions are those ones, and which are actually for the good of the universe? What gives us the right to be judge, jury, and executioner?"
"That was an isolated fluke," Sam objected. "Things like that don't happen more than once, Marcus."
Marcus blinked and stared at them all, keeping the rest of his thoughts to himself. They honestly believed that. They'd been on the same missions he had in the Dilgar war on the fringes of known space. And yet somehow he was the only one who had come up against enough reality to start to see grey areas instead of the black and white that their job required. Why?
"Never mind," Marcus finally grumbled, and pulled out a set of headphones, cueing up his music player. Unexpectedly severe rock beats filled his ears, and he remembered Talia's cryptic comments. What did it all mean? Why this music? What was important about it? It was interesting, certainly, and complexly layered, but what was she trying to tell him?
Suddenly, like the key piece of a puzzle slotting into place, he understood. Talia had told him herself, years ago. He was at least partially mind-blind. The others were not; that much had been quite clear over their time in training. Was it possible the Corp had manipulated their thoughts, laying patterns deep in their minds? But if that was the case, why hadn't it worked with Marcus? Had they even tried? He wasn't totally immune, because Talia had gotten readings out of him more than once. If she could, their superiors certainly could.
The ship rocked as an explosion hit it and he was jolted out of his thoughts. Time enough to contemplate objective morality when he wasn't in the middle of a war zone.
Their return to earth several weeks later, tired and bloody, went largely unnoticed. A few knives in the dark and several enemy garrisons now lacked critical staff – or so they assumed, since they couldn't translate the alien's language yet. Marcus suspected, though, that they hadn't only killed military personnel. Unfortunately he didn't yet know enough about the Minbari to tell Worker Caste from Warrior; many years later when he finally gained that knowledge, only Jeffrey Sinclair would be able to pull him out of the despair it caused and keep him from outright suicide.
"Come with me," one of their trainers told him as they trickled into the complex, looking forward to showers and clean beds.
"Where are we going?" he asked, handing his small pack off to Sam to have it stowed in his room.
"The EarthForce commanders require more information about the Minbari. You were one of the only successful ground operatives sent out; we need to examine your memories."
"Telepathically?" Marcus wondered.
"Yes," his escort admitted.
"Fine," Marcus sighed. "Lead on."
The room he was led to was something straight out of a gothic torture chamber, only done in plastic and gleaming black metal. He was strapped into a reclining chair, and various monitors were set up around him. He was too tired to object; the sooner they got this over with, the better.
"Now, you shouldn't feel anything," his escort told him as several other black-clad Psi Cops entered the room. "We're just going to view a few of your recent memories."
"Fine, fine," Marcus would have waved a hand if he could have moved. "Just make it quick, I want to sleep."
He felt nothing for a long moment, then there was a sensation of gradually building pressure.
"Stop fighting us," his escort commanded.
"I'm not," Marcus retorted.
"This is most unprecedented," another of the telepaths muttered. "He has natural shields. I've never seen anything like it outside of the truly mind-blind, but we've gotten readings off him before this; he can't be mind-blind."
"Do you suppose the conditioning didn't take?" another asked worriedly. "Check that."
The sensation of pressure increased, then Marcus felt something snap and he was staring at his own body in the chair from six or seven different angles throughout the room. His body was arched in the chair, screaming, but Marcus couldn't feel anything. It was the strangest experience he'd ever had.
"He's almost totally blocked!" someone yelled, except that no one had actually spoken. It was all in his head. So to speak, since it wasn't actually his head that he was in.
"Why didn't we know about this?"
"He was never conditioned properly! We can't keep using him!"
"He doesn't know anything, it's all right. He believes in our cause. That is as good as or perhaps better than the conditioning. As long as we discontinue what we're doing and go on as we always have we'll be fine. He must never know that he's blocked from deep telepathic scan."
Marcus felt pulled this time, stretched like taffy over one of the antique wheels he'd seen in a museum once, then another snap and he was staring up at the ceiling again, back in his own body. The sudden rush of adrenaline was startling, as was the raw feeling of his throat.
"What happened?" he croaked.
"Nothing," his guide assured him. "You can get up now, but slowly. The process may have left you disoriented."
Marcus snorted. That was an understatement, but he shoved himself up anyway. His legs were a little bit wobbly but he appeared otherwise intact.
"We'll need you to file the usual complete mission report tomorrow," his guide informed him as he was escorted back through the confusing maze of hallways to his current room.
Marcus just nodded, exhausted and deep in though. So he was mostly mind-blind, was he? Good to have official confirmation of that. Less common than telepathy, it was the complete reverse of mental abilities of any kind; a kind of sinkhole, where any telepathic contact was simply impossible. His mother's family had a long history of being partially mind-blind, but none of the relatives he'd heard of had it to this extent. Then again, how many of them had ever been deep-scanned by a Psi Cop? But he shouldn't have been able to do whatever it was that he'd done to look at himself through their eyes. It shouldn't have caused him pain, or them consternation; the entire thing just shouldn't have worked. What was going on? Furthermore, they thought he'd been unaware of everything going on in that room or they'd never have spoken so freely about whatever conditioning they'd put his unit through. Why hadn't they felt his presence? He filed it away with all the other suspicious bits he was gathering, deep in a locked drawer in his mind.
His guide left him at his room and Marcus had just about managed to put the entire incident out of his mind and fall into a much-needed sleep when a tentative knock sounded at his door.
"Come in," he grumbled, hoping it was more intelligible to whoever was knocking than it sounded to his own ears.
"Marcus?" Talia asked quietly as she closed his door behind her. "Are you awake?"
Marcus sighed and sat up, cueing the lights on a low setting. "I am now," he grumbled. "What?"
"Are you okay?" she asked. "I heard they took you for scanning."
Marcus gave her an odd look. "Talia, I'm a field operative in an intelligence division… they have every right to scan my memories of a mission to find out details that I might miss in my reports. Why would you think something went wrong with that?"
"Because of the feeling I get from you," she answered. "Like a rock, remember?"
Marcus snorted. "I remember."
"You have natural shields, very strong natural shields. You puzzled me when I was a student, so I asked one of my teachers. He said that the impression I was getting was what we usually get from people who are mind-blind, but that in that case I wouldn't be getting anything else from you, and I was. I kept getting these flashes. The best we could ever figure out without actually scanning you was that you're mostly mind-blind but that there are a couple of cracks somewhere, and stuff was seeping out through them. Which is dangerous, because according to my teacher if you don't know about it then people can get in through those holes and manipulate you and it would be much, much worse than a normal person being telepathically manipulated because your mind has these natural defences against it already in place. My teacher compared us to firecrackers; most people's minds are open fields, so us going in and coming out doesn't do anything much to them. But with you, it would be like a firecracker going off inside a fortified bunker."
Marcus blinked. That actually… made sense. A lot of sense, given what had just happened and some of the things he'd begun noticing on this last mission.
"Who was this teacher?" he asked cautiously. He wasn't sure he trusted most of the people he knew with this kind of information.
"Jason Ironheart," Talia told him. Marcus' memory quickly identified the man as a bit of a renegade, not quite as militant as a lot of the other telepaths, and a philosopher. Probably the safest of all the teachers here. He supposed that would have to do.
"We thought if you had something that could block the leaks, you'd be safer," Talia continued. "Remember that music I gave you?"
"Wait, what?" Marcus asked, train of thought derailing once again. "What does rock music have to do with telepathy?"
"It has more to do with the sections of your brain that activate when you listen to it," Talia admitted. "I'm not sure I can explain it to someone who's never seen it. But if you focus on that music really really hard, it can push out intrusions at those key points. I just liked the music, and that's why I originally gave it to you, but then after you left to fight the Dilgar Jason started teaching me to use it as a shielding focus, and I figured you might be able to too."
"Why tell me this now?" Marcus asked.
"I didn't know if I'd ever have to," Talia admitted. "I'm not one hundred percent sure about any of it. I had a little bit worked out when I saw you last time, but I was a bit too messed up then myself to really explain it coherently. I've been working on it with Jason ever since, as kind of a research project."
Marcus sighed. "Thank you," he said.
Talia shrugged fluidly. "Jason says that knowledge is power. It's why people are so afraid of us. We know things we shouldn't know."
"Isn't your telling me sort of like betraying Corp secrets to a normal, though?" Marcus asked.
"Why?" Talia returned. "I'm just telling you what my teacher and I figured out about your brain, so that if you ever need to be telepathically scanned nothing bad will happen to you. I didn't think you'd ever need to be scanned; most people go their whole lives without. But then you got back this time and they took you, and I called myself an idiot for not figuring that an intelligence agent would need to have his memories viewed."
Marcus blinked, and realized that they were operating under two vastly different sets of suspicious circumstances. Talia's panic several months earlier actually had been a result of contact with a killer's mind. She had no idea about any of the things Marcus was coming to suspect about the Psi Corp, and equally little idea that Marcus himself had just come from having his brain fried. Her appearance tonight was a coincidence, nothing more, and her concern for him was that of a friend who knew more about something dangerous than he did.
Abruptly, Marcus relaxed. This was good; it made his circle of enemies – and their possible informants – much more manageable. An isolated conspiracy was much easier to handle than a widespread one.
"Never mind," he assured his old neighbour, dismissing his last question. "I'm exhausted, my brain is putting two and two together and coming up with negative orange."
Talia smiled. "I've felt like that before. But I have to go; Matt's waiting for me. I just wanted to make sure you got home okay, and that someone told you about your weird brain before you had to be scanned again, if they didn't finish tonight."
"Matt?" Marcus asked, curious.
"I completely forgot you wouldn't know him!" Talia exclaimed. "Matt's my husband. We got married a few months ago."
Marcus smiled, and congratulated her while he showed her to the door. He shook his head once she was out of it, though. Funny. He'd always gotten the distinct impression when they were teenagers that Talia preferred women. Especially after he'd caught her sighing over that redhead the next year-group down…
The war with the Minbari continued, and Marcus and the remainder of his group were sent out more often alone than together. It wasn't much like the Dilgar war; that had been many species uniting against a common threat. The Dilgar had been the closest thing to evil Marcus ever expected to encounter, too; he had believed in their cause then and hadn't flinched when asked to deal of death in a variety of unusual ways. He had believed in their cause since then, operating against the scum of the far reaches of the galaxy.
The Minbari were different from the Dilgar and the scum on a fundamental level. They were, for the most part, leaving the civilian populations intact. They were hitting military targets with everything they had and decimating them, but the non-combatants were being left alone apart from garrisons left to prevent an insurrection from behind the line of battle. To Marcus that spoke of an opponent who understood the difference between war and genocide. An opponent who should be faced openly, not picked off from the shadows.
It wasn't his decision to make, though. He spent most of his time travelling, in and out of refugee camps. He was alternately bringing aid and supplies to his own people and death and mayhem to their opponents, and he wasn't sure which task sickened him more.
They lost Santan first, when the military transport he was aboard was hit. Marcus didn't even get the news until a month and a half later, and he wasn't sure how he felt about it when he did finally hear. They'd been thrown together at 18; they'd learned to fight and kill and survive together. They'd been through hell together. And yet, had he ever really known Santan? How early had the conditioning their teachers had mentioned been set in motion? Was Marcus the only one out of the ten of them who had learned and fought because he believed, and not because he was programmed?
In a way, he was glad he could legitimately claim not to have known, so he wouldn't have to attend the funeral or express his regrets. It was just one last thing, on top of everything else, that he couldn't deal with right now.
Mizumi was the second to go. Marcus never knew what her exact mission was; of them all she was the most likely to be assigned missions even the other members of their group couldn't be given clearance for. He received a short note from their superiors a few weeks after the fact, informing him that she was dead.
Siobhan sent him a private message a few days after that with a recording in it from Mizumi herself. Apparently she'd had a bit of a crush on him, which he hadn't known; it made the entire situation worse, somehow. He was tired, confused, soul sick from the things he was seeing and doing, and more terribly alone than he'd ever been in his life. There was no one he could turn to. He'd gotten into this in the first place because he wanted to keep Will out of ever facing a war zone and damned if he'd go back to Arisia and taint them with what he'd become. But that left him only the other members of beta group, who he now knew beyond a shadow of a doubt had been altered by their teachers, and Talia Winters, who would never believe ill of the Psi Corp.
They managed to go almost a year without another death, but then Sam got caught in one of his own explosions. He took the Minbari weapons plant with him, though, and Marcus figured it was a fitting end. Judging by the stories he'd told of his childhood, Sam's enthusiasm for explosives hadn't been tampered with at all.
Not quite a year after that, they were all recalled to earth. Humanity was facing almost certain extinction; the Minbari fleet was gathering in space above Mars. They needed every soldier they could get to take a fighter and fly against them to keep them from reaching earth, and Marcus and his friends could certainly pilot as well as most.
History would call it the Battle of the Line. Marcus called it the day he sold whatever remained of his soul, as well as any hope of redemption or forgiveness. He'd seen too much over the past several years, clues he couldn't quite put together into a coherent whole, but one thing he did know for sure. The Psi Corp could not be allowed to have highly trained, highly skilled, highly loyal assassins and spies who could not in any concrete way be linked back to them. The destruction of beta group would set their plans back years, and it might save lives.
In the confusion of wildfire and exploding ships, shrapnel and lasers flying thick as rain, it was terrifyingly easy for someone with Marcus' skills to draw fire into a specific location. Tony went first, sliced clean through by a Minbari gunner before Marcus could even begin to put his plan into motion, but the others were better pilots than Tony had ever been. They wouldn't go out easily. Fortunately, Marcus knew most of the trick spots to hit on an EarthForce fighter.
Li's ship had already been hit once by the time Marcus caught up to him. Marcus only had to fire a wild blast at an oncoming enemy fighter, making sure that one of his shots impacted on the damaged section. Li went up in a fireball, but at least he took the enemy fighter with him. Marcus closed his eyes in a prayer for the dead, and bowed his head to fight back tears.
Siobhan was the hardest. His flyer hung suspended in space in front of hers during a lull in the battle. They stared at each other over an expanse of hard vacuum, lit by flares of laser fire from nearby.
"Marcus?" Siobhan's voice came thinly over his internal speakers. "What is it?"
Marcus didn't reply. He spotted a Minbari flyer on his scanners heading for them and firing wildly, and faked a hit, shorting out his own navigation system. Siobhan's eyes widened at the sparks that shot up from his engines, and tried to move out of his way as the force of the explosion pushed him towards her.
Marcus still had manual steering control, however. He was looking into her eyes as his ship impacted hers, their cockpits meeting. Her eyes were wide with surprise and fear, but her hands remained steady on her controls even as their ships, locked into a deadly dance, hurled closer to one of the strangely beautiful Minbari warships. At the last minute she shook her head, confused, and Marcus saw someone else looking back at him. Not the hardened killer and technical expert he'd come to know, but the girl who'd helped him with their physics homework in the first weeks of training.
Siobhan saluted him, then twisted her ship wildly to send him spinning off into space before plunging into the warship in a suicide run. Marcus slumped in his restraints as her ship vanished in a cloud of fire. So they'd known, at some level, that they were being controlled. Released of it, Siobhan had killed herself. The idea that they'd rather die than be pawns should have made him feel better, but all it made him feel was ill. He shook his head, wiping savagely at the tears that were trying to fall. He had a battle to fight, and a planet to protect. The damage to his fighter was easily repaired. If he screamed his pain as he fired on the enemy, no one was left on his com channel to hear.
Their trainers gave him a medal for it, when he touched down. The only one of his unit to survive, they figured he must have performed above and beyond the call of duty. Marcus chucked the medal into the ocean at the first opportunity.
They also scheduled him for another session of mental probing. It appeared someone had figured out what Jason Ironheart had, that the strange reactions they'd gotten from him meant that his mind could be accessed if they went about it the right way. Marcus had only been back on earth for two days when he found himself strapped into the chair again.
This time, though, Marcus was absolutely certain that his trainers meant him no good. He was further certain, after what he'd heard in some of the refugee camps, that the Psi Corp was no kind of good. He intended to fight back as well as he could; he'd studied meditation techniques for the past year or so just in case they ever tried this on him again. He relaxed into the chair and cleared his mind of everything except the pounding, primal beat of one of Talia's songs, closing his eyes to concentrate on it and nothing else. He could feel the telepaths getting ready, positioning themselves around him, then the displacement of air as one moved closer, pulling off a glove to touch his face and get a stronger contact with his mind.
The man groped his way around Marcus' natural shields, looking for a way in. Marcus purposefully allowed him to see one of the faint cracks that he'd learned to recognize, and he took the bait. Marcus grinned triumphantly before subsuming that emotion in the swirl of the music. It filled his mind, pushing out all other thoughts. With the shrieking, pounding rhythms filling him as though they were his very blood, he could not be harmed by their efforts. The telepath could not penetrate beyond the wilderness he had created within his mind; thorn forest of guitar riffs, plunging cliffs of drum cadences, roaring waterfalls of synthesizers whirling the man about even as he tried to steal the only thing Marcus had left intact after his years in the service of the very men now out to destroy him. His mind.
"He's still resisting," another of his adversaries commented, pulling off a smooth black glove to add his power to the one already attempting to access Marcus' innermost thoughts.
Marcus smiled ferally and shoved his human self even farther back, throwing the wildness he'd created into the minds of the Psi-Cops, tearing them to shreds even as they sought beneath his strange defences to find the information the Corp needed. The black-clad telepaths stiffened and fell back, locked into a whirling maelstrom in their own heads.
Their compatriots stood back, and Marcus laughed loudly, wildly.
"Set me free," he commanded, eyes glowing eerily in the strange light they used in the interrogation rooms. "Or I'll take you all with me."
"What do we do?" one of them asked.
"Let him up," another decided quickly. "We'll have to study this further, but he can't be here. Take him back to his rooms and confine him."
Marcus snorted at that. These were the men who'd trained him to be one of the most elite special agents in the galaxy; did they really think he'd stay quietly in his room once they put him there?
Apparently they did, because the door was locked behind them as they left and Marcus was left on his own to ponder recent events. Talia's wild idea for a shield had worked; he could protect his strangely vulnerable mind from the Psi Corp. But they knew that now, knew that he knew about them and what they were trying to do to him, and they couldn't let him walk out of this complex a free man. On the other hand, they couldn't stop him because they couldn't track him; they couldn't get a fix on his mind and he was the last left of their non-telepathic operatives.
That thought made him pause. That wasn't quite true, was it? Were Xavier, Sarah, and Rob unaltered? Or were they sleeper agents, allowed to go free in case of just this eventuality? He needed to answer that question, and fast. He grabbed his travel bag, still packed out of long habit, and slipped out quietly through ductwork and windows, escaping the compound without much difficulty.
His first stop was Austria, where Rob and Sarah were still working in his parent's old business. Marcus dropped in on them just after lunch.
"Marcus!" Sarah exclaimed, seeing him first and rushing up to greet him. She looked much different than she had the last time he'd seen her; plumper and happier, although still clearly fit and strong. He hoped like he'd never hoped before that she had escaped their trainer's manipulations.
"Sarah," he smiled at her, but his eyes were haunted. "Is Rob in?"
"Of course, come in and sit down, we'll get you some tea," she hustled him into the shop, pushing him onto a stool behind the counter and calling Rob to come out of the office.
"Marcus!" Rob exclaimed in surprise, face lighting up. "How are you?" He moved to the front door, switching the sign over to closed and adding a note to the bottom about a celebration. Marcus figured that would hardly be unusual right now; the whole planet was either celebrating or mourning.
Marcus shrugged. "I get by," he answered non-committally. "You heard about the battle?"
"How could we not?" Sarah retorted, returning with his tea. "But yes, we heard. Are the others all right?"
Marcus shook his head. "I'm it," he answered, voice thick with emotion. Sarah and Rob fortunately took it for grief rather than guilt.
"Oh my," Sarah murmured. "Oh my. All of them?"
Marcus nodded silently.
"Oh my." Sarah didn't quite seem capable of saying anything else.
"Are we being recalled?" Rob asked.
Marcus shook his head. "Why? The war's over. Nothing left for us."
"There are always enemies to be discovered and destroyed," Rob answered tonelessly, and Marcus remembered the eerie feeling he'd gotten when the other two had left; as if something had been suppressed, but not quite well enough. Perhaps the Psi Corp hadn't yet mastered the art of sleeper agents. In any case, the look in Rob's eyes gave him all the answer he needed. This was not the same man who had left notes in his underwear during their first months of training; that man was long dead, killed by their teachers so that another personality could be implanted.
Marcus pulled a bottle of brandy out of his bag. "Would you join me in toasting them?" he asked, looking around for some cups. Sarah quickly provided them and he filled two, handing them over.
"Aren't you drinking?" Rob asked him.
"My ship was hit," Marcus explained. "I'm still on painkillers. Would you be horribly offended if I stuck with tea?"
Rob shook his head. "Not at all," he assured, raising his glass. "To old friends, in memory held dear," he offered.
"To old friends," Sarah and Marcus echoed, all three of them drinking. Sarah kept Marcus' tea filled, and he kept their tumblers filled, and they were well intoxicated on the altered brandy before Santan's other alterations to it kicked in. Too intoxicated, really, to understand that anything was wrong until it was far too late and they were already dead.
Marcus took his tea cup back to the kitchen, washed it, dried it, and put it away in Sarah's cupboard. He then returned to the front room and poured the rest of the brandy over the floor, and carefully tipped over a display rack of old-fashioned lighters. When the police came to investigate – and they would, he was sure – all that anyone would be able to prove would be that the shopkeepers had decided to celebrate earth's good fortune, had drunk a bit too much, and had suffered from a tragic accident. It would be even odds as to whether the fire or the alcohol had actually killed them, but foul play would never be suspected; Santan's brandy was undetectable.
He was well on his way to Brazil before the news feeds caught up with the 'accident' in Austria, and he snapped the first reports off without watching. One more black mark on his soul, he supposed, but he couldn't bear to see what he'd just done.
Xavier was equally happy to see him, ushering him into his apartment above the studio. Marcus had to admire the building; it was just like something he'd have built himself, if he were going to build a martial arts studio.
"I heard about Santan and Mizumi," Xavier said quietly. "How are the others?"
"Dead," Marcus answered shortly. "All dead."
Xavier paled. "Well." He set about making them tea; Marcus wondered if it was something genetic, hardwired into the human brain. Shit happens, make tea. It would be an interesting phenomenon to chart.
"How have you been?" Marcus asked, changing the subject.
"Oh, you know," Xavier answered. "I do okay. I get by. The studio is popular, but I'm not teaching as much these days."
Marcus took a closer look at his old friend, and blinked. His exhaustion and guilt had been occupying so much of his mind he'd scarcely noticed how thin the other man had gotten. "What's wrong?" he asked, concerned.
"I'm sick. One of those weird rare incurable things, they tell me it's genetic. Don't ask for the gory details, I try not to understand them."
Marcus shook his head, shocked. "God. How long?"
"Six months at the outside," Xavier answered. "It's been something of a relief, actually. Our trainers came to see me a few months back, when we knew the battle was going to reach earth."
Marcus raised an eyebrow. "Oh?" he asked.
"Yeah," Xavier sighed. "I don't know, it was like I was a different person after they left. I've been looking at the things we did, in the Dilgar war, and Madre de Dios, Marcus, how could we?"
Marcus sighed and deflated suddenly. "You know, then?"
Xavier gave him a sideways look. "I didn't think you did… how did you avoid…?"
Marcus sighed. "I'm mind-blind. My old hallway neighbour, Talia, you remember her?"
"Little blonde thing? Quite shy?"
"That's her. She figured it out a few years back. Our trainers never knew, because they were just doing kind of a low-level manipulation field on all of us, unless they needed something specific. They never realized it wasn't working until they tried to scan me a little while ago. Then the excrement hit the whirling rotator blade."
Xavier chuckled. "That a fancy British way of saying the shit hit the fan?"
Marcus snorted. "Basically. I'm on the run now; they didn't want me to get out of the compound."
Xavier sighed, and leaned back into his chair. "You can't run forever, Marcus. I've been looking into it the past few months. You can't hide from them. They only let me go because I'm dead anyway."
Marcus shook his head. "I know. I have to destroy the place."
"Did you ever wonder what happened to alpha group?" Xavier asked.
"What's alpha group?" Marcus asked.
"The group before us," Xavier informed him. "We're beta group, but none of us ever thought to ask what happened to alpha."
"Do you know?" Marcus wondered.
"They died. Insane. The Psi Corp hadn't quite got the technique right, you see. I think maybe they still don't, but every kid like us they get their hands on, they learn a little more. Take them out, Marcus. Or we'll be facing worse than an honest war in open space; we'll be facing a war inside our own minds."
Marcus paled, but nodded. "I promise. I can't get them all, but I'll get the ones that trained us."
"That'll slow them, at least," Xavier smiled tightly. "You're exhausted. Come on, take my bed for a while. I have a class coming in an hour. I'll wake you up later and we can have dinner before you have to go."
Marcus smiled, and gave the other man an uncharacteristic embrace as he accepted the offer.
"Thank you," Marcus whispered thickly. "I'm so glad you're still you."
Xavier shot him a strange look, but just returned the hug. Whatever he suspected about the true nature of their friend's deaths he kept to himself.
Dinner was one of the more pleasant – and edible – meals Marcus had eaten in recent memory. Xavier saw him off afterwards with a warm smile.
"You're always welcome here, Marcus. Come back if you need a place to stay for a while."
Marcus smiled back. "I just might do that. Take care of yourself, Xavier." The he was off, into the night like a thief, just like old times. He wondered if he'd ever be able to stop lurking in shadows.
Terrorist attacks on Psi Corp were fairly common; even in the darkest moments of the war some had found time to throw stones at their neighbours. It was easy for Marcus to get hold of some of the signature weapons used by one of the darker organizations. Marcus had no love for the Corp, but he knew that most telepaths were simply people like Talia, decent people taken from their families early on and raised by the Corp. It was the leaders who needed to be brought down, the ones who manipulated and undercut other's minds. But this organization made no such distinction; they'd as soon torture a five-year-old child as a seasoned Psi Cop.
Marcus figured it was only justice that, when the evidence was examined, the massive explosion in the interrogation section that killed all of his instructors would be blamed on them, and the organization would be hunted out and exterminated. Kill two birds with one stone, as it were.
After it was done, he headed straight for the nearest soldier's bar. He needed to get drunk. Drunk enough to forget the past seven years of his life, drunk enough to forget that he'd just killed nearly everyone he knew, drunk enough to forget that he was even Marcus Cole.
It appeared he wasn't the only one. As closing time approached and most of the bar's inhabitants staggered off into the night, Marcus was left at the bar with another man who seemed intent on pickling his liver.
"How's that old song go?" the stranger muttered, speaking astonishingly clearly for the amount of alcohol he'd put away.
"What song?" Marcus wondered, interested in a fuzzy sort of unconnected way.
"From that show, you know," the other man waved his hand vaguely. "Old show. About revolutions."
Marcus just shook his head. He had no idea what the man was talking about.
"Hah!" the man exclaimed a moment later. "Got it!"
"Oh?" Marcus asked, not really interested.
"Empty chairs at empty tables, where my friends will sit no more," the man quoted.
Marcus didn't recognize the song, or the musical, but he definitely understood the sentiment. "To empty chairs," he offered, raising his glass.
The other man focused on him. "You too huh?" he asked, raising his own glass in toast before slamming it back and calling for another. The bartender switched the sign on the door around, but he was an old soldier himself; he wasn't going to throw them out as long as they kept drowning their sorrows quietly, whatever the law said. Not a week after the end of the war. Not men with the shadowed eyes of soldiers who'd been in the worst of it.
"Yeah," Marcus acknowledged quietly. "Me too."
"I'm Jeff," the other man offered. He struggled for his last name a moment, then gave it up as too complicated.
"Marcus," Marcus answered, seeing no reason to offer his. The fewer people who could locate him, the better.
"What brings you here?" Jeff asked. Clearly, he was far too sober.
Marcus glared at him. "Same as you, I'd imagine," he growled.
"I doubt that," Jeff returned, eyes haunted. "You're no soldier."
Marcus blinked. "What?" he asked, brain not quite up to processing that.
"You don't move right," Jeff observed. "I know soldiers."
Marcus sighed. "Not all soldiers operate in the light under a clear chain of orders," he answered. It was as close as he'd ever come to telling someone outside of beta group what he did for a living.
"Ah," Jeff seemed to accept that at face value, a reaction Marcus found slightly suspicious. Your average soldier had a real horror of clandestine operatives.
"What?" Marcus demanded.
"Nothing," Jeff replied. "Just ah. You lose someone up there?" he gestured vaguely at the ceiling.
Marcus shrugged. "Whole unit," he answered. He wasn't sure why; something about this man just made him want to trust him. The only other people he'd ever known with this kind of vibe were a wandering monk who'd gone through Arisia one year and his mother.
Jeff poured him another drink. "That sucks."
Marcus just snorted, and drank it.
"Got anyplace to go home to?" Jeff asked compassionately.
Marcus shrugged. "Don't know. Colony's still there, but what do they want with someone like me?"
Jeff gave him a shrewd look. "Like some advice?" he offered.
Marcus shrugged. "Whatever."
"Go home, Marcus. Find something to live for. I buried too many kids your age in the past few years. You lived through hell for a reason."
"How can you know that?" Marcus demanded. "You don't know me. You don't know anything about me."
"I know you're alive," Jeff sighed. "Right now? That's enough. Whatever you've seen, whatever you've done… you're alive. Accept it as the gift it is."
Marcus blinked at him, and for just a moment thought he saw something closer to divine than human. Then he shook his head, and it was just a tired drunk soldier in a seedy bar, and Marcus chuckled quietly to himself. Here he was seeing visions. It was probably time to go, before he passed out.
"Thanks for the advice," he tossed over his shoulder as he settled his tab and pulled his coat on, preparing to stagger out into the dark night.
"Look me up sometime, hey?" Jeff asked. "Let me know at least one person I tried to save made it."
Marcus shrugged. "You never know."
"Seriously," the soldier said, unnaturally sober still. "Jeffrey Sinclair. I don't know where I'll be assigned next when they finish picking through my brain. But look me up."
Marcus hesitated, then finally nodded. "I promise. Someday." He filed the man's name in his memory and let the heavy oak door slam behind him.
That soldier had probably saved his life, Marcus reflected several months later. He might have gone out and thrown himself into a convenient river that night if they hadn't had that conversation. Instead he'd gone back to Xavier's. He wasn't ready to go home yet, so he spent several months taking care of his old friend as the other man's health failed further.
"Do you ever wonder," Xavier whispered one night several months later. He was confined to his bed now, wasted almost to nothing.
"Wonder what?" Marcus asked.
"Well, the people who really change your life, I mean, really really have a huge profound impact… they all tend to be people you meet suddenly and never talk to again. Do you ever wonder what might have happened, if you'd turned left instead of right, and never run into them? Where would you be now, if you never met the people who changed your life?"
"Dead," Marcus answered glibly, thinking of that stranger in the bar and of Talia Winters giving him some random music that she liked and of any number of people in refugee camps scattered across a hundred worlds.
"Yeah," Xavier said. "Marcus?"
"Hmm?" Marcus wondered.
"Go home, Marcus," Xavier pleaded gently. "Go home to Arisia."
Marcus shook his head violently. "I'm not… I can't."
"You can," Xavier argued. "Please. For me. If it doesn't work out you can leave again. But I've seen the news reports; that colony needs someone to take care of it, and I don't think you're quite finished needing someone to take care of. Rebuild it, make it into something good and great, and maybe you'll put some of your ghosts to rest."
Marcus sighed. "You won't leave this alone, will you?"
"No," Xavier confirmed, then coughed harshly. "Please, Marcus. Live. Live and remember what we all died for; a better world, a better universe. Even if they tampered with our minds, made us do things we'd never have done otherwise, we started out believing we could make a difference. Don't let that dream die with us."
Marcus could only nod, and wait while his friend's breathing grew shallower and shallower, and finally simply stopped coming. It was the most peaceful death Marcus had ever seen in seven and a half years as a spy and assassin. He closed Xavier's eyes gently, then stood to put the funeral arrangements in motion.
When Xavier's coffin was lowered into the ground four days later, Marcus stood at the graveside long after everyone else had been and gone. Finally, he threw the small bundle of flowers he carried onto the ground.
"Do not stand by my grave and weep," he quoted. "I am not there, I do not sleep." He paused. "I don't know why I remembered that just now. Of all of our group, you were the only one who was actually wholly yourself when you died. I hope wherever you are, you're dancing on the wind, my friend."
He turned to go, then paused. "You're wrong, you know. They might have tampered with your mind, and made you do things you hated when you regained your senses, but I knew all along. I have no one to blame but myself, and I will never forget that. But I will go home; there is nowhere left for me but Arisia now."
He didn't go directly, though; he wasn't quite ready yet to face them. But slowly, over the next several months, he worked his way closer and closer to his home colony.
A figure garbed all in black slumped wearily down the ramp of a transport ship just over a year after the Battle of the Line, bag clutched in his arms. Dark hair hung somewhat limply to his shoulders, and his face was covered in a scruffy growth of stubble.
Another man met him as he reached ground and the transport lifted off.
"Marcus?" the man asked, peering at the newcomer. "Is it really you?"
Marcus blinked. "Will?" he gasped, shocked, looking up at a brother he hadn't seen since the younger man was an awkward sixteen-year-old. "Good heavens, what have you been eating? You're big as houses!"
Will chuckled, and seized his brother in a bone-crushing embrace. "And you're tiny as a mouse. Don't you eat?"
Marcus shrugged. "It's been a hard few years. How's the colony?" He was determined Will would never find out what the past few years had really been like for him; he'd sold his soul to the devil for eight years so that Will would be forever free of war, and he intended to make the bargain mean something even now the wars were over.
"We're doing okay, but I haven't got your memory or your head for business, unfortunately. I'm glad you're back; the mine foreman had to go back to Mars to take care of his mother a few months back and I've been struggling a bit since."
Marcus smiled. "Well then, show me. Maybe I'll be useful."
Will showed him, and Marcus found he had an affinity for the business of the little mining colony. He'd run it all right for three years after their father died and all the old procedures came back quickly. Soon the mine was running completely debt-free, and life on Arisia had returned to something like it had been when Marcus' parents ran the place. He gloried in being useful; Xavier had been right. This was exactly what he needed. If he could stay here the rest of his life and care for these people, then he'd be content. Not happy; never happy again, after what he'd done and seen. He'd never stop waking up in the night screaming, trying to wash the blood of thousands of innocents off his hands. Never stop seeing Siobhan's surprised eyes, or Sarah and Rob's trembling hands, or the fireball consuming Li's ship. Never be free of guilt. But he could be content doing some small good here, and maybe in time it would wash him clean enough to keep him out of the deepest pits of hell; he certainly had no hope of gaining enough redemption for heaven.
Things settled into a routine and Marcus was able to begin observing important anniversaries again, as he hadn't in years. He tended to closet himself in the deepest vault on the colony on those occasions, the one you needed special access codes to reach. Every family who lived on Arisia had a section of this vault, and kept their true valuables there. The things that, should the environmental controls fail or something explode, people could not bear to lose. For the Cole family this included a small rosebush, an ancient bible, a family photo, and an urn holding the ashes of Colin and Mairi Cole with their wedding bands tied firmly about the neck.
It was there that Will found him one day some years later. Marcus wasn't quite thirty-three and was finally starting to feel like he had some kind of life again.
"Marcus?" Will asked tentatively.
"Yes?" Marcus looked up from where he knelt on the floor, holding the precious Cole family bible like the antique treasure it was. It was the anniversary of the Battle of the Line again, and he had never yet failed to confess his sins on that day, still entrenched in the guilt and horror that had filled him as he destroyed everyone he knew.
"I need to talk to you."
Marcus closed the book with a sigh and gestured Will to a seat. "What about?"
"Well, since you've come back, the colony is running really smoothly. And I'm not really doing anything useful here, I'm not good at mining or administration really."
Marcus nodded. That much was quite true. "So you want to leave? Of course. Where to? Are you going to try for university of some kind?"
Will shook his head. "There's this group called the Rangers, on Minbar… they're kind of like intergalactic scouts. They've opened the organization up to humans. I thought about EarthForce, but this seems like it would offer more opportunities for seeing the galaxy. And I want to see it, Marcus. I want to travel!"
Marcus paled, and stared at his brother. He couldn't deny Will's enthusiasm, nor the younger man's right to choose his own path. "Is it a military organization?" he asked.
"Not as such," Will told him. "It's more… looking for problem spots, places where things are going wrong or people are being mistreated, and then coming back and telling people about it so help can get to them. Sometimes it's doing supply runs and stuff, too. It seems like I could make a difference doing this, Marcus."
Marcus snorted. "Be very careful making a difference, Will. It doesn't always turn out the way you want. You're sure about this? You've never seen a war zone, Will. Some of the missions they'll send you on… they won't be pretty."
Will shrugged. "I know you saw a lot of horrible things. I could hardly miss that, the nightmares you have. But this sounds like a really good thing, Marcus. I've talked to people, and they've talked to other people, and it seems legit. The Minbari are really into honesty and stuff, too… I don't think they'd lie about the purpose of this organization."
"No," Marcus mused. "They were honourable opponents in the war. When do you leave?"
Will flushed. "That's the thing… the next round of training starts in six weeks. So I was thinking… next weekend?"
Marcus caught his breath carefully and nodded, smiling for his brother's benefit. "We'll throw a party. And Will?" he continued, as his brother started to get up.
"Yes?" Will asked.
"Don't forget that you can always come home to Arisia. If you ever need to."
"I won't," Will promised, hugging him tightly. "I'm not going to vanish, Marcus, I promise. I'll be home for visits and everything."
Marcus nodded, and let him leave. He knew better; in his eight years away there had never been a free moment to come home to Arisia even if he'd felt clean enough to do so. Will would be busy, and maybe even doing some good. That would have to be enough.
Silently Marcus bowed his head over his family bible, kneeling in a barren cavern deep under the ground of an inhospitable mining planet. A single tear trickled down his cheek, all he'd allowed himself in years. He'd failed. Everything he'd done, all the death, all the evil, and he'd failed. He'd acted to keep his brother safe and innocent, but the gilded cage he'd built for Will was no less a prison than the cage of bones and death he'd built for himself. And now Will was off, to seek his future and to bear witness to all the horrors Marcus had tried to keep him from. It had all been for nothing.
Marcus didn't get up from where he knelt for a very long time, and when he did he wasn't quite the same man he'd been when he went down there several hours earlier. But the last of his family was concerned only for himself, excited to be leaving Arisia for the first time, and didn't notice. And then there was no one left who cared.
The next time Marcus saw his brother, his world ended in fire.