Disclaimer: I do not own Babylon 5 or Sword of the Stars.
Time: For Sword of the Stars, this happens just before Born of Blood, as I don't know enough about that cannon to really write effectively. For B5, this begins during the build up to the Shadow War in season 3, and will continue through that conflict.
Author's Notes: I'm taking some serious liberties with SotS technologies and tech levels, but I think that they follow the Cannon fairly well, and will add to the story rather than detract from it. Constructive criticism is always appreciated, as are any ideas you may have. I've already got the plot lined out, but you never know.
The Avalon Incident
Discovery-class scout Solaris
Along the Terran Alliance/Liir Consortium border
July 20th, 2623 A.D.
1400 hrs
Commander Richard Montoya ran a tight ship. He was hard, but fair- he expected everyone to do their job to the best of his/her ability. He made it a point to know everyone on the ship, not because he was a particularly friendly man, but because it allowed him to know the strengths and weaknesses of everyone aboard. This made him an effective ship's captain, but it also meant that his punishments were harsh. In fact, he was the only destroyer captain in the entire Navy who was known to use solitary confinement on bread and water as a punishment, though only for major infractions.
The crew, of course, believed this to be because his career had hit a dead end early on. Scuttlebutt said that Richard Montoya was not to be trusted with anything more expensive than a destroyer, and nothing less prestigious than a front-line command. He was, after all, an excellent leader and a war hero on top of that. He had begun his career as an ensign piloting an assault shuttle during the war, and was known to be impulsive, brash, and always walking the line between eccentricity and outright rebellion. Everything from the minor annoyance of painting "Who's Your Daddy?" on the side of his otherwise pristine and regulation shuttle, to the far more serious offense of telling off-color, if harmless, jokes about flag officers… consistently… to their faces. Somehow, though, he never crossed the line to do something truly damaging. He followed orders, never showing fear, which was almost unheard of for someone in such a dangerous and thankless job, and never broke anything except his superiors' pompous pride, if any existed.
Then, during the assault on the Tarka colony of Ke'Vorath in 2607, Montoya's wing was ordered to enter the atmosphere and begin their assault run. Each shuttle was bristling with fusion missiles, bombs, and rail guns. Their primary targets on Ke'Vorath were first the missile defense stations at the poles, then all military bases and outposts, followed by ground based dry-docks, and finally, ammo and fuel permitting, major population centers. Unlike the Tarkas, Humans did not make a habit of indiscriminately bombing worlds whenever they could avoid it.
The Ke'Vorath operation was a disaster. Intel had reported the planet defended by a handful of outdated destroyers and three medium sized defense platforms. The Third Fleet had arrived to find themselves facing not only the promised destroyers and platforms, but also a full clutch of six cruisers and the bane of any Human assault force- a Tarka dreadnaught. Nevertheless, Montoya's wing was given the go ahead to proceed with the operation. The carrier destroyers got as close as they could to the planet before launching the shuttles. That too, didn't work as planned. Standard insertion procedure dictated that the shuttles were to launch from a distance of no more than one thousand kilometers from the planet's surface. At Ke'Vorath, the Tarka defense was so fierce that the destroyers were forced to launch the shuttles from 2600 km out, lest they be destroyed before the shuttles could get away at all.
It was a moot point anyway. Every shuttle with the exception of Montoya's was blown to bits by the orbital platforms, even as the Third Fleet hammered at the cruisers and dreadnaught. Montoya, seeing the operation a total failure, diverted his course and tried to make it back to the fleet. At that time, however, he noticed that a round had penetrated the dreadnaught's armor, and he could see right into the engineering section of the massive vessel. He immediately plotted an evasive course for the behemoth, trusting in his ship's small size and general Tarka arrogance to get him there in one piece.
His gambit worked, and allowed him to get within 250 km of the breach in the dreadnaught's hull. Then Montoya let loose with everything he had, firing off all of his ordinance into that one hole, starting with his dual rail guns and working his way up to the fusion missiles. As soon as those were fired off, he turned the shuttle around and flew off as quickly as possible. The dreadnaught's reactor went critical moments later, and the entire proud ship went up in a massive fireball, taking a Human cruiser with it. Montoya himself was caught in the edge of the blast, and barely managed to limp back to his carrier.
His insane actions allowed the Third Fleet the time it needed to withdraw to the node lines at the edge of the system and retreat to friendly territory. It also earned him the nickname "Mad Dog" among officers and enlisted alike. After that, he rose quickly through the ranks, and for the rest of the war, he lived up to his nickname to an extent that appalled the admiralty. His first battle in command of a destroyer saw him charging a Tarka cruiser formation. He came out of it heavily damaged, but with four more kills to his name. So the trend went, through six destroyers in ten years, up until the end of the war in 2619. He didn't lose one of those six ships, but each was in space dock for months, and he was needed on the line, and so was transferred off. The same went for a shockingly loyal crew, who went through great pains to stay with their commander. So the pattern went, his brilliance ensuring his continued use as a ship's commander, and his recklessness in that brilliance ensuring that his superiors were careful to provide him with the smallest liability possible. That trend landed him command of the Solaris, a fine ship outfitted with the latest technologies, important to any front-line fleet, but still only a scout.
Commander Montoya sat in his chair on the bridge of the Solaris, seeing everything, missing nothing, and yet his mind was not even aboard ship. He was considering his mission. It was certainly high-profile, as scout missions go, but he saw little point to it. All they were doing was running a deep scan security sweep at the outskirts of the system. All that was this far away from the primary were two gas giants and a particularly resource-rich asteroid belt, and of course the all-important jump points. They had been making this sweep periodically for the past four months, and the only thing they really did was locate promising asteroids for harvesting. The reality of the matter was that Avalon was a high-publicity, politically risky situation. That warranted putting a semi-famous war hero on system patrol.
Avalon was a system well away from both the Tarka Empire and the Hiver Expanse. There were no enemies here. Humanity had a strong truce with the Liir, and Avalon was the proof. It was the first world to be terraformed to the specifications of more than one species. The two actually had similar environmental requirements in terms of size, temperature, air mixture, etc. In fact the only real difference was that the Liir needed more water. A LOT more water. The plan was for Avalon to follow Earth's layout: three quarters water to one quarter land, rather than the more usual half water/half land of human colonies, or the more extreme ninety percent water that the Liir preferred. The compromise would hopefully help solidify the truce into a more permanent alliance. It was even said that the Liir believed it could be used as a stepping stone to a unified galaxy, where there would be no war among the four great races. Humanity was a little more skeptical, but even they wanted to be able to say they were at peace with someone.
Montoya was brought out of his musings by a confused grunt from his sensor officer. Solaris' sensors were top-of-the-line deep scanners, and detected everything in the system. Or at least as near as possible to everything. There shouldn't be anything out there to confuse a sensor operator.
"What's the problem, lieutenant?" Montoya asked, his voice strong, but not unkind.
"Sir, I'm picking up a fifth jump point. It's further away from the others, but it shouldn't be there at all." This interested Montoya. Jump points didn't just appear out of nowhere.
Montoya got up and walked over to the sensor station, reading over the lieutenant's shoulder.
"Well, let's see," he said, "there's the jump point to Corvus, the one to Dorsai, and there's Shaaymi, and Lonuu. Then there's that one, six hundred thousand kilometers more distant than average, and not following any established node patterns." He considered for a moment, then said, "Run a diagnostic, just to be sure. Then, if it's still there, push the coordinates over to navigation."
Montoya then straightened and walked back to his command chair.
Sitting down, he said, "Nav, I suspect in a few minutes you'll have a new set of coordinates on your screen. When that happens, plot a course and take us there, all ahead one third. Comm, when we make our course adjustment, fire off a communiqué to Avalon control, and tell them we're investigating a sensor anomaly at the system's edge. Send the coordinates as well. We're the only deep scan capable ship in system, and we don't want the high brass to get lost, now do we?" This earned genuine, if polite, chuckles around the bridge.
Ten minutes later, the TAS Solaris adjusted course, and sped of to meet a destiny none of them could imagine…