When the Shadows Fall
Chapter 7
Councillor Taron had been right about the lystheni, Draal realised. The man sitting opposite him was taller and more muscular than any salarian he had ever seen.
"You are Zarin Arrax, head of the Arrax Trading Company?" Draal asked.
"Yes." The voice was deeper, slower than Draal expected. "And you are Captain Draal, Special Tactics and Reconnaissance. A Council Spectre in a place where the Councils' writ does not run."
"If you know who I am, you probably know why I'm here." Draal responded.
"I imagine," Arrax returned, "that you are somewhat annoyed at our attempt to assassinate you on Babylon 5. Five thousand credits that job cost us. I'm glad you survived."
"I'm surprised you pass off the loss of that amount so lightly." Draal gestured around the dingy office they sat in. "Unless this is what humans call 'shabby chic'?"
Arrax gave a grating laugh. "This is Omega, Captain. If you are going to flaunt wealth here, you have to be Aria. Anyone else becomes a target."
"For who?" Draal asked.
"Everyone." Arrax replied. "The human philosopher Diogenes would have wasted a lot of lamp oil here!"
The reference escaped Draal, but he ignored it for now. "So why are you glad I survived?" He wanted to know.
Arrax shrugged. "If the attempt had succeeded, you would have been beneath our notice. But it did not, and thus you are judged worthy to join us."
"To join the Unity Movement?" Draal enquired. "That seems a little extreme, for an organisation dedicated to Galactic peace!"
The grating laugh again. "The Unity Movement? They are a tool, pawns to be sacrificed in the larger game!" Arrax told him. "No, Captain, we are offering you the chance to become part of HYDRA!"
"And what, exactly, is HYDRA?" Draal demanded.
"Nothing more nor less than the future of the Galaxy!" Arrax announced. "It began on Earth, thousands of years ago, when some humans realised they were superior to others. Later, it was given a form and a name by a man named Johann Schmidt. HYDRA made many attempts to correct the course of human history, but the inferior were always too many. But now, the time has come. Soon, the whole Galaxy will stand ready to accept our rule!"
"You're working for human supremacists?" This was a shock to Draal, even knowing what he did of lystheni history.
Arrax shook his head. "Not human supremacists. HYDRA does not discriminate. It seeks out those who are superior among every race. Those born to lead, to command, those who are above petty morality and recognise only superior ability and the will to use it. Male, female, salarian, krogan, even hanar, it does not matter!
"Like all Spectres, Captain, you have superior abilities. There is so much more you could do, were you not bound by the restraints the Council puts upon even its elite agents. HYDRA would remove those limits, allow you to exercise your judgment as you see fit, to dispose of the venial, the dishonest, or those who are simply a waste of skin, and all without the dreary necessity of waiting for them to commit the inevitable wrongdoing.
"More, there are your people to consider. You are a Warrior-caste minbari. Surely like others of your caste, you chafe at being forced to accept foolish decisions made by slow-witted Workers and milksop Religious? Surely you know, deep in your heart, how your whole people would benefit from having the leadership and discipline of your caste imposed upon them?
"That is why we lystheni joined HYDRA. We are physically superior to other salarians. More, we live by a strict code and discipline while they scurry about obeying the whims of indulged and amoral women. Our people need us, and the changes we will bring to their corrupt and decadent society.
"What do you say, Captain?"
"I take it," Draal said, "that if I give the wrong answer, the two gentlemen standing behind me – yes, I heard them creep in – will make sure I don't leave here alive?"
"We are not quite ready to enter the public domain."Arrax explained. "If you were to give your word that you would not report anything I have said, then I personally would be prepared to let you go, We are both men of honour. But I suspect you must consider your duty to the Council as well, so sadly, you are correct."
Draals' long legs shot out, pushing Arrax' desk back to pin the salarian against the wall. The same movement tipped Draals' own chair over backwards. He rolled clear to come between his would-be assassins. Unlimbering his fighting pike, he swept the legs out from under one of them, then turned to the other. He rose as he thrust, adding the power of his legs to a strike that punched deep into his targets' abdomen. The salarian coughed up a gout of green blood and went down, Draal turned and crushed the skull of the other, who was scrambling to his feet.
Arrax had managed to push the desk away and was standing, pistol levelled. Draal hurled his pike like a javelin at the mans' face and as Arrax twisted aside to avoid the missile, Draal drew his own gun and fired once. Arrax slumped to the floor, bleeding from a wound in the belly.
Draal moved to stand over him. "Now, Mr Arrax, I think a quick shot of medi-gel is in order, followed by a long, quiet chat, superior man to superior man, yes?"
Arrax seemed to be grinding his teeth for a moment, then he spat "Hail HYDRA!", went rigid, and collapsed. Draal felt for a pulse and found none. His omni-tool confirmed death by fast-acting poison.
Minbari seldom swear, but the Warrior caste do have a soldiers' vocabulary, and Draal availed himself of a few select items from it. That over, he collected his fighting pike, downloaded as much data as he could from Arrax' computer, and left. Incidents of violence were far from rare on Omega, he knew. The Talons might make a cursory investigation before putting it down to a business deal gone sour.
Besides, Draal knew that he would have been identified as soon as he came aboard the station, and word about his Spectre status would have gone out. Aria T'loak had learned the hard way not to mess with Spectres, so it was unlikely that anyone would view his leaving with anything but relief.
The quarian frigate signalled Traffic Control on Nova Roma with the usual polite request for an orbital slot and clearance to send a shuttle groundside. The response, from a stern-faced human with close-cropped hair, wearing a red uniform, was unintelligible, but clearly unfriendly:
"Cave aliena navis!" He barked. "Hoc est planeta hominum. Hic non receperint vos. Statim relinquere!"
"Say what?" Mordin wanted to know. "Is your translator offline?"
"No, but theirs is." The Comms Officer said. "Give me a minute." She pulled up an extra display or two and got to work. "Keelah!" She said finally. "I had to go to the extranet to find the language. It's an ancient human one called Latin, only used for ceremonial purposes for most. Seems it was the language of the old Empire these guys base their society on, and they use it all the time. Guess they don't talk much, hey?
"Anyway, here's the translation, as close as I can make it: Beware alien ship. This is a human planet. You are not welcome here. Leave at once. Friendly people."
"Not so much." The Tactical Officer warned them. "This planet has more defensive platforms in orbit than Palaven! And every one in range of us just came online!
"We're being targeted from all sides. I'd say they really don't want us here!"
"Orders, Major?" The Captain asked.
"Come about and withdraw." Lorn ordered. "Nice and easy, let's not make anyone jump while they've got a finger on the firing button. We'll have to find another way."
"Major!" The Comms Officer called. "I have a message coming through on the QEC. High priority, encrypted, from the surface. Sir, it's on a Spectre eyes-only channel!"
"Patch it through." Lorn said, heading for the QEC room.
Quantum Entanglement Communication can't be traced, has no known range limit, and is usually only used for military or high-level diplomatic communications. Special Tactics and Reconnaissance have their own reserved QEC channels which are programmed into every Council race warship as well as Spectre offices and safe-houses. So whoever was calling either knew there was a Spectre aboard this ship, or was taking a chance.
The holographic image was of a human, middle-sized and stocky, with short-cropped, grizzled brown hair and a square-jawed, determined face. He appeared to be wearing a short red tunic with some kind of white robe draped around and over him
"Captain Jack Hallinger, Special Tactics and Recon." He introduced himself. "Known locally as Marcus Quintillius Hallina. Excuse the outfit, it's what we wear down here. I take it I'm addressing Major Lorn'Reegar vas Tirimon?"
"You are." Lorn replied. "Lucky guess or is someone talking out of school?"
"Neither." Hallinger told him. "I'm on an extended undercover mission here. It was me who reported that the Night Watch are flavour of the month on this shithole, so when Councillor Alenko asked you to look into them, he briefed me. We both figured you'd be heading this way, and we knew you wouldn't be allowed to land here.
"We need to talk, Major. I'm sending you the coordinates of a station we can meet on. I'll see you there tomorrow. I can't say any more for now. The Praetorians can't detect this signal, but excessive power drain will get flagged up, so I have to go.
"Hallinger out."
"Good news?" Mordin asked as they headed back to the crew deck.
"Depends on your definition of 'good'." Lorn told him. "There's a Spectre working undercover down there, and he's arranged a meet."
"You want to handle it yourself, or shall I come along?" Mordin wanted to know.
"I may need somebody to watch my back." Lorn allowed. "Spectres have been known to turn….
"While I'm thinking about it, Mordin, why are you still here? Especially after what happened to Falere?"
"Sick of me already?" Mordin asked.
"Not me personally." Lorn said. "But the quartermaster and cook on this ship are going crazy trying to scare up enough levo food to keep a krogan from eating the rest of the crew!"
"Hurr, hurr, hurr." Krogan laughter always makes its' producer sound dim-witted, something very few krogan actually are. Then Mordin went on.
"I killed the thresher maw, you know."
"In your Rite of Passage?" Lorn asked.
"Yeah." Grunt affirmed. "Just like my father before me, and Uncle Grunt after him. A lot of people say that Grunt only succeeded because Shepard was part of his krantt, but when you ask them about me, they say 'like father, like son', or 'chip off the old block'. My brothers both survived the maw, but I killed mine. So I'm supposed to be the new Urdnot Wrex, the mighty, fearless clan-leader.
"That didn't suit me, and it didn't suit Dad. My grandfather tried to kill Dad, and Dad had to kill him in self-defence. That's why he left Tuchanka for so long, didn't go back until Shepard showed him that nothing's impossible. He went back to try and unite our people, and with the genophage gone, he's succeeding. He could live another thousand years, for all anyone knows, and so could I. No krogan we know of ever died of old age. If we weren't so keen on getting into fights, we might live forever.
"Now I don't want to fight Dad, and he doesn't want to fight me. He's a lot better leader than I would be, I'm too young still, don't know enough. But we krogan thrive on challenge. It's what drove the Ancients to create a civilisation almost before the asari did, but it's also what brought us down. Mom says we made life too easy for ourselves, so we looked for challenge in each other and it ended in a nuclear war that reduced Tuchanka to a wasteland and the krogan to a bunch of warring tribes.
"When the salarians uplifted us, they gave us the rachni as a challenge, and that worked for a while. But after they were gone, we took on the whole damn Galaxy and ended up with the genophage.
"So now, my generation are looking for new challenges. We're becoming scientists, engineers, explorers. Me, I was fascinated by literature – novels, plays, poetry. Everything the Ancients did, apart from some statues and wall-paintings, is gone. So I set myself the challenge of studying the literature of other races, and using that knowledge to create a literature for my people. I chose to start with humans because they have the most diverse heritage.
"But in doing that, I kinda forgot about being a krogan. Joining up with you and Falere was fun at first. I'm good at fighting, always have been. Also, I admired you both. Quarian history is almost as bad as krogan, you came within a breath of extinction and survived without a home, on the edge of Galactic society, for centuries. But now here you are, Lorn, a Council Spectre, and a damned good one! As to Falere, her own kind thought of her as a monster. She could never be a mother or a bond-mate, all she had was a monastery or being hunted down. Yet after all that, she was determined to do some good in the Galaxy, and she died doing it.
"That's what the turning point was for me, Lorn. When Falere was gunned down that way – out of pure viciousness, it didn't achieve anything – I felt rage. For the first time I felt the krogan rage my ancestors spoke of. So now I'm going to do what krogan do. I'm going to take my krantt – that's you, Lorn – and I'm going to hunt down the bastard who murdered my friend and I'm going to kill him!"
Matriarch Carina was a pureblood, and proud of it. In a society where exogamy and interracial breeding were positively encouraged, that made her a standout. It also made it a surprise that she had enough followers to earn her status. But as Carina herself was at pains to explain, it wasn't that she disliked other races. She respected and admired them entirely. She had been a Commando in the Battle of London, and had fought beside humans, turians, krogan and salarians, all of whom had earned her respect.
Carina just didn't think it was right to expect asari to mate with anyone but their own kind. She didn't like the prejudice against purebloods. It wasn't as if asari couples produced deformed idiots, after all. But what would be the consequences of the wholesale adoption of alien characteristics into the asari? You might be arguing with a perfectly normal-looking asari and suddenly find yourself on the floor or staring down the barrel of a gun because her father was a krogan! No, if the Asari Culture were not to fall into chaos, the government must be in the hands of purebloods. If the asari were to remain asari, a stand had to be taken.
Carina had tried. She had gathered enough like-minded followers to earn the status of Matriarch. A few small communities were doing things in the way she recommended, with senior positions closed to all but purebloods. But most of asari society was too open and accepting of difference.
"We're asari, not turians, Carina." They would tell her. "We celebrate diversity, we don't demand uniformity. We're all born of the same universe, after all."
Which was all fine and dandy, Carina mused, until your precious diversity blew your culture apart! Asari society could only remain asari if it were under the guidance and control of the pure-blooded. If she couldn't persuade them, she might have to take more direct action.
That decision had not come easily to Carina, but the human, Hugo Schmidt, had explained matters to her. He had shown her how, even in the short history of humanity, what he called 'mongrelisation' had destroyed great civilisations. How a man named Adolf Hitler had tried to create a society based upon selflessness, discipline and service to a greater ideal, but had been crushed by the individualistic greed of capitalism on the one hand, and the totalitarianism of Communism on the other.
"They will come for you, the mongrelised, as soon as they realise your ideas are a threat to their power." He had said. "You must be ready to defend yourselves. And there is an old human saying that attack is the best form of defence. HYDRA can provide you with the supplies and resources you need. We can also provide the support of members of other species who share our ideals of purity and service to the greater good."
So Carina had made her plans. She had gathered those she could trust, those she knew would be ready to act. They were here, now, seated around this room, waiting. Carina had received a message today through a channel only HYDRA knew. A Messenger was coming, one who would start them on the journey to the renewal of asari society, in blood if necessary.
The Messenger was tall, female, cloaked and hooded. She stopped in the middle of the room and spoke in clear asari tones. "You are Matriarch Carina?"
"I am." Carina replied.
"Are all here to be trusted?" The hooded figure demanded.
"I trust them all." Carina said firmly.
"Then it is decided!" Declared the messenger, and threw off her cloak.
That was when Carina saw the extent of her folly, her arrogance. Too late, and as the Justicar Samaras' Warp attack tore through her biotic shield like tissue paper, Carina realised that she was no more than an infection, and that all healthy living things have antibodies.
Samara had glided through the melee like a shadow. There had been veteran Commandos among the group, powerful and skilled biotics, but none had been a match for the Justicar. This nest of vipers had been cleansed, but there was more to do. There was always more to do.
Hallingers' coordinates took them to an abandoned mining station deep in the systems' asteroid field. Or at any rate, one that looked abandoned. Scanning showed that while the outer sections remained dark and cold, the extensive internal parts -where the refineries and processing plants had once been – were still active. There were also numerous ships in the area, not exactly hidden, but discreetly parked among the asteroids.
They were clearly expected, as a docking signal was immediately broadcast. Lorn and Mordin took the shuttle out and were guided to a carefully-concealed docking bay, where a courteous hanar directed them to where "your meeting" was to take place.
To get there, they passed through an area very similar to the Presidium Commons or Zakera Markets on B5. A place lined with shops, restaurants and so on. The crowds milling around were from various races. The volus and hanar were there in numbers, along with a few asari and salarians. But the majority were human. Some were obviously from various non-Alliance colonies, but most were clearly from Nova Roma. Men with short-cropped hair wearing knee length tunics, either in various shades of blue, or occasionally in red, and sandals that laced up to the knee. The wiry quarian and his massive companion earned a few curious looks, but nothing threatening. Among the other humans there were a number of military-looking types, so maybe there was nothing to be surprised about.
Their directions took them to an office building and ultimately to a spacious corner office where Hallinger was waiting for them. He welcomed them cordially and gestured to some seats set around a low table.
"Come in, take a load off!" He said cheerily. "There's snacks and drinks over there, help yourselves. I made sure to get some turian and quarian stuff, so you'll be fine, Major. The advantages of being a Patrician – I can get almost anything I want. I've also got the air scrubbers turned up, so you should be OK to take your mask off."
Mordin made a beeline for the food, of course, and amassed a huge plateful. Lorn, with instilled quarian frugality, contented himself with a fruit juice and a sandwich.
They sat down, and Lorn began by asking. "What is this place?"
"This place doesn't exist, not officially." Hallinger told him. "The law here forbids any Nova Roman from trading, dealing with or even speaking to a non-human. Trading with other human colonies is also restricted and heavily-taxed.
"But this area of space isn't all that rich, you know. An Empire looking to expand needs resources, an aristocratic upper class wants luxuries -exotic ones, preferably – and merchants don't like paying taxes any more than they have to. So this old mining station was bought up by a joint volus-hanar venture as a place where discreet trading can happen. As long as nobody overdoes things, the Senate ignores it – those who know about it, anyway.
"People who come here are used to seeing aliens – even the occasional krogan – and arms deals get done here, so nobody worries about military types.
"That said, Major, I did think you'd come alone. Who's your hungry friend?"
"Oh, sorry!" Lorn said. "This is Urdnot Mordin. He's been backing me up on this job. He's as effective as the average army, takes up less space, but he does require more feeding!"
"Urdnot Mordin?" Hallinger queried. "The Urdnot Mordin? The one who wrote Love, Loss and the Genophage?"
Mordin contrived to look embarrassed. "Yeah." He muttered. "That was my first book. It was just a collection of interviews and anecdotes, and I wasn't much more than a kid when I wrote it. I didn't know anyone other than krogan ever read it."
"It made the best-seller lists on Earth and Thessia!" Hallinger told him. "My mother and sister both love it, they cried all the way through it."
Mordin muttered something and addressed himself more attentively to his food. Hallinger shook his head and grinned, then turned to Lorn.
"Right, you're going to need some background. Nova Roma was founded by people who admired the Romans, an ancient Empire that ruled most of Europe centuries ago. Do you know where Europe is?"
"I've been to Earth." Lorn said. "I've even visited Rome and seen some of the ruins and stuff. I know the basics."
"OK." Hallinger said. "OK, the current Imperator, Gaius Messanius, is an all-out human supremacist. It's he who put the laws in place forbidding any contact or trade with aliens. Before that, there'd been a special enclave where alien merchants could land and do business. He convinced the Senate and most of the Patrician class that the loss to our economy would be negligible.
"Predictably, that turned out to be untrue, but it wasn't the patricians who felt the bite, it was the Plebeians and the Proles, who were expected to increase production without putting prices up. Now in the old Roman empire, on Earth, they had slaves. Here on Nova Roma, they have mechs running on non-networked VIs."
"Smart." Lorn allowed. "Nobody wants another Morning War!"
"Right." Hallinger agreed. "Well, in order to keep the costs down, the Plebs started using more mechs and less Proles, so we end up with Proles not working and living on the small allowance the Senate gives out to the indigent and sick. They're not happy, because every Prole wants to become a Pleb, and to do that you have to make enough money to buy some land. But Proles don't get a vote, even for the Tribunes, so nobody cares, right?
"But then the mechs start to wear out. See, the Plebs kept mechs to do the heavy and dangerous work, but paid Proles to do the rest. So if a farmer, say, owned five mechs, he'd maybe only use three of them at a time. But now, he's using all of them, all the time. Maintenance cycles get lengthened, and the work gets done in a rush so the mech can get back to work. Patching instead of proper repairs, and so on. So now the mechs are failing.
"The problem is, that we're also running out of spare parts and second-hand mechs. Which would be fine if not for the no-contact, no-trade laws. No non-Alliance colonies manufacture mechs, about half of them won't even use them, and trading with the Alliance means having to make political concessions. Basically we'd have to give the Proles the vote and allow anyone to stand for Senate, which is against everything Nova Roma stands for. So if we want new mechs and spare parts we need to trade with the volus or hanar. But that's against the law.
"So the Plebs go to the Tribunes, and the Tribunes go to the Senate. But here has to be a minimum number of Tribunes, all bringing the same complaint, in order to force the Senate to act. Thirty or more to force a vote, all fifty to make the Senate change the law without a vote. Messanius knows this, and he's already brought the Night Watch in. By a mixture of force and bribery, he keeps the number of Tribunes complaining below the trigger number, while the Night Watch pick out the Plebs who are keenest on alien trade and make examples of them.
"So now the Plebs have to hire Proles, and because they're doing stuff that only mechs did before, they want more pay. Prices are going up and things are getting short.
"Then Messanius brings in a Decree that all Proles who have less than a certain amount in savings, or who earn less than a given amount, or who have debts above a certain amount, have to be enslaved. The Plebs don't like that, because slaves are more expensive than employees. You only have to pay an employee, and you can fire him if he doesn't work out. A slave has to be fed, clothed, housed and kept fit for work, you have to hire overseers, and a slave that won't work can't be sold off because word gets around and people won't buy him. So they go to the Tribunes again, and the Tribunes – those that still take their job seriously -speak to the Senate.
"The Senate has a month to challenge a decree and if that happens they get three tries to vote it down. Messanius is trying to use the Night Watch to intimidate the Senators, but that doesn't work because each Senatorial family patronises one or more Equestrian -military - family who have their own armed and trained 'retainers'. So the Watch are getting their asses kicked.
"If the Decree falls, so does Messanius , everyone holds him responsible for the mess we're in. There's a successor waiting in the wings, promising to restore interstellar trade and the economy while maintaining the integrity of Nova Roma. Also to turf out the Night Watch. His name's Lucius Gallinus, and he has enough support in the Senate and among the Tribunes to swing it if this vote goes against Messanius, which it almost certainly will."
"Well, that doesn't sound too bad." Lorn noted.
"You'd think, wouldn't you?" Hallinger said. "But here's some surveillance footage taken at Gallinus' house yesterday."
The images on the screen showed a tall man with short, iron-grey hair and the profile of a hawk, wearing a purple tunic, in earnest but obviously cordial conversation with another, even taller, man with blond hair and hard, even features, wearing a black uniform. The man in the tunic was obviously Gallinus. The other…
"Hugo Schmidt!" Lorn breathed. "The head of the Night Watch! Doesn't Gallinus know who he's dealing with? Schmidt's been all over the extranet!"
"No extranet on Nova Roma, it's forbidden on pain of five years in the eezo mines, pretty much a death sentence." Hallinger said. "Everybody here thinks the Night Watch was started by Messanius himself, but he actually got the idea from a man called Mordenius, who disappeared shortly afterwards.
"This Schmidt character, from what my people in Gallius' household tell me, claims to represent an organisation called HYDRA, which is some kind of all-species elitist alliance looking to gain power among all the Council races and the associates."
"And here we were thinking the Night Watch was just a front for HYDRA." Mordin said. "Smoke and mirrors."
"There's more." Hallinger said. "I was hoping you could tell me something about this fellow! All we have is a name – Ulkesh. It was just a quick shot, he's very careful to stay out of sight, but we've enhanced it as best we can."
The detail was different, and the colour, but the configuration was unmistakable.
"That," Lorn said, "is a vorlon. One came to Babylon Five with the minbari delegation. He's called Kosh and he lives in the Minbari Embassy. That thing he wears, an Encounter Suit they call it, is a different colour and style from this one, but obviously they're the same thing.
"Now that's odd, because according to what we've been told, there are only fifty or so of these vorlons, they only have one ship, and all of them apart from Kosh live on Minbar!
"What's more, Kosh is heavily involved with the Unity Movement, which seems to me to be the exact opposite of HYDRA and the Night Watch.
"What do you reckon, Mordin, more smoke and mirrors?"
"If it gets any more complicated, it's gonna turn into a soap opera!" Mordin grunted.
"What's a soap opera?" Lorn wanted to know.
"Form of human vid entertainment." Hallinger told him. "Don't ask!"
Jeffrey Sinclair was running for his life. A few minutes before, he'd woken in his room at the seminary to blazing lights and an indescribable noise. Stumbling to the window, he'd been shocked into full wakefulness by the sight of a massive Reaper vessel touching down nearby. Father Superior had thought that the seminarys' isolated position, far from centres of population, would keep them safe, but it seemed he was mistaken.
Sinclair pushed his feet into his running shoes and threw a jacket on over his pyjamas. He could already hear the screams of teachers and students coming from the front of the building. No point running that way. He opened his window and scrambled onto the outer sill. There was a tree just to the left, and with a desperate, adrenalin-fuelled leap, he made it to the branches. He'd last climbed this old giant when he was thirteen, and he'd gained a few kilos since then, but the branches still supported him. Not knowing what else to do, Sinclair scrambled down and took off across country, wanting nothing more than to put as much distance between himself and the Reaper as possible.
But adrenalin can only carry you so far, and while the seminary encouraged healthy exercise, he was not at the peak of fitness. Eventually he had to stop, winded and with a burning stitch in his side. Then the Husks came, Reaper-created abominations that had once been human, loping out of the nearby woods toward him. This was the end.
Then there was a light in the sky. The Husks stopped and looked up, Sinclair followed their gaze. Some kind of ship hung in the air above them. It looked almost like a Reaper, with a long hull and arms at the bow. But this ship looked somehow organic, like a living thing, and the limbs looked like tentacles, rather than the jointed appendages of a Reaper.
As they all stared, the ship opened fire. Blasts of bright energy that vapourised the Husks closest to Sinclair. As the rest turned to flee, a form seemed to come though the hull of the ship and descend toward him. A form no theology student could mistake. Tall, slender, white-robed with magnificent wings and a face too beautiful to be human. The angel settled in front of him and put out a hand. There was a blaze of white light….
Sinclair was awake, heart pounding, in his apartment on Babylon Five. He lay there, confused. It was the old dream, the one that had pursued him for decades, the one that chimed with his memories of that night…Until now.
Always before he had awoken as the Husks came at him. The last image of the dream had been his last waking memory until the day he found himself joining a battle. But tonight, the dream had gone further than he remembered, the strange ship and the angelic figure were nothing he could remember encountering in waking life.
As he lay trying to make sense of things, his door buzzer sounded insistently. He checked his clock – three in the morning? It must be urgent, but why not use the comm system?
He climbed out of bed, pulled on his robe, went to the door and opened it. The figure on the threshold was the last one he had expected to see.
"It is time." Kosh said. "Come. Now."