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Everything's gone to hell.
Susan Ivanova had seen dozens of upheavals in her life; political battles which as time passed proved to be nothing more than little blips, problems at school, work, at the Academy, or even during her duties on Babylon 5, the Earth-Minbari war was perhaps one of the worst examples of a mind-shattering upheaval, especially when Ganya her brother was killed in one of the fleet battles and her father's heart was broken as a result and he had gone mad when he discovered she was joining Earthforce herself, not just to do her bit but because she had longed to join the service and make something out of her life.
But it was hard for her to imagine how quickly things could just spiral out of control; for the last year since President Santiago's assassination - Ivanova had never kept it a secret how she wasn't enamoured with the former president, believing that a strong leader should have a strong chin but Santiago lacked one, but clearly, something about the man had pulled her without her realising it - so many things had happened that resulted in an avalanche.
The policies Clark was pushing through the Senate were bad enough since they were the total opposite of what Santiago was trying to achieve while it had still existed before he dissolved it, which was a blow for her own image of the Earth Alliance that she loved, the fact a President, the man who was sworn to uphold the law and spirit of the Earth Alliance constitution would do such a thing.
The establishment of the Ministries of Peace and Truth, and the creation of Nightwatch… when Susan learnt of the paramilitary organisation, she had researched it, and what she'd discovered frightened her. Susan and her family were practicing Jews, and her family had passed down diaries detailing fears of the Nazis invading Russia during World War 2, knowing the stories of what the Germans were doing to their fellow Jews would happen to them; arrests, their businesses being unfairly closed down, forced to undergo the humiliation of that yellow star stitched into their clothes and being segregated from everyone else.
Sure, the Nightwatch was not the same thing - Clark disliked aliens, everything he had said and done over the years had made that brutally clear - but there were too many similarities between Nightwatch and the Nazi SS for Susan to accept, and she hoped there were Jews between here and on Earth, serving on ships and outposts and living on colonies like Proxima 3 who could see the increasingly fascistic attitudes back home and felt disgusted it was happening again.
But other things had happened as well; Dr Jacob's escape and the revelation Clark hadn't been suffering from was a lie. That thing she had seen while Sheridan was busy with that bitch from Nightwatch with Draal's help which had been given to Earth, and had led to a host of problems before Sheridan was forced to destroy that Shadow vessel in Jupiter's gravity. If the news of the ship hadn't reached Babylon 5 through the Rangers, Susan wondered if Clark would have been impeached and kicked out and imprisoned. She hoped so. She only hoped he hadn't greased the laws and twisted them around all over the place like they were one giant mass of pretzel dough for him to use, but she wouldn't have put it past Clark, who had already manipulated the laws and found ways around them.
All the things that had been happening on Earth - those posters saying 'TRAITORS CAN'T HIDE' and Nightwatch members spying and actively causing problems and making arrests on people who only had opinions, that was happening back home on Earth before Clark declared Martial Law. Susan knew there were other things and she had given John, Marcus, Michael and Stephen the rundown on the goings-on such as the unlawful arrests of people who were called traitors or something unbelievable like that when their crimes were either not paying a fine, forgetting to pay a bill or even having more money they should. Michael wasn't surprised; he had said with the kind of environment Nightwatch was promoting with Clark's sick approval, people like this were bound to come out of the woodwork, people who were jealous of their coworkers and neighbours for no real reason and now, thanks to Clark's Nightwatch, they had the perfect opportunity to get revenge on perceived wrongs.
Susan and the others didn't like it, especially Stephen, but she was more pragmatic than the doctor, who believed that the Earth Alliance would never do that. He was right, the Alliance under a different President would never issue those kinds of orders, but Susan had seen more than enough of the dark side of human nature know, buried beneath the surface, this kind of behaviour was inevitable.
Sheridan liked it even less but there was nothing he could do about this, and truthfully Susan doubted that right now Sheridan wanted to do anything after what happened in the Solar system to make things worse, but truthfully she knew the man well enough to know he was trying to find a way of bypassing the order for Nightwatch to virtually take over everything.
She hoped it worked.
If the Earth Alliance was going to hell with the Shadows in the background, and now the Centauri had conquered and re-enslaved the Narns and some of the other powers were fighting themselves, then the entire galaxy was in hell. Everything had gone to hell.
