A Place to Call Home
By Terri Osborne
terri@terriosborne.com
Part 20
All Babylon 5 characters and settings belong to JMS, Warner Brothers, TNT and anyone else with legitimate legal claim. No infringement of copyright is intended by this work. Only a few select characters are mine, and should the Great Maker need them, or anyone similar to them, I can probably be bought off with a story credit. ;-)
Even though this covers the same time period and the same major event, no infringement upon J. Gregory Keyes' novels is intended. Though, I will draw upon them for some background information.
Content Warning: [AC] [AL]
Anything encased in * these * is telepathic speech.
Spoilers through Season 5 and the Psi Corps novels.
And thanks to Sarah, Sharon and Keith, my eagle-eyed beta readers! Virtual boxes of Godivas to all of you!
----------
April 26, 2264
"This appears to be the
weakest point in the supply line," Alina said, pointing to a spot on the map just
outside of the blip corresponding to the Syria Planum facility. "A hit there should
take it down for at least a week. Probably more like two."
Andrew stared at the map.
"I don't get it," he said with a slow shake of his head. "Why
don't we just hit the transport tubes and get it over with? They'll be isolated
for at least a month that way."
Alina sighed. "And
precisely how do you propose Susan get the Grin masks to us, Andrew? Marsdome Parcel
Service? We can't stage the full raid on Syria Planum without them."
"Garibaldi can-"
"No, Andrew," Lyta
interrupted sharply. "She's right. We can't hit transit lines. There's
just too much of a risk to the innocents."
Andrew stabbed at the display
with a stylus. "Right here. These tubes don't run between two and six in the
morning. No innocents."
Alina turned toward him,
fighting hard to keep her patience. "And why do you think that is, hmm?"
She was met by an angry,
confused glare.
Squaring her shoulders, Alina
took a step closer. "Maintenance. That's when they do upkeep on the system. Last
I checked, some of those maintenance workers were actually on our side."
Andrew's face fell.
Alina's hand went to his
shoulder. "What is it, Andrew? You usually think these things through much more than
that."
He shook his head.
*Nothing.*
*I know a lie when I feel
it. I'm not going away that easily.*
The image of a small,
exquisitely adorable girl with shoulder-length golden hair and blue eyes that literally
sparkled leapt into her mind. *It's your daughter, isn't it?*
Sadness, regret, the pain of
loss.
Andrew ever-so-slightly
nodded. *Today was her birthday.*
Alina's entire being sank
with him, memories of losing Will, and finding Marcus beyond her true reach were open
wounds in her soul. Psi Corps wasn't responsible for them, but she still understood
the pain. *Bester's going to pay, Andrew. They all are. When we're done
there won't be anything left of the Corps. We'll start from the ground up, I
promise.*
*I know. It's just
sometimes I-*
*Want to grab a nuke, run
off on your own and do something monumentally stupid?*
Andrew nodded, then turned and
strode away from the conference table.
When he was outside of hearing
range, Lyta whispered, "I didn't want to listen, but I heard. I don't like
it, Alina. Just because it's his daughter's-"
"Just because today was
his daughter's birthday? Do you mourn on Byron's birthday, Lyta?"
The redhead's voice
slowly raised in volume. "Now, don't bring him-"
"He wasn't your
flesh and blood, Lyta. You loved him, yes, but it was only for a little while. You told me
that you were raised by the Corps. How old were you when they came? Four? Five? You cannot
possibly understand what it's like to really have a family."
Lyta's indignance was
palpable. "Oh, and you can?"
Alina closed her eyes, forcing
a calm she did not truly feel over herself.
Andrew's behavior she
could comprehend. She had personally organized a small memorial service for the Rangers
that had been under her command on White Star 22 after hearing of William Cole's
death.
Losing someone who had been
close enough to be family had been difficult enough, but losing a wife, a daughter? No, it
would take months, if not years, for Andrew to bounce back from that big a loss. He may
have seemed fine, but underneath that exterior was a man with a mission. Vengeance could
motivate the weakest of hearts. She understood that, the need to make things right, the
need to grieve.
Grief made sense.
Lyta, however, was beginning
to give her concern. Alarm bells were going off in Alina's mind, alarm bells that she
had hoped to never hear again. She prayed to as many deities as she could think of that
for once, she was wrong.
With a deep breath, she opened
her eyes on the redhead and stared deeply into those dark hazel eyes. She backed the stare
with a slight telepathic restraint. When she was certain that it was working, Alina said,
"More than you'll ever know, Lyta. I'll go talk to Andrew. Can you have our
ground people go with the attack as is?"
Lyta sighed.
"Attack at dawn. Not a
second before. If they need any further instructions, they can find me."
Lyta remained still. At the
precise moment when Alina was beginning to think her wishes weren't going to be
followed, the redhead turned and stalked away.
Bloody hell. In
Valen's name, I can't handle both of them. Alina searched the corridors
surrounding the conference room. Might as well deal with the lesser of two evils. Okay,
if I'd just had memories like those dredged up, where would I go?
It only took seconds for her
to decide. Sprinting off down a side tunnel, she sensed him within seconds.
He was precisely where she had
expected he would be, staring through the tiny window beside the airlock door. He
didn't move as she approached, just continued to gaze at the coppery Martian surface.
A quick inspection of the rack
beside the tunnel wall found breather masks for every surface-worthy coat there. Going
outside without even those would be akin to suicide.
And he, of all people,
would know that.
"Don't worry,
I'm not going out there."
"I know."
Despair rolled off of him in
waves. "I just . . . . Alina, I don't like that plan of attack. It's not
going to do us any long-term good. We need to hit those transit tubes."
"Long-term good?"
she asked, walking up beside him. Placing a hand on his shoulder, she attempted to project
comfort in that touch. "Andrew, we need to get those masks from Susan, otherwise
everything she has gone through will be for nothing. After she gets out of there,
we'll reconsider your idea. It should only be two or three more weeks."
Andrew grumbled.
Nudging him telepathically,
she said, "Can you wait that long?"
He slowly turned toward her,
blue eyes troubled and just the slightest bit angry. "I'll have to, won't
I?"
----------
May 1, 2264
"How's it going,
Ivanova? What's the progress?"
Garibaldi grinned from the
viewscreen like the cat that ate the canary. Susan wished that she could share that smile,
but the dull throb in her head was blocking any cheer. "Best I can tell, we're
about halfway there. I've got two leads taken care of, but there are still two more I
want to check out. Unless something else shows up, give me a couple more weeks. Everything
should be wrapped up by the thirteenth."
"Good to hear it,"
Michael replied. "The Corps isn't giving you grief?"
Susan smiled thinly at Talia
Winters' reflection in the viewscreen. "Nothing that can't be dealt
with."
"Diplomatic, as always. I
knew we put the right person in charge of this. Keep me updated."
With a curt nod, Susan
terminated the connection.
"Who are your other two
leads?" Talia asked in a silken voice that, in another time, would have sent a
pleasurable shiver down Susan's spine. "I'll have them brought in for
questioning."
Susan stared at the blonde.
After ten days of working with the Talia that Psi Corps had implanted years before, she
still despised the woman. This Talia was nothing like the woman she had loved, a fact that
had caused endless amounts of grief in the last few days. Innuendo flew from Talia's
mouth with impunity in a vain attempt to cause strong emotion and breach her telepathic
defenses. If she'd been without Alina's blocks, it might have worked.
The innuendo did cause the
strong emotion; that much was, to Susan's chagrin, certain.
"You could allow
me to help you, Susan. Mister Bester did assign me to you, after all."
"It's not going to
work, Miss Winters," Susan said, putting special emphasis on the form of address.
"This new personality of yours is light on the brains if you think it is."
The blonde feigned innocence.
"What isn't going to work?"
Susan sank slowly onto the
sofa, forcing every ounce of emotion from her features. "Trying to get near me again
to get the secrets of this investigation."
One black-gloved hand spread
across Talia Winters' chest. "Whoever said that was wrong, Susan."
Locking eyes with Talia, Susan
stared coldly. Her surface thoughts were bland, emotionless. Behind the blocks, however,
Susan was seething.
It had taken every ounce of
control not to kill Talia Winters whenever they were in the same room. Scan after scan
after unauthorized (not to mention fruitless) scan had been attempted by the woman since
Susan's arrival, yet Talia hadn't breached the blocks that Alina had installed.
Susan was definitely going to
owe the Ranger a big favor at some point, and soon.
She opened her mouth to speak,
and closed it as she felt Miss Winters try a scan once again. It wasn't nearly as
sophisticated a scan as the numerous attempts Andrew had made. Where his had been
serpentine, insidious, this held all of the subtlety of a battering ram. Folding her arms
over her chest, Susan leaned back against the sofa and decided to let the blonde do her
worst.
Minutes seemed like hours.
Beads of sweat glistened on Talia's fair skin.
For a Psi Cop, Susan
mused, she's weak. Probably a low P11 at best.
She'd attempted to read
Talia's Psi Corps file as part of the investigation, but it was buried beneath
security Susan simply hadn't had a proper chance to breach. It intrigued her that
this Talia was a Cop. She'd heard that multiple-personality telepaths could have
different psi levels, but it was interesting to see it in person.
Wonder if I should stop
her? Might sprain something if she tries any harder.
Talia pulled back from her
battering ram assault, opting instead for an attack that was all-too familiar to Susan --
but from another time, another place.
From a cloud that she had
nearly lost her life in the center of at Coriana Six.
Pinpricks. It feels like a
million pinpricks. God, the Planet Killer.
Even though the blocks were
still holding firm, Susan put a bit more of her own strength around them in a blanket. If
even the slightest hole existed, Talia had a chance of finding it.
----------
Alina leaned her right
shoulder against the tunnel wall, a wide smile on her face as Andrew told yet another
sweetly amusing tale of his daughter.
"And Alex, she walks
right up to the guy and smiles. Next thing we know he's bought her the stuffed
animal."
"Sounds like your
daughter was quite a piece of work."
The gentle smile that had been
on his face throughout the story faded back to sadness, but not quite the despair that she
had seen days before. "She was," he replied.
Taking both of his hands into
hers, she fought past the surface pain that met her. "And so long as you remember
her, tell her stories, smile at the memories, she will never die, Andrew."
"That something the
Minbari taught you?"
"No," she replied.
Memories of her own were beginning to surface, memories that were best saved for another
time. "It's experience. I'm not saying it's easy, Andrew. To this day,
I grieve for my mother, and she died when I was four. Some losses take time. I understand
Susan lost her mother almost as young as I -"
"Alina?"
She tried to finish her
thought, fought valiantly to get the words out, but all she could do was whisper,
"God, the Cloud."
"Cloud?"
Visions of darkness filled
Alina's consciousness; black clouds, ships sitting dead in space, pinpricks sharp
against her mind, but the most overwhelming thing was the icy cold fear. The last time she
could recall sensing that much fear, she'd been sitting in the captain's chair
of White Star 22, slowly freezing to death at Coriana Six.
The cloud had been the Shadow
Planet Killer, a vile weapon that propelled millions of missiles deep into a planet's
core, exploding it from within. Only two other people on Mars had been at Coriana Six,
Lyta and . . . .
"Susan!"
"What?"
Alina attempted to shake off
the hallucination, but it was too strong. Letting her fingers guide her, she turned and
pressed her back against the wall. "I'm here," she whispered. "I hear
you."
For the briefest of moments,
Alina dropped her telepathic guards. The barrage of voices that attacked her instantly,
even over a kilometer from the Main Dome, was deafening. Her fingers dug into the wall as
she fought to focus her attention. The ocean of minds slowly receded, until finally she
isolated Susan's telepathic signal.
Who taught her to send? And
how did she find the lifeline?
That was when it occurred to
her precisely why Susan might have been using the lifeline. When she had set the
telepathic blocks into Susan's mind, Alina had also implanted a lifeline; a slender
thread that ran between Susan's conscious thoughts and Alina's subconscious
mind. Lyta had insisted upon it as a fallback measure, that way if Susan found out that
they were being lured into a trap, that information could get to Alina faster than any
communication Susan might have eventually managed. She had fought Lyta's initial
mandate that Susan not be informed of any of this, but even with Andrew's arguments
behind her, it was a futile gesture.
Andrew's voice sounded in
the distance. "The lifeline?"
"Yes. She's being
scanned."
"Is it holding?"
Alina gently extended herself
along the line, as quickly as possible, until she began to get a sense of Susan.
"Yes, but the scan isn't that strong."
"Then why-"
"It's got structure
- in Valen's name, it's structured just like a Shadow Planet Killer."
A blanket of cold settled
across Alina's shoulders. She could feel the pinpricks in her own mind. Judging by
the feelings that she was receiving from Susan, to her they were more like spikes.
Susan was hardly taking the
attack lying down, however. A layer of telepathic energy had been spread over the blocks,
a layer that felt nothing like Alina's own energy.
Susan's a stronger
telepath than I thought. .
----------
Susan watched the
expression on Talia's face with a sadistic pleasure. The pinpricks, which for a bit
had felt like spikes boring into her skull, had abated. She could feel energy pouring over
the blocks like wet cement, covering the holes, making them even stronger. Where the
energy was coming from, she had no idea.
But the surprise on
Talia's features made it all worthwhile.
The blonde continued her
assault a minute or two longer, then retreated. Wiping away the perspiration that matted
her brow, Talia broke eye contact and stepped toward the door.
She got one step in before
Susan was off of the sofa and had a hand clenched around her arm. In one deft move, Susan
pushed the telepath back up against the wall, pressing her free arm against Talia's
throat.
"And if you ever
scan me again . . . ."
Talia simply smiled a sweet,
innocent smile. "And how do you know I was scanning you?"
Susan pressed gently with her
arm, fighting the urge to crush the woman's windpipe and be done with the whole
thing. "I will kill you. Garibaldi-"
"Mister Garibaldi
can't help you in here, Susan. The Corps is -"
"The Corps is nothing.
You are nothing. It's time for some new assistance' from Psi
Corps."
With a final nudge against
Talia's throat, Susan whirled on her heel and strode out the door.
[End Part 20]