Spoiler Warning: May contain spoilers for the second season of Battlestar Galactica

Writer's Note: I addressed a comment made about the relationship between Galen and Dureena in this chapter, so hopefully the reader who made it will understand why I went the way I did in their part of the story.

Thirteen

Chapter Forty

Unholy Alliance

Galen's fears had been realized: the Drakh had developed an alliance with the Cylons. He had hoped that the Drakh would choose to attack the Cylons and weaken the both of them, meaning that the Interstellar Alliance could eventually take down each side at their leisure. Now, as he looked through the visual sensors on the microscopic probes that had made their way onto some of the Cylons, he realized that they had already had some preliminary contacts of some kind. That worried him even more, and he broke contact with the probes, walked over to a nearby bench, and sat down.

Dureena Nafeel came onto the bridge of the ship and saw her lover with his head in his hands. She sat down beside him and asked, "What's wrong?"

"It's like I feared, Dureena. The Cylons and the Drakh have an alliance, all right. What's worse, though, is that it appears as if they've had contact before. If that's so, then it doesn't bode well for the lot of us."

She put her head on his shoulder, and he leaned her head onto hers, and they sat there silently for a while. It wasn't supposed to have come to this, but, somewhere along the line, their teacher/student relationship had turned into a relationship of equals.

He had spotted her years ago, on a planet out on the Rim. Back then, she was just a thief in the Thieves' Guild, eeking out a living as best she could. Then the Drakh began to move against the Interstellar Alliance, and Galen had to act. Dureena was one of the ones he chose, and he eventually led her to meet with Interstellar Alliance president John Sheridan. Had it not been for her observation that the Shadow planet killer the Drakh were going to use against Earth, the humans might have already been decimated from the loss of their homeworld.

Instead, they got a plague, and Captain Matthew Gideon, who saw her as an asset he could use that no other Earthforce officer was able to give him, brought Dureena on board the crew of the Excalibur. Galen took Dureena under his wing and he eventually began to teach her some of what he knew.

It took three years to find the cure, and in that time, Dureena had learned a lot. She knew she could never become a technomage like Galen had, because there was no way to replicate the tech that the mages used. However, after her tour of duty with the crew of the Excalibur was over, she joined the Rangers.

Galen hadn't seen Dureena for almost a decade until things began to heat up on Centauri Prime. When they were reunited, Dureena had changed. Instead of a simple student, he saw that she was an adept warrior these days, and considered one of the best Rangers by her peers. She commanded a Whitestar when they reunited, and she had helped him as well as Hollifield in the liberation of Centauri Prime from the Drakh.

Since then, they had been inseparable, as she was the Rangers' liaison with the technomages. Sheridan and Delenn wanted to bring the technomages around to coming out of their hiding place, and they felt that Dureena could be the key to that. Dureena had told them that it probably would not work, but they had sent her anyway, so she had teamed up with the technomage she best knew: Galen.

They hadn't intended for their relationship to stray from friendship into a romance, but an incident on Sentara 4 had broken the last walls between them. Dureena had been hit with a poisonous dart, and Galen worked feverishly to save her life, sending his own organelles into her body in a dire effort to counteract the effects of the poison. He had succeeded, but it had been a close call. She had to go back to Minbar to recover for a few weeks, and Galen didn't leave her side during all of this.

When she had recovered and well enough to return to duty, she walked back onto his ship and they took off. They were on their way to another world, this one near the Rim, when she asked him, on a hunch, about how he felt about her. Unlike his usual confident answers, he hemmed and hawed around, before he finally admitted that he had feelings for her. She smiled and said simply, "I feel the same way.", and kissed him. From then on, their romance blossomed.

When Matthew and Elizabeth Gideon reunited with Galen and Dureena, they were surprised by how the relationship had changed. Now that they all worked together to monitor the new Drakh/Cylon alliance, and they all got used to the changes that had happened since their lives first intersected aboard Excalibur. They were older, wiser, and different. Whether they were better or not, they did not know.

Galen stayed over the planet for two days, monitoring things as best he could. He got a lot of information on both the Drakh and the Cylons, and he intended to take it to Minbar as soon as he could. As for Earth, he had a much faster way to get his information to President Hollifield, who had returned to Geneva.

Andromeda lived in the small university town of Boone, North Carolina. Her house was up on a nearby mountain, which cleverly hid her technomage place of power. She was a professor of history at Appalachian State University, using the name Andrea Medina, specializing in Native American history. She was a local legend, and a nemesis to the Baptist ministers and other members of the Christian clergy around the town for her pagan beliefs. Instead of shirking from them like other members of the App State faculty, she took on the conservative fundamentalist Christians and, more often than not, left them scarred from her ferocious debating skills.

She was a long time friend of Garrison Hollifield's family, and when Galen contacted her one night in her mountain home for an electronic incantation. It was a process that even the technomages themselves did not understand, but knew that it worked. Galen asked for permission from Andromeda to initiate the transmission, and she agreed.

He chose a simple setting, walking in a park on a cool autumn afternoon in the Appalachian Mountains. If one did not know better, they might have been on the campus of App State, but Galen had never been there, so his setting could have easily been in Canada or Italy or Germany for all he knew.

When he had sent her all he knew, Andromeda commented, "This is very bad indeed. But I wonder how they came to know one another, because this seemed to odd of a coupling."

"Why do you say that?" Galen asked.

"I don't know. Call it a hunch if you will." Andromeda said, whose colorful Cherokee clothing clashed with Galen's simple black robe, tunic and trousers. "There has to be someone behind all of this, or several people, for all we know. How have the probes you and Galen have deployed worked to infiltrate the Cylons?"

"Quite well, in fact. The probes are a new design, similar to the type that Burell used to make, in that they are able to move around and find new targets to attach themselves to. We have several hundred on the planet where the Cylons reside, and they've given us valuable information."

Andromeda nodded and said, "I'll take the information to the president. It'll mean missing the Georgia Southern game at Kitt Brewer Stadium this weekend, but with what you've told me, a simple football game, no matter how important, is meaningless when compared to this." They talked for a while longer, and Galen was amazed at how comforting the southern twang she had taken on as part of her disguise. She wished Galen well and he terminated the incantation.

When Galen came out of his incantation, Dureena had a certain look on her face. "Something up?" Galen asked.

Matthew and his wife Elizabeth were in the room now, and it was Matthew who said, "Yes there is. Take a look at this." He showed him to one of the workstations that Galen had installed to allow Dureena and the others to use the sensors on his ship to monitor the various probes. They activated a file, and an image came up.

It was of an old man, and Galen accessed a file in his mind and found it to be of one Kevin Vacit. He noticed another woman was Talia Winters. Both were supposed to be dead, but Galen had already found out from President Hollifield that they were involved in this. He also saw Alfred Bester, the recently escaped Psi Cop who had been freeded by telepaths working with Winters.

Also in the room were three Drakh, none of which Galen recognized. The conversation was what he expected, outlining their working arrangement as well as plans to attack Babylon 5. It wasn't until Vacit asked, "Where is the person who helped us out in this arrangement?"

"She's here!" said one of the Drakh, and he bent his head down, which made Galen suspect he was sending a telepathic message of some kind to another Drakh. He knew that the Drakh Entire could communicate with one another via telepathy, so he expected to see another Drakh come through the door when the probe on one of the Centurions inside the office turned its head to it to witness who came through.

Who he saw walk through, though, shocked him, because he had thought her dead, but there she was, very much alive. It was Regana, a technomage he had though lost to a Shadow attack when the mages fled their last convocation for the temporary shelter on Selic 4. Her student, Tilar, had been cast away shortly before initiation because he was found to be unfit to become a technomage. She had been incensed at his dismissal, but he never suspected she would turn against the mages.

But she had, and a whole new element had been added to the witches' brew of galactic current events. She removed her hood from her cloak and addressed the three telepaths. "Greetings, Vacit! I am glad to have helped bring our two sides together so that we may have the vengeance that we seek against the Interstellar Alliance! Together, we will see them all consumed in fire and turned to ash, and we will come to our rightful places of dominance in this galaxy!" Vacit got up from his chair and shook the hand of Regana, who looked very much like she had when Galen had last seen her almost a quarter of a century ago. Her Asiatic features and dark hair still marked her as a beauty, but her eyes showed a very dangerous individual indeed.

"Well, this is the last thing we need!" Galen remarked dryly. "Ship, take us away!" he told the ship, and the tech inside the ship responded and set them on a course away from the planet.

"Shouldn't we stay and monitor them some more?" Elizabeth asked.

"No. We need to get back to Babylon 5 and give them this news, as well as help them prepare. I believe that they might strike soon, and we need to be ready." Galen said.