Not far from the entry gate of the Tau Atrea civilian compound, Hawk was sitting up on the wall and watching the compound return to normal. His helmet, formed by the nanites in his body, was gone. Those same nanites enhanced his eyesight and, at a command, formed augmented contact lenses over his eyes that let him see as if through a scope or a set of binoculars.

Everything about this place seemed legit. There wasn't even a jail from what he could tell. On deeper consideration that wasn't too surprising, since with two Psi Cops and everyone else a telepath, they could likely mentally program a criminal to stay put. Or do something else to one…

That was the one thing that creeped out Hawk the most about the entire concept of telepaths. The very idea of telepathy, the ability to enter minds, to take control of them, acted against the basic concept of individuality. Who could be an individual when your thoughts could be read and your mind altered against your will?

Not that it was fair to blame telepaths for this. They didn't ask to be born that way, and from what Hawk had seen so far, you couldn't exactly turn telepathy off. Not without screwing someone up. And that wasn't right. But, of course, that's precisely what the Earth's government - and populace - did.

The fact that the governments on Becca's home Earth were still mostly worse… well, they'd have to do something about this Earth too, he supposed.

Why is this universe so full of bastards? The Feddies over in S5T3 might be naive idiots about a lot of things, and complete cowards with that precious Prime Directive of theirs, but at least they're mostly good people.

Granted, he'd thought the same thing about the Alliance, up until the Allied Systems started getting friendly with states like the Draconis Combine and the Clans. When we're done here, we're really due for a visit to Clan space. He amused himself with the thought of using their precious genetic material repositories as urinal cakes.

But that amusement faded. The anger came back. It always came back, as did those damn headaches. And then he got more angry as he thought about what Dr. Meier had said, and what it meant for himself and the people he cared for. For the entire cause they'd taken up.

While the anger simmered, he heard laughter and looked down. Children came running by, laughing and squealing, then briefly stopping to look up at him. The laughter stopped. They said nothing as they looked up at him in bewilderment.

"Why are you so angry?" a boy asked. Some of the other children gave him bewildered looks, as if he'd just broken a playground rule.

"Why the hell are you peeking in my head, kid?" Hawk retorted in challenge.

"I'm not peeking," the boy replied, his tone defensive. "We all feel it. You're just… angry. So angry our mental shields can't keep it out."

Hawk made a "hmph" at that. At least the kid's probably not messing with my head… and if you hear this kids, don't even think about it. You'll just make things bad for everyone. Aloud, he gave them an answer. "Because the world, the whole damned Multiverse, makes me angry."

"But you're a mundane," one of the other children, a girl, said. "What do you have to be angry about? You get to make the rules."

"Yeah, and most of the rules we 'mundanes' make are bullsh… are bad." Hawk forced himself to bite back the curse word. "So I make my own. I kill bad guys and help the people they hurt."

"Hey."

Hawk and the kids turned their heads to see the new arrival. Hawk sighed in resignation at the sight of his other "partner" on this mission. Robert walked up, looking like some ridiculous hermit out of a kung fu movie, with his long hair and bearded face and that ridiculous robe around armor that at least looked functional. He focused his attention on the kids. "A Mrs. Saunders is starting class. You might not want to be caught playing hooky."

The children acknowledged him and after a moment of mental coordination, they headed off to class.

Watching them go, Hawk smirked. "Let me guess. You were always that law-abiding Boy Scout who volunteered to be hall monitor and ensure everyone's being a good little boy or girl."

Robert looked up toward Hawk. Again his essence seemed permeated with anger. "I was never a Scout, actually," Robert said. "I preferred the farm."

"Ha. Farmboy." Hawk jumped down from the wall to face him.

The two men, from the moment they encountered each other, suspected this conversation was going to come. Now that it had, each was pondering what to say and how to say it.

"I was surprised," Robert admitted aloud, finally breaking the silence.

"At what?"

"You." Robert met Hawk's curious look with a contemplative one. "When Max shared those memories with us, I didn't expect that reaction from you. Real, genuine empathy for the suffering of others, from a man who seems devoted to violence and killing."

The anger in Hawk kicked up a notch. "I kill people who deserve it," he insisted.

"Warmaster Shai'jhur shows otherwise," Robert replied. "You would have killed her right then and there if she hadn't been wearing an anti-disruptor mesh. And she didn't do anything to deserve that. You admit that yourself."

"Maybe if her girlfriend hadn't lied about what happened between them, I wouldn't have tried," Hawk retorted. "Kaveri Varma let everyone in Earthforce think Shai'jhur raped her, just to protect her career. And it nearly got her girlfriend killed."

"That excuse makes it feel easier, doesn't it?" Robert asked, his tone searching. His eyes locked onto Hawk's. "It makes it feel easier to deal with the fact you nearly killed an innocent woman, one trying to save her people from genocide, because of your haste."

Unsurprisingly for someone with Hawk's passions, he responded to an attack with an attack. "And what kind of excuses do you use to make it easier, Dale? To excuse what you've become?"

"What I've become?" Robert asked. "Enlighten me."

"I guess that answers my question," Hawk said, sneering. "You and I apparently started out the same, but we're different. I'm still out there fighting to stop atrocities while you've become a Goddamned sell out."

Robert laughed at that. "A sell out? That's what you think of me?"

"Yeah. That's what I think," Hawk growled. "You're a damn sellout. You decided to become a part of the system. A good little soldier boy obeying the orders of politicians and bureaucrats instead of fighting the people who need to be fought. Hell, how many bad people get away with it because it's in your bosses' interest to let them off?"

"The Alliance isn't like that."

"Tell that to all of the worlds in the Clan Occupation Zone," Hawk hissed. "Tell that to the people on Turtle Bay who had their entire city vaped. Or all of the Rasalhaguans who had their country smashed into a pitiful little remnant by the Clans. You shouldn't have negotiated with the Clans, you should have crushed them. The Draconis Combine too! But instead you let them join your war and gave them more planets to conquer!"

"What were we supposed to do, go to war with them too?"

"You could have saved them for later!"

"What you're talking about is unending war," Robert said. "Nobody can just keep fighting like that. Nobody sane anyway." The emphasis made clear just how little sanity Robert attributed Hawk with. "And I didn't see you fighting the Nazis, Hawk, so who are you to judge us for what we had to do in the war?"

"Goringwelt," replied Hawk, his tone harsh. "New Saxony. New Baden. Hesperus. Concentration and labor camps on all of them, and we hit them. We hit them hard."

Robert narrowed his eyes at that. He could recall reports from intelligence about attacks on those worlds, but he'd always imagined they were covert operations, either Alliance ops or from the Citadel Council races. That it was Hawk and his crew… "You're telling me you plunged into the heart of Reich space on your own? You idiot." He felt Hawk's anger grow at that and didn't care. "After New Austria the Reich kept fleet units near all of its critical systems. You idiots could've easily gotten yourselves overrun! You could have given them the IU drive, your tech…!"

"We're not idiots, Dale, we know what the hell we're doing!" Hawk pressed a finger to Robert's chest. "And at least we're doing it! We're dealing with the scum of the Multiverse. You? You're dealing with petty crap when you should be out there hunting the bad guys! Dealing with the pirates and the slavers and the war criminals!"

To Hawk's anger and surprise, the response of Robert was literally to laugh in his face. "What's so damn funny?!" he demanded as Robert continued to laugh.

"You are… Abe would call it chutzpah," Robert said, managing to get his laughter under control. "You of all people are going to lecture me to start devoting all of my time to pursuing war criminals?"

"Someone should!"

"Fine!" Robert got up in his face and the smile disappeared. "Then I should start with you."

Hawk's nostrils flared at that.

"You heard me," Robert said, his face now contorted into an angry look. "If you're right, and I'm not doing enough to stop the, what did you call them, the 'bastards of the Multiverse', then I should start with the Butcher of Earth C1P2, James Hawk himself!" Robert felt his own anger increase, as he thought of that burning world, its wrecked cities, all of those plasma-burnt people in the Aurora medbay. "James Hawk," he repeated. "The so-called commander of the vessel responsible for the killings of millions of innocent civilians! Who scoured entire cities with plasma fire from orbit, incinerating men, women, and children! The man responsible for the dozens of wars since, wars that have killed thousands, maybe millions more on that poor planet!" Robert's voice picked up in volume as he spoke. "James Hawk, the war criminal with the blood of millions on his hands, still at large in the Multiverse, still causing unknown amounts of havoc! Yes, maybe I should begin my rampage across the Multiverse by bringing him to justice, or simply striking him down as another 'bastard of the Multiverse' who needs killing!"

As Robert's tirade continued, he felt Hawk's anger grow even as he vented his own, and this was not surprising.

What did surprise him was where that anger, formerly defiant fury, was flowing. He'd expected to be the source and target of that anger, given he was throwing Hawk's bloody sins in his self-righteous face.

But Hawk wasn't angry at Robert. He was angry at himself.

Indeed, as furious as that anger was flowing now, Robert felt he sensed the source of it, more clearly than ever before, and it wasn't some old wound that could never be healed, not a sense of being wronged that demanded to be righted. Not even the selfish need to justify his violent urges. What Robert felt instead… was guilt.

Deep, immeasurable guilt.

In that moment, the contradiction Robert had felt before was gone. There was no contradiction between Hawk's empathy and his violent rage. His empathy helped to fuel it, by presenting him with wrongs that needed to be righted, and which made him furious when they were not.

Including his own wrongs. His own perceived failures to prevent them. To prevent the deaths at Earth C1P2. To prevent the deaths that had left Rebekah bat Gurion so emotionally devastated. Wrongs that he could only repay by devoting himself to stopping other wrongs, at all costs.

While he was not a telepath that could sense the memories of others as a physical sense, through the Flow of Life Robert could sometimes feel the memories of others, if they were powerful enough, focal enough, to that being, or if he were connected to them in some way. At this moment, his understanding of Hawk provided that necessary connection.

He could see Hawk rising from his bed, confusion turning to horror as he looked out the window of his quarters… and beheld the sapphire fury of the Avenger's weapons scouring the Earth. He could feel the desperation that fueled Hawk's race through the halls of his ship and to the lift. His arrival in the secondary bridge, deep in the Avenger's heart, the locked door that required precious minutes to hack through with his nanites. The sight of another man his age, someone he considered a friend, a member of his family, hunched over the tactical console, face full of hideous rage as his fingers triggered the targeting systems and firing mechanism again and again. He could feel the impact of Hawk's fist on Andy's face, knocking him away from the controls, ending the killing, the words they shared...

"What the Hell, Andy?! What have you done?!"

"They were never going to listen! They were mocking us! And now they're dead! Every one of those imperialist, racist, bigoted bastards is dead!"

"Christ, Andy, how many people did you just kill?!"

There was no answer to that, just Andy's wide, contented smile at a job he considered well done. Defiant at even his friend's horror for his actions.

"Get out of my head," Hawk demanded, his voice lacking the heat from before. Now he just sounded… tired.

Robert returned his focus to the here and now. He took in a breath, stunned by what he'd just seen. Hawk knew he'd seen it too. "It wasn't you," Robert said softly. "You… you weren't responsible."

"I was," Hawk answered hoarsely. "My ship. My friends. My cause."

"Andy Luttrell is the man responsible," Robert said in disagreement. He recalled the man's face from the Tira Crisis materials. Andy had been the member of the Avenger crew sent to the Minbari Warcruiser Orsala for the fake negotiations. According to the notes he'd behaved like a fanatic more than a talker. "Why…"

"We gave an ultimatum to the governments of that Earth," Hawk said. "No more slavery. No more empires. No more autocracies. No more bigotry over racial or gender or sexual differences."

"They'd never go for it," Robert said. "You were demanding they dismantle their entire world, to change the very way they thought. Even the people we rescued from that world took months, sometimes years, to accept our way of thinking, especially toward LGBT people. I think some still haven't."

"They could change the laws. It'd be a start." Hawk's eyes grew distant. "Although I wish we'd never gone to that planet."

"Why did he…?"

"He was impatient. And they were dragging their feet. One of them got a little mocking, insulting. Andy lost it."

"He's the one." Robert shook his head. "My God, Hawk, he… what did you do about it?"

"What I could. I made sure he'll never do it again. He's banned from tactical control. The weapons won't work for him anymore."

Robert almost laughed in sheer incomprehension. "For that… Hawk, he butchered millions of people. You're telling me his punishment for that is to lose his job?!"

"What else was I supposed to do?!" Hawk demanded.

"Turn him in!" Robert answered. "Surrender him to the Alliance along with the records proving his actions! Give testimony!"

"So you can throw him in a prison cell?!"

"So he can stand trial! So justice can be done!"

"I'm responsible!" Hawk roared. Robert saw tears of frustration glisten in his eyes. "I brought him along! Andy, he… he didn't even want to hold a gun when we started. He didn't have a violent bone in his body! I pushed him into it, insisted it had to happen, and… and then…" Hawk stopped and, for a moment, a sob escaped from him before he could hold it back. "I ruined him," Hawk confessed, tears streaming down his eyes. "He shouldn't be punished for what I turned him into."

"Someone has to answer," Robert insisted. "Someone has to answer for what happened."

Just as he finished speaking, Robert felt the shift inside Hawk. Perhaps he'd pushed Hawk far enough, or perhaps it was Hawk's way to escape the feelings of guilt within him. Either way his anger built back up, and this time it turned external. He glared his eyes toward Robert and demanded, "And when are you going to answer, Dale?"

"For?"

"Well, for starters, your bungling started a war with the Nazis before your Alliance was ready," Hawk said accusingly. "Yeah, I know about 33LA. That was on your head. How many people died because the Alliance wasn't ready to fight the Reich?"

The honest answer was that Robert didn't know. He couldn't. There was, even now, uncertainty about whether 33LA provoked the Nazis to strike at Krellan Nebula when they did. If they'd planned something longer-term, even a month would have meant more Alliance ships ready to fight. Thousands of civilians and ship crew would still be alive.

"Right. I thought so," said Hawk. "And are you going to always use the Nazis as an excuse for why you're hooking up with people like the Goddamned Clans. The people behind the bombardment of Edo on Turtle Bay, who consider civilians and prisoners-of-war as, what do they call it again? Bondsmen, right. But let's face it, the proper word is slave." Hawk's eyes flared angrily. "How can you justify working with people like that?! They're little better than Nazis themselves!"

"The Nazis were the greater threat," Robert said. "As it was, we barely defeated them in time to keep them from acquiring the IU drive!"

"Maybe they wouldn't have gotten so close if you hadn't bungled everything from the start! And I'm sure that's a real Goddamned comfort to the civilians having those damn bondcords wrapped around their wrists! You should be telling the Clans hands off! Hell, don't tell them crap, put the eugenicist bastards down!"

"So that's what you want? Another war?!"

"I'd rather fight than be a Goddamned appeaser! You don't compromise with people like that! You kill them!"

"And where do you draw the line, Hawk?!"

"Anyone who turns people into slaves! Anyone who harms others!" Hawk raged. Robert felt the full force of Hawk's anger, his need to lash out against those he judged evil, and felt a horror at how unbalanced it was. "You should be going after them. You've got the fleet to wreck the Clans completely, do it! Pulverize their ships and wreck their walking tanks from orbit. Liberate the people of Tamar and Rasalhague, of all the worlds that they've put the boot on!"

"And I suppose you think we should attack the Cardassians too, and the Dominion?!" Robert yelled back. "And NEUROM and the Bragulans and the Draconians…!"

"Yes, dammit! Gather your allies and go after the states that abuse and enslave!"

"You're talking about a Multiverse constantly at war!" Robert retorted. "Constant bloodshed! Never-ending, never-ceasing! You can't fight wars that long, not without corrupting everything else! You're a lunatic if you think you can keep fighting forever!"

"And you're a hypocritical Goddamned coward," Hawk shot back. "Playing hero, but it's just playacting. You won't go out and devote yourself to the fight against evil. Because that's what you should be doing! Find evil and stop it! Find the people causing massacres and slavery and misery, and put them down. That's the only thing you should be worried about!"

"There's more to existence than violence and killing, dammit!" Robert felt his head hurt and tried to contain the anger he felt building inside of him. Whether it was some kind of sympathetic reaction to Hawk's anger and pain or simply his frustrations with the man, Robert wasn't sure. "When will you understand that? Look at what you did with the Darglans' legacy, Hawk! They created that technology to explore the wonders of the Multiverse! They acted to guide species, to protect them, they even transplanted them to other worlds to give them a chance to survive! They didn't destroy, they built." He waved his arm around the compound. "This is what you should be doing! Build homes for people to have better lives! Build communities! That's what I learned from my Facility, and look at what we've accomplished. New Liberty has a population of over four hundred thousand beings now, and it's just five years old! The Alliance is one of the most powerful governments in the Multiverse, respected for standing for the rights of sentient beings everywhere, and it's even younger than that!" Before Hawk could protest the needs of politics, Robert added, "Yes, it's not perfect. People disagree. And sometimes compromise means we have to pick our fights and deal with people we'd rather not, but just by existing, we can show people a better path. Including our enemies."

"And yet people are still suffering," Hawk spat back. "While you build your Alliance, entire worlds are being enslaved. People are being slaughtered. Even as we're speaking here, somewhere in the Multiverse someone is being abused, someone is suffering, someone is dying, and they've got nobody to stand up for them! Nobody to save them. Except me!"

A part of Robert wanted to laugh at the irony. "Hawk, I used to think that way," he said. "That I couldn't stop, couldn't rest, because someone somewhere was suffering and I had to save them. I spent the first months with the Facility running non-stop, trying to save everyone. All it got me were the deaths of good people and a ship in need of repair. You have to accept that we're just human, Hawk. Mortal human beings. For our own sanity, we have to stop sometime, we have to care for ourselves, or we'll go mad, and then we'll help nobody."

Hawk simply frowned at him, but he didn't seem to have words. He'd spoken everything he intended to.

"And whatever else, Hawk, your methods are counter-productive to your aims. You're not going to make things better by just rushing in and killing things, it's not that easy! And you won't help anyone becoming this… this brain-damaged rage monster you've become!"

"Brain damaged? More of that?" Hawk guffawed, though Robert sensed that was more bravado than conviction.

"Yes, more of that, because it's the damned truth!" Robert insisted. "You and your friends are overusing the infusers. You're downloading too much information into your mind too frequently! You're killing yourselves, Hawk! For God's sake, man, stop and think! Stop pushing your crusade at the expense of everything else!"

There was a silence from Hawk, a change from the usual instinctive retorts fueled by his anger. Robert realized he was coming to accept the warnings. But yet… he sensed no intent to cease. "I can't stop," Hawk insisted. "We can't."

"You have to," Robert pleaded. "If you keep going this way, whatever good you've done, it'll be for nothing."

Robert knew immediately that the plea hadn't worked. He felt Hawk's mind shift back toward anger, not quite as strongly as before. "Ah, to hell with it." Hawk made a frustrated gesture by lifting his arms and dropping them. "I'm going to find Becca, then we're out of here. And don't worry about me leaking this place, Dale," Hawk added. "I don't work with EarthGov. As far as I'm concerned, EarthDome will make good target practice if they push it. I won't betray the compound so long as they don't start storing prisoners here." He glanced back briefly. "Truce is still on, by the way. I'll leave you alone until we're both out of the system, but afterward, if you get in my way, all bets are off."

Robert felt him go. A part of him wondered still if he shouldn't have agreed to such a truce. How much more damage would Hawk do in the name of killing "bad guys"? By not stopping him here, had Robert guaranteed another Earth C1P2?

The whole thing made him feel unsettled.

Worse, it gave him a Goddamn headache.

The 5 and 6 year-olds were released from their classes for playtime. They retrieved the anti-grav orb from where it was left by the older kids and activated it. The children were so enthralled by the resulting chase that they paid little heed to Becca watching them from the distance, smiling despite the ache she felt. Such a toy hadn't existed when she was a child, not on her Earth, but there had been similar games among the children of the kibbutz. They'd continued playing them even after their relocation to northern England. Until she was sent to the military school...

Thinking of her lost childhood was painful. Of those she had lost, that was a pain she endured every day.

Becca heard another set of footsteps, these somewhat more tentative than Colin's sure strides, older. Then an older voice spoke in an accent that was almost German-cast Hebrew and when he spoke, it was in that language.

"Let their memory be a blessing." Max said in consoling tones.

She looked to the older man. "Shabbat shalom," she said in respect, recalling how Max had earlier greeted Captain Dale. Genuine respect filled her voice at this gentleman, who had taken such a terrible burden upon himself. "An interesting choice of words, Mister Cohen. You and I both know memories that are far from blessings."

Max chuckled a bit at that. "It depends on your perspective I think. Carrying their lives with me allows me to… I don't know how to describe it… " He paused thinking about it. "So long as their memories live in me, are they really that dead? Can I not show them the beginnings of a better future, and that their suffering ultimately had meaning? It may be a bit different for you, but I've carried them almost forty years. I get maudlin about it in my dotage."

The idea of living that long with her memories was bitter for Becca. So many of those she loved growing up didn't have that choice. So many…

"What happened?" Max asked "You don't have to share, but it seems like something you might need to talk about."

Becca sighed and sat on the nearby bench. She didn't want to talk about it, but since the memories were there anyway, she let them through her blocks. Her Earth had seen a terrible Third World War. The response, in the end, was the formation of United Earth, an attempt to "get right" what the prior World Wars had failed. But United Earth was a struggling concept. The discovery of telepaths helped destroy it from the inability of the government to deal with the panic caused.

The world fell into three camps. The side who were the most anti-telepath were the Dissolutionists, opponents of the entire idea of the global government. Their hostility to telepaths was palpable, to the extent that the leadership were openly supportive of telepath extermination. The other side of the war, Restorationists, were willing to grant some civil rights… but coupled with conscription, and the broad attitude that telepaths were weapons of the state.

Israel, a Reformist state with telepath civil rights, was invaded by the Dissolutionists. Her parents and two-thirds of Israel's telepaths were outright slaughtered by the enemy. Her last memory of the telepath kibbutz was of sitting in the evac hopper, watching the burning fields and homes after the bombers hit. From there it was England and a refugee camp, then English telepaths as foster parents. And then at age 11, it was off to the Continent for military training camp…

Sensing an instinctive revulsion from Max at the idea, Becca glyphed agreement, coupled with a thought. To the global government, we were weapons foremost. We would fight and die and they would not allow us to be subjected to hate crimes.

To Max, that attitude among mundanes was all too familiar, because the Earth Alliance was largely similar. The only difference was the existence of the Psi Corps that let telepaths form their own community, and the use of most telepaths in commercial applications. The Earth Alliance had still conscripted telepaths to fight in their wars, without any civil rights guarantees or protections. And when the Minbari War happened, being left off the evacuation lottery. Mercifully, the Minbari ceased their attack before orbital bombardment.

It…could have been worse. He thought. Not about her world, but his own.

Having felt his thoughts, Becca agreed. I was made a psi-hunter at 14. I was a strong T6 and they were needed. The Dissolutionists… they exploited the refugees to slip suicide psi-bombers into other countries. In Dissolutionist-held territory, the only way to avoid execution for a telepath and their family was to become one. To go into another nation and slaughter people in a public terrorist attack using their minds. If they didn't die of a stroke first from the drugs to enhance their powers for the attack.

Just thinking about that caused Max pain, deep in his soul. It was an offense against everything he believed in, everything he was, everything his God commanded and all that was good in the world. It was an abomination, and the idea that his branch of their people could have suffered that same fate without contact with the Centauri shook him to the core.

I was fifteen years old when I killed my first psi-bomber, Becca confided. Memories flooded through her blocks. The girl had been a Taureg two years younger than her, a T5 telepath taught to kill to save her family. Max saw more faces, some generic, barely remembered, others with crystal clarity, twenty in all.

Then came the army and combat service. Automated drones raining rockets down, tanks roaring across fields, chemical and electromagnetic firearms spitting their lethal bits of metal with enough force and speed to mutilate and demolish a human body. The dying minds crying out for their mothers, begging to live, the continuous mindscreams all around her, telepath and non-telepath alike.

Max shuddered. He had plenty of memories of combat, some of them brutal, but none of it was modern or even modern-approaching warfare. The mental screams of the wounded and dying would wreak havoc for a telepath.

There was some happiness to be found. At twenty-two she'd been a founding member of an all-telepath regiment. Telepaths from across Europe and Russia and parts of North America, plus refugees from the other parts of the world. Many of the surviving members of her kibbutz were in her platoon: childhood friends like Avital and Moshe and Haim and Sara. They combined infantry tactics with telepathic capabilities, and won many victories, although all were painful from those lost in the fighting. At least she had the bonds from outside of combat, when the unit was alone in the barracks or field camps, and all of their blocks came down.

That happiness ended in the ruins of the Turkish city of Zonguldak. Their own side used them as a distraction, knowing how much the enemy wanted them destroyed. They fought for weeks, cut off, isolated, scrounging for supplies on the ruined Black Sea coast. Hoppers and boats got only a few out; for the rest it was death or captivity when they were inevitably overrun without any help from high command. They were sacrificed to enable a successful offensive elsewhere. They were, after all, weapons in the cause of restoring United Earth. A few hundred dead and captured telepaths was a small price to pay to crush thousands of enemy soldiers elsewhere.

She remembered the savage beatings. The petty acts of torture. And the drugs. The drugs.

They took away the world. Everything became flat and colorless. Food tasted like ash. It was like living death. It was enough to make someone wish to just die, but your body could barely move. She remembered endless days on the hard concrete slab of her confined cell, unable to move, unable to think. She could barely remember seeing the others taken. Moshe, then Haim, Avital, Deborah...

That clinched it for Max. He'd been wondering exactly how there were human telepaths in a universe without the Vorlons, but somehow someone had gotten their hands on the genes necessary and created telepaths elsewhere, it wasn't something independent. If the Sleepers worked, the physiology was the same; and he knew what Sleepers were like, he had his own memories of them, especially the early-versions that didn't even let a telepath kill themselves to escape because they were literally too sick to do so. He shook, in grief and anger vibrating in place. He wanted to take the fleet and lead it across the gulf of space and time and liberate his people - and he did consider her people to be his - from that nightmare. But he couldn't.

Thank you was her response to that sentiment. And then the images continued. One by one, her comrades were being taken. Their guards occasionally laughed about it. It was an open secret that they were being taken to be subjects for researchers looking for the "cure", a way to permanently shut down the unique brain structures in a telepath. The enemy wouldn't care if it left the telepath alive or dead, they simply wanted telepaths eliminated, as a threat to the minds of the "normal" humans. Those sent to the labs never returned.

There was a change. A young man half her age was assigned to inject the drugs weekly. His name was Abdullah, a Palestinian boy conscripted for camp duty. For the first month he obeyed, watched by an overseer. Then the day came when he entered alone and triggered the injector before sticking the needle in. He carefully sopped up the hated drugs with a napkin which he flushed down her commode. The days passed and her senses improved, her health as well, but she made sure to continue to act sick. To not let the enemy suspect.

The next week he returned. Again he injected the poison on her arm instead of in it. She'd regained enough strength to ask "Why?" To her surprise, his reply was a glyph. Solidarity. Sympathy. Abdullah was a telepath hiding his talents to avoid being sent as a psi-bomber.

The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father was the only thing Max could think of to say, it meant largely the same thing and he made sure that Becca grasped it's full meaning. Then he thought of something else because he had an idea what was coming. Let his memory be a blessing.

She swallowed in reply. The tears already flowing were joined by a sniffle and a low sob as the thought of what Max meant filled her. She thought back to the camp. Mimicking sickness, which was not hard as she distantly felt her fellows suffering under the drugs. She was the only telepath he could spare; the camera angle for her cell was the only one that let him do so. For two weeks she yearned for the day he came to pretend to inject her, if only to connect to Abdullah's mind, to share his memories, his love for his parents and smaller siblings, two of whom were also manifesting telepathy. He was scared for them. It was why he didn't dare risk sparing the others. And she, selfishly, still wanted him to come by, even if it meant the continued suffering of her comrades.

Then he came two days early, in a panic. Enemy forces were rumored near. The camp leadership was evacuating and there were rumors that the camp would be destroyed and the prisoners slaughtered. Abdullah opened her cell and bade her to run while he distracted the guards. She didn't want to. The others were still there… but they had the drugs in their bodies. They wouldn't be able to move. Abdullah swore he would protect them as much as he could, that he knew where to get the counter-agent that had to be used in the experiments. He glyphed his desire to save at least one fellow telepath, so he could face divine judgement without flinching.

And so Becca ran. In the chaos of the camp and with her abilities her escape went undetected. She ran for the nearby hills, rushing up and up, her body straining, her stomach growling in hunger, muscles protesting, trying to get away, praying Abdullah and the others made it.

It was as she topped a hill over the camp that she heard the roar. She looked up in time to see the drone ships. She watched the bombs fall. Incendiaries, which smothered the camp in burning chemicals. Even from the distance she could feel Abdullah's mind, his screams of agony as the fires claimed everything and everyone in the camp, friend and enemy alike. She felt them all burn, burn alive, and heard their mindscreams as they were consumed. And that horrible door again, open and shut and open and shut over and over again. Finally she screamed…

And Becca did scream. The pain of the memory was too much. She wailed at it, drawing the attention of passing residents.

Max couldn't stop himself even if he wanted to, as he cried with her he wrapped her in a comforting hug and wept with her, projecting love and warmth into her mind, and everyone in line of sight did the same. They didn't need to know why, only that she was in pain and deserved nothing less.

Becca's blocks melted away. It had been so long since she felt such warmth from other minds. Not since the days before Zonguldak, the last time the regiment was together in peace. Now she couldn't resist it. She let that unconditional love and warmth fill her, let it begin to push away the horrible memories, to suppress the pain…

...and then, in a panic, she pushed it all away, as she felt the nanites begin to trigger. The failsafe! Silver material flowed from her wrists and ankles for a second, nearly enveloping her limbs before stopping at her assertion of self-control.

Max and the others broke off mental contact immediately, not wanting to risk themselves to that, but also not wanting Becca to have to live with the consequences of that failsafe triggering by accident. But Max didn't let her go either. "Save one life, and you save an entire world… I never thought it would be so literal Becca. I know it doesn't feel like it, but He saved you for a reason. I don't know what, but it wasn't random." He couldn't help but think about what the name Abdullah meant in Arabic, literally 'servant of God'. It smacked him in the face. Colin and Gene both would say it was a coincidence and that it's a common name, but he didn't buy that.

She heard his words. She understood what he was saying. But it didn't work. She knew in her heart she should have died that day. She had the blood of fellow telepaths on her hands, and she'd killed so many, telepath and non-telepath, even banals (Mundanes was the definition for Max)… why should she get to live? Why didn't Abdullah live? Or sweet Avital?

There was the sound of running footsteps. Becca and Max turned to see Hawk running toward them. She noticed he was tense, felt readiness in his anger, and jumped up from the bench. "It's fine!" she insisted, loudly.

"I got a warning," he said. "Your failsafe activated. Did they…?!"

She shook her head. "They were… they were trying to make me feel better, James, that's all. They were filling my mind with affection and love and suppressing my emotional pain. The nanites registered it as an attempt to alter my brain and triggered. But it's fine, everything is fine."

There was a suspicious look in Hawk's face as he glared toward Max for a moment. But he stopped. "I think it's time to go," he said to her. "The mission is accomplished."

"You don't have to go Becca, you know that. You've seen enough death, you deserve to have a life." Max said.

The sad look Becca gave him was enough to tell Max she didn't agree. Even if she longed for that kind of contact again, she didn't believe him on deserving it.

"A lot of people deserve to have a life," said Hawk. There was a challenging tone to his voice. "Including the people in all of those re-education camps your Corps runs. But you didn't seem so worried about whether the telepaths kept on Sirius Major were happy or had good lives."

"We don't run them." Max said in a hard tone. "We're just held at population-scale gunpoint and forced to provide security. Remember that the next time you start slaughtering people. Not all of them are in your path by choice. Sometimes their families are held hostage. Are you going to start going after our ships and marine corps because the mundanes feed you a line of bull like the Drazi did at Tira as well?"

"James, please…"

Hawk was frowning, and he clenched his jaw. Max had indeed scored a point by referencing Tira, and on a sore spot. He had no argument on that. But she could tell he was still suspicious of the Corps, of whether it would lead to telepath liberation, or continue to force all telepaths to toe the line. "We'll see how this little revolution of yours goes," he said. "You people stay righteous, you give telepaths a choice, and you won't have problems from me." His eyes met Becca's again. "Let's go, Becca. We have work elsewhere." He started to walk away. Becca moved to follow.

I have to ask Becca, why are you working with him of all people? Max asked.

Becca stopped and turned back to Max. She gave him a sad look. And then she showed him the memories, painful as they were. Of her after the fire-bombing, so damaged by the stress of experiencing the horrific deaths below that she nearly shut down. She stumbled away.

Then pain shot through her leg from the slug that ripped through her femur, shattering the bone. She screamed and fell. Enemy soldiers approached, vicious, hateful. One kicked her in the face, shrieking "Witch!" Another kicked her in the stomach. They debated on what to do to her, to kill or drag her away to another camp, more drugs, experimentation, and considered what they might do to her either way. The filthy, terrible fantasies a few had regarding her, the desire to violate and degrade.

And then one vanished in a cloud of blue. The others turned as more bolts came from nothingness, vaporizing the patrol one soldier at a time. The leader turned toward her and leveled his gun, intent on killing her. She saw the hate in his eyes, the barrel of his gun pointed toward her forehead, closed her eyes and waited for the merciful end… and then the sound of flesh being ripped, a shriek of pain, and hot blood on her face. When she opened her eyes her would-be killer stood over her with a silver spike sticking through his throat, thrown by the unseen attacker. The enemy collapsed, dead, joined by the last of his comrades in the following seconds. A presence approached, a man rippled into view before her...

"Are you okay?" asked (and thought) James Hawk. Anger and guilt from his mind echoed in hers. She knew he'd come to save the camp, but had come too late. He blamed himself just as she blamed herself.

He took her away then. To his ship, to the medical technology beyond anything she could imagine, the medical nanites that rebuilt her shattered bone, the replicators that seemed to make nourishing food and drink from thin air. Some other telepaths were there, freed from the camps and eager to go home. They did.

But Becca didn't. She stayed on the Avenger and watched as Hawk ended that brutal war in a night, as the Dissolutionist armies and navies and air forces fell to the weapons of the Darglan-built battlecruiser, as the war criminals who had each butchered hundreds, thousands of innocent people - including telepaths - met their deaths at the hands of Hawk and his friends. All of those she lost, avenged by the man who saved her life.

If she truly deserved to live, this was how she would prove it. She would fight at his side. She would serve his cause however he asked. She would tear through the minds of slavers and pirates and war criminals to learn their secrets. She would volunteer to have the information she needed to serve downloaded into her brain, whatever headaches it might cause. She would, in the end, agree to become one of his agents, to have her body augmented with the Darglan combat nanites.

It was the least she could do for the man who saved her life and stopped that horrible war.

Max sighed and lowered his head, shaking it. He understood, even if he thought she didn't need to prove she deserved life. Alright. I get it. But...if it ever gets to be too much, if your conscience can't bear it anymore. You'll always have a home to come back to, provided we survive the next couple of years.

Becca's reply was a glyph of hope that they did survive, and gratitude for the offer. But there was no sense it was one she intended to take up. With a nod of her head, Becca turned and followed Hawk down the footpath and out of sight.

With his headache and the general frustration caused by Hawk's inability to see past his own anger, Robert needed a quiet place to re-center himself. He found it at the far corner of the courtyard in what looked like the storage room for the nearby machine shop. After setting his backpack down near the door he found a space in the side of the room and sat down, crossing his legs and setting his hands on his knees, his robe settled behind him so that he could stand easily if he needed to. Once he was in position, he closed his eyes and settled his thoughts. He pushed away his own anger and irritation at the encounter and focused on the warm energy inside of him. The energy of his swevyra, his life, and of the Flow of Life he could feel through it.

The life of this place was not like that of a city, it lacked the numbers, but it was no worse than being on a ship. The Flow moved freely here and its golden warmth soothed the frustration he felt from the encounter with Hawk. It was invigorating to simply immerse his thoughts into it and enjoy the warm feelings in this place.

He lost track of the time in this state. So he wasn't sure how long he'd been meditating when he felt presences around him. Curious, eager thoughts and feelings. It wasn't hard to figure them out, especially when one of the presences was newly familiar. Without opening his eyes he said, "I can sense you, you know." He opened his eyes a moment later.

"He's friendly, I promise." Zara said encouragingly to three other younger kids, one girl and two younger boys. Robert recognized them from the group he'd seen playing hide and seek earlier in the day. One of them, a little brown-haired blue-eyed boy of around eight years old had a question he couldn't contain anymore.

"What are you? You're not a mundane, but… you're not a telepath either?" he said

"There's no word in any Human language I know that fits with the term typically used for what I am," Robert replied. "The closest would probably be 'life force user'. My name is Robert. Your's?" His voice remained gentle. He sensed a slight trace of anxiety, save in Zara, but it was the kind many kids would feel toward a stranger.

"Lucas. Lucas Dixon."

Another one of them, the little girl who was a little younger and of middle eastern stock piped up. "Husn Mira."

"And I'm Maina Botha." said the last one who was of African descent.

Robert nodded. Lucas, Husn, Maina, he thought back, knowing the children would p'hear him.

"Huh. So you're a wizard?" Lucas asked, while the others looked over at him like he'd said something insane but they weren't sure the question was totally off-base.

Robert chuckled at that. "I saw it like that myself when I first witnessed it being used. I suppose there's some justice in the title, but no, we generally don't use it. The Gersallians would use the word swevyra'se." Years of practice had made the pronunciation as close to the proper term as he'd ever get.

"Swev-ee-ra-say…" Husn sounded it out.

"If you don't want to go around tongue-twisting yourselves trying to pronounce Gersallian, their choice for translating swevyra'se once they knew of English is 'Knight of Life'."

"It's pretty easy compared to Arabic... So, how does it work?" Husn followed up on the explanation.

Or French Lucas mentally added.

Ich spreche auch Deutsch, Robert responded. After that he turned his attention to Husn's question. "There are individuals across the Multiverse who have a… special connection to the universe or cosmos, whichever you prefer," Robert explained. "The Gersallians refer to this as having swevyra, or rather a connected swevyra. It means one's life energies are linked to the world and universe around them. We can sense the Flow of Life that moves through all things, binding all life together."

"That almost sounds like something the Minbari might say." Maina remarked "They believe that the universe itself is almost conscious and that life is the universe trying to know itself."

"That's entirely possible." Robert thought back, briefly, to his time in the coma, and the world the Flow of Life had constructed around his mind to save him from the Time Vortex's maddening effects.

"You've been through... a lot of weird, haven't you?" Maina asked.

"He travels between universes. One is weird enough. Imagine lots." Lucas replied.

"I have seen quite a few weird things, yes," Robert said. "And being a space traveler was something I never imagined growing up. My Earth is only in the first decades of the 21st Century. When I was growing up just making orbit was a feat, and it was a big deal that a small space station was being put into orbit. Interuniversal jump drives, warp drive, hyperspace engines… that was all something for science fiction." I'm basically living a science fiction series now.

"Are you are least Genre Savvy?" Zara asked with a wry grin.

"Well, I know better than to challenge the harmless looking old man if I meet one, at least," Robert replied, smiling.

Everyone but Zara giggled, she belly-laughed. They'd all seen those, though mostly in fantasy stories.

"So, you don't carry a gun? Not even the Psi Cops go anywhere without a backup weapon." Maina asked Robert.

"I used to carry guns, but with my abilities, this is more useful," Robert explained, taking his lightsaber from its place on his belt. "It's based on an old Gersallian weapon from thousands of years ago, during the last interuniversal era when the Darglan were exploring. The method to build them was rediscovered by my friend Lucy. She calls it a lightsaber."

"Is that like, some kind of laser-sword?" Lucas asked "Or is it plasma?"

"Does it go on forever when activated?" Maina added

"How do you not dry-roast yourself?" Husn brought up the rear of the inquisitiveness train.

"It's… basically a light beam with an inflection point," Robert replied. "Or so Lucy said when I asked. But she's more technically minded than I am, so I'm not sure why I don't dry-roast myself."

The math describing the physics has got to be interesting… Zara thought.

"Coooool" was the collective response. All of them were happy that there were still mysteries in the universe, because he had a laser that curved in on itself and that shouldn't be possible but apparently was. Lucas was about to ask him to activate it but Husn had another question and beat him to it.

"Are the armor and robes some sort of uniform? I know we have armored uniforms now."

"They're not a conventional Alliance uniform," he answered, returning his weapon to its place. "The armor is based on the armor used by the Order of Swenya's Knights, and the robes were a gift to me from Mastrash Kilaba, the abbess of one of their monasteries."

Robert felt the children instinctively recoil from the Order's name. "The Order of Swenya? We've heard of them. They take telepaths out of Earth Alliance space. You're not here to take us, are you?" Lucas asked, eyeing Robert but carefully suspending judgement.

Ah, here we go. And here I thought I'd be having this conversation with Zara's dads. Robert felt the caution in Lucas and went for a reassuring look. "Do you want me to?" he asked calmly.

"NO!" NO! From all of them.

There was real ferocity in that response. Robert refrained from matching it, instead only shaking his head. "Then I won't." He gave them each a gentle look and made sure they understood his sincerity. "What I want, and what the Order wants, is to make sure all telepaths get to have a choice. If you choose the Corps, that's fine. We just think it should be your choice, not anyone else's."

"Why would we want to leave our Mother and Father? That doesn't make any sense." Husn asked, gobstruck by the notion.

"Well, they should have the choice too," Robert answered. The three younger children raised eyebrows at him like he'd just said that circles had right angles.

"I think you're confused." Lucas said in a voice that almost sounded patronizing. "The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father."

Robert blinked at that. "Is that how you see it? That's…" He considered his thoughts on it. There was something… almost cultish about the use of the term. Authoritarian. The kind of thing you'd use to alienate new members, especially children, from their families. Thoughts of David Koresh and the like came to mind through word and idea association. He couldn't keep the discomfort at these thoughts from his head, so he knew it was obvious to them. "As you can sense, I find it too much like cults I've heard and read about during my life. But maybe I'm just not understanding something about it at the moment."

"Yeah. You're confused." Lucas replied, nodding sagely, but he was having a hard time putting it into words and looked up at Zara for help.

"Mother and Father, Mom and Dad, they don't mean the same thing like they do to mundanes." Zara said. "The Psi Corps teaches us, feeds us, and protects us. Like parents are supposed to do." That last part was bitter again. "Mom and Dad, or in my case Dads, when we have them because sometimes we don't, do the supportive nurturing things." Lucas, Husn, and Maina nodded in agreement.

"I see." Robert nodded. A shielded thought considered how much was Column A and how much was Column B, between Zara's view and what he'd thought. It probably depends on the internal issues… or Earth. I'm sure Clark was fine with Column B.

"Yeah. My mundane family is Mormon, well, not so mundane anymore. I have six brothers and sisters and four of them are telepaths. I thought that was big. Now I have twelve million."

There's more to it than the literal meaning. Zara informed him. It's also a promise but they're a bit too...young, to understand it yet. Zara left it at that. After a brief pause while he considered how to ask, Lucas spoke up again. "Do you have a family Captain?"

Robert considered the meaning the question and nodded.

"I don't think mundanes can have a family like we do Lucas." Maina said aloud. It was blunt, but he was only seven. He had yet to learn tact.

Robert smiled thinly at that. "Oh, we can have family in that way. I do. It isn't as big, though."

"What does that mean for you?" Maina asked "I was born in the Corps, I don't know what that looks like."

Robert considered how he could answer. What kind of words he should use. From the life energy within him came an answer that was quite obvious. No words were needed. "How about this? I can show you," he said. "You can see my memories of family and how they make me feel, and then understand what I'm talking about."

"That could work but, we're kinda new at that. Mrs. Sanders says it can be dangerous because we're not trained yet." Maina replied timorously, but Zara stepped in.

"I have been. I can guide you and keep Captain Dale safe."

Robert nodded to her. "It'll be okay," he said to the kids. And with that, he breathed in and prepared his thoughts for them, using the training he'd received to isolate certain thoughts young children should probably not know.

"Okay, take each other's hands, and one of you take mine." Zara suggested and the kids did it. She reached her free hand, still in it's glove, over to Robert. "You too."

He nodded and reached over, taking Zara's hand in his own.

With that, she knit the minds of the other kids together with her own, guiding them toward a single common thought that would permit a meeting of minds. A powerful emotion they all shared: hope for a future. Robert felt their minds become something greater than the mere sum of their parts, but also that Zara was the one in control of the gestalt consciousness. They were no longer strictly speaking multiple individuals but they weren't entirely a single mind either. They reached out with their thoughts and brushed against Robert's mind, Zara carefully holding them back so they didn't accidentally initiate a deep scan that could hurt him.

With the mental contact made, Robert brought the memories to the fore of his mind. It wasn't hard; the youth he sensed in the children made the association easy. The thoughts formed a progression, starting with one of his earliest memories, somewhat incomplete given his age, when he was just about three years old. He remembered his mother introducing him to the Andreys family. Most of that was a blur of some kind, but one memory stood out: a little girl with a little ponytail of golden blond hair, her aquamarine eyes glittering like tiny stars, who was eager to have a playmate. And that was how he met Julia.

The memories became more solid as their ages progressed, a collage of birthday parties and playgrounds at school, as well as playing on the farm. Eventually another boy appeared, and his name was easily detected by the children in their collective mind: Zack. More memories passed, memories of happy times with those that went from friends to close family.

Robert let the progression continue, smiling in happy recollection as he did, as the trio expanded over their adolescence. Shy, nerdy, and ever so lonely Tom, picked on at school until Zack stepped in. The loneliness and shyness went away, leaving the group hellion, always the first to try out new curse words or get in trouble. Then came the Hispanic girl in Julia's martial arts class, built tough, but with a warm heart: Angela.

The association there was tricky. Robert's more personal memories of Angel threatened to come up, enough that at least one element of the gestalt reached for it out of curiosity. Robert quietly nudged the memory away with the thought "for grownups". He thought he felt Zara help the nudging.

With Angel came her "crazy little sister", Caterina. Always small for her age, always reading books, and with a curiosity that was insatiable. She asked questions all the time, on top of being utterly devoted to her big sister, just as Angel was completely devoted to Cat's welfare.

Last but certainly not least, Leo arrived, the lonely black child in an area that was majority white. Briefly the memory of the death of Zack's mother came with it; Leo's mother, a psychiatrist at the hospital that acted as a grief counselor, introduced her son to the bereaved Zack.

The memories continued through teenage years into adulthood. Sports glory for Julia and Zack, academic for Tom and for Leo, everything else for the others. Fun parties, nights roaming the Kansas prairies looking for things to do, even that brawl that once got them all arrested… they were virtually inseparable. Losing even one - such as Leo going off to medical school - made the others feel somehow less whole.

That was what he meant by family.

Of course, that was just the oldest segment of the family. Robert's discovery of the old Darglan-made Facility came, and with it new members. Lucy Lucero, once just a girl they knew in school, became a part of it. Gabriel - Gabe - who helped them with their Spanish and supported them in their humanitarian goals, even if it meant violence or danger. And then Jarod, and Nick, and Scotty, and Meridina… Robert felt his connections to them warmly, connections shared among them all that made them into something more than friends, more than fellow officers…

What came next wasn't intended, but it was unavoidable. The fact was, simply considering the Facility also required considering what led to that day above all days, when Robert's discovery changed everything. That discovery hadn't just been an accident of circumstance; it was brought about by deep grief and loss. Just as much, the memories Robert was sharing with the children couldn't be excised of the other people he loved that were part of those memories. All of those years of playing on the farm with Julia and Zack… many of those memories had his little sister Susanna playing along with them. His grandmother's cooking had fed them. His grandfather had entertained them with folk tales and family legends stretching back to the Dale boys who settled in the area and became Jayhawkers in the days of Bleeding Kansas. His parents had given rides to those same friends. Later in life they attended sports games, supported him when he needed it, encouraged him often…

Thinking about those family members made the pain of their loss impossible for Robert to avoid. He simply tried to push it away. He might have, if not for the link.

Initially, Zara saw memories of a happy biological family and Robert could feel her mental grimace, the pain of knowing that it could be conditional, or a lie. That pain and sense of loss looped back in on Robert, making him feel the pain of his own loss more acutely. The painful memories breached the protective wall he kept them in, echoing in his mind and through the connection. Memories of sight and sound filled him and the link.

Robert as an eight year old boy beside a deathbed, the first he'd ever known, pleading to his Grandma Anna. "Oma! Oma, wach auf! Oma, wach auf bitte! Oma!"

Years later, Grandpa Allen in a hospital gown, eyes closed, face contorted with pain, every breath one of agony until finally they stopped...

And then, a decade later… the phone call. The sheriff's deputies, the quiet ride through the Kansas night to the county ME's office. Those sterile halls, bright with fluorescent light, the chemical smell of cleaners. The window into the room of metal slabs. An old man with an emotionless face pulls back the sheets, revealing beloved parents and dear little sister, mangled and broken. Eyes dull with death.

Another thought came. I had them again. Had them and let them go! The image of his family together again, in defiance of death, joined that of a little boy with his face and Julia's eyes and hair, pleading "Daddy, please don't go!" The son he never knew he'd wanted until then, joined by the family his heart yearned to see again. And they were all gone now, a dream that had popped like a bubble when he returned to the real world.

From all of this the wound in his heart, his very being, reopened. The pain came on fresh, as if it had just happened, and Robert couldn't fight it. He let out a low, agonized sob as tears poured down his cheeks.

The three younger children rejected that emotional pain entirely. They worked with Zara to find the memory associations cascading through Robert's brain and like a finger plugging a hole they stopped it, and poured unconditional love and acceptance into Robert's mind.

Then Zara transitioned to sharing a few of her own happier memories. Waking up with Gene wrapped around her like a protective blanket and Colin's cooking. She shared the surprise visit in Teeptown from her dads, when she learned how to walk like a panther and fly Kites - the raptor not the toy - by Lake Geneva. Gene conspired with her to propose to Colin by an oak tree in front of her cadre house; the same house that had also been Colin's. Then their wedding, with everyone from their home, and a lot of other places besides crammed into a Jewish community center. Lucas shared the happiest moment of his life, when he could feel anything again; when Mrs. Saunders, the same Mrs. Saunders who ran the schools of the camp, came to his house and convinced his parents to take him off Sleepers and administer the counter-agent. It was like waking up from a living death. Maina shared other memories, he was too young to have anything profound or particularly resonant, but he did have Birthday in his old Cadre. Husn had another, of her parents coming to visit on Omega VII on Sundays and taking her to the Mosque, hearing the Adhan and all the thoughts and emotions that accompanied the worship of Allah.

Robert felt those thoughts and the warm associations with them. His sobbing receded and, smothered in love and acceptance, a smile came to him. It occurred to him that this was why so many telepaths remained loyal to the Psi Corps, regardless of any dark side it had or the promise of greater personal freedom elsewhere. A childhood of knowing that love and acceptance awaited anyone suffering, of this kind of feeling… who needed brainwashing and mental reprogramming to enforce loyalty when they had this to offer? This was something real, something special.

So he would have to return the favor and show them something just as special. Something that they would never get to experience otherwise.

Thanks to the children Robert's emotions were re-balanced, though his face was still wet with shed tears. He used that balance to reach for the energy within himself. He felt for his swevyra, the life energy-fueled connection within him, with the children along for the ride, and from there opened himself to the Flow of Life. Not just as he felt it here, but through memory association he shared it as he had felt it in so many other places: New Avalon, the Citadel, Solaris, Portland, New Liberty.

Golden warmth filled him and, through him, them. It was not the thermal meaning of warmth, but rather a warmth of the spirit, of the soul. It was the warmth of joining one's friends for a cup of warm cocoa after working on a cold day. The warmth of a family cuddling together on a couch to watch a favored program. The warmth of watching children playing happily without a care in the world. It was this, but magnified, deeper, soothing and serene. It was the Light of Life, the positive feelings of living beings everywhere, bound together through the Flow of Life.

It was so big and inconceivable that Lucas and Maina could only respond with awestruck wonder. They could feel the minds in a room, but the Life of the cosmos, not just their universal everywhere but everywhere that was everywhere was almost too much for their minds to take in, to even begin to comprehend. Zara tried, she attempted to analyze it and examine it, but couldn't. Truly knowing it was beyond her and it kept slipping from her grasp. Husn however could reach out, touch it, make little ripples in it, and felt like she was touching what God might actually be.

Husn's reaction wasn't lost on Robert. He opened his eyes and looked at the girl, recognizing immediately what she was doing. Just like Meridina, he thought, recognizing Husn as both telepath and sensitive. One by one the children opened their eyes as well.

"Woah." Lucas intoned, and Zara perked her head up, noticing the others. Colin, Gene, Max, Mrs. Saunders, Indiri, Doctors Petrovich and Hegebe, several others. They'd approached to a respectful distance and stopped.

"I see you've been keeping Captain Dale out of trouble…" Colin said with an affectionate grin as he walked up, only to kneel down and kiss her on the forehead. Gene came in close behind and gave her a hug. Not for any real reason, he just wanted to.

"What was that?" Gene asked.

"Apparently swevyra," Zara replied and let Robert actually explain things as she enthusiastically returned the hug.

"That's what that was?" Husn asked, still trying to wrap her head around it.

"I was showing the children the Flow of Life," Robert explained. He shifted a leg to begin the process of standing up. "I'm sorry if we caused any problems. It wouldn't be the first time I've accidentally amplified a telepathic connection like that. Although last time it was… less desirable." His mind flashed back to the attempt, well over two years ago, to help Meridina cope with her remote telepathic sensing of two Maquis being tortured by Cardassians. Despite the fact that he had not yet begun to imagine he had such powers, the resulting interaction had not only intensified their experiencing of the torture, it had caused about every psionically-sensitive being within a ten kilometer radius to feel it, including Counselor Troi on the Federation Starship Enterprise.

"I'm pretty sure everyone felt that…much better subject this time, thankfully." Colin remarked "And that range is tremendous. You don't need line of sight or even a semblance of it?"

"Not with my abilities," Robert said. "I mean, line of sight can be useful, yes, it gives us something to focus on. But with time and practice we can influence things without having to see them." He looked to the children, most especially to Husn. "I suppose that's the reason the interaction can travel so far."

"Yeah." Zara agreed. "We can cheat sometimes, but unless we can see something it's hard to sort things out from the background."

Husn knew she felt something the others didn't and looked at Robert, projecting a pointed question mark into his mind like she was pointing at herself with it.

Robert looked to her and nodded. At that moment a tone filled the room. The back of Robert's left hand lit up with blue light, forming a circle, or rather, an obvious button. Robert pressed it. "I'm here."

"Do your hosts know about the ship approaching the system in hyperspace? And not the local band either. Going by the sensors, they're using an S0T5-style hyperdrive."

Robert glanced toward Colin and Gene. He sensed immediate concern and uncertainty and knew what it meant: as far as either knew, the Corps had no ships with that kind of drive system.

"Lucy, would you be of the opinion that such a hyperdrive is the perfect FTL system to use in this universe if you're looking to sneak up on unsuspecting colonies and settlements?" he asked cautiously.

"Given how local scanning systems work? Yeah, I'd say so. The only reason we see it is because this ship has Darglan sensor technology. Even most subspace scanners would have trouble finding it."

As she spoke Robert felt a terrible little feeling in his gut. He gave the assembled telepaths a worried look.

"Pirates or slavers, and they're not here at random. Someone leaked this location." Gene concluded, while Colin pulled out his own comm device, tapped a code into its touch screen and slid the little slider from yellow all the way over past the visual spectrum to X-ray for Pogrom/Slave Raid. Every communications device in the entire compound blared out a warning klaxon specifically coded for that particular alarm, and Robert felt a surge of both fear and determination as everyone retreated in as orderly a fashion as they could toward the bunker. Psionic pings called out everyone's location beyond vocal range or line of sight as everyone was accounted for. Not one telepath would be left behind.