A handful of weapons were set out on the table in the dark room.
"We have a problem," a raspy voiced man said to the collected group.
There were several humans present as well as two narns, a drazi, three brakiri and a centauri.
Rally leaned forward and sorted through the weapons. Most of them were melee weapons: stun guns, drazi knives, a flexible fiberoptic baton, some others. These weren't the problem, nor were the occasional PPG.
No, the problem lay in a small pistol sized firearm with a massive single shot round.
A mini-grenade launcher.
"That's a planetary-use weapon," the Centauri said grimly.
"Right, this baby can fire a grenade strong enough to open a foot long hole in the hull if directed right," the raspy voiced man said.
"What fool would deal in those weapons?" one of the Narn asked.
"It gets worse than that," Rally said. "I found one of these things on a job not a little bit ago. In a trash heap."
"Someone is seeding the station with these weapons and eventually something is going to go boom," the second Narn said.
"What purpose would that serve?" the drazi asked. "Something like this will bring security down on the weapons trade like a black hole."
"Legal trade will try up like Minbari at a wetbar," one of the humans noted irritably. "Gray and black markets..."
"Will be prohibitively expensive to operate," the Centauri said. "Not to mention that this puts the lot of us in a station littered with dangerous weapons."
"The vulnerable parts of the station are placed quite apart from the living quarters," a Narn noted. "Really, these days, it's only tradition that keeps slugthrowers off most vessels."
"It's still an explosion in a tight, confined space," Rally said. "There's no real cover to be had. One grenade in a corridor and we'll have mass death...including the person who fires the grenade in most places."
She paused.
"I could take this to security," she said. "I'm legal, and I've got some good in-roads there."
"No good," the raspy-voiced man said. "They'll have to investigate us and my customers aren't going to like me turning over information."
"For whatever motivations," the Centauri said. "Everyone here has at least dipped in the black market, which will prove...embarrassing when security does what it has to do to find the lunatic behind these weapons."
"You know what your suggesting here?" Rally asked. "I doubt any of us here will get along too well. You all know I don't appreciate any weapons getting into just anybody's hands."
"I would note that we've kept a fairly tight rein on firearms in this station," the Narn noted. "We don't have a flood of well armed lurkers shooting the place up yet. I would advise, Miss Vincent, that we are much better than the alternative."
"Unfortunately," Rally said leaning back. "I'm guessing I'm the agent you're looking to use here? It'll look good for me if I get credits from a bunch of black arms types."
"I've heard rumors that some of your human rogue telepaths have been filtering through Brakiri space," the Brakiri merchant said. "I wonder what might happen if they stumble on one of my shipments."
"Or a Narn shipment for that matter," someone else said.
Rally tapped her fingers on the table in front of her.
"The underground is a bunch of pacifists and doctors," Rally said.
"And I know that's the company you prefer to keep," a human said. "But can you really say that the end of Psi-Corps is going to come peacefully?"
"What do you know about it?" Rally asked.
"You're a white knight, Vincent," the human said. "Always have been, a do-gooder with pretensions of being mercenary. I don't know whether your problem with Psi-Corps is personal or idealistic, and I don't care. I've heard your name whispered more than once a safe contact."
Rally grimaced at that, guessed it only took one set of loose lips to pass on that she might not know names a telepath could go to for help.
Garibaldi looked across at Rally as the bounty hunter walked up right on time for her normal meeting on Shanti's progress in her community service.
"Not right now, Rally," he said. "We've got a big problem to focus on."
"Is it related to the thing I told you about before?" Rally asked.
"The grenade launcher?" Garibaldi asked. "Please tell me that was a fluke."
"I've been unofficially asked to look into it," she told him.
"Great," Garibaldi said. "I'll alert medlab."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Rally noted irritably.
"I'm guessing that the parties asking you to look into this aren't interested in security looking into it," Garibaldi said.
"Good guess," Rally said.
Garibaldi frowned and nodded as he looked around.
"I'm guessing things will get messy if I have to go asking questions of these parties," Garibaldi said. "And that you're here at your normal time as a sort of underneath an under the table courtesy call."
He thought for a moment.
"Okay, we've got a Free Mars terrorist running around," Garibaldi said. "You have until that's wrapped up to handle this problem. If it's not done by then, I'm moving in."
"I'll have it by then," Rally promised. "And Shanti?"
"No complaints on my end," Garibaldi said. "You?"
"Other than from her?" Rally asked. "Not yet."
"Let's hope that stays that way too," the security chief said. "By the way, how long are you going to ask me to hold that gun of yours?"
"That gun has been in battle for almost three hundred years," Rally said. "I don't want it anywhere near Vivian if I can avoid it. If I need it, I'll tell you."
"In the meantime," Garibaldi noted. "I have one hell of a collector's piece."
"Just remember that it's on lease," Rally warned sharply.
"Don't worry, I like having two hands, eight fingers and two thumbs," Garibaldi noted with a smile and raising up his hands.
"Let's first start with what you know," the Minbari said casually, not expecting too much.
Rally Vincent's silence was intimidating to say the least, but she still wasn't a telepath and she was human besides.
"Know about what, Mr. Dhaliri?" Vivian asked.
"About the use of your gifts, of course," the Minbari said with an arched brow. "And you do not need to refer to me by this human title of 'Mister'."
"All right," Vivian said, uncertainly.
"I burn things," Shanti said simply, looking up from a mirror before looking back down and checking her make-up. "I don't think it gets much simpler than that."
Dhaliri reached over and took the mirror out of her hand and set it aside as Vivi rolled her eyes.
"And what about your sister," he asked, looking over towards Vivi.
"I can get visions off of objects," Vivian said, uncomfortably. "Gloves help, but if there's a lot then I still feel it. And the strong memories last a long time."
"What has your mother done up to now to help you deal with it?" the Minbari asked, nodding as he considered that neither gift was something he had heard about outside of perhaps the Vorlons.
"Well," Shanti said. "She made us practice a lot. So I know what it feels like and what happens when I do stuff. I get really thirsty and my head hurts a lot when I do that though, so I'd really rather just have a gun."
"Of course you would," Dhaliri said. "I imagine you have your own weapon already."
"No," Shanti said irritably. "Rally only lets us use firearms on the targeting range and sometimes she makes us clean them."
"So, you've only had practical trial and error practice?" the Minbari reasoned. That was a bit more than he'd expected really. "Anything at all like meditation."
"We learn awareness, focus," Vivian said, counting it off, "and visualization."
"Can you say a little bit more about that?" Dhaliri asked, idly curious.
"Well, first you have to know what's going on around you," Shanti said. "Then know what to focus on, and visualize what you want to happen."
"And focus without ignoring anything," Vivian said.
"Yeah, I always forget that part," Shanti said, shrugging. "Oh yeah, and dreaming."
"What is that?" Dhaliri said.
"Lucid dreaming," Vivian said. "Rally said we need to be able to recognize what a dream feels like and to control what happens during it."
"That's fun," Shanti said eagerly. "Rally says to give the dream what it wants but put what you want underneath it so it doesn't take you somewhere you don't want to go. But I just like to have fun and imagine great fight scenes or really pretty dresses or something. Burning stuff is a lot easier when I'm dreaming."
Dhaliri swallowed a bit nervously.
"How often do you practice this?" he wondered.
"Every night," Vivian said.
"The boring part is getting ready to go to sleep and just breathing for fifteen minutes," Shanti said. "Then we're asleep and the fun part is when the dreams start."
"Did she tell you why?" Dhaliri asked.
"Because a telepath or drugs can make you see things or feel things that aren't real," Vivian said. "And Rally said that dreaming is the closest thing to that feeling she can think of. So she makes us practice against our dreams."
"And your mother does this too?" Dhaliri asked.
"I don't think Rally even really sleeps much," Shanti said.
"She sleeps," Vivian said. "She just doesn't...turn off. Her alarm is a red light about this big."
She pinched her thumb and index finger together less than an inch.
"That wakes her up if she's facing it," the short-haired twin said.
The woman had been teaching her children defense techniques against telepathic intrusion. And if he had to guess from the description, how to undermine manipulation while making the invader feel that they had succeeded at whatever they were attempting.
That was rather intimidating. He'd run across one other silent person before, and that was the result of acute mental trauma, but the individual hadn't spent anytime afterwards developing the condition. Now that he thought about it, Vivian and Shanti were both quieter, though not silent, than most, though Shanti had brief spikes of mental volume. He had just considered it part of their gift.
Given Vivian's ability that might be the case with her, but he wondered if it was as much their mother's upbringing that had to do with it.
"Now, what I want," he said. "Is for you to use your abilities while I listen to see what is happening with your abilities."
Rally was starting to learn her way around Down Below given how often she had business down here recently. At the moment, she was poking around the area that she had found the first grenade launcher.
It had been in a pile of refuse probably scavenged from who knows where and nobody in the area seemed to know who had brought the debris to that area.
None of the arms merchants had heard of any new players in the black market, and none of them claimed to be behind this.
However, Rally wouldn't be surprised if she discovered that one of them had stumbled upon the launchers by accident and tried to get rid of them. Resulting in them scattered all over the place.
She grimaced visually at that. Such a hopeful guess wouldn't explain why the launchers were being found loaded with armed grenades.
At the moment, she was picking through the debris a second time, keeping in mind where it all would come from. But, as she picked through it a second time now, she was coming to the same conclusion that she knew she would.
The debris of this pile didn't match the debris of the pile where the other arms dealer had found the second launcher.
If a rogue, lost shipment of weapons had been found and were getting scattered about by accident, then she'd expect to find something in common between the debris other than just the weapons.
It made the chance they were being deliberately seeded just that much more dangerous.
Looking up and around, Rally couldn't see any other piles of debris in the immediate area. She glanced around toward one of the people looking toward her cautiously and walked over, pulling out a small credit chit with a casual attitude.
She maintained a number of small accounts with a set number of credits which had orders to close as soon as they were first emptied. It let her bribe or otherwise pay people that didn't have accents to transfer money to.
"Can someone tell me what these debris piles are here for?" she asked.
A mousy woman eyed the credit chit and then the debris pile.
"It's out of the way there," she said. "It's the stuff that gets put aside after someone builds a wall or takes one down."
Rally nodded and looked around again before turning back to the woman.
"Are there set places to put these things?" she asked.
"Th..there are a few big dumping places," the woman said, eyes on the chit.
"Show me," Rally said.
Rally hefted the small, pistol sized launcher in her hand and frowned as she considered it. This was the third debris pile she'd found since the lurker had led her to the first. And it was the third grenade launcher that she'd found.
"All right, has anybody seen someone strange around here?" she asked, looking to the lurkers staring at her.
"What's strange?" one of the lurkers asked. "Everybody that comes down here is kind of strange."
"I'm strange, your strange," Rally said flatly. "We're all strange. Thank you Cheshire. I mean doesn't belong here kind of strange. Too shiny to work for a living."
"There was a woman," someone said. "She came down here, had a case..."
"A woman," Rally said idly. "Let me try to describe her..."
"How can you do that?" the lurker asked.
"I can smell when a trail is being laid," Rally said idly. "I can probably guess in at most three tries."
It took two.
It made sense that whoever brought Jack back wouldn't have left yet. Not one of Goldie's and not this close to her.
Back in Chicago this would call for going to Becky and doing a search of names or faces on the station. But there was no way to contact Becky at the moment and even if there was, she was too far away to swiftly hack B5's records like that.
For her own part, her skills were in the form of the battle, the stalk and the hunt. All the physical aspects of the field.
She had an excellent amount of both deductive and inductive reasoning, but without all the information, reasoning still left holes.
"She's following Goldie's will still," Rally reasoned as she moved through the tunnels of Down Below. "So where would she be?"
The scrape of a sound to her side attracted Rally's attention and she dodged aside barely as the knife slashed down at her, slashing a harmless line across her neck that was only half an inch from being deadly.
The PPG was in her hand and aiming at the assailant in the same flash, but the trigger wasn't pulled as Rally's eye trailed down the woman's left arm to the grenade launcher there, loaded, primed and aimed right at their feet.
"Rally Vincent," the knife wielding woman said with a smile. "She wants to talk to you."
"Goldie is dead, Diane," Rally said, already calculating and planning. "If you think otherwise, it's the kerasine talking."
"Goldie is never dead once," Diane said with a chuckle before glancing off to the side with glassy eyes. "She found the presents just like you said. I have brought her to you!"
Rally briefly considered the direction that Diane was looking and immediately dismissed it as a delusion.
Still it was a delusion that she could use.
Rally fired out, shattering the grenade launcher's hammer in Diane's hand and at the same time half-melting a fair sized chunk of the surface of what proved to be a prosthetic hand.
"You replaced the hand, I see," Rally noted.
The woman snapped to awareness and slashed outward with her knife as she discarded the useless grenade launcher.
Rally stepped back away from the knife, trying to increase range between her and the brainwashed and expertly trained assassin. Diane was faster, but her insanity was not the asset against Rally that it would be against some.
The gunsmith sidestepped a slash as she aimed down at the lunatic's feet and used her free hand to shove Diane away further down the hall.
The woman rolled into the fall and came up to her feet, throwing her knife. Rally batted it aside and fired again, striking over Diane's shoulder and scoring across slender armored shoulder pads warn there to deal with PPG fire.
Such a slender protection was only worth one or two direct shots, but it got the knife wielding fanatic in close enough to draw another blade, a small fighting blade which Rally was familiar with. It had cut her at least once before in the hands of another deadly woman.
The small blade slammed into her side with force but not accuracy, missing anything vital and barely scratching Rally through the faux leather she normally wore on these sorts of jobs.
Rally felt a sudden coldness that came with a distance from reality and an urge to sweat. It didn't feel like kerasine, but drugs were certainly not far from her mind, especially as the crazed image of Diane leaning over her morphed smoothly into that of Goldie's image reaching out to caress her as she sat helpless and tied to a chair.
The hallucination may have continued as the chair burst apart around her into splinters that rained over Goldie's image and Rally's mind fashioned its rejection of the induced image in the form of her preferred CZ 75. The image Goldie stared at her arrogant, mocking and seemingly unaware until the the moment that Rally pulled the trigger in her mind.
And then reality came smashing in as she came to in time to feel the satisfying crunch as Diane's chest plate shattered under her free hand's punch. It was the problem with some of the cheaper concealable armors, they just didn't handle a physical blow very well.
"Ho...how! Mistress! Where are you!" Diane demanded pitifully as she tumbled back onto her rear and immediately was dodging aside as Rally advanced firing.
She turned her back, letting the remains of her armor take the first couple of blows before she snatched up her knife again and dodged around a corner.
Cursing and wishing for a good slug thrower to perform a ricochet with, Rally thought about dodging low and going for the shot around the corner, but the woman would be expecting the slide.
Instead, Rally grunted with effort as she jumped high and wide around the corner, staying well away from it and easily dodging the debris thrown her way as Diane rolled forward under the bounty hunter's shot and came to her feet with another knife in hand.
"You're too close to use a gun safely!" Diane shouted. "I'm disappointed. She's disappointed!"
Rally grimaced as she dodged aside again, back against the wall and reaching into her jacket for a moment as Diane turned about to face her again.
The lunatic found a small spray can of filling her vision just briefly before a fine mist sprayed out over her.
A laugh moved through her mind just before the mist reached her face, thinking it was something like commercial mace or such. Then the pain ripped through her as the mist covered her eyes and sent her screaming in crippled agony.
"Sorry about the bleach, but I want you alive," Rally said shortly before slamming her PPG into back of Diane's skull.
Rally sat on the bed and waited for the tests to come to see whatever might have been on that knife edge. She glanced across toward where Diane was shackled into her bed and was struggling about.
The gunsmith frowned sadly and shook her head.
"Poor girl," she muttered.
"She's hardly a girl," Dr. Franklin said. "And if you really felt sorry for her, you wouldn't have sprayed her in the eyes with a can of undiluted bleach."
"Ever get something in your eye, Doctor?" Rally asked idly. "I hated to do it, but she isn't someone you can save. It would be kinder to kill her, but I think we need to talk to her first."
"What are you talking about?" Franklin asked.
Rally shook her head and looked toward the woman again.
"Do you know about Goldie Musou?" Rally asked.
"She was the drug lord that developed kerasine 2," the Doctor said with a frown. "That's about all I need to know about her."
"Goldie had a thing for teenaged girls, especially innocent virginal types," Rally said. "She'd find a girl with a happy life and loving family and then kidnap them. Dose them with kerasine and work at them until she'd programmed them completely."
"That's hardly anything..."
"I'm not finished," Rally said quietly, interrupting Franklin. "Then she sends the girl back to the family...and the girl waits until her loved ones are all in place then she kills them all according to her programming. Mother, father, younger siblings, older siblings, boyfriends, best friends...everybody."
"Good god," Franklin said.
"After that, Goldie recollects them and waits for the kerasine to drop enough for the girl to realize what she's done," Rally whispered. "You see, she stays on the drugs, because then she can pretend that this is all a nightmare. She can deny that it was her hand who killed her own family. She's so determined to avoid that that she's stayed programmed ten years after Goldie Musou's death."
"And you think you can get something useful out of her?" Franklin asked.
Rally nodded quietly.
"The game is close to reality," Rally said. "She'll know something."
The doctor stared at the struggling woman along with Rally and felt a distinct shiver work over his spine.
"Your blood work is clean," he said, recovering himself. "Whatever was on that knife must be normally untraceable or else quickly processed."
Rally nodded.
"Thanks for that," she said. "Maybe it was just a wandering thought."
Not that she had those much anymore, but it was always possible.
"Whatever," Franklin said. "We'll tell Garibaldi when she's ready to be questioned. We're just getting started on her preliminaries here."
Rally smiled grimly at the thinly veiled dislike and the implication that she would be kept away from the patients before leaving the room.
"Targeting you specifically," Garibaldi said, shaking his head. "Goldie's famous sex pets wonderful."
"Sex...what?" Ivanova asked.
"Brainwashed teenaged girls she used as assassins and sex slaves," Garibaldi explained gingerly.
"Oh great, plural, how many more do we have to deal with?" the Russian commander asked.
"Two others, unless there are more than I know about," Rally said.
Sheridan nodded gruffly.
"We're going to question her soon as the Doc clears her," Garibaldi said. "Already logging her in, though had to remind one of my guys that her knives aren't for purchase or collecting."
"That's just the sort of added complication we don't need around here," he said irritably.
"Regretting the decision to back me?" the bounty hunter asked.
"Maybe just a little," Sheridan said. "But we all have our pasts and all of it was pretty colorful in ways. I don't doubt that we'll all be getting more than our fair share of attention coming soon."
"Just one thing," Garibaldi asked.
"What's that?" Rally asked as she stood up.
"Is this one of those girls?" Garibaldi asked.
Rally frowned as she looked over the photo. The woman in the picture was familiar, but she wasn't sure where she'd seen it before. However, she was way too young to be one of Goldie's girls. Maybe they were emulating their old mistress?
That was a disturbing thought.
"No, and what was she doing outside my store back when I caught Jack the second time?" Rally asked.
"What makes you say that was when this was taken?" Ivanova asked.
"Because he held back to tire his shoelaces," Rally said simply.
"Shoelaces?" Ivanova asked, glancing down at the laceless boots. "Really?"
"Hey, I was rushed," Garibaldi protested. "Anyway, we're not sure what she was doing there, we didn't get much of a look."
"Right," Rally said. "I've got to go and look to see if there are any more launchers around before someone finds them. How'd your terrorist hunt go?"
"Thanks for attending to this, Miss Vincent," Sheridan said. "It's good to know we can count on this protection going two ways. Though I assume you are getting paid."
"In a manner of speaking," Rally said.
"These are military grade arms," one of several people noted. "And armor, bullet and energy resistant. With this we can take the fight to Psi-Corp!"
"Not yet," someone else said as they looked through the crate and weapons. "We're untrained and there aren't enough of us."
Several people agreed.
"We have to prepare first," he said then. "But maybe soon we won't just be running."
Sheridan breathed heavily as he looked back over his shoulder at where Garibaldi had left.
The security chief had asked to be brought in to Sheridan's suspicions about Bureau 13 and Sheridan had obliged.
The day had been very hectic.
"At least none of those grenades went off," he muttered.
Diane stopped struggling as she heard a couple of doctors and nurses heading her way again, talking about scans and examinations.
She chuckled darkly for a moment.
"Hey Doctor, did you ever watch 21st century films?" she asked with a raspy, bleach damaged voice.
"What's that?" the voice asked.
"You see, my mistress taught me how to take the pain away and replace it with pretty lights," Diane said chuckling.
"What are you talking about?" he wondered before his eyes widened. "Damn it! Don't do..."
A nerve impulse sent through her prosthetic limb, triggering a motion of the mechanical fingers which further sent a new, wireless signal.
The explosion ripped out of her body from the implanted device, tearing her to pieces as the operating theater of medlab was torn into pieces with shrapnel flying in every which direction.
Stephen picked himself up from the floor as he looked about the mess of his medlab and listened to the coming cries of the wounded about him.
Looking around, he was sure that nobody seemed to be dead, which had to be some kind of miracle. But the operating room was trashed and even as he watched, something thunked down in front of him before rolling to a stop.
The still smiling head of the woman staring up at him.
Morden crossed his arms and considered the two women he saw sitting down across from him.
"No," he said idly toward his side. "They're insane, but they could be useful. First, we just have to know what they want."
He smiled then and rocked back lightly on his heels.
"And that's not the kind of thing to ask them up front," he decided with a trace of dark humor.
Okay, here's the complete Chapter 6, fairly short I know, but significant...I hope to have a good preview for Friday (and full episode on my site)
Also, remember, currently having an event run on my site at
thryth dot webs dot com
