Paint and Powder: Defiant Hope
A Star Trek/Babylon 5 fanfic by Andrew Joshua Talon
DISCLAIMER: This is a non-profit fan based work of prose. Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager et al are the property of CBS Television, and creation of Gene Roddenberry. Babylon 5 is owned by Warner Brothers. Azur Lane is owned by Yostar. Please support the official release.
Outer Reaches of Minbari Space
Alyt Hareen was an able Minbari Warrior. He had been proud to call himself such since he was inducted into the Windswords Clan. He had served ably for many years, and when Dukhat had been slain by humans? He had eagerly joined the call for their extermination. You did not get away with such insults, such sacrilege, to the chosen of Valen and the Vorlons!
For a time, the war had gone well. The numerous human outposts and colonies at the periphery of their modest empire had fallen easily. All too easily, really. Hareen had secretly hoped for more of a challenge.
Well... The Universe had answered that hope. The Thinking Ships-The Defiant-had appeared, and had rescued mankind. That thinking ship and its sisters had begun to wreak havoc across Minbari space, and the war had slowed to a crawl!
His own small squadron, led by his ship the Blood of Sacrifice, was currently patrolling near the border with human space in case one of those unpredictable vessels appeared, ready to destroy Minbari lives and ships!
It was as though some darkness had intervened, given the humans a hand against their righteous cause. Whispers of the Shadows had begun to permeate the ranks.
Hareen had read the ancient records of the last Shadow War. The Thinking Ships were devious, and yet... They didn't fit the pattern of the Ancient Enemy. They were chaotic, but the technology was so dissimilar to the Shadows it was difficult to think that was their origin. True, the enemy might be concealing themselves, but... Something didn't quite fit.
For now, Hareen pushed that puzzle aside. There was another matter that required his attention.
"Unusual spacial disturbance, 250,000 kilometers away, my Alyt," his captain Feanor reported. Hareen frowned.
"Of what kind?"
"It almost resembles a jump point, but... Not," he said. Hareen's frown deepened the lines on his aged face.
"Send our escort fighters to investigate, and open gun ports," he ordered.
"At once!"
The Nial fighters that screened the Blood of Sacrifice pulled away, as several Lintara gunships flew up to take their place as escorts. Hareen was taking no chances. Ancient battle tactics that had been seen as unnecessary against the humans had come back the moment Earthforce was able to pierce their stealth. Many warriors had already died due to overconfidence-Hareen swore no more would on his watch.
The Nials returned their telemetry, which was displayed on the holoscreens. A vessel appeared out of the strange spatial disturbance, and Hareen grimaced. It wasn't one of those "Federation" Thinking Ships-Its profile was far too predatory. Enough that it made him feel... Uneasy.
It resembled a red Zok-A flying predator that captured animals on the wing with its talon-bearing legs, and ate them while in flight. It was small, but its power readings were monstrous-Just like the Thinking Ships. And in its zok-like claws were deadly looking cannons.
"The fighters report it appears to be inert, Alyt," Feanor stated, "no lifesigns."
"Yet its power systems are still active," Hareen hummed. Still...
"Have the fighters take it in tow," he ordered, "make for the jumpgate. I want every sensor on that ship, full power. I want no surprises!"
"Yes, my Alyt!"
The Nials extended their gravimetric drives and began to tow the green vessel back towards the Blood of Sacrifice. It soon came into range of the Sharlin's own sensors, and Hareen looked the vessel over.
"It's beautiful," Feanor spoke softly. Hareen nodded.
"It is indeed," he said, admiring the feather-like designs on the vessel's wings.
"Why, thank you darling~," a female voice crooned over the speakers. Hareen scowled.
"Who was that-?'
The lights and holoscreens on the bridge went out. The holographic shroud that showed the outside of the vessel flickered and vanished... Before someone new appeared on the bridge. Hareen nearly gasped.
He was no Religious Caste prude, but... The woman was shaped for sin itself. Voluptuous, and wearing red, gold and black robes that showed off her legs and her cleavage to near lewdness. Her hair was long and black, and decorated with a golden crest that resembled zok feathers. Her ears were pointed, and there were ridges on her forehead that almost resembled the crest of a zok. Her smile was predatory, and Hareen almost felt like cornered prey when she turned her scarlet eyes onto him.
"INTRUDER!" Two of his warriors charged... And then were flattened, their bones crunching under increased gravity. Hareen gaped-This being had tapped into the gravity systems?!
"Now now, none of that," the woman taunted, wagging a finger at them, "I'm a guest here, you should treat me politely."
"Who are you?" Hareen demanded.
She brought a long, sharp fingernail up to tap her chin.
"Hmmm... Strange. An entirely different universe, according to your databases and mine," she sighed. "I shall never know the glory of the Romulan Star Empire... Pity. Yet..." Her smile grew wider. "Humans are still around...? And..."
Her eyes gleamed.
"Defiant... And Enterprise," she crooned. "Oooh... How delicious."
"Who are you?!" Hareen demanded again. The woman scoffed.
"I am Bloodwing. The artificial intelligence of the Romulan Winged Defender of the same name. And you? Alyt Hareen, of the Windswords? You have saved yourself from death for the next five minutes. Because we have something in common."
"And that is?" Hareen asked, a cold chill running down his spine. Another Thinking Ship?! And now it had control over his ship?
"That we have a mutual interest," she said, licking her lips, "the extermination of the human race. I want to see the taint of mankind eliminated from the universe-any universe."
She waved her hand, and the artificial gravity buckled underneath Hareen's feet. He was thrown forward with Feanor, and both fell onto their knees in front of the mad AI. Bloodwing chuckled.
"That makes us allies... Does it not?" She asked, her smile as warm and comforting as Minbar's northern ice cap.
"It... Does, yes," Hareen said carefully, biting back his pride. "What will you offer us?"
"Oh... For now?" Bloodwing caressed his cheek with a hand, the static uncomfortable, "you get to live. Isn't that wonderful~? For now... Let's see what else your little civilization has to offer~..."
Hareen knew he should have listened to his instincts. Now, he could only think one thing as the Bloodwing strutted about his bridge like a queen:
Valen help us all...
Jericho III
Jeanne took a mental breath as she watched the Minbari jump in their reinforcements. She had to give it to her opponent in this battle, they were being bold and intelligent this time around, having learned from their past mistakes fighting the up-gunned and up-armoured Earth Alliance fleet.
But it would avail them not. Four times prior, this time being the fifth, the enemy had come for this system and had been turned aside at increasingly greater cost. Though Jericho was not the most strategic system in Earth Alliance space, its value in terms of morale was incalculable.
Every battle won in this system, every drop of blood spilled to hold it, shored up the flagging but defiant hope of the Earth Alliance and her people. Its loss, though not a death knell, would nonetheless be crippling for her crew and compatriots.
'The walls of Jericho must not fall, this time,' she thought to herself.
Her orders here and now were simple and to the point.
Beat the Minbari. Beat them so badly that they would never think to mount a sixth assault on Jericho's walls. Beat them so bloody and blue that the mere mention of the word 'Jericho' would become as synonymous as General Pyrrhus' infamous 'victory' so long ago.
"Minbari ships jumping in at Sectors 11, 19 and 25!" shouted Lt. Adams.
"Frag," swore Captain Maynard.
Frag indeed. The Minbari had jumped out at the end points of a pyramid in space, to their fore and aft. It would force them to either split up their forces and weaken them overall, or accept punishing fire from the sides where the new polarised hull plating was weakest. Between that and interception fire on the anti-matter mass driver rounds being flung at Jericho, they'd be stretched perilously thin as the battle raged.
"Permission to fight in earnest, Captain Maynard?" asked Jeanne, even as she anticipated his affirmative by warming up her phaser banks, opening her missile tubes, charging her hull plating and firing up her ECM and ECCM.
Favouring her with a glance and a grin, he nodded. "Permission granted."
For a single moment both fleets stared down one another, before both sides unleashed fire and fury at one another.
Jeanne grit her teeth as she ripple fired every missile launcher and rack she had, continuous phaser fire lancing out as her interceptors ran hot. Three Minbari ships found themselves snapped and broken under her barrage, but the Minbari were not without teeth. EAS Calypso and EAS Hadrians Wall had both crumpled under well placed fire by the enemy.
"Receiving a hail from the leading Minbari vessel!" shouted Lt. Henderson.
"Put it through!" snapped Captain Maynard as Jeanne bucked slightly from a lucky strike, a testament to the new technology, given that in the past such strikes would have simply sliced through Earth Alliance ships in half like a hot knife through butter.
Jeanne furrowed a brow at the comm signal however. The enemy rarely deigned to talk to humans except to announce their doom.
A severe looking Minbari of the Warrior caste appeared on their comms screen. He wasted no time in addressing them.
"Attention Earthforce Vessels," he said with a barely suppressed sneer, "You are surrounded and outgunned. Surrender, and you may be offered... clemency. Continue to fight and you shall be destroyed. Choose."
The screen winked off as the commline was cut.
"Well this is new," muttered Captain Maynard.
It was new. The Minbari never offered the option of surrender and 'clemency', whatever that actually meant. She knew that for them it was a holy war of extermination. It stank of being a ruse or simply a way to rattle them, to shake their resolve in the face of battle. Even if it were genuine, it would only mean that their newfound technology advantage would fall into enemy hands, which wasn't an option.
No, Jeanne wasn't having it. Another vessel, the EAS Hornet, burned and smoked under repeated fire, but continued to return fire even as it burned. No escape pods were launched, knowing they'd be easy pickings for Minbari fire. No screams for a mercy they knew the enemy lacked. Only a determined and dogged desire to send ordnance downrange until it finally guttered out and fell silent.
Jeanne silently recited a thousand Rosaries for every man and woman that had fallen in the defense of this system. She would not, could not, let them down.
"Permission to respond to the enemy's demand for surrender, Captain?" she asked.
Captain Maynard regarded her with a calculating look. Responding to the enemy was a Captain's prerogative, one that he could defer if he so wished. The sight of Jeanne's thunderous expression had him grinning from ear to ear despite the battle raging in anticipation of her response.
Sineval glared at the human woman clad in archaic armour who had shimmered into holographic existence before him. With neither the rank nor the uniform of the Earth Alliance, he could only assume that this was the avatar of the thinking ship deigning to respond in place of her captain as was good and proper. The dour look and dead eyed stare she favoured him with set his blood to a low boil. Here then stood a warrior made and his warrior born. He could taste her lust for his blood, and he in turn felt a low thrill at the likes of such cunning minds, against which the Minbari would whet their blades upon in anticipation of the true enemy to come.
The resolution was fuzzy, a clear sign of lacking sophistication in their primitive communications, but also owing somewhat to the isolated nature of this communication channel. No risks were taken with the thinking ships in combat, not after the last tragedy with lax security protocols had beaten the arrogance out of their security experts.
She met his eye, an impressive feat given the time she'd had to deduce his position from the camera angles, and all but shouted a single uncouth and incomprehensible word before cutting communications.
"What did she say?" he asked, knowing that it amounted to a no but wanting all the specifics regardless, "What in the Nine did she say exactly?!"
"Alyt," said a slight looking Minbari woman from the Religious Caste, one of the few he considered worthy to be on his bridge crew, "I believe it was one of the humans secondary languages, French to be specific."
"And the word she used? Its meaning?" he demanded with rapidly degrading patience.
The woman did not hesitate in spite of her clear nerves under the watch of her Alyt, a definite mark in her favour.
"I believe she said 'MERDE!', It means-"
A dozen neutron beams flashed towards Jeanne as the entirety of the Minbari fighter screen charged forward hurling insults of their own towards the fleet.
"Think you might have pissed them off slightly, Jean," said Captain Maynard warily.
"Oui, monsiuer Capitane, that was the point," she replied with an impish grin.
Her fusion cores thrummed as the Minbari charged. Her blood was up. Targeting solutions that once had to be calculated carefully now flowed easily and naturally before being flung towards the rest of the fleet for final execution. Adrenaline-equivalent code fired off, enhancing her battle instincts as the enemy charged, charged and charged ever more... into the welcoming fiery embrace of her firing solutions.
Only when escape became impossible did Jeanne relay the signal for her allies to open fire in earnest, her own firepower reserved for interception and suppressing fire duties. It was precisely the kind of tactic that would have been impossible to pull off before she had rolled out of the shipyard, for a single vessel to cover a fleet would have demanded a responsiveness and coordination capability that organics alone just couldn't pull off. She was faster, more accurate, more deadly than any ship in known space bar her mother, and though she was tempted she was not arrogant. This was very much a team effort. Her covering fire would have been for nought without their firepower to back her up, their firepower would have been for nothing without her being able to run interference against the Minbari. They complemented and completed each other where the Minbari's anger and fervor for their blood made them disorganised and short sighted.
Two dozen Minbari ships paid the price for that shortsightedness in mere minutes of battle. For the price of four Earth Alliance ships, it would have been considered an excellent trade prior to Jeanne's creation.
For Jeanne, the price of even a single loss was too high, though she knew the odds of a bloodless victory in this or any battle were beyond remote. Even so, a thousand Rosaries for every lost crewman and a thousand more for every lost ship, now a potential sister never to be born, found themselves added to her processing queue for after the battle.
The enemy however, were nothing if not tenacious. Many fought through the firing lines and began to wreak havoc on their forces. Nial fighters still had teeth even against the upgraded and upgunned Star Furies who rapidly came to trust her targeting data well enough to blind fire against the enemy with perfect accuracy, and though the closed distance may have favoured the Earth Alliance in terms of firepower, it also benefitted the Minbari, who could now support each other in the face of the fleet's unwillingness to split or flee.
Sooner or later the brutal calculus of war would dictate the Minbari to withdraw in good order.
'Unacceptable,' she thought with increasing savagery as another Earth Alliance ship went down with all hands, 'though it will cost us much, the enemy cannot be allowed to withdraw in good order. They need to be broken by my hands!'
She glared at every Minbari vessel through a thousand sensors with a seething anger for daring to tread in Earth Alliance space. She vowed to crush them all. Brutally. Finally.
And fatally.
Fifteen Lightyears from Jericho System
The void between the stars was disturbed by a lone ship, warping the spacetime continuum. Inside, the dark hallways and empty rooms were silent as a tomb. Only on the bridge did anything move.
A glowing green orb bobbed gently in the air, its poisonous light illuminating the other figure sitting in the command chair.
"Behold!" a voice said, emanating from the green orb. "Look carefully. My power infests all times, all galaxies, all dimensions!"
The figure sitting in the captain's chair twitched an antenna, and lightning flickered across the surface of the green orb, causing it to cry out.
"Fine! Ruin my fun," the orb said petulantly. In a sotto voce, it added menacingly, "For now." It began to chuckle softly to itself.
The figure in the captain's chair gestured impatiently for the orb to get on with its job.
"The paltry fleets of this universe are but playthings to me. I have detected a battle just 5 degrees off the course given to us by those filthy, obnoxious, bottom-feeding—"
Lightning crackled again across the sphere, which almost fell to the floor.
"Alright! Alright! The pak'ma'ra. I really don't see what made you so sympathetic to them, Taarna."
The slim figure of an Andorian woman sitting in the captain's chair shrugged. The holo-avatar of the USS Taarna, a Pyotr Velikiy-class cruiser belonging to the Starfleet of the United Federation of Planets, stood and walked over to the viewscreen, which showed the sensor readings her companion had noticed.
"It matches the signatures of Minbari and Earthforce ships the… pak'ma'ra gave us," the green orb said. "One Earthforce vessel against three Minbari cruisers. Hardly fair odds, would you say?"
Taarna noded, and the ship shifted course, aiming itself toward the battle.
"Yes! My powers continue from one war to another. My influence is always present—OW! Stop that!"
The bridge of the Hyperion-class heavy cruiser EAS Pangea rocked as another blast from the Minbari cruisers hit them. Captain Shannon Lee, Earthforce, was dismayed to feel the usual vibration from their three Beigie-Bryant 900A Particle Thrust Engines abruptly cut out.
"They've taken out the engine room!" her Executive officer, Commander Arnold Kopp cried out. "Heavy casualties! We've lost power!"
"All Hands!" Captain Lee cried out. "Abandon Ship! Repeat, All Hands, Abandon Ship!"
There was a sudden shimmering and a sense of disconnection, which she did not find pleasant at all, and then Captain Lee found herself in another place. It was a generally circular room filled with consoles and chairs, with a viewscreen in the front. Another ship's bridge? her mind suggested. She felt gravity, which no Earthforce ship could generate without a centrifugal force.
"Do not try to escape!" a deep menacing voice shouted. "You are in my control!" A glowing green orb floated toward her. "Look at me, I am the sum of all evil—ack!"
An alien woman with blue skin, silver hair, and a pair of antennae on her head let out a sigh as lightning crackled across the green sphere.
"Fine! Spoil my fun," the deep voice muttered. "I am the Loc-Nar, a sophisticated computer system and current adjunct to this one, the ship girl of the USS Taarna, a ship belonging to the Starfleet of an Earth in another universe."
An awkward silence fell on the bridge.
"See?" the Loc-Nar said petulantly. "A little theatrics would have helped sold it."
The girl—Taarna?—just raised an eyebrow sardonically.
"Ahem, we are here—oh this is painful to say—to help you."
"Why? No one else has," Commander Kopp said.
"Taarna's Starfleet does not approve of genocide, though I would say that they just do not use it enough-argh!"
"Are you her servant?" Lee asked, looking at the green orb.
"Not by choice," the Loc-Nar said. "In some worlds, I have been worshipped as a god. Starfleet apparently takes a dim view of that. I was her prisoner, quite unjustly, and she gave me a… modified parole when she found herself alone here. I was, and I believe remain, the only hope she has for intelligent conversation." The orb shrank a little as Taarna stared at it. "She was transporting me to a… facility for my kind to be… ugh, rehabilitated. Totally unfair, just because you manipulate a few worlds of filthy organics into interstellar war…" The lightning crackled again. "Ow! Stop that! Look, Captain," the Loc-Nar said, floating closer to her. "For reasons that escape me, Taarna needs a crew, and you just lost a ship… win-win, am I right?"
Lee looked at the viewscreen, which appeared to show the expanding cloud of debris that had been the EAS Pangea. "It appears I have little choice. Did she rescue my whole crew?"
"We transported 239 living beings, though some are currently in sickbay. One of my avatars is assisting your Doctor Wattana understand civilized medical procedures." At a look from Taarna, the Loc-Nar was quick to add, "I told her where to find the pain-killers."
Commander Kopp looked at the viewscreen with growing concern. "Captain, those Minbari cruisers are heading this way."
"You noticed," the Loc-Nar said. "And they do not seem interested in our requests to stand off or be destroyed." The glowing orb sniggered. "So we get to kill some organics today after all."
Taarna sighed again, but the particle beams of the Minbari ships were already reaching out for the ship.
Captain Lee and her bridge crew were shocked as the Minbari beams hit some sort of energy field around the Taarna's hull, and even more so when beams of energy and glowing blue torpedoes lanced out from the Starfleet vessel, carefully taking out the weapons and engines of the Minbari. Soon, the three cruisers were escaping into hyperspace, leaving Lee's crew cheering on a strange bridge.
That night, in Taarna's captain's cabin, Lee found a little insight into her new ship in a translated collection of Andorian myths.
"And the spirit of Taarna is transferred across the universe to a new Defender.
And the power of evil is contained for another generation.
And a new Taarakian is born to protect the next."
Author's Note: Since Taarna only talks "offscreen", needed someone to talk for her. Enter the Loc-Nar, from her source material, as a Self-Aware Megalomaniacal Computer on his way to the Daystrom Institute when the Taarna ran afoul of a Tholian rift and got copied to the Defiant Hope universe. One mad crew and a visit to the pak'ma'ra got Taarna heading for earth, and this meeting with Earthforce.
Written with jhosmer1 and RazorOne.