Shatter the Dream

Chapter 2 : Part 1

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Inspection Tour

On the Dorsal Thorax hull of the SPRUANCE

'Meet the RAYMOND AMES SPRUANCE.' thought Captain Janet Heller. Like many Human Captains over the centuries, before her, Janet Heller walked the tour of her new command. The ship was no beauty. It lacked the grace of the HYPERION. The same clunk-heads, who gracelessly designed the WARLOCK, probably naval architected this gonzo-hulk. Heller was already aware of two facts.

This monster was cramped. Ninety nine percent of the ship was solid. Solid what? Heller was probably waiting for Hell, itself, to freeze before she found an answer to that one. Certainly, the Lockheed civilian contractors she asked, had no clue.

The other fact was that this ship was built around two enormous collimated particle beam "lasers", and two large weapons that one Lockheed bozo called "slicers". She understood the "lasers "; since she used much smaller spinal versions installed aboard the EUREKA in battle, but she had no idea what a "slicer" might be. Her only clue was that the Minbari had used somerthing like them to trench the Earth. To satisfy her curiosity, she went to see.for herself what a slicer was. She stood at the base of the dorsal one now.

The Slicer in question was a truncated, flat-topped pyramid, a hundred and fifty meters square on a side, fifty meters tall to the pyramid's flat top. Each face of the pyramid sloped inward at a forty five degree angle. The flat top, itself, was a square fifty meters on a side. Heller had seen one of these at a distance on a PATRIOT fitting out, the NATHAN HALE, when the EUREKA underwent her MIDWINTER refit at IO, but she hadn't been close to it, or known with what thing or function she was supposed to identify it. She thought it was some kind of radar at the time.

Now she owned two of these "slicer" emitters: one on the other side of her ship and the one she climbed. She saw the facets of the emitter arrays were lensed, like the eyes of a bee she once dissected, when she took biology as a child in school. The facets were hexagonal, but were of the same smokey oily black-grey color that covered the entire ship's armored hide. As Janet hull-walked the SPRUANCE from the thruster-pack to the massive muzzles of her bow spinal "lasers", the ship measured about a thousand meters in length, and six hundred fifty meters wide at the "wings", which were those port and starboard launch and recovery trapezoidal blocks that jutted from the thorax block. The width of the ship as measured from the ventral slicer top facet, to the Dorsal top facet was a scant four hundred fifty meters "tall". The SPRUANCE massed at twenty-five million tonnes. Janet found it curious that the HERO class, which was programmed to replace the HYPERION, as the standard Alliance patrol cruiser was almost three times the HYPERION's mass and twice the overall volume of the ship she replaced. On the other hand, Janet was somewhat pleased to find that the SPRUANCE required a crew of one hundred souls for the flight group and twice that many for the ship, herself. That was less than one third of the EUREKA's manning levels of a thousand crew. Captain Heller had made do with one third of that number to operate the HYPERION, but the EUREKA, suffered for it. She had no choice, so hard pressed was Human people power these days. With this new monster she would, for once, have full one hundred percent manning levels.

She walked on top of the slicer, her boots thudding up through the fabric of her suit so that she heard her not-so-dainty feet magnetically clang on the armor. She was roughly midline dorsal striding from the starboard wing side across the top of the slicer, clanging her way down the incline of the port-side facet and marching spacesuit-stiff toward the port "wing". She clanged her way to the knife edge, where port-face facet met dorsal-face facet of the ship's thorax block. She peered at the port trapezoid dorsal "wing" landing pad. She counted two Furies and a Vulture parked and hard-stood, waiting to be moved to the hanger bays. Heller knew that SPRUANCE had eight bays per pad. Four pads times eight bays meant thirty-two ship's small craft of all types. Heller contrasted that with the EUREKA's hanger capacity of fourteen: six of them, were Furies. SPRUANCE could handle four times that many...

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Loading for Snowballs

Tactician Athena Proxmire was up to her ears in EUREKA crewman and Lockheed contractors. Working in vacuum was tedious and necessary when you loaded munitions, as even after more than ten centuries of this kind of missile warfare, it still took Human beings, or something sapient with muscles, to guide explosive loads into that last millimeter of tube alignment. She supervised, at the moment, missile cell-loading procedures. She saw a small space-suited figure standing on the aft port-dorsal edge of SPRUANCE's thorax. Athena didn't like the word "thorax". She preferred "amidship" as "thorax" gave the monster an "aliveness" she did not want to invest in it. The SPRUANCE, as is, was nightmare enough to Athena. She ignored the arm-waving space-suited nut, afore her, whoever, that personage was. Loading HAWKs into their launch cells in micro-gravity was dangerous enough when things went right. This botched evolution required her utmost concentration. Her ragtag work party fought the awkward missiles into position. The new peculiar butt-end first missile-loading procedures were unfamiliar. On the old Earth Force warships, even as late as the new construction OMEGAs and WARLOCKs, you took the pointy end and slid it nose first into the roller assisted ram-feeder and you let the loading machinery slide the missile into its cell into the magazine. Not with this HERO! Each missile had to be lined up, nozzle end first to fit into its "silo", and then carefully slid inside into its tube. Then you seated a dust-cover over the cell that blew off when you launched the HAWK. Her crew had to do this thirty-six times per cell array. Then, there were the NIXONs to load, and, then, the mines. It was the same exact silo procedure, again to fill the other forty cells in the munitions dispenser magazines. All of these cells were ten-silo strips nested in the dead hull space at the corners of the HERO's reactionless thruster-pack block.

'Real intelligent design,' thought Athena. 'Put 4x10^20 joule warheaded HAWKs, Narn captor mines, and NIXONs next to the ship's main propulsion!' Her mind wandered off task. Abruptly she caught herself. 'Concentrate on the job at hand!' she reminded herself. Each HAWK was a multi-billion dollars worth of death, that could easily kill them all, if she screwed up. She watched the Hyach-designed missile handling jig push the missile into its allotted tube and breathed a sigh of relief as her crew began laboriously to move the jig to the next silo in the line. This load was a NIXON. Crap. Athena walked along the knife edge of the thruster pack where its dorsal and port edges met to see the handling jig set up properly, The finishing team trying to manhandle the pop-off cover to the last loaded silo were Hyach. They were trying to put the lid on the silo upside down. Athena yelled a correction into her radio in Hyachese. One of the Hyach, manhandling the lid as they tried to flip over the ten meter in diameter cover, broke loose frome the hull and drifted off. Athena watched him float off in her grim silence, as the Narn jig-crew stopped their frenzied exertions with that crane, and mounted a rescue, in typical Narn-botched fashion. A few bungled attempts later, and someone HUMAN finally got a rocket line to that adrift clueless Hyach. Athena was not a happy Ship's Tactician.

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Now If You Hold the Blueprints This Way

Deep inside the thrusterpack about a hundred meters from where Athena stood on the HERO's hull, was Luciano Tracciani. Lockheed technicians and his own engineers, space-suited, in work parties, four or five strong, swam or crawled through smokey grey jello in a familiarization jaunt. The "jello" was something that should have been, by its apparent other properties, as hard as cold steel matter. It would, also, eat you alive; if you remained motionless long enough, Luciano's guide told him. Luciano, learned crash-course fashion, about the SPRUANCE's quantum electro-weak force-based engineering. Subjects, that his Lockheed guide covered superficially, included the reactionless thrusterpack, Planck-radius spiked field effect particle interactions, the power-grid, the plug-and-pray repair system, and half a dozen other things that flew over and past Luciano's comprehension, that were built into this Lockheed monster. 'Why couldn't it be a Rocketdyne WARLOCK; or even a NOVA?' groused Luciano to himself. He had a dozen years of schooling leading up to this stuff, but that was based on "metal technology". Most of this, whatever it was, was "organic". The permeable nanite-infested matter-stuff, the Lockheed engineer babbled so eagerly about, was as new to him as gunpowder was to the Aztecs.

His guide, sensing Tracciani's puzzlement, quipped, "Better learn it quick, buddy. We turn this jewel over to you in seventy-eight hours."

"How can you learn such magic in three days?" demanded Luciano.

The Lockheed jerk answered, "How much do you need to know about electricity to change a light bulb or throw a switch?"

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Just Point and Shoot

The Human and the Hyach stood exactly on the bow of the SPRUANCE, between the two cylinders that were the muzzles of the HERO's spinal weapons. The Hyach, Acamos, wore a translucent bio-suit that protected him from the vacuum of space. Joshua was grateful that the "Bumpy" wore clothes under it. A naked Hyach was supposed to be butt-ugly. Joshua Kelly conversed (If you could call it that at all, with all the pseudoreligious gibberish involved.), with the Hyach, Acamos, via a translator do-it-all tied into his suit radio. They stood in the shadow pool thrown by the star NYM across the HERO's port "laser" muzzle . "So the "lasers"... ah... the spinal weapons are Hyach in design," he asked Acamos in confusion for the fourteenth time. His hand-held Hyach-to-English translator do-it-all was mis-translating again, he decided.

"No; the beam weapons are Human." said Acamos."We, Hyach, simply built them to our standards."

Joshua tried again, "The beam weapons are lasers?" he asked, hoping to see if he could get this part of the confusion eliminated.

Acamos said, "The beam emitters are photonic pumps that produce mono-chromatic frequency light, that does not diffuse with distance." 'Baby talk?' Kelly thought. Obviously the translator do-it-all was screwing up the transposition of the sorted word meanings.

Joshua tried a different question. "How far does it travel, until beam divergence?"

Acamos looked puzzled until the translator do-it-all stumbled through its third attempt. He pointed to Kelly's watch, held up three fingers, made four Hyach pantomime cutting motions for slicing something and said "Ttick. Ttick. Ttick... "

Five minutes later a confused Kelly thought he understood it as a quarter of a light second range for the "lasers." Joshua looked at the massive lasers' muzzles towering a hundred meters above him and he said "Sweet Maker! The piercing power!" He forgot about the translator do-it-all which promptly mis-translated it into a Hyach religious format question, asking of an elder by an acolyte for guidance of the "Way." This could and would eventually produce fatal results.

Acamos, joyous, burst, into a long-winded explanation of the "Way" that lasted an hour. Buried in his lecture before the translator do-it-all broke down and died, Joshua heard that these "lasers' could pierce through five hundred meters of meteor iron in under three seconds.

The old EUREKA's particle beam "lasers' couldn't pierce more than fifty meters of rock in such a rake, and that on full overload with barrel burnout guaranteed.

For some strange reason, that made no sense to Joshua, the Hyach suddenly grabbed him, twirled him around three times in micro-gravity, pointed Joshua face-ward toward ENOCH's starlit hemisphere, and set the Human down again upon the hull of the SPRUANCE. Joshua had his PPG half drawn to shoot the Hyach in his face; when Acamos let go of him. Kelley had a sneaking suspicion about what just happened. He, as a Human, did not like that suspicion one bit.

He knew the Hyach understood a little Vregan. So he signed to Acamos, "Did you just teach me the "Way?"

The joyous Hyach signed back an affirmative.

"Crap." said Kelly, "I've been proselytized, baptized, and acolyted by a Hyach!"

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Counting Inventory

Heller sat at the aft end of the HERO. It was odd that Humans built magnets into the butts of their space-suits, she supposed; but then the designers might have had moments like this one in mind. Behind her was the mass of the SPRUANCE stretching its kilometer away in the distance. Before her as she dangled her legs over the stern was all ETERNITY. She needed the quiet privacy.

'It is quite a monster.' she ruminated. She was an Earth Force veteran, was Janet Heller. She had served in so many numerous deathtrap Karmatech and Rocketdyne hulls that she had lost count of them. She turned and looked over her shoulder at the EUREKA. She floated there in her bright cheerful greens, blues, yellows and greys against the stars. The old girl had been given everything that Earth could invent, beg, or steal to bring her up to her alien opponents, but it still wasn't enough. Studded with Hyach monochromatic particle-beams and with a defense grid left over from the Dilgar War she couldn't shoot it out with anything larger than a Drazi Sun-hawk with an absolute guarantee of victory. Heller shifted until she saw the SPRUANCE stretched out before her. The hump of the pyramidal dorsal molecular slicer blocked her view of the pyramidal slabbed head where the lasers poked out like two symmetric cylindrical black-mirrored nostrils on the flat faced bow. this ship had so FEW guns.

A glance, left and right, showed Janet where the kinetic mass drivers, the KMD's, the SPRUANCE's most advanced purely Human-designed weapons were mounted; right in the trapezoidal "wing" tips. These were probably the HERO's most numerous "heavy" weapon. Capable of firing adjustable dispersal streams of iron filing "sand" at velocities of ninety percent the speed of light, their only shortcomings were two; they missed beyond a few hundred kilometers range, and they could run out of "sand" relatively quickly.

Then there was the Regenerative Armor that repaired itself after sublimation or kinetic shock. That was a Human copy of captured Shadow Technology, as was the Shadow Accumulators, that combined with Energy Web allowed a ship like the SPRUANCE to absorb much of the charge of non-kinetic shock energy weapons and store it in capacitors for discharge back through her own power-grid.

'Why so FEW heavy long-ranged guns?' thought Janet to herself. It was a good question.

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How Do You Steer This Crazy Thing?

Khan, who hated it when somebody called him Mister Singh confusing his first for his last name, was with the Vree, Raskallon, in the C&C. He was attempting to get a feel for the SPRUANCE's helm. The Vree signed in excellent English; "Twenty five million tons rest mass before fuel, ordnance, consumables, and crew. Raskallon added, "She rolls, pitches, yaws, one hundred twenty degrees per second. Acceleration maximum is one ship length per second second squared.

Khan objected, "That's over a hundred times Earth's gravity!"

"Closer to one hundred ten times." agreed Raskallon. "It is what is built into the ship. Perhaps you, Humans, are close to an inertia cage?"

"I'm a helmsman not a physics professor." signed Khan irritably. He signed to Raskallon, "It means that we can maneuver around our light cone trajectile vector about two hundred meters per second/second if we need to dodge enemy beam weapon fire. not as good as the Minbari in their day, but better than most anybody, maybe even the Centauri?" He smiled at the Vree as he appreciated the possibilities., "Raskallon, you old goblin, this girl may do for us, after all!"

Raskallon hid his irritation at the Human's remark.'Goblin indeed!'

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Taking the Temperature

Doctor Caledine Depalma shuffled along, her ship shoes rip-ripping, as she walked through the depressing passageways of the beast. "Everything is dark, except for the damn lights and the double-damned signs,' she thought. Aside from the lighting and the lettering, it was all smokey oily obsidian, armored, very angular, very sharp-edged angular. You could cut yourself on the bulkhead and frame corners, Depalma knew. She had cut her hand, carelessly, on a hatchway lip, just grabbing it to steady herself. bending through it. Now, she wore chain mail gloves; like the rest of the crew did.

She walked through the passage-ways, virtually alone. Most of the crew was outside, loading stores. so the doctor had no one with whom to share her impressions.

Those thoughts weren't favorable. The doctor hated the ship. It, or "she" as Janet would insist, was a pure killer. 'Not a very efficient one,' de Palma thought, 'But you are a killer.'

She scudded at last to SICKBAY. At least that was what she read over the hatchway. She had to duck through the access. It had one of those standard issue armored counter-sprung hinged hatches that seemed to be a trademark of the beast; an oval pressure seal too small for a standing Human to walk through as a "door". The doctor refused to call it a "hatch" or Manhole.

As she expected, SICKBAY was as cramped as the rest of the ship. This sickbay seemed no better nor worse than the one she had on the EUREKA. It was definitely smaller. Depalma sorted through the stuff she found. Most of the sickbay's supplies was commercial-off-the-shelf and inferior LONAW copies of Centauri products. Many wore Abbai script labels. Finhead supplied pharmaceuticals and medical supplies were of good manufactured quality, if medically inferior in effectiveness to their Human, Minbari or Centauri counterparts, Depalma knew. At least Naval Procurement hadn't cut corners and tried to buy Narn or Drazi combat medicines.

The doctor re-stocked things in storage the way that she liked her sickbay organized. It wasn't orthodox, but her corpsmen knew the way she organized things and she trained them to her practical standards; not to some mythical ideal dreamed up by some nincompoop staff planner back on Earth.

Finished in SICKBAY for the moment, the bored doctor left to explore some more of the beast. She found the layout to be simpler than the HYPERION's curved wheel-shaped maze. It, no she, the HERO, was a checkerboard maze of passageways and blocks with no apparent curves anywhere. It was all lines and angles except for the oval "doors". Small void spaces, mere clusters of compartments were separated by huge masses of solids. Everywhere the doctor roamed, the same accursed armor panels reflected back at her the image of her slight emaciated radiation scarred body that she showed to the universe where the overalls she wore, allowed.

Wandering around aimlessly finally brought the doctor to the STARBOARD HANGER. It was so printed over the "door" she entered. Here, the doctor stepped through the oval access and was finally in a large "room"; the Navy called it a "compartment"; where she could shake her claustrophobia off. She poked into the various semi-walled spaces and found those spaces mostly empty. The Furies, Vultures, and other ship's boats were outside or missing she supposed. She went into the port "wing" along the small ship's boat feeder track and peered "down" into the "Fury" launch bays. These were simple drop tubes that would launch Furies, or transports or breeching pods or whatever, as a HERO moved forward, in trailing falling "sticks" or "flights". The Doctor saw there were twelve such drop tubes in the "wing".

As she blundered among the small boat maintenance bays, Depalma must have found the STARBOARD HANGER CONTROL, or so the sign that placarded it read, for here she saw for the first time the meters thick armor that formed the ship's outer skin. A space-suited crew work party was moving a Vulture from its port dorsal wing landing pad hardstand through the incredibly thick access shutter to the port hanger. Caledine Depalma watched the entire slow-as-molasses evolution on a holograph monitor (An Analog it was called?), someone carelessly left running in the STARBOARD HANGER CONTROL. 'That was organic armor?' The doctor was thought surprised. If it was, it wasn't the mostly squishy Ikarran-derived stuff she had seen and with which she was sadly very familiar. This stuff looked harder than the carbon-based poly-ceramics that made up the skin of ships that Depalma had previously served aboard.

Depalma satisfied her curiosity and left the control center. She was suddenly interested in those small boat machine shops. As she wandered, she would occasionally lose her footing and float off the floor, and she would frantically flail until she planted her feet securely to the floor again.

On one such occasion she fetched up against an Incubator, one of the living machines Humans budded like plant cuttings from looted alien technology. Depalma knew very little about this technology; except that it was a legacy of the Clark era and thus in her opinion- "EVIL!" with capital letters and the exclamation point. Furies were grown and / or repaired inside these accursed things. This one began to whisper to her like some succubus straight out of medieval mythology. Depalma recoiled from it in horror. How could sane Humans work near or inside those things? Supposedly Furies were exactly like it in kind inside your mind as they whispered, as they wrapped themselves around their Human pilots.

That was enough for Depalma. She fled from the hanger and retreated to her sickbay. She really hated this ship. It was dark, cold, and brutal; unlike the EUREKA, which had been a ship full of light and empathy. Depalma, once in sickbay, hid herself in her small office behind her desk, and strapped herself into her chair. She needed a stiff dose of 100 proof medication, which she immediately proscribed for herself. The Bourbon did its medical magic as it fired her up inside to out. This hiding place, that she co-opted for herself, was still as grey-black as the rest of the SPRUANCE, but in her office she found her happy medical gear that beeped, blurped, winked, and flashed friendly sounds and lights at her in some warm friendly Human hues. It made her feel better.

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Summations

In the Captain's "Stateroom"

Captain Janet Heller took each report and read it. She particularly noticed Doctor Depalma's report. The SPRUANCE had that kind of an effect? Janet and Caledine had served together on previous ships. Janet was well aware of Caledine's phobias and neuroses. This was the first time, though, that she, the doctor, said in official writing, that she "hated" a ship.

The other officers had their own misgivings.

Tracciani reported that the SPRUANCE's vortex generators were far more complex and dangerous than the EUREKA's ones. The old HYPERION had used a Human-copied Centauri style Quantium Forty Vortex Initiator. This HERO used a negative energy focusing system that opened a vortex without needing the boosting effect of exotic matter as a gravitic lens. It was far slower than Q-40 and took forever to fill the charge capacitors, but a ship could carry multiple generators and as long as you had the charge capacitance to generate the vortex, it allowed for some interesting options, as Janet recognized. The SPRUANCE had four such generators and four such charge capacitors scaled to fit her mass, plus about ten percent under normal charge loads which would be her small-boat fighter group. Under combat overloads, she could possibly open a wormhole that could handle objects or groups of objects up to four times her mass. Theoretically Q-40 had not that time problem and it definitely had a severe mass limitation. Still Janet could see an option like what Tracciani suggested in passaing, the advantages of using the negative energy Vortex Generators as offensive weapons. If Humanity had had those toys at the BATTLE OF THE LINE, those SHARLINs would have been destroyed without the need for two Human ships to open kamikazi jump-points and die for each SHARLIN battlegroup unit successfully killed.

Singh Khan's report summed up the maneuvering parameters. Impressive! Straightline acceleration suffered as always from Human biological limitations. This affected Human tactics only in so far that you didn't fight gravidic-engined ships with your thruster-driven ships, near masses where the rich graviton soup gave the gravidic-engined enemy vessels the accleration speed, inertia, and manuever advantage. Human Captains had that lesson pounded into them, "Fight in flat space, away from masses, where the aliens can't outrun and outturn you using those masses as traction points!" Simple basic ballistic vector tactics prevailed in flat space.

Athena's report was sobering as to what she thought how those tactics applied to SPRUANCE.

Janet read, *Let me use an analogy from ancient Human naval warfare. There was not that much difference in the battleship engines, steerage, guns, and armor between a first world war battleship and one of the second world war. Both of those ships would destroy an ironclad vessel of the Crimean War with ease. However, what made the BISMARK superior to HOOD and the WASHINGTON to KIRISHIMA was their second world war radar; used against the first world war optical systems of their victims. Fire control was the difference. The SPRUANCE might have the weapons to handle the referent VORCHAN attack group enemy; but our 'primitive' WWI fire control.is not good enough to match the Centauri WWII advantage, if you follow the analogy to its conclusion.*

Janet read further down, *The EUREKA with her bolter weapons and Hyach supplied spinal beam weapons, while inferior in range and power to the SPRUANCE, has this advantage in that she can use her optical trackers to hit her targets at close range with her numerous hit / miss weapons as a Centauri VORCHAN does. The SPRUANCE has far fewer weapons, and those are all of the beam splash or raking types. She has to accurately track targets at long range to use her raking weapons to engage. The HERO's weapons, except for the KMD's take longer to charge and longer to cool between shots than those of the HYPERION."

"The SPRUANCE is designed as a long-ranged shooter, not an in-fighter or brawler like a HYPERION or a NOVA. She looks to be designed as a Minbari-style combatant.in layout, as well as in the choice of her weaponry. Though I don't know what drug induced delusions possessed those idiots in the Bureau of Ships to chose the Hyach particle laser of all weapons to supply the main basis for the SPRUANCE's spinal beam weapons instead of using our own particle beam cannon technology, I point out that the SPRUANCE's slicers are definitely inspired by the Minbari version of that weapon. I might also add that the Human "knockoffs" are not that inferior in range, and power as you might expect to the Minbari original. Now as to the KMD's and the peculiar decision to mount these guns on the point and starboard "wingtips" while the slicers are mounted on the dorsal and ventral amidships positions, I can only speculate that the decision was based on the need to put the slicers and the KMD's where their point defense firing arcs are as un-restricted as possible. As you may be aware, that has been a criticism of the WARLOCKs and the OMEGAs: that the railguns and Interceptors on those ships have blind spots in certain of their weapon's firing arcs caused by the awkward hull placement of the mounts."

"I remark in passing that as I researched the Hyach "particle laser", I came across something that the "Bumpies" use for point defense called an "interdictor", a form of particle projector that acts as a "sprayer". The interdictor scatters defensive particle screens to occlude and disperse incoming enemy weapon fire. It sounds very much in principle like the first sandcasters Earth Force used originally; before we developed Interceptor Technology, doesn't it? I bring it up only because if we need iron "sand" for our KMD's, the Hyach copper product used for their interdictors is possibly suitable as a substitute anmmunition for our own current scarce iron sand supplies."

"In closing I note that the SPRUANCE' fire control is so little improved over that of the EUREKA, that these assorted "wonder weapons", I discussed above, will actually have a greater propensity to miss targets at their optimum tactical engagement range than we would with our older bolters. Its that blasted fire control problem again. Maybe in a thousand years we will have it fixed? she finished reading."

Next Janet Heller read Raymond Sealy's report on those very systems. As her Signals officer (Lacking for the moment a Master Gunner.), Janet gave him the problem of reporting on the SPRUANCE fire control.

He wrote the usual drivel about passive systems; mass detectors, electromagnetic receivers of all types, strain gauges used to measure spatiometric distortion, etc,. All of it was spoofable by the referent enemy, the Centauri, Raymond concluded. Janet shook her head at Sealy's report. 'For crying out loud!' she knew that drivel. Most of what Humans used, THEY could spoof themselves. 'If we can do it, how easy is it for the aliens?' she asked herself in her own mind.

Sealy spent the bulk of his writing on discussing about all the known Centauri methods that the SPRUANCE's fire control was susceptible... false gravity waves, photo-optical distortion, embedded virus programs in false targeting system echoes, etc, ... ad nauseum.

Sealy just rehashed the obvious here. Heller decided he needed mentoring. Janet could and would be his harsh teacher.

She tossed Sealy's report aside and turned her attention to the necessary follow ups. This was her job, planning the workups. SPRUANCE obviously needed drills in maneuver and gunnery evolutions. Athena would be too busy with other things to do this executive officer work.

Janet decided she would abscond with the EUREKA flight group against orders. Six Furies and a couple of Vultures was better than nothing. If the Alliance was saddling her with a pre-commissioning unit: expecting her to bring it to operational status-without a proper shakedown and workup; then she could make them supply her old ship with a new green flight group, while she took aboard her ship her old seasoned one. 'The flight group is the hardest part of a ship's complement to train.' she thought. "If I keep mine, at least I will have the cadre to train a full flight group complement;-if I ever get one from the bean-counters.'

She stacked the reports neatly, as she decided training priorities, 'Gunnery above all else, just so I can get a feel for what this ship is supposed to do.' she mused. 'What was the SPRUANCE? Was she a patrol cruiser like her HYPERION, or was she a heavy fleet escort, a deep raider, a fire-support ship? Maybe a few ship-exercises against a variety of problems would answer that little question.'

"Definitely gunnery first." she said aloud.

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End of Chapter 2; Part 1

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Chapter 2; Part 2

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Practice

'Two weeks of exercises in the outer comet belt.' thought Janet Heller. 'I learn two things about you, girl.' She looked around in disgust at her C&C. 'You reach out farther and hit harder than I expected you to do; and I can't get you to hit anything at all.'

Athena's holograph Analog image floated in mid-air before Janet's face. The pop-up image showed Athena was chaired in Secondary Battle Control, in a duplicate setup to Janet's own arrangement in C&C. The Tactician prattled on with nuissance statistics. 'Redundancy' , observed Janet. 'Navigation, Signals, Weapons, Propulsion could all duplicate C&C; if need be. Some Rocketdyne engineer must have told Lockheed about the NOVA's bad habit of falling out of control when a Minbari slicer hit the "bridge" and killed all the command group officers in a single rake. I think about distributive naval architecture and Athena uncharacteristically babbles statistics instead of getting to the point of it?' wondered the captain.

"On the plus side, the web/KMD/Interceptor combination stopped roughly ninety percent of the incoming simulated particle beam and bolter fire from the Drazi and Abbai opposing force ships the Alliance arranged for us to practice against." said Athena.

"Poor stand-ins for the Drakh." observed Janet.

"Vree would be better," agreed Athena, "The Goblins fight dirty and they know their tactics."

"So why did they send us the Snakeheads and the Fish People?" asked Janet.

Athena squirmed in her chair. Scratching an itch under sixty meters per second^2 acceleration was preposterous. "Centauri stand-ins?" she suggested.

Janet barked in laughter. "Centauri simulators? WE can barely simulate the Centauri, and who, besides them, knows the operational art, better?"

"All kidding aside, Captain," Athena, turning serious, continued with her assessment as she read her own repeaters, "We missed with eighty-two percent of our spinal beam weapon's fire and with slicers in forty-seven percent of our flyby attacks. We hoped to rake the enemy with our slicers by using optical interferometry, but we failed to contact with the intended targets as we should have according to our predictors. That was against Drazi and Abbai countermeasures. You can imagine what CENTAURI jammers will do to us?"

'I know.' Janet thought to herself, ' I aimed those missed shots.'

"The Finheads are forming up again." observed Athena, her image probably looking at her own Analog repeater.

Janet smiled. "The Abbai are no good when it comes to the run-and-gun. Let us give them the dog and cat routine and feed them some drift mines."

Athena chuckled, "If you can't spear or slice them, you can always mine them."

"Johnny Nukem." agreed Captain Heller.

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Results

Janet threw the exercise results down on the obsidian table in front of her morose officers. The clipboard landed upside down in a peacock spread of paper flimsies before it magnetically stuck with a click. She looked at them through the Analog projected replay of the fiasco that was the current subject of this officer's wardroom social gathering.

"Our shooting is great against snowballs following ballistic trajectories. But against an obvious target bullseye painted lump of metal with a PRIMITIVE autopilot, set to randomly move? We stink." She looked at Athena.

Athena blamed the weapons. "It's the firing cycle, Captain. It takes up to ten seconds to charge the spinal lasers' capacitors, five seconds to obtain a firing solution, and then shoot. The beam propagates for three to ten seconds and then we usually miss. Add cool-down time between shots and we average barely one shot per minute per barrel."

Heller looked crossly at her engineer, Tracciani, "The Hyach, who built the damned things, say we should be able to fire ours with a three second burst from the pair, at least ten times per minute. That would allow us to walk the fire in, instead of this hit / miss circus we have now. What gives with our lasers, Mister Tracciani?"

Luciano wasn't taking this criticism. "Captain, Madam. Maybe the Hyach operate monochromatic photon-pumped particle beams that way, but our lasers," he paused for effect, "need to cool between shots or we lose the mirrors... " he said calmly.

"Permission to speak, Madame?" interrupted Raymond Sealy.

Janet nodded.

"The lasers are centerline-of-ship mass boresight weapons," he suggested. "Maybe we shouldn't use them as our long range setup shot and then close with the slicers. I mean don't try to maneuver on the vector to gain a spear shot, but close in, pivot on the vector and swing through with a raking shot."

Athena responded; "Good suggestion, Mister Sealy. There is one problem. Our slicers use phased array emitters. Those beams we can swing like swords to follow multiple targets within the firing arcs, without the clumsy expedient of pivoting the entire ship to follow a target track at the medium to close ranges you suggest. The slicers are also powerful enough to split asunder anything of our size... if we can hit it. Otherwise we cleave vacuum. With those lasers... we... have.... to... point." she said.

"At least the KMDs hit." grumped Sealy.

Tracciani looked at the Captain. She nodded. This was becoming a teach Raymond Sealy how things work session.

The Engineer said, "The KMD is of the matter-caster weapon family. Everybody who use the type-class, Hyach Interdictors and Vree anti-matter streamers come to my mind, knows the virtues of such weapons. With them you spray and pray. Such weapons use simple spoof-proof lead predict fire control. You hose a stream of garbage into the future path of the enemy and then he runs into it."

"Except for the KMD. In defense, we fire iron sand as a charge-held bundle that bursts in a pre-set cloud. that disrupts and diverges enemy laser and particle beam fire. That is similar to what a Hyach Interdictor does, except the Hyachs' particle cloud doesn't leave their gun barrels at ninety percent the speed of light when they fire; more like ten percent of light speed... Nor do they use induced quark color states in their copper loads as we do in iron sand charges to act as lenticular diffraction in our defensive "flak" bursts; that is to break up monochromatic particle streams, photonic or otherwise. In fact, I doubt the Hyach know the why of it, why it is IMPORTANT for us to use iron as the "sand" in our KMDs." Tracciani said, looking at his hands.

"Now the Vree anti-matter streamer fires a very short-ranged, continuous quickly diverging stream of hydrogen-derived anti-matter." he said. "That stream is murderous at close range-mere kilometers close-ship's lengths close." Tracciani looked side-eyed at Raymond to see if the young Signals officer paid attention. It makes it almost suicidal to attack Vree Xill or Xort saucers with fighters. It also explains the Vree's reputation for having possibly the best point-defense in Known Space outside the Minbari or us; that is Humanity."

"The KMD, in contrast to the Vree streamer which uses anti-hydrogen nuclei, in offensive mode, fires a continuous stream of iron sand." Tracciani emphasized, making a pounding motion with his hand. "Those are actual grains of sand, moving at ninety percent of light velocity, Mister Sealy. Even Shadow Armor cannot take that kind of kinetic shock." Tracciani said.

"To get that kind of weapon performance," the Engineer continued, " We encounter the same problems you would expect from any particle beam weapon!" He emphasized the lasdt three words. You have divergence, due to that old inverse square law; and loss of accuracy over time crossed over interval, due to the three body ballistics problem. Our enemy can dodge the short KMD bursts that we fire. So we have a range limit--a short range measured in hundreds of kilometers limit for our KMDs; which is well inside the Centauri ion bolter outer engagement range limit." concluded Luciano.

Athena added as a coda, "You forgot to add, Mister Tracciani, that we need the same kind of fire control accuracy we use to aim our slicers to aim our KMDs."

Raymond Sealy looked at the others and nodded in slow comprehension, "So we traded a ship full of a lot of weak, turret-mounted, rapid-firing beam and bolter weapons that could at least hose the enemy, if we got suicidally close enough, for a ship with a very few long-ranged slow-firing incredibly powerful steerable-emitter beam weapons with which we can't hit anything; unless we get suicidally close enough?"

Athena agreed. "That is the result of our ship trade, I believe."

Janet Heller dropped her head onto her forearms and sighed.

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Bumpy

Acamos awoke from a grey sleep into a black compartment. The Hyach stared wildly around. To his goggly eyes everything was too bright, the air was too heavy and everything smelled of decayed iron. By the "Way" he was inside the accursed Human ship! He remembered groggily. The fur-heads were shooting up balls of ice at the HYACH NYM system border. Confused thoughts sorted themselves into the binary ordered point / counterpoint that made the Hyach twice as smart and twice as moral as those blessed with but one stream of consciousness in the 'Way".

'Poor singletons / hapless linear thinkers.' he simul-thought. Many of the linear thinkers complained that the Hyach "Way" was incomprehensible. Only the fur-heads showed the patience that the inferiors needed to speak with the Followers; that the less gifted of the "Way" required. It had been a lucky blessing for the Holy Ones. The previous Gerontarchs' policy of sin-killing the mirrors of themselves, the Hyach Doe; left the Hyach in a biological birthrate death spiral. The same insane fools tried to ally themselves with the Shadows through the Zenner to fix their misreading of the "Way". That brought on the disastrous war with the Vree. The other outsiders then gathered to feast on the dying Hyach as the Vree wreaked their vengeance. They, who called themselves the League, would gladly let the Chosen Ones die. The Humans stayed them and convinced the Vree to stop their own extermination crusade.

It was odd that the Humans should so act. It showed peculiar mercy and ruthlessness. By all that the Humans suffered at the Shadows' Will along the "Way", they should have let anyone, Hyach included, associated with the Shadows die. But, somehow, the cruel fur-heads found a replacement for the extinct symbiont Hyach Doh, and the fur-heads acted with a mercy. It was not at all like followers of the Lords of Order should act. All of these thoughts followed two rivers of consciousness more distinct and defined than any schizophrenia in Acamos' mind. He slowly rolled and sat up on his "rack" as the Humans called such beds on their ship and gazed into the muzzle of an Ikarran-derived weapon the fur-heads called a Thumper, pointed at his face.

That snapped him wide awake.

The Marine behind it said, "Out of the rack, Hyach.." The Marine's translation machine worked perfectly. Acamos noticed it was a Vree version of the Human portable computer they called an Amiga. All of the crazy fur-heads seemed to carry one of the book-like devices that they unfolded at the slightest excuse of confusion. This Marine had his strapped to his right thigh. For a fur-head the Marine was huge. He also looked too happy with that thumper in his hands.

The Marine said, "The Captain wants to see you. Apparently your lasers are a bust."

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Lasers

Acamos was frogfloated down the passageway into Janet Heller's presence. The Marine saluted her and firmly planted Acamos with a definite thud; leaving him standing on the deck with aching feet. The Captain, if it was she, was wearing a black skin suit with red glowing orbs where her eyes should have been. She was upside down in the middle of the passageway, buried in the deck, and was half in and half out of the smokey grey "substance"; that seemed to be of what this ship was made. That greyness was usually hidden behind the tough armored scales with which the fur-heads covered it. Out of Hyach curiosity, Acamos reached down to touch it. It felt hard and cold, like iced metal. He suddenly couldn't move, and felt the PAIN!

"Idiot." snapped Heller as she plunged upwards and snapped him free of contact. She pointed at the open deck from where Acamos had been jerked free. "That kills you on sustained contact." she said in broken Hyachese, very simply and slowly. "Then it eats you." She stood silent for a moment in the passageway brightness, a creature decked out in the blackness that seemed to be the main color Human, while Acamos tried to adjust to the idea of this ally of the Lords of Order using the tools of Chaos.

While the befuddled Hyach gathered himself to a standing position again the Human dove again into the greyness. She resumed her struggle, with that within the ship, with which she contended. Acamos heard her give voice to Human speech he didn't understand which must have been deeply religious. The Marine standing next to him, turned a deep hue of purple-something the fur-heads did, called blushing. The Captain's religious experience must be profound indeed, Acamos decided. The Humans only blushed when deeply moved by their primal emotions.

She finished her incantation, replaced the armored decking, whirled and swam toward the Hyach and asked him, her glowing red eyed face, scarce centimeters from his, "Are you not an expert on Hyach beam weapons?" Her broken Hyachese was of the artisans class, low vulgar and beneath one of Acamos station or status according to the "Way". Nevertheless, Acamos was a prudent Follower. You made allowances for an inferior's ignorance of the "Way".

He replied in his best Narnish, "Yes."

Janet tried Centauri lowlander, "Is this better?"

Happy to find a common language, Acamos agreed, "Yes."

Which promptly unleashed the black skin-suited Human's anger. "Explain to me, expert, why this "laser" takes five times longer to cool than the model upon which it is based?" Almost as if by magic in mid-passageway two holographic images appeared; one of the Hyach beam weapon supplied to the Humans, and one of a Human copy which Acamos presumed was based on the weapons carried aboard this fur-head ship.

Acamos quickly scanned the two models. He had not seen the Humans' copy of the original. Trenaman led the Hyach party working with the fur-heads during that period. That Follower of the "Way", the Humans caught in collusion with the Streib. He died for it. Acamos pointed at the mirror assemblies and said, "Those are different." He added, "You use photonic reflectors not used by us. That does not dissipate heat as efficiently? Heat sinks take longer to work?"

Tracciani appeared in a hologram before Acamos and the glowing scarlet-eyed demon Human Captain. The fur-head seemed as taken aback by the demon as Acamos had been, but he said in perfect Centauri lowlander, "Lies again, like the traitor, Trenaman? Why do you Hyach try to deceive us? Our materials and our assemblies may be different, but we field tested each component against the original template to match it specification for specification."

Acamos tried placation. Sometimes inferiors became dangerous through their lack of understanding of the "Way". He would explain, so that their small childish linear minds could comprehend, "You misunderstand. These;" he pointed at the holograms, "are not assemblies of parts. These are complete unities of purpose. The 'laser' you Humans copy, is a completeness. The copy you make is but parts put together. Because you lack whole knowledge. Because you still must learn about the wholeness of things, you do not understand how it is; that if you build all your parts to match our parts and put it together the way you see us build ours; you expect the same result? Not so. It is that why; when different races build the same thing, the thing works differently for each. Some build a thing better than others. The Human copy is good, but the differences you do not see in the whole, cause the differences you do. So Human lasers take longer to cool."

Janet Heller looked at her engineer. "Mirror assemblies are the problem?" she said, "Mister Tracciani? I put this Hyach in your charge. Work on the reflector assemblies, the focal arrays, the photonic pumps, the heat exchangers, whatever it takes. I suspect that our Hyach friend is telling us that our electro-plasma mirrors are a poor substitute for those crystals we couldn't duplicate" She turned her attention away from L.T.; as she knew he would follow orders, couched as "suggestions". "You," she suddenly turned on Acamos, "are a source of profoundly irritating obtuseness. Unities; indeed."

She grabbed Acamos by his shirt front. Acamos felt the same cold metal touch and the PAIN he had when he touched the greyness of the ship, itself. He went rigid as if he were electrocuted.

The demon spoke, "I don't care how you accomplish it, expert. Use all the mumbo-jumbo philosophy and balderdash superstition you wish, but by the Great Maker, I wil have my lasers work as they are supposed to work. This is much more than just you, involved, Bumpy. And as to Human ignorance of a higher whole order wisdom?" She let go of Acamos. "Remember the Hyach Doh?" she said. "If you think I'm kidding, just remember that between the Vree, Raskallon, and your deserved extinction stands the Alliance, and, I, in the HYACH NYM system AM the Alliance."

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Religion

Tracciani was bemused. The Hyach, Acamos, danced his ritual circle dance, mouthing his prayers in his Hyachese gibberish.to the Holy Ones. Luciano, himself, had his Amiga ported into the SPRUANCE, herself. It would be interesting firing the Hyach's latest idea out the HERO's "lasers". He had, between the Hyach's prayers learned enough; so that he could alternately fire each laser in turn and thereby improve the cool down wait between shots by a factor of four.'One full charge five second shot every fifteen seconds isn't shabby', he thought. Unfortunately, Captain Heller wanted both barrels, every fifteen seconds. She was the kind of person who liked giving somebody the works. Tracciani decided that he preferred "the works" be outgoing down those lasers than incoming directly at him.

Maybe; if there was a way to destroy and then re-integrate the electro-plasma mirrors after each shot? Humanity did it with the particle beam cannons aboard the WARLOCKs, but those monsters had a full minute between shots to re-establish the plasma boundary layers. But then again; the SPRUANCE's "lasers" weren't designed to boil a continent to glass in a series of sustained raking shots.

Acamos, meanwhile, was turning out to be like any "hired expert". The Hyach was nothing, but promises.given, and empty ones at that. Maybe he should take a walk in space without clothes?

Luciano grunted. The Captain would never go for it. Now that crazy idea about a re-integrating plasma mirror: a continuously re-integrating plasma mirror? Why not! The armor regenerated. You could do the same with the mirrors! The problem was that you would run out of the working nanite fluid after a few shots. Then, the nanite fluid reservoir would have to be refilled after a longish cooldown. He would have to heavily modify those focal mirror assemblies and the photonic pump. Luciano whistled to himself as he called up a hologram of the laser. He drew with his finger what he wanted it to do.

Complex! But doable. SPRUANCE would need both barrels pulled and completely rebuilt to this different configuration. Dockyard work? Well; the Hyach were contracted to do it. Maybe a month, depending on how long it took for the templater to grow what Luciano drew. Growing things, if you knew how, was far quicker than bending metal. It was the one area of technology that Humanity had a knack for doing as long as Humans understood that it was the in-built knowledge of a billion years of stolen nano-technology that created the miracles, it so produced. Luciano could give such an X-technology derived machine a detailed original text description of working physical principles; then it, the templater, would grow the device based upon its far superior understanding of the needs described, to achieve the desired ends. Where the Human intellect came in was not in the simple instruction "grow me a monochromatic photonic pumped particle beam emitter." It was in the mathematical binary equivalent of "Use these physical / mechanical principles to build a monochromatic photonic-pumped particle beam emitter. Instruction therefore was; "STEP ONE: regenerative mirrors shall have the following characteristics, followed by the description and STEP TWO: which was always the same to the templater: Grow them."

The Engineer quickly finished his finger drawing. Now Luciano started writing code for the Von Neumann machine: the templater, to read and interpret.

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End of Chapter 2; Part 2

A little CHAOS is a GOOD thing.

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Chapter 4; Part 1

Hiding

The SPRUANCE was cold-silent licking her wounds, hiding in unknown (to Humans) Centauri space among the rubble of a failed planet - the fresh-charted asteroid field that dotted the orbital maelstrom.labeled as Star-system AS1712 according to the new chart that Sealy and Kelly were assembling to map this unknown void as SPRUANCE crawled her wounded way back to PRAXAL and thence to HYACH NYM. The Fanheads probably had a task-group out there, looking strenuously for her.

Janet Heller yawned deeply as she stretched in place.. C&C was in micro-gravity status at the moment; so Janet had to be careful not to rip her velcro-soled feet loose from the deck, or she would drift off like some foolish Narn. Dignity in command, always, as she had been taught. As the SPRUANCE ballistically traveled on the current chosen parabola, Janet checked once more with Athena to ensure that her order to set Condition Three was in effect throughout the ship.

Proxmire showed up as a hologram from Secondary Control to reassure the nervous Janet, "We are running silent, as ordered, Captain." she said.

Tracciani, as if on cue, popped in on the analog as a hologram himself to report, "The Zippy is stood down and the reactor is scrammed. We are cold."

It seemed like forever; being adrift in Hyperspace with the ship cycling its heat into the accumulators. That was something for which the energy web was useful. Heller was thankful that few; if any, outside the Human segment of the Alliance Navy understood just how useful Human energy web was in this capacity as a stealth device. Even when shut down, the energy web anchors prevented electromagnetic radiation's passage into the twisty spinor vacuum of hyper-space or into Rwel space. The Centauri might use mass detectors, but right now the twenty-five million ton SPRUANCE gave a fair imitation of a rock.

Putting the SPRUANCE into the asteroid field had been Joshua Kelly's idea. The Fanheads would need sheer luck to find the HERO Class destroyer, among all the debris. Singh Khan computed ballistic drift and applied the minimal delta vee to match the SPRUANCE's mean average velocity to that of this bunch of rocks. No movement error was going to get past him as an arrow to point the Centauri at the SPRUANCE. Heller was confident of that about Khan. 'So, we just wait them out.' thought Janet.

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Thruster Troubles and Captain Crazy.

Tracciani cursed his engineers and the ship's Captain. The Captain, despite his warnings to her, had spiked the thruster pack with that stupid bass-ackwards maneuver. It was clearly a case of her unimaginatively going to the cliche' bass- ackwards maneuver once too often; to use the one trick she knew to get herself out of trouble, when she so bullheadedly charged them all into it. You couldn't just jump potential levels like that. The reactionless thruster had a waterfall mass accretion limit. You couldn't recycle the mass-potential too fast, or you would blow the array, like popping a lighbulb string with too much amperage for the filament impedance to handle. (Though that was a crude analogy; that was how Tracciani imagined it, remembering it from the almost forgotten light-bulb comment that the LOCKHEED engineer who briefed him on the thrusterpack so long ago made.). This spiking of the arrays had happened.

By Tracciani's own guesstimate, it would be at least a month before he could repair everything in the thruster arrays. Almost half, of the centerline of ship's mass thruster-pack emitter elements were burned out. There wqas no way that he had aboard the SPRUANCE, the components to replace everything the Captain broke in her tactical insanity. The only thing Luciano realistically thought he could do for the moment, was swap surviving components around, to try to balance the thrust work loads. What a nightmare of logistics and engineering that promised! Each thruster-pack array had more than ten thousand individual emitters. Such an exercise in swap-out, was akin to changing out all the light bulbs in Times Square in New York City during a blackout, while the bulb-changer was blindfolded. With no trickle power to the emitters, how could you test the failed components? Bench-test them? Do it, one at a time, in a plug-and-pray in a test rig? 'That would go over well with the SPRUANCE's crew, as soon as he told them what they would have to do to get the ship moving', Luciano concluded. It boiled down to a lot of hull-walking and some VERY dangerous swap-outs that would most likely get at least a five-some of people killed. At least that was what the manual, covering this procedure, read when Tracciani looked it up in his Amiga.

Kelly was learning how valuable thick armor could be. Tracciani, as an analog hologram, had proposed a repair regime that sent Heller through the C&C overhead, when he reported it out to her, in DETAIL. Joshua was most thankful that he was in CARTOGRAPHY with a few hundred meters distance and all that thick lovely armor between him and the volcano that was Captain Janet, when she erupted. The poor engineer had misjudged his timing.when he brought her the bad news. A month? If Luciano took more than three weeks, he would not live to see four. Heller was not some liberal fascist milksop, like the recently executed General Lefcourt. She was Earth Force OLD SCHOOL Republic; in the mold of reprobates like Sulla, Scipio Africanus, or George Washington. Generals "Firestorm" Franklin and "Kill-Them-All" Dmitrinov compared to her, were kitty-cats.

Kelly turned the volume on the Analog down. He was tempted to also adjust the holographic image color balance until he realized that the blanched pasty faces of the C&C crew and Heller's deep purple-hued skin were already properly color-balanced to reflect reality......

Luciano made his deadline with eighteen hours to spare and thereby learned what was meant by working "under the gun." He was not happy to have this kind of pressure, but he supposed it produced results after a fashion. That pressure traveled rapidly downhill, as he learned, along with the lessons of command so involved. Heller had pointedly given him a reference to show him this lessonhe had looked up "The Removal of Ten Percent" in the SPRUANCE computer library. It was included in Livy's; "THE HISTORY OF ROME". Tracciani felt insulted when he found himself computer-directed to the specific section about DECIMATION as practiced by Scipio Africanus. It took him a while to get ahold of Heller's lesson. When he passed it along to the engineers of his division, he surely made some new friends and influenced people? Three weeks of hell followed the threat. Luciano shuddered.

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Falling In-system

When SPRUANCE reached ENOCH II, she brought an immediate flurry of intercepting traffic bombing out from the L-7 Station that was far different from the response, EUREKA's visit to Hyach Space had provoked. Tugs, freighters, a Hyach version of a mobile repair dock (Unusual ship, for it looked like a fat ellipsoidal green, yellow, and purple metallic octopus.) came to meet her, as she limped in.

Vregan soldiers and Hyach dockyard workers came out with the cluster of Hyach repair ships that swarmed SPRUANCE as she fell into the interior of the HYACH NYM system.

Along with these people came a couple of Human ships-the MERIWEATHER LEWIS and the LONESOME TRAVELLER

Tracciani supervised the continuing repair work on the battle damage that thwarted the sick SPRUANCE's self-repair recovery. With some great pride in himself, Luciano and his people, did in one month what he KNEW would take SOL's yards up to a half year to repair.

The Hyach ship-workers, who worked alongside his engineers, hated the around-the-watch earnestness and fanaticism that the Humans brought to their work. This was on top of the recent re-dedication that Luciano brought to his own duties.

In this exercise, the SPRUANCE's crew, now, more or less duplicated the experience of Humans who came out of the Human / Minbari war. Repair it immediately to get the maximum numbers of platforms into service, since it was probable that the Humans would be outnumbered and out-gunned by their adversaries, at the next go-around. Numbers mattered.

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Dead Presidents and Rascally Raskallon

Raskallon turned off the recording. The Shadow Planet Killer had been defeated at SOL, after it cut a swath through Alliance Space. Good. That threat was dead. Frankly, he fully expected the Humans to survive the Drakh assault, despite predictable Hyach treachery and his own species' late and bungled warnings to Alliance Command. The Humans, also, had not come away unscathed, as he also expected. That could be a BIG problem, that he had to address quickly. This news would make the sanest species go xenocidal. The Hairballs had an excellent intelligence service. They would not take too long to discover this latest Hyach treachery, and when they did; he, Raskallon, would have to lie, cheat, steal, and kill to keep the mad Humans present from killing ENOCH II. Not that Raskallon would normally save the Hyach from their deserved doom, right now, but in the current scheme of political events, HE needed the RAYMOND SPRUANCE and her captain pointed at the Centauri to achieve his own personal ambitions of being the Vregan who brought the VENTUKI CONGLOMERATE into the Alliance as the most senior political state. Raskallon intended to become the nest-father of his own Guild. With that came Political, Economic, and Religious Deification, along with all the money and power he could ever want. That was his objective. Just the normal Vregan ambition. It was what Raskallon sought to fulfill and for that goal; he needed the Hyach shipyards. He needed HYACH NYM's infrastructure intact for now. Otherwise he would lose this end of the war.

This was the situation as he understood it, that Raskallon looked upon from his own little nexus of power in HYACH NYM as he peered into his Analog.. 'What a perfect setup!' he thought; as he saw the rendezvous fleet brake to meet the HERO in the holography. This was very like the Minbari War as opportunity unfolded before his scheming mind. True the Centauri were no where near as technologically advanced, or militarily powerful as the Minbari had been, but they were not as INCOMPETENT militarily or societally backward or incohesive. Judged by those criteria, the trials of the RAYMOND SPRUANCE were not all that extraordinary in the current Human situation, as the Sheridan forces had faced as recently as the Clarkist Interregnum. Whatever the exact circumstances that he could manipulate, the little Vree, judged the present conditions for the VENTUKI CONGLOMERATE to be excellently ideal.

Raskallon expected, by dint of his personal efforts in this reality, to become a very rich Vregan. Along that trajectory, he was honor expected to help his Human friends, in ways they might not quite understand, for he had a sense of keen Vregan justice. He intended to make the Hyach SUFFER for their collexctive crimes. Whatever his own selfish ambitions; Raskallon, the Vregan, fully intended to honor his people's debt to the Hairballs for saving VREETUN.

But it was the how, now, that mattered. How could he do what he planned, without tipping off his friends? That Janet Heller was no fool, Raskallon well knew. This latest foray she made, attacking what was obviously a trapped and baited convoy on such scant information as she had; was the mark of something close to genius. Hitherto; she had followed the sensible course of hitting House KADRONA bases and avoiding the Fanhead fleets; where her own single ship could be so easily hurt, as in this case it had been.

Raskallon flipped a coin in his port hand. It was an old Human dollar made out of alloyed gold. Stamped into it, was the bas relief Eagle, a predator bird symbol, of the Earth Alliance. On the obverse side was the stamped visage of a Human leader: some dead President, who the Humans so honored on their coinage. It was one of the shared items, habits, besides the learned distrust of electronic fund transfers and paper money, that made the Humans so convivial to the Vree. They were the only other species known, besides the VENTUKI CONGLOMERATE that properly glorified their political heroes on their hard coinage as a civilized species should. No nonsense about raising statues that could only be seen by the few. If you wanted to honor your famous ones, properly, then do so on your money, where everybody, of the society, could see who the famous among them were, in one of the tools of their daily lives, that they used.

'To work, Raskallon.' thought the Vregan governor of HYACH NYM. 'There's a war to be won, glory to be gained and Humans to be fooled into the doing of both.'

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Trojan Horses

Janet Heller floated alone in her quarters. It was funny, how certain events might last less than ten minutes, yet the sour aftermath could chew up weeks of your life. Take Luciano Tracciani's list-of-the-ship. The ship's bill of particulars was long. That man wrote novels. She peered over the list of engineering casualties . Everything from the focal tap to the thruster-pack was listed, as requiring repair or replacement. In one appendix to the master list, alone, her chief engineer listed over a million lines of computer code; where he found errors and overwrites, which had crept in to corrupt the ship's operating system.

Worrisome.

Janet broke out her Amiga. She plugged it into SPRUANCE's mainframe, to sample some of the code as a down-loadable read. Janet was a little rusty in current machine languages, but she could see what L.T. meant. Whoever wrote this original crap operating system, had left so many backdoors, poison pills, and open exploitation gates, that it looked positively Centauri. She sampled more OS code and tried a local subroutine infection scan to clean up the more obvious (to her), corruptions. The scan promptly failed to initialize. She muttered to herself, "I bet the Hyach wrote this operating system using a Centauri master platform. We really should not contract our sensitive work out to people who hate us."

"Mister Tracciani!" she shouted into the air around her.

Luciano holographically appeared. In the background, behind him, Janet saw he was up to his ears in people problems. There were half a dozen persons shouting at him, besides waving arms and legs. L.T. was thoroughly not paying any attention to her.

Heller waited a second out of politeness and then her patience ended, "MISTER TRACCIANI!"

"Captain on deck!" he immediately responded, once he looked at her, out of his holographed image.

That quieted the chaos locally for the moment. Janet, now that she had Tracciani;s focused attention, scripted with her index finger in the air between her and the engineer's hologram, some of the code she was reading. As the "Mene mene tekel unfarsi" script appeared in green before her, as she wrote it backwards, so the engineer could read it, she asked Luciano, "Is this the crap code, we have been using as our operating system?"

Tracciani nodded. "I thought you knew this. It is based on old Centauri operating systems. When the Fanheads gave us our two century technology upgrade, eighty years ago, they supplied us with some of their computer code to handle the new Peacock-derived technology. The stuff you are showing me now, looks very similarn to it.".

Janet, frustrated, said to him; "I thought we scrapped all of the Centauri oh esses after the Dilgar, Narns, and Minbari reamed us through its vulnerabilities, again and again and again?"

Tracciani's hologram roamed through what looked like a transmitted madhouse of work by Humans, Vree, and Hyachs on the what looked to Janet like the Zippy, as he remote-discussed this with Janet. He drifted over to a knot of confusion and while he corrected a befuddled Hyach worker with his boot heel, said, "No that is the wrong node, you idiot! Plug in the XP 1174 7A instead, or do you want to kill us all?" He turned to face the Captain, holographically, after dealing with this routine near-fatal distraction. He replied; "Sure we use our own code now, so that the aliens; especially the Centauri, cannot trapdoor or infect our systems with their viruses and tape-worms, but with the new systems aboard our latest generation ships? Well, we just have not developed the complete oh ess sets, yet. We, apparently, had to temporaize with the Hyachs, give them what we had, trust their work to finish our incomplete installs for us. We apparently goofed in our coding."

Janet Heller moaned to herself sotto vocce as if in pain, 'Captain Obvious strikes you again, Janet. The Hyachs must have used their own oh esses as downloads, when they put SPRUANCE together and bench tested her computers for sabotage accession. We should have checked for that treachery, as a given. Bastards.' she thought silently.

She had to ask; "Mister Chief Engineer?" That, again, got L.T.'s now full undivided attention. "If the Centauri knew that we used an operating system that once originated from one of their masters, could they use that system, to trapdoor us?"

Tracciani looked at her, eye to eye; "If you mean the Hyach switched operating system codes on us? If the Hyach templated off their oh esses from some Centauri master code, then the Fanheads would have no problem exploiting any weaknesses they might find in the Hyach code switch-out. After all; if I were the Centauri, I would put in exploitable: Oh!"

Janet wearily said to her chief engineer "Great Maker! L.T. It is standard Centauri drill to broadcast instruction code to corrupt enemy computer systems. As far as I know, it is embedded in their active fire control scan-while-track detection gear emissions. It is practically, we think, the formative operating basis for their accursed infamous jammers."

"Human, Vree, and Minbari systems are immune to this exploitation, because those operating systems are nativist developed non-Centauri in origin. Any LONAW system, on the other hand, is susceptible. It is one of the many reasons the Centauri and their Dilgar mercenaries, were able to overwhelm the League. The LONAW, by and large, got their computer operating systems by trading with the Centauri."

"Okay, Captain." Luciano said, "I understand the problem. But how do we solve this problem on top of all the others we have? We will have to do a complete wipe and re-format of our ship's operating system, since we cannot use Hyach code obviously. The only other oh ess, locally available to us, that we can guarantee as source friendly, is Vregan. That code is as totally incompatible with our hardware as Minbari sourced code would be. Not that I would trust a Bonehead operating system!"

"Luciano, we will use the one HUMAN source code we do have." Janet said sweetly.

The Tracciani hologram looked puzzled, "What oh ess code?"

"The EUREKA's." said Janet.

The Chief Engineer laughed at his Captain. "A HYPERION's? Those files will not work" .

Janet Heller was going to make her Chief Engineer pay for his misplaced sense of humor. Yet for now, she explained calmly, "Too simple and totally inadequate for our current ship systems? But L.T. we can modify them to function for our maneuver and navigation requirements. And that is all we need to get to KATHRA; where we can rendezvous with the NATHAN HALE. Once we meet the PATRIOT, we'll see how good you are in downloading EACOS from the NATHAN HALE; and transferring it to SPRUANCE."

Tracciani's face blanched. The Earth Alliance Computer Operating System was X-technology. It had to be uploaded into a Human mind and then downloaded into a Human-built copy of an X-technology computer to work. Obviously, the NATHAN HALE, being a full SOL Ceres yards built PATRIOT, had the EACOS, and a Teacher for the purpose of such file transfers. He gulped as he gave evidence that he fully comprehended the implications of the proposed procedure.

Janet Heller was totally unsympathetic. It was L.T.'s responsibility to catch these engineering problems before they blew up in her face. She regretfully understood what she asked of her Chief Engineer. From what she knew, she realized it would be a most painful and unpleasant experience. It was also very likely that L.T. might not survive the process. Janet made a mental note to comb ship's hardcopy personnel records to see who a good replacement for him might be.

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Acamos

Thick fat clouds scudded across MORTHO city.

Unlike many Hyach Gerontarchs, Acamos actually liked to nest in the urban sprawl of the materialist culturalists. One could find the Way here, quite as easily as one could upon the Plains of Meditation. Besides; it was cold sleeping in a tent and there was no edict in the Way that said Revelation came from following the Ganzellan grazing herds: no matter what the Old Traditionalist Faction might read in the scrolls. You also could not RULE the Hyach, as well, from the Plains of Meditation.

Access to space ports, bureaucracies and computers were necessary in a space-farer civilization. The foolish revaunchist Traditionalists, with their fourteenth cycle imaginations, simply could not understand the necessity that drove him in his search. The Way was so clear. Now he would see the results of his meditations. He would, thus, save his people. He would humble the accursed unbelievers: especially the Greys and the double damned Hairballs. Parsing them down to size, he would lead those alien unbelievers into becoming true disciples in the Way. Had he not proven so with the acolyte he recruited recently from among the Hairballs?

Now: to open the message crystal and see for himself his success!

In horror the Hyach Gerontarch saw his minions' and allies' multiple failures play before his eyes. It was not fair! There was no Way that his plan could fail! Yet, those fools had ignored his plan. "Be subtle in the preaching." he told them. Idiot acolytes! They went for the bold statement, instead of the understated nuance. Naturally the unbelievers reacted badly to this public proclamation of the Way.

How would he survive their mistake? Acamos' mind hurtled along two parallel tracks. First, all trace of his involvement in these failures, would have to be hidden from the unbelievers and his own people. This was simple enough among his own Hyach. Simply give the command and the young, who failed him, would do their duty and remove themselves from this cycle. It was the allies; who were the problem. Despite the Accursed Ones' assurances that they would never fail or fall to the unbelievers, Acamos had visual proof that those idiots were not only liars (Like the Wurt, as the Hyach called the Zenner.); but that they lacked the common sense to prevent the Hairballs from taking them alive and squeezing them like rotten fruit to spit out useful seeds of information.

It was entirely possible that the Hairballs would track back along the Way to Him. How could He, Acamos, lead all of the unbelievers to the Way, if the unbelievers in their ignorance of the Way pursued Him and removed Him from this Cycle?

It never occurred to Acamos that the Hyach could suffer extinction at Humanity's hands in such a backtracking along the Way, as he replayed the death of the Shadow Planet Killer at Humanity's hands for the third time.

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Between Jumps; Hiding While En route to KATHRA So That L.T. Can Get His Brains Boosted

In SPRUANCE in the SIGNALS Compartment

Joshua Kelly looked at his readouts. The telescopics he studied with their the spectrals showed him where the Centauri drift mines exited the Hyperspace jump-point. Appalled and impressed; Joshua manually inputted the drift vectors, as he determined them. 'If the computer was working, I would not have to do this donkey work the hard way.' Joshua groused to himself. Clever Peacocks. Whoever was on the other end of that jump-point was ingenious, or he was served by a very good staff. Ordinarily, Raymond Sealy should be handling this end of the ship's business, but Raymond was busy with the engineers and the Luckless Luciano, trying to clean up the messy Hyach inserted computer code in the SPRUANCE mainframe. Kelly, had in his dim sinful past, worked the Signals specialty; so he could cover Sealy's duty. Nobody was navigating at the moment, so here he was, sitting in SIGNALS; free to look, listen, and admire just this kind of Centauri nonsense.

The mine deployment pattern suggested some things to Joshua. All of them were very bad for the SPRUANCE. 'I sure would like to discover how the Fanheads knew we were coming?' thought Kelly, as he downloaded some of the Centauri mines active emissions. Nothing too outrageous showed in the drift mine emissions and broadcasts. Just the usual viruses and tape-worms showed up; now that he knew ('Thanks for NOTHING L.T.!'), the Centauri liked to embed in their active search transmissions. The Centauri were, also, probably using spatial-metric distortion detectors to sniff for the operation of gravidic engines. Idiots. Kelly understood theoretically how such devices worked. Several wrecked Minbari cruisers were in Human hands, after all. Perhaps, the Centauri should have known this little fact. The Bonehead technology might still be several centuries beyond Humanity's current capability to understand thoroughly, but not all of it was. The simpler Minbari gravidic detection gear was Human understood. It was probably closely analogous to the best Centauri active and passive gravidic detection systems. The Human Teledyne gear, that Joshua used at this moment, was designed to passively home in on THAT.

"The Centauri sure love using active detectors by the hundred count." said Kelly aloud.

Athena Proxmire, from across the compartment, looked up from her workstation, where she was rewriting source origin HYPERION operating system code to handle SPRUANCE's auto-navigation star-mapper, said; "Have faith, Joshua. The Fanheads haven't found us yet. The energy web should be absorbing anything that they throw at us in the way of the radiation spectrum."

"Now, that we have set the Web anchors to absorb all ambient radiation." groused Joshua. "We make a nice black cold hole to anybody smart enough to use passive electromagnetic scan-and track optics to look for that lack of light. You, also, know that we cannot dump heat while we so cleverly hide?" He added a split second later,"Madam." as he saw Proxmire's cross look, which she aimed at him in response to his snark.

"RADAR." muttered Kelly as an afterthought. "If the Fanheads paint us with radio waves, there's a small chance that the hole we leave in the cosmic microwave background radiation might give them a clue. I mean asteroids reflect radio waves, Madam. Our energy web now absorbs them, so a cluster of radar mines could triangulate us. We, then, would get a quick visit from the local VORCHAN string quartet.

Athena considered this all too likely possibility for a moment. "Let us hope that the arrogant Centauri are not as clever as you think they are."

Kelly said; "I am that sort of pessimist. I always think we, Humans, underestimate our enemies. We should plan for the very worst, Madam. I would like to suggest something to the Captain, with your permission, Lieutenant Commander. If you were the Centauri commander, hiding in Hyper-space, hunting for us by using radar mines, would you not find our current situation ideal from your Centauri point of view/? How should we, Humans, fix that situation for the Peacocks?"

"Time for you to be a navigator, again, Mister Kelly. Think you can drift navigate us to a convenient radio reflecting mass to mask us?" Athena asked.

She called up local space on her segment of the Teledyne and looked around the ship-centered vacuum for some debris.

"Properly, that should be Mister Khan Singh's responsibility, not mine." said Joshua Kelly.

"There." she stabbed at a snowball.

"I see it." said Joshua as he studied the frozen comet."You know that is where the Centauri are set up to meet us?"

"I know." said Athena, "but that is MY job to handle. I have to go and talk to the Captain. I leave you to co-ordinate your half of this fluster clucker with Mister Khan.

Kelly, who was already plotting the three-body problem for an inertia approach using minimum thrust times, cursed, "Futz! Stupid computer. Nothing works the way it should, anymore. The Hyach codecorruption is getting worse! Manual inputs, pfaw!."

Kelly shrugged to himself. Proxmire was long gone, not present, was not listening to his complaints. He plotted the drift approach and calculated his nudge forces upon his stand alone Amiga, instead of on the SPRUANCE mainframe. STL plotting was not really his forte. As he said, a Helmsman / pilot was better suited to this particular task. But since it would be his and Athena's plan, that would be briefed by them to the Captain, HE was responsible for planning his part of it. "A ten second burst at step two thrust in about two hours and fifteen minutes? Braking to come rest-relative? One hundred fifty seconds at step one and we take a bump at the halt." he said to himself as he scribbled the vectors on his Amiga.

"Now to input it into the Analog, as a graph, so that Singh can use it to plan his movements." continued Joshua.

Two hours it took for Athena to sell the Captain on the plan. That gave her scarce ten minutes to set up for what she knew was coming. Singh was already working to waltz with the snowball. As she expected, Singh heavily reworked Kelly's approach. He wanted a much more rapid merge. This was probably due to his supreme confidence in his own skills as a Ship's pilot. That was his responsibility.

The crew would soon be summoned to General Quarters. They would have to fight the ongoing engineering casualties ('ALL of those being computer-operating-system-corruption-induced by virii recently planted into their Hyach sabotaged operating system, transmitted by that late unlamented PRIMUS.' she thought), that plagued the RAYMOND SPRUANCE.

She, Proxmire, could not do anything about that part of the upcoming struggle: her part was just the space battle with the waiting Centauri ambushers, that would immediately follow the snowball rendezvous.

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The Centauri Await

There were a few clever Centauri aboard that next PRIMUS. They did use RADAR in their search and their detector mines did broadcast new instruction code, which they hoped would cause the SPRUANCE to broadcast her own position in replay. The Centauri, also, tried a few things that their Human opponents aboard the SPRUANCE had not thought about, like scattering explosive drift mines randomly, hoping that the Humans would detect the bombs and thus give themselves away by their silly attempts to clear the mines with minimalist active countermeasures. The Centauri theory was that, if such an explosive mine stopped broadcasting, then the Hairballs were proximate to it, and had, therefore, shut it up. Hairballs located. Simple.

As the SPRUANCE nestled up to her pet snowball, one of the Centauri's explosive mines, which should not have gone off as it was out of proximity detection range, had a computer which decided that it was close enough to a target and it went off. That strobed the SPRUANCE by pure bad dumb luck. The energy web absorbed most of the charge. Fortunately, the detector mines that picked up the energy from the event and triangulated it; showed it as a snowball being side-lighted by a malfunctioning mine. What the Centauri thought they saw was , thus, a malfunctioning mine. They totally missed the obvious significance of the event, as they failed to do a routine explosion debris distribution analysis. If they had done that simple thing they would have seen that the blast didn't uniformly reflect off the snowball, and that some of the reflecting radiation they should have expected was MISSING. The luckless Centauri, also, failed to meet the third requirement that was drummed into every Human soldier before you entered battle. Thorough reconnaissance of the battle-space, to know where everybody and everything was / is; is absolutely necessary before you commit yourself to a (stupid), course of action.

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Mirror, Mirror

Captain Heller waited and waited. The fractured snowball still masked the SPRUANCE. Why did not Kelly and Proxmire foresee the explosive mines? She was fearful for her own precious-to-her life, being selfish enough to realize that from such small mistakes made by others she could be killed.

"I really need to get out of this business." Janet said to herself. Fortunately nobody heard her express her cowardice aloud.

"There they are." interrupted Raymond Sealy quietly, He shared the C&C battle watch with her this time. "They are exiting their hide." Sealy brought up the Analog and showed the battle plot to all present. He highlighted the all-too-obvious jump-point. "Their wormhole is about two light minutes away, heading system anti-spinward."

"Not toward us?" asked Captain Heller, wanting to ensure to herself, that indeed the Centauri had made this mistake and that her eyes and the sensors were not deceiving her.

"Definitely away, Captain." said Sealy. "We are drifting out ballistically system spinward with the comet and below the ecliptic." Raymond remarked gently to his obviously nervous Captain.

Heller waited for the Teledyne to update the gravity plots. Another un-intended Minbari gift to Humanity, the Teledyne showed smear tracks as wave probabilities; but gave no range-gating data, that Human fire control could currently exploit. One day, the Teledyne might give such aiming details such as point mass, delta vee, and relative-to-the-ship range, but until the day Humanity defeated Heisenberg and the Uncertainty Principle, she, Janet, would have to settle for this long-ranged blob-detector and use electro-magnetic means to supply the missing scalar numbers that formed definitive vectors.

Tracciani picked this unfortunate moment to stage his unwelcome holographic appearance to announce loudly, "Captain, we can maneuver."

"Of course we can maneuver." said Janet, irked at this foolish pronouncement delivered by L.T. to her, at the precise moment that she was prepared to gamble the ship in one her patented Captain Crazy maneuvers.

"Captain, you misunderstand. We can use the HYPERION uploads to steer and shoot now."

Kelly showed up to announce, "Micro-jump plotted, inputted, and available with predictive updates as previously briefed to you, Madam. Mister Khan should have that across his interface in thirty seconds to execute the exit."

Athena's holograph window now opened up in the Analog in front the Teledyne plot. She looked around wildly confused and apologized, "Sorry Captain" as she moved her image to the outside of the plotted vector cones shown. "I am ready to do it."

'Terrific' thought Janet, 'My overeager officers are jumping the shark again.' She shrugged. She called into the air in front of her, "Mister Donovan? Master Gunner, are you ready?"

The Master Gunner popped in."Yes, Captain. That Fanhead bastard is going to get the works."

By now, Janet's intuition had identified the blob. "He's a PRIMUS." she said.

"Not again!" said Sealy; half mockingly.

"That's not funny, Raymond!" Janet snapped. "Set Condition One, Battle anti-spacecraft. We run-and-gun, instead of a close bombardment, as originally planned. Donovan! Do not forget to use our own mines!"

Donovan nodded curtly once. "So, you are going to flyby, pass him, strafe, and then run? Get him to chase us? Ah, but that sure takes the fun out of it. I think we can hang in there and waste the Fanheads straight up, but you are the boss. Just the same, I have prepared a few special gifts I want to leave those jokers, when we skedaddle."

Donovan was as good as his word. The PRIMUS turned and charged, as soon as the SPRUANCE exited her micro-jump. In the firing pass, both ships exchanged, and also as Janet expected, both ships missed each other at the merge. The Centauri built fast ships and this Fanhead PRIMUS proved it. As she hoped, Janet saw the PRIMUS Captain abandon his VORCHAN support waiting for him to call them out of Hyper-space. In his desire for a glorious unassisted kill, the PRIMUS captain left them to stew in place. It was a House KADRONA ship. No ship of the Centauri Royal Republican Guard would break fleet doctrine like that on the whim of a noble's arrogant pride.

It was a thirty minute chase.and the PRIMUS plowed stupidly through a hail of NIXON mines that the SPRUANCE's Hanger crew dumped out the Fury drop-tubes. Donovan had jerry-rigged those extra mines out of the suicide scuttling charges, that were part and parcel of every Human warship. Patiently, Janet waited until Donovan was satisfied after observing the blossoming of a few of the mines. The idiot Centauri Captain did not even try to avoid the mines. Bullheaded, er rather Fanheaded, the Centauri captain blinded his own ship. Donovan took longer than she would have liked, too, but finally he said, "I'm ready."

Athena, from SECONDARY CONTROL, breathed,"About damned time!"

She waited. Janet said,"You may execute the PRIMUS, Miater Donavan."

Athena became busy.

Janet did not have to see it to visualize it in her mind's eye. She knew that SPRUANCE blossomed interferometric drift mines and that the optical fire control triangulation was underway. She knew that the prolonged proximity bursts by Donovan's improvised NIXONs had scragged the PRIMUS' transmitters and fogged the Centauri ship's fire control in a halo of charged particles that clung to the PRIMUS' hull. A smart Centauri Captain would have hauled off and degaussed, but this one was a House KADRONA fool.

"Any time, Mister Donovan! He's almost in his combat laser range. He will have a solution on us in about thirty seconds." Janet roared into the air, as she estimated the vector merge. The SPRUANCE limped for her life at a paltry fifty meters per second / second squared. That 'illusion' was a planned one. "Just a little closer." Janet hoped.

She suddenly felt SPRUANCE pivot on its center of mass. The red targeting reticle appeared on the Teledyne. It flashed yellow as it neared the prominent reddish-yellow blob in the center of the Analog's field of view. It centered.

SPRUANCE speared the PRIMUS' port-side on her twin lasers. Two thumps announced the launch by SPRUANCE of FURIES to act as escape pod pursuit and cleanup. A cheer among the C&C crew broke out, as the Analog cleared up visually, showing the holed and on fire PRIMUS in closeup, indicating that the interference from the Centauri PRIMUS' jammers had failed at last.

"Mister Donovan. I want you to hold off on the coup-de-gras HAWKS for the moment. Mister Sealy? TBS if you please. Query the PRIMUS, and ask her if she wishes to strike her colors."

Sealy looked at her blankly, "Strike her colors?"

"Surrender, Raymond. Ask the fools, if they want to surrender." Janet explained.

"Aye, aye, Captain." Sealy shrugged and sent the message.

Minutes passed in silence.

"Any answer?" asked Janet.

"No, Captain." replied Raymond."Maybe we wrecked their radios?"

"Centauri, when they surrender in space among themselves, fire off signal flare rockets, three greens, a yellow, and a red in that order." Captain Heller taught Mister Sealey. "Did they not teach anything in Communications courses these days?' she asked herself silently and bitterly.

"Dragon Leader reports." Over the hiss of an STL radio carrier wave with its quarter second time / distance delay came the words into the air of C&C. No image came from the FURY. "I see flares. Green, Green, Green, Yellow, Red. This is in response to the challenge transmitted by my light strobe. Green, Yellow, Green, Red, Red, Red."

That was a shocker to Janet Heller. 'Since when did a mere FURY pilot know Centauri naval flag / light signals?'

"Confirm the surrender!" she ordered to the pilot.

The confirmation came quickly. "They signal again. Flares, Green, Green, Green, Yellow, Red. They give up."

A cold grimness came over Janet, as she ordered; "Mister Khan. Move us toward that PRIMUS. Set Condition Four throughout the ship. Boarding action, enemy vessel. Presumed opposed.by enemy defenders."

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Jolly Time

Donovan pushed needle and thread through his kill sash. That purple chevron with the yellow stripe looked good on his green sash. Those stupid Centauri of House KADRONA sure could not do things the right way. They even screwed up their faked-up surrender ambush. Did they seriously believe that Humans would waltz their ship into a PRIMUS' power-plant burst radius? The PRIMUS should have scuttled before the SPRUANCE pulsed her and shorted out her electronics. Before the Centauri crew (A poorly trained bunch of House KADRONA retainer bastards; hardly worthy of the claim to "spacer status" in Donovan's exalted Irish opinion), never had the chance to reset breakers or jump out shorts. The Vultures docked, breached the PRIMUS' hull: and then it was Thumper and Variable Knife work; until SPRUANCE's Marines took the PRIMUS' power-plant. It was hectic; moving the surviving Fanhead prisoners, cutting out the easily removable and stealable technology bits and planting the scuttling charges, during that party time. Donovan wanted Heller to take the whole ship; so he could have bragging rights, dockside; but she was right on the money, as usual. Those pesky missing waiting VORCHANS finally popped out of Hyperspace, eventually, as she predicted, when they got worried about their missing PRIMUS. There were eight of them, and she ordered her victorious strategic retreat with her usual keen grasp of the prevailing tactical situation: to exact wit, as Patrick remembered it verbatim, as she responded to Sealy's nose count; "Eight of them? Let us get the hell out of here!"

There; he was finished sewing. Patrick donned his kill sash over his uniform and preened himself in front of the section of the obsidian hull armor in his quarters that he polished to serve as his mirror. Sure it twas the Drazi custom to wear the kill sash, but it was an excellent custom that appealed to his Irish vanity.

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Battlefront

KATHRA was a Human cluttered place these days. The freighter, THE LONESOME TRAVELLER, had journeyed all the way from HYACH NYM and beaten the SPRUANCE into the system. It was unnerving to see that cranky strange bird in this region of space. The Human PATHFINDER Class ship, MERIWEATHER LEWIS, also, oddly seemed to HAVE CONVENIENTLY PICKED this time and place to beat the SPRUANCE into a berth. She was rest relative to the Abbai fuel depot. SPRUANCE, herself, was alongside the MERIWEATHER LEWIS. Cross work between the two Alliance Navy ships was fast and furious. Temporary scaffolding surrounded the HERO Class ship that originated from the amidships of the LEWIS. Cables snaked between the two ships, as if the SPRUANCE was baby-to-momma umbilicalled to the EXPLORER. Bright flood lights illuminated hull-walking work parties all over the HERO. The flood lights' cones of brightness, cast pools of fierce sharp-edged shadows, wherever the geometry of obstruction cut off the too-bright white light. SPRUANCE in her oily sheening polished blackness provided the depressing counterpoint to the cheerful grey-white, red and green of the LEWIS. Looking at the two ships from an observation port in the Abbai fueling station, two Alliance Naval ship captains smiled at each other, quite warily.

Captain Heller pointed at the LEWIS and asked Captain Albert Henry Thomas innocently; "That is not an EXPLORER class is it?"

Thomas gave the HERO captain his strange 'I-don't-know-what-you-are-talking-about-look Number Four' and said, "It is not an EXPLORER. It is a PATHFINDER. Much smaller and better ship, but it does essentially the same job.".

"As an ORACLE." finished Janet Heller. "That explains all the weird antennas on her."

Both Captains laughed. The EXPLORERS, like the CORTEZ, which Janet had seen once on a pass through near the ORION colony, were eight kilometer long jump-gate building clunkers, designed to spread Human jump-gates across all of those backwater systems, not in the hands of the LONAW powers, the Narns, or the Centauri. Janet had heard of the PATHFINDERS, but never seen one in the flesh, so to speak, and so up close and personal. Even at HYACH NYM, the LEWIS had kept her distance It spoke volumes about what was going on, localy, to see one here. Captains like her, might get lucky in the NAVPERS lottery draw and receive a MIDWINTER HYPERION: or in her incredibly lucky case, a HERO during a naval career: but only the BEST Earth Alliance captains drew such plum ship's commands as the LEWIS.

She listened to Thomas boast.

"We are a lot smaller than a ship like the CRISTOBAL COLON. We carry the parts for two gates as opposed to their five, but we are much faster, go at least twice as far, cost one tenth as much to operate, and do it at one fifth the size."

"Plus you can operate as a deep survey cruiser, heavy fleet scout, and triple up as a mobile fleet repair dock in a pinch." said Janet plainly, if not too politely.

At that, both Captains shifted view to THE LONESOME TRAVELLER, rather plain and blocky and shabby in her greyish hull. THE LONESOME TRAVELLER had scaffolding extruded from herself; jutting out from what looked like two of her four cargo pallets, that ringed her mid-body just aft of the polygon cylinder that was so obviously her crew compartment / command module. Heller raked her eyes from forward to aft, yet once again, across THE LONESOME TRAVELLER to take in the whole of that "freighter". She still could not get over the MORTON THIOKOL C (V) reactionless thruster pack that was the aft end of that otherwise apparent pedestrian pallet hauler. That oddity, and the freighter's unusual huge size for such a type, was the only things that marked it out as mildly curious to any sensibly aware alien. To Janet, it was profoundly disturbing.

"That 'joker' is our COTTON TENDER equivalent?" she asked.

Thomas nodded. "Spares and a Templater."

Janet shook her head. "And there is a G'Quan, also, assigned to this system?"

Thomas shook his head and lied, "Now, Captain, you are fishing for something that even I do not know or suspect." He sighed and then spoke some truth;. "You would almost guess that the Alliance NGS was assembling a task-group to do something major and hurtful to the Centauri Republic: instead of just throwing whatever Alliance ships they could grab together, helter-skelter, to deal locally with some minor House KADRONA piracy?"

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Bar Hopping

Abigail Sanders, the Captain of THE LONESOME TRAVELLER was alone as she liked it, at a table, by herself, and that was just fine by her. She nursed a nondescript Abbai drink. The Finheads were health freaks, so whatever Abigail was drinking; even if it was alcohol-based, was probably very good for her. Disgusting.

Heller and Thomas entered the bar. This brought the usual patronage to a curious silence. The presence of the Alliance Navy at a bar-restaurant in a station during layover was not unusual these days. Being cooped up in a G'QUAN or an OMEGA; living on a diet of monotonous drills, momentary terror, recycled air and water, and of course those hideous Humsan-made naval food brick rations, would drive any crew to a shore leave where the highlight was distilled colored hydraulic fluid masquerading as whiskey to drink, and wilted CHONU leaves (An excellent Brakiri origin plant for oxygen / carbon dioxide air exchange), a "pseudo-lettuce" from the station garden, masquerading itself as Russian tossed salad.

Two Alliance Captains together, particularly Janet Heller, whose reputation as a Centauri pirate-killer was growing on both sides of the border, was enough, by itself, to quiet this crowd of stationers, in-system miners, trades-people, and the few tourists. What was doubly curious was that the two Captains were alone without the usual Marine bodyguards. Abigail paid attention to that. Slumming among the riffraff? Why? The two of them looked at her. 'Oh crap.' thought Sanders, who wanted to be alone for a while. 'Here comes that 'We Humans have to stick together moment. Damn.' Abigail started her internal 'Here comes the Troubles.' countdown clock, as the two nitwit idiots bee-lined for her table.

Abigail was in no mood for that kind of future, just now. Though she was the Captain of a subsidized merchant, pressed into naval service. She was no naval hero. Her ship was, as far as she was concerned, commandeered, her crew shanghaied, and those two idiots were directly responsible for it all, somehow. At least the Alliance picked up the berthing and station dock air / power fees. There was a minor upside to this situation. Not enough to offset her grumpiness, though.

Abigail Sanders never forgot that she was a Merchanter. Cargo schedules, including her NAVAL cargo schedules, which formed the floor of her cash-flow slipped. She knew that some of her crew would jump ship at any first opportunity and leave her short-handed. Unlike the posh naval service, where you were coddled; working a freighter was HARD dangerous work with little in the way of genuine economic return for the crew or owner / operators like herself. Certainly THIS was, as she raised her glass, as the sober healthy highlight of her life, indicative of her "good fortunes'?

'Some life. Playing nursemaid and supply ship to a pair of naval yoyos, out in the middle of no-where. And now here they come to publicly wrap arms around her shoulders and enforce "Human Solidarity" in front of the alien riffraff.' Abigail looked at her empty glass and thought to herself. 'Eighty proof alcohol. And I can't even get drunk on this silly-juice.'

The two Captains seated themselves, uninvited, at Abigail's table. Immediately, the senior of the two, Thomas, started what he thought was going to be a friendly conversation.

It was simple enough, "Hello."

Her reply was equally friendly, "Hello."

You could feel the frost.

The conversation drifted aimlessly among the three Humans, covering the mine-fields of recent Alliance politics, the lousy economy, the local border unrest caused by House KADRONA antics, and such other assorted harmless subjects, as the three of them sipped silly-juice and munched CHONU leaves. Eventually; the subject drifted around to Narns.

Abigail said something extremely stupid, in retrospect, within the earshot of a couple of Narns, a table over, who were later discovered to be crew marsupials released from the G'QUAN cruiser BITTER HARVEST (In hiding out-system), slumming around in mufti, waiting for their free ride back to their Home-world to enjoy their planet-side shore leave, "I still do not understand why I am here in this place." she said, "Just because of some stupid incompetent Earth Force desire to politically placate the nervous Narns about Centauri pirate activity?"

That was how the subject of Narns came up during the riot, as the Abbai station police investigators later determined.

She continued in this vein, perhaps too loudly and did not notice when her two companions had suddenly gone silent on her. An Abbai waiter came up with another round of three drinks and what looked like a poor Abbai imitation of Vregan BLASK that the Finhead set down in front of the glowering Janet Heller. She, the HERO Captain, fished in her purse and pulled forth an Alliance dollar. which she held up in front of her eyes and said quietly; "Clark dollar. They still haven't pulled that son-of-a-bitch's face from circulation." She tossed it with contempt onto the Abbai's service cart to pay for the round and her BLASK and this was seen, and misinterpreted by those Narns.

Such mistakes can lead to wars. In retrospect, it was a preventable incident. Aliens were alien and some of THEM were bigots and extremely stupid, too. Heller, never the best diplomat, for the moment, forgot that fact.

But that was the future after-action lesson-learned. In the here and now, one of the Narns got up and walked over uninvited to Abigail's table and said rather mildly, "Excuse me, gentle-being. But I think you are in error. There is no Earth Force. There is the Alliance, Merchanter: and you, Madam Captain, as its warrior-representative, could be more courteous of the wait-staff of this establishment, who only seek to serve you; no matter how incompetently."

"What do you want?" interjected Thomas, rising from his seat, as he interrupted the Narn.

"Never ask that question!" hissed the Narn, a devout G'Karist, who reacted badly to Thomas' challenge.

Abigail did not understand the significance of what that question meant to an Army of Light veteran; until she saw the Narn go for Thomas' throat with his bare hands, and she had to stop the spot-headed fool with a solar plexus kick from her seated position. The fight was on!

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End of Chapter 4; Part 1

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Chapter 4; Part 2

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The Price of Victory

Doctor Calendine Depalma supervised Luciano's recovery. 'Curse the Captain!' she thought. They could have downloaded from the MERIWEATHER LEWIS the slow way; machine to machine. But no, the Captain had to have "warship" programs and she had to have them NOW. Depalma was not quite sure why the SPRUANCE needed a code F dump purge, and an operating system overwrite, but she did understand what this process was doing to her patient. She hated it.

Depalma regarded as her main present worry, the drooling engineer under her immediate care. Luciano floated in the middle of DePalma's sickbay in a fetal position. As the engineer occasionally thrashed about, he left clouds of spittled droplets spraying through the compartment. She batted aside the spit that came her way, as she attached EEG leads to the twitching Tracciani. She plugged away at her substandard second-rate equipment; until it merrily chirped at her at what it measured as Luckless Luciano's current condition.

She patted the twitchy engineer, reassuringly, on the head; and sorted through her collection of controlled poisons (Abbai drugs.), until she found the correct ampule containing the correct dosage for this step of the proscribed treatment. Few things changed through the centuries. Hypodermics worked as delivery systems. Dosages were ratioed by body mass. That still ruled the day as to how medication was administered to Humans. She flicked out any air bubbles that might be hidden in the solution, and hunted for a good vein in Tracciani's left fore arm. Finding it, she injected him with the correct drug in the correct dosage; as she read it from the printout supplied by the NATHAN HALE's medical library. As she had learned in over thirty years of medical practice, she watched for the signs of allergic shock. Just because it came out of an authorized medical database, did not mean that the instructions were infallible. People were not machines with interchangeable responses to events. She turned on her EEG recorder again, and waited until the alpha wave and beta wave patterns were somewhat synchronized with what was supposed to be Human-normal. She, then, began to input the overwrites into the Chief Engineer.

The input was administered via encoded mild trickle current electricity through the scalp electrode leads. In and of itself, this should have been no more distressing than a scalp itch. However, the bad side-effect was some twenty hours of epileptic seizures that would afflict poor Luciano. He would need constant watching. He shocked out on Depalma a little more quickly than Calendine expected. Tracciani started flopping. Locking all the breakables away in SICKBAY and forgetting all about her personal dignity was the small stuff for the doctor. She grabbed hold of him and hung on. When Heller asked, later, why she, Calendine, did not strap him to a table, instead, Depalma bitterly answered her clueless Captain; "Have you ever seen a man drown in micro-gravity in his own vomit?"

Holding on to Tracciani was like holding onto a blimp. Once she healed Luciano's mind, she was going to put the fat Chief Engineer on a diet!

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Strolling for Trouble.

Proxmire, Sealy, Kelly, and Donovan trooped together through the bazaar. Like any Abbai station, the place was a riot of greens, yellows, and blacks. Various merchants displayed their wares in their kiosks. Unlike a Human station Mall, most of the bazaar was haphazard in layout.

Athena did not recognize much order, but Sealy, who was something of a self-appointed expert on LONAW cultures, steered the foursome around the seeming economic chaos.

It was not much of a shore leave, this layover. How much fun could you have at a re-fueling depot? The Finhead cops, out in force, maintained a law-and-order presence and atmosphere, that made a Church social seem like a riot. Even Donovan seemed subdued by it.

The four of them bumped into a crowd of loose Narns. The possibility of good-natured social interchange with the Spoo-heads was, by Captain Heller's order, restricted for unspecified reasons Janet did not feel the need to explain when she gave the order, and further re-enforced by the Finhead Flatfoots, who cautiously and ostentatiously followed the foursome with shock rods at the ready.

Athena felt positively frustrated. She nudged Joshua in the ribs and motioned to him, with her chin, to vector starboard, away from Sealy and Donovan. Maybe Kelly and she could ditch the Abbai goons, too; if the pair of them went off, strictly by themselves, to look at some stars in the observation lounge?

The two of them waltzed past a bar-restaurant, bearing the proud name; "Way of the Egg". As they neared the portal to the establishment; out of that doorway sailed the unconscious bodies of a Brakiri, two Narns, an Abbai cop, some alien type Athena could not identify, who had tentacles where a Human's ears would be, more than a trio of Drazi, a Human, some mantis-like insect that defied description; all in the space of a minute or so. Athena and Joshua stopped, and stood aside to watch the fun. Inside the open portal, they saw smashed furniture, fixtures, thudding flying bodies and a whirling, hard-kicking Human woman, who was re-arranging alien anatomies to suit herself.

"The Captain!" said Joshua and Athena together. Neither one of them knew that she had left SPRUANCE. "We better get her out of there, before," Joshua began.

Athena was already inside the establishment, clubbing an Ipshain with a chair.

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Raskallon and Acamos

It had been a while since Acamos had been in space. That was by choice. Since the departure of the Hairball killer-ship, the goblins had run free and wild over the Hyach. That was as He expected. What might appear to the uninitiated unbelievers, as detours along the Way, was as a straight path for Him, the True Follower.

The goblins were the means to weed out the weak among his own kind. Trenaman had not seen this; and thus he departed this cycle. He, Acomos, though, saw the Way. Despite the recent catastrophic failure by His flawed acolytes, weak fools that He employed; He was certain that HE would achieve the Way-even for the unbelievers.

Still, as He parallel-thought about Trenaman's death, and the Shadow Planet Killer's death, both which were equivalent in significance in Acomos' mind, He had reason for disquiet. He was in space by a goblin's order. That was not entirely by His own free choice. What did the Grey, Raskallon, want? Certainly the little fool, who was not his equal in age or seniority, or intellect, was totally ignorant of the Way and was no threat to Him.

Raskallon read the Guild Report in his talons. It, the report, made quite clear that the dead Drakhs, who the hero, Ivanova, took in battle before she killed them, talked as the cowardly creatures they were. Raskallon was not really interested in that Human centric portion of the record, though a reporter like Excolsus of the Artisans' Guild, would gain fame in writing it, for all Vree to read when the Humans finally (Foolishly to Raskallon's way of cautious thinking), allowed it to be seen.

The part that interested Raskallon was the portion that covered the Hyachs' part in the Third Battle of Sol. He read very carefully this section. He wanted names, so that when the Humans put the pieces together, themselves, he could direct their vengeance in a narrow spear of justice that would not drop yet another whole world into their laps for Humaa settlement.

IKARRA was theirs; thanks to their Interplanetary Expeditions Corporation.

EPSILON III fell to them almost as if by a conspiracy hatched by the FIRST ONES.

MARKAB fell to the Humans, likewise.

And if his hunches were correct; probably IDANA and other Centaur border colonies would fall to the Earth Alliance; if the Human-dominated Alliance Naval General Staff plan went forward, as he feared it would.

ENOCH II could not fall. He liked the Humans immensely and he hated the Hyach, but he judged that the Humans were dangerous enough, as spread out as they were. They needed a few centuries to settle themselves down, to digest the chunk of the galaxy that they owned by accident or others' plans, before they strayed into the Kirishiac Mistake.

Besides; if the Humans took ENOCH II, that would put them smack into the middle of LONAW space. The VENTUKI CONGLOMERATE enjoyed stiff economic competition, but not this close to its borders. The Humans had a tendency to squeeze their trading partners in a crushing economic hug: as the NARN REGIME was just discovering. Thus, he had to preserve the Hyach.

Of course, there were certain Hyach whose carcasses he would not mind rendering slowly in an acid vat, as was the approved Vregan custom for those stupid sapients who were found to be unfit to live for any reason, such as for example as Acamos.

Nevertheless, though he would render the Hyach Gerontarch, for his part in attacking Humanity, a friend of the VENTUKI; he, Raskallon, would be somewhat patient. The Humans had a certsain right to partake in the due process of Vree justice.

"The Way indeed!" Raskallon signed to himself absent-mindedly, as he went to work in arranging Acamos' deserved death. "Religious fanatics."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Acamos donned his secular robes. For some reason the Vree became upset these days when they saw a Hyach in his role as an Acolyte of the Way. The goblins, were insane as it was, and difficult to play for the fools that they were, unless He kept them calm.

Acamos was not deceived. Surely the goblin unbelievers knew that the Hyach had supplied kidnapped captive Humans and Hyach medical experts, who gave that material, and who taught the Drakh how to tune the nanite plague that infested EARTH. He was prepared for that eventuality to be found out. There would be a great show of Hyach indignation at the criminals in their midst. The anointed guilty Hyachs would leave this cycle very publicly. Thus, the last of Trenaman's acolytes would be removed and He, Acamos, would clear away the final impediment to the Way among his own kind while giving the un-believers the false show that they needed; before he showed them the True Path.

Some of the very acolytes who served Him, now, as He robed himself were those who had followed the false Trenaman. That the poison and the knife was their fate aboard this now Alliance; but former Hyach Station, they did not foresee? That was all the proof He needed that they deserved to leave this cycle. Such was the punishment for their blindness to the Way.

As for Raskallon, the goblin, his fate was as sealed as the acolytes. That unbeliever was as subject to the Way as anyone. His blindness doomed him, too.

As to the tools he would use to carry out His vision? Acamos, as soon as he finished robing, dismissed His acolytes and went over to the chest that He had brought out from ENOCH. He opened it. He looked upon the strange pieces of metal that the Hairballs called "coins". There were several million "dollars" worth. He picked up one of the "dollars" and turned it in his four-fingered hand. He knew very little Humanese, but he read the script under the stamped bas-relief Human male head that he saw on the obverse coin side; opposite from where the Earth Alliance stamped their bird seal signet, marking it as their property. He read, "William Morgan Clark".

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Escape and Evade

Abigail Sinclair Sanders led the quintet of Humans through the checkpoints. Five misfortunate in-system miners, down on their luck, were not for whom the Abbai were looking. The Finheads sought four supremely confident Human warship officers and a freighter captain who had wrecked one of their station eateries. The Abbai of the fuel station would not make too much of a fuss, as this was Alliance Space; but the dramatic public embarrassment among the loser participants was something best handled left-handedly by all victorious parties concerned. Thus, Abigail Sanders had been convinced, under the unfortunate circumstances, to help smuggle the malefactors out with minimal fuss to avoid the much-hated paperwork. The worst headache, for any spacer was the paper trail that dogged you from port to port. That crap followed you everywhere. If the Abbai had no bodies to charge, then the Abbai had nobody to charge. Hence; the quick duck into the lavatories: a change of clothes and demeanor; including a surprisingly good performance by Janet Heller, as a passed-out overdosed drug-addict Human being dragged back to quarters by her "friends" to detox. It helped her performance that a lucky Drazi in the bar fight, had hit her with a table from behind, when she kicked two of his companions through the wall. Athena had broken the Drazi's legs in righteous retaliation and scooped her unconscious Captain up as Joshua hustled everyone into the quick change routine.

It helped out; that the Abbai Flatfeet seemed suddenly and energetically inefficient. "Papers, please?" the Abbai cop had been watching too many Human movies. His Claude Rains imitation was awful. Sanders handed over her false miner's papers for the seventh time. If this situation had been aboard a station, like BABYLON 5, with station security run by Senior Inspector Zack Allen, they would have her party in the brig so fast, that she would not have had time to shout "I want a lawyer!"

The Finhead waved them on and out.

The Quintet shuffled along until they reached the station small boat berthing. At this point, Albert Henry Thomas picked up some of his own crew. He ditched the rags he wore and headed out into the bay where his own gig was docked. The remaining four Humans watched his gig smartly move out to the LEWIS.

"Why the hell can we not get a boat like that?" wondered Joshua Kelly.

"Not necessary!" snapped Athena. "Besides where would you berth something like that aboard?"

Abigail tugged at Athena's arm and pointed. There were parties of Narns, who hunted for the Humans who had beaten up their defenseless pouch brethren in the bar fight. They roamed the station looking for their brand of private Narn justice. Some of them were headed toward the four Humans.

"Crap. They are between us and our Vulture." said Joshua.

"And she needs medical attention." said Abigail, referring to Janet Heller. Taking Athena by the shoulder, Abigail steered the four of them toward a berth away from the oncoming Narns.

When Athena opened her mouth to question, Abigail put finger to lips as she cycled the pressure hatch to the greenish berth airlock."My jolly boat." she explained. "Dump your rags into the waste burner. They are skein paper anyway; so they will flash burn. No evidence in that ash. As far as the station knows, I have officially been holed up here all the time: so if we depart the berth they will not "officially" connect our departure with the riot."

"Good." decided Athena, "then you can drop us off by the SPRUANCE and."

Abigail looked at Athena with her standard look reserved for the ignorant and the terminally irredeemaby moronic.

Joshua, being more alert, guessed, "That's a no-way, since when you berthed, you probably manifested yourself as a singleton, did you not, Captain Sanders?'

"Bright boy, Navy." Abigail agreed sourly. "If we go: it has to be to THE LONESOME TRAVELLER. We have to cross-transfer you lot during the confusion of resupply to avoid ^complications^. Paperwork? Remember? We cannot give anyone on the station the slightest excuse to ^officially^ pursue this investigation beyond "escaped perpetrators are unknown to us" so let us close the investigation." Abigail continued, "Besides, I suspect your Captain needs a doctor rather quickly and the TRAVELLER is a lot closer to us than the SPRUANCE time-wise."

The four of them entered Abigail's jolly boat. Athena and Joshua carried Janet to a bunk where they laid their Captain out and rolled her in. Janet did not so much as moan, as they strapped her down for acceleration. This produced concerned looks from the two SPRUANCE officers. Abigail checked on then and looked at Janet. Janet's eyes had rolled back into her head. Abigail's face, which had shown some slight emotion to this point, went mask-like. "Strap in, you two." she said curtly as she hustled forward to the pilot's compartment.

Seconds later, the little jolly boat rotated out and hustled toward the grey freighter she called mother, with such uncharacteristic speed that one normally did not see from a Human shuttle craft or small boat.

Athena shouted from her perch in the starboard passenger compartment astern of the pilot's compartment, "Are you crazy? We must be pulling two gees! There is not any need for this. Nobody is shooting at us!'"

Abigail growled in return, "Shut up, Navy! I decide what is necessary, here. And for your information, what the HELL do you know about being shot at? My ship was part of a convoy that was bounced by a VORCHAN at MEREWHON. That bastard blew out one of my cargo pallets and sent my ship tumbling through the gate. To trim my mass ballast, I had to dump the rest of my cargo, straighten out my vector, and run three weeks sub-light cold before the Centauri hyper-spaced out seeing nothing else to rip up. I lost that cargo run. But no matter, I long-legged to IPSHAI and picked up a new load and came to KATHRA to dump cargo, profit, and recharge. That was when your NGS nimrods commandeered me and told me I was your nursemaid. I was saddled with you babies, ever since!"

She was already docking with THE LONESOME TRAVELLER as she said this. It was a hard-jolting docking."Now get your Captain and come on!" Abigail ordered. "And do not think I'm not charging the Navy for my time, consumables, and my ship's doctor's services." she added.

She was already at the jolly boat hatch when Joshua floated up with Janet Heller in his arms like a male Madonna carrying some oversized waif.

Abigail saw the man with the woman in his arms as he waited for the lock to cycle. She motioned him forward and threw her own human mass at the hatch to force it open more quickly. She popped through and grabbed a wall mike and shouted into it, "Sawbones! Medellin Wake your ass up and meet me at frame 121-4 F." Kelly was right next to her, floating. Athena Proxmire was securing the Jolly boat hatch and the access to THE LONESOME TRAVELLER inner pressure hull.

Abigail spoke once more into the mike."Carlos, for the love of the Great Maker, HURRY!"

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Raskallon and Acamos

You could count on treachery among the unbelievers. The alien version were even more corrupt than those among his own Hyach people. Oddly enough, Acamos thought that He would find the traitor among the Hairballs who supported the Darkness in the last conflict. But the one He tried to recruit to the Way, a one who had been a chief among the Clarkists, had flung the coins back into His face and defied Him and the Way. Acamos had the wretch dispatched from this cycle out a station airlock, but not before he, the Human pronounced (falsely) as to his, Acamos, own doom along the Way.

Odd that the creature had said,"See you in HELL, Bumpy!" when he was put out; as if he knew what his own fate was.

Acamos out of curiosity, later researched HELL. It was a place of eternal punishment for the irretrievably lost as the Humans (falsely), believed? How could one be lost to the Way? It might take many cycles but all must eventually come to the Way. Time and Order demanded it!

Ah; no matter. He found His traitor among the goblins. And for such a cheap price would the fool Raskallon die. Only one million of those Earther "dollars" would it cost Acamos to be rid of that unbeliever this cycle.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Two Vregans in the Station Master's Villa shared the same bitter Julon from the same cup.

Raskallon was a left-handed speaker. His guest, Molitor, was female, and as was true of her sex, she spoke right-handed.

"So the Human traitor, Colonel Grayson, chose honor rather than profit?" signed Raskallon.

"So, said the Hyach acolyte, who murdered him, before I rendered the wretch." signed Molitor, as she sipped the bitter wine.

"That is good news, that I can forward to our Human allies. It will comfort them to know that the traitor redeemed himself to them; to the rightness of things. They have a vast forgiving intelligence that allows for their redemption among their own kind that way."

"It makes them the best of allies." signed Molitor in agreement.

"How went the other matter?" signed Raskallon.

"Acamos has arranged your death by poison. His payment was paltry for the deed. A mere million Human dollars for your passing from this cycle as he believes it." Molitor signed.

"And when are you supposed to do this?" asked Raskallon quizzically left-handed.

"Now." signed Molitor.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

An acolyte came into Acamos presence and bowed extremely low. That was the harbinger of either very good or very bad news.

Acamos studied the body language of the acolyte. This was a clue. If the acolyte expected to pass out of this cycle as a result of his news, then he would shiver in fear, lacking the sincerity and serenity of a true seer of the Way. This youngling was rock-steady. Arrogant. Acamos waited. "It is done." said the acolyte. To teach all the acolytes, present, a lesson as to proper humility in following the Way; Acamos gave the silent signal and the message-bringer was sent out of this cycle by having his breath stifled through strangulation.

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Aboard THE LONESOME TRAVELLER

Athena Proxmire closed the compartment hatch on her snoring Captain. Janet Heller was lightly strapped into a medical bunk in the TRAVELLER's SICKBAY. She looked at the short fat mustachioed Mexican.

Carlos Medellin shrugged his shoulders and said, "Simple concussion. I relieved the pressure on her brain with a pulse treatment. That is standard. We wait for twenty-four hours for the drugs to do their follow-up work. If it had been another fifteen minutes: skzzzzzt." He made a slashing motion with his finger across his throat. "Shame that would be too. She is a beautiful woman. She should do her duty by Humanity and have children. Leave the brawling to the males. We are the ones who are expendable. Women, like her, are very precious." He said this professionally and medically; totally without machismo or condescension.

That still did not stifle the anger that Athena, as a woman felt. Janet had DONE her duty by Humanity, and this fat bastard was presuming to judge the woman?

Joshua floated up, as the fat Mexican pushed off to do other good works. "I take it you hate the fat little bastard, too?" he asked Athena. He looked at the fat little Mexican's broad back. The doctor whistled; "Hail Columbia!" as he swam away.

Athena nodded. "I suppose we should be grateful that he knows what he does."

Joshua shrugged; as if he thought that remained to be seen, "We have been invited to visit Captain Sanders in her quarters for a private meal. Did you know that she runs this tub with fifteen people?"

That THE LONESOME TRAVELLER, a kilometer and three quarters worth of pallet hauler, only had a crew of fifteen idiots to run her, did not surprise Proxmire. It was probably insurance requirements that prevented Sanders from ditching the crew and lone-wolfing it, with only the ship's computer for a crew.

This subject, and other topics of conversation related to the freighter that the two saw, passed between them, as they swam along the passageways of the crew module toward officer's country. Consulting a frame map oriented them to the passage way that led to Sander's quarters. The two Alliance officers showed up outside the entryway.

Joshua read aloud the sign on the hatch "Bang on hatch, three knocks, with the wrench provided. Announce yourself. State your business."

Athena picked at the floating wrench (Attached to the hatch by a piece of welded chain) and CLANG, CLANG, CLANG. 'Steel? How quaint?' Athena thought. "Lieutenant Commander Proxmire and Senior Lieutenant Kelly to see Captain Sanders." she announced; "In regards to the Captain's invitation."

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In the Captain's Lair

"So you used me as bait?" asked an angry Abigail.

"We got that VORCHAN did we not? It gutted a dozen Alliance freighters prior to that convoy. I am sorry that you lost your cargo; but that House KADRONA pirate Captain killed a lot of Merchanters. He had to be stopped." snapped Athena. "If it at all would do any good, I would continue to argue the necessity for what happened at MEREWHON. But it is done and past. I am too tired to fight about it. If its any consolation to you, the Centauri, in that VORCHAN, never got the cargo. We killed them all almost as soon as we saw you dump mass." She said that fact, flatly.

"You killed them right away, and you left me to run blind scared for three weeks?" almost shouted Abigail.

"We were running from a Hyper-space hidden PRIMUS that just popped out of its Hide, ourselves, at the time." said Joshua. "If we had not lured it off of you, you would not have survived your three week run into the cold."

That shut Sanders up for the moment. "Well, the cargo's gone. I cannot salvage it now." she lied. "Schedule and all that. I suppose I should thank you for my life and my ship after all?" She smiled grudgingly a bit. Sanders could feign diplomacy. "I guess we will put you up for a day, until we deadhead you to SPRUANCE. I suppose you wil not leave your Captain, here?"

There was an automatic combined "No." from Joshua and Athena.

"Thought so." said Abigail. "Well, I promised you two, a meal. How about some genuine soybean burgers, baked potatoes, and a side dish of broiled green beans, all washed down with beer?"

Joshua brightened,"REAL food!"

Abigail nodded, "I will even cook it on a REAL stove. I have not cooked for guests in.....YEARS." Abigail was such a liar.

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Recovered

Janet Heller came too, aboard a stateroom of some kind. She found herself in a micro-gravity sleep-suit. She recognized that condition. It was a poor man's substitute for the more expensive squirrel cage to be used during sleep periods by a civie ship's crew when they were in Holhman transit between gates or from one docking to the next. It was designed to auto-massage the Human body during sleep, as a supposed substitute for the acceleration field associated with gravity. It somewhat offset the effects of calcium leaching and muscular atrophy that was the benefits of micro-gravity by putting the body at rest under strain-like mechanically induced auto-isometrics.

The bed she was in, or rather the rack, was conventional enough, if non-Navy. It had three point straps for the blanket. Janet unsnapped these and rolled out and came to proper vertical orientation in the intended plane of acceleration, as her Navy muscle memory prompted her. She was shocked at how weak she felt herself to be. She peeled off the the sleep-suit. She found herself in a one piece undergarment. Not Navy issue. She looked around for her uniform; or at least some proper-fitted outer-wear clothes. Instead she found, clipped in place by a magnet, on a wall mounted table adjacent to her rack, a paper chit. She snagged it, read it, and groaned for the first time in what felt like centuries.

It was a laundry chit. It listed her compartment by frame number. That meant that delivery service was part of the bill. Yep. There was the service delivery charge listed on the cleaning and mending bill, that were her accrued laundry charges. Each article of clothing was listed by type and repair / cleaning task along with the estimated cost to restore it to a "clean and wearable condition".

Janet groaned a little more, not so much from her now half-remembered injuries and her fuzzy memories of how she got here, but over the realization that the NAVY would not pay these bills. It would be considered personal expenses. Janet was not wealthy. She had sons to rear, and this was not going to help her savings. She frankly dreaded to see what the medical and air bills were likely to be. If they were in the same order of magnitude, as this ship's laundry bill then she would be financially wiped out: destitute and forced to take out credit, against her future naval salary. How would she pay for this?

Tears to be mended on the uniform. Bloodstains to be removed? Janet felt herself all over. Except for that bandage on her head, she did not seem to have any wounds that could have bled out.

Narn blood stains?!?!

It was not her blood.

Oops. She must have fought harder than she intended. She noticed her boots in the armoire. She saw a chit tied to the laces of her right boot. She read that. "Mending of soles. Removal of blood and gore from the leather uppers?!?!" Janet flexed her legs experimentally. 'Ah nuts.' she thought to herself in disgust. Savate kicks were intended for micro-gravity close quarters unarmed combat. She used it in gravity? 'Not good.' she decided. Banged, bruised, with a probable concussion, as she touched her bandaged head again. "Ouch!" she cried aloud. "I should have studied Home Economics." she decided again aloud. She must be in seven kinds of trouble with the Alliance Military Command. She reached over to the intercom at the starboard side of the rack and pressed the call button. The flat-screen on the wall, over what she now decided was the wall extruded nightstand, flicked into life. Janet remained fuzzy on the "nautical" terms for the type of furnishings that she found in her compartment. "Built-ins!" That was the term for the furnishings.

Abigail Sanders peered out of the flat-screen at Janet. "Sorry we have no hologram projectors for you, Captain, but on my ship things have to be purchased from her earnings, so that cost matters. I hope you like the cabin. It would set a Centauri noble back a growing season's total income on his estate to book his passage in it. Unnecessary, as it is, as my ship is a pallet-hauler. We are strictly a freighter. But: I am required, by law, to have several of these "cabins" available to be used by "commercial^ passengers" for travel, in order to operate on the TIGRIS CIRCUIT. Go figure? Ha!" She paused to enjoy her own joke, as Janet's internal calculator recalculated how much more debt than she originally estimated that she accrued per second as a paying passenger on THE LONESOME TRAVELLER.

'Yikes!'

"Well enough small chat, eh? I invite you to the morning meal at the ^Captains Table^. I believe that you naval types call it breakfast?"

Heller glowered at the Merchanter's image. "It is called first mess, to go with First Watch and so forth." She flapped her arms to her sides, like a penguin. "Is your ship so informal, that people run around in their underwear?"

Sanders laughed. "I will have a crewman run your uniform over to you." Sanders looked offscreen for a moment.and then said; "Aw, a uniform. It seems we destroyed your uniform in the laundry. Sorry. We will adjust your bill accordingly." She faded out quickly with that joke.

Janet did not think it was funny at all.

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Acamos

It was unusual for a Gerontarch to take on an alien, as a body servant and a prime Acolyte. Yet, as Acamos felt His sureness in the Way grow, and as He imposed His sureness in an ever expanding circle that rippled across from HYACH NYM and beyond to the outer universe at large, none dared question His vision of the Way.

And none was as devoted to Him, as the Grey-Molitor. Her conversion to belief was complete. So much so, that she gave back to her Senior, the coins that he originally paid to her to perform her first service in the Way.

Acamos bent his head in frustration. If only He could reach forth with his vision to clarify the Way for the acolytes in the mass instead of issuing orders, as if to an army. Then, the acolytes would act as required on their own, without his almost constant interventions and supervisions.

It showed. The Vree still entered HYACH NYM with their XILLs and XORTs and acted as if they ran Hyach space, despite the truth that He, Acamos, was the True Master of the Hyach.

Molitor, though, was His means to change that Grey arrogance as well. She, being female could be unioned to the supremely powerful at VREETAN as Acamos understood it. Influence like that was, could be far more useful to Him than any energy that the VENTUKI CONGLOMERATE could amass against the Hyach.

Acamos had a simple Vision of the Way.

Patience.

The nanite plague among the Hairballs would reduce them all to a memory in this cycle within, but five years.

Patience.

The Narns and the Centauri would go to war and remove each other from this cycle.

Patience.

The plague, stolen from the Drakh, He planned for using against the VENTUKI. That would also remove them in five years. This he would do, as he told the Drakh, to do to the Humans originally. Thereby He would prove to those fools, who doubted Him, how One actually carried out the Vision of the Way.

And; as all these dangerous unbelievers left this cycle as unworthy, He, Acamos, would send his acolytes forth to those who would follow the Way: to the Abbai, the Ipshai, the Brakiri, the Drazi, ultimately even the Minbari would be brought to See the Way.

He spoke these thoughts aloud before Molitor, who could not understand speech. When He spoke to her, he had to speak to her using the clumsy language cards that she supplied him for thaT purpose. And those cards He discovered, were the accursed invention supplied to the Vree, by the HUMANS!

Patience.

He began to pace in his Villa. He continued to speak aloud as he envisioned the Way. He looked at his prime acolyte in a momentary flash of suspicion, but she showed proper deferment and his suspicion passed.

Now to detail and delegate.

He motioned to Molitor and she scurried to obey, opening her Amiga (Another Human-inspired tool!?!), to copy orders that He gave her. He found her abilities to take his broad generalized directives in the Way and set out specific instructions to his acolytes to be amazingly useful. Perhaps; if He could recruit more VENTUKI as acolytes? No. That thought passed along the left side of His parallel thoughts as His right side remembered why the Vree must pass from this cycle. He suppressed the anger, as being something that distracted Him from His clear vision of the Way.

He began clumsily with his old four-fingered hands, laying out the flash cards on a low table in His slow laborious way to tell Molitor what He wanted.her to convey. He marveled at how quickly her five-fingered hands danced across the touch-pad of her Amiga. He had tried it once, but the accursed thing refused to obey, or accept His inputs, which He found disturbing. He was a Hyach and Hyachs were masters of the Way for the machines as well as for men. After all, were not Hyach computers and operating systems the finest in space?

This brought a little smile to Acamos as he dredged up a past memory of the clever trick He had put into the Human killer-ship. By now the Centauri should have exploited all the openess that he, Acamos, had instructed his acolytes, who worked on the killer-ship's operating systems to install in its computer. Who knows? Maybe that accursed Human female who dared to have Him brought before her as if He was a nothing, not even a grub: maybe she was a slave in some Centauri nobleman's harem by now? The Way allowed for such arcane irony. And there were Centauri nobles perverse enough; to enjoy the company of Human females. Acamos smiled as he thought of this vision; as He laid out the cards. Molitor dutifully watched Acamos, as he fool-mumbled, and laid out cards wrong, out of syntax, proper tense, or order. She recorded it all on her Amiga, for her actions and His ordered approvals.

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Speaking of the Fantastic

The uniform assortment that Sanders sent Heller was made out of honest to goodness lambs' wool. There was also cotton and silk undergarments to go with it. None of the crazy Narn animal hides and metal studs were involved here. Actual socks were part of the ensemble, instead of leggings, came with the uniform. Heller could almost kiss the deck in gratitude. Honest to goodness Human clothes made by Humans for humans were here for her!

She buttoned her tunic hurriedly as she schicked schicked her way down the passageway. She developed a good feel for the ship.now. It was, as she had observed it from the outside, a skinny thing almost seventeen hundred meters long. The thruster pack was, surprisingly, the same type family, as the one used by the EUREKA. Thus; this freighter could not be more than ten years old. Built to a simple planform, the spine of the freighter hull was a cruciform frame. The main hull, the facetted head-spheroid section, held the command, crew compartments and the small cargo. The spine held more small cargo, fuel and the power-plant. The engine block was, as Janet now knew, a MORTON THIOKOL C (V) reactionless thruster-pack. The main cargo was the reason for this freighter. This cargo was stored in four enormous pallets, each five hundred meters long, three hundred fifty meters wide and one hundred fifty meters deep.

Janet was a quick study and no fool. She had seen this freighter from the outside and estimated these scales with the long practiced naval eye she had developed in her career; and now she was looking at it from the inside. She knew what the prefab dimension sections of an EARTH built outpost or a deep-range free-space settlement module were. THE LONESOME TRAVELLER's cargo pallet's measurements matched those module sizes exactly. THE LONESOME TRAVELLER outside, might wear civilian livery, and her Captain might play owner / operator running a subsidized pallet-hauler freighter, pressed on rare occasion into a contracted naval service; but Janet knew a disguised FLEET COMMAND and CONTROL ship when she saw one. THE LONESOME TRAVELLER might have been better renamed THE TRAVELLING LIAR.

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Union Forever

Janet Heller reached the galley-mess in time to be served soybean sausages, real eggs (Not from an EARTH-born chicken, alas, but she would settle for ORION III ostrich eggs scrambled sunny side-up.), and honest-to-the-Great Maker toast! She wolfed down the first real food she had eaten in months, as she sat among strangers. She knew none of them. None of them, in turn, spoke to her. All of them were dour Humans. 'So the big happy Interstella Alliance has not integrated these "Merchanters" into the multi-cultural / multi-species family, yet? EFNI reprobates? It would not surprise her, here and now, given what else she was receiving from her own private PARANOIA CENTRAL.' Janet thought.

She ate silently, at her table, in the same quiet solitude of the outsider in the crowd. There was no Abigail Sanders to join her here, yet. One head-bandaged stranger, alone among a half dozen zombies eating breakfast? Janet looked up at the overhead to see why this cafeteria-style mess was bathed in blue light rather than the warm bright-white to which she was accustomed. Strange how few things changed over the centuries. Flourescent lights? Cheapskates outfitted this ship.

"Hey, Captain! er... Madam Captain?" she heard to her starboard. She swiveled her head too fast to track the in-bound. That caused her head to swim a bit. She shook off her dizziness. She saw Joshua Kelly swimming to her table with a tray in his dexter hand and legs flailing madly as he oriented to a sit-down position.

"You need to refresh yourself on micro-gravity movement, Mister Kelly." she said.

Kelly grabbed his seat, one handed, and pulled himself down. "I know." He looked at his covered plate and said, "Soybean sausage? Yuck. I wonder, if we will ever see real cows out here?"

"Endangered species list." said Janet, eating her sausage and enjoying it a lot less, now. She scowled in anger. "The Minbari made sure of that one."

Joshua nodded. "Not just cows, Captain."

Now, Abigail Sanders floated over to join them. She was trailed by two burly male ratings. The men took up easy lounging positions at a table nearby. As Abigail swam over to where Heller and Kelly sat, the two of them adjusted their seating and made room; so Sanders could land and seat before they resumed consuming their own breakfast. Sanders somersaulted into her seat with veteran spacer grace.

Joshua almost spat out his orange juice which he was busy sucking out of a squeeze bulb, when he realized that he had forgotten to rise in the presence of a ship's Captain when at table before the Captain took a seat. He then realized that his own Captain had ignored that strict naval honors protocol. He looked at Janet in confusion.

Janet looked back at him, cocked her head, picked up her own squeeze bulb, and said, "Cheers."

A steward schicked over with a covered-plate. He uncovered it. Voila! Oatmeal. Sanders made a face at it, and frowned at the steward. She motioned for him to set it down for common self service.

Kelly looked at his Captain and asked her, "Another blessing for us from the Minbari?"

Janet, now cross, told Joshua, "Stow that nonsense. We use oats; because it easily grows on every world we colonize. Other cereal grains do not do that well. It also allows us to grow horses."

Kelly shut up at that point, as he realized what that meant.

"Hydroponics, rabbit food, and in space a vegan life-style," growled Abigail Sanders as she attacked her oatmeal. "I have something to show you, Captain Heller."

She motioned over to the shorter of her two bodyguards.

"Crew problems?" asked Joshua, puzzled.

"Regulations." said Sanders. "The Guild requires the Captain to have a yeoman. So i picked these two."

Janet chuckled.

The short "yeoman" gave Captain Sanders a small black cube. She looked at it briefly, then handed it to Janet and said simply. "Push the white face of the cube, twice; and set it on the table, white face pointing toward the overhead."

Puzzled, Captain Heller did as instructed. Sanders muttered at her, "Your Fun-time is over."

It must have either been a Vregan or Minbari recorder. The holography was much better than Centauri or standard LONAW gear. It was certainly not Human. It was horrible.

It opened with an introduction by a Talon-Second Leader named N'Lan: a Narn of all people to set the stage for the bitter subsequent play. She, the Narn, described (In thickly accented English); very briefly the assembly of the Drakh Horde, their shepherding of a Shadow Planet Killer into SOL system, and then she faded out, so the actual play could begin.

The wagon-wheel stations near Saturn were the first to go.

Janet Heller looked with objective professional detachment at the details, that the Drakh gun-ships used some kind of boser as their primary beam weapon. Those seemed shorter-ranged and weaker than the lasers that she had aboard SPRUANCE. The Drakh cruisers she saw, were larger than a typical SHARLIN, but seemed to have weaker and fewer guns. The Drakh green beams were wave-guided and directed, much like Vorlon lightning guns. That was unusual. Janet always suspected that the Shadows had better final focus and aiming technology for their emitters than the so-called "LORDS OF ORDER." Despite all that sidebar detail, Drakh gunnery and range of effect was impressive, as was their rate of fire; in her professional opinion.

They made short work of TRITON base.

The next act was IO. Here for the first time, Humans were present in strength. The Shadow Planet Killer acted as a remote backdrop to the fur-ball of FURIES and Drakh gun-ships. The Demon-head Cruisers went up against the first group of OMEGAs and improved NOVAs. It was a close fight. The Drakh ran from this confrontation. The Jump-gate and the IO base was damaged, but survived.

Kelly whistled during this bit of stage-play and light-show. Janet shushed him.

The particle cannons of the EARTH ships were red-beamed contrasted with Drakh green. Where Drakh green met Human hull, lightning and sparks flew, steam vented, and gouges appeared. Where Human red met Drakh hull, the red pierced, raked through and tore rents int the Drakh hull. Shock-power was, in this case, Humanity's. The Drakh had the numbers.

Act Three occurred near poor battered EARTH, herself. Wormholes polka-dotted the sky as Drakh and Human ships charged against each other. The planetary defense grid opened up on everything Drakh within reach. More FURIES, more Drakh gun-ships, more Demon-head cruisers: there were.hundreds of them. They cluttered the sky. Here WARLOCKs, PATRIOTs, and a few HEROs went in alongside OMEGAs, NOVAs, ARTEMIi, HYPERIONs, even obsolete ORESTIi, TETHYi, and well nigh useless ORACLEs; they all mixed it up.

Janet had never seen a WARLOCK fight. Personally, she thought it was a clunker, like the OMEGA. It was built around a pair of particle accelerators, the most primitive type of beam technology you could imagine using. 'Very simple, very primitive, but very reliable technology' she thought as she looked at the play.

She delineated the vector of the WARLOCK she decided to follow in this light-show, as the point of view seemed to particularly concentrate its attention on this particular hull for the moment.

One brief close up on the nameplate (From a nearby interferometric fire control buoy?), showed the WARLOCK's identification as "THE TITANS". Heller counted the shots. Eight spinal cannon vollies erupted; eight Drakh cruisers died. Impressive, those particle cannons. Impressive fire control!!!!!! THE TITANs: hit repeatedly by Drakh beam weapons, shrugged off the hits as if they were fly swats. She plowed through hordes of Demon-head gun-ships. She blew the Drakh pests apart with her flank guns, as if they were nothing to her at all.

Interceptors, energy-web, and hull armor seemed as good as what Janet knew was the performance of similar systems on her own HERO. Maybe it was better?

She winced as she saw THE TITANs stagger under a glancing hit by a red black beam of some kind.

"Slicer." suggested Joshua Kelly, recognizing the type of beam strike.

"Wrong color. Too powerful." said Janet, as she measured with her practiced eye the one hundred meter gash in the WARLOCK's hull.

The source of the beam revealed itself, as it appeared close up at last. 'The Shadow Planet Killer' was firing its point defense weapons.

Act Four now unfolded. This was the arrival of Alliance follow-on forces. Narns, Vree, a few Drazi, and surprise, the Anla-shok! White Stars! Minbari fighting for Humans? Those formed a wedge, Minbari-idiot-fashion and as you would expect from such Minbari. They heroically charged. The planet killer ripped them apart. Brave fools. The Narn ships slid in beside the Humans and cautiously approached the Shadow Planet Killer. A group of WARLOCKs, including THE TITANs, laid down a cone of fire that ripped the Drakh covering force away and opened a corridor leading into the heart of the SPK as it unfolded. Thirty or so OMEGA captains, who knew the score, formed up and went in under the cover of that WARLOCK fire. Less than a third of them made it. They peeled open the last layer of SPK defense with their own closer-ranged fire.

Then Janet saw two ships. These were unlike any Human or alien ship of which she was familiar. Of course. those were the experimental destroyers for which President Sheridan had argued.

They both charged into the Shadow Planet Killer. One died heroically; like too many other Human ships, but this one rammed itself at something inside the SPK. Something vital, it hit. The SPK started to fold up. The other ship fired into the impact site with what looked like a badly tuned Vorlon lightning gun to finish that site's destruction.

Janet approved of this action. Follow up fire was necessary to ensure the damage. FIRST ONES' artifacts had a nasty habit of regeneratively repairing themselves if you didn't make SURE. That was her personal experience.

That meant she was looking at SHERIDAN.

Act Five was a violent change in perspective. Here was another battle. Human built automatic defenses fired vollies of missiles and particle beams into swarms of Drakh ships closely orbiting EARTH. Some of the Drakh ships (Unlike in design to the other Drakh ships Janet had seen previously.), plunged into EARTH"s upper atmosphere and vented something. These were being mechanically splashed, but that did not matter, as it was obvious that it was the spraying that was their sole purpose to exist for as long as they expected to last. If the Drakh died in the doing, what did it matter as long as the spraying succeeded? Here and there a few scattered FURIES swept in to plunge after the Drakh and join the defense grid in downing the sprayers, but it was obviously too little and far too late. None of the sprayers escaped.

N'lan appeared again. She described the Alliance quarantine, the discovered plague, and the sentence of doom upon MAN's home-world. Five years and EARTH would be dead.

Heller and Kelly looked at each other. Joshua said with rage, "We are fighting the wrong enemy."

Abigail gave Janet Heller a knowing look, as if to confirm Janet's suspicions about her. Joshua, totally oblivious, missed most of what Abigail revealed when she said, "It is all the same war, youngster. Evil sides with evil. If you scratch the Centauri deeply now, you will find the Drakh at work, among them."

"Or the Hyach!" snarled a feral Janet, making a future appointment to herself, she swore that she would keep.

Still not understanding, Joshua asked, "How much did we lose?:

Sanders said, "I do not know. Probably everything, we have space mobile near SOL. Certainly TRITON base. Maybe the Ceres yards, based on the fact that we had the Hyach assembling our on hand components to form ships such as your SPRUANCE."

"Two hundred of our heavy ships." said Janet with some emotional difficulty. "I can count. That is a full one half of the Human fleet not otherwise occupied with the." She looked at Joshua. "Never forget the Boneheads, Joshua. We fight this chess war with more than half of our total power removed from the board."

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Proselytize

The Gerontarch walked the balcony garden of His Villa, looking occasionally skyward, to see a civilian sky-car move silently overhead. His security was in place. Now no-one He did not trust could approach him unseen.

Acamos repeated it to Himself. "Keep it simple and keep it small. A pebble dropped into a pool spreads its ripples far and wide."

It was truly His most brilliant Insight into the Way. No Hyach could enter space without Human permission. They hid behind their front of the VENTUKI, and the Alliance, but it was the Humans who were the fencing that hemmed in the followers of the Way. Acamos' alien contacts had told him that the foolish Drakh had not totally failed against the accursed Hairballs. Man-home was infected and doomed. Enough Drakh had escaped to a safe haven, where Acamos could find them and put them to future good use in spreading the Way. The perfidious Centauri would be a good hide for the Drakh for the while. Acamos smiled. He could see how the Drakh intended to use the Centauri against the Alliance. Not subtle were they. He would have to prompt Molitor, to see if she could nudge the psychotic Narns to do their part in the Way, as He saw it unfold for them. The Drakh he could manage with ease, but the Centauri, if they should get off their Drakh leash, would be far more dangerous than even a fully aroused Humanity to the Hyach.

The Xon were the proof of that. The Centauri unbelievers would show no weakness of mercy, if He failed to properly correctly interpret the Way. They would send any and all they regarded as a threat out of this cycle. Had they not so conspired to arm the Humans to remove their servants, the Dilgar, when they thought their Dilgar mercenaries were growing too strong?

That problem could wait. Subtleness.

The stone dropped was so small. The ripples outward from where it splashed was so clear.

The Vregans went everywhere, without interruption, or interception. Everyone trusted them. As carriers of the message of the Way, they were perfect.

Acamos awaited those among His own kind, who were expert in such things, to develop the means and the counter so that He could spread it out among all others as the Way required. Those who developed the means He would order rewarded in the usual fashion, so that their silence, as they passed from this cycle, would be guaranteed.

Molitor would oversee that task. She already had the aliens He needed working on the problem and He trusted, that she would present Him the solution soon, transcribed in the scripture of life itself.

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Molitor at Work

She was thinking lucidly, that is without the confusing religious overlay of the Way to clog her Vregan thinking.

Acamos' plan that he directed her to implement was quite simple. Spread the Drakh nanite plague among the worlds of the Alliance. The chosen means was by slow introduction through vector-infected living beings who could travel everywhere in space with impunity without check or obstruction.

The Vree.

But who beside the Drakh had the means to tailor the plague to serve in such a fashion? The Shadows were gone, driven out of this galaxy by Humanity. The Vorlons had gone with the LORDS OF CHAOS. Nobody else had anything like the advanced technical or technical knowledge to manipulate the infection.

She thought that Acamos had demanded the impossible of her.

To serve the Way, thus, was a task far beyond her means she argued to him.

But Acamos saw the Way and He told her where to look for her solution.

The Humans.

It must have been her choice of EDGAR INDUSTRIES, when she originally chose a distributor among the Human worlds that the Drakh missed, that enlightened Acamos. That was the Vregan left in her that supplied that belated analysis. It was the only way she could set aside Acamos logic error and fatal mistake in his interpretation of the Way. For if SHE was the alien inspiration for his plan to proselytize, then he, Acamos, truly was a charlatan and a power-mad, revenge-driven religious superstition-motivated fraud, who needed the rendering.

She ignored that small Vregan voice, as she set into motion some more business transactions with EDGARS INDUSTRIES.

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Strategy

Aboard THE LONESOME TRAVELER in COMMAND and CONTROL

"So local Alliance strategy is to knock out House KADRONA take INDRICUS for the Quantium 40 mines, seize the IDANA colony as an Alliance forward base, blow the First Ones' gate and beacon, to split the Tigris circuit and the Centauri Republic into two parts."said Janet Heller, in a repeat back, to Abigail Sanders

"And seal off the anti-spinward frontier between the Centauri Republic and us; until Ivanova hunts down the last of the fleeing space-based Drakh caravaners to core-ward and kills them all." said Sanders in conclusion. "We support the Centauri resistance with cross-border raids and smuggled arms, until they overthrow the Drakh infestation on Centauri Prime.

Athena Proxmire looked at the Teledyne. "Makes sense. It would be decades before we were strong enough to take the Centauri Republic in a formal invasion. That would give the Demon-heads too long to plan future mischief. But will the Resistance be strong enough to tie them down that long?"

"We already have its leader picked out." said Janet, guessing.

Abigail nodded. "According to what I have been told, he is the toughest, most ruthless Centauri you can possibly imagine. And he was trained, personally, by the best they, the Centauri, ever produced in the great game, prior to him."

Athena, who was the only other one on SPRUANCE, who had guessed that Abigail was not the Merchanter she pretended to be, stabbed at PRAXAL.

"Does Malcolm Thomas Caldwell know what he's supposed to be doing there?" she asked.

Abigail said, "No. Not really. He is a fighter, not a thinker. NGS picked him to front this operation, because they believe he will follow tactical orders, blindly, without looking too deeply at the strategic picture. Frankly, he is probably the best PATRIOT operator they could find for this rubik. Nobody else in local space has the political skills to meld the poly-species crew that he has, into an effective fighting unit. Plus; his neutralization of the Centauri threat against the fuel depot last August; proves that he can think on his own within the overall plan and act independently as needed. He just is not an original brilliant strategic thinker-like us." She smiled. "Think of him as Captain Gridley to Admiral George Dewey."

Athena knew the reference. "And where do we, two, fit in?" she asked, pointing to Janet Heller who was not paying attention, as she was looking out-map deep back into Alliance Space, and to herself as she addressed Abigail. "It is obvious to me, that you think of yourself as a Nimitz."

Abigail said quietly, "That is not true. If anything, I might be more in the mold of Richmond Turner. I co-ordinate and implement the plans of the genius. I am not one."

"Well." said Janet Heller, looking up. "It is not Dmitrinov. He is a smash and smash again, against the wall, type of general. And it is not Firestorm. That man has his hands full of Boneheads. This plan took too much time and detail, that he has not got to spare, to supervise its execution. And. Begging your pardon, Abigail, while your EFNI boss, Inago Gonzago, is a great gatherer of facts, he frankly lacks the patience, or the imagination, to plan such a complicated game of chess, though; if he is given the moves written down for him, he can PLAY it with a vengeance."

Athena said; "It is not Sheridan, either. This is only a small piece of the overall pie to him. He would delegate this little problen to someone: maybe that Centauri you mentioned?" she said looking at Abigail. "No. We do not trust any alien planner, that much, when we send our own into battle, and not for this type of vengeance. Not the right hand of the Great Maker, either. She is off chasing the Drakhs, as you mentioned to us."

All three of them said it together; "Michael Garibaldi!"

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Aboard SPRUANCE in the Wardroom

Officer's Call

Janet did not call many of these. She knew what she wanted done, so she told people to do it. It was a direct command style she learned under Kitimel "Kill-Them-All" Dmitrinov, though she never followed his choice of tactics, if she could help it. Commanders who used officer's calls to reach a decision by committee, rarely won through to their objectives or achieved their mission goals in her experience. They were failures as leaders, since they wasted lives through delays and second guessing. Still this specific situation required input from her command group. And to that end.

Raymond Sealy had asked a very pertinent question.

"Why does this Sanders want us to try for INDRICUS? You'd think the knuckle-heads who let Earth get infected, would put us to better use, either hunting for a cure, or killing Drakhs? Why try to mount a campaign to take a moon that we cannot hold, once the Fanheads bestir themselves to swat us?"

Kelly spoke up. Pointing at Raymond, he said; "He is right, you know. We should be hunting Drakhs. We are getting propaganda and orders from the idiots, who bungled the Alliance Capital System defense. How is starting a war here, going to fix what they wrecked, back there?"

Janet quickly formed what she hoped was a plausible cover story. "We are after the Quantium Forty. The Centauri cannot operate deeply into our space, if we deny them the Q-40 that they need to build raiders. Besides, with an idiot like Lord Jathren running the Centauri side of this little war, in this sector, it will be stealing sweets from an infant."

"Our last candy snatch from that baby put us into repair berthing for a month." said Caledine Depalma; as always the voice of pessimistic realism when these joy sessions got together.

"We killed a PRIMUS the last time" said Janet, sweetly, as she closed the meeting.

The others floated out after she dismissed them, but Janet stopped Athena and waved her back.

Athena waited until Kelly cleared the hatch. She called after him, "Close and seal! And tell Mr. Sealy to stand my watch in C&C until the Captain and I finish here. I will stand his time in rotation at four bells." Kelly saluted, kicked out, and slammed the hatch home with a resounding thud, dogging it home.

Athena then turned in mid-float and faced her Captain, "Now what is really on your Mind, Janet?" She asked.

"I have not heard anything from Raskallon, in quite a while." said Janet. "After we finish here, I think we should find out 'why'. And if the 'why' is what I suspect it is, then I want a plan to do something about it."

Athena shook her head in a mix of affirmation and negation."You had best be right, Janet. They just shot Lefcourt for his monumental error in judgement."

"They?" Janet asked.

Athena answered, "If they shoot you, I willl be the one right next beside you, Captain."

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Acamos and Molitor

Heartsick, Molitor watched as the Vregan, who had been her childhood friend in the forest creche school on SYMOESES, a sweet memory standing, when she was last on VREETAN, drank the infected Julon. He, now, was a disease vector. He might live a bit onward, perhaps as long as ten years with the plague inside him, if he was not given the antidote. She refused to look upon him, with his name, as she feared that her Teacher, Acamos, might see her weakness in the Way, if she did so.

Acamos looked at his prime acolyte's.behavior via a recessed viewer. One must test the acolytes, in the Way, from time to time to ensure that they did not falter in the Vision. So, this was the surprise test that he arranged for Molitor, to check her loyalty to the Way. He watched her with keen interest.

Childhood bonds are among the strongest. He knew this. Trenaman, the fool, had been Acamos closest and oldest friend before he, Trenaman, failed in the Way.

Ah, excellent! She offered the chosen instrument to spread the Way, the drink. She betrayed nothing to the instrument. Acamos would wait the full appropriate time until his acolytes charged with such tasking assured him that Molitor and her quarters had been cleansed of the corruption that was for the unbelievers alone. Then He would go unto her and congratulate his prime acolyte in her steadfastness.

Acamos was slightly troubled, though. What new test could he devise for the future to test his prime acolyte? For you could never let an acolyte live to rest in assurance in the acolyte's understanding of the Way. The acolyte might become unstable and delusional and think that a Teaching was within the acolyte's reach, and then beware Teacher!

Molitor knew where the monitors were. After all, she was Vregan. She might be an acolyte within the Way, but she still knew the Hyach and their limitations. They were not clever when it came to the ways of the serriptitious. She could spot anything they concealed from her.

So also, she, like Vregans everywhere, had learned how to hide her private thoughts in plain sight, among the aliens.

She grieved for her friend by becoming motionless and emotionless. A Human, was the only one besides one of her own kind, in the present menagerie of known sapients, who would instantly recognize her grief and guess its cause.

Within her deepest and most private-self, the grieving silent VENTUKI voice told her that Acamos had made his second fatal mistake: that he was a truly damned Hyach and that he and all of his accursed works, would come to not. Before Molitor's inner eye she saw VENGEANCE. It was HUMAN and it wore a Human woman's face.

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End of Chapter 4; Part 2

A little CHAOS is a GOOD thing.

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Chapter 6; Part 1

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DAGAB II

The fight for IDANA was on. The RAYMOND AMES SPRUANCE in-jumped, above IDANA, right with the NATHAN HALE; to confront the main Centauri attack group, which was confirmed to be now in-system. The PATRIOT and the HERO split apart, as planned at their nadir-exit points. While the NATHAN HALE headed for high orbit cover to await Lord Jathren's expected appearance; the RAYMOND AMES SPRUANCE vectored, herself, over the planet's horizon, toward the rear-threat Fanhead ship grouping, she was tasked to eliminate, while she dumped blockade mines to orbit over the Centauri colony world. Donovan's gun-crews, as Athena planned in the TPE, as the HERO's first act upon jump-point egress, fired upon the geosynchronous-orbiting Centauri base above IDANA's day-side equator. Donavan sliced that base,  moving the SPRUANCE's spinal lasers, from out-to-in across the Centauri base's orbit inclination. The SPRUANCE, then, turned her gunnery attention to her next prioritized target. She headed for it directly; while as her secondary action in the TPE; she sowed the aforementioned blockade mines over IDANA. Her attention was firmly focused on that surprised pair of IDANA orbiting VORCHANS; that formed the planetary cover-group which in this case were supposed, and presumably could and would micro-jump onto the flank of any enemy fleet that came in-system at the IDANA Lagrange point, to engage the Centauri mobile main-group. Such an ambush-group would use close orbit to hide its gravidic signature and to optically mask its presence That was standard hackwork for any Centauri fleet battle-plan. The 'Fools' thought they were clever.


The Battle of DAGAB II was a relatively simple affair, as space battles went, but the illustration above showed what the complicated Real-space plot looked like to Human tacticians like Athena Proxmire, or to a gravigator like Joshua Kelly. Notice all of the fighter tracks involved? Notice Caldwell's and Heller's start positions? The Humans used the Lagrange points (Gravitational eddies or whirlpools. Author.), as gravitational topological features and effects to negate Centauri graviational drive advantages in curved space.



The distances at first glance seem rather small for interstellar capable ships, but the Humans during that battle, covered tracks that measured in the Alliance Naval Vessel SPRUANCE's case, of at least ten light seconds distance, by the Human meaurement system, in a combat interval of about an hour. That works out to about 835 kilometers per second, which seems slow for a starship. But the A.N.V SPRUANCE spent about half of her fighting time in close orbit combat around IDANA. The rest of that combat time was under sustained acceleration and deceleration to merge with the Jathren battle group. The average velocity in that period was about 1,650 kilometers per second, but more like the differential sustained accelerations were 100 to 200 meters per second / second squared continuous or 10 to 20 gees for that half hour. Let us just say, that you did not want to physically fight a Human spacer who could take that kind of acceleration load for more than that half hour. Janet Heller, for example, a little woman who massed barely sixty kilograms, could bench press a TIGER, or tear it asunder with her bare hands.      

Khan, without prompting, plotted the trajectory intercept to merge with the nearest of the two VORCHANs. It was inside the SPRUANCE's orbit in a rather lower orbit.

Dragon Leader, of the SPRUANCE fighter group, spread out his FURIES into two Flights of Four, slightly ahead of the Human killer-ship, to form the tines of a quadrant.

Donovan's gunners speared the nearer VORCHAN. Janet heard Patrick curse over the TWS as the beams missed the power-plant by a slim margin. She watched the one beam burn through target VORCHAN's port wing, the until it, theat VORCHAN, tumbled out of control, venting plasma gas through the laser cut rent. spewing vulcanic plumes of fire.

The farther VORCHAN put out a spectacular display of ion-bolter fire. it launched torpedoes and hurled anti-fighter mines in a desperate bid to escape what it saw coming for it. It did that VORCHAN no good.

Janet did not have to say anything at all at this point. It was strictly theater for her, even the surprises. Sometimes events ran away from you. With the second VORCHAN Captain, suddenly about to open an escape jump-point this close to the planet, Human battle-drill, and the sheer Centauri stupidity, on display, took over and made the results inevitable. Dragon Leader led his FURIES through the Centauri flack to strafe the second VORCHAN, who turned to meet the charging fighters. The VORCHAN missed with his ion-bolters at point blank range, while the FURIES missed with theor KMDs and missiles. (Those missiles fell into IDANA and went off H-bomb ferocious upon planetary surface impacts, highlighting to Janet, why only stupid idiots fought their enemies, inside their own houses. She would revisit that thought later, ironically.)

'Ah! Here comes the jump-point', Janet saw. 'He might get away after all.' she thought: but no: Donovan cut him in two, with the dorsal Slicer. The VORCHAN was mere moments from the jump-point, when the HERO's slicer chopped it. The VORCHAN split into two parts-one third and two thirds-from the dorsal fin to the starboard wing, that wing being the smaller surviving portion. The other part exploded, as it tumbled off vector into the collapsing jump-point. The wing remained in a deay orbit. It wsould still be there post battle. There were no pods and therefore no survivors. The SPRUANCE was playing for keeps. 

Now she had to sling-shot out of orbit. The NATHAN HALE was moving hard, herself  to intercept chase hostile inbounds that had just appeared on the SPRUANCE's Analog. She had to join Caldwell to meet them, or these local 'victories' would have no meaning. Janet: 'Could Not Allow That To Happen.'

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The SPRUANCE merged with and then parelled the NATHAN HALE. She made her charge at Lord Jathren's, by now identified, OCTURION. The Centauri Duke had a tight group of VORCHANS as his close-escort shield. HALE would never get through that twelve pack; to fight the close single-ship duel battle that Captain Caldwell obviously wanted; unless that VORCHAN shield was disrupted. Janet, seeing the PATRIOT's poor gunnery, understood this grim truth. Dragon Leader, as if reading her mind as to what to do about it, collected his FURIES and charged ahead of SPRUANCE once again.

Janet flicked her hand to Athena Proxmire, and the Ship's Tactician, also understanding her Captains intent, made her way to the C&C station where the fighter director was talking to the FURIES. She took over that station and over the fighter circuit talked to Dragon Leader to coach him into the merge.

Janet waited some more, until she saw on the Teledyne what she wanted to develop. The capstone VORCHAN ahead of the OCTURIAN she wanted killed in the close-escort. Now, her FURIES swarmed it. Skin-dancing like a swarm of bees, they reduced the capstone VORCHAN promptly to junk. The multi-vectored conic of close approach strafing runs along multiple axis was precisely the way that Minbari single-ship fighter pilots made the best use of the NIAL's 'poor" turning ability. In the hands of expert Humans, flying FURIES, with greater roll, yaw and pitch ability in the present battle, it was a much better Human tactic than any Bonehead ever could pull off. The VORCHAN ruptured in flames as it vomited gas and chunks of itself. That capstone VORCHAN exploded.

Meanwhile; the SPRUANCE opened the trajectile-conic on the close merge that she made with the charging PATRIOT, for Janet had some more clever ideas, as to how to further can-opener that wall of VORCHANs between Caldwell and Jathren.

Several House Kadrona VORCHANs,(Six of them) seeing the SPRUANCE; so obviously and cowardly, in and out, fleeing when faced with 'true Centauri power', gave chase to the 'yellow-flag-waving' retreating 'cowardly' HERO. Janet merely flicked her hand at Singh Khan. She felt the SPRUANCE rotate on its center-of-mass. Donovan's gunners had their targets. Two laser vollies resulted in two more exploded VORCHANS.

"Move in, Caldwell! Before those Fanheads figure this ruse all out!" yelled Janet unconsciously aloud.

The NTDS symbol, that was NATHAN HALE, promptly so moved to exploit the new hole. Janet saw the PATRIOT's Polarizer fire. It was more powerful than her ship's combined lasers, but SLOW-cycling between shots. Plus that PATRIOT's gunnery was awful. The first shot had to be a mere graze on the OCTURION.

Donovan showed all the Humans present, how it was to be done, a third time. The third trailing VORCHAN, of the pursuing hapless first trio wedge, was trying to sheer off. He had finally figured SPRUANCE's ruse de guerre gambit out, but caught a laser beam in his mid-vector evasive course change, right in his gravity keel fins. That was the third fire-blossom and the third VORCHAN gone in under a half-minute. This was deadly accurate long-ranged shooting, as the SPRUANCE's designers and originators had intended for her. Not like at KATHRA was it, at all; where the SPRUANCE's miserable shooting had been singular, at one slow Markab ship, and that poor performance at extremely close knife-fighting ranges.

Donovan showed up on the Teledyne, just as Janet expected he would, to quickly report,"Our lasers are out-of-service. The mirrors and lenses need reconstitution."

Janet asked, "Luciano?"

Luciano appeared. His hologram showed that he was was already working with his crews on the lasers, trying to quickly desperately regenerate the nanite-jello 'mirrors' that gave way under too many full-charged Donovan-style-shots."We need at least five more minutes, Captain," he said, "to replace the focal arrays. Then I cannot guarantee more than a couple of vollies. Patrick has really overstressed the guns this time."

He quickly winked out; after delivering his bad news. Without her lasers, the SPRUANCE, Janet realized, was VORCHAN fodder to a single one of those dangerous knife-fighters. And there were still three of them in pursuit of her ship.

Janet flicked her hand at Singh Khan.and pointed directly to IDANA on the Analog.

She, then, spoke into the air, "Mister Kelly! Private channel."

Once again, she did not have to say anything much. Khan understood her. Maybe SPRUANCE would die, or maybe not. She, Janet, could not help NATHAN HALE or Malcolm Thomas Caldwell's plan any further, by staying around, to perish, under a hail of massed VORCHAN ion-bolter fire. But by drawing off the three Centauri ships that were still chasing her, the SPRUANCE could still balance the battle out for the NATHAN HALE and buy more added time for the unreasonably slow Caldwell to finish the damned job, that he so incompetently started. To say Janet was miffed that the NATHAN HALE could not get her part done, was a bit of the understatement.

Athena said, "We are deep in the kimchee, Captain?" as she looked at Janet from where she was at the fighter director."Caldwell should not have tried this cockamamie psychological single-ship duel challenge lunacy at all."

Janet held up her hand. She said, "Wait." She looked at the teledyne for a second. "It can still work, Athena. I have another idea."

Athena saw Janet stab and scribble with her finger at the Teledyne. This 'new idea' was being transmitted to NAVIGATION where Joshua Kelly was presumably, also, reading the sloppy vectors and hasty mathematical script. Athena saw Joshua's face turn white with fear and shock. It was another Captain Crazy fragment battle order and to Athena, it was clearly Janet Heller's typical insanity.

Janet said as she wrote, "Be actually thankful, that Malcolm Thomas Caldwell sucked him in, Athena. I should not have been so hasty to underestimate and misjudge our stolid unimaginative PATRIOT Captain." ("I can change my mind about that idiot.' Janet, thought. 'Caldwell will still do the right thing and ram that OCTURION.'). She was of a mercurial temperament at the moment. "He has played the Duke KADRONA Actual for a fool, all the way down the line. That is Jathren, the actual DUKE, out there in command of all of the Centauri here, about to lose his whole command, his holdings, his honor, his noble rank and his fiefdom." Janet said. She, then, gave virtually the only formal verbal order she would utter during this entire battle as she calmly told Singh Khan,"Charge the planet!"

Tracciani popped in on the Analog, now, to announce, "Lens and mirrors replacement completed." He popped out quickly again. Janet had emphasized in her pre-battle Officer's Call that she wanted her Teledyne uncluttered of distractions. The confused snowball fight at KATHRA, with the pirates, had showed her that in a multi-vectored battle, the Analog had to be kept clear; so that her situational awareness remained uncompromised. IDANA, now, showed up exactly within the centered vector-cone that she drew when she laid out the upcoming tactical moves that she instructed Joshua Kelly to so hurriedly plot. The question was, now, could Joshua feed Singh Khan, in real-time, the incredibly complex helm-cntrolled battle-maneuvers she was about to try?

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An on-the-fly spontaneous TPE was something for which Athena had way to many years of specialized training. She had not realized that Janet Heller, herself, might also have possessed such unique rare skills. She really did not know her captain, and friend after all? Right now; she, Athena, was scribbling firing priority target orders to Donovan. It was a maniacal fire-plan to cap an already insane TPE. As the HERO fled before the three VORCHANs, the planet IDANA swelled in actuality in front of her, as well as in the Analog.

"Things are not as they seem or as dreamed by the Centauri in their philosophy, OR in this UNIVERSE." Janet said aloud to everyone in the SPRUANCE C&C. as IDANA grew bigger, SO menacingly bigger, so quickly in the Teledynes. That outburst surprised everybody in the C&C. It could have been another Janet 'Captain Crazy' Heller psychotic episode; but nobody presently had spare time to ponder it. ('Hurry up, Joshua!' thought Janet Heller.). "There will not be a flank ambush on an unsuspecting pathetic enemy, using a planet's mass as masking terrain, optically, or gravitationally by the Centauri against us, THIS TIME." she said in triumph.

The three pursuing VORCHANs grimly closed up from tactical line astern to a three-pointed tactical-star and increased their rate of pursuit acceleration to get within point-blank bolter range. They would cuisinart the SPRUANCE in a flyby. It was a good plan to use when you had the numbers and wanted to split your enemy's defnsive fire among many inbound attack fires.

But: it cost them precious time to execute their formation change evolution, and 'TIME', as a vector, was something, as a physical real comodity they should not have given SPRUANCE; or to the Humans aboard her.

Too late, they realized their error. The SPRUANCE opened a wormhole: far too close to IDANA as the three shocked Centauri Captains realized! The Human was trying for a suicide jump-point kill!

The gravity incline, that was the Hyper-space mass-node anchor coincident in that space with IDANA, the planet, sucked the Human ship in so quickly, that she left a burst of Cherenkov radiation as the only evidence of her passing, as the wormhole quickly collapsed. The VORCHANs broke formation and wildly scattered apart to avoid the vortex backwash that could have overloaded their own jump engines. the VORCHANs survived the Human suicide ploy, or so the Centauri VORCHAN crews thought. 

In one of the VORCHAN's logs, recovered by the SPRUANCE after the battle, was recorded a Centauri Captain's intended noble salute to the SPRUANCE's crew. "Poor fools, they died like Centauri; most honorably and well." That was a 'strange epitaph' he left behind.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Singh Khan thought he sweated a kilogram of water a minute in fear sweat, as he wrestled the bucking HERO in the planet's uneven gravity sheer. Harvey the SPRUANCE, updated him real-time with Kelly's latest guesstimates about the incline slope. "Here it comes." he warned everyone in C&C aloud; and everyone else aboard the ship, via the Talk Within Ship. "Fifteen seconds count to the exit." he shouted. Janet, his Captain, looked at him calmly. Singh licked his lips and frantically worked his station: ten seconds: six, five...

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Tracciani prayed to the Great Maker that the Number Two Vortex Generator would work off the energy-web's accumulators this time without packing it in. After Joshua forwarded to him, and he read, as Janet Heller instructed, the rushed TPE, she generated: he understood why she was nicknamed; 'Captain Crazy.' Jump through the planet!?!? The accumulators should work. After all, they had absorbed the charge of a collapsing jump-point; before, so there should be enough energy stored in the anchors to open a new one. He had to shut down the Zero Point Focal Tap in such close proximity to such a Hyperspace node during the cross-the-mass-event horizon transit. The hypermass powerplant, itself, had been charge-coupled and entangled by the jump-across-the-planetary-mass-event. Until he could bleed the singularity's charge off; it would instantly evaporate them all into quarks, if he tried to use it to do this next bit of Janet Heller insanity. Tracciani, crossed his fingers, looked along with Harvey C. in his mind's eyes, as Harvey S. displayed the countdown clock that he, Harvey S., fed to Singh Khan. At zero; 'Lucky' Luciano dumped the energy-web anchors into Number Two Vortex Generator. The wormhole exit inflated into Real-space. That was a FIRST ONE's level technology stunt accomplished! ...

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... as Singh Khan applied thrust from the reactionless thruster pack to orient the HERO ninety degrees to the current vector-cone.

The wormhole opened into Real-space. The SPRUANCE popped-out nightside on the opposite hemisphere of IDANA in low orbit.

Several things now happened according to Heller's TPE. The already-deployed IDANA day-side blockade mines started transmitting  tracking data by ANSIBLE to Harvey S. These mines generated target tracks of the scattered and baffled VORCHANs to the otherwise blind SPRUANE. This tracking data he, Harvey S., displayed as updated Naval Tactical Data System friendlies and hostiles symbols to Janet Heller on the Teledyne. The SPRUANCE broadcasted via ANSIBLE her fighter recalls.  She also sent those recalls by slower than light radio. The SPRUANCE's group of FURIES picked out the encrypted signal from its position a half light second away and began their own long hyperbole back to rejoin their mother ship. If the pursuing Centauri VORCHANs heard the parallel slower than light radio broadcast, themselves, then they would head around IDANA's bulk, themselves, chasing what they thought was a wounded jump-damaged HERO, calling her own fighters to her; so that she could run for her life. The VORCHANs would come around the planet horizon and surprise the SPRUANCE, using IDANA to hide their approach vectors. 

Janet thought, 'They might not be wrong. They could still kill us, if they figure us out.'

That is a truth, if the Centauri could hear an ANSIBLE, or and if they took the bait the wrong way, it meant that they exactly knew and understood  Heller's simple gambit.  If they did, then SPRUANCE would execute Appendix A of the Janet-generated TPE still scribbled in yellow finger-script on the Teledyne. If not, if they fell for it; hook, line and sinker; then it would be Janet's new-updated Appendix B, which the SPRUANCE would execute upon the VORCHANS.

It looked like, from what Janet saw on the Analog plots generated from the blockade mines' transmitted data, that, it would be Appendix B, that she would have to use. She pitied her poor Helmsman / Pilot, as to what strain she put him through. She saw Singh Khan sweat more fear, as he struggled to keep the SPRUANCE balanced on her thruster pack, in the hover, just inside IDANA's outer atmosphere. That atmosphere was above them to mask them for a few precious seconds from Centauri optical sensors. This close to the planet, IDANA, in the hover; Janet gambled that Centauri gravidics could not discriminate her ship from the planet. The Centauri would have to use LIGHT to find her. LIGHT was the Human advantage in this ambush. 

Janet waited calmly. She knew that Donovan's gun-crews ranged their Slicers and KMDs on the planet's horizon. They were waiting. They were waiting for the targets that the gunners knew had to appear, because their captain told them so. They, the Centauri, came over the horizon as two groups: Two and one; they should have stayed grouped as three, together.

The two VORCHANs that came over the horizon together, first, came fast, each spitting a volcano of ion bolter and torpedo fire. SPRUANCE for the first time in this battle, staggered under impacts, and lurched crazily, as she was savagely hit. Khan pitched the ship so violently: that people, despite their strapped-in five-point safety harnesses, were flung from their chairs, to cascade all bodies across C&C in a blizzard of flesh and cries of anguish.

Janet picked herself up from the canted deck, and slowly slid herself across the now-apparent port to starboard incline to return to her seat. She hung grimly on ito the side of her chair, as she saw Donavan's gunners finish burning through the second Vorchan with what appeared to be the radically reduced-power lasers. Tracciani, true to his word, had given her, the two volley shots he promised. The falling sideways, SPRUANCE, righted herself and pitched onto a new stable ballistic orbital ascent trajectory. She  started climbing above IDANA nightside, to emerge from the atmosphe into the vacuum of space.

The third VORCHAN came over the horizon, tardy. Maybe, it was pure dumb Human luck. Maybe it was not the good planning on Janet's part; because he certainly had failed to rendezvous on TIME with his partners, as the Centauri captains as a group, probably intended. So; he would die a litte late. Janet, knew that this final kill, would come down to a joust. She looked to Singh Khan a fourth time, indicated the third VORCHAN with a wave of her hand. She flicked her finger forward. For the last time this day, the SPRUANCE pivoted onto an intercept vector and charged.

The two ships passed each other within five VORCHAN lengths. The VORCHAN charged down; while the SPRUANCE charged UP.

Patrick Donovan, like an old Irish cavalryman, personally swung the SPRUANCE's Dorsal Slicer through and cut the last VORCHAN; port bow high forward through; to stern starboard low aft. He deliberately avoided the VORCHAN's engines and power-plant in his slice cut. He did not want the VORCHAN to explode this close to SPRUANCE. Let the Centauri fall to their deaths, instead. 

All persons in the SPRUANCE C&C watched via assorted Analogs; the two halves of the last VORCHAN fall past and then beneath the SPRUANCE into the planet down below. The VORCHAN halves exploded on impacts at the end of their independent curved ballistic trajectories. It took longer than the final battle pass to watch the falls.

"Captain, there is the NATHAN HALE!" excitedly said Athena; pointing to a blue-diamond NTDS symbol in the deep recess of the Teledyne. It winked three times, once and then three more times in the classic Earth Force identification friend or foe, NTDS authentication. It then transmitted by slower than light radio; .-- . / .- .-. . / ... - .. .-.. .-.. / .- .-.. .. ...- . .-.-.- (We are still alive.)

Janet did not take her eyes off the Analog where she followed the pieces of the last VORCHAN as they fell down. She said dully, aloud what she previously thought at the start of this fight. "Only a fool chooses his own home as the place to fight his enemy."

She wearily asked, "Athena?"

"I have the con, Captain." announced Commander Proxmire. "Move us toward the HALE, Mister Khan."

Janet climbed into and slumped in her chair, still looking mesmerized at the VORCHAN's flaming-halves plunge through IDANA's nightside atmosphere, as it moved toward dawn. The future impact footprints looked to her, to be Centauri settled lands.

She thought about that one. 'Caldwell was still alive?' That the NATHAN HALE was still here; proved it should be true. She would know for certain, soon enough. That probably meant that he, Malcolm, had his own devil: either dead or in his hands.

Impacts came as gigaton events within the quarter-hour. Rendezvous with the HALE came scarce minutes a mere micro-jump later. The whole battle took scarce an hour?

Mop-up took months,

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End of Chapter 6; Part 1

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Chapter 6; Part 2

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Intermission or the Quiet Before Sleep

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Walking around the Camp Hades Perimeter with the Navigator

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Six months of war had changed a lot of things. Joshua Kelly looked skyward into INDRICUS' moon glow. If you looked closely you might see the glint of light off one of the orbital gun-satellites that formed IDANA's close-orbit defense-grid.

The growing Human presence on the poisoned Western continent ('Called Nightshade for obvious reasons.' thought Kelly), was mostly an immigration of settlers from the VEGA and PROXIMA colonies. This was strange to Joshua. He supposed Athena's explanation, that Martians could not handle the gravity, might make sense, but why move dirt-farmers from PI-THREE ORIONIS or ALPHA LYRAE when the soil was poisoned in the Alliance enclave on Nightshade? What Joshua thought was needed at the moment, was a strong influx of industrial services type Humans to support a naval base. Hell. Everybody dirt-side was eating NAVY food-bricks. It would be decades before Humans would have anything but the pathetic truck-gardens inside the radiation barrier that the taken-in-battle Fan-head House KADRONA prisoners tended and grew at Camp Hades, as part of their war crimes prison term 'rehabilitation to return to civil society' treatments.

The local Centauri colonialists were leaving. Finding the radiation poisoning and the attendant clean-up too hard for them, the Idanese Centauri, to handle; these hardy Fanhead pioneers, chose to flee in the face of what a Human veteran from the horrors of the VEGA settlements or ORION VII; might merely regard as a minor daily inconvenience. Now that Joshua thought about it, 'Maybe sod-busters were the correct first assault elements for this Human lodgement?'

In any event, the Centauri were living up to their VORLON reputation. They appeared to act as a dying people, at least here locally. Joshua thought about one that too. His own people seemed a little tougher. There was still the grim possibility that EARTH would die, but that, too, was a contingency for which a Human military plan existed. Humanity on MARS, and in the SOL free-space settlements, and the Jovian and Saturnian moons, with every critter Humanity could salvage from their space zoos, and maybe some alien imports, were already tasked; as the ecological recovery and resettlement force in a reverse terra-forming operation to retake EARTH; if the Humanity present on EARTH were to succumb to the Drakh plague.

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Or Visiting the Tactician at the End of the Day as She Works Reports in Her Little Quonset Hut

A VULTURE screamed over-head on final approach rattling the one window in Proxmire's office.

The one desk-lamp, the only light she had, rattled in sympathy to the sound waves beating down all ariound it, and on Athena. She could feel the waves as if they were a palpable touching thing all over her skin.

"Damn that idiot Minbari, Soren." Athena said aloud. 'Tracciani should have laid out Camp Hades,' she thought. 'He was Roman-well at least Italian, and those people know how to lay out camps. Good military engineers.'

Proxmire worried about a different irritation. Always the reports read the same way.

The Drakh were in Centauri space. They clearly ran the Centauri side of this silly war. That made this IDANA mess, which up to now, Athena had never thought was good war-making, considering that the Drakh threat, to her, was the paramount main one facing her species, more sensible. So the Alliance Naval General Staff did know what they were doing, after all?

Marvelous.

There were still the side issues with the Zenner and the Streib. Assaults on those fools would be straightforward. Athena had an idea that the Streib, notorious samplers, and would-be-conquerors, would hate the Gaim-derived infestation Humanity would loose upon their world. Dropping the single pod-ship on the Streib-Home should be sufficient. "Let them test their theories of their species' biological superiority out in their own ecological-system for a change." she said to herself, self-justified in her moral saying of it. The NGS follow-up plan was for ALTAIR's Human colonists to exploit the action. Their manpower was tasked to move upon that "near-terrestrial" world, terra-form it better, and claim it as a Human one, once the Streib failed their mandated Darwin Test. The Gaim would get the gas Giant moon ZYMOS- a near TITAN equivalent as their own prize in the Streib's star-system as their price for their part in the comvbined operation.

The Zenner were a bigger problem. Like Humanity; they tended to spread out into every nook and cranny accessible to a space-faring people, so eradicating them was like stomping on ants. They would have to be hunted down the conventional military way, by Human hunting parties, in a process that Athena foresaw might take millenia. She thought of this exercise as vermin eradication.

As for the Drakh? APOLLON had been the Drakhs' last stand in this region of space. After that set-to, they fled. The latest reports showed that Ivanova was in hot pursuit of their main Caravan. She, Sheridan's fiercest lieutenant, expected to trap them at SADELMELIK, ('The alpha-star in the Constellation Aquarius', Athena remembered. 'Yellow supergiant sun? What an odd place the Drakh picked as their final place to die.')

So, the Drakh, out there in Alliance Space, were handled. As for the Drakh inside Centauri Space? They were solidly corked by Humanity in a severed and blinded TIGRIS CIRCUIT bottle: alone on CENTAURI PRIME, from which they could not escape, thanks to such operations; as the one carried out by the Technomage Adrienne Brown, when she blew the FIRST ONE's beacon out at DAGAB II. The Centauri Resistance could have the Drakh on CENTAURI PRIME. That struggle was turning int a deadly pit-bull dog fight, that Athena would sooner have Humanity enjoy as a mere spectator; than as a direct participant.

That left just one enemy on Humanity's current to-do-them-in list.

And Athena turned her attention, at last, to that paticular problem, as Janet Heller had tasked her to work it, when they, together, on SPRUANCE, were still trying to crack the House KADRONA nut. Poor little squirrels were Janet and she.

How long ago that was, and how small that problem seemed.

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Perhaps a Little Visit with the Engineer Aboard the A.N.V. GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI Orbiting IDANA?

'Lucky Luciano'. was a name that Tracciani now hated. Still, it was the name by which he was famous.

And he was famous.

Enough to be called a Weapon Master.

By the Minbari.

One of the things, he did these days, was share the wisdom he had gained when he modified the lasers on the SPRUANCE at HYACH NYM, and the further subsequent SHADOW technology augmented insights he gained; when Janet Heller gave him the choice to either get TAUGHT or get spaced.

Harvey the Conscience, as the Technomage Adrienne Brown had warned him when he underwent the ^procedure^, was with him always. Fortunately, Harvey the SPRUANCE, seemed to have a communications range limit, so aboard the A.N.V. GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI, Luciano was alone with Harvey C.. He could deal with that problem. Two AYEYES telling him, constantly, that he was wrong one hundred percent of the time in real-time, just was not fair. So this work was a vacation for "Lucky".

He supervised the Centauri engineers installing the new lasers into the GARIBALDI with practiced ease. This was the third such installation he had overseen for a HERO. DAGAB II / IDANA was becoming the major primary naval refit-depot outside SOL, itself, for Human-built warships.

Luciano was thankful that, in the ship-to-ship fighting that presaged the fall of DAGAB II, the Centauri who occupied the system's space-infrastructure, saw the careful violence that Janet Heller and Malcolm Thomas Caldwell applied to the working equations of battle. Those Centauri drew the correct conclusions.

Breaching habitats and blowing-out pressure-domes, was not something Luciano thought, was a proper military thing to do. That was typical House KADRONA policy when Duke Jathren suppressed the civil unrest at Beta 3.

He preferred to hire those Centauri people, Jathren terrorized. It made more sense use their expertise to serve the Alliance and themselves.

Capitalism was the perfect cure for civil unrest, Tracciani believed, by making the otherwise-oppressed miserable overworked Helots: fat, tired, rich, and happy overworked Helots.

And he was doing everything in his power to make the Fanheads in question, the Spacers of DAGAB II; become fat, tired, rich, and happy. It should make them devout INTERSTELLAR ALLIANCE citizens.

He did not want them dumb. The work, for which he needed them, was dangerous enough for the brilliant to do.

Next in the queue for refit, was the WARLOCK destroyer, the A.N.V. THE MAGI. "Lucky' Luciano's 'nanite-jello mirrors and lenses' worked for the WARLOCK's AEGIS particle-cannons, quite as well, as the mirrors did for the HERO"s grasers.

Luciano dreaded the possibility that someone might tap him to work on a PATRIOT's Polarizer. He knew nothing about those quark-bonding disruptors.

Of course he still had his duties aboard the stood-down SPRUANCE.

His engineers, in his division, were reasonably well-trained in his absence. In that stand-down condition, a brief walk-through every other watch-rotation scheduled cycle, sufficed to keep them from making mistakes.

But, knowing Captain Janet Heller, as 'Lucky' did now, that happy stable conditiuon he enjoyed, was going to change, soon. Chaos, was Captain Crazy's default setting. Also, she had one more problem, she had to do in, to finish everything up.

Frankly, he was surprised, that she was taking this long to make an end of that dangler.

Luciano understood VENDETTA.

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Sail the Light with the Helmsman

You would think that in the middle of this shooting war, with the Human Species in the balance, that there would be no time for relaxation? Singh Khan found that time.

He loved to sail.

Thanks to that accursed fool of a Centauri, Jathren, and his slug-brained Fan-head minions, tacking into the wind on an IDANESE surface lake or ocean, was a bolo. Fall-out was still a problem outside of the protected enclaves. Unfortunately these protected enclaves did not include lakes, upon which to sail, either.

So, being resourceful, he looked around for a substitute.

And; he found Centauri who loved to sail.

They even raced their boats and boasted of their skills to each other.

And here he was, with his own Centauri-built sail boat, competing with the locals in a single-ship race to INDRICUS, IDANA's moon, to prove that Hairballs were just as good behind a tiller as any Fanhead.

Singh Khan was relatively uninterested in historical and cultural connections; or he would have understood what the strange observation meant: that the old Minbari, Neroon, passed on to a very young Delenn twenty years before current Human history; when she, Delenn, had asked the old cantankerous Warrior Caste veteran, in a moment of curiosity, why certain space-faring species were better at fighting than others. The old Warrior Caste reprobate told her; "The good ones, fish." He cited the Centauri and the Vree, then, as examples. If Neroon were still alive and speaking to the subject to a very harassed Delenn, today, he might have told her, that the dangerous Humans fished as well. But then he had yet to meet any Human. Certainly he never mentioned to her the Minbari in his answer. Most Minbari lacked the patience and quiet minds required to fish. Maybe, you might or could extrapolate that quality into a single-ship sailor. But, as to that philosophical cojecture, practical Singh Khan, was not interested in such historical and cultural connections.

So, Neroon's comment; was a history and possibility of legend about which Singh was blissfully ignorant. Instead, he was happily busy in a waldo body-harness, working the cables that controlled his boat's magneto-dynamic particle-trap sails. Surely a computer could do the handling better, but the point to Singh; was to sail the stellar winds, not let some stupid machine carry you helplessly along as a deadhead passenger.

He raced five Centauri. The first one to insert into INDRICUS' orbit from the start at IDANA would win. He would not be the first, to do so, this race, as he was a good enough pilot to know when he was beaten. The Centauri, Roshon Moello, had a good fifteen hours lead over Singh Khan. Unless he, Roshon Moello, something stupid; like turn his sail-traps parallel to the particle stream, he could coast-onward to the win asleep.

Singh was satisfied with himself, though. Coming in second, while sailing a M2D2 boat; which with he had but a couple month's experience, against Centaurio veterans who had sailed such boats, for years?

The Centauri should have known better, than to underestimate the Helmsman of the A.N.V. SPRUANCE!

Singh should enjoy himself, now, while he can, reader, for life rushes ever onward. Soon he will not live, forever.

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A Brief Visit with a Captain Aboard a Killer-ship.

Janet Heller sat cross-legged on her rack in her work-compartment aboard the SPRUANCE. Most of the crew was scattered apart; either on IDANA or across the DAGAB II system. The war was in the doldrums along the Centauri / Alliance frontier. The Abbai had a word for this condition. 'Shungmahut'. There was no real Human word equivalent for that Finhead term. Tit-for-tat was not even a close approximation to 'shungmahut' in meaning. It was mostly cross-border raiding with the Narns, in THE BITTER HARVEST, blowing some outpost, and the Centauri Republic having to hire pirates; as proxies on this side of the firewall; to hit some Alliance convoy in retaliation. The Centauri were Hyper-space blinded. Their entire TIGRIS CIRCUIT Hyper-space beacon network was DEAD. They could not even navigate outside their own core systems.

Both sides avoided each others' fortified systems now. DAGAB II had taught that lesson quite harshly to the Centauri. The Alliance could not spare the ships to mount an attack of their own, either. Nor did they, the Alliance, need or desire to spend their scarce resources for such 'Pyhrric' victories.

The new Fanhead duke, Kolomon Patellnan, of House MURFONA, who took over this frontier from the defunct Jathren and his disgraced House KADRONA, had no jump-capable ships left. (Caldwell and Company, Janet included, had made certain of THAT condition.); to defend his systems, but he had troops and a lot of slave-laborers. He knew how to fortify every strong-point he had left. That did not keep the Alliance from raiding him; ort at least the Narn portion of the Alliance.

He, Patellnan, also, had to deal with the Drakh-controlled Centauri fleet that hit his holdings near the CENTAURI Core-systems since they, the Drakh had nothing now; but the Centauri upon which to prey.

Janet had no sympathy for those Fanheads, so preyed upon. They had made their choices. This was the price they paid for doing business with the Drakh.

The Alliance network, NAVSTAR 5, would probably be compromised; if the Centauri ever discovered the ANSIBLE, but they needed an entire Electro-Magnetic Strong Nuclear Influence Unaffected Energy technology to build such an ANSIBLE. The ever-proud Centauri would never abandon their 'advanced' gravity keels, for the chimera of 'action / reaction(less)', or and for such primitive 'rockets', as the Humans used.

'Sometimes, you had to thank the Great Maker for the Mote he put in your enemy's eye.' Janet thought, as she bent over her Amiga. It was trouble enough to dig out the Mote from hers.

There, then. All the recalls are done. She would soon have the SPRUANCE manned and ready, again.

And after the recall happened; there was still that unfinished business, she had been too remiss to conclude. She still had her 'obligations to fulfill', and her 'promises to keep'.

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End of Chapter 6; Part 2

A little CHAOS is a GOOD thing.