A Call to Arms (5 page)

He lay there on the bed, looking at the pastel ceiling, thinking vague thoughts, and sleep came to him. With it came a dream. Or was it a dream?

He was standing on rocky, uneven ground, and it was dark. A wind was blowing, and he could feel a gritty dust in the air. The area was fitfully illuminated by fires burning in the immense landscape that stretched around him on all sides.

Everything was lava and scorched rock. There wasn’t a tree or any green thing in sight. Turning, he saw, at a distance, the ruined crater of a city silhouetted black against the charcoal-gray sky. Fires were burning in the city, too, and columns of smoke rose into the sky.

He sensed that this was what his recent dreams had been about. But this time, he knew he would remember.

Sheridan could also sense that this had once been a beautiful place. Even in ruins, the city showed signs of a former nobility. Even at this distance, he could see there were minarets and spires lying in the streets like the bodies of fallen giants, and they were mixed with the remains of a classical, unearthly sculpture, giant heads and torsos lying in the rubble-choked streets. This had been a place devoted to the arts.

Lightning flashed in the sky, double and triple forked, revealing a devastated landscape as far as the eye could see. Sheridan didn’t need a guided tour to know that all this world was dead, ravaged, bereft of life, even vegetable life, even algae. Somehow, he knew. Something or someone had really done a job on this world, devouring the forests, drying up the seas, sweeping away the cities and other Human habitations.

He turned slowly, looking at all this in sorrow and slowly mounting anger. And at the same time he was wondering,
Where the hell am I? What’s going on here?

As if in answer to his thoughts, a voice came out of the darkness and said, “Do you hear that?” Sheridan turned quickly in the direction of the voice. He could just make out a robed figure squatting on the ground beside the cliff face. The man’s face was concealed behind a hood. He was bent over, scratching on the ground with a stick.

“Who the hell are you?” Sheridan demanded.

“I am called Galen,” he answered. Then, “Do you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“Listen,” Galen said.

“I don’t hear anything,” Sheridan said.

“Exactly. No birds, no animals, no machines, no voices. And no insects, or starships, or music. Only the wind. You are hearing the sound of a dead world. A murdered world.”

“Was there an attack?” Sheridan asked.

“Nothing so grand as that. It was a test. Can you imagine that? All this, just for a test!” Sheridan shook his head slowly. What in hell was going on? He was aboard
Excalibur
. He was asleep!

He shook his head slowly. “This is a dream.”

“No,” Galen said. “Not a dream. A nightmare. And if sometimes dreams come true, then what of our nightmares?”

“Who are you?” Sheridan asked.

“A friend. I called to you earlier.” Galen pushed back his cowl, revealing a square, good-looking face with strong features. He was dark-eyed, hairless save for his brows, and he had the disciplined look of a monk or acolyte. His face at present showed concern, but Sheridan thought he could see the possibilities of a sly humor beneath that.

With a hint of embarrassment, Galen said, “That message from Delenn... that was me. I apologize for the deception. But a connection was necessary for the electron incantation.”

Before Sheridan could speak, he heard a deep, distant, massive humming noise. He identified it at once as the sound of a fleet of spaceships, approaching, but still a long way away.

Sheridan said, “I thought you said this world was dead.”

“It is. The killers are coming back to check on their handiwork. We should go. They probably can’t pick up on my probe, but there’s no point in risking it.”

He looked at Sheridan--an electrifying look. “
Remember
what you have seen.”

The humming sound increased and Sheridan looked toward the sky. He thought he saw something moving through the clouds--something dark and massive and made of strange angles--a huge spaceship of some kind...

When he looked down again, Galen was gone.

“There were some things I wanted to ask him,” Sheridan said ruefully.

He looked at the spot where Galen had been. The ground was marked where he had been digging with his stick. It looked like letters. Sheridan walked around to where Galen had been squatting. He could read what Galen had scratched in the dirt. Words.
Daltron 7
.

The name of a planet, most likely. But Sheridan didn’t think he had ever heard of a world by that name.

He looked up again as the humming sound increased. He had the impression that the massive spaceship was coming closer.

He searched the sky, trying to make out its shape. And found he was looking at the pastel ceiling above his bunk bed aboard
Excalibur
.

He sat up, startled. From the nearby window, he could see that
Excalibur
was slowly moving away from the spacedock. To one side he could see the space tugs that were towing the big ship out.

“Guess they got it fixed,” Sheridan said aloud.

He took the time now to shower and shave. Then he poured himself a coffee from a carafe and sat down to think things over.

He knew that something amazing had happened to him, but he didn’t know what it was or what it meant. No doubt the meaning of what he had seen would be revealed to him in the fullness of time. His impatient spirit rebelled against that thought. He wanted the answers now, but there was no way he could get them. Although it didn’t suit his nature, he had to be patient.

For a moment Sheridan considered the possibility that his blackouts might be the result of job pressure--the office of the presidency finally taking its toll. His position was demanding, and he took his duty very seriously. The lives of countless individuals required that he do so. It had been that way for five years.

Years. How many of those did he have remaining? How many had he left behind, on Z’ha’dum? That was another source of pressure--the ticking of the clock. Twenty years and counting.

This isn’t doing anyone any good, he mused. I know what I’ve seen, and ignoring it won’t get me anywhere.
Best to get back to work. The full truth would reveal itself in due course.

He went up to the bridge. Garibaldi was sitting in the captain’s chair. He got up when Sheridan came in. Drake was standing nearby. The man didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. He was plucking nervously at a button on his uniform, quite unconscious of what he was doing.

Drake said, “I had to call up those tugs at pretty short notice. We could really use a few more.”

Garibaldi shrugged unsympathetically. “It ain’t pretty, but at least it’ll get us out to the firing range. You get to live another ten minutes, Drake.”

Drake stared at Garibaldi’s face: blank, hostile, sardonic. How he hated the man! But there was nothing he could do about it yet. He forced his own face into a formal mask of acceptance. He was going to have to take this for a little longer.

“Yes, sir,” Drake said in a formal tone. “Thank you, sir.”

Although she’d heard of this place even before she had arrived on Babylon 5, Dureena still found Down Below astonishing, a cacophony of chaos--especially after the clean, modernistic look of the customs area. Going through there had been like moving through a dream of a better world, all of it bright and clean and shiny.

But Down Below was a different sort of a vision-a glimpse of what a place comes to look like when no one pays any attention to it, and when it’s occupied by a floating population that doesn’t care how they live.

She was in a crowded, industrial-looking area, something like a warehouse district in some ancient Earth city. A line of cars rattled by on overhead rails, throwing down showers of sparks. Machinery, disused and abandoned, lay piled against the walls or out in the rudimentary streets that wove, seemingly in haphazard, patternless lines, through the area. The air was warm, moist, hazy, with a tang of machine oil and chemicals. Steam oozed from fittings on pipes long past their time of inspection.

There were people passing through this area, or just hanging out; people in ragged, shapeless clothing, warming their hands over heat barrels, killing time while time slowly killed them. Dureena noticed representatives of half the races of the galaxy, not all of them humanoid. Most of them were air-breathers, although a few wore respirating equipment to let them function here in this common area before returning to the more congenial atmospheric mixes of their own special sectors. But most of them seemed able to function in B5’s oxygen atmosphere.

Dureena glided through the populace, trying not to call attention to herself--though she was aware that her costume stood out too much in this place, and wished she’d brought along something more appropriate.

Despite the amazing variety of beings found there--each wearing his or her own native garb--many of the denizens of Down Below seemed to possess some intuitive sense that told them when someone new had arrived. Since she was the only survivor of Zander Prime, she couldn’t help but stand out in the crowd. To Dureena, it seemed as though all eyes had turned her way.

Nonetheless, she was trying to act as if she had always lived here, a wised-up citizen of this place. And so she moved through the multicolored, fantastically arrayed crowd of the lost people of Down Below, looking for she knew not what, yet somehow aware that this was the end of the line, for the moment.

Down Below! It was said that your nerves and your bad luck brought you here, far from whatever world you originated in. And here you ran out of your last vestiges of luck, or nerve, or both, and settled into the scruffy, comfortable life of scuffling along, taking it one day at a time, getting by, and not even noticing that the sands of your life were running out of the huge hourglass that marked each sentient creature’s days and hours.

There were rules of behavior, even in a place like this.
Especially
in a place like this. Dureena picked them up intuitively. The people of Down Below minded their own business. Many of them just liked to drift along in their own dreams, content to mind their own concerns, ignorant of the greater life that pulsed around them.

But not everyone could afford to be so out of it. Nor did everyone want to. Many, rich and poor, had a living that had to be won each day. They all had to keep their eyes open for what came up, the unexpected opportunity or unprecedented disaster, and find a way to put it to good use. Any object, carelessly lost or discarded or stolen, might be sold, because there was a market here for just about everything.

But if you couldn’t find something to sell, there was always the possibility of latching onto some person new to Down Below and unfamiliar with its ways. Using who or what you found helped you get by another day, or maybe even another year, if you hit it lucky.

Hycher Vlast was thinking such thoughts as he idled beside a heat barrel. He was a short, long-nosed, weasel-faced man with small darting eyes. A scar along his jawline bespoke an encounter with someone even less amiable than himself. Three healing scratches on his face gave evidence of his relationship to the opposite sex.

Vlast was a scavenger who aspired to be something greater--a conspirator, perhaps. He had managed to get a good free meal the previous night--a consignment of old meats from the throwaways of the Eddisto, one of the newer restaurants. He had begged his dinner from Med, the busboy, whose vegetarian constitution had no use for it, and who owed Vlast a favor.

Vlast didn’t have much money on him. But he did have his eyes open. And when he saw the compact, golden-skinned woman, he sensed that he had come upon an opportunity.

She was a newcomer. He could tell this by her strangely alien features, and the way she tried to blend in with the crowd. Her clothing alone would have given her away as a new arrival. She had on the sort of outfit a fighting man or woman would wear. Was she looking for bodyguard work? There was no fighting down here, unless you counted the occasional drunken scuffle and, of course, the assassin’s dagger in the dark. But since she was raw, and ignorant of Down Below’s ways, she had to be gullible, he reasoned. Here was a rich opportunity for Vlast.

Nonchalantly, he began walking behind her, keeping a good distance to prevent being noticed. There was no need for following too closely, anyhow: she wasn’t going anywhere. She could run, but she could not hide. There was no place she could get to here where Vlast could not find her. In his five years in Down Below, Vlast had learned every twist and turn of the place, every hidey-hole, every closet and cupboard.

The woman had a casual air about her that Vlast figured must be feigned. She was looking for something, he was sure of that. And who better than he to help her find it? For a price, of course. Always for a price.

She stopped, and he stopped, too. Something had attracted her attention. And now she was moving again, more surely now, into a tangle where five corridors met.

Vlast hurried after her, moving as quickly as his stubby legs would take him, his ragged coat floating out behind him.

Into the tangle of streets. Five directions to choose from. No sign of the woman in any of them.

Damn it!
What was the use of knowing all of Down Below if you didn’t know what path your quarry had taken through it?

He calmed himself. She’d had beginner’s luck, eluding him that way. He’d find her. There was no place for her to go.

When Dureena had entered Down Below, she’d had no idea where she was going. How could she? It was the first time she’d seen this place. The folks around here didn’t furnish any street maps, and there certainly were no street signs. Nor was she about to ask directions from any of the people in the area, who, to say the least, looked very strange.

Maybe she didn’t know where she was going, but she knew what she was looking for.