To Dream in the City of Sorrows

Babylon5 - To Dream In The City Of Sorrows

By Kathryn M. Drennan

[version 2.0 - March 2012 - proof-read & corrected HTML & ePub version by Shlemiel]

F
INAL COUNTDOWN

“Stay in formation! Hold the line. No one gets through, no matter what!”

“Alpha leader! You’ve got a Minbari fighter on your tail! I’m on him.”

“No! Mitchell! Stay in formation! It might be a–“

The shadow of the massive Minbari fighter fell across Sinclair’s Starfury. “Oh, my God. It’s a trap!”

“Mitchell! Break off! Break off!”

Too late. Starfury after Starfury blown to bits, exploding like miniature suns around him. Every ship of his squadron gone. Every Earth ship in his field of view destroyed.

“Not like this! Not like this! If I’m going out, I’m taking you bastards with me. Target main cruiser. Set for full-velocity ram. Afterburners on my mark... Mark!”

Sinclair was thrown back in his seat, his craft hurtling toward a collision with the Minbari cruiser. Ten, nine, eight, seven...

Babylon5: To Dream in the City of Sorrows is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A Del Rey® Book

Published by The Random House Publishing Group

Copyright © 1997 by Dell Publishing

Babylon5, names, characters, and all related indicia are trademarks of Warner Bros. © 1996.

Copyright © PTN Consortium, a division of Time Warner Co., L.P.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,New York , and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

www.delreydigital.com

ISBN 0-345-45219-4

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Ballantine Books Edition: August 2003

OPM 10 987654321

This book is dedicated with love

to Mom and Dad

I
NTRODUCTION

MISSING MOMENTS AND MIDNIGHT THOUGHTS

J. Michael Straczynski

MY friend Harlan Ellison has, from time to time, engaged in a bit of performance art. He will sit in a bookstore window and write a short story. As each page is finished, it’s taped to the window for people to read. He can’t backtrack, can’t change it; it is what it is.

That trick is probably the closest available comparison to what has been done with BABYLON 5 over the last four years.

BABYLON5 is a novel for television, with a definite beginning, middle, and end. It is also a work in progress, with its fair share of sudden turns caused when the real world impinges upon the writing process, or when better ideas are stumbled upon. Yes, one may plan to have Ivanova kick several Drazi senseless and escape from the trap they’ve set for her ... but if Claudia Christian breaks her foot the day before you’re to shoot that sequence, you adjust.

You keep going, and you never look back. Because unlike a print novel, where after the first draft is finished you can go back and smooth out the bumps in the road, you can’t change what went before. It’s out there, transmitted into the ether at approximately the speed of light. You cannot go back, you can only go forward, broadcasting episodes as they are finished like pages taped sequentially to a window, for all the world to see. For the most part, this particular example of performance art – telling the BABYLON 5 story in front of fifteen million viewers in the United States and countless millions more in scores of other countries around the planet – has been very successful. Most of the bumps and subtle adjustments are barely noticeable.

But they’re there. And over four years, with the real world a constant random factor in the making of BABYLON 5, there are a lot of them. Small, annoying, but there. They lurk in threads that fall by the wayside, or are mentioned but not explained in as much detail as they should be, and can thus seem like logical contradictions. It’s all pretty much there ... it just takes a very logical and precise mind to put the pieces together and make sense of it all.

Which makes the book you hold in your hands all the more extraordinary.

Imagine someone coming to your house with a box containing eighty-eight jigsaw puzzles, all jumbled together, and dumping the contents at your feet, saying “Here ... all the pieces are there, all you have to do is make sense of it.” That is essentially the task undertaken by Kathryn Drennan in
To Dream in the City of Sorrows
.

While all of the BABYLON 5 books operate, to one extent or another, within series continuity, this is the first real attempt to stitch together massive amounts of continuity from the series itself into one book... to pull together the pieces dropped here and there over eighty-eight episodes and four years, ironing out the seeming discontinuities, explaining what was not explained previously, and tying together seemingly unrelated threads into a beautifully defined tapestry, all the while telling the one story that viewers have been asking for since the first season: “What happened to Jeffrey Sinclair after he left Babylon 5 and before he returned in
War without End
!”

How difficult a task was this? Job would’ve packed it in, Hercules would’ve retired, and Orpheus would’ve decided that his days spent in Hades weren’t really that bad after all.

We’re talking here late-night conversations, too many to number, that began with, “Okay, now when you wrote this in season one, what did you really mean and how the heck does that tie into what happened over here in season four? You spent four years talking about the Minbari warrior and religious castes but you hardly even mention the worker caste, how do they tie in? And how the hell was an entire Minbari fleet able to sneak up on Sinclair’s squadron at the
Battle of the Line
right out in open space?!”

Kathryn is not just rigorously logical, she is relentlessly logical. Things have to make sense, and there can’t be any loose threads lying around. But there were a number of loose threads surrounding the story of Sinclair’s development into Entil’Zha, the head of the Rangers ... Marcus’s months being trained for his own duties as a Ranger ... the fate of Sinclair’s fiancee Catherine Sakai... and the ceremonies that prepared Sinclair to take up the role of Valen, one of Minbar’s greatest leaders, a Minbari not born of Minbari.

All those threads have now been tied up in this one book.

And I’m just as astonished by this as you are. It’s a remarkable achievement. A breathtaking accomplishment, if for no other reason than we both somehow came through the experience without killing each other.

Relentless. Trust me on this one. Re-fragging-lentless.

To Dream in the City of Sorrows
is not simply a licensed book set in the BABYLON 5 universe. While most of the Dell books to date have contained some elements that are considered canon, this is the very first one that is considered canonical in every small detail.

What you hold in your hand is an official, authorized chapter in the BABYLON 5 story line. This is the definitive answer to the Sinclair question, and should be considered as authentic as any episode in the regular series. This, you should also know, is Kathryn Drennan’s first novel, though she’s a Clarion graduate who has been published in Twilight Zone magazine and many other fine magazines. She has also written for several television series, including BABYLON 5, for which she penned the excellent episode “By Any Means Necessary.” This novel marks the first time an original BABYLON 5 novel has been written by someone who has actually written for the series itself. Trust me. You’ll love it. Would this face lie?

J. Michael Straczynski
Executive Producer/Creator BABYLON 5

19 February 1997

P
ROLOGUE

MARCUS Cole still walked with a limp, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the young Minbari acolyte as Marcus entered the small temple. Marcus didn’t recognize the rather chubby Minbari and briefly wondered where Sech Turval was, but as he was not in the mood for conversation, he simply made a note to seek out the venerable Minbari teacher at a later time.

This had always been his favorite place at the Ranger compound, filled with the strange melodic chittering of the temshwee, the odd little Minbari birdlike animals that nested in the upper arches of most Minbari temples, and the gentle clinking of the wind chimes that moved in the now cool autumn breeze that swirled through the open archways. Warm sunlight streamed through the wide crystalline windows that ringed the top portion of the temple dome, creating multicolored ribbons of light. All he wanted to do now was sit and think.

Sitting, however, was not as easy right now as it used to be. Every muscle, every bone, every inch of his body still ached from the beating he had sustained six days ago, and as he gingerly lowered himself onto one of the hard, marble benches just below the larger-than-life statue of Valen that dominated the temple, he knew the acolyte was watching him. Had he heard the story?

Probably. It seemed to be common knowledge at the Ranger compound that Marcus had been thrashed to within an inch of his life by the Minbari warrior Neroon while defending the life and honor of the new Entil’Zha against Neroon’s murderous intentions.

In her gratitude, Delenn had arranged for Marcus to make this brief pilgrimage, as he thought of it, back to the Minbari city known as Tuzanor, the City of Sorrows, back to the Ranger training compound, back to the beginning of it all, to finish his recuperation and to reflect – on the past and on the future, on life and on dreams, on friends and on legends.

Marcus became aware of the young Minbari acolyte hovering just at the edge of his vision, apparently uncertain if he should leave or offer his assistance to this important Ranger. Marcus closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths and assumed the Minbari meditative pose as he had been taught such a short time and such a long time ago. After a moment, he heard the acolyte leave quietly. Marcus opened his eyes again with a silent apology to Sech Turval for not continuing the meditation the old Minbari had worked so hard to teach him, but this wasn’t the time for formal meditation. He just wanted to sit here – in what he and most of the other Human Rangers affectionately thought of as The Chapel – and see if in this peaceful place he could come to a better understanding of what had been lost and what had been gained since his life had intersected with the Rangers. And he wanted to visit one more time with a friend he knew he might never see again.

Marcus looked up at the imposing statue of the great Minbari military and spiritual leader Valen, studied the stern but deliberately ambiguous features of the chiseled face, and wondered once again, could that really be his friend and mentor, the very human Jeffrey Sinclair?

It had not been that many weeks since Sinclair – former Earthforce commander of Babylon 5, former ambassador from Earth to Minbar, and former Entil’Zha of the Rangers – had taken Babylon 4 on a journey through time to live out a life he had already studied as history here on Minbar: the life of the mysterious and legendary Valen. A journey taken to save lives – in both the past and future – as was always Sinclair’s primary concern. But Marcus knew it was also a journey taken for the most personal of reasons. Marcus understood those reasons far better than those who had sent Sinclair on his journey. But there was still so much he didn’t know, didn’t understand.

He wasn’t sure he’d find the answers he was looking for by studying the life of Valen. Valen, this figure of myth that towered over him here in the temple, was a stranger to Marcus. The leader, teacher, and friend he had known and had come here to Minbar to revisit in memory was a man – a remarkable man to be sure – but very Human nonetheless. It was the life of Jeffrey Sinclair he wanted to reflect on. And as his friend, it had come to seem very important to Marcus that the man not be obscured by the myth ...

C
HAPTER 1

“ALPHA 7 to Alpha Leader, I’m hit!” Static swallowed the rest of the frantic words. Even as he shouted his reply, Earthforce Lieutenant Jeffrey Sinclair saw Quinton Orozco’s Starfury flash past overhead, trailing smoke and flames, shadowed by a Minbari fighter, “Pull out! Pull out! Alpha 7!”

“He’s gone.”

That was Bill Mitchell’s voice in the earpiece of his helmet. Sinclair checked the scope on his instrument panel, then did a quick visual check through the cockpit windshield and canopy. How many of his squadron were left against the Minbari onslaught? How many Human ships were left at all?

“Stay in formation,” Sinclair ordered as he brought his Starfury around, turning away from the sun to face what seemed to be the greater concentration of Minbari fighters. “Hold the line. No one gets through, no matter what!”