To Dream in the City of Sorrows (33 page)

“Whatever else you might say about the Vorlons,” he said over the com, “they know a thing or two about building spacecraft.”

“Amen to that, Fighter 1,” said Marcus. “Can I keep this one when we’re done? As a souvenir?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Sinclair said with a grin. He had not forgotten how serious and dangerous the task before them was, and had made a point of stressing that fact to both Catherine and Marcus when they saw the prototype fighters for the first time sitting in the empty docking bay of an orbiting Minbari freighter. But, at least for this moment, Marcus wasn’t the only one having the time of his life.

“What about target practice?” Sakai asked.

“On schedule, Fighter 2,” Sinclair replied. “We’re coming up on it in Valerian’s crater, straight ahead.”

Some of the Ranger laser targets had been arranged in the wide, shallow crater to allow them to test the accuracy of their energy cannons and missiles. Sinclair was not surprised to find the weaponry systems to be as well engineered as the rest of the ship. There had been no surprises. Everything on the fighters performed exactly as with the simulators or better.

All too soon, it was time to return to the Minbari freighter. They entered the docking bay and the space doors closed behind them even as the lumbering freighter headed toward Minbar’s jump gate to begin the three-and-a-half-day trip through hyperspace to the Babylon 5 jump gate.

Sinclair was surprised to see Rathenn waiting for them as they emerged from the docking bay still in their pressure suits, helmets under their arms, and right in the middle of a spirited evaluation of the ships.

“Entil’Zha,” Rathenn bowed. “Do you approve?”

“Very much, Rathenn. I didn’t know you’d come aboard. Shouldn’t you be on a shuttle off of here before we hit that jump gate?”

“I will be accompanying you to Babylon 5, Entil’Zha.”

“I see,” Sinclair said. It struck him as more than a little unusual. Rathenn had already debriefed them thoroughly. Or so Sinclair had thought. “Catherine. Marcus. Go on ahead and change out of your pressure suits.” As they left, Sinclair gestured for Rathenn to take a walk with him, then got right to the point. “Please don’t take this wrong, Rathenn, but is there any particular reason you’ve chosen to come along?”

“To be of assistance where I can, Entil’Zha.”

The Satai could do a passable imitation of the Vorlon when he wanted to. “Do you have more information for us?”

“Nothing at this time, Entil’Zha.”

Sinclair stopped walking. “Rathenn, if you have anything more to tell me, anything of importance, I’m asking you, don’t leave it for the last minute.”

Rathenn gave him a quizzical look. “Information is always given at the proper time, Entil’Zha,” he said.

Sinclair tried not to sigh. That did not particularly reassure him, but there didn’t seem to be much he could do about the Minbari penchant for parceling out information as they deemed best.

“Then if you’ll excuse me, I want to catch up with my fellow pilots.”

Rathenn would make his purpose known soon enough, Sinclair knew. In the meantime, he, Catherine, and Marcus would have plenty to keep them occupied during the time in hyperspace, going over every inch of their ships to make sure all was in order, studying what information they had been given about the Shadow fighters and the device they were to destroy, and planning an attack strategy.

Rathenn had said the mission should be easy to accomplish. Sinclair wasn’t willing to give that assurance any credence at all. Nothing concerning the Shadows – or the Vorlons – had ever been easy.

Sinclair caught up with Catherine and Marcus, and as they continued toward their bunk area to get out of their pressure suits, he resumed their discussion of the fighters, pushing doubt out of his mind for now.

“Do you think this is the only time rift in existence?” Sakai asked.

As they ate their dinner in the mess area set up for them, Sinclair had been doing his best to answer whatever questions Marcus and Catherine had about his experiences with the time rift.

“I don’t know,” Sinclair replied. “Rathenn said that the rift was a unique natural phenomenon. But it seems to me, if the laws of physics and nature can cause it to happen once, it’s possible for it to happen more than once, in more than one place. Maybe Rathenn only meant it’s an extremely rare phenomenon.”

“Or maybe it’s unique,” Sakai said, “because nature got a little help in its creation, say from the Vorlons.”

“Which would imply they could do it again, if they wanted to,” Sinclair agreed. “But we just don’t know. All we know for sure is that they are very concerned about keeping control of this one.”

“Well, that’s not the part I have a problem with,” Marcus said. “I have a problem with the notion of this rift being some kind of a time machine.”

“Then how do you explain what happened to Babylon 4?” Sakai asked.

“That’s easy,” Marcus said. “Let’s say the rift does distort space-time in some previously unknown way. B4 had the bad luck to get caught up in it and was accelerated by the effect enough to experience relativistic effects. When they slow down, presto, they think it’s a couple of weeks later, but find out four years have passed. Nothing too mysterious about that. And a heck of a lot easier to accomplish than going back in time.”

“I don’t know,” Sinclair said. “That doesn’t explain the time flashes we experienced while near the rift. I had the feeling I had been propelled forward in time, but Garibaldi relived something from his past.”

“You experienced something, but I thought you said you never physically ever left B4.”

“I’m not sure. There’d be a blinding flash of light, and afterward someone would report having experienced a time flash. Now, did the person physically go backward or forward in time and then return to the present, all within the time frame of that flash of light? Or did we only experience it in our minds, and not physically travel in time at all? I don’t know, except that it felt real.”

“Whatever you experienced happened outside the rift. You never actually went through the rift itself,” Sakai added. “But Marcus has a point. If this rift really is a time machine, why haven’t the Vorlons used it? Why don’t they just take a quick trip to the past and change things so that the Shadows are no longer a threat to anybody. It’s the sort of thing they’re afraid the Shadows will do if given the chance.”

“I’ve asked those same questions,” Sinclair said ruefully, “and haven’t yet gotten a satisfactory answer. I know this: persons claiming to be from the future came aboard B4 and took it through the rift because they said it was needed to fight a great war. And I believe the Vorlons know something about that incident, and are now very concerned about maintaining control of the rift. But that’s all I can say for sure.”

“Well, people can claim anything they want,” Marcus said skeptically. “All we really know for sure, Entil’Zha, is that somebody came aboard and took B4 through the rift for some purpose. But I have a hard time believing they were from the future without some proof, like a future edition of Universe Today.”

Sakai laughed. “Do you have a personal grudge against the idea of time travel, Marcus?”

“Only traveling backward in time,” he explained. “We all travel forward. I put traveling backward in time in the same category as superstition and myth. It violates too many laws of physics, logic, and causality to be possible. It’s just a romantic notion, a form of unhealthy nostalgia. I mean, who wouldn’t like to be able to travel into the past, knowing everything that’s going to happen, so that you can correct old mistakes? But let’s face it, if you want to rectify your mistakes, you have to do so in the present – the past is done and gone. If you spend all your time wishing you could change the past, you miss your opportunities to change things right here and now.”

“You make a persuasive argument,” Sinclair said. “And the truth is, I tend to agree with you. Nevertheless, I experienced things near that rift that I still can’t explain. You’ll just have to see for yourself.”

“That’s one of my mottoes, Entil’Zha,” Marcus said.

When they finished dinner, they said good night and went to their assigned sleeping quarters. The Minbari freighter had not been designed to accommodate passengers – or Humans – and the small area set aside for Sinclair and Sakai offered few amenities other than privacy. It was a rectangular room with bare metal walls and a ceiling so low Sinclair’s head brushed against it if he stood up too straight. It was just barely large enough to contain the usual Minbari bed, set at a forty-five-degree angle.

Sakai started laughing when she saw the bed. “You wouldn’t think it was so funny,” Sinclair said with mock indignation, “if you’d had your hand caught in the gears of these things as many times as I have.”

“Come on, I’ll help you fix it.”

She held the bed straight while he grabbed an extra blanket and crouched down to reach the gear mechanism. “And here I thought we wouldn’t have time for a honeymoon trip,” he said, as he shoved the blanket into what he hoped was the right place in the mechanism. He stood up to test it. The bed held firmly in the horizontal.

“You can’t have a honeymoon before the wedding, Sinclair,” Sakai said, testing the steadiness of the bed for herself.

“Who says?” he replied, smiling.

The Minbari freighter left hyperspace through the jump gate at Babylon 5 exactly on schedule. To Command and Control on the station, it was just one of many Minbari commercial ships that used the gate and so it was given little more than a cursory glance as it made its way to take up an orbit around the planet Epsilon 3. Many ships took similar orbits, then used small shuttles to travel to and from the space station. That this freighter’s orbit would take it to the other side of the planet away from Babylon 5 would hardly be noticed by anyone.

The three-and-a-half-day trip had been uneventful but productive. Sinclair felt sure that they were ready to do the job. They were comfortable with their fighters, and confident they had the firepower and the maneuverability to face the Shadow fighters, who would be hampered by their need to stay close to their apparatus at the rift to protect it.

The plan was simple. As soon as the freighter was on the other side of Epsilon 3, out of sight of Babylon 5 and any other ships, Sinclair, Sakai, and Marcus would leave for Sector 14 in their fighters. The trip in normal space would take three hours, and their trajectory, if traced back by the Shadows, would show them as having come from Epsilon 3, as the Vorlons wanted.

Sinclair had been assured that the distortion effect used by the Shadow fighters to hide their activities from Babylon 5’s sensors would also make it difficult for the Shadow fighters to detect them as they approached from the other side of the rift, away from the Shadow apparatus.

As Rathenn had said, it all appeared straightforward, almost easy. And that’s what worried Sinclair the most.

The three of them suited up in the docking bay, and checked out their pressure-suit systems while they waited for word they could launch. Pressure suits were customarily used by Earthforce pilots as backup protection, and although the cockpits of the prototype fighters had full life-support systems, Sinclair had decided wearing the suits would be a wise precaution.

“Entil’Zha?”

Sinclair hadn’t noticed Rathenn’s arrival. They hadn’t seen much of Rathenn during the trip, and he still didn’t have any idea what purpose had brought the Grey Council member along with them. Maybe they were finally going to find out.

“We have reached the desired position in orbit,” Rathenn said, “but there will be a short delay before your launch. I must ask you and your Rangers to please accompany me out of the bay. A shuttle from the planet will be docking within minutes.”

Even as he spoke, an alarm sounded, and a warning was broadcast in worker-caste Minbari to clear the docking bay. They followed Rathenn out to the holding area and then watched through the observation window as the space doors opened and a small shuttle landed. The odd craft was of a design unfamiliar to Sinclair, and he wondered who was in it. Draal was literally part of the machine below, and couldn’t have left the planet even if he hadn’t been completely preoccupied with the Shadow threat. Beyond that, Sinclair had not been aware anyone else lived on the planet.

When the bay repressurized, Rathenn asked them to please continue waiting, and went alone to the alien ship. A hatch opened and Rathenn went aboard, to emerge only a minute later, carrying three small boxes. He returned to the holding area, and the space doors in the bay opened once again to allow the tiny shuttle to leave without ever having revealed its pilot to the others.

Sinclair inspected the small boxes, each marked with a different glyph in an unknown alien script. Rathenn examined those glyphs carefully before handing one box each to Sinclair, Catherine, and Marcus. Each box contained a round metallic object, somewhat bigger than a belt buckle, with a clasp on one side.

“These are time stabilizers,” Rathenn explained. “They will keep you anchored in the present and protect you from the effects of the time distortion caused by the rift. You must attach them to your suits and not remove them for as long as you are near the rift. This is imperative. The effects of the time distortion are unpredictable and can be fatal without these stabilizers.”

It seemed hard to believe such a small, almost featureless device could have such a protective effect, but Sinclair had seen firsthand how dangerous the rift could be and would take any help he could get.

“We’ll use them, don’t worry,” he said.

“Then it is time for you to depart. May Valen light your way.” Rathenn bowed and left.

“Do you really think these things will do us any good?” Marcus asked as they walked back to their fighters. “Don’t take the chance that they won’t,” Sinclair replied.

Marcus shrugged and attached the stabilizer to his suit. “See you in space,” he said and climbed aboard his ship.

Sinclair stopped Sakai. “Let me see your stabilizer for a minute,” he said.

“Why?” she asked, handing it over to him.