To Dream in the City of Sorrows (6 page)

“Ambassador?” It was Venak. “Your next appointment is here.”

“Tell them to wait,” he said without looking up. He continued to read the lengthy article, growing steadily more uneasy at the tone of hysteria, bigotry, and isolationism that pervaded both the President’s speech and the article itself. But he was totally unprepared for what he found when he turned to the back page to finish, and saw a sidebar article regarding himself.

“‘AMBASSADOR’ OR CARPETBAGGER?” read the headline. What followed was an interview with Senator Balakirov in which the opposition leader launched a vitriolic attack on Sinclair, variously implying and stating that he had gone to Minbar under dubious authority, sent by President Clark only on the insistence of the Minbari, to function solely as a “goodwill Ambassador and fact-finder” to precede possibly setting up an official embassy. Now Balakirov questioned if Sinclair had “gone native and perhaps even turned traitor” and was attempting to “build a power base or reap some financial gain” perhaps with the “collusion” of the Minbari government. These charges were ambiguously and lukewarmly denied by presidential aides in explanations that only served to further confuse the issue. In “defending” his character as a war hero, the aides were careful to underscore the time he spent as a Minbari prisoner.

Sinclair crumpled the paper and tossed it aside. He had agreed, against his deepest instincts as a soldier, to accept this diplomatic post in the hope he might be able to help turn Earth and Minbar away from a dangerous militarism and xenophobia he had perceived growing on both worlds, attitudes that could threaten the cooperation between them that until now had kept the peace among many different worlds.

But now there was no denying that his appointment as ambassador was a sham, designed by Earth Central both to discredit the Minbari and keep him from pursuing any further investigation into the assassination of President Santiago.

What the Minbari had in mind with his appointment, he still didn’t know. But it no longer really mattered. He couldn’t do any good here without support from Earth, and he couldn’t just sit here and do nothing while his planet slid into hysteria, authoritarianism, or worse. He would go to Babylon 5 first. He needed to talk with Delenn, and he knew the new commander, Captain Sheridan, and believed he could trust him.

Sinclair canceled all the rest of his appointments for the day, wrote up a resignation letter, sealed it, gave it to Venak to give to Rathenn, then returned to his quarters.

Sinclair went immediately into the bedroom to start packing the few things he had been able to bring with him. Preoccupied as he was, it took a minute for him to realize that his bed was back to a forty-five-degree angle. In spite of everything, he went over to it and stared. He looked under the bed and examined the mechanism. They had replaced his bed, probably deciding the old one had been broken.

Sinclair shook his head and went back to packing. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to be there much longer anyway.

C
HAPTER 5

EARTH survey ship Skydancer skimmed swiftly through the upper troposphere of Planet UTC43-02C, code name Fensalir. Its onboard surveying instruments sampled the thick radioactive atmosphere that blanketed the remote, desolate world. Then its pilot, Catherine Sakai, brought the small craft into a higher orbit.

“Computer. Launch UTC Mineralogical probe 02C-2 and UTC Environmental probe 02C-2 on my mark. Mark launch.”

Skydancer shuddered slightly as the lander probe blasted toward the planet surface, then again twenty seconds later as the atmospheric satellite launched into its own preset orbit.

“Receiving data stream from 02C-2,” the computer announced. “Nominal functioning.” It would be an hour before she would hear if her second ground probe was functioning as it should, but Sakai felt certain it would only confirm the data from the first lander probe she had launched several hours earlier to a different site. She could mark this one down in her logbook as an FGP, a Fool’s Gold Planet. Looked good on first glance, but on closer examination, worthless.

Oh, there was plenty of diridium gas in the atmosphere, often a sign there was Quantium 40 in the planet’s crust. But what little Q-40 was present seemed to consist mostly of improperly formed crystalline structures, or was too tainted by other minerals to make extraction economical, let alone profitable in the way a megacorporation like Universal Terraform would insist upon.

She would have the probes bring back some carefully selected core drills and rock samples to be examined later by the corporation scientists for other things, known and unknown, although she didn’t want to waste too much energy or cargo space that could be better used for samples from a more likely planetary prospect. And she would still carefully survey and map the planet. But for now, she had an hour to kill. Sakai took off her headset, yawned and stretched. Oh, the glamorous life of the professional planetary surveyor, she thought. Travel to distant, exotic worlds! Be your own boss! Discover untold riches! That had been the promise when she had embarked upon this career after the war ended and she had finished her hitch in Earthforce. And it had proved to be true – partially. The work did pay well in fees and in commissions when a planet proved rich with Quantium 40 – the rare substance that made interstellar travel possible – or contained other valuable resources. But the bulk of the “untold riches” belonged to the corporations she contracted out to.

And she was her own boss, as much as any independent contractor was, though as more and more of the smaller surveying companies were being elbowed out by the megacorporations – a move encouraged by EarthGov in the interest of “science, safety, and efficiency” – she had begun to feel at times like just another corporate employee, but without the medical benefits or retirement plan.

And she had certainly traveled to many distant worlds. True, most Class 4 planets, the type that usually contained Q-40, looked pretty much alike, but she had seen some beautiful and amazing sights on those planets and on the few potentially habitable planets she had been hired to survey. Unbroken rings of massive volcanoes continually erupting fire on one hellish planet. A beautiful blue-ocean planet swirled with continent-size swaths of orange-and-green colony organisms that glowed with an eerie but beautiful silver light when the planet’s face turned toward the night.

All from orbit, though. By the nature of her job, she never landed, merely observed and recorded from above. Landfall surveys, which were large, expensive, and highly specialized operations, were only undertaken after she had returned and the data she brought back had been scrutinized for months. Which meant, in reality, she spent months at a time in the cramped confines of her survey ship.

She loved her ship; it was dependable, maneuverable, and efficient. It didn’t have a jump-point generator, but most survey ships didn’t. Only Earthforce and some of the larger corporations could afford to build ships large enough to generate the power necessary for one of those.

And it wasn’t luxurious. The cockpit looked like the refitted cockpit of the old freighter that it was; one chair, a console, and a jumble of instruments, vents, pipes and wiring, metal and plastic. Just behind the cockpit was her narrow bunk area; some fold-down, compact exercise equipment, necessary for long stints in zero-g such as this; storage containers for her condensed, freeze-dried food supplies; a small toilet area; and a decontamination chamber, which doubled as a shower. The rest of the ship was taken up with the air and water processors and other life-support systems, the fuel tanks, the engines, her survey equipment, the satellite launch bays, and the sample bay.

A good surveying ship had to have a first-class sample bay, and she had skimped a little on living amenities to install the best in Skydancer. It boasted a changeable system of sample compartments that she could configure by computer to be a large number of very small compartments, or a smaller number of larger compartments, depending on the planets she surveyed, how much soil and rock she had her sampler robots bring back, and what those samples contained. Although even large amounts of unrefined Q-40 samples could not reach critical mass and start a chain reaction, too large an aggregate could generate enough radiation and heat to pose a risk to the ship and her health, so it was better to keep it in smaller amounts in the fully shielded compartments, all of which could be emptied into space one at a time or all at once in an emergency. This last safety feature had also cost her plenty, even though she hoped never to have to use it. Coming back with an empty sample bay did not make the paying customer happy.

If only she’d be lucky enough this mission to find even one planet rich enough to make the risk of gathering that much Q-40-saturated soil and rock necessary.

What to do with the free hour she had coming up? Take a nap? Have a snack? Get some extra exercise? She leaned to her right, still strapped in her chair, and flipped on the small entertainment console screen, scrolling through the extensive index of music, movies, and books. Nothing looked good there either. What time was it? She checked the ship’s chronometer. In a half hour she would be receiving a scheduled tight-beam tachyon transmission from the UTC Operations ship, giving her the top-secret location and jump coordinates for her next stop. And, maybe, some word from Jeffrey Sinclair.

Personal messages while on survey missions such as this were frowned upon, and usually only sent in emergency situations. There were many corporate reasons for this, most dealing with the issue of cost and the obsessive attention to secrecy these missions entailed. The corporations wanted to keep their target planets a secret from the competition for as long as possible. But she also suspected they wanted their pilots to keep their minds on the job, and not worry about what was happening at home.

But Jeff had said he would try to pull a few strings if he could as the commander of a space station. And as she absolutely could not send any messages to him, all she could do was wait. It was something one did quite a bit of in the glamorous profession of planetary surveyor.

So what should she do while she waited? She knew what Jeff what do in this situation. The same thing she was probably going to do yet again. It was one of the first things they discovered they had in common. “Computer,” she said, “lower the lights.” She released herself from the chair, pushed herself up gently in the microgravity, just above the console, and settled in to watch the surface of Fensalir moving broadly past the bow of her ship and to float with the incredible swarm of stars beyond the planet, all shining in the particularly intense way seen only in the deep night of space.

And she thought of Jeff, who always tried to do the same thing at least once a day: simply look out at the stars from whatever spot on Babylon 5 he could, be it a temporarily empty Command and Control, or one of the observation domes, or even walking along the outside surface of the station in a space suit, having cobbled up some plausible reason for taking a space walk. Best way to meditate and think, he would say. And to help keep everything in perspective.

What was he doing right now? She had left him on Babylon 5, on New Year’s Day, Earth time, two days after he had asked her to marry him. Even though they had lived together once for a short period of time, it had taken her fifteen years to say yes to that question.

So much had changed in the years since they had first met at Earthforce Academy where she had been the second-year cadet, and he had been the incredibly handsome and dashing lieutenant and flight instructor.

He had literally taken her breath away on their first meeting, by executing a hairpin backward loop followed by a spinning barrel roll on her first instruction flight with him that had nearly blacked her out. She had accused him of being a dangerous show-off, although she had to admit to herself later that her anger had come more from embarrassment at almost losing it than at anything he had done. He told her she wasn’t tough enough to make it as a pilot and said she was treading very close to insubordination. It was, embarrassingly enough, love at first sight.

What followed was war and separation and reunion and separation again, fifteen years of fighting with him, breaking up and getting back together, breaking up again and seeing other people. But always, always loving each other. As he put it, that just never went away, even if they sometimes didn’t know why.

But they had spent far too much time apart during those years, and for what reason? Her job, his job, his stubbornness – her stubbornness. It didn’t make any sense to her now, and yet here she was again, many light-years away, orbiting a godforsaken planet, having left just two days after agreeing to marry him to carry out a five-month stint on the rim of explored space.

The irony of the situation hadn’t been lost on either of them as one of their longest-running arguments had been that Jeff never allowed himself a real life, a personal life because of work and duty and honor and orders. That he was never off-duty and never would be and what kind of life could they have together if that were so?

She tried only once to get him to quit and go into business with her, but he had refused, and the resulting argument had ended in yet another one of their breakups.

She had found it particularly difficult to understand his devotion to Earthforce service since it had treated him so badly after the war. He had been the fighter pilot with the greatest number of craft-to-craft combat victories, one of the heroes of the Battle of the Line who saw virtually all of his friends and comrades killed – and had emerged from the experience so emotionally scarred she had barely recognized him the first time she saw him after the war. But in spite of his heroism, he had been treated with suspicion and harassment by his superiors, shunted aside when he refused to resign, and then assigned to the worst postings.

But now he was commander of Babylon 5, so maybe his steadfast devotion to duty had finally paid off. On Babylon 5 he at last had been given a job that was both important and worthy of his abilities. It had helped him become a man more at ease with himself and his world. He laughed more easily now than he had in years. He no longer automatically tried so hard to keep others at a safe, emotional distance, a tendency he had developed after losing so many people dear to him both before and during the war (a trait not unknown to Sakai herself, as she knew he would be gently reminding her right about now). He had made some important new friends and deepened some old friendships. The true Jeffrey Sinclair had finally reemerged from the hard shell the war had put around him.