From: "Stephen J. Barringer" Subject: WANDERING STAR 34/?? Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 00:29:41 -0400 Sorry about the delay, folks, hope everyone's enjoying VS6 so far... Check out the websites: Jakhel's -- Gary's and the VS6 site -- and David's -- Gareth's -- Sel's -- I *will* have a page of my own, eventually, once I untangle the mysteries of Netcom and HTML.... Anyways, on with our merry band of lunatics, and just to taunt everyone, I think the end of Part II, SCAVENGER HUNT, may be in sight.... *****************DISCLAIMER***************** Susan Ivanova and all BABYLON 5 characters and situations are the creations and copyrighted property of J. Michael Straczynski and Babylonian Productions, and are used here without permission strictly for the purposes of non-profit entertainment. Other characters and situations are copyright of the author, but permission is hereby granted for free, non-profit use by other fanfic authors. (Though it would be nice if you asked anyway.) WARNING: Spicy language and what some might consider excessive violence in this one: call it an R in the States, AA in Canada. Also a very slight riff on John Carpenter; a reward to the reader who spots it.... (Okay, there's no real reward, but how else am I gonna get feedback?) ************************************************** < < W A N D E R I N G S T A R > > PART II: SCAVENGER HUNT - 29 - 22:53 EST Merhaupt woke to soft golden light and a feeling of warmth, though all around him was a strange distance as well. Consciousnesses alien and strange shifted slowly through his sluggish thoughts. It was a strange feeling. There was a peculiarly dispassionate benevolence to the consciousnesses – as if they intended him well without feeling any particular affection or interest in him. He tried to move and was startled to find he could; he sat up. The long tablelike length beneath him slowly settled into the ground, collapsing like an evenly deflating bubble. Carefully Alan stood, unnerved to find his body in perfect working order. He didn't remember much of what had happened, but he knew darn well he'd been hurt. Badly. Mortally, if he was honest with himself. "This supposed to be heaven?" he asked aloud. He swung up his rifle and whirled about, then realized the rifle had not charged. In consternation he stared down at it, then checked it. It seemed to be in perfect working order. He jacked the charge-slide again; still nothing happened. "Who are you?" Merhaupt supposed the question deserved an answer. "Private Alan Merhaupt, serial number 356KL30952-A, 196th Earthforce Planetary Service Infantry Platoon, attached to the crew of the EAS *Saint-Germain*." As quickly as that it all came back to him: the Drazi ambush, the fight at the bore, his desperate dive into the well and the blast that had almost killed him. "Yes! Captain Ivanova! We're in danger, we're all in danger, there are marauders – " "Then *help* me *find* her!" The floor disappeared. Merhaupt stared down between his feet as Ivanova, in black EDI armour with a PPG rifle in her hands, strode down a tubular corridor. At her side walked Security Chief Waverly and three guards. "Yes!" The wall rippled and opened like a valve. Merhaupt raced down the passageway revealed, not bothering to wonder who had spoken to him or what had happened. Those questions could wait. One thing being a soldier taught you was to prioritize. 22:59 EST Corelli led the group into the small circular chamber, checking his compass once in faint hope. They were still heading north, back towards the city, if he had his directions straight... or if some weird energy hadn't disrupted the magnetic field of the planet. Tisiara crouched at his side, sniffing and casting about cautiously, whiskers twitching. she sent. "The City might not be in any shape to answer, Tish," Corelli muttered. Tisiara responded with a pulse of angry denial. Corelli opened his mouth, then caught Snow's eye as she came in. He sighed and desisted. He had never claimed to understand women much, but he knew better than to argue with one who had that look in her eye. "Lieutenant, a moment of your time, if you please." Snow's mouth tightened, but she came over anyway. Uninvited, Braun followed. Corelli kept his grimace off his face. He neither liked nor trusted Braun but the man was a xenobiologist, and they needed any insight they could get. He beckoned the three of them into a tight circle. "We're in trouble." "What penetrating insight, Lieutenant." "Shut up, Ulrich," Snow snapped. "Look, all we need to do is find another way out, Tisiara says she knows these passages – " "Tisiara is relying on the mechanics and structure of a City we've half-destroyed," Corelli growled. "She may be getting wrong instructions from telepathic control centres, for all we know. We have to go back and start at the beginning." "There's no way we can climb up that hole to the mausoleum room, Leandro." "Then we *make* a way." Corelli brandished his PPG. Braun raised his eyebrows. "Bear in mind what happened when I severed a segment of the structural material, Lieutenant. Multiply that reaction by the power of several dozen phased plasma charges and we may not survive it." "You have any better ideas?" "As a matter of fact, yes." Braun produced several biosensors and a control pad from his coveralls. "Let me apply these and tap into the bioelectric currents of the city tissue. With time and experimentation I believe I can manipulate the substance of the walls at our command. I can open a passage to the surface." Corelli stared at him. "The last time you tried that you nearly blew the *Saint-Germain* out of the sky!" "Every experiment begins with less-than-optimum results." Braun's face looked aggravatingly serene. "Less-than-optimum my fragging *ass*, you bonehead – " Snow raised her hand as if to slap or punch the older scientist. Braun backed up a step, though his face didn't change. But before Corelli could step forward to intervene, several things happened at once. Tisiara let out a shriek of surprise and fright. Weapons charged with a bass thrum utterly unlike the whirr of a PPG rifle. And a flare burst in the chamber overhead, throwing the room into searing white light as four Drazi, stationed equidistantly around the chamber, stepped forward with disruptor rifles levelled. The fifth raised Tisiara high above its head, clawed hands at the little alien's throat. Corelli had dropped to a firing crouch, one knee down and PPG rifle bearing on the draz holding Tisiara. "This is First Lieutenant Leandro Corelli, Earthforce Planetary Service!" he shouted. "That's a *child* you're holding, you *fangule* idiots! Put her down and drop the weapons!" he thought in cold, quiet panic. They outnumbered the Drazi, but the marauders had gotten the positioning and the drop on them -- a firefight might wipe them out but only at the cost of half his men, and he was *not* going into a fight like that unless there was no choice. "We can talk about this! Put her down!" "Talk rights to world first, we will," snarled the tallest Drazi, a yellow-scarred giant. Strangely, he wasn't the one holding Tisiara. The hissing and crackling of the flare as it slowly drifted downwards underlay his words like the snapping spit of acid eating into stone. "We claim this planet in name of Drazi Freehold! Authorized by Coalition!" "Nobody's claiming *anything* until we bring this before the Interstellar Alliance," Corelli grated. The Sharasai huddled in and among the legs of the human soldiers, quivering with terror and incomprehension, their unprepared minds overpowered by the venom and tension crackling in the air. "Now put the little one down and *drop your weapons!*" The draz holding Tisiara drew its claws just very slightly across her throat. A gleam of red sparked, minuscule and almost black in the bluish-white light of the flare. Tisiara gave a thin, high wavering cry like a hacksaw blade stroked with a bow. The Sharasai moaned, pain and fear and anguish spilling from them in a blinding flood. Corelli's rifle actually shook in his hand. His vision blurred under the tide. "Stop it, stop it, *stop it all of you*!" Snow screamed. Out of the corner of his eye Corelli saw her putting her hands to the side of her head, eyes tight shut. Braun had fallen to his knees, leaning forward on his hands on the floor. Most of the Claymores had kept their weapons up, but from the quivers he could see in their muscles there wasn't much chance of an accurate shot out of them. If the Drazi were affected, it didn't show; maybe their bloodlust was enough of an insulator. Corelli realized abruptly that the entire chamber had just become one huge bomb and the only chance he had to defuse it was bleeding away between his fingers. He didn't drop his gun, but he lowered it and straightened up -- *made* himself straighten up; he had to literally force the muscles of his body to respond. "Nobody wants to kill anybody here," he said as clearly and as loudly as he could without shouting. "We're citizens of the Interstellar Alliance, all of us. Let's *think!*" It was Tisiara's panicked thought. "Tisiara, *shut* -- " Two things hit Corelli in the same moment. The thought-image that Tisiara had flung to everyone in her terror had not been of the Sharasai alone, or even Sharasai and humans. It had been of them *all*. Drazi, humans *and* Sharasai. All the Drazi – -- except the one holding Tisiara. And the next thing to hit him was the bucking wave of the floor as it rippled in a shockwave that knocked every being in the chamber off its feet. 23:01 EST Ivanova reeled and fell against the wall as a wave of contraction swept the passage in a solid gulp. Waverly shouted and flung out his limbs, stabilizing himself; Pike, Mihjawic and DeChant staggered about like drunkards. She clung to the wall, panting. The wave had had a second dimension, one she alone could sense: the psychic shock of a reflex jerk, for all the world as if Ivanova had been kicked in her own knee. The City was alive for her now. A hot, animated, living presence, all around her, alien and impossibly complex and perfect – -- alien and dying. The City was not conscious the way she was conscious. Much of its sentience was an almost accidental byproduct of the interaction of complex organic programs. But there was enough thought in the living structures surrounding them to know that the blast of the detonating tower-cannon had mortally wounded the complex eco-architecture. It took its consciousness from her, thinking with her thoughts, like an organic computer slaved to her mental patterns. And it knew, now, that it had not long to live. For her, the Messenger – and she was finally beginning to understand what that meant – the City was gathering its last resources. "What the *hell* was that?" shouted DeChant. "Bioresponse stimulus," said Ivanova flatly. "Somebody's getting tricky. We have to – " The ceiling irised open and Alan Merhaupt fell through it onto the floor. Waverly just managed to stop himself from shooting the other man. "Jeese!" he yelped. "What the frag – " Merhaupt rolled a little shakily to his feet and managed a salute. "Captain Ivanova. Private Merhaupt, reporting for duty." Ivanova stared at him as if he'd just fallen out of the underground ceiling of a dying alien city. It seemed the most reasonable response. Reflexively she returned the salute. "Report, Private." "There are Drazi marauders in the city, Captain." Talking about a tangible enemy seemed to give the dazed man something to focus on; his voice and bearing steadied. "The Sixth Squad is dead; I'm the only survivor. I was – I was wounded in an attempt to get down here and warn you – " "Wounded -- ?" Waverly stepped forward, grabbed Merhaupt by the shoulder and spun him round. Ivanova stared at the back of his uniform. It was gone, for the most part; a huge hole replaced the back of his armour, his dress tunic, and his undervest. The edges of the hole revealed layers of fabric blackened in a ring of destruction. But the skin beneath was smooth and unmarked. "The City healed him," said Ivanova. She knew it the same way she knew there were aliens menacing Corelli, Snow and Braun. She hadn't known they were Drazi – the City hadn't recognized them and it wasn't anything so simple as straightforward visual transference, but the identity sense of her people had carried clearly through the City's link. "It sensed him trying to get back to me, and it healed him and brought him here." "How the *frag* do you *know* all this, Captain?!" Waverly shouted. "Later." "Captain – " "I SAID LATER!" Ivanova roared, rounding on him. The echoes rippled up and down the corridor... and waves of light followed them as the substance of the passageway glowed, flashing out along the passage like the acceleration pulse of a launch bay. Waverly fell back, stunned; the guards twisted back and forth, watching the lightwaves as they shot away and faded. "Never mind," Waverly whispered. Ivanova turned and shoved straight past him, running now, her armour bouncing on her frame. Merhaupt was after her in an instant. Waverly hissed out something that might have been either curse or prayer and followed, Pike, Mihjawic and DeChant running with him. 23:02 EST Corelli didn't try to get to his feet; the ground was still jerking and lashing under his feet like the muscles of a man dying in the electric chair. Instead, he rolled onto his back, letting his body ride and buck with the waves in the floor, got as close an aim as he could, and unleashed a stream of plasma bursts into the air. One of them, as he'd hoped, got lucky; it struck the flare directly. The furious chemical reaction blew apart in one final blinding burst of searing blue light. A storm of sparks blew out over the chamber; darkness crashed down in their wake. The Drazi roared in their guttural tongue. Tisiara shrieked on both sonic and telepathic wavelengths. Corelli rolled to his knees, braced himself as he oriented on the sound, then shouted as loud as he could, "TAKE 'EM DOWN! CONTACT ONLY!" He flung himself forward, charging over the rocking floor, and crashed into a thick hot muscular form that he bore back against the wall. Claws tore at his armour without penetrating. He felt Tisiara bounce off his shoulders and roll away with the boneless flexibility of children. The chamber flashed briefly to more plasma bolts, and a disruptor pulse or two. Then all the weapons wielders were down in rolling, tangled heaps of wrestling panic. The Sharasai were shrieking like the damned. From the entrance to the north side of the chamber, beams of light pierced the darkness like knives scoring flesh. Corelli saw dim silhouettes behind the light beams, unmistakeably human forms. He seized the draz round the waist and heaved backwards, bringing the struggling alien to the floor with him, smashing him down. The draz struck back, backhand blows across his face that broke something in his nose, sent hot blood gushing down his face and dizzied him. He rose up and slammed down again. The draz jerked with the impact. And then others were there, helping him, pinning the Drazi by the limbs and holding it down. One by one the other Drazi were being subdued as well. "*Corelli!*" The shout cut through the slowly subsiding noise. Corelli stiffened as he recognized the voice. He clawed his way upright and stood, trembling. Then saluted. "Captain Ivanova." Ivanova put her flashlight beam under her face, illuminating her features from below; her eyes and hair were wild in the light, like a disheveled angel's. "I see you caught our ambushers." "They must have come from a ship," Corelli muttered. "The moment we're out of here we have to warn the *Saint-Germain* -- " "We've sent Starfuries to check," Ivanova interrupted. "Don't worry, there's no need for panic. We can – " She was cut off by a strange gargling sound. So utterly odd was it that the other sounds died, one by one. Even the sobbing Sharasai, gathered around Snow as if they were iron filings pulled to her magnet, slowly quieted. Snow looked up and around, bewildered. Corelli turned slowly. It was the Drazi he'd taken down, the one who'd held Tisiara. It raised its head. There was a strange red gleam in its eyes, an almost black light in the flashlamp's blue-white beams. "No need," it repeated in thick, barely comprehensible Interlac. It laughed again, a glottal sound, as if its throat was melting into thick sludge. "No need for panic? Panic is all you will ever have." "Mazrakh!" shouted the yellow-scarred Drazi, thrashing furiously in the grip of his half-dozen captors. "Silence! No words! Prisoners of war we are! We will plead to the Interstellar Alliance – " Mazrakh laughed again. Blood sprayed from his mouth, staining his teeth black. "Alliance of fools!" he rasped. "Dreams, folly, madness! Blood is all! The blood! The Hunt! The *kiiiiiiiiillllllll....*" The last word went on and on, and Mazrakh's body began to spasm and convulse as if electricity was erupting in it. His scales rippled, then tore. Black blood spurted from the gashes as they ripped open. "All of you, back! Get back!" Ivanova shouted. She levelled the PPG as the gropos leapt up and back from the convulsing, flopping body. Even the pinioned Drazi backed away, not resisting their captors as everyone pulled back against the wall. Mazrakh's flesh tore and snapped like fabric burst from within, blood and gore spraying everywhere. The skull exploded abruptly like a balloon, erupting with bone and dark hot liquid and a horrific stench. Red light flared in twin searing points within the ruin, expanded as something insubstantial and fluid and space-black swelled out of the wrecked corpse. Half insectoid, half reptilian, vaguely humanoid, it arose, seeming to coalesce from the very shadow itself. The light beams seemed to disappear into it as they played over its form. Its outline shimmered. Huge, fang-lined jaws gaped; claws gleamed like swords of ice on the end of barely-seen arms. A shrieking keen of laughter filled the air, filled the minds of the terrified onlookers. "What the *frag* is that?" Waverly screamed. "Besides mean and pissed off?" Snow shouted back. "Soldier of Darkness," Ivanova whispered. "A servant of the Shadows. A killing machine. We are all in big, big, *big* trouble." The Dark Soldier reared back its head and screamed its triumph. ...TO BE CONTINUED