The air around Elizar seemed to boil. His body was rigid, shaking, fists clenched.
"I've done what I had to do. And I will continue, until I rebuild our order."
Galen visualized a blank screen, imposed upon it equation after equation after equation. A ball of brilliant blue energy formed a few feet behind Elizar, shot toward his shield. Another ball formed at the same place, shot forward. Another. Another.
Each slammed into the same spot, and with each impact, a yellow wave flashed over Elizar's shield. Galen conjured ball of energy, equation of motion, ball, motion, faster and faster, determined to burn through his shield, to burn him.
If Elizar's masters had ordered him to spare Galen, Galen would simply keep attacking until he succeeded in killing Elizar. The waves of pulsing yellow and red lit Elizar's face with keen eagerness.
"Now you'll see some more of what I know."
He brought his hands to his mouth, with a jerk of his head uttered a long, sustained syllable. Then blackness was growing up over his shoulders, spreading down his chest, out along his arms, across his face. Elizar stood covered in glittering black Shadow skin.
Galen continued his bombardment, forcing his mind to work faster, faster. He scanned the Shadow skin for signs of weakening; his attacks caused only a slight, temporary heating.
Elizar's skin was stronger than the skin of the machine people, a hundred times stronger than a mage defensive shield. This must be the shield their creators had meant them to have. Agents of chaos and destruction would need strong protection.
"This is pointless," Elizar said, his voice passing clearly through the barrier.
The black skin over his face shifted, and Galen could almost see eyes, nose, mouth. With an equation of motion, Galen drove his final ball into the rock at Elizar's feet. As the ground blasted apart, Elizar was thrown into the air.
Galen conjured a platform, raced out of the cavern, down the long, dark tunnel. He did not have the ability to kill Elizar.
* * *
The outer air-lock door closed behind them. John was now trapped inside the underground city. He was further under Anna's control. She had separated him from Babylon 5, separated him from the White Star. She had just one more step to take to bring him completely under her power.
They removed their breathers, and Anna took his, set them aside, the helpful wife.
"For security reasons," she explained, "they moved all their main structures underground centuries ago. And John..."
She extended her hand, looked up at him with love, the love she felt for the machine.
"I'll need your gun."
His face carried the familiar frown, but after a brief hesitation, he gave her the weapon. He trusted her. Perhaps it was a frown of love. She clasped the gun eagerly. He was now reduced to the meager power of his own body. The inner air-lock door opened, and she led the way down the corridor.
She was back within the domain of the Eye. Though she could not feel that great machine's pulsing power surrounding her, the very thought of it sent a tingle of excitement through her.
The corridor was more brightly lit than the liberators and their servants preferred. Brown and tan fiberboard covered the rock walls and floor, making this place look like a typical Earth building.
"They designed this part of the complex specifically for us."
"Us?" he said.
"You'll see."
She stopped before a closed door. This was the room where she'd undergone much of her training. John stopped at another door. Still he resisted her. She forced a smile.
"No, not that door. This one."
He came to her, and she knocked.
"Yes. Come in," Justin called from inside.
The door swung open, and Anna entered. John would have to see that chaos was superior to order, and then it was explained properly to him. Just as Sheridan had discovered. Justin could do that, and Anna would help. She had gained control of John, and soon she would gain control of the Eye.
Victory would be hers. The greatest joy was the ecstasy of victory.
C
HAPTER 17
Galen twisted down tunnel after tunnel, mind racing, heart pounding, tech echoing his desperation. Elizar followed, only a few seconds behind, a figure of glittering blackness in the dim light. In his mind's eye, Galen watched through the probe on John as Anna, Morden, and Justin sat in one of the pleasant meeting rooms above and attempted to turn the commander of the Army of Light.
Their words faded in and out as he formulated equation of motion after equation of motion. He would be dead ten times over if not for the fact that Elizar had been ordered to spare him.
That was the great unknown – what they might want him for. It had been the purpose behind everything: the bombing of Soom, the interrogation and torture of Fa.
Perhaps Elizar had wanted the spell of destruction, but that had merely been a bonus. The Shadows had pulled Elizar's strings; Elizar had pulled his strings. And like a fool, he had come.
"Back a million years ago," Justin said, "there were forces prowling around the galaxy beyond anything that we can understand."
Galen swerved down another tunnel. He had to get back to the Eye, and he had to get there alone. He was deeper now than he'd ever been, and he'd passed no one in the last minute or two. No machine people were near to aid Elizar. This passage was narrow and straight.
He conjured the spell of destruction once, twice, three times in the ceiling above Elizar, the tech flaring with brilliant heat. His sensors showed spherical concentrations of energy building within the rock. Then those spheres began to move, drifting back through the ceiling until they were behind Elizar. With a firecracker-quick series of booms they imploded, and great boulders and slabs of stone cascaded down. A rush of dirt and rocks flew out at them, peppering Galen's back.
Within that billowing cloud, Elizar lifted a palm as if in good-bye, and a red plasma beam shot out from it. Galen jumped to the right, the beam streaming past his left shoulder and down the tunnel. But as Elizar adjusted his aim, the beam rose, cutting into the ceiling ahead of Galen.
Elizar hadn't meant to hit him. Elizar wanted to block him in. Dropping to his knees on the platform, arms covering his head, Galen conjured a shield and sped into the rock-fall.
A few small stones bounced off him with just light impressions of pressure, as if he were padded with pillows. Then a larger rock slammed into his back, its sharp edge jamming into his spine. Two hard blows to his arms, and though he held the shield's equation firmly in his mind, he could feel the protection melting away, running down his sides.
He'd never been good at shields, as Elizar well knew. As the rocks rained down around him, Elizar would expect him to stop and retreat, but he would not. His translations of the shield spells were complex, the results weak, perhaps because they drifted too far from the Shadows' original intent. If the Shadows meant the mages to have a protective skin, then it would arise from a simple incantation, one of the basic postulates.
He knew the one; it had underlain a progression of spells involving many different types of shields. A heavy strike to his shoulder, and he fell forward onto the platform, enveloped in a torrent of rock.
He made the decision in a moment, visualized the spell. It slipped around him like a warm, silky embrace. He was aware of the rocks still dropping onto him, but they seemed weightless, inconsequential.
In a few seconds, he emerged from the rock-fall. At a safe distance, he stilled the platform, climbed to his feet. He felt the Shadow skin only as a faint tingling. His vision was unimpeded by it, and though the tunnel was filled with dust, he breathed clean air.
He looked back the way he'd come. Rocks filled the tunnel, separating him from Elizar. Elizar would no doubt cut his way quickly through them, but Galen had his chance.
Anna spoke. "The ones who live here... believe that strength only comes from conflict."
She smiled.
"They want to release our potential, not bottle it up."
He raised a glittering black hand to his face, followed the subtle, shifting patterns. This, finally, was what he was. A barely Human device designed to fight, to kill, and to survive. A pestilence of chaos and destruction.
He conveyed himself a few yards farther from the cave-in. He aimed his palm up at the ceiling near the blockage, chose another of the basic postulates, one he'd derived from spells that accessed external devices.
Perhaps it would allow him to fire the beam. He visualized the equation. Whispers reached into him, circulated through him, winding along the burning lines of his tech, reveling in the joy of destruction.
Chaos is the proper state of being, the state in which all impulse is freed to act.
Chaos is the way to strength.
He had connected to the Eye. Information filled his mind's eye, lists written in the Shadows' language, and as it scrolled down, he translated what he could. Here was the heading SHIP COMPONENTS, and beneath a list of numbers and names. Then a heading that roughly translated as MACHINE COMPONENTS, but below just numbers. A third heading, something like SUBSTRATES, and more numbers. Below, even more headings.
He could access the Shadow machines. Perhaps he could even control them, as Elizar had done. He dissolved the spell, banishing the whispers, and chose another basic postulate, this one derived from spells for using internal systems, such as his sensors.
In a burning, beautiful rush, the beam shot out from his palm, blasted into the tunnel ceiling. His heart pounding in elation, he quickly corrected his aim, ran the beam along the area near the rock-fall.
Huge slabs of stone dropped down from the ceiling, increasing the blockage. A few smaller rocks bounced to hit him, but he felt only the brilliant red energy blazing through his skin.
With regret he dissolved the spell, closed his hand into a fist. An equation of motion sent him racing away.
Focusing on his exercises, tightening his control, he searched for a way back up to the large cavern. He could sense the opening of the Eye just a hundred feet above, but he could not find a tunnel leading upward, only farther down.
Among the mazelike warren of tunnels, he came upon another huge, dim cavern. Galen stopped. At the far end, he saw light from some sort of passage. The cavern itself was filled with dark, unidentifiable shapes. He accessed the infrared band, saw that the shapes arrayed across the floor were all covered in the bright, shifting red of Shadow skin.
Some were little more than scraps, no larger than a mouse; others were massive, like great sails of Shadow skin supported by some kind of underlying structure. Faint sounds carried through the chamber, almost like gasping, or crying.
Galen scanned back down the tunnel, detected no sign of Elizar's pursuit. He dissolved his platform, walked toward the nearest shape.
Morden stood behind Anna's chair, leaning forward toward John. The intensity and passion he'd lacked when he and Galen had spoken privately were back full force.
"Look at the long history of Human struggle. Six thousand years of recorded wars, bloodshed, atrocities beyond description. But look at what came out of all that. We've gone to the stars. Split the atom."
It looked like a pod, about two feet long, resting on a thick, roughly rectangular base about six feet by two feet. The entire construction seemed draped in a single sheet of Shadow skin. The pod appeared similar to the ones he'd seen when he'd first entered the underground city, except smaller.
His sensors could not penetrate the skin to study the underlying structure. He passed several more small pods, then reached a bigger one, over three feet long. The Shadow skin was stretched tight over this one. The pods were growing, he realized. This must be how the Shadows produced them. Movement caught his eye farther down the row, and he went toward it. The pods here were plumper, the Shadow skin taut.
Again he caught movement. It came from the rectangular base beneath a pod. As Galen watched, it twitched. The bright red Shadow skin, apparently needed to cover the pod, was pulling slightly away from the base, and a thin line of duller red spread down its edge, revealing the material beneath. He crouched and touched it. The material was soft, though through his own Shadow skin, the texture felt strange to him.
His sensors identified oils, salt, water. Another shiver ran through the platform, and the Shadow skin pulled farther away, the strip of underlying material widening. He followed the dull red up along the side of the platform. The material was wrinkled, as if deflated, and tiny fine hairs protruded from it.
A horrible feeling came over him. With another shiver the Shadow skin retreated farther, and now there was no mistaking what lay beneath. Though shriveled and desiccated, it was, unmistakably, an arm, And above it, a strip of forehead. The head, he realized, was bent to one side, resting against the shoulder. It was a body, covered in Shadow skin.
A body out of which this pod had grown. Galen stumbled back, breathing hard. He added another mind-focusing exercise to the two he already carried. Realizing that the Shadow skin covered his body as well, he quickly dissolved his spell. The blackness unfolded from around him.
He forced himself to continue. He must know it all, and he must hurry. Across from the pods stood the large sails of Shadow skin. Bodies cloaked in shifting redness formed the supports between the large stretches of skin. It was the beginning of a large structure – perhaps a Shadow ship, perhaps something else, he couldn't be sure. Farther down, he thought he recognized different species of animals, from which strange objects were growing. Then more humanoid shapes.
In some cases the object being produced grew out of the chest or stomach, in other cases it grew out of the side, looking almost like a conjoined twin. As the object grew larger, it pulled the Shadow skin away from the host, revealing a limb, a foot, the top of the head.
He saw pieces of Drazi, Humans, Narns, Minbari, Centauri, Pak'ma'ra, others. These were the substrates listed by the Eye. Then he reached the source of the sound.