The Drazi lay on his chest, an object growing out of his head and spine that looked almost like a second brain and spinal cord. The object must be nearly complete; the Shadow skin had pulled away enough to reveal a strip several inches wide down the length of the Drazi's shriveled arms and legs, and of his head, which was turned to one side, his mouth and one eye had been freed. He was panting, gasping desperately for air.
Galen knelt beside him.
"Can you hear me?"
The Drazi's eye was pointed at the ceiling. It did not move. Galen studied the strip of withered scales on his arm. Beneath, tissues were desiccated, muscles atrophied, bones decalcified. The Shadow skin had drawn all strength from his body. There could be no saving him. He would already have died, if the Shadow skin were not keeping him alive.
Galen found his hand clenched about the Drazi's arm, forced his grip to relax. He looked up at the rocky ceiling. Even if he could destroy the Eye, even if the White Star homed in on John and penetrated the cavern above, he didn't know if the destruction would reach this far. This could not continue. He had to destroy it. He had to destroy it all.
He released the Drazi, forced himself to stand, to move on. He drew closer to the source of light. Against the far wall, stacks of bodies – naked of their Shadow skin, drained of strength and substance and life, long slits cut down their chest or sides. Farther down, bins of the objects harvested – pods, small saucer shapes, mouse-sized objects, and strange brain and spinal cord combinations, like the one that was growing on the Drazi.
As he looked at one now, separated from its host, it looked almost familiar, the thick, umbrella-shaped top resembling the bell of a jellyfish, the trailing section like one of a jellyfish's long oral arms. If the shifting Shadow skin were removed, or disguised... it would be... it would be a mage's chrysalis.
He walked to the next bin, his legs stiff with fear. It was filled with canisters he well recognized, wooden and carved with runes. He took one out, opened it, reached into the liquid. Across his palm hung the warm, pulsing threads of the tech.
After a few moments out of the liquid, they began to squirm. One curled up on his hand and poked its end at his skin, searching for an opening. Galen returned them to their canister. Cheerful humming echoed across the cavern.
It sounded like a woman's voice. Galen crouched, seeing movement across the rows of atrocities. A spiky figure shrouded in brilliant red Shadow skin stopped beside one of the "substrates," knelt there.
The figure looked humanoid, except for a series of tapering projections that fanned out from her spine on both sides. In their arrangement, they created almost the impression of wings. She touched the pod, and the Shadow skin covering the substrate contracted, closing around the pod and revealing the being beneath, a Minbari male.
Excess skin flowed up her arm. She turned her hand, and a narrow plasma beam came from her palm, cut along the bottom of the pod that had grown. With a sharp breath from the Minbari, a liquid of a duller, cooler red gushed out of the open wound, running down his shriveled body to the floor. She lifted the pod, studied it, the tone of her song sounding pleased. The Minbari's labored breaths grew heavy, slow. Finally, they stopped.
"Evolution will be served," Justin said, his voice hard. "One way or another. You can work with us, or..."
"Or you'll do to me what you did to Anna," John said.
The conversation was quickly escalating. John would be forced to make a decision soon. A flying platform lifted the pod from her hands and conveyed it to the bin.
"The memories are there," John said. "The voice is there. The DNA is there. But the personality... I look in her eyes, and the woman I love, the woman I married... isn't there."
Alwyn had said almost the exact same thing about Galen. Her humming stopped, her head rising.
"Who's there? Brother?"
He recognized that rich, deep voice. It was Razeel.
* * *
"I look in her eyes," John said, shaking his there.
"She would never go along with this. As he sat there on the couch."
John stared at her with the strangest expression.
Then Anna realized. He was not her friend. He did not love her. He was not under her control. He had deceived her, just as she had deceived him. He was their enemy, as she had thought all along.
"Just so," Justin said.
He stood and walked behind Anna, rested his hands on her shoulders.
"You see, when she came here five years ago, she was given a choice. The same choice we're giving you. She made the mistake of choosing badly, and our associates–"
"You stuck her in one of those ships, didn't you," John yelled.
Anna didn't understand. How could Justin say she had chosen badly? He'd told her the liberators had seen her potential, had wanted to free it. Yet the archaeologist Sheridan had been so full of foolish ideas, perhaps she had resisted. Just as John was resisting. He didn't understand the joys of the machine. It was so beautiful, so elegant. Perfect grace, perfect control, form and function integrated into the circuitry of the unbroken loop, the closed universe. She needed to incorporate herself once again into the machine, to beat out the perfect, flawless march, to coordinate, to synchronize, to strike.
"Once you've been inside one of those ships for a while," Justin said, "you're never quite whole again."
He pointed a finger at John, his quavering voice rising.
"But you do what you're told. And so will you."
One of the liberators entered the room behind John. It would teach him the principles of chaos. It would teach him obedience. John stood, spun toward the liberator, and raised his arm, and in his hand was a weapon, a gun he had hidden from her. She had failed.
He aimed it at the liberator, fired – again, again. Shrieking, Anna dove at him, seized him in her arms, struck at him. But this body was weak, and she wasn't quite sure how to use it for attack, what areas on John to target.
John threw her to the couch, turned the gun on Morden and Justin, and ran for the far door. As Anna climbed to her feet, she saw with relief that the liberator was all right. The weak blasts hadn't penetrated its skin. Morden pulled a gun out of his waistband.
"Don't kill him," Justin said. "There's no need. He can't get far."
The percussion of gunfire echoed from the tunnel outside. Morden ran to the door, and Anna started after him, ready to shriek an oratorio of destruction. Justin grabbed her.
"You wait, Anna. I don't want you attacking John. You'll have one more chance to succeed. When John has given up all hope. When John has realized that there is no hope, except with us."
She wanted to pull away, to pursue John and destroy him utterly. Justin didn't understand. John was fighting the war just as she would – he brought chaos to the heart of his enemy. He would not be controlled. He had no intention of joining. He had nearly killed one of the liberators. They were too generous, risking their lives to release John's potential. Their lives could not be endangered for the sake of this one Human, their enemy.
"Chaos through warfare," she said. He must be fought.
"Evolution through bloodshed."
"The inferior would die, the superior would live."
"Perfection through victory."
And she would be joined with the Eye. She tried to pull away.
"Anna, stop it," Justin said. "You will do as you're told."
At last she broke free, stumbled back, turned toward the door. Behind her, the liberator stood, its dazzling white eyes filled with fury. From those fourteen brilliant pinpoints, ropes of light streamed toward her, thrust into her, began to spin. They whirled faster and faster, churning her thoughts into chaos, filling her with their shredding screaming brilliant agony.
When, after a time, they withdrew, her mind was clear, like a blank white screen. Chaos was for another place and time. For now, she must convince John to join them. She must gain control over him. That was her purpose. And obedience was the only option.
* * *
The memory bled through Galen's defenses – Razeel, hair blowing over her face, smiling into the ring at him, humming as she led Fa to her death. He turned his mind away, accelerated his exercises. Perhaps he could complete this part of his task.
A bright ball of light popped into the air above him, then another and another, illuminating his side of the cavern. The spiky figure rose.
"Galen!" She sounded excited.
"Brother didn't tell me he had a playmate."
She glided toward him on a platform, and he stood. He saw now more clearly the source of the original light, a square opening in the ceiling, perhaps three feet on each side. A shaft. Somewhere, above, there was light.
Razeel approached. Obviously she knew many of the Shadows' secrets. Did she know how to evade the spell of destruction? She had always been less skilled than Elizar.
In his mind's eye, John yelled at Justin. "You stuck her in one of those ships, didn't you?"
The conversation would soon end. Galen had to reach the Eye. He visualized the one-term equation. The sphere caught her in midair, tainting the air around her with shadow. As space and time distorted, her torso stretched, her spikes rippling like snakes, fading into the darkness that engulfed her.
Galen's left leg was swelling, bowing outward. But he kept his eyes fixed on Razeel. Elizar had moved the sphere almost instantly, yet still it encompassed her. Her figure was visible now only as a vague movement within the blackness.
Then the sphere began to pale, and as his leg drew back to normal size, the sphere snapped into rapid collapse. With sudden speed it shot off to the right, passed partway into the cave wall, and imploded with a crack that shook the chamber.
Rocks rained down around them. Razeel came to float before him, the glittering Shadow-skin's patterns shifting, evolving. Over the place where her face would be, an image took shape, an illusion projected over the skin, or created by the skin. It was her face, yet the image was changed, enhanced, her pale skin now a radiant white, her large blue eyes a solid, gleaming black. She reminded him, in some strange, twisted way, of an angel. The angel of death.
She had found, at last, an identity that fit. She extended her arms, stretched one leg back, to increase the illusion that she was flying.
"I am the queen of Shadows."
Galen conjured a platform and, with an equation of motion, raced toward the opening in the ceiling. Razeel followed. He entered the shaft, swooped upward. Through the transparent platform, he could see Razeel's black figure rising after him.
He started with her right hand and conjured sphere after sphere of destruction, capturing one section of her body after another, arms, head, chest, stomach, legs. The energy came down upon him, blazed out of him. If she'd barely been able to move one sphere in time, let her try to escape all of those.
The full heat of destruction was upon him now, the brilliant incandescence burning through his veins, shooting down his neurons. He reached deeper into the earth, to the cavern from which he had just come, the equations forming one after the next, destruction filling the rock above the cave ceiling, below the cave floor, surrounding that nest so that everything would be crushed beyond hope of survival. As he shot upward, the shaft boomed with the echoes of implosions below, the rock around him fracturing, cracking, falling.
He visualized the equation, cloaked himself in Shadow skin. Dust billowed up around him. He detected no sign of Razeel. He closed the suffocating exercises around him, forcing the flow of destruction to stop. He would not lose control, would not give himself over to chaos.
His sensors told him that he was now level with the opening of the Eye, but the shaft had no outlets. He continued higher.
Far above was another skylight, this one much smaller than the one in the main cavern. He was nearly halfway there before he found an opening large enough for him to pass through. He was on the same level as John.
"You do what you're told," Justin said to John. "And so will you."
A PPG in his hand, John whipped around to find himself face-to-face with a Shadow. He fired several quick blasts.
Galen sped around a curve and down a straightaway, searching for the fastest way back to the Eye.
Only eighty feet ahead, he sensed a huge open space – the main cavern. He would probably come out on one of the balconies or parapets he had seen. From there, he could easily reach the Eye. But there wasn't enough time.
John fled the meeting room, and very quickly he would see that there was no chance for escape. As soon as he did, he would send for the White Star.
Galen located John's probe – a hundred yards ahead and to the left. Sounds echoed down the tunnel from behind Galen, growing louder. The clattering of footsteps, running – lots of them. Drakh soldiers. They would round the curve in a moment, and see him. They must be coming after John, but Galen had to reach him first.
In an instant, Galen made his decision: the basic postulate derived from the spells for illusions. He visualized the one-term equation, and the tech echoed it. With a silky whisper, the Shadow skin slipped away.
Drakh swarmed around the curve, guns held to their chests. Galen looked down at himself, but saw nothing. The camouflage illusion – or whatever it was – worked perfectly. Just as it did for the Shadows. The Drakh showed no reaction to his presence.
Galen raced ahead of them, tracking the probe through the twisting tunnels. He came out onto a parapet, followed the signal back into the interior. Twenty yards. Ten. Five.
He came up behind Morden, who fired a PPG from the shelter of a doorway. Ahead, John was pinned down in an indentation in the rock, a small group of Drakh firing at him from the far side. Galen conjured a fireball in his palm, seized Morden's wrist.
Morden screamed, his gaze darting from side to side, searching for his enemy. Desperately he jerked his hand free, and the weapon fell to the tunnel floor. Galen kicked it away.