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*
“Delenn, what else can this ship do?”
“All in good time, Captain.”
*
Delenn lets it go on longer than perhaps she should, watching Captain Sheridan direct the White Star to and fro.
At first, she could predict his orders as a logical progression of system tests: engine speed and agility, weapons power and targeting. He walked from station to station around the bridge in methodical order, asking questions and looking over shoulders at each control console and display, all while the crew patiently tolerated his close observation.
Delenn lost the logic of it hours ago. John is now in the command chair at the center of the bridge, an upgrade installed while the ship was repaired from their first encounter with a Shadow vessel. Again and again, he selects asteroid targets and orders ever more unusual flight trajectories. The latest one is so complex he needs both hands to explain it.
After a long tour of the ship’s major sections and at least three hours on the bridge, Delenn has learned all she cares to about the ship itself. Instead, she watches him, idly pondering the mystery presented by his sequence of unexpected orders.
Either his actions are just as methodical as before, which would mean that Humans are capable of logical patterning too complex for even a well-trained Minbari mind to identify…
… or he’s having fun, and she is choosing to let him.
Lennier translates as best he can into the Minbari language, then gives her a look that requires no translation.
She supposes that if even Lennier is losing patience, she should step in. When John asked her to make the White Star available for trials as soon as all battle damage was repaired, he said it was important for “a captain to get to know his new ship, and a crew to get to know their captain.”
She agreed, especially with a Minbari crew with little to no previous exposure to Human eccentricities. Perhaps too much exposure at this stage would be counter-productive.
“Yes!” John cheers, pumping his fist in the air as the asteroids are successfully destroyed once again. “Good! Okay. Now…”
“Captain,” she interrupts, sliding off her seat and approaching him before he can choose a new target. She offers the first excuse that comes to mind. “When studying your people, I was taught that to operate in good health, Humans must eat at regular intervals.”
“What?” His attention is still on his console, surely focused on plans for the next creative strike.
She rests her hand on his arm, and he turns to look at her. With her touch, the distraction clears from his eyes. It’s oddly gratifying. “You require a break.”
He sweeps his gaze around the bridge, then back to her. The crew can’t understand him at any volume, but he lowers his voice anyway when he says, “… you’re saying they need a break from me, aren’t you?”
His smile is bright and easy and catching, and she mirrors it back.
“Several things can be true at once.” She slides her hand around his arm, the better to hold him on course should he get distracted by a new idea on their way out of the room.
Large Minbari cruisers are typically equipped for long-term voyages, but as a prototype vessel designed for combat missions, the White Star has leaner amenities in the crew area. Those that exist were not prioritized during construction. There are nutritional rations suitable for both Humans and Minbari, but the kitchen and dining areas are still incomplete. The ration crates themselves double as temporary tables.
The silent prayers Delenn offers in advance of the meal are similarly abridged. John is already eating out of the ration tray when she opens her eyes.
“I’m sorry about all that,” he says between bites. “I’m like a kid with a new toy, I know.”
The image makes her smile. “A toy is hardly a dignified comparison for a Minbari vessel.” She finds herself smiling often lately in his presence, so widely and frequently that her cheeks hurt if they spend too long together.
“You didn’t grow up playing with model ships, I take it. I must have had a hundred of them—every kind I could find. Birthdays, Christmases, it was all I asked for. Earth ships, Centauri ships… no Minbari ships yet, of course.”
Her smile falters. He doesn’t notice, gazing up and around the room with a level of wonder incompatible with a half-finished dining area.
“What I wouldn’t have given for one of these.”
She shakes off her momentary discomfort. “Now you have the real thing.”
He grins. “Much better.”
She picks at her own meal, and makes a mental note to ensure a proper kitchen is at the top of the list the next time the White Star visits a repair station. She chooses conversation over food. “I wish to ask you something.”
Through a full mouth, John asks, “What’s that?”
She shouldn’t find his table manners as endearing as she does. “When you requested this day of exercises, you called them… C trials?”
He makes a sound that she has learned from context is an affirmative one.
“What does the C stand for?”
“No, sea trials.” He swallows, then spells, “S-E-A, like the ocean. On Earth, that’s what we used to call putting a ship through her paces, especially if she’s the first of her class. They’d take her out on the open water and test everything—speed, agility, capacity—to make sure she’s seaworthy.”
Seaworthy is a new word to her. She likes it. “And while you have traded the oceans of your world for the stars, the vocabulary remains.” She punctuates the point with, “Captain.”
“Exactly.” Then, after a moment, “Huh,” another meaningful sound Humans use for communication that cannot be found in any Earth-Minbari dictionary.
He takes another bite and chews it more thoughtfully. It seems it has never before occurred to him to contemplate the origin of a word he hears every day—the word he uses even before his own name whenever he introduces himself.
He comes up with, “Well, maybe that’s our way of honoring the first great explorers to set out into the deep.”
“Perhaps,” she offers. Minbari poets are certainly not immune to the occasional romantic comparison between the once-mysterious depths of the ocean and the black of space. For the Humans, though, she sees other meaning in it.
She studied several Earth languages during the war—an essential step, Minbari believe, on the path to understanding and defeating an enemy. When Humans speak, it’s with the evidence of their rapid development. They invent new technologies at such a pace that they must borrow and adapt words already in use for other things. There are oceans on Minbar as well, of course, and great vessels built to cut through both water and ice. In English translation, they and the White Star would all be called ships, but not in any Minbari tongue.
She has found her linguistic study equally illuminating once they became allies, and now friends… and whatever new relationship is kindling between them that makes her so attentive not just to the study of John’s language, but to the particular way he speaks it.
“You’ve never visited Earth, have you?”
It catches her by surprise. She hesitates, though hopefully not long enough for him to notice. “No.”
It’s true in two ways: She has never stood on the planet, and if he knew, he would never call it something as benign as a visit.
“It’s funny. I traveled all over Earth with my dad, must have flown across the oceans dozens of times before my first trip off-world, but I never really thought about how beautiful that shade of blue is until I saw it from space.”
The memory comes to her with surprising clarity—the Grey Council chamber, with thousands of explosions between her and that fragile world. Through all the debris and death, she remembers that blue.
She misses his next few words while she puts the memory back where it belongs, twelve years in the past.
“… so long aiming for the stars, I never even thought about it. I was fifteen. I don’t know how much you know about Human teenagers, but at that age, you act like nothing impresses you, but I just… stared. I’ve seen the same sight a hundred times since then. In Earth Force Academy, you spend weeks in close orbit for different exercises. But when I close my eyes…” He does that now.
It’s compelling, the chance to watch him like this, without being seen in return. His eyes pop open, catching her in the act, but she doesn’t look away.
“Well, they say you never forget your first.” The specific twinkle in his eye implies something amusing, a reference she lacks.
Sometimes, she is willing to let understanding come in its own time. “I shall have to add that to my list of things they say.”
“I know the Minbari have already tested the ship, better than I could. Hell, she has already more than proven herself. But with a beauty like this…” He trails off, and with his gaze focused on her, she finds herself holding her breath. “I think it must have been quite a day, when an old sailing ship was declared seaworthy. We’re going to do great things here, Delenn, and it’s nice to spend some time… enjoying the beginning.”
His hand is resting on the table, and she reaches out. He turns it palm up, making space for hers to fit. “A beginning,” she echoes.
They have a lovely, quiet moment, and then the ship starts screaming.
The alarms come before the explosions, but only just. They’re on their feet and running in seconds, but the ship is shaking so hard that she slips twice before they even make it halfway to the bridge. The second time he stops to help her to her feet she yells, “Go!” because one of them must make it to their destination and take command, and that’s when the ceiling crashes down.
Somehow, she stays conscious. Her skull is less protected than it once was, and with the force of the impact, she can’t immediately tell which way is up. The metal that knocked her down is heavy and so hot it burns, but it collapsed in pieces, and she’s able to use her strength to claw herself out from under them.
That freedom comes with a spray of coolant gas directly in her face, blinding her and choking off her calls for help. She crawls away from the ruptured conduit seeking fresh air.
The ship shakes again, and something else crashes nearby. The sound of falling beams, the smell of coolant and smoke and burning hot metal—
John, her first truly clear thought. “John!”
She forces her burning eyes open and searches through a dizzying sea of shapes until she finds him.
He’s unconscious on the deck, his head bleeding. There’s more blood when she pulls away the panel that was covering his chest, and with her vision blurred, she doesn’t know where it’s coming from. Her hands hover over his chest, his face, uncertain where to touch him. She can’t remember where to find a pulse on a Human, can only think to hover her palm above his mouth, praying she will feel air still moving—
She hears, “Delenn!” and she’s no longer on the White Star.
It’s not Lennier calling her name, but Satai Morann. The ships outside attacking them are from Earth. It’s Dukhat’s bleeding face in her shaking hands, and the galaxy is about to burn alive with the force of her despair.
She scrambles back, away from both John and the vivid memory of the past.
Her eyes are wet, and whether it’s from tears or an automatic reflex, it’s clearing the dust and gas from her sight. She uses all of her inner discipline to focus her attention on the here and now. She recognizes Lennier’s voice the second time he yells for her, then the two Minbari crewmembers moving toward her, and the dark shapes crossing her face... her hair.
There is an emergency, and she is needed. Fifteen years wiser now, she remembers herself more quickly.
She lets Lennier pull her to her feet, and though it feels as though she’s leaving her heart on the deck, she follows him to the bridge without hesitation.
“Care for him!” she orders the crewmembers behind her, and does not look back.
There are five enemy ships, black fighters of a kind she has never seen before but recognizes nonetheless. When she sees them on the display, she hears the scream of the Shadow vessel John outsmarted the first time he captained the White Star.
She can only offer her thanks to Valen or anyone else who may be listening that these many ships are, at least, smaller. There is no choice over whether to flee or fight. If the ships observed their day-long trials before deciding to attack, they have witnessed their every capability and cannot now be allowed to escape. Delenn will worry later about how they came to be here in the first place, in a remote area of Minbari space used only to test new ships and weapons.
The White Star destroys two of them in open space; the remaining three flee into the asteroid field. Delenn doesn’t specify a particular flight path, only an order to seek and destroy, but she recognizes at least one maneuver from the crew’s earlier practice under John’s guidance.
They chase each ship down, one at a time, until there are none left.
The battle is over, but Delenn remains where she is, and she will stay there until they can jump. If more enemy ships arrive while they are damaged in space, if a dark mothership returns to collect the fighters they have just destroyed, she cannot be caught away from the bridge.
In English, for Lennier only, she asks: “Is he alive?”
The pause as he contacts the medical bay through his console is long. She sees the answer in Lennier’s face, suddenly softening with relief.
Her own relief makes her shake. She grips the edge of her seat and stops Lennier from telling her anything else. She had to know that much, but she cannot afford to be distracted with details.
It’s distracting enough, looking down at the blood drying on her hands. She can’t tell which of it is his, and which is hers.
She used to be able to tell the difference. Her eyes changed in the chrysalis, even more than her blood. She sees more shades of green now, making the gardens on Babylon 5 wildly alive.
Other colors have thinned out. Now, Minbari and Human blood both look red.
On her hands. In her heart. Perhaps the blue of Earth’s oceans would look different now, if she ever has the chance to see them again.
She waits.
He is alive. The wave of relief that she experienced on the bridge comes over her again, seeing the proof in person.
She has injuries as well, but none so urgent that she can’t sit with him for a while before tending to them. It’s only now, seeing him so still, that she realizes how much he is always in motion. The first ten minutes she sits by his side are the only ten minutes she has ever seen him at rest.
She would like to see what he looks like when that rest is peaceful, without pain. It could take her hours to chart all the planes and lines of his face... or longer.
Three nights, to see him for who he truly is.
Who he can be to her.
Here, he grants her only minutes to be alone with this revelation before he stirs. She takes his hand, and his fingers flutter closed around hers, a slight motion that makes her exhale hours of worry in one breath.
“Delenn?” His eyes are still closed, like perhaps he recognizes her from her touch alone.
“I am here.” To reassure them both, she adds, “You will be all right.”
He gets one eye open, only a sliver, and tries to lift his head. “An attack?”
She brings her other hand to his face, touching gently. “We won.”
“Good.” His head sinks back to the pillow, and she thinks he is asleep. Then, she hears, “The ship?”
She smiles. She will tell him later about their hunt in the asteroid field. He will enjoy that. For now, she only promises: “We are seaworthy.”
