The last
heart
beat
stopped.
Part 5 : The First Footsteps on the Road to Babylon.
The forces of destiny begin to converge on Proxima as the war comes to the home of humanity. As internecine power struggles grip the heart of the Resistance Government and Delenn lies helpless in a forgotten and abandoned place, a dark plan nears fruition and a terrible punishment is prepared. Humanity chose wrongly, out of fear and out of fury, and the punishment for that choice may well be the extinction of all that they are, and all they will ever be.
Chapter 1
Captain David Corwin, aboard the
President William Morgan Clark, private observation.
'Interesting,' said the cold voice. 'She's speaking in her own language, or rather.... some dialect of it. It is possible each caste has its own language, I suppose. And yet some things are in English. A recurrence of names, as well. John.... and David. I wonder about their significance. Perhaps....'
'Perhaps you did not hear me, Doctor,' snapped another voice, an angry one. 'I asked how she was doing, not for an in–depth analysis of linguistic patterns.'
She knows these voices, somehow. One of them anyway. The second voice. The last time it spoke to her there had been the same.... anger. The other voice she recalls hearing dimly across a veil of sleep, of drugged anguish.
'Oh.... she's doing well. As well as can be expected anyway. We managed to stabilise her system after the blood loss, but we feel the major damage was to her.... was psychological. Something like that would be a tremendous shock to anyone, of course. It was worse in this case because of.... ah....'
'Because of what?'
'The anaesthetic.... It was not entirely effective. Something in her system we could not account for. Unfortunate, really. We believe she was partly conscious throughout the operation.'
'Good God! You mean to tell me she was awake while you were killing her baby?'
'If you want to put it like that.... Unfortunate, really. Still, we could hardly expect....'
'You had all the time in the world to perform all the tests in the world to expect that very thing, Doctor! Did it escape your notice that she is a unique biological specimen? Did it also escape your notice that she is to stay alive.... at all costs?'
'Well.... no, of course. As I said earlier, most of the medical problems were easily resolved. The.... ah.... unusual thickness of the vascular layer of the endometrium caused the excessive haemorrhage, but we managed to compensate for that. A transplant would be difficult.... for obvious reasons, but we are well on the way to developing an adequate synthetic. As I said, the problems are mostly psychiatric. We believe she has willed herself into a catatonic trance.'
'Listen to me, Doctor. Forget the jargon. You are a man of medicine. She is a sick patient. You will make her better, and if you do not I will personally have you killed, and your family, and your friends, and your family's friends, and in short, everyone you have ever met.
'Do not fail me in this, Doctor.'
'We will do what we can, Mr. Welles.'
Welles. She knows that name, but somehow....
.... it escapes her.
He speaks to her again, and this time the anger is gone from his voice, and there is only a terrible sadness. She wants to reach out and comfort him, but something prevents her.
'I am sorry,' he says to her. 'Oh, Delenn, I wish.... there could have been....
'.... another way.
'I am sorry.'
She wants to say something, but the words she reaches for are soon gone. A moment later her consciousness recedes, and she is again lost in a world where all she can hear is a heart beating, slower and slower each time.
There is another who cannot hear his heart beating, for it does not beat any longer. He is dead, and has been dead for a thousand years, lost and alone in his self–imposed prison of darkness and fire. There are others he could talk to, there is a vast land stretching out for miles in all directions had he but the courage to seek it out, but he does not, and so he stays, still, quiet, dead.
Alone.
For a thousand years he has been alone, living always with the ghosts of his past and the spectres of his future. He talks to those long dead, to those he loved, those he betrayed, and those he killed.
He walks deeper into caverns and catacombs, and stops, noticing something wrong about the scene before him. It takes a mere moment to realise what it is. With a sad smile he stretches out his hands, and something rises from the ground at his feet. It is a small shrine, and a candle. With a thought he lights it, and he looks at the words carved on the rock. He cannot remember exactly what he wrote there on that day a thousand years ago, the last
