There were words in there, he was sure of it, even a conversation, but the language, the voices…. all these were beyond him. He felt like an ant trying to understand the words of angels. Falling silent, something touching what remained of his soul, he tried to tune in more clearly, working at the limits of his equipment. All thoughts of his mission left his mind. All he could think of was discovering the nature of this conversation.
He could pick up a little of one of the parties now. It seemed like countless voices speaking through one mouth. Or was it countless mouths speaking with one voice?
Everything stopped, and in one instant all the lights in his ship went out. He started, and began frantically trying to restore power.
Then he looked out at the scene before him.
There was a ship moving across the ecliptic, something so big and so vast it blocked out everything, space and light and stars and all. It glided through the planet's atmosphere, ignoring him utterly, an insect beneath the feet of giants.
Jack hardly dared to breathe, a wise move. As the alien ship moved forward a rent opened in the fabric of space, a vast jump point, bigger than anything he had ever imagined. The image of hyperspace beyond flickered with countless colours, very different from the usual red. Clouds of mist shimmered through the gap in space, and there were flickers of lightning.
Something was waiting in there, in hyperspace. Smaller than the vast alien ship, it was still huge, much bigger than Jack's diminutive shuttle. It looked slightly familiar, almost like a….
A castle?
The vast ship moved slowly into hyperspace, its every manoeuvre beautifully graceful. The gateway closed, and Jack was alone once more.
Alone in a dying ship above a dead world whose name he could not remember.
Fortunately, after a few hours of creative engineering with life support, a squadron of ships from the Narn fleet arrived and picked him up. Jack was so grateful to be rescued that he only had a few seconds to think up some suitably inventive lies.
* * *
After we joined the Alliance, affairs on Centauri Prime grew, not better, but slowly and steadily worse. With the death of Lord Kiro the riots had ended and the Shadow Criers fallen apart, but their legacies remained. There was widespread famine and hunger, the cost of the war and the reparations had almost bankrupted the Republic, and the costs of the repairs to the homeworld and to the regained colonies were almost impossible to meet. The Centarum eventually swallowed its pride and borrowed vast sums of money from the Alliance.
