Too many sights, too much of such things. Michael Garibaldi took a cup of coffee from one of the aid workers who passed the desk and leaned on his arm, stared out across the docks and tried to rub the ache from his eyes. The coffee tasted like disinfectant, just like everything here smelled like it, as it was in their pores, their noses---everywhere! The troops stayed on guard, keeping this little area of the dock safe. Someone had been stabbed in Alpha Barracks. No one could account for the weapon. They thought that it had come from the kitchen of one of the shuttered restaurants on dockside, a piece of cutlery unthinkingly left behind, by someone who'd never realized the situation. He found himself exhausted beyond all common sense. He had no answers: station police could not find the offender in the lines of refugees which still wended their way out there across the docks, inching along to housing desks.
A touch descended on his shoulder. He turned an aching neck, blinked up at his brother. Sergio Garibaldi settled in the vacant chair next to him, hand still on his shoulder. Elder brother. Sergio was in alterday central command. It was alterday now, Michael realized muzzily. The wake-sleep worlds in which they seldom met on duty had gotten lapped in the confusion.
"Go home," Sergio said gently. "My turn, if one of us has to be here. I promised Lise I'd send you home. She sounded upset."
"All right," he agreed, but he failed to move, lacking the volition or the energy. Sergio's hand tightened, fell away. 
"I saw the monitors," Sergio said. "I know what we've got here."
Michael tightened his lips against a sudden rush of nausea, staring straight before him, not at refugees, but at infinity, at the future, at the undoing of what had always been stable and sure. Babylon 5. Theirs, his and Lise's, his and Sergio's. The Fleet took license on itself to do this to them and there was nothing they could do to stop it, because the refugees were poured in too suddenly, and they had no alternatives ready. "I've seen people shot down," he said. "I didn't do anything. I couldn't. Couldn't fight the military. Dissent---would have caused a riot. It would have taken all of us under. But they shot people for breaking a line."
"Michael, get out of here. It's my problem now. We'll work something out."
"We have no recourse. Only the Terradyne agents; and we don't need them involved. Don't let them into this."
"We'll handle it, Sergio said. "There are limits; even the Fleet understands them. They can't jeopardize Babylon 5 and survive. Whatever else they do, they won't risk us."
"But they have," Michael said. He focused his eyes on the lines across the docks, then turned a glance on his brother, on a face the image of his own with five years added to it. "We've gotten something I'm not sure we can ever digest."
"So when they shut down the Barrier Stars. We managed."
"Two stations----six thousand people reach us out of what? Fifty? Sixty thousand?"
"In Alliance hands, I'd guess." Sergio muttered. "Or dead with Asgard; no knowing what casualties there. Or maybe someone got out in freighters, went elsewhere." he leaned back in the chair, his face settled into morose lines. "Father's likely asleep. Mother too, I hope. I stopped by the apartment before I came. Father says it was crazy for you to come here; I said I was crazy too and I could probably clean up what you didn't get to. He didn't say anything. But he's worried---Get back on Lise. She's been working the other side of this chaos, passing papers on the refugee merchant kings. She's been asking questions of her own. Michael, I think you should get home."
"New Orleans." Apprehension hit through to him. "She's hunting rumors."
"She went home. She was tired or upset; I don't know. She just said she wanted you to get home when you could."
"Something's come in." He pushed himself to his feet, gathered up his papers, realized what he was doing, pushed them at Sergio and left hastily, past the guardpoint, into the chaos of the dock on the other side of the passage which divided man station from quarantine. Native labor scurried out of his way, furred, skulking forms more alien by reason by reason of the breather-masks they wore outside their maintenance tunnels: they were moving equipage and cargo and belongings in frantic haste----shrieked and shouted among themselves in insane counterpoint to the commands of human overseers.
He took the lift over to green, walked the corridor into their own residence area, and even this was littered with displaced belongings in boxes, a security guard dozing at his post among them. They were all overshift, particularly security. Michael passed him, turned a face to a belated and embarrassed challenge, walked to the door of the apartment.
He keyed it open, saw with relief the lights on, heard the familiar rattle of plastic in the kitchen.
"Lise?" He walked in. She was watching the oven, her back to him. She didn't turn. He stopped, sensing disaster, another world amiss.
The timer went off. She removed the plate from the oven, set it on the counter, turned, managed composure to look at him. He waited, hurting for her, and after a moment came and took in her arms. She gave a short sigh. "They're gone," she said. And a moment later another short gasp and a release. "Blown with Asgard. New Orleans's gone, with everyone aboard. No possible survivors. Krishna saw her go; they couldn't get undocked----all those people trying to get aboard. Fire broke out. And that part of the station went, that's all. Exploded, blew the nose shell off."
Fifty-six aboard. Father, mother, cousins, remoter relatives. A world unto itself, New Orleans. He had his own, however damaged. He had a family. Hers was dead.
She said nothing more, no word of grief for her loss or of relief to have been spared, to have stayed behind from the voyage. She gave a few more convulsive breaths, hugged him, turned, dry-eyed, to put a second dinner in the nanowave oven.
She sat down, ate, went through all the normal motions. He forced his own meal down, still with a disinfectant taint in his mouth, reckoning it clung all about him. He succeeded finally in catching her eyes looking at him. They were as stark as those of the refugees. He found nothing to say. He got up, walked around the table and hugged her from behind.
Her hands covered his. "I'm all right."
"I wish you'd called me."
She let go of his hands and stood up, touched his arm, a weary gesture. Looked at him suddenly, directly, with that same dark tiredness. "There's one of us left,' she said. He blinked, perplexed, realized that she meant the Gwents. New Orleans's folk. Merchanter kings owned names as stationers had a home. She was Gwent; that meant something he knew he didn't understand, in the months they had been together. Revenge was a merchant king commodity; he knew that----among folk where name alone was a property and reputation went with it.
"I want a child," she said.
He stared at her, struck with the darkness in her eyes. He loved her. She'd walked into his life off a merchant king ship and decided to give station life a try, though she still spoke of her ship. Four months. For the first time in their being together he had no desire for her, not with that look and New Orleans's death and her reasons for revenge. He said nothing. They had agreed there would be no children until she knew for certain whether she could bear to stay. What she offered him might be that agreement. It might be something else. It was not the time to talk about it, not now, with insanity all about them. He just gathered her against him, walked with her to the bedroom, held her through the long dark hours. She made no demands and he asked no questions.
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"No," the man at the operations desk said, without looking this time at the printout; and then with a weary impulse toward humanity: "Wait. I'll do another search. Maybe it wasn't posted with that spelling. Ben Breeze waited, sick with terror, ad despair hung all about this final, forlorn assembly of refugees which refused to leave the desks on dockside: families and parts of families, who hunted relatives, who waited on word. There were twenty-seven of them on the benches near the desk, counting children; he had counted. They had gone from station mainday into alterday, and another shift of operators at the desk which was station's one extension of humanity toward them, and there was nothing more coming out of comp but what had been there earlier.
He waited. The operator keyed through time after time. There was nothing; he knew that there was nothing, by the look the man turned toward him. Of a sudden he was sorry for the operation too, who had to sit out here obtaining nothing, knowing there was no hope, surrounded by the grieving relatives, with armed guards stationed near the desk in case. Breeze sat down again, next to the family who had lost a son in the confusion.
It was the same story for each. They had loaded in panic, the guards more concerned for getting themselves onto the ships than for keeping order and getting others on. It was their own fault; no use denying that. The mob had hit the docks, men forcing their way aboard who had no passes allotted to those critical personnel meant for evacuation. The guards had fired in panic, unsure of attackers and legitimate passengers. Station Olympia 6 had died in riot. Those in the process of loading had been hurried aboard the nearest ship at the last, doors had been sealed as soon as the counters reached capacity. Mag and Tap should've been aboard before him. He'd stayed, trying to keep order at his assigned post. Most of the ships had gotten sealed in time. It was Tycho the mob had gotten wide open. Tycho where the drugs had run out, where the pressure of lives more than the systems could bear had broken everything down and a shock-crazed mob had run amok. New Orleans had been bad enough; he had gotten out well before the wave the guards had had to chop down. And he had trusted that Mag and Tap had made it into Rita. The passenger manifest had said that they were on Rita, at least what printout they had finally gotten in the tumult after launch.
But neither of them had gotten off at Babylon 5; they had not come off the ship. No one of those critical enough to be taken to station hospital matched their descriptions. They couldn't be impressed by Horvath; Mag had no skills Horvath would need, and Tag----somewhere the records were wrong. He had believed the passenger list, had had to believe it, because there were too many of them that ship's com could pass direct messages. They had voyaged in silence, Mag and Tap had not gotten off Rita. Had never been there.
"They were wrong to throw them out in space," the woman near him moaned. "They didn't identify them He's gone, he's gone, he must've been on the Tycho."I
Another man was at the desk again, attempting to check, insisting that Horvath's ID of impressed civilians wasn't a lie; and the operator was patiently running another search, comparing descriptions, negative again.
"He was there," the man shouted at the operator. "He was on the list and he didn't get off, and he was there." The man was crying. Winters sat numb.
On New Orleans, they had read the passenger list and asked for IDs. Few had had them. People had answered to names which could not possibly be theirs. Some answered to two, to get the rations, if they were not caught at it. He had been afraid then, with a deep and sickly fear; but a lot of people were on the wrong ships, and one of them had realized the situation on Tycho. He had been sure they were aboard.
Unless they'd gotten word and gotten off to go look for him. Unless they'd done something so miserably, horribly stupid, out of fear, for love.
Tears began to roll down his face. It was not the likes of Mag and Tap who could have gotten onto Tycho, who could have forced their way among men armed with guns and knives and lengths of pipe. He didn't reckon them among the dead of that ship. It was rather that they were still on Olympia 6, where Alliance ruled now. And he was here; and there was no way back.
He rose at last and accepted it. He was the first to leave. He went to the quarters which were assigned him; the barracks for single men, who were many of them young, and probably many of them under phony IDs, and not the techs and other personnel they were supposed to be. He found an unoccupied cot and gathered up the kit the supervisor provided each man. He bathed a second time (no bathing seemed like enough) and walked back among the rows of sleeping, exhausted men, and lay down.
There was brainwipe for those prisoner who had been high enough to be valuable and opinionated. Mag, he though, O Mag, and their son, if he were alive....to be reared by a shadow of Mag, who fought the approved thoughts and disputed nothing, liable to Adjustment because she'd been his wife. It was not even sure that they would let her keep Tap. There were state nurseries, which turned out Alliance's soldiers and workers.
He contemplated suicide. Some had chosen that rather than board the ships for some strange place, a station which was not theirs. That solution was not in his nature. He lay still and stared at the metal ceiling, in the near dark, and survived, which had done so far, middle-aged, alone and utterly empty.
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