Chapter Text
EAS Titans, Spring 2264
The message came through Earthforce Central, which was the first indication that someone had made a bureaucratic error.
Chen brought it to her on the bridge with the studied neutrality of someone delivering a routine communiqué, which it was not. The Office of the President of the Interstellar Alliance requests the pleasure of Captain Ivanova's company for dinner, 1930 hours, Portside Restaurant, Level 7. Standard format. Completely insane.
She read it, and gave a short laugh.
"Confirm the reservation," she said.
"Yes, Captain." A beat, the precise length of a silence that Chen wanted to fill but found herself incapable of doing so, before she went back to her station.
Earthforce Central called forty minutes later with what she was informed were several urgent clarifying questions. She didn't take the call. She was in the middle of a nav review and John Sheridan wanting to have dinner did not constitute a diplomatic incident regardless of what Earthforce Central's protocol office thought about it.
The Titans did not lose its mind. The Titans had been watching her for two years. The Titans' reaction, insofar as she was aware of it, was the collective expression of a crew that had come to believe that their captain was one of the more superior officers in Earthforce and had just been given confirmation. This was not surprise. This was satisfaction.
Earthforce Central messaged again at 1600.
She didn't take that one either.
The restaurant was better than it had any right to be, given the station. She filed this under someone in Sheridan's advance team has good taste and, when John ordered the beef without looking at the menu, revised it to John Sheridan has good taste and also knows people. She ordered the same, assuming he had good reason to order beef light years away from the nearest cattle ranch.
He was after something. She'd known it from the moment the message came through; someone had clearly checked the Titans' schedule with deliberate intent. John Sheridan had not reached the presidency by being a poor actor, but she had known him for a long time.
She was not going to make it easy for him.
"The Ancile's new CO," he was saying. "Have you met her? Quinn. She came up through the Io corridor."
"Briefly. At the Proxima systems review. She asked the right questions."
"That's a high bar from you."
"It's an accurate description."
He smiled. They were two glasses of wine in and the beef had been excellent and she had genuinely missed him - the version of John Sheridan that had not only defeated the Shadows, overthrown tyrannical governments and set up galaxy-spanning alliances, but the one that drank orange juice and made speeches to empty C in Cs and came to see his XO off the station for no other reason than he cared. She saw him rarely enough now that she appreciated it when she got it.
She was also watching him work up to something and finding it mildly entertaining.
"You seem well," he said.
There it was.
"I am well," she said. "The Titans is a good ship."
"It suits you."
"Command generally does."
"That's not what I meant." He said it without pressure, the tone of someone making an observation rather than pressing a point. He looked at her across the table with a look she recognised, one that had been seeing her clearly during the war, when she was leaving and ever since, that she trusted because he'd earned it and she still had no intention of giving anything to tonight. "You look different. Better. Since the last time I saw you."
"When was the last time we saw each other, anyway?"
"Umm. Babylon Accords?"
"I've had nearly a year of no major disasters, no wars, no advanced beings trying to kill me. The worst thing that has happened is I have a lieutenant with a creative understanding of approach vectors and a tempermental port side jump engine. It's straightforward. It makes a difference."
She looked at him.
He looked back with the expression of someone who was fond of her and also not an idiot, and who was asking because he wanted to know she was alright, in the specific register of someone who had been worrying about her in a low-level way for longer than he was going to admit.
"Is it just the ship?"
That got a laugh from her.
"The ship is a significant variable," she said. "Two years of a functional command, a crew that's mature, work that uses all of it." She picked up her wine. "Sleep helps too."
He smiled. Took the answer. She couldn't tell if he'd meant more by the question or not, and found she didn't particularly want to find out.
She felt, quietly, rather pleased with herself.
"Tell me more about your crew," he said, pivoting with the grace of someone who knew when to change course.
"The crew is excellent." She meant it. "Chen has turned into someone I'd go to war with. Ramirez has stopped second-guessing his own nav calculations. Even Morrison's approach vectors are improving, which at one point I would not have bet on."
"Morrison." Something flickered in his expression. "He was on the Ancile before, wasn't he?"
"He was." She considered. "Quinn is welcome to him back when I'm done."
He laughed, deep and genuine. She felt the warmth of it, the specific register of being in a room with someone you'd been through things with and who laughed at your jokes. She'd missed that.
"What's next?" he said, with the lightness of a completely unrelated question.
She looked at him mildly.
"For Morrison?"
"For you."
"The tour runs another couple of months. Nearly weeks. After that, the flag board will have opinions."
"And you?"
"I'll have opinions about their opinions." She tilted her head slightly. "Are you asking whether I want a star, John? Because the answer is yes, obviously, and I don't think that's what you're actually asking."
"It's part of what I'm asking." He leaned forward slightly. "The whole shape of it. After the board."
She considered him for a moment.
"Flag board," she said. "One star, assuming the board agrees with my assessment of my own competence, which I'm cautiously optimistic about. Then Command and Staff College." A slight pause, something she was turning over. "Which is what Earthforce will make me do before it lets me do anything interesting again."
"You don't sound entirely resigned to it."
"I'm entirely resigned to it." A beat. "Ten months on Earth. Regular hours. I've been told there are things called weekends." She said it in the tone of someone reporting information received from a foreign culture. "I haven't spent that long on a planet in -", she calculates " - nearly a decade. I'll manage."
He looked at her with the expression of someone who had just filed something.
She let him file it. The I'll manage had landed exactly as she'd intended; dry, pragmatic, a minor inconvenience on the way to something better. She was aware, privately, that it was also doing something else, carrying a weight she wasn't going to examine across a dinner table. Ten months in one place. Regular hours. The kind of time she hadn't had in years, that she'd never had with anything worth having. She was not going to think about this in front of John Sheridan.
She filed it herself, under to be determined, and moved on.
"After college," she continued, "what I want versus what Earthforce will give me? something with scope. Ship command again if the timing works, a fleet eventually. Something operational." She paused. "I'm not a staff officer. I know what the career track says about ticking boxes, and I'll tick the boxes, but I've watched good commanders turn into good administrators and I know which one I am."
"Nobody who knows you thinks you're the second one."
"Earthforce HR has views."
"Earthforce HR is frequently wrong."
She smiled slightly. "I'll tell them you said so."
"Please don't." He refilled her glass. Then, with the tone of someone asking a practical question: "And if the board wants a staff posting first? Before a ship, or fleet?"
She looked at him.
"Then I do the staff posting," she said.
"You sound very calm about that."
"I am very calm about that." She picked up her wine. "I have given this considerable thought, John. There is a version of the next few years where Earthforce decides that what I need before they give me a battle group or fleet command is two years at Joint Operations Planning in Geneva, and I have made my peace with it."
"Joint Operations Planning," he repeated.
"Committees," she said. "Documents about documents. Meetings to discuss the meetings. The full institutional experience." She said it with the tone of someone describing a root canal; unpleasant, finite, survivable. "I will go to Geneva. I will sit in the rooms. I will produce the documents. I will not set anything on fire." A beat. "Probably."
"Probably."
"I'm giving myself some margin." She set her glass down. "Two years, tick the box, and then something worth doing. That's the transaction. I understand the transaction. I'm not going to enjoy it but I don't have to enjoy it, I just have to do it without catastrophically alienating anyone important."
"You think that's likely?"
"Not catastrophically alienating anyone?"
He snorted. "The Geneva posting?"
"I think it's the obvious move," she said. "I've never done staff work at that level. The board will want to see it." She paused. "I have already identified which of the Geneva postings is least likely to make me lose the will to live. I'm being proactive about it."
He nodded slowly. Then, apparently idly:
"Carthage. How did that actually go? I saw the debrief."
She looked at him.
"You read the Carthage debrief."
"Delenn mentioned it. And I like to keep my hand in"
Of course she did. "It went well," she said. "From my perspective."
"And from Earthforce's perspective?"
"From Earthforce's perspective it went well right up until it didn't," A beat. "I'm told my after action report generated considerable discussion."
"Walk me through it."
She considered him for a moment. Then set her glass down.
"The scenario was a hostile incursion into the Proxima corridor. Standard threat parameters, unknown aggressor, conventional force profile. Blue force had a battle group, full sensor coverage, home advantage." She paused. "I had the Titans, two Omegas, a Hyperion, and a Nova that had seen better days."
"Red force."
"Red force." The corner of her mouth went. "I think the expectation was that we'd provide a credible threat, blue force would execute standard interdiction protocol, and everyone would go home with their assumptions intact."
"That's not what happened."
"The first thing I did was split the formation and go to minimal communications. No centralised command signal. Each vessel operating on a pre-agreed dispersal pattern with conditional triggers rather than direct orders, subordinates empowered to act on intent rather than waiting for instruction." She picked up her wine. "Hell, Nelson's captains at Trafalgar understood their admiral's mind well enough to act without orders. The Germans called the same principle Auftragstaktik, the Anla'shok use a version of it, so do the Minbari military in certain engagement types. It's not a new idea. But it's not in current Earthforce fleet doctrine, and blue force spent the first six hours looking for my command node because that's the play, find it, take it out, the formation collapses." A pause. "There was no command node to find." She was openingly smiling now.
"And then?"
"And then I used the jump points." The specific satisfaction of something that had worked exactly as intended. "There's a geometry to how Minbari captains use hyperspace entry and exit in engagements. Not as transit, as tactical positioning. You can bracket a formation if you know what you're doing and you accept the navigation risk. Blue force was positioned to defend the Proxima approach vector. I came out of jump on their flank and rear simultaneously." She paused. "I also detached the Starfuries entirely from the capital ship formation and ran them as an independent harassment element. Standard doctrine has them on escort and point defence, tied to the formation, reactive. Mine weren't. Blue force's fighter screen was deployed to counter a threat that never materialised where they were looking for it."
"With five vessels total."
"With five vessels. The umpires intervened at that point." She said it with the tone of someone describing a minor bureaucratic inconvenience. "The exercise was suspended while the senior umpire had a conversation with the blue force commander. When it resumed I'd been given new operational constraints."
"Did you still win?"
She looked at him.
"The constraints made it less interesting," she said.
He laughed.
"I should say," she added, "that I had considerable help. Commander Vasic on the Ankusha is an absolute pirate - he ran the detached Starfury element. Completely instinctive feel for operating as one enormous pain in the ass." A beat, dry as dust. "He will not go far in Earthforce."
John looked at her.
She looked back with the expression of someone making a straightforward career assessment.
"The debrief was not popular," she said. "Which I understand. But we know Minbari ships are hard to hit. We don't always know why the tactical geometry works the way it does at the level of the assumptions that generate it. The Centauri will sacrifice a tactically valueless position to protect something with political significance because they don't separate those two categories the way we do. The Narn calculate acceptable losses differently. These things matter." She picked up her wine. "Anyway. The flag officers were constructive about it. Mostly. I was be appropriately receptive and we will all learn something."
She heard herself.
Looked at him.
He had the filing face. The very specific version of it he'd had intermittently all evening, the one she'd been cataloguing and not entirely understanding.
"John," she said.
"Susan."
"What are you actually thinking?"
"I'm having dinner," he said, with the serenity of someone having dinner.
She looked at him for a long moment. He looked back with the expression of someone who had somewhere to be after this conversation and it was not going to involve telling her anything further tonight.
"You," she said, "are extremely irritating."
"You've mentioned that."
She picked up her wine. He picked up his. The moment settled.
She thought about Geneva. The committees, the documents, the meetings about meetings. The transaction she'd made her peace with.
She thought about Carthage. The jump point geometry working exactly as the mathematics said it would. Vasic's starfuries appearing from entirely the wrong direction at entirely the right moment.
She filed it under John being John and moved on.
"With the caveat that the galaxy cooperates," she said, "which historically it hasn't." She turned the glass in her hand. "I stopped planning past the next eighteen months somewhere around the war. It seemed like better use of the energy."
"And now?"
She was quiet for a moment. Not evasive - genuinely thinking about it. He watched her do it.
"Now the Titans," she said. "After that I want something that uses all of it. Not just the parts that fit on a standard deployment." A pause. "I'll know it when I see it."
"You have a face," she said.
"I'm having dinner."
"You have the face you have when something goes in the useful column."
"All of this is useful," he said. "You're interesting to talk to."
She looked at him with the flat patience of someone who had known him too long for that. He smiled into his wine.
They talked for another hour. The conversation went where good conversations went between people who knew each other well, and she watched him listen with the attention of someone who was genuinely interested and also, she suspected, still quietly filing. She let him file. She'd given him enough and not too much and she was comfortable with the calibration.
The plates had been cleared for a while and the second bottle was mostly gone when he said, with the tone of someone following a thought rather than making a point:
"Marcus is on Orion VII at the moment. Ranger posting. Delenn sent him there to head up the mission there."
The heat in her face arrived arrived before she could do anything about it. The involuntary, two-bottles-of-wine version of it: Orion VII, the eastern reach, cold posting, he complained about the food exactly once and then found something in it to be interested in. The knowing that lived in the body rather than the head and had apparently decided that right now, here, across a dinner table from John Sheridan, was an excellent time to make itself known.
She thought about how well the earlier part of the evening had gone. The deflection, the yes I am - all of it clean, all of it exactly calibrated, nothing given that she hadn't meant to give. She had come into this dinner knowing he was fishing and she had been, quietly, rather pleased with herself.
And then.
"I -"
I know, she thought. I know so thoroughly that it is genuinely impressive that you think you're telling me something.
She had been about to say I know. She picked up her wine instead.
John continued "He's doing well. Better than - for a while after -" A pause. "I don't know if you two have ever talked since -"
He saw her face and stopped, looking at her with the expression of someone who had just stepped on something he hadn't seen and was now being very careful about where he put his feet.
"I'm sorry," he said. "That was - I didn't mean to -"
"It's fine," she said.
"Susan -"
"It's fine, John." Level. Not cold, he didn't deserve cold, but clear. The specific register of this subject is closed and we are both going to be comfortable with that.
A moment.
"Of course," he said quietly. And left it there.
She picked up her wine. He picked up his.
"Morrison," he said, after a beat. "The approach vectors. You said there was an incident near the Io marker."
She let the breath out slowly.
"On a scale," she said, "of technically legal to what were you thinking -"
He laughed - the real one. She told him about Morrison, and it was extensive and genuinely funny, and the evening ended warmly, and she did not think about the warmth that was still quietly there.
She thought about it constantly.
Later that evening
He sat with the second glass of bourbon he'd poured himself, which he felt he needed, and thought.
She'd flushed.
He hadn't meant to land it quite like that. He'd been following a genuine thought, Delenn had mentioned the Orion VII posting, it was relevant to the outer sectors work they'd been discussing, it had been at the back of his mind all evening, and he'd said the name and watched the colour rise before she'd looked down at her glass and then looked back up completely steady.
He felt slightly guilty about it. Not enough to wish he hadn't; he'd learned something and if she was going to come to Tuzanor she'd have to deal with it, with him eventually, but enough to sit with.
She'd been managing herself with considerable precision all evening. The whole dinner: the crew talk, the career talk, the deflection, the I am well, all of it delivered with the careful calibration of someone who knew exactly how much they were giving. And then Marcus's name, at the end of a long evening two bottles in, and the half second before she recovered.
He understood. MedLab had been - he didn't know the full shape of it, he'd only seen the edges, but he'd seen enough. And then the Accords signing, that brief exchange in the garden that he'd clocked without being able to read, and apparently nothing since. Two years. He should have known better than to land it without warning.
I don't know if you two have ever talked since -
He hadn't finished the sentence. He hadn't needed to. Her face had finished it for him.
Unfinished chapter, he thought. She'd got somewhere genuinely good - the I am well had been real, the most real thing she'd given him all evening, and there was still this. The old thing sitting somewhere she hadn't finished with. He understood that about people. The heart kept its own accounts independently of everything else.
He wasn't going to push on it. The it's fine had been delivered in the specific tone that ended subjects permanently, and he respected that.
He thought about the rest of it.
She was well. The substantial, real version of well, not just the competence of someone doing a good job, but something settled underneath. Whatever had happened had got somewhere the work alone couldn't reach. He'd been watching her all evening and the quality of it was unmistakable. He didn't know what, and she wasn't going to tell him, and that was fine. It was enough.
He thought about the role.
The role was real. The Alliance genuinely needed someone with her profile - someone who understood Earthforce from the inside out and the ISA from years on Babylon 5, who could operate in both registers without losing authority in either. It hadn't technically been invented it to suit her. But he'd known for a while that she was the right person, and tonight had confirmed it. The way she'd talked about what came next, the scope, the all of it, the I'll know it when I see it. She was going to know it when she saw it.
He thought about the sequencing. The tour had another couple of months. Then the flag board, then staff college, ten months on Earth, which she was going to find stranger and more interesting than she expected, and he was not going to examine too closely why he thought that. Then the attaché posting. He needed to talk to Delenn about the approach to Earthforce - there were two generals and a handful of politicians who'd need convincing and at least one who'd be a problem and he had thoughts about the order but the direction was clear.
He was ready to move.
He picked up his link.
Put it down.
It was late. She would be in her evening meditation. He was not going to interrupt her evening reading because he'd had dinner and arrived at a conclusion she'd probably reached two months ago.
He picked the link back up.
She answered on the second tone.
"John." The warmth of it, even across the link. "How was dinner?"
"Informative," he said.
A pause that contained considerable composure.
"Tell me," she said.
He told her.