Read To Dream in the City of Sorrows for Free Online Page B

I’m going out, I’m taking you bastards with me. Target main cruiser. Set for full-velocity ram. Afterburners on my mark ... Mark!”
    Sinclair was thrown back in his seat, his craft hurtling toward a collision with the Minbari cruiser. Ten, nine, eight, seven ...
    Metal fiber ropes bit into Sinclair’s wrists and legs. He was racked with almost unbearable pain. Just beyond the rim of light, he could see moving shadowy shapes, humanoid, robed. Minbari.
    “Who are you?” Sinclair could barely force the words out. “Why are you doing this?”
    Neroon stepped out of the shadows. “You stand accused of the death of thirty-three Minbari warriors. How do you plead? Answer the court!”
    “It was your war,” Sinclair tried to shout, but again could barely croak out a whisper. “I was defending my planet. Defending the survival of Humanity. It was combat–“
    “You stand accused,” Neroon thundered, “of killing our leader Dukhat. How do you plead?”
    “I wasn’t even there when our two peoples met for the first time. It was a tragic misunderstanding that caused Dukhat’s death. And for that you tried to exterminate an entire species of sentient beings!”
    “And was it a misunderstanding,” Neroon shouted over him, “when you conspired to assassinate the new Chosen One? How do you plead?”
    “I had nothing to do with that!”
    Neroon turned away. “The council will render its verdict.”
    Out of the shadows stepped other Minbari. He recognized some of them. Jenimer. Rathenn. Delenn.
    “Sentence him as he would be sentenced on Earth,” said a voice that Sinclair did not recognize. “Death of personality.”
    Sinclair was no longer bound. He was standing in the center of the area of light. Rathenn walked over to him, held up the Triluminary. The stone at its center glowed. There was a mirror to his right. Sinclair looked into the mirror – and a Minbari stared back at him from out of the mirror.
    He turned back around, intent on grabbing Rathenn and throttling him if necessary to find out what was happening. But the Minbari were gone. Every member of his squadron was standing there, looking at him accusingly. Bill Mitchell stepped forward. “Why are you doing this?”
    Sinclair shot upright in his bed, drenched in sweat, his heart pounding furiously, his breathing labored. He sat there, a long time it seemed, until his heartbeat and breathing returned to normal.
    Damn it, he thought. The dreams shouldn’t still shake him that much. He had been reliving the Battle of the Line in his nightmares for eleven years now. True, they had been changing in the last year, but they were still only dreams, weren’t they?
    For the first ten years, the battle itself dominated the nightmares. The events following his attempt to ram the Minbari cruiser with his Starfury, the 24 hours he could not remember, appeared in his dreams only as vague but sinister flashes of light, shadow, and sound, images he could not completely recall upon waking.
    Then two men had come to Babylon 5, agents perhaps of his own government, or from some independent group with connections in the government. He was never able to determine which it was. They had come to try to prove his loss of memory was a sham, and that he was in fact colluding with the Minbari. They had hooked him up to a machine that had forced memories of the missing 24 hours back into his conscious awareness; memories of the capture, torture, interrogation, and mind-wipe he had suffered at the hands of the Minbari. These memories had afterward joined his repertoire of nightmares, slowly gaining equal prominence with his dreams of the battle.
    When he had been recalled from Babylon 5 to Earth and summoned to President Clark’s office, to meet with Rathenn and be offered the position of Earth’s ambassador to Minbar, Rathenn had produced a Triluminary and claimed it would restore the rest of Sinclair’s memory about those 24 hours. The tiny alien device seemed to confirm