A Call to Arms by Robert Sheckley

indicated a direction straight up. The only obvious way was through an open grate, too high to jump for. She found a couple of pipes set into the wall, climbed, then pulled herself into the grate.
    She was in an air duct, a square pipe that sloped upward at a steep angle. Setting her feet, she made her way through it, finding handholds, slithering snakelike, around one bend and then another, until at last she came to an egress that dropped her in a wholly unfamiliar area.
    Cautiously, she poked her head out. She was still in Down Below--that much was clear--in a place filled with battered garbage cans and discarded boxes. There seemed to be no one around. She pulled herself out. Then she looked around again--and froze.
    Someone was pressing a gun to the back of her head.
    Whoever could get behind her that way was good--very good. She was about to congratulate him on his stealth. But the man spoke first.
    “Good night,” Rolf said. And he coldcocked her with the gun butt.
     
    Coming out of unconsciousness was not what Dureena had expected. She was in a place that wasn’t at all like Babylon 5, didn’t seem to be in or on Babylon 5. She was lying on frozen ground, in a cold place plagued by high winds and swirling dust.
    But how could that be? Down Below had been steamy, sweaty, pungent with the odorous effluvia of its many inhabitants.
    Where was she?
    Dureena opened her eyes, blinked, and scrambled to her feet.
    She was on a gigantic tumbled landscape of bare, twisted rock and shining black solidified lava. She was near a cliff wall that rose high and sheer above her. Standing back, she could see broken walls and tumbled buildings where a city had once stood.
    Clouds roiled in the nighttime sky, and flashes of forked lightning lit up the scene in sepulchral flashes.
    It was a place she thought she remembered. “Oh, no!” Dureena gasped. “I can’t be back... I can’t...”
    “Can’t you?” a voice asked. She turned. A tall man in a uniform was smiling at her. Sheridan! She had memorized his face; she would know him anywhere! The detested Earther, author of all her woes! Her reaction was immediate, lethal. She launched herself at him, prepared to maim, kill, destroy this hated enemy whom she had never met, but knew very well.
    Her charge carried her right through him, and his image rippled as she came out the other side and rolled in the dirt.
    It had been nothing but an image, with nothing substantial about it.
    She turned to face it again, but now the image had changed. Instead of Sheridan, it was a Drakh, its hideous face grinning at her in a sneer of triumph.
    She tensed herself to charge again. But the Drakh was holding something in his hand, stretching it out toward her. In his open hand was a tiny Milky Way galaxy.
    As she watched, his fingers closed around it. The light from the galaxy briefly bled through his fingers, and then went dark.
    And then the image of the Drakh was gone. And a voice was speaking to her.
    “This is not your world, Dureena Nafeel. But it shared a common fate.”
    She turned, and found a cloaked young man standing behind her.
    “I am called Galen,” the man said. He held up his hand as she tensed, prepared to attack again. “When the time comes to choose your target, be sure to pick the right one. Because you will get only one shot.”
    She stared at him, trying to make sense of his words, trying to grasp the situation. Then the land shook beneath her and she was knocked to the ground.
    When she opened her eyes again, she was back on Babylon 5, in Down Below. Her hands were manacled. And there was a circle of faces around her.
     

Chapter 13
     
    Dureena took a moment to gather her wits about her, then slowly got to her feet. The circle moved back slightly to give her room. They looked like a hard-bitten bunch, clad in a great variety of gaudy and ragged clothes. Those present all seemed to be Humans, or of Human stock.
    A little back from them, and seated on a raised platform,