I do not own Babylon 5.

I would like feedback, and if you have any potential ideas for how this series can go, I would appreciate it as long as the ideas are mature. While this storyline is close to the canon of the series, this is an alternate universe set just around the time of the Earth-Minbari war.

Enjoy!

The Beginning of the Age of the Raiders.

Jeffrey Sinclair flinched at the brightness of the explosion as another fighter was destroyed at the hands of the Minbari as the aliens' fusion cannons sliced through the star fury's hull like a blowtorch through butter, which was the perfect description for how the Minbari weapons were able to penetrate through the fighter's nuclear reactor and destroy the fighter and kill its pilot.

Yet another death caused by this madness! Sinclair thought to himself angrily, his hatred for the Minbari warring with something else inside of him, an empathy and familiarity he had never experienced with any alien race before. Ever since this war had begun, Sinclair remembered he had not been surprised by the declaration as the Earth Alliance was forced to take up arms to try to prevent the more advanced alien race from sweeping through human-controlled space like a relentless juggernaut.

Sinclair had no idea where this feeling came from, but when another explosion which indicated another fighter had just been destroyed by the Minbari fighters occurred he realised he didn't care about these bastards. He had more important things to worry about.

"They're blocking off all routes of escape!"

"Targeting systems are dead; they've got their stealth on full-blast!" Sinclair ground his teeth together. "Turn your targeting systems off!" he yelled over the link with the other fighters.

"But sir, we need an accurate weapon's lock-," the voice of one of the pilots to his squadron protested Sinclair was sure was called Susan Ivanova, one of the newest high-fliers in EarthForce.

Or would be, if this war was kind enough to let her live, a dark voice inside of his head pointed out, but Sinclair pushed it aside even if he knew the voice had a point. Like all squadrons and fleets in EarthForce, Sinclair's people had been shot down more times than the veteran pilot would have wanted, and he received new people every day. Sinclair didn't grow attached to any of them.

What would be the point? Many of them would likely never return home. But he just wished the newbies realised not all of the tactics taught to them at the Academy as their training was rushed to get them to the frontline to stop the Minbari, even though it was a foolish thing to do would work. The reason why he and his squadron had survived so far was that he had told his pilots to switch off their targeting systems and just use their instincts. While it didn't work on the capital ships, it proved more than effective against Minbari fighters. Already Sinclair and some of the older members of the squadron had killed quite a few Minbari fighters, but right now there were simply too many of them, and each time Sinclair and the others tried to fight back, the Minbari would overpower them.

But they had no choice.

"Just do it!" Sinclair knew he was yelling, but he was tired of being questioned. "What does it matter? We're hardly making a dent. Just take your systems offline, and use your instincts."

While he had been speaking Sinclair swung his fighter around, spotting a few Minbari fighters in his peripheral vision, firing their weapons, long deadly beams of focused energy, and he opened fire. There wasn't any great finesse as he fired his weapons at the Minbari, and more than one blast missed. But he got lucky when four Minbari fighters were destroyed.

Sinclair spared a small, brief smile while the other pilots were less reserved and he listened to their cheers while he kept firing on the Minbari, managing to destroy two more fighters. It was hardly a replay of the Battle of Britain, but at this point the more Minbari who died, that meant more humans were saved from the Minbari's genocidal madness, but the cheers were quickly stopped when the Minbari retaliated. The blue fighters swarmed over the star fury squadron, and one look at his scanners showed the Minbari had managed to shoot down four more fighters.

Sinclair grimaced. "Let's get out of here!" he ordered, swinging his fury round.

"But we can still use your tactic," one fighter pilot protested. "We can't just run and hide!"

Sinclair shook his head. "Believe it or not, more than one EarthForce captain has done this before, and while they may have destroyed a few Minbari ships, they didn't do much good. Besides, there are too many of them. There are only seven of us left, and they're picking us off one by one."

"But-!" the protesting pilot tried to go on, but he didn't get very far as he was cut off by a dreadful scream as his fighter was destroyed. Sinclair closed his eyes.

"We have to go. There's a large gas giant close by. Hopefully, we can hide in its atmosphere and hopefully we could wait it out while we take stock of our casualties and come up with a plan to fight another day," Sinclair suggested. "Or we could come up with a plan to destroy the fighters."

It was a nightmare trip across to the gas giant while the star furies raced on maximum burn towards the gas giant. The Minbari had fallen back when they could easily have just shot them out of space with one hit. The star furies had no place to hide now they were out in the open, so the aliens wouldn't have had any trouble wiping the fighters out.

But the Minbari didn't treat the humans like that. Instead, their whole squadron fell back now the real excitement was beginning, and they used the opportunity to draw out their pleasure. While the ships of their squadron were kept back, two or three of their fighters would shoot forwards first and fired their weapons close to the human fighters while making sure they missed. But the beams of deadly green energy would come dangerously close to hitting the fighters, but they never did. Sinclair ground his teeth together, thinking of that time when he had been very young, and his parents took him on a rare visit to his relatives on Earth. While he had been there, he had visited a farm which had been overrun with rats.

Sinclair had watched as the farmers had gotten themselves a number of terriers and a ferret, and they had used the ferret to drive out the rats, who were then bitten into by the dogs. Although this scene was different and more terrifying since there was no place for him or his squadron to hide, Sinclair could not help but think back to that time when he had been a child.

Absently he wondered if this was a typical Minbari pastime when it came to war. Pilots and warriors hunting humans down, playing with them, taunting them with the hopelessness of their situation while they drew out the moment to make the whole experience as exciting as they could make it before putting their victim out of their misery.

Sickened by the possibility which he planned to bring to the attention of EarthForce command which would likely be taken down in note form and presented to the xeno-psychiatrists in EarthDome to compare with the information supplied by the Centauri on the Minbari, Sinclair momentarily pictured Minbari warriors by the generic description that had been passed through the EarthForce soldiers who'd somehow managed to survive the genocide of the Minbari and returned home to tell the tale of what they'd gone through, sitting around on their home planet drinking their form of refreshments, boasting about what they'd been doing to the humans.

"After I had killed off his platoon, I dragged him to a desert and then set him free with a flesh wound to the leg which slowed him down while he tried to escape. I chased him over two miles, he surprised me by how far he managed to get, and then I killed him."

Sinclair pushed the mental vision aside, sickened that any race would try such a thing, but as he thought about it, wasn't that what the Narn did to their own victims? What about the Centauri?

Thinking about the so-called former 'allies' of the Earth Alliance made Sinclair remember the events of the last few months with anger. While all the alien races who had opened friendly ties with the Alliance in the wake of the victory against the Dilgar had turned their backs within the first few months of the war, all of them echoing the Centauri's own dismissal who claimed the human race was doomed to be wiped out by the Minbari for "waking up the dragon," as Londo Mollari of the Republic had put it when he had told General Lefcourt and another EarthForce official they could not go near Minbari space in a battle fleet, and not expect retaliation, the only race to stand with the humans had been the Narns.

They had supplied the Alliance with arms and equipment, all of them derived from the equipment they'd salvaged from the Centauri during their war of liberation after the Centauri Republic had occupied their planet for a hundred years, and while the equipment had helped save lives it hadn't done any real good against the Minbari, and there were rumours the Narns had even been willing to help administrate negotiations between the Alliance and the Minbari, but if they were true or not, Sinclair had no idea since they were still fighting in a war.

But he guessed there had been something because he had noticed on the frontline of the war, the fighting had intensified. There had been more and more Minbari attacks, and a greater number of ships, and although EarthForce had done its best to put up a good fight, it was obvious they were losing badly.

Even the tactic derived from John Sheridan hadn't gotten them anywhere. In their desperation, EarthForce had mined asteroid fields with nukes, but the Minbari had learnt what had happened to the Black Star and they had no desire to let the same fate befall them. EarthForce had begun loading their ships and stray passing asteroids with nukes, so if the Minbari came close, they could detonate the bombs. While it had some degree of success, it hadn't been a lasting one.

For the last two years, the human race had found itself pushed further and further close to the line that separated life from extinction. By now much of Earth's territories were in the hands of the Minbari, and while many of the colonies were now evacuated there was no way of knowing if any of the humans on those planets had somehow managed to survive, but if they had EarthForce intelligence had not found any clues. Many people thought those colonists had died.

Personally, Sinclair hoped there were some survivors who had managed to dig themselves down, hiding in caves or even under the sea in whatever submarines they had found that had been left behind by oceanographers sent to those various Earth-type worlds to compare those alien seas to the ones on Earth to continue to fight back while they learnt the art of guerrilla warfare. Truthfully, it was easy warfare to learn, as much of guerrilla practices were based on improvisation in the face of any lack of equipment. But they had no way of finding out since the Minbari, like the Centauri, were extremely brutal in their thorough strangleholds on various systems.

Sinclair had no idea what possessed EarthForce to not bother to evacuate those planets in their entirety, and he guessed a lot of it was down to denial on the part of some of the EarthForce generals and colonels to see that the battles were lost before they had even begun.

But the good news was EarthDome and the President had ordered all colonies to be evacuated, with the colonists being packed inside whatever ship still had flight capability before they were sent deeper into human space towards Earth before the Minbari arrived. The good news was the Minbari sent scouting groups deeper into human space, but they didn't attack any of the colonies, but to discover the lay of the land as it was. That was why each attack was so devastating.

But recently there had been a terrifying change in the war.

The Narn and the Centauri had betrayed them. They were helping the Minbari in wiping out humanity. The Narns had even had the gall to apologise, but they said they needed new colonies and in any case, they were getting bits of technology from the Minbari to help them in their never-ending quest to get revenge on the Centauri.

The Centauri just wanted new colonies, but the fact both races had made deals with the Minbari to plunder what was left of the Earth Alliance put Sinclair in mind of vultures, and other parasites. The good news was both alien races were easier to fight than the Minbari. Yes, although the Centauri were more advanced, if there was one thing the EarthForce fleets had learnt in their battles against the Dilgar, it was how to fight with others on that level. Whatever technology was gleaned from the wreckage of Centauri ships was taken, but Sinclair wondered if any good would come from it.

The Minbari cruisers were still protected by their stealth, and despite their best efforts in fending off the Centauri and the Narns, Earth's resources were struggling to cope under the onslaught.

The Minbari were getting closer and closer to Earth. At the rate they were going, Sinclair estimated they would arrive at Earth within the next seven months. He doubted they would send battle fleets on ahead; the Minbari fleets were too busy trying to fight their way through EarthForce even with the help of their Narn and Centauri allies, who were getting everything they deserved.

Sinclair snapped back out of his thoughts when he flinched and he had to close his eyes and turn away from the flash as one of the Minbari fighters decided they'd had enough fun playing with their victims.

Fortunately, by that time the fighters had come towards the gravity well. The Minbari, seeing the clear change in tactics, stopped their game and started getting serious; Sinclair wished that wasn't the case, even with the fact they had suffered losses in the game, at least the Minbari had wanted to toy with them and keep them alive for the main event. Now their life expectancy was plummeting.

Sinclair desperately scanned the gravity well while he broadcasted a desperate tachyon burst to EarthForce to let them know what was going on, and the surrounding space near the gas giant for something they could make of their current situation while the Minbari were shooting them down. He noticed there was some strange spatial anomaly close to the gravity well, but he couldn't identify it properly. He frowned as he noticed that the tachyons seemed to be exciting the phenomenon which meant it wasn't some kind of fluke.

Checking his instruments, Sinclair also noticed that only himself and three others were left.

"Follow my lead," he ordered the other star furies. "There's some kind of anomaly near the giant, it might be enough to shield us from Minbari sensors while we work on another plan. It seems to be attracted to tachyons; I just broadcasted a burst of tachyons, and the anomaly became more noticeable."

"I think I see what you mean, Jeff," Mitchell observed.

"What do you think it is?" Susan asked.

Sinclair shook his head. "How should I know, but we're going there regardless. Try to zig-zag to dodge the Minbari fighters to stop them getting an idea of where we're going, I don't want them to get there before us."

"Roger that!"

Sinclair swung his fighter around and he caught sight of two Minbari fighters, and he opened fire instantly before he began shooting at random in all directions. He got lucky twice and destroyed two enemy fighters, but the rapid firing drove the Minbari away although he knew the Minbari would come back. The Minbari suddenly stopped firing at them and they turned around.

Sinclair watched them go, momentarily curious about why they were suddenly leaving. It occurred to him the Minbari's mother ship was calling them back because they had bigger fish to fry than a small cluster of fighters.

Once he was finished, making a mental note to do that again since it seemed to work although it wasn't the most effective tactic imaginable, Sinclair swung his star fury around and he quickly caught up with the others, only to see that they had seen his example and were following it although they didn't try to go after any of the Minbari fighters.

Sinclair pushed the fury on, pushing the engines close to their maximum burn, closer to the anomaly.

"There's nothing here, and yet my scanners are picking something up," Susan's voice was confused over the link.

"These are definitely the right coordinates," Sinclair said. "It's here okay. Hold on, " he added, remembering how tachyons seemed to act around the phenomenon. Once he triggered the burst, the anomaly appeared again.

"There is it," Sinclair declared.

"It matches nothing in our records," Susan pointed out.

"That is unsurprising," Sinclair said dryly before his voice rose in urgency, "Mitchell! Why are you going so close?"

"I'm just checking it-aarrgh!" Mitchell screamed in surprise.

"MITCHELL!" Sinclair yelled.

"Its….it's okay, Jeff. I'm okay. You'll never believe where I am," Mitchell's voice came back, startling Sinclair and Susan Ivanova that he was still alive even if they were worried they couldn't see him.

"What happened, where are you?"

"I….dunno, Jeff. I dunno where I am. It looks like I'm in some kinda….tunnel, and it looks like its branching off in a different direction, like a subway junction. You've gotta come in here!"

Sinclair sat back in his seat and thought, wondering if he had just been thrown into a parallel universe. Mitchell was still alive, and while his description of what he was seeing was vague enough, Sinclair wondered just what he had seen.

"Mitchell, can you come back?"

"What, why?"

Sinclair closed his eyes in exasperation. "Mitchell, I want to make sure you can get back from wherever you are, so then we know we can get out as well," he replied patiently while he bit down what he had actually planned to say which was "Don't question my orders, get back here."

"Good point."

Sinclair sighed with relief when he saw Mitchell's fighter coming out of whatever it was. "Are you okay, Mitchell?" Sinclair asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I'm getting my fighter to do a systems check, but everything looks okay right now."

"Good. But get your computer to do a quick scan of your body," Sinclair ordered. "When we go through ourselves, and then later pass this off to EarthForce, they're gonna want to know more details."

"Okay," Mitchell replied, and a few minutes later he was back. "Jeff, I've just done the scan. The computer says that I'm completely clean."

"Good," Sinclair mentally speculated he and the others would be put through a battery of tests to be sure. "Right, let's go in."

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Susan asked, her tone showing her concerns about the decision to enter this…whatever it was. "We don't know anything about it, and we've only got Starfuries, not a full IPX team."

Sinclair bit his tongue to stop himself from telling Ivanova to shut up. He had to investigate this. EarthForce regs were very clear, everything out of the ordinary was to be investigated and reported. It was standard procedure, and while they were at war, those regulations stood. "We have to," he said shortly, and he prepared to enter the anomaly. "Susan," he went on, knowing the younger woman would follow direct orders regardless. In any case, this was a kind of petty revenge. "I want you to follow right after me. Mitchell, you can cover the rear."

"Okay."

"Roger that," Mitchel's unhappy voice replied.

Sinclair triggered the engines. Propelled by the ion burn of the thrusters, the star furies entered the anomaly.

"Whoa!" Susan gasped as they entered.

Sinclair nodded in his helmet even though Susan couldn't see what he was doing in his fighter, but he agreed with her.

They were hovering in the mouth of a long orange tunnel, and as Mitchell had described there was what looked like a junction in a subway tunnel found in one of many cities of Earth. The walls seemed to be made of thick orange-brown gas, which glowed with light at different intervals.

"Where are we?" Susan asked the most important question of all.

"I don't know," Sinclair replied before he activated his scanners. "That's strange."

"What is?" Mitchell asked.

"I've just activated my scanners to see what's ahead, and I'm getting a good view ahead. The branch leading off to the right appears to be the longest of the tunnels, while the first one is the shortest," Sinclair commented.

"Which was are we going?" Susan asked.

Sinclair considered. "Let's go for the one on the right, I want to know how far this tunnel goes. Okay, let's go for a maximum burn, but activate computers to begin recording. I don't want Command to think this is a hoax."

"Gottcha."

The journey through the tunnel wasn't especially long. They were only inside it for a few minutes, but as they travelled through the corridor they came across another junction which they discovered a minute beforehand.

"Do we go down this one?"

"No," Sinclair responded without needing to really think about his reply. "We don't know where any of these tunnels go to, and I don't want us to get lost."

"Mm, good point."

As they travelled through the corridor, Sinclair noticed something about their velocity. While the fighter's engine burns were constant, it felt like their speed was much greater.

"Have you noticed the speed?" Mitchell asked.

"Yeah. There must be something about these corridors which makes them act like rapids in a river," Sinclair speculated while he took a look at the scanners. "Our acceleration is five times that of our maximum burn."

"Five?!"

"That's as far as the scanners can calculate," Sinclair said, wondering just what it was about these corridors which increased their speed, but the thing was if this wormhole, or whatever it was, provided a faster mode of travel, then they were effortlessly faster than hyperspace.

"Have you considered what these corridors are, sir?" Susan asked.

"No. They could be wormholes," Sinclair gave the question some thought, even though he had no idea if it was a wormhole at all.

"Wormholes? But from what we've learnt from the other races, no-one has ever discovered a wormhole before, never mind one which has junctions in it like an interstellar subway!"

Sinclair shrugged under his flight suit, but before he could reply Mitchell got there first. In a tone full of bitterness and anger, the other pilot spat, "What, the same aliens who betrayed us?! Ever since we made first contact with the Centauri and then with other races, we discovered that all races depended on hyperspace for space travel. No-one's bothered to experiment with anything since."

"Mitchell, that's enough," Sinclair agreed with the other man because it was well known to every student studying hyperspace mechanics the only way to travel through space was to use hyperspace, and while he agreed with Mitchell's anger, he didn't want it to make Mitchell hot-headed. Not now.

"But Jeff-!"

"No. I agree with what you're saying, but we are currently in an unknown situation which has the potential to turn everything we know about space travel on its head, and I can't let you cause trouble. That's an order!" Sinclair barked.

"Yes, sir," Mitchell said sulkily.

"I wonder how far this tunnel goes," Susan commented to break the tension. "We've come a long way already, but it would be greater to know just where we are in relation to our charts of normal space."

Sinclair agreed with her there. Whenever someone used hyperspace, they were able to navigate thanks to the existence of tachyon beacons. Here, there was no way of knowing where they were. And as they moved through the corridor, propelled by their engines and whatever property it was in the corridor which propelled them forward much more rapidly than they would have been in hyperspace or ordinary space, there were no landmarks, and as they passed through the corridors, seeing junctions turning and veering in all directions which further reminded Sinclair of subway tunnels, he did other checks.

He quickly saw that unlike in hyperspace, which felt the gravitational influences of planets and stars, there was nothing here. He also checked his scanners, just in time to see another junction veering off. "Wait, this one looks like its shorter than the others."

"You think we can get out of here?"

"Well, we got in through an anomaly, didn't we? That means there's always a way out," Sinclair pointed out philosophically.

"Guess you're right," Susan commented dryly, which made Sinclair chuckle before he turned his fighter in the direction of the tunnel junction. As the trio of fighters was turning, something occurred to Sinclair.

"Keep your weapon systems hot. We dunno what we're gonna find, so be ready for anything. Got it?"

"Definitely."

The new branch wasn't that long. The trio of fighters emerged out of the corridor as smoothly as passing through a doorway in a building or a space station, and they found themselves back in normal space.

All three pilots could not believe what they were seeing.

"Jeff, we're-." Mitchell tried to say, but he couldn't.

"I know, Mitchell. I know," Sinclair whispered.

The three fighters had emerged out into normal space in a familiar solar system.

"Sir….how are we gonna tell them?" Susan's voice was quiet as she looked out at the fleet of EarthForce ships.

Sinclair could not speak for a moment. "Guys, that system we were in before we were attacked….do you realise that was over 30 light-years away, and yet we're back at Earth in just five minutes? We might have found a way to defeat the Minbari!"

Just in time as well, he thought to himself as he looked out of the viewing port of his fighter at the blue jewel which was Earth, we need good news at this point.

At the same time, his fury received a transmission. It seemed that some of the EarthForce ships had detected them and was hailing them.

Sinclair was just about to take the call, but he paused for a moment as he struggled to work out what he was going to say. How do you report something like this, which had the potential to save them from a genocidal holocaust demanded by a supposedly civilised race?