Season 3, Episode 3: In the Walls of Eryx

by Simon-F. Laflamme

Dubbed « Hessius’s Folly » by the Centauri, Quadrant 93 is a world of ruins rumored to occult fable riches, located in a tumultuous region of hyperspace. It is also a place from which no one returns, and Captain Carlson is persuaded it is the resting place of his and Ta’Ren’s missing friend, the Techno-Mage Enoch. After a brief encounter with a hostile crew of stranded Drazi privateers, the Human and the Narn reach the shore of an ocean of Shadow-stuff, where they are waylaid by the degenerate descendants of the original Centauri explorers. The timely intervention of the fallen Minbari Ranger Lennier allows them to retreat to the Ruins of Iscolas, the ancient fabled city of Quadrant 93. Lennier tells them how, in a quest for penance, he was tricked into coming to Quadrant 93 by the “man in-between”, the oracle, of the dark city of Tenothk: a Human named Christopher Spears. That night, Carlson and Ta’Ren are visited by a ghostly incarnation of Enoch, who explains how, after his defeat on Babylon 5, the Shadow technology used by his Technomancy instinctively led him to Iscolas to be recycled in its oceans, where his body and ship now lie. Enoch’s brush with death also had the fortunate consequence of “rebooting” his memory, and the Techno-Mage confirms that what he, Carlson, and Ta’Ren saw in the Virtual Reality Net regarding Babylon 3 is true. After his abduction from Babylon 3, Enoch remembers being put in a Shadow Ship by a man named Christopher Spears. The predicament of Spears’ victims becomes explicit: Quadrant 93 is a giant Prisoner’s Dilemma built by the Shadows to favor their ideology: only the opening of two simultaneous jump points will allow one to reach hyperspace; only the cunning and the ruthless will escape Quadrant 93 by sacrificing the weak and the foolish. Carlson, Lennier and Ta’Ren con the Drazi pirates into retrieving Enoch and his ship from the dark matter, and take turns in volunteering who should pilot Enoch’s ship, which is to be sacrificed. Lennier seizes this opportunity for redemption, making Ta’Ren swear to bring his love to his Entil’Zha, Delenn. The Drazi patrol boat makes the jump to hyperspace, followed by the Brakiri shuttle transporting Carlson, Enoch and Ta’Ren, while Enoch’s Pinnace is vaporized, and Lennier along with it.