The Marraketh Connection
Epilogue: "Paradigm Shift"

"These days, it's harder to say I know what I'm fighting for
 My faith is falling away
 I'm not that sure anymore."
                --Billy Joel, "Shades of Grey"

"I do not hope to hope again."
                --T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"

	It was a quiet day, a few days after the return from 
Marraketh. It had been clearly determined that's Mal's device had 
worked for the most part, as they suffered only one casualty in 
Marraketh.

	This was why Katze was sitting in the ampetheater in HQ. 
The lone man missing had been Kapella, and they were 
commemorating his disappearance. There were few other people in 
the room, mainly just Mal and Ari and the random people who felt 
for some reason or another that they needed to commemorate the 
missing man.

	Not many people around Blanca had known kap. He'd just 
recently come back, to find everything in chaos, and his friends 
gone off to who knows where. Katze had actually traveled to 
Lethbridge once to meet the guy, and deliver the bad news. She 
knew the truth, probably the only reason he'd gone on the mission 
is because he had known her. And because of that, he was gone, 
before she'd gotten a really good chance to know him.

	It wasn't fair, this mess Marraketh had made of her life. 
She hadn't asked for this. Nobody asked her if she wanted to have 
her whole world-view yanked violently in another direction. She 
hadn't asked to have a massive paradigm shift. It just wasn't 
easy to deal with.

	A bugelist in front of the service picked up his trumpet 
and played the most mournful version of Taps Katze had ever 
heard. She gathered up her stuff, eyes wet with tears, and tried
escaped the room before anyone could corner her.  Unfortunately,
Mal corralled her into having a drink with him and Ari.

	The second she has a chance, she excused herself from the
meeting with Mal and Ari and ran, somewhere and anywhere to get
away from the thoughts that were starting to haunt her.  The 
version of Taps wandered through her memory.

	She found solace in her office. It was a mess as usual, 
but that no longer concerned her. She flipped on the monitor, 
dislodging a sticky note from the monitor which read "Clean 
office. Call Shad." It wasn't important anymore, it was from her 
past life. How ironic.

	She wandered through the stuff that she'd been doing 
prior to Chicago and had left up on her desk machine. None of it 
sounded really interesting. Life didn't sound very interesting, 
to be frank.

	She flipped off the lights, leaving only the light from 
the monitor to brighten the room. That done, she started playing 
Solitaire. It wasn't much, but she really couldn't muster up the 
energy to do a lot more.

	The phone rang. She picked it up, hoping it would be some 
salesman who had somehow gotten ahold of the number whom she 
could gratifying slam the phone down on. She needed to get rid of 
some anger somewhere.

	But it was only a supply clerk, wanting to verify that it 
was okay to stick keebler's jolts in his room, considering the 
last case exploded in the kitchen. This was something Katze could 
agree to, and did agree to, but it didn't do much to improve her 
mood.

	She hung up the phone and was about to go back to her 
solitaire game when there came a knock at the door. "Come in," 
she said, without looking up from the computer.

	"Katze?" came a response.

	Katze looked up from the monitor to see Cyoh standing 
there. "Yessss?" she asked, drawing out the s.

	"It's nice to see you back in one piece...,"

	"Cut to the chase. What do you want?"

	"I need to get away from the Jihad for a while. Take 
leave. Do things. Not have to worry about the Jihad. Is that 
alright?"

	Katze looked back at her monitor. "Do I have any say 
elsewise? Permission granted."

	Cyohtee left the office, leaving Katze alone with her 
thoughts. She pulled up XBill, but it got boring after a while. 
After all, there is only so much torture you can put Bill Gates 
and his virus disguised as an operating system through before you 
get completely bored. So she amused herself by cleaning out her 
green duffel bag from its adventures in Marraketh. Finding the 
denied stamp, she chortled in glee at all the applications that 
needed to be taken care of properly.

	She stuck the denied stamp on her desk and pulled out the 
next thing in the bag. It was a book, written in a script no 
human had ever had the opportunity to learn to read, but Katze 
knew the words contained within the book. It was her father's 
prison journal; the same journal that had helped her outlast her 
ordeal. But seeing it here reminded her of how screwed up things 
really were.

	She placed the tome on the top of her computer monitor, 
intending to come back to it. It lent a solemn air to the room, 
and stood as nothing but a reminder that life was never going to 
go back to the way it had been before Marraketh. She thought of 
the Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times" and for 
the first time she actually understood.

	There was a hesitant knock at the door of the office, and 
Katze looked up from the gaze she held from the tome she had 
placed upon her monitor.

	Phoenix was standing in the doorway. "Hey, Kat," he said 
hesitantly, not sure what her reaction was going to be.

	Katze nodded at him. "It's good to see you in one piece 
and back in the office again," Phoe offered hesitantly, hoping to 
get some sort of positive reaction from her.

	"What do you want?" Katze asked.

	"Err, well, basically... it's time I went home. Or tried 
to go home anyway, I don't know how much success I'm going to 
have at it. I know it's important and all to fight b'harnee... 
but there comes a time one has to go home."

	Katze ducked behind her monitor so that Phoe couldn't see 
the tears coming to her eyes. His words rang through her with 
such a trueness that she could not have admitted to herself. 
"...there comes a time one has to go home..." How could she keep 
him here when there'd been often she'd longed just for the same 
thing? "Permission granted...and Phoe?"

	He had just turned to walk out of the office. "Yeah?"

	"Have a safe trip home, okay?"

	Phoe grinned. "You betcha... I'll always remember this, 
Katze. It's been a blast."

	Katze nodded. "If you ever get back here, you've got a 
spot in the Rangers. Now get out of here before you change your 
mind."

	Phoe left the office, leaving Katze alone to ponder the 
eternal mysteries of life. It seemed to keep coming at you. At 
least she still had Calc to help with the everyday tasks.

	She pulled up a command line on the computer and just 
randomly ran different commands at the prompt. After a few ls and 
cd commands, Katze held steady, not expecting life to blow her 
expectations any further to hell. Comms would be a lot smaller in 
the future, and perhaps that was just as well. She started to 
make plans for the new comms.

	The lights to the office flicked on. Katze looked up with 
a huge scowl on her face. "Those were supposed to be... err, hi, 
Calc."

	Calculus stood there, one hand on the lightswitch. He 
stood that way for a few seconds, long enough for Katze to start 
worrying. Finally, he said, "Have you ph33red the Penguin today?"

	Katze grinned, her first real grin since returning from 
Marraketh. But Calc didn't share in the grin. He looked at his 
shoes, and then finally looked at Katze. "I can't do this anymore,
 Katze. I came to that conclusion in Marraketh. There's just too 
much else that I can be doing, and besides, I've been a Jihaddi 
for a long time. It's time I actually took retirement for a 
while. And then, who knows?"

	Katze twisted her face up in thought at the longest 
speech she'd ever heard from Calculus. After a long moment of 
silence, Katze shook her head. "What can I do Calc? Say no? As 
much as I'd like to, that wouldn't be fair to you. You're one of 
my better friends here, and I hate to see you go... but if you 
must, I can't stop you. Permission granted, just if retirement 
ever gets boring, you're always welcome back."

	Calc nodded, neatly flipped the light out, and left Katze 
to herself. She looked at the book on top of the monitor, thought 
back over the events of the day, and finally gave into emotion. 
She put her head on the desk and began to cry as if there was no 
tomorrow. She mourned for there was no way for things to go back 
to the way they once were. And she wished for the darkness and 
the oblivion to take her somewhere away from her problems and her 
paradigm shifts.

"It was easy then to learn what was fair
 When to keep and when to share
 How much to protect your heart
 And how much to care.

"But today there is no day or night
 Today, there is no dark or light,
 Today, there is no black or white
 Only shades of grey."
                        --Monkees, "Shades of Grey"

	She knew not how long she cried with only the darkness 
there to hear her tears, but she knew somebody had come in the 
room. The quiet and dark held them silent for quite a while, 
until finally a voice cut through the darkness, "Kat?"

	Katze groaned. It was Ari, one of the two people she 
really didn't want to see, at least not at this moment in time. 
She refused to look up from her desk in hopes that Ari would get 
the hint and go away.

	But there were times Ari could be as stubborn as Katze, 
and this was one of those times. She stood there waiting for 
Katze to acknowledge her presence, and when it looked like Katze 
wasn't going to do that, she started poking through the office, 
stopping at the book Katze had placed on the top of her monitor.

	Katze sat bolt upright, yelling at Ari not to touch that 
book whatever else she did.

	Ari stepped back a few steps. "Relax, Kat, I wasn't going 
to do anything to the book."

	Katze nodded, face streaked with tear lines. "I'm sorry. 
I didn't mean to yell at you, that book is the only thing 
anchoring me to somewhere, and I don't want to drift away. I 
don't want to lose my only grasp to sanity."

	"I don't see what all the fuzz is over the Marrakethian 
version of a composition book, but I'm not gonna touch it if it 
bothers you so much."

	"It's not just a composition book." Katze picked up the 
book and opened it to a random page. She handed the book to Ari. 
"See?"

	Ari read the page and nodded. "Oh...I see." she replied 
quietly.

	"Do you see why it's my lone grasp to sanity?"

	"Kat, what is biting you? I've not seen you this upset 
before."

	"Oh, nothing, nothing, my life has only gone to hell, and 
I have no idea when it's planning to return. I'm head of a 
division that has absolutely nobody in it, I'm responsible for 
someone's death, and I have no freaking clue where I fit anymore! 
Upset? Me? It couldn't be!"

	Katze took a breath, surprised at the intensity of her 
reaction. Ari stood at the side of Katze's desk, flipping through 
pages in the journal. Neither spoke for a long time.

	Finally, Katze put her head in her hands. "Sorry... I'm 
just so confused."

	Ari nodded. "Okay, what do you mean about being 
responsible for someone's death? You talking about Kap?" Katze 
nodded, and Ari continued, "Oy, Kat, why for? Kap chose to come 
along on his own; he knew the risks, we all did."

	"Yeah, but the only reason he came along is that the 
mission involved rescuing me."

	Ari sighed. "I don't know what to tell you, Kat, 'cept it'
s not your fault. Now what's this busiwhack 'bout you being the 
head of a division that has nobody in it?"

	Katze briefly relayed what had happened in her office 
that day. Ari listened, and at the end of the tale, she shook her 
head. "Poor Kat."

	Katze put her head back in her hands. "What am I to do?"

	Ari randomly flipped through a few more pages in the book 
from Marraketh. Finally, she said, "I'm putting you on leave." 
Noticing Katze look up and start to open her mouth, she 
continued. "No, a depressed Kat is worse than no Kat at all. 
You've been to hades and back, you're all confuseled... take some 
time off and get yourself straightened out. We'll be glad to have 
you back once you do."

	"But what am I to do?"

	"That's your decision. I'll see you in a few weeks, okay? 
 And don't worry, I'll cover for you with Mal and DL." Ari 
thought for a second and then added, "And Shad will understand."

	Katze nodded, and stood up. She started gathering up a 
few things and stuck them in the green duffel bag. Finally, she 
took the journal from Marraketh back from Ari and stuck it neatly 
in the bag. The first real smile since she returned from 
Marraketh twitched across her face as she said, "Well, I'll see 
you soon. You can't ever keep a good Kat down."

	Thus concludes the Marraketh Connection.