Garibaldi decides to take a shuttle to their "secret" meeting place, and Warren Keffer invites himself along.  Londo is met by Morden again, who dissuades him from his meeting with Refa, demanding to know where his meeting place is.  En route, Keffer admits to coming along because, with the departure of Commander Sinclair, Garibaldi doesn't seem to have many friends left on Babylon 5.  Garibaldi begins to tell Keffer the story of how he met Sinclair...

Years earlier, on Mars Colony, Garibaldi was running a "discreet" transport service.  Lieutenant Commander Sinclair and two junior officers, Sanchez and Foster, enlist his help, although a little dubious about Garibaldi's apparently alcoholism...

Garibaldi's story is interrupted when they are shot down by a Shadow fighter, plunging toward the planet below...

Despite Garibaldi's alcohol problem, Sinclair is determined to carry out his mission - apparently one assigned to him to keep him "out of the way".  Flying over the surface of Mars, Sinclair refuses to tell Garibaldi what they're looking for.  When the navigation and inertia systems go off-line, Garibaldi crash-lands, injuring Sanchez and killing Foster.  Sanchez blames Garibaldi for the incident.

Sinclair and Garibaldi trek across Mars to find help, while Sanchez stays with the flyer.  When the ship's systems come on-line again, she discovers that Garibaldi isn't at fault after all, and warns the two of an oncoming sandstorm.  

Reaching a vantage point above their own crash site, Keffer and Garibaldi discover a Centauri settlement.  They also see the Shadow ship land by their shuttle and humanoid figures emerge to inspect the damage.  They "erase" the crash site, hiding the evidence - nobody knows where Garibaldi of Keffer went - and then set out to find the occupants.  Garibaldi, expecting the worst, makes a run for it...

With only five days of air and food, Sinclair and Garibaldi wait out the sandstorm on the surface of Mars.  While Sinclair talks with Sanchez, Garibaldi hits the booze again and wanders out onto the surface.  When Sinclair had noticed he was missing, he went out to search but got caught under a collapsed rock face.  Garibaldi finds him and saves him by switching air cylinders, but Sinclair says if anything like this ever happened again he would kill him.

The humanoid aliens catch up with Garibaldi and Keffer, hiding invisibly in a forest.  Keffer becomes paranoid and accuses Garibaldi of keeping them out in the open where they are easy targets.  Garibaldi can feel something trying to gain control of him, getting him angrier at Keffer.  Keffer fires a weapon at him, which Garibaldi dodges, and instead hits one of the hiding aliens, breaking their hold on the two.  Before they can examine the alien, it disappears.

Garibaldi claims that this is how these aliens operate - from behind the scenes, leaving no evidence.  If this does have anything to do with what happened on Mars, he says, they are in big trouble.

Because on Mars, looking from the top of a canyon with Sinclair, Garibaldi watches as a Shadow cruiser excavates another from beneath the surface of Mars.  In a nearby building, humanoid figures stand watching... 

Sinclair explains that he is investigating covert human-alien activities.  Previous missions had failed and so this time Sinclair employed Garibaldi, a private transport service clear of official channels, to avoid sabotage.  The two are forced to infiltrate the building compound before they can engineer an escape.

Inside the largest building they find an enormous alien biomechanical construct, human bodies being conveyed through it.  Garibaldi begins to feel fear and self-pity building in his mind, but recalling that he is the only person Sinclair can trust right now gives him impetus to keep going.

A box of grenades comes in handy as Garibaldi and Sinclair are discovered and make an escape.  The explosion destroys most of the building, and they are not pursued for long: whatever was inside the building requires the most attention from the telepaths to save...