BACKGROUND INFO
Fairly poor compared to many worlds, 'Teep' is Agrarian based (they're pretty much all farmers) but its settlers are lacking in many of the basic skills and equipment to farm properly (like work animals). The world is extremely low in metals, and it was deliberately kept low-tech because of a unique-to-all-known-space psi-phenomenon the colonists call 'Music', which is very pleasant to listen to with your mind, so much that it unifies the diverse colonists. Music could not exist in the presence of electronics, or any other artificial EM field (such as a powerful magnet). So the colonists, unable to maintain or repair their few on powered tools anyway, soon had stopped using electronics altogether. It turned out that the music was heavily addictive - effectively penning the telepaths to the one world, permanently. They don't mind this, as the entire solar system, named 'Sanctuary', is protected from attack by a nasty hyperspace phenomenon that tends to repel or destroy any ship that seems to be armed and/or hostile. It also repels any vessel not carrying a telepath, either active or latent. (No, it's not natural, but the colonists have no intention of letting the rest of the universe know they'd been able to find and use a few pieces of vorlon technology.) And with the deadly persecution by others, the locals were unlikely to leave anyway.
Byron is out of the picture by now, permanently, and Lyta no longer loves him in light of certain bad things he'd done that *really* pissed her off, but Lyta is still fairly lonely and wants to have a family of her own. After only a few years of self-induced isolation to build up what they could, their exile was cut drastically short when Earthforce (in the form of the Warlock-class Destroyer 'EAS Sophocles' - and thereby the InterStellar Alliance) accidentally found the colony. While the Rangers are okay with the idea (many Rangers had helped the refugees along the way), the reaction of many others was quite hostile. Deciding to try to make the best of the abrupt information spill, the colonists gathered containers of refined metals ores (that they really could not spare, but they had little else to barter with) and a trade team to go back to the Alliance and try to explain that they were not a threat - and to hopefully get some of the much-needed supplies. The trade team started to get death threats before the second day was up, showing the level of danger the Envoys have since been enduring.
Lyta Alexander is currently leading and protecting the small group (almost 30) of colonists. Most are normals, but some are latents, with only a few being active telepaths (the higher the Psi, the stronger the addiction to the music = the harder it is to leave, but Lyta's vorlon enhancements allowed her to preserve the sensation and share it with the others for brief periods). They've come back to Alliance space (to Proxima, because it has orbiting shipyards and is an independent IA member) for the trade negotiations, and to secure treaties that will attempt to keep other worlds from coming around and trying to kick the stuffing out of the young colony.
Being refugees, they couldn't bring much with them when they settled. The trade team's main goal is trying to get viable plants and seeds, food and work animals; along with hiring teachers (of every subject) and doctors who might be willing to come to Teep and assist for a few years or even a lifetime; also getting medicines that they could hopefully learn to produce themselves. With dozens of species scattered over the one smallish world, illness is common; but the colony is doing quite well overall. The fact that untold thousands - possibly millions - of telepaths from various species were slaughtered while still on the run has encouraged those who lived to colonise Teep (and those who did not die afterwards from accidents, starvation, or illness) to work hard towards self-sufficiency.
Apart from the absence on Proxima of the addictive 'Music' and the death-threats, the team has other problems in their numbers: they don't all get along with each other, and, after a while, the 'noise' made by electronics can really get to be annoying for the teeps capable of sensing them. Since they were without power for so long, such things are very noticeable to the trade team - there are many such little aggravations that have been building up since they started out on their quest. The envoys are from nine different species (including 3 that were not from Alliance space), though Humans form the largest part of the team.
The trade team had been granted (paid for with a few crates of scarce Q-40 the colonists had mined from a moon near their home, which was also the source of their cargo of trade-metals) protection by the Rangers, who were acting as guides just as much as guards for the team. Though all the Rangers who guard them were all assigned voluntarily, and are there to protect the team rather than to confine them, the envoys are understandably very mistrustful of uniformed soldiers in general. The Ranger contingent is led by Lisette Deveax, who had helped the telepaths while they were still rogues (she had once kept Lyta and hundreds of other teeps out of the then-surviving Psi Corps's clutches), and Zack Allan, who specifically transferred from B5 for the task. That part angered Lyta at first, until she realised he came more to be near her than for any nasty reason - he'd apologised for his previous behaviour the first day, and they started from square one again. It's too bad most of the universe still seems to hate them.
Time: Ice Breaker started late November, 2267 - Earth had been under quarantine for the Drakh plague for almost a year. This is one of the events set in the two-month gap between parts 4 and 5.