s o k o l part one of seven by khyber khyber@citizensofgravity.com rated nc17 for graphic violence and mature content full headers later in this section. * * * Near Dnepropetrovsk, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic August 18, 1951 The airplane is a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, slow and steady. What little we would be able to hear over the engine's howl is deadened by my leather helmet. I am thrilled, imagining that maybe only six years ago proud Soviet soldiers jumped from this very craft, far behind the Fascists' lines in the middle of the night. I imagine what it would be like to clutch the rifle to my chest, ready my knife for the sentries guarding the heroic partisan prisoners. Take that, Fritzi, Soviet women fight too! There are eight of us, the best of the Young Pioneers' camp, with the old parachutes we carefully packed ourselves. Perhaps with this very parachute we won the war. The pilot and the instructor are women too-- on the ground, they told us Maria Feodorovna flew a Yak fighter and brought down three Fascist planes herself. Some of my co-jumpers are green. I am shaking, but it is with excitement. I want them to open the door, I want to see the sky from the inside. Maria Feodorovna throttles the radial engine back, barely fast enough to stay airborne, little faster than a truck. Lena Abramova hauls the big side door open, and sunlight streams into the biplane's interior. Outside is nothing but a horizon of Ukrainian countryside eight thousand feet below. The green ones turn gray, but Lara the girl from Smolensk and I look at each other with wild smiles. I see Lena Abramova nod her head at me as she yells over the engine and wind to Maria Feodorovna. "Look at that one, Masha! We have a little swallow for sure here!" "Don't let her jump yet," the pilot meets my eyes. "Swallow nothing, she thinks she's a falcon!" I am first out the door, they put me before Lara even. The plane falls up away from me as the wind tears at my face, and I spread my arms. I am in the sky. Ya lastochka, ya tchaika, ya sokol. I am a swallow, I am a seagull, I am a falcon... * * * May 23, 1961 five...four...three ...two...one...one two...three...four...five... come in... come in... come in... LISTEN...LISTEN! ...COME IN! COME IN... COME IN... TALK TO ME! TALK TO ME!... I AM HOT!... I AM HOT! WHAT?... FORTYFIVE?... WHAT?... FORTYFIVE?... FIFTY?... YES...YES...YES... BREATHING... BREATHING... OXYGEN... OXYGEN... I AM HOT... (THIS) ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL... ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL... YES...YES...YES... HOW IS THIS? WHAT?... TALK TO ME!... HOW SHOULD I TRANSMIT? YES...YES...YES... WHAT? OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW... FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW... FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW... FORTYONE... YES... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... IT'S ALL... IT'S HOT... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... ... I CAN SEE A FLAME!... WHAT?... I CAN SEE A FLAME!... I CAN SEE A FLAME!... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... THIRTYTWO... THIRTYTWO... FORTYONE... FORTYONE AM I GOING TO CRASH?... YES...YES... I FEEL HOT!... I FEEL HOT!... I WILL REENTER!... I WILL REENTER... * * * TITLE: Sokol AUTHOR: Khyber EMAIL: khyber@citizensofgravity.com CATEGORY: XAR RATING: NC17 for killing, fighting, horror, grownup badness, hot XXX action, head-hopping, gun-fu, boyficcy parts, one bit of dirty talk, booze, drugs, rape symbolism, Gnostic and Nietzschean subtexts, dog-whistle canon references, obscure fanfic shoutouts, metaphysical lunacy, some vague slashiness, non-M/S character death(s), gratuitous and heavy-handed symbolism, brutal manipulation of characters for thematic purposes, and Mary Sue-ing my own band. Oh, fuck, I forgot-- bad language. KEYWORDS: Mulder/Scully romance, X-file, mytharc DISTRIBUTION: Will be sent to ATXC/Ephemeral/Gossamer. Please ask for any other archiving. SPOILERS: Any ep up to and including "The Red and the Black." SUMMARY: A boy, a girl, a girl, a spaceship, and how things end. DISCLAIMER: I've now been working on the X-Files almost as long as Chris Carter. Surely that's worth something. On paper it all belongs to 1013. IMPORTANT NOTE ON CHRONOLOGY AND CANON: This story is set in the early summer of 1998, approximately two months after the events portrayed in Khyber's "Reach." No eps after "The Red and the Black" have taken place. This story relies very heavily on S5 canon and events; be warned :) "Fight The Future" has not happened; in fact, "Sokol" is intended to replace "FTF". Seasons Six and beyond have not happened, although some references are made to pre-1998 events that did not become "canon" until after "FTF." AUTHOR'S NOTES: You wouldn't be reading this at all if it weren't for bugs. It wouldn't be as good if it weren't for FoxEstacado. It would have a lot more commas if it weren't for Cathryn Fuller. * * * Alexandria, VA Monday, May 25 1998 4:14 AM Fox Mulder hadn't been sleeping when the phone rang. It was too warm in the room-- his lover's apartment had high ceilings, excellent sunlight, and no air conditioning. Beside him, she slept through the damp heat of early summer with a single sheet pulled low over one hip and leg, a drapery of interest for an artist's eye accentuating rather than hiding her nakedness. At four-thirty in the morning, dawn still waited. Streetlight glow allowed him to distinguish the colors of her body in blues and grays, and make shine the light perspiration across her full breasts and strong shoulders. He lay on his back, slightly separate, in the unsaid understanding that the warmth of bodies is best shared on colder nights than this one. The changes in her night-limned repose told him that he had drifted back and forth into sleep, sometimes seeing and sometimes missing her movements. Dana Scully had whimpered drowsy disappointment as the ringing demanded attention, something less than razor-sharp as she slithered comfortably across the lover's body in her bed. Naked skin pressed close in warm, humid friction, and she casually threw her right arm over his shoulder and neck while reaching across him for the phone. "...hello...?" "Special Agent Scully?" A man's voice. "Yes?" Her voice stiffened slightly, remembering that she had been that woman up until late last evening and would have to be again in a few hours. For now, she was still more aware of Mulder's lips and nose pressing against her bicep, smelling and tasting her skin. "I need to speak to Special Agent Mulder, please." "Is this the duty desk? I assume Agent Mulder is at home..." "This isn't the duty desk, and I know he's there. I need to speak to him, please." Dana rolled over on her back, on top of Mulder's hips, holding up the receiver without comment. His eyes widened slightly, and he took the phone slowly. "Mulder," he said. She could hear his interest growing, almost see his mind beginning to work. "Who is this?" He was sitting up straighter now. Dana began gathering her thoughts and planning how they would need to move. "Why should I believe you?" It was obvious that he didn't receive a response. His hand dropped, placing the phone back in its cradle. His other hand was stroking the softly muscled relief of Scully's belly as she lay across him. Her head leaned back as she contemplated the ceiling, feeling Mulder's touch and distracted eyes on her. "Light plane crash, Washington. Less than an hour ago. Apparently we should be there. He said to do an autopsy." "Did you recognize the voice?" "Whoever it was knew I was here." He felt the small laugh ripple through her back into his body, her shoulders shifting slightly as she turned towards him. "Good Lord, Mulder, someone thinks we're sleeping together. Whatever shall we do?" In the dark, he could feel the laugh, couldn't see the moment after when her eyes, now clear and awake, stared into a dim corner of the room. "So do you think we should go?" "Skinner's going to hand me my ass if we do." "Nothing else, just the plane crash?" "Yeah." "We could check it with him first." "No, I doubt it. Skinner seems to like us where we are." He felt the laugh again. "Well, maybe not right where we are." She rolled over and rested the point of her chin against his sternum. "They knew we were here, Mulder." "I think I said that." "So we agree." He felt part of her standing up already, opening the door, letting the light into their room. "Stranger things have happened." * * * Olympic National Forest Near Grisdale, Washington 1140 AM PST She wished she had brought an umbrella as she stepped out of the car and a heavy hand of rain began patting her down. Her mind refused to recognize that it was barely eight AM and she was most of a continent away from the bed she had left unmade nine hours ago. She watched Mulder scanning yellow fire and blue police slickers, trying to figure out who was in charge. They had driven up a fire road to get to this isolated area of the park, and Mulder immediately loped off towards the knot of milling emergency personnel. He throve on initial impressions, and usually made his mind up before speaking to anyone (frequently including her) about the issue at hand. The only other time they had investigated an air crash there had been a gigantic field of debris and bodies scattered over a wide area, a grand-scale, CNN-helicopter-shot disaster. That had been an airliner, and so she had expected something rather different-- a small, broken aircraft, a few body bags, with the homely air of mundane tragedy about the scene. What she saw was a crater, or perhaps more of a scar, fifteen yards wide, in the thick underbrush thirty yards away. There was a vague scent of charred wood and burnt leaves held low by the rain. They had driven up a winding, single-lane access road, dodging around two fire trucks coming the other way. Trees. Everywhere trees, reaching down from low-hanging mist, dull green supports for a dull gray sky. Nothing good had ever happened to them in the woods, Scully thought. She took a deep breath and changed her stride, stepping so long it made her ass hurt. She feared she had a tendency to look like she was shuffling, especially when swathed in a long coat, or a way of stepping delicately when she was outdoors. Scully imagined looking girly, prissy, out of her element, and hated the mental image. She hated even more that she was thinking about it. Spotting a pickup truck with the fire marshal's crest on it, she put on her most purposeful look. They had ignored the regional office in Seattle entirely, calling the sheriff's and fire marshal's offices directly. No one questioned the presence of the FBI agents-- when there was no obvious crime or collar, no one was too attached to their jurisdiction. First impressions, Agent Scully. Only one guy in a jacket saying "Fire Marshal" on the back. Easy enough. Project yourself, Dana, so he doesn't turn around too close and see right over you. Start speaking a little farther away than he is tall, slowing one step. 'Distant' can be a virtue. "Excuse me, Marshal Wyckham?" A blank minor authority, somewhere in his early fifties, going soft and large in the middle. "Yes?" Good, a good five feet away, he didn't have to look down to look at me. "Special Agent Dana Scully, I'm with the Bureau, we spoke on the phone." She stopped a bit out of handshake reach, never liking the gesture, the reminder of smallness. "Yes, I was waiting for you to show up. How many on your team, Special Agent Scully?" "Just myself and Special Agent Mulder for the time being." His eyes flick up to where I know Mulder is probably alternating between kneeling, pacing, flipping his overcoat back from his hips with both hands, and generally orbiting the catch of the day like an erratic comet. "It all depends on what we have here." "I don't know. It got called in as a light plane of some kind, but it's definitely not. It looks like it came in fast, nearly vertical, and pretty much shattered when it hit the ground. It's too small to be a light plane anyway, and it doesn't even look like it had wings." "Was there anyone in it, a pilot?" "Yeah, one body, I think. It's pretty, uh, we haven't found everything yet." "I'll be wanting to do an autopsy as soon as possible." "Well, we'll be taking down what we got right away. I don't think the county coroner is exactly gonna mind givin' over to you on this one. We actually get more than a few small plane crashes here. A lot of people commute by air and there's stuff out to logging camps and what-all. None of them really look anything like this, though." Mulder was heading back towards them, leaning slightly forward in his standard expression of discreet urgency intended only for her. She glanced back at the rather small scatter of wreckage that at this distance looked very charred for the evidence of a minor brush fire quickly extinguished by rain. Scully turned back to Wyckham. "When are you expecting the FAA inspectors up here?" "Probably by early evening." Scully handed him two of her business cards. "Could you please pass this on to the chief inspector when they arrive? We'll probably be at the county coroner's and you can reach me on my cell. Thanks a lot for your cooperation." Mulder glanced over at Scully as she finished and caught the marshal's eye before speaking. "Marshal, were there any eyewitnesses to the crash?" "None I know of. Some campers reported hearing the impact and then seeing the fire. Apparently there's air traffic records too, but that'll be the FAA's job, not mine. I'm just sort of the man on the spot here." "Just one more thing, sir. What time was this reported?" "Well, just before three, would have come down probably two-thirty, I guess, time it took them to get to a phone." Two-thirty plus three time zones equals a good hour after my phone rang this morning, Scully thought. She didn't need to glance at Mulder, nor he at her, to both conclude that they'd worry about this when their apparently clairvoyant informant was less likely to be within arm's reach. "Thanks." Mulder strode off towards the rental car as Scully arranged to meet the ambulance carrying the remains at the coroner's office. They had taken to carrying small, plain cameras in their travel kits, and Mulder began working his way through two rolls of film over the spill of twisted, blackened metal. He noted a smell of burning rubber but nothing that smelled like fuel. Definitely the remnant of an instrument panel, with a small number of analog instruments and toggle switches on it. It looked kind of like somebody's failed science project, he thought, crouching down to snap several close pictures of the panel and its backside. Bolts and machine screws and hose clamps, very ordinary artifacts. "Mulder, I'm going to go down in the ambulance and get started as soon as I can." "Okay, Scully, I'll meet you down there. I'm going to try and get some of this looked at in the next couple of hours. You go do that corpse-cuttin' voodoo that you do..." "Which one of us is going to call Skinner?" "I think he likes yelling at me more. I'll tell him I tied you up and carried you onto the airplane." He looked up at her, lips cracked into a slight smile, and his eyes suddenly deepened and invited her to fall in. Uh-uh, Mulder, she thought. Not making me swoon on company time. She ran her tongue across her lower lip, a move she saved only for when he really needed to be reminded of his place. It worked again. "You just tell him that, G-man," Scully half-whispered as he grinned in defeat. "I'll wait for you down at the coroner's office." She straightened up, and a brisk, efficient FBI agent walked towards a waiting ambulance. * * * Cypress Rest Funeral Parlour Grisdale, WA 2:50 PM "Subject is an adult female, definitely Caucasian, probably between 20 and 40 years of age. Measurement of height, weight must be estimated, subject is of medium build. Torso is partially dismembered and decapitated. Limbs and head have not been recovered. Cause of death appears to be massive trauma consistent with an air crash. There were fragmentary remains of what looked like a pressure suit at the scene. The body shows signs of second- and third- degree burns which appear to be post-mortem judging from placement and lividity." The initial description always helped, devolving the 'body' to a 'subject'. The initial visual survey also began the process of narrowing her vision, looking for detail. Scully didn't step closer to the table yet; too soon to concentrate on one feature. It was difficult not to try-- Grisdale's funeral parlor doubled as the morgue and county coroner's autopsy theater, and the accoutrements of North America's business of remembrance were stacked on plain green metal shelves around her. This wasn't an unusual experience, and Dana had long since decided that the most ghoulish autopsy she had ever performed would still not make her capable of being an embalmer. I can cut them up, she thought, stick probes in them, take little slices of them and study them. A twenty-minute discussion of tooth marks on a liver? I'm your woman. Put shoes on a dead man? Not a chance. "Coloration of the dismemberment wounds and burns is unusual, as is their apparent texture...?" Now that's a start, something to look for. She moved closer to the table, bending down. "Yes, very unusual. It's as if there has been some sort of melting or cauterization, but without evidence of burns or charring?" They simply didn't look like wounds; where there should be torn muscle and ragged tissue caked with dried blood there was only solid-looking mass. The strange flesh (but there's no such thing as 'flesh,' there's muscle and fat and bone woven together intricately... not this...) was an oddly rosy, healthy color for a corpse that had suffered such violence, yet within the wounds there seemed to be almost a total absence of blood. She explored the remnants of the left shoulder with the longest probe, feeling the tissue respond springily. "It looks almost bloodless... there's no sign of muscle or connective tissue or even subdermal fatty tissues... there's only one vein or artery and it's almost a half inch in diameter, and the bone looks almost unformed..." She clicked off the recorder, and tried not to notice the box of silk corsages sitting next to her cell phone on the shelves behind her. "Mulder? It's me. I think you might want to see this for yourself." * * * Mulder didn't try to conceal the appraising look that accompanied his entrances. Starting at her face, flicking downward once, then back up, a brief linger on her hips and again at her breasts, then casually meeting her eyes for a silent exchange before turning to the matter at hand. Yep, it's all still there, Mulder, glancing casually up at him. If there were other men in the room, he made a habit of inserting random icy glances at them in his leisurely trail back up her body. It was a smug, possessive, wildly unprofessional gesture. She had gotten over hating it, largely because the way his eyes traveled made her feel six inches taller. "I don't smell it." Mulder's observations came out loud around her more often now, giving hints of the wild leaps he made, the rapid associations. Usually they started with something mundane, like this. She noticed that his coat and pantlegs were still muddy from clambering around the crash site. "That's because it's not a body, Mulder." He moved in closer to the table, and she offered him a pair of latex gloves. "No, thanks, I'll take your word for it. What do you mean?" She pulled off the cap and stepped back, arms crossing. "It's not a body. It wasn't ever a living human being. I don't really know what it is, though. It's human tissue, or several kinds of tissue as far as I can tell, arranged to resemble a human body. But it's just all wrong, it's like a child made it out of clay, I can't think of a better way to put it. There are undifferentiated organs in the torso, no chest cavity, sort of a limited skeletal structure, almost no circulatory system, and no nervous or endocrine system except a spinal cord that's outside the spine, which incidentally has only eight vertebrae. There's no connective tissue, and it doesn't even look like there's muscle or fat. It's almost a solid block of, of dermis, of skin." "Show me." Scully revealed the bizarrely sterile object to him, the bean-shaped masses in the near-solid block of the torso, the blocky, undefined bone masses, and the hoselike veins running from the 'heart', one into each extremity. Mulder's normally twitchy stomach didn't raise any issues with him, a combination of his affinity for anything bizarre and the almost total lack of odor except for a vague whiff of charred skin. "Where did it come from?" "I don't know. It certainly wasn't ever alive, I know that. It couldn't breathe, pump blood, have nerve reactions, or even move, as far as I can tell. Essentially, it's a doll." Scully stripped off her gloves and picked up the camera she'd used to take the gross pathology slides, removing the film. "I don't even know where to get these developed. I've taken samples, but I don't have equipment here for DNA typing and I'm concerned about sending them out. I don't know what I'm going to tell the FAA inspectors." "Because we're here unofficially?" "Because this is really strange, Mulder. I don't know what to tell anyone and I'm afraid of who they might tell." She looked back at the table, slightly distracted. "And I think this is one of those things..." One of those things that we won't be able to prove happened in 72 hours, Mulder thought as he walked over behind her. As Scully washed her hands, he gently stroked the fine lines of her neck, initially sliding downward millimeters from her skin to feel the faint downy hair there against his fingers and return the other side of the sensation. "Mmm. So what did you find out?" She stopped moving, leaning slightly against the edge of the sink. "That if we're back in DC by tomorrow morning Skinner will consider it vacation time. Good thing you took some pictures, we can have him over for travel slides." The tension of discovery and further question knotted the fine intricacies of her shoulders, and Mulder's fingers probed gently into the familiar quandaries. "Ahhh... you can't do that in the lab in DC, Mulder, I don't want to go back..." She waited three, four seconds of company time, drawing the sensation out. "...how about the crash site?" His hands stopped abruptly, and Scully turned around. She felt what nearly amounted to a 'click' from Mulder, a withdrawal. Leaning back now, heels of her hands against the stainless steel table, she slipped her small feet in between his, and the physical contact brought his head up and his eyes to hers. "The wreckage is a Soviet space capsule, called a Vostok," he began. "It was the Soviet version of the Mercurys, like John Glenn. It's basically a tin can with a man inside. It looks like it suffered a lot of damage on reentry and then its parachute didn't open. It would have hit the ground at over five hundred miles per hour." Scully's eyes widened slightly. "When did you become an expert on forensic identification of spaceships?" "Actually, it was a miracle of the Internet. Perko's Copymatic, your photos to disk in an hour and rental computers. I emailed some of the pictures to Langly and they called me back with the ID." Scully couldn't help grinning slightly. Of course they would know, she thought. "I don't remember for sure, but I don't think the Russians ever lost one of these thirty-five years ago, though they may not have admitted it." "A thirty-year-old Russian spaceship? That would explain the crash at least within the realm of possibility, Mulder, but it doesn't explain this." "And it doesn't explain why we got tipped off probably over an hour before the crash actually took place." "The marshal could have been mistaken about the time, Mulder." "No, I checked. I talked to the parks service guy where the call was made and talked to the campers. Definitely no later than two-thirty, local time. That's five-thirty in DC. We were already checking our bags at Dulles by then." Scully shifted her feet slightly against Mulder's insteps. "Scully?" One-third curious, one-third habit, and one-third just because he was Mulder, her brow arched a familiar response. "I'm supposed to see the air traffic records later this evening, but somehow I doubt that will happen. Can you take extra tissue samples?" He lowered his voice to a bare whisper, just above mouthing the words. "Something we can take." She glanced over towards her blazer hung by the door, then back at Mulder, the corners of her mouth turning upwards slightly. "I'm just going to finish up here. Where will you be?" They separated slightly, Mulder straightening up. "I'll wait for you out front. I'll ask around and see where there is to stay around here." As he walked through the door, he brushed his fingertips against the pocket of her blazer, feeling three small, square sample cases inside. * * * The policies quite clearly said separate accommodations, though, like most other fine print, that didn't come into play until you were already in trouble for something else writ larger. Since they'd put themselves in a position to consider non-Bureau-approved sleeping arrangements about six weeks before, they'd only been allowed to leave the DC area overnight twice, and only spent two nights in motels. The first night they'd been exhausted from tramping through a polluted urban river valley all day, and had simply zonked out half-dressed, one's arm thrown across another's stomach. The second, though, they'd definitely finished undressing. * * * They ate quietly, the same variations on a cheeseburger and fries and a chicken burger and salad that appeared on nearly every menu they had ever seen. It was still raining, or raining again, she didn't know which. Mulder apparently had nothing to say. "So are you going to try to convince Skinner to let us stay on this?" she started. "Do you think I should?" "You'll forgive me if I have no idea how to react to that." "What do you mean, Scully?" Mulder paused around a mouthful of burger. "Skinner's had us tied down in DC for weeks, since..." she began. He grinned slightly at her. "Since he found out." Scully remembered the Assistant Director's refusal to acknowledge any impropriety while making it extremely clear that he knew exactly what was going on. Mulder remembered differently. He'd long suspected, and tried to avoid manipulating, Skinner's attempts to support their work. He imagined that Skinner wished he could break the chain of compromises he himself had had to make over the years. But it was clear that something had changed for Skinner as well. A couple of months ago, he'd bluntly suggested to Mulder that he (or they-- the assumption that they were a couple had been implicit) consider some other assignment besides the X-Files. He had gone as far as offering him a promotion to a desk job. Mulder hadn't answered yes or no. Nor had he mentioned it to Scully, which he'd rationalized by saying it was 'before,' which was true by a couple of days. Since then, Skinner had more or less ensured that the X-Files was a desk job. "Mulder, this is the first thing we've had that's even close to an X-file, or even worthy of investigation, since I came back to work." "What's your point?" "Well, I'm expecting something a little different from you, based on experience." "This doesn't feel right, Scully. It's too easy." "Too easy." "No one's fighting us here. We waltzed up to the crash site, took pictures, ID'ed everything, talked to more people than can conveniently disappear, and we were specifically instructed to do an autopsy on something that turned out to be neither human nor alien." "Either way, I don't think there's much doubt that this is an X-file, Mulder. Even if Skinner calls us back to DC I've arranged for shipment of the remains, and that alone-- even just the autopsy results from today-- should be enough to justify keeping the file open." As they left the restaurant Dana felt something brushing against the sleeve of her jacket, tickling her wrist under the hem, and then Mulder's long fingers curling around hers. She looked around quickly, for whatever he was signaling to her. His hand didn't move, and swayed just a little with their pace. "I distinctly remember Skinner telling me that we were on vacation time until tomorrow morning." * * * The evening has kept up the day's steady drizzle, pattering on my leather jacket. We don't have an umbrella, and Grisdale doesn't have the awnings and overhangs of Seattle or Portland. We're holding hands, outside, for the world to see. We'll get back to the hotel, and her damp hair will curl slightly when it starts to dry. She'll take her weights into the other room, and I'll turn on the TV while I have the laptop glowing beside me. I'd love to watch her, but she'd feel self-conscious and stop. Maybe I'll buy a paper, and we'll trade sections back and forth. She's looking at the windows of the places we pass. I run my thumb across her palm, fingers staying entwined, and she looks up at me. Blue can be a warm color. We're out of control again. It's all happening to us. Come here, Agent Mulder, look behind the curtain, bring that pretty partner of yours with you. Come and play, Mulder. It's a big game. We act in the expectation that something will go wrong, assuming the worst. Extra tissue samples, leaving DC without permission that we know we'll be denied. And she's doing it too now, wondering why I'm not pushing further and harder. * * * "You must be Agent Mulder." The FAA inspector was obviously junior, probably the proud owner of a newly minted engineering degree. She was a small, round young Asian woman who gave the impression of being about to suddenly burst into wild activity starting at the tips of her dancing fingers, throwing the pen dangling from a plastic cord on her wrist into a propeller frenzy. "Yeah, and you are..." "Sherry Tsang, FAA. So what brought the FBI out here? Not that this isn't looking stranger and stranger all the time. But I don't see any terrorists or, you know, drug dealers, or..?" The young woman faded off into a chuckle and Mulder got the impression that her brain had run far ahead of even her racing speech. "Agent Scully and I are sort of a special investigative unit. You've seen the wreckage, then." "Oh, yes, we got most of the collection done this evening, I'm just, sort of, you know, trying to keep up with all the administrative stuff before we get back to it. Going to be an all-nighter for sure." She pushed the sheaf of papers in front of her to one side of the fake woodgrain table. The FAA team had put down stakes in the same hotel as Mulder and Scully, making its coffee shop a logical meeting place. "Do you think it's a Vostok?" "How did you know?" The young woman's voice came out so rapidly that Mulder felt his brain had to undertake some process of translation, and he felt himself speaking more slowly, trying to balance her. "I had a friend look at some of the pictures I took this morning, sort of off the record." "Oh, no kidding. This will just be a mess if everything gets out really quickly. It's almost like archaeology or something. I mean there's been lots of stories about this kind of thing, but to really see it?" She had finally settled down in the bench on her side of the table, movement restricted to fiddling with her pen. "Stories about what?" "Russian space accidents," the young woman replied. "This craft is really old, Agent Mulder, no more than 1962 by my guess. And I, uh, didn't talk to your partner directly, but the fire marshal told me that the, uh, body looks like it was a woman." "That was what it looked like." "Well, if it was, she would have been the first woman in space." "Ms. Tsang, do you have any idea why this would have come down here, now, after thirty-five years?" Mulder asked. "It could be a lot of things. Gradual orbital decay, maybe a collision with a piece of space junk that altered the orbit it was in, maybe a venting of gas from one of the oxygen tanks that acted like a maneuvering thruster, I don't really know. The whole trajectory and probably the original orbit have to have been detected by radar and catalogued at some point. It'll just be a matter of sort of backtracking to find out where it's been." "What do you mean by catalogued?" "Well, every object in orbit, as far as we know, is cataloged and assigned a number when it's placed there or detected by radar. We're more careful now but there's still a lot of junk--boosters and shrouds and stuff from the 1960s. But something this size should have been detected a long time ago." "Nobody would have figured out what it was before now?" "Oh, probably the Soviets just said it was an old satellite or booster or something to cover up the failure. Nobody would know unless they actually got up close to it, and that doesn't happen very often." "But it's possible that someone knew what it was and where it was before the crash?" Mulder leaned back, stretching his arms out sideways. Tsang seemed to relax slightly as well, as if taking a signal from him. "I suppose. I don't know why they'd keep it a secret, though, not now. It's more of a historical oddity than anything." Her speech slowed perceptibly, and she seemed to notice at last that she had a glass of water in front of her. She poked at the ice cubes with her pen. "Can I ask you a question, Agent Mulder?" He nodded. "You still didn't tell me why your 'special investigative unit' is here." She put the wet tip of her pen in her mouth for a minute, and then regarded him, elbows on the table. "Ms. Tsang, I can't really talk about an ongoing investigation..." "It's my ongoing investigation too." "All I can do is promise to keep in touch with you about anything that might have some bearing on your work." "This is likely to work the other way around and you know it. When you decide why you're here, tell me." Mulder blinked once, slowly, as the young engineer stood up and strode purposefully past him towards the hotel's lobby. The footsteps that approached were slower, and familiar. "That looked like it could have gone better," Scully said as she slid into the bench Tsang had just left. "What was that about?" "It all happened so fast..." Scully looked vaguely amused. He looked sheepish. "All I found out is that it's not impossible for that wreckage to be what Langly said it was. You?" She shrugged uncharacteristically. "Went over my work from the autopsy, transcribed. I'm not ashamed to say I'm exhausted. We've been up for twenty hours." Mulder nodded assent, and slid out of the bench. Scully followed, rubbing her temples. * * * In a plain hallway with brown carpet and no eyes to see, the tall, dark man says something to his small, bright partner, who smiles at him with a hint of indulgence as they unlock adjoining doors. Showers run, his briefly, hers continuing, and just over a minute after it stops, the man reemerges, rapping gently at her door. It opens in front of him, and there are a few soft words and another indulgent smile as he enters. And then, with no eyes to see, night is briefly theirs. * * * Tuesday, May 26, 1998 4:32 AM Dana glanced up at herself in the bathroom mirror-- just once. I will ask it no more questions. Do I look sick? Do I look alive? Do I look like I've been awake all night rearranging my bookcase and wondering if I can summon up enough of a headache to justify a couple of codeine, 30mg? She'd padded gently out of the room they had chosen, having slipped out of his sleeping embrace. Mulder loved to cling to her after sex, whispering dreams and endearments into her hair. It was a strange, quiet afterglow to lovemaking often tinged with shared humor, or occasionally desperate hunger. He would say wonderful, romantic, fantastic things, his voice slowly drifting and becoming more breath against her than sound. She had heard about the house he imagined, a trip to somewhere where they could look at mountains from a hundred miles away. When his breathing deepened and evened, unless she was utterly exhausted, Dana would slip from his embrace and head quietly to the bathroom. The act of coming back to bed and arranging herself around Mulder's sleeping body was something she needed to do, though she wondered about the source of the need. Sex had been astonishingly easy for them, so much so that Dana found herself looking for evidence that the fulfillment of her body's desires was clouding her judgment regarding him, regarding them. We're still in this giddy, sexual phase, she reminded herself, not thinking completely straight. I've just temporarily forgotten that he's crazy. To lie drowsy, feeling satisfied and comfortably entwined with her lover's body and mind, could not be allowed so easily. She would come back into her bedroom, or his bedroom, and regard his sleeping body for a moment as she forced herself to consider that she was about to lie down with Fox Mulder, her partner of five years. At first, she had found the thought disturbing her slightly, and she would lie down pensively, experimentally. The mirror would call to her (dana, dana, mommy,) wanting to hear more questions. The experimentation had showed that Mulder-slumber was apparently contagious, because with him, she fell asleep as though she'd been hit over the head with a brick. It was a welcome change from the bizarre sleep patterns and occasional self-prescription of Ativan she'd developed over the past few years, though she wondered if Mulder had noticed that she didn't fall asleep on his shoulder anymore. Now, after two months, she used the post-coital moments alone with herself, or gazing at him, for quiet and strictly limited reflection. Just the facts, Dana; don't over-think. I called him Agent Mulder today, and we are back on a real X-file. We spoke on cell phones and over an autopsy table, and half an hour ago I watched his beautiful face between my thighs, and took him inside me. I'm on a case, sleeping naked, to which I think I have been completely converted. As she reached up to turn out the bathroom light, she noticed that the covers on the other bed had been turned down, and there was a large envelope or folder with two small objects on top of it lying on the clean motel sheets. Mulder? It hadn't been that way before they'd returned from meeting the FAA inspector, and she'd been quite close to him since he'd returned. They had slept quietly since midnight, then awoke together as if by agreement at about four and wordlessly begun to make love. She walked out into the unused bedroom, turning on the bedside lamp. The light sloping down from under its shade made her suddenly conscious of her pale nakedness, and Scully looked around the room quickly. It was a large, heavy envelope, tied at the top. Two plastic-wrapped mints lay on top of it, on a sheet from the 'Olympia National Forest and Area Attractions' notepad that lay by the phone. The notepaper read 'Room Service' in quick, neat ballpoint capitals. * * * Olympia National Forest Early morning There was a powerful wash from the rotor blades as the chopper dusted off, flashes from its nav lights dragging dance floor patterns across the uneven ground and the eight white semi trailers ranked in the hasty bulldozer clearing. The man who had disembarked glanced towards the vague glow beginning on the horizon, then lingered on an array of mobile radars and communications aerials. There was a treble buzz over the midrange lead of the chopper's turbines, generators chugging away and pumping diesel exhaust into the federally protected forest air. He dug into his pocket unconsciously, tapping a cigarette out of a slightly bent pack. The man who came up to him, oblivious to the spinning gusts from the departing flier, wore an unexpectedly bright nylon jacket over a dark, finely cut suit with no lapels and a Nehru collar. His shaved, severely formed head tilted forward slightly to allow him to peer over the top of fashionable gold wire glasses. "You've arrived." His voice was Indian-accented, with a faint tinge of BBC. One hand stretched out in an obvious greeting-- too high to shake, heading for a shoulder. "What's he doing here?" The smoking man didn't respond to the greeting, instead slashing his cigarette in the direction of the other's young companion. Black leather, black jeans, a black glove, and an expression of smug false earnestness. He nodded slightly, prettily. "He is working with me now," the dark-skinned man replied, closing beside the smoker, who pulled away to avoid the comradely hand that reached for his shoulder. "I had heard you were unwell." "He's dangerous." Again, the smoker ignored the pleasantries. They began to walk towards the nearest trailer, where fatigue-clad bodies moved under awnings stretched out from both sides. The younger man took up station ten paces behind, after watching the lights of the chopper dip beneath the treeline to the west. "It's often said that you're dangerous, my friend." The Indian beckoned to an orderly, who ran out towards them with a clipboard. "Mr. Krycek is well paid, and that is the best way to ensure his sort of loyalty, don't you think...?" * * * "Krycek," Mulder started to crumple the paper, then turned it over on top of the folder and began smoothing it out. "It's fucking Krycek." He leapt off the bed, rapidly pulling on jeans, t-shirt, falling back on the bed to pull on his hiking boots. "Mulder, wait. We don't know when he was here. He could be anywhere by now. How do you know?" "Last time he dropped by my apartment he left me a note outside my door." A smoky trail of casual bitterness carried his words to wherever Krycek would be. "It's him. And... he'd do this; he'd come here. When we're here." When we're making love, Dana thought. She imagined Alex Krycek's cold, flat eyes looking up slightly at the sound of her soft cries as Mulder drank from her. He would not smile, show no more emotion than he would at a car starting or a furnace clicking on. "Scully... I wasn't sure before, it seemed too easy, so I didn't tell you. I'm sure now. It was him on the phone, too, at your apartment." Dana sat down on their bed, pulling on her sweater. "Let's just go. He has to be around here somewhere. It's a small town." She didn't look at him. * * * Grisdale was a small town, but large enough, apparently, that Alex Krycek could disappear in it quite handily. The hotel clerk who had to be roused out of bed obviously hadn't seen anyone, and there was hardly anywhere else to check at that hour. That didn't stop Mulder from standing outside the coffee shop, gazing up and down the main street, after Scully arrowed through the door. Scully sat across from the package, one finger hooked through the handle of a coffee mug. The morning waitress walking away from her glanced at Mulder with a worried expression. Yes, I'm in shit. Deep shit. Glad you noticed Mulder picked up the envelope, pulling at the red cord that bound it. It was marked 'FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY-PLEASE REUSE!' and covered in meaningless reception stamps. "I'm sorry. I was hoping I was wrong. It was early. I was out of it. I hoped I imagined it. I should have told you." She was silent, and a brief lash of her gaze was acknowledgment and reminder before it turned down to the envelope. Taking his release from her, Mulder pulled out the contents: a sheaf of papers clipped together and some sort of computer disk. Zip disk, she remembered. Black-and-white photographs. She grabbed at them, flipping through photos of blackened metal and charred wood (wood?) washed up on a narrow scrubby beach. "Mulder, is this another crash?" "Twelve, thirteen days ago. Eleven before the one we came here for." Mulder flipped through the loose, mismatched papers. "It's some sort of partial report, an investigation of the crash site. Scully, it looks like this was only forty miles from here..." "Yes, you should have told me. Your suspicions are as important as anything else." Mulder started to open his mouth, no doubt for another apology. There was a faint desperation in his eyes. "This isn't the time for this discussion, Mulder. You know what I think." She scanned the partial map clipped into the sheaf, trying to make out the ballpoint scrawl on it. "This is one of the naval weapons ranges to the west." "These documents are military... it's not a complete report. It looks like someone just grabbed a handful of documents out of a bigger file." He studied the map, pulling the top of it over towards him while leaving it in Scully's hand. "Mulder, I don't think we should..." "Oh. No, no, no way, Scully. We're not going. There aren't any roads out there, and I'll bet it's not worth the kind of shit we'll be in with Skinner to get out there twelve days after the fact. These papers are a tease, establishes the authenticity. Whatever the good stuff is, it'll be on this." He held up the zip disk. "We can do that in Washington, where we're supposed to be." Scully picked at two pieces of toast for ten minutes, her partner gazing carefully out the window while stuffing eggs into his mouth. "Flight out of Tacoma's at twelve-thirty?" "Yeah." Mulder's cell phone trilled as he held the coffee shop door for Scully, and he crouched under the small awning. "Mulder." Scully heard a rapid pulse of an agitated female voice. "Hang on, I signed for what?" Mulder replied. "What's going on?" Three sharp expressions of anger she could hear from two feet away. Mulder's lips curled back from his teeth. "I'm on my way..." Mulder jogged the few steps to the car, and she had to sprint to keep up. "What's going on?" He spun the tires on the wet pavement even as she asked. "Same old fucking same old is what's going on.." * * * FBI Headquarters Washington, DC 11:43 AM EST "Walter, there's an urgent call for you on line two." Kim would probably have mentioned if it was Mulder, he thought. Mulder will be calling soon, looking for an angle, some kind of justification to stay out there investigating whatever the hell it is he thinks he's on to. "Thank you Kimberly, I'll take it." Of course, Scully's just as likely to start pulling that crap now. She's stopped apologizing for him and started cheerleading. He punched line two slightly harder than necessary. "Mr. Skinner. It's been a while." "Who is this?" "You know who this is." Walter could almost smell smoke curling out of the telephone. "I don't think I ever got your name. I was hoping to send flowers." "I don't have time for games, Mr. Skinner. You've been in contact with Agents Mulder and Scully?" "Is that any concern of yours?" You had a bullet in your chest, you bastard. Die. "I'll be brief. The lead they are following is not one which they will be permitted to pursue. They have received information from a rogue element, one over whom I have no control. Their presence and activities are being tolerated only because of my intervention on their behalf." "I'm supposed to believe this?" "Mr. Skinner, if this were a novel I would say it doesn't matter whether you believe me or not, but the fact is that it does. If Mulder and Scully continue with this investigation they will be in tremendous danger, and the indulgence they are often allowed will not be permitted." Skinner heard him puff once. "I'll pass that along." "You and I both know that would be essentially the same as shooting them." Walter thought he might have heard the smoker almost chuckle. "So what am I supposed to do?" "It doesn't matter to me what you do, as long as you play your part and do it. Just get them out of Washington State and off this lead. Goodbye, Mr. Skinner." Walter Skinner's large hands carefully steepled in front of him after setting the phone in its cradle. He wished he knew them better, some days. If Sharon were alive, and if he and Sharon had had a real marriage, maybe it would be different somehow. At least there'd be a basis, a pretext for some kind of human contact, some way to acknowledge the connection. But Sharon was dead, and human contact was the last thing they thought of outside of each other. He'd caught them out once, exactly once, and it was enough to know. He'd stepped into the basement, looking up and seeing them standing two inches from each other, the space increasing. Scully's hands were dropping from Mulder's shoulders, Mulder's hand from her ass. Mulder's facial expression, as always, said nothing. In the second before Scully flustered, between when she saw him and when she remembered what they were all supposed to be, she looked like an angry teenager daring him to scold her. Of course, it worked both ways. Scully knew Skinner carried condoms in case he got a chance to score in a hotel bar, and Skinner knew Mulder didn't like the way that Skinner noticed Scully's mouth. They could smell the old corruption on him, compared it with each other's imagined virtue. Too late for human contact, too late for a lot of things. * * * Grisdale, WA 8:45 AM PST The wreckage had been transported to a small commercial charter hangar just east of Grisdale. As they pulled up, Mulder noticed two obvious rental cars, most likely the FAA team, parked outside next to an impractical-looking red sports car. Sherry Tsang, wearing a blue FAA windbreaker, stormed out of the partially opened hangar doors as the agents stepped out of the car. She thrust a carbon copy of an official form under Mulder's chin. "What the hell is this? Who gave you authority over this investigation?" Mulder recoiled slightly as he took the paper. Scully interposed herself slightly, standing perpendicular to Mulder's shoulder. "Sonofa... Fuck!" Mulder swore. Scully caught the paper on its first downward swirl. It was an authorization for Air Force personnel to take custody of unspecified materials, presumably the wreckage of the space capsule. The authorizing official's signature blank said "Fox Mulder", not in the agent's careless scrawl, but in the same neat capitals they had seen earlier that morning. "Now we know where Krycek was." He paced five steps, stopping with his hands on his hips. "Ms. Tsang, did you see any of this happening?" Scully glanced at Mulder as she asked the question. "When I got here they were almost finished. They were wearing black uniforms and weren't exactly sociable." Tsang looked at the two agents, and nodded at the form Scully was holding. "Let me guess, that's not your signature." "Good guess." Mulder returned to the small gathering, peering around at the small cluster of buildings. "So these guys weren't military?" Tsang asked. "Is this legitimate?" "Well, they were probably military, but not being legit and not getting away with it are two different things." "Do you have any idea where they might have taken the wreckage?" Scully looked at two others, probably members of Tsang's team, coming out of the hangar doors. "There are a lot of military installations around here. It didn't say anything on that." Tsang gestured at the half-crumpled form with Krycek's printing on it. "What are you and your people doing?" Scully nodded towards the hangar. "Well, we called Portland FSDO and they didn't know anything about this. I'd like to sit here until someone tells us to leave, but there isn't a hell of a lot of point. We've still got material but we may as well have it in Portland. They asked for all our notes and films, but well, you know how it is," she grinned thinly. "You kinda miss things when goons are harassing you." "I'm gonna call Skinner," Mulder dug for his cell. "They screwed up the moment Alex Krycek forged my signature. Even if the rest of this is on the level we've got jurisdiction right there." "Do you seriously think we're going to get anywhere that way?" "Somebody wants us to get somewhere, Scully, remember? They called us." "Mulder, Krycek called us. He's playing some kind of game with you." "Last time I ran into Krycek, he gave me the impression he was working both sides of some division. Maybe this is part of it. He may be juggling conflicting orders here." "Should I remind you that last time you ran into Krycek he beat you up and handcuffed you to your desk?" Scully's chin set hard as she stepped in close to him, her voice low and dark. Oh, and apparently he kissed you, too, she thought to herself, but I just don't want to go there. "Yeah," Mulder replied, "and it's about time I got a little payback." "Okay... I don't know about you two," Tsang began, breaking into something that she could see escalating, "but I know I have jurisdiction. If that's a Soviet craft, it's civil until the Russian Federation says it isn't and Boris Yeltsin hasn't called me yet. And if those goons weren't on the level, I want my investigation back." A cell phone beeped, and all three glanced at each other, Mulder shrugged that it wasn't his. Scully dug in her coat, walking out of their little triangle and identifying herself into the phone. "Are you and your team based in Portland?" Mulder asked the younger woman. "Officially. Most of us are in Seattle-Tacoma, though; better air connections. A lot of my people are contractors, and I can't justify keeping this together without something physical to investigate. I'd rather take what I've got right now back to Seattle where I can talk to more people off the record." "Mulder?" Scully flipped the cover on her cell phone closed and walked back to them. "It looks like you went to the morgue, too." "Body's gone?" Mulder studied the horizon for a second and sucked at his teeth, then turned to Tsang. "I'm gonna call DC and try to get support for Scully and I to work this thing. Let me know before you leave or get ordered out." "Sure thing. Sorry I jumped on you this morning on the phone." The woman paused. "But. If we're gonna work this, we're gonna trade. You can have everything I get, on or off the record, on one condition." "Okay..." Mulder glanced sideways at his partner when she responded for them. "Krycek. Who's Krycek?" "That's a pretty good question," Mulder began, his voice tight. "He's an operator, black-type operations. Probably CIA at some point. Things that the government's left hand really wants to keep the right hand from knowing." Scully looked at him, then back to the FAA inspector. "There's no delicate way to put this. Alex Krycek's a killer." "Right." The word came out with what for the young engineer was a positive drawl. Mulder stepped in closer to her. "Be really careful what questions you ask. Keep your antennas up. The minute something feels weird, call us." "Sounds like you guys have done this before." "Yeah. Look, you might want to just..." "Fuck that. I want my Vostok." Sherry Tsang handed him a business card and jogged towards the hangar. She stopped, turning around. "You don't know why this is so damn important either, do you." Mulder laughed a little as he opened up his cell. "Do we ever...?" * * * "Skinner." "It's Mulder. Look, we're onto something out here. I've got Alex Krycek running around signing my name to federal documents." "Sonofabitch." He leaned back in his chair, turning it away from the desk slightly. "We want to stay out here and keep working this. Most of the physical evidence has disappeared on us, but Krycek is out here somewhere and knows where it all is." "No, Mulder, I'm ordering you back to DC right now. Even if you hadn't contravened a direct order by going out there, I just had a military courier show up with a sheaf and a half of paperwork describing the NSA's position that this is none of the Bureau's business. I don't know if this'll all hold up but I don't think they're going to wait until I make sure their t's are crossed." He looked at his empty desktop, but could hear Mulder swallowing the lie whole for the time being. "NSA? It's the Air Force out here. What the hell is this?" "We'll talk about it in my office, ten o'clock tomorrow. Just get back here." The line clicked dead, and Walter stared at the handset, letting it slip a bit in his grip. * * * The rain hammered on the car as they drove south. The morning sun had lasted all of four hours before rain rolled in from the northwest. She didn't speak at first, not for a long while. "Mulder." "Yes?" His tone sounded slightly calculated. He'd been planning just how to respond as he glanced over at her, watching her think, for the past forty minutes. "We're stuck with each other, you know that?" Her strange choice of words struck him. A dozen retorts came to mind, but he chose nothing quickly. She stared out the passenger window, away from him, carefully gathering herself as he began his apology. "I'm sorry, Scully. I'd pro..." He almost flinched as she turned as rapidly and forcefully as someone wearing a seatbelt could. "First fucking case, Mulder. First time we go up against these people when they can use us against each other and you have already cut me out once." Mulder's face quickly went through three different expressions before he responded. "They've been able to use us against each other for years. You can't un-admit that." "That's not the point." She faced forward again, glaring down the highway. "You brought it up," he grunted. "So what you're saying is that nothing's changed except we're ripping the taxpayer off for hotel rooms?" The words snapped, things she immediately wished she hadn't said. "No! You know that's... I said it already. I wasn't... I didn't want to beli... be sure." His jaw worked furiously, molars grinding. Scully could tell he was considering pulling over. "The last time we went up against this you almost died, Scully. I was walking around on a fucking bridge full of corpses looking for redheads." His face was suddenly flushed, and his voice caught. "Burned people, Scully. I was thinking, what if her hair is gone? How am I gonna find her if her hair is gone?" "Then we need to make these decisions together!" she shot back, her voice raised even higher than his. She realized after the fact that it made no sense as a response, which suited the pattern. They didn't fight, she thought, not as a couple. Hadn't fought once, hadn't found anything to fight about. Random bits of code sometimes flew out when voices raised or tempers flared, things pressed diamond-hard in deep furnaces but since gone cold, simply ejected to make room. This didn't qualify as a fight-- the Scullys, six willful people in a series of small houses, knew fighting. It built character. No one got to age fourteen in a Scully household without learning to scream "I hate you," to take a real cuff across the ear for the boys or a threatened one for the girls, and knowing all the ways to slam a door. By fifteen, Dana, the smart one, had learned a different way. Don't scream, just glare, don't ever flinch no matter how close the arm comes to moving, and shut the door hard, precise. You can cry in your room, you can scream in your pillow. Just don't let them know you slammed the door. For all his considerable potential for real violence, Mulder wouldn't last ten seconds in a Scully fight. Real fights are contests of will alone. Mulder mistakes arguing for fighting. He probably considers this a fight, she thought. "I can't not forgive you. S'too much at stake." Scully reached out suddenly, her hand jutting out almost awkwardly. He pulled one hand off the wheel and met her, touching in midair. * * * There is a tangle of sheets in the middle of the bed, no quilts, no comforter. His legs are long and the white curls in and out of them, and his body is lean, softening slightly in late thirties. He surrounds her without touching her, her knees drawn up under sheets, a small body in a small space enclosed by his concern. She is trying to shame tears back into her eyes, as she fears another betrayal from herself. The scent is of heated city and woman-dwelling and interrupted sex, sweat without liquid. Each tear she holds in is a tiny shake in her shoulders, a tightening in thighs she tried to open to his tenderness. I'm sorry Mulder, I'm sorry I'm sorry... Ssssshhhh... Shhhhh... he touches her now, light on her temple, behind her ear, shoulder blades. It's okay Scully it's okay baby it's okay... It's not you Mulder it's not it's not anything I just don't know just.. her fist beats slowly on her knee, and she concentrates on the point of impact. I know I know it's okay baby it's okay. His hand covers her fist and holds it there, stopping the motion, enveloping her fist in his fingers, slowly drawing the tension out of it. She swallows, she gulps, and air comes into her lungs in ragged, damp sighs, the hurt unknotting and spreading out. "I don't know what they, what they ...did to me... there, where I was, and I, I don't remember..." She is looking up now, up at him. He knows the question is will he try to understand, and she knows the answer. "And I don't want to know, or remember... but..." and she is rocking a little again, and her fist is hardening and wants to move ssssshhhh Scully it's okay it's okay "...there's something there Mulder, sometimes, sometimes my body remembers, my body remembers..." That is something, the shaping of it into words, and she lets him put his arms around her shoulders and draw her close. * * * end of part one of seven s o k o l part two of seven by khyber khyber@citizensofgravity.com rated nc17 for graphic violence and mature content full headers in part one of seven * * * FBI Headquarters Washington, DC Wednesday, May 27 1998 10:00 AM "Good morning, sir." Well, that sounded like I was sucking up, Scully thought. Mulder had a look of practiced indifference, sleepy-eyed and casual. "Sit down." Skinner didn't stand up behind his desk, nor did he look up. He joined his hands on the desk in front of him. "I haven't requested a report from you on why you left DC against my orders on Monday morning." He finally looked up at them, glancing at Scully and then piercing Mulder. "I've been informed rather clearly by Air Force intelligence that the matter which you chose to investigate on your own is no interest of the Bureau, and that it's a matter of national security. I had two full colonels in here yesterday to tell me that. That's why I don't want your report." He stood up and looked out the window, his broad back to the agents. The humidity was rising again, and the smell of sweating diesel and civilization was gathering its dank shroud outside. "Sir, we received a tip-off from a reliable source..." Scully began, drawing a glance from Mulder. "So? There are FBI agents in Seattle." "I was given the impression, sir, that time was of the essence." Mulder snapped. "What's of the essence, Agent Mulder, is that you and Agent Scully have become a little too used to having unlimited freedom of action. The X-Files division, like any other office in this organization, has to consider the best way to make use of its resources. Those resources, incidentally, include your lives." "Sir, especially now, this is a valid investigation. We've got official complicity in a coverup, Agent Scully's autopsy results, and our notes from the crash site." "Stop jerking me around, Mulder. Which is it? Your anonymous tip? Or what you found when you got there? If you add those up it sounds like a set-up, a set-up whoever is behind it knows you couldn't resist. Get out and let it go. That is an order. You're dismissed. Agent Scully, I need a moment of your time, please." "Sir, if this discussion relates in any way to Agent Mulder, I would prefer that he were present for it." Oh, for fuck's sakes, Walter thought. I can get attitude in stereo now. "Very well, Agent Scully. I'll be frank. I have come to expect a higher degree of responsibility and judgment from you than your recent actions would suggest." "Are you implying that I am responsible for Agent Mulder, sir?" "You have considerable concern for his well-being, Agent Scully?" "Thank you, sir. Will that be all?" "You're dismissed." * * * X-Files Division Office 3:20 PM Mulder started slightly when Lieutenant Uhura answered the phone. "Hailing frequencies open, Captain." BEEP. "Uhhhh... This message is for Sherry Tsang, this is Fox Mulder in Washington, please call me at 555-1013... uhhh, if you get this." Okay, after that, I'm putting 'get your filthy hands off my desert' back on my machine, Mulder thought as he looked at the photos from Krycek's gift spread out in front of him. The zip disk had proven largely impenetrable, with copies of the documents for which they already had print copies and several large data files he'd handed over to the Gunmen for their entertainment. He'd just returned from their lair. Langly had looked at him pityingly, he remembered. At first. * * * "Well, these five are just tiff files, Mulder," Langly announced. "What's that?" "A less efficient way of storing porn." Byers looked up from a magazine. "Anything good?" "Ahhh, but with no degradation when you alter the... oh my sweet lord, what the fuck is that?" Frohike took over the mouse from Langly, who had blanched visibly and pulled his chair back from the terminal. "Jesus H. Christ on a crutch." The longhaired man unfolded himself from the chair, taking his cola with him. "I'm guessing this is Agent Scully's department?" Frohike rifled quickly through the image files, checking the printer for paper. "You want hard copies?" "Uh, yeah, yeah, of course." Mulder paced in a small circle, then quickly shoved the printouts Frohike handed him into the folder he'd brought. "Want us to take a look at those other files? I don't know if they're encrypted or what, but they're definitely unfamiliar." All three of them regarded Mulder intently. Frohike had closed the image viewer, but Langly was still glancing at the monitor as if it had been cursed. "Yeah, that'd be, uhhh, that'd be great. I better get this stuff to Scully." Mulder looked down at the folder. "Yeah." He headed out the door, which clunked shut behind him. "Well, that was some fucked-up shit," Langly started, picking up between two fingers the zip disk Mulder had left. Frohike swiped it out of his hands and jammed it into a drive. "You ladies want to dwell on your upset tummies," Frohike chided, "or you want to stick it to the man?" * * * Mulder arranged the photo prints on his desk again just as the door opened. Her eyes were downcast, face serious, thoughtful. "Hey," he said quietly. "Hey," she responded, looking up. A faint smile touched her lips, and she seemed to relax slightly. "So where have you been?" "Lab. I got those samples analyzed... to a point." She lowered herself into her swivel chair, pulling one shoe off and rubbing at her heel. She glanced around the room, then looked at him pointedly. He shrugged. If we're bugged, we're bugged. Scully wheeled the chair over to the other side of the desk, opposite him. "It's human tissue, of a sort. It's more appropriate to say that it could be human tissue. It's a sort of undifferentiated cellular material that's not really like and not really unlike any other human tissue or organ. It's nothing anyone had ever seen before, but McEvoy thought it looked a little like something she'd read about, experimental artificial tissues grown for grafting purposes." She nodded at the new printouts on his desk. "What did you get?" "You're going to love this." He pushed them, delicately, like a child avoiding the pictures of spiders in the encyclopedia. Scully scooped up the loose sheaf of prints. "Oh, my God." A table, metal, morgue, familiar. Black and white print; gross pathology slide. On the table, perhaps five and a half feet long, oblong, slightly wider in the middle, silvery like scar tissue and wrinkled like a knuckle. "No, ah... no visible limbs?" she heard herself saying, starting the examination as Mulder watched her face. "Mulder, is this from the earlier crash, the files that Krycek..." "Yeah." The body (body?) widened slightly three-quarters of the way up, there a suggestion of shoulder and perhaps collarbone (burning, is it some kind of burning but there's no cauterization) and then, yes, the neck was recognizable and the frame cut it off there. She rifled to the next print and stifled some sort of exclamation. The neck reached up, slightly longer than possible, and widened into an ovoid shape with the same texture. The face on it was a woman's, quite clear and even normal allowing for the lack of chin, ears or hairline. A strong nose, not unlike Scully's but perhaps more like Mulder's. Wide lips, low cheekbones. A simple, even slightly pretty woman's face. Looking again, pressing down on the rising coil of unease in her stomach, Scully noted that the eyes looked too simple, as if the eyelids were merely folds, and the nostrils were just depressions in the proud mount of the nose. The eyes were blank and dark. She looked at the rest of the prints. A closeup of an incision, perhaps a half-inch deep, across the middle of the main mass. "No tissue differentiation." The scalpel had been taken through the eye, showing a small convex lens of transparent, tinted material before more of the same stuff as the rest of it. The final frame had the body sliced neatly in half lengthwise, photographed from the cut side. Nothing inside, solid, a perceptible darkening of the colour of the material in the center. The cut neatly followed the profile of nose and forehead. She dropped the prints between her knees, lowering her head for a moment, then replaced them on Mulder's desk. "It's... similar, obviously. Was there any documentation or autopsy report?" "Not unless it's in one of the files the guys are still working on." They both jumped in their seats as the phone rang. "Hello! Mulder..." he began. Scully saw him mouth 'Sherry Tsang' at her and nodded. "Yeah, I have something you might be interested in. Do you have a fax at home? Great... well, I'll send it all along and you can take a look. Five, ten minutes. I'll talk to you later." "Seems you have a kindred spirit," Scully noted as her partner set the phone down and began gathering papers. She glanced one more time at the five prints. "You think we can trust her?" "With what? Someone's dumping this stuff in our laps, Scully. There's something we're supposed to find. Besides, I'm only sending her the technical stuff from this batch of wreckage." Scully watched him standing, moving towards the fax machine. She stood, and a signal passed between them. He stopped, and she reached out. They held onto each other, Scully gripping the edge of his palm, working her fingers slowly. "How you doing?" he asked quietly. "No, no, I'm fine," she said distractedly. The rubbing of her fingers slowed, and she let go of his hand. Scully glanced towards the doorway, and Mulder set the papers down beside the fax. They walked down the hallway until Mulder stopped, leaning back against a maintenance room door. "Mulder, how are we going to cover that we're still working on this?" "Why bother? Skinner hasn't given us any room to work on real X-Files in weeks. You saw those pictures. We're onto something here." "For once I'm not going to argue with you." Scully crossed her arms in front of her as the memory of the ghastly lump of tissue on the anonymous autopsy table pushed up from the base of her skull. "What are you doing this evening?" Mulder chuckled and didn't respond verbally, nodding back towards the office. "Well, I'm going to the gym first, now that my jet lag's gone." "Mmmm. Sweaty Scully. Need a towel boy?" He leaned close to her and whispered. She smiled at him and turned her lovely face down the hall as Mulder felt her tugging at a button low on his shirt. She turned back to him, whispering. "You're a little overqualified for towel boy." Mulder's hand was on the swell of her hip, in the empty hallway. He smiled too, half his age. "Can I be Towel Maaaan?" He reluctantly dropped his hand. "I better go fax Tsang. I'll call you as soon as the guys get back to me." "I'll be home later," she said. He'd heard it, was waiting for something from her, hadn't just headed back to the office to start faxing. I could mean a couple of things, she thought. Call, come by. The weeknights they spent together tended to be at her place, weekends more frequently at his. They didn't plan in advance. It seemed to work out anyway, and she felt strange, unused muscles stretching (besides the obvious ones). She knew she had a new lazy, welcoming smile to let him know that it was okay that he'd showed up at midnight, as long as he left up to her whether anything besides sleeping was going to happen. * * * The King Edward's Arms Washington, DC 5:50 PM Jeffrey Spender left his jacket in the car and loosened his tie. He felt himself melt into the bar's afternoon crowd, indistinguishable from eighty other just-past-young professionals with accounts on the brain and Tracey from Marketing in their sights. Mulder was the exception, he thought. Dressing too sharp was a warning sign of individualism and ambition. Agents who dressed like Mulder usually lasted five or six years, then paid out and became 'consultants' where the money was better and the politics irrelevant. His date was early, as he had been for every other meeting. It was difficult for one man to hold a booth to himself during happy hour in the Eddy, but Spender figured that the smooth, dully shining plastic of the man's left arm had something to do with it. He looked tired this time, his hair still damp as if he had just showered, dark circles under his eyes. Spender slid into the booth and glanced at the other as the waitress closed in on them. The one-handed man asked her what was on tap, and they both ordered beer. The girl looked at the man's handsome face with more than a usual professional interest, and then withdrew perceptibly as he tapped his plastic hand against the tabletop. "Jeffrey." "Wilkins." "How are we doing?" "I'm doing fine," Spender said pointedly. "But if this is expanding into the Assistant Director's office as well I'm going to need some help." "Jeffrey, Skinner's got connections upstairs. You're doing this because OPR can trust you, you're outside, you're clean. If we bring in anyone else he might figure it out even if Mulder and Scully don't." Spender leaned forward towards Wilkins, his elbow a few inches from Wilkins' plastic hand. "Then I need my ass covered. I need something on paper saying that the Office of Professional Review, on a request from the National Security Agency, asked Agent Jeffrey Spender to collect taps and evidence on the X-Files division and AD Skinner regarding..." The other man's eyes flared, and he cut Spender off. "For fuck's sakes, Jeffrey, keep your voice down. I'll get you your fucking paper. Now drink your beer." He set an example, plastic fingers clicking on the glass. Spender wondered how long it had taken him to learn to pick up a drink with that hand. "Mulder faxed some of the documents to an FAA office in Portland. The content matched what you were describing." "Well, that's fucking typical Fox Mulder," Wilkins observed. "Steal classified material and then advertise you have it." Spender wondered just how well this cold, one-armed man knew Mulder. He was younger than Spooky, probably by five years, and looked ex-military-- which might explain the hand. Wilkins suddenly drained his beer in a few long gulps. "I'm going to have to get going. I'll be in touch." He stood, picking up a suit jacket off the bench beside him. Spender nodded. "And in the meantime?" "Just keep doing what you're doing, Jeffrey, you're good at it. Watch your mail." * * * Alex Krycek looked both ways before crossing the street outside the bar. Some people worry about traffic, he thought, and some people worry about drive-bys. Spender just barely crossed the line into smart, Krycek reflected. Smart enough to know he was the easiest fall guy but too stupid to consider the benefits of coloring outside the lines. All you have to do is draw him a new set of lines. Krycek rubbed at his eyes. The ginseng had stopped working last week, and the caffeine pills were just keeping him awake on the planes from DC to Seattle. Another week of transcontinental Mulder-busting and I'm going to be doing speed, he thought. Not that he was completely against speed, but there was a time and a place. He pulled a black leather glove onto his cripple-hand as he swung into the driver's seat of a company car and thumbed numbers into his cell with the other. The other end rang five times. "Yes?" The precise, foreign voice. A direct line, Krycek thought, class all the way. "It's me. Mulder's showing off the gift I gave him." "You know him. Find a way to keep him interested." "I'm on my way back west tonight." He clicked off the phone and put the car in gear, disappearing into the fluid rush of traffic. * * * Fox Mulder's Apartment Arlington, VA 6:48 PM Right now, Scully's working out, he thought, leaning back on the leather couch. I've got secret Air Force data files, freak autopsies, antique space capsules falling from the sky and I'm thinking of Scully's sweat. In the time of his solitude Fox Mulder had remembered the basics, with the help of the occasional study aid. Breasts, thighs, soft dewed folds, mouth. But he realized quickly that he had forgotten so many important things, and set himself to relearning tastes and textures. Underarm, the back of her knee, the inside of her forearm, the crease where the swell of her ass joined her thigh. He'd forgotten what it felt like to pull on a nipple, the flesh of breast rising slightly, and how a woman's juices could be sticky and slippery at the same time. She had been closer to a fantasy than he imagined she would be, her breasts larger and softer, nipples darker, belly firmer and better defined. Her arousal could range from playful to desperate. They would take turns between her crawling over him as though he were her playground, and her taking charge of her smaller figure, turning her around and over in his arms to bring different parts of her to his mouth or hands or cock. Scully's sweat was sharp and slightly bitter, salty, without the underlying round foulness of his own. Mulder realised he was hard, hard with the idea that she could be in his bed soon or he in hers, with the idea of her sleek body cupped and pressed by damp lycra as she stretched, lifted, moved. Maybe she was in the shower. Closing her eyes, he thought, the water beating against her forehead as her fingers swept her hair back, then rested briefly against the upper swells of her breasts. Scully's soapy hands crossed up her arms, to her shoulders, then drew crossing sudsy paths over her nipples, down to her hips. Her eyes suddenly slightly lidded, she glances slowly around the shower room. She is alone. The heavy, damp air tastes like soap and faint mildew, and the water slaps loosely on the tiles. Scully's hand slips down between her legs, one long caress starting at the narrow patch of dark hair and moving lower. She stops there, rubbing in a circular motion, her two long fingertips in a gently circular motion over her slick opening, the heel of her hand pressuring her clitoris. ring ring curled up in your arms apologizing, jesus Mulder that would have been your postorgasmic guilt surge today "Huuuhhh? Mulder..." "Whoa, Mulder. I hope I didn't interrupt any X-Files division extracurricular activities." "What is it, Frohike?" "We've got it. When can you get here?" "On my way." * * * Offices of "The Lone Gunman" 7:13 PM "Well, it took a little doing, but we eventually got the sucker cracked..." Frohike led Mulder around several crates with UPS labels that were just inside the door. New toys, Mulder assumed. "It was encrypted?" "We just didn't know what it was," Frohike said. "You got it going there?" Langly held up one pausing finger as he tapped away at a keyboard. "So what is it?" "A whole bag of DoD goodies," Frohike responded. "One's a radar trace from a Navy ship, we think, in one of the weapons ranges off the Pacific Coast. Another radar trace from I don't know where, but it's orbital stuff, not aerial, so that would narrow it down to a few installations. And what seem like voice and telemetry transmissions. I'm guessing this has to do with those pictures you sent Langly, right?" "Maybe." "Too easy." Langly called out in mid-roll between two terminals. "We can't grep the telemetry except that it's really crude stuff by modern standards," Frohike continued. "Byers said he'd give it another go, but the voice transmission.. well... you got it, Langly?" "Here we go." The woman's voice was distant and with a watery sort of distortion over swelling washes of static and a vague, low rumble. Too distorted? Mulder first thought, then no, just not English. Short, repetitive statements. Reporting. Interspersed with something longer, slightly more emotive. Observations, maybe. "It's Russian?" Mulder asked. Byers nodded. The voice seemed to slide further underwater, with a slightly greater stressor to it. Mulder realized he could hear a professional facade cracking, higher pitched, faster. After slightly more than two minutes, the voice rippled and buzzed out of existence. "It's going to take a few hours at least for us to track down somebody to translate this reliably," Byers said, breaking an uncomfortable silence. "Mostly, I can tell she is giving readings of some sort, numbers, repeated." He rocked once on his heels. "I also think she says, 'It's hot', and 'I see a flame.'" Mulder's mind drifted over the charred wreckage in the dense, wet brush. "Reentry." "Probably." Byers nodded. "Because of the ionization, it would be unusual but not impossible to maintain radio contact up to this point." "When did you learn Russian, Byers?" "I took it in college when I wanted to go into the CIA." Byers smiled slightly. "I forgot most of it, but this is pretty simple stuff." "Narc." Langly tapped up a series of aerial navigation maps on parallel screens. "The radar traces are definitely of an object entering the atmosphere from orbit after a course correction-- actually, two course corrections." Byers spun the chair around and sat with knees spread, leaning forward. "I thought this was kind of strange, though, because once a spacecraft begins reentry you don't normally change the trajectory." "It's kind of like riding a toboggan. Try to turn and ...wipeout." Frohike added from his vantage point by their tangle of telephonic equipment. Mulder nodded back at him. "Was anyone transmitting back to the, uh, craft?" "It's hard to tell." Byers picked up a sheaf of printouts. "I'm not really familiar with these kind of telemetric transmissions, especially not what this looks like." He glanced at Mulder, gesturing with the ream of paper. "We know someone who might be able to make better sense of it for you, though." "Twelver?" Frohike stepped forward with his arms crossed across his chest. "Is it important? Twelver's a valuable resource." Langly moved to a chair nearer Mulder, straddling it backwards, completing an informal circle. "Who's Twelver?" Mulder asked, looking around the circle "Yeah, it might be important." "He's a spook." Frohike said. "Signals intelligence, like NSA, but not one of ours. Foreign. Does a little hobby work for us sometimes." "Can we trust him?" Mulder looked from Frohike to Langly. Stupid question. "How do I get in contact with him?" "You don't," Langly replied. "Leave it to us, we got all the stuff anyway." "How long's it going to take?" "This is important, right?" Frohike asked Mulder with a serious tone. "I think so." "How long to get those files uploaded?" the older Gunman asked Langly. "Sometime tonight, then I'll leave Twelver a flag for the download." "Maybe three, four days?" * * * "Scully, it's me." He tucked the phone up between head and shoulder to pull out of his parking space. "The boys got a few more things for us." "I've got something for us too, Mulder," she replied. "What's that?" "I found her." He heard the shadow of distraction in her voice that meant she was looking at something else. Computer, maybe, the soft glow lighting the planes of her face. She would have the look of unfocused concern that meant... shit, Mulder, he told himself, get a grip on it. "I'm on my way over." * * * Anacostia, DC 9:34 PM Spender looked both ways before crossing the street, sprinting across to the graffiti-scarred pay phone. The reason people tap your phone, Mulder, is that you use your own goddamn phone. "Yes?" the voice answered. "It's me. Mulder's gotten hold of what look like some DoD documents that the OPR guy found very interesting." He heard the pause of a cigarette puff. "That's Wilkins? The cripple?" The older man's disapproval of Spender's contact had been clear for some weeks. "Yeah, that's him. I have copies if you're interested." "That won't be necessary-- I'm familiar with the matter already." The smoker chuckled on the end of the line. "Agent Mulder never gets bored with digging his own grave, especially if someone offers to take the shovel away. Has he made any progress on your mother's case?" "Not so I've noticed." The graffiti inside the phone booth was a dense code of warring tags. If there had been any original meaning besides an endless stream of 'me!', it was long lost. "I'm still looking into that, but I haven't got very much to offer besides what I already misguidedly gave Agent Mulder." The smoker paused. "Has he shared Dr. Werber's files from Agent Scully's hypnosis?" "No, he hasn't." "That's... unfortunate. I'll see if there's any leverage I might be able to apply from my end." "I appreciate it." "Thank you, Jeffrey." Spender hung up the phone, looked both ways, and jogged back to his car. * * * Mulder leaned over her shoulder, looking at the monitor of the Mac in her bedroom, noticing her hair was still damp from a post-workout shower. "Galina Kovalyova," Scully announced as the images pulled up onto the screen. "These pages are about the Soviet space program. This is the first class of female cosmonauts." "But only one of them went into space, right? Tereshkova?" "That's the story. But look here, this picture is of the entire class in November 1962. 'Not shown: Galina Kovalyova.'" She clicked on the link, and a small biographical page appeared. "Says she was killed in a training flight, February 1963..." Then the small black-and-white photo finished loading. Dark hair, cropped short, unfamiliar on a face that needed longer hair to soften low, hard cheekbones and a prominent nose. Without a doubt, it was the face from the hideous autopsy photos. Mulder placed his hand on Scully's shoulder. "That's it. That's her." "I think it's entirely possible that she may have been killed in an earlier accident that the Soviets didn't want to admit." "Entirely possible, Scully?" "Mulder, this is the easiest part to explain in all this. The Soviets wanted to have the first woman in space, but they especially didn't want her to be the first casualty. So they just developed this story around her, placing her in this class of female cosmonauts later." "So why'd she come down twice?" Scully leaned back slightly in her chair. She spoke carefully. "We don't know that the crash that we were called to was her. It couldn't have been. The first crash couldn't have been her either, it was something that partially looked like her. It wasn't any kind of burn damage, or radiation damage, or...?" She trailed off. "Then why is this her?" Mulder said after a time. "I don't know. Just a feeling." "A feeling? I'm impressed. Are we going to have to chalk this one up to 'Satan' too?" She snorted. It was an occasional joke, where they considered handing some utterly convoluted and indecipherable investigation back to Skinner marked 'Satan,' written in red Sharpie, with no explanation. "Careful, Mulder, speaking of the devil again." She turned towards him in her chair. "What did the Gunmen have for us?" * * * She had always disliked her dreams, even before she had been sown with the seeds of nightmares. Mulder asked her about her dreams, and she was embarrassed. Silly, trite things they seemed, the unwindings of a busy mind preoccupied with minutiae. Taking the school bus with her brothers, ending up at FBI Headquarters. Cars, airplanes that didn't work, lost hallway passes, crowds of people at meaningless events shifting faces between old classmates and siblings. Mulder sometimes, other situations dissolving into arguing with Mulder, having sex with Mulder, her fifteen-year-old self playing tennis with Mulder and being mad because he was better than at it than her. She wanted to have dreams that she would be able to dismiss despite their obvious symbolic richness; she wanted to dream of white horses, of undersea, of cryptically arranged gardens. But this night she dreamed of flight. Green-brown-black fields checkerboarded below, the sky blue and unbounded except by the distant line of horizon. The wind roared joyfully in her ears, tugged at her limbs. * * * Olympia National Forest Thursday, May 28, 1998 12:45 PM PST The Englishman loves this kind of shit, Krycek thought. Meeting under a tent. Battle of Britain, Lawrence of Arabia. That nasty business in the Sudan with 'Chinese' Gordon, you know old boy? "I have no doubt that you are already aware why this meeting has been called in this place," the Englishman began. Krycek looked around from his seat behind the dark man, at the impromptu parking lot full of Land Rovers and Cherokees. Limos don't cut it up here. "We have been contacted. The Colonists want a meeting." Ten, eleven figures around two long tables pressed end to end. Krycek had appropriated the only extra chair, and other aides and assistants stood uncomfortably around the meeting, insulating it from the purposeful black-uniformed figures running between trailers and equipment. The sun was currently winning its daily battle against the Pacific cloud cover, but the breeze through the tent was still damp and boreal. "What kind of meeting?" The fat man. They're no better friends than they ever have been, Krycek thought. "They want a remote viewer. Information must be transferred." "Does it regard this business?" "We can assume so." "Then this has become serious. The involvement of other parties was a mistake." The well-fed face turned towards the lean, dark visage of Krycek's employer, who lounged casually in his folding chair. "It is I who involved you, my friend," the Indian replied, with a tinge of gentle humor. "That has been the problem of your group since the beginning. Your arrogance already cost you the cooperation of the Russians. And now?" He held up his hands in a gesture of dismissal, eyes glittering over the wire rims of his glasses. "Colonel, how long will it take to undertake this?" the Englishman asked a black-uniformed man standing at ease at one corner of the awning. "At Fort Meade, sir? Two or three hours, once coordinates are established. If that's how it works. I'm not certain, sir," he finished lamely, glancing at several technicians by one of the radar emplacements. "I believe they are already waiting, gentlemen. Those of you who wish to accompany may do so." Heads nodded, aides scrambled out from under the canvas, cell-phones emerging. The dark man leaned back casually. "Mr. Krycek, you have a package to deliver?" he said quietly. Krycek rose by way of response. As the young man left the tent towards the parked vehicles, the smoker stepped out from where he had placed himself at the outskirts of the gathering. He gestured to a small group of men leaning against a Cherokee. * * * The uniform is not his, it has been some time since he wore a uniform that anyone would recognize. Like most uniforms, it grants one thing while restraining many others, and it is this one thing that the man wearing the uniform needs. What he needs is a nod from the guard on the main floor of the apartment complex. "Yup, sixth floor. Sign in, please." He took the stairs. There hadn't been a chance to check if there were cameras in the elevator or not, and where. They had radios, or cells, or something, because the two already upstairs managed to know he was coming. He'd heard the footsteps behind him, was figuring on getting the guy between four and five when he heard a door open several flights up. "How you boys doing?" The suits didn't answer the uniform, which would not be unusual. He looked over his shoulder. "The package, Mr. Krycek." "Sorry. It absolutely, positively has to get there." Krycek threw himself backwards, slamming an elbow into the chest of the man below him on the stairs. The suit wheezed hard and high as something crunched in his chest. Alex let himself fall down around onto the next flight as the two suits from upstairs clattered down towards him. The stairwell was too narrow for them to double-team him, Krycek thought. He lunged up, supporting himself on the banister, kicking one leg straight out into a knee that buckled noisily. Broken-knee fell down, still clutching at him, and it was into the arms of the last one. There was a burst of light at the edge of Krycek's field of vision as the man swung sideways, striking him across the temple. Krycek shoved the man's arm further along the arc of the blow and pushed hard. The suit fell down three stairs, halting on one knee facing away from Krycek and below him. Alex launched himself down the stairs as if running, planting one foot between the man's shoulder blades and stamping hard on him as he literally ran the suit over. There was a faint wet crunch as his torso was crushed against the edges of the stairs by Alex's falling weight. The suit moaned loudly, one hand fluttering weakly as Krycek mounted the stairs towards Sherry Tsang's apartment. * * * It struck the security guard at the desk as slightly odd that the UPS courier he'd buzzed in five minutes before was leaving with the same package under his arm. And, had he not been suddenly occupied by the stairwell door clanging open and a broken, bloodied man in a suit falling to the floor of the lobby, he would have noticed the courier dropping his package in the mailbox outside the building. * * * Fort Meade, Maryland 4:58PM EST The captain noticed the man's hands shaking slightly as he lit a cigarette. He wished he was cleared to smoke in here, he wished he smoked, he wished he had some gum to chew or something to put his eyes out with. Gimme an order, sir, please. Anything. I'll drop and give you infinity. I'll run to Huntsville. I'll go to Ops-1 and do a My Lai in the cafeteria. Just don't make me stand in here anymore. The smoker finally released a long rush of smoke, steadied, but there was still a slight crack in his voice. "Captain?" "Sir, yes, sir!" "Prepare tapes of the session for the M12 list and distribute." The smoker looked at him directly, a dark and empty distance behind his eyes. "Captain?" "Sir?" "Do you have a family, Captain?" "Uhhh... no sir. Not myself. I have a sister, in Cincinnati, and she has two kids, sir." The smoker looked past the captain, concentrating on something else. The soldier stood for a few moments, nervous. "Yes, you're dismissed, Captain." * * * X-Files Division Office Friday, May 29 1998 9:22AM EST Mulder had gone to the Library of Congress, chasing Russian spaceships. She knew there was no point in going with him. Mulder's evolution into Homo libraris whenever he was in the vicinity of more than thirty books wasn't something she wanted to interfere in. Surrounded by disconnected information, Mulder's mind would turn in on itself into an analytical frenzy, holding everything up to everything else. For all her years of playing the spoiler, the inactivity was grating-- not that she missed being knee-deep in mud and chicken guts somewhere, or honestly wanted to find some new Luther Boggs-- but it made her feel as if she was in her grandfather's boots at Anzio, waiting to hit the beach, for the shells to start flying and the deadly dice rolling. It didn't seem to bother Mulder as much, since the X-Files appeared to just be one segment of a one-man Department of Parapsychological Studies. Like any office, there was a steady flow of paper that needed to be maintained whether anything was being produced or not. The pattern that had developed was that they would send a request to Skinner's office to proceed on an existing case or lead, which would be denied, or take long enough to be approved that the trail would go cold. Travel was apparently out. A memo from Skinner's office, which he hadn't had the stomach to fully explain to Mulder's face, was that the X-Files division was currently restricted due to budgetary concerns. Until a new allocation was approved, the memo read, there would be no X-Files involvement in cases where it was not requested by other local or federal law enforcement. And, considering no one outside of the Weekly Weird News knows we're here, Dana thought, that put a bit of a damper on things. She and Mulder had tried to play along and submitted what they thought was a very modest and well-considered budget proposal. It should have been a mind-wracking, soul-crushing procedure, but she remembered three nights in her apartment, their less-than-meticulous records of the past five years in boxes and piles, thrusting papers at each other, tapping on her laptop, calling Byers for patient explanations of how to make the spreadsheet work. Her: detailed, procedural, a strong finisher. Him: scattered at first, having already figured out enough of the big picture to satisfy himself and now pushing at odd angles. It was a different kind of normal, she thought. Like doing our taxes, she'd imagined, trying to remember how my friend had told us we could claim part of the new car and we'd be up too late before we went upstairs to bed. Only there's no upstairs, she remembered, and we still can't show up for work together every day... Prior to reconfiguring themselves as an actual couple, Dana had tried to dissuade herself from such thoughts by imagining them having one of their knockdown arguments over paint chips, or paying bills. The fact was, however, that the events of the past five years lent significant perspective to haggling over line-items in a spreadsheet. She opened the CD tray of her laptop, sliding one of the Gunmen's CDROMs inside. It struck her as faintly ridiculous that she kept doing this. After all, she didn't know a word of Russian, didn't bother to follow along with Byers' transcription. She just wanted to hear the voice again, or needed to, as if something was wriggling and itching just under the surface of consciousness. It was a Mulder thing to do, she realized. Mulder does this to try to put himself in the other's place, to see through other eyes. She listened again, trying to forget that she didn't understand, listening for the things she might. The buzzy, clicky transmission sounds again in the small cluttered office. Even from the beginning, Dana recognizes the tension in the woman's voice. Something's wrong and she knows it, there's too many things happening at once. Not afraid, not yet, just trying to stay on top of it all. Dana's eyes close, still trying to forget that the foreign syllables make no actual sense. There, something new, something specific, dangerous, she knows that feeling. The woman responds by stiffening herself, doing something appropriate, following the procedure. It smells wrong. For days it's been just the air, freezing cold but thick and foul, but now there is something else, a hot chemical smell. Hot, that's it, that's what the tingling feeling is, it's been days since there was anything but dead cold and the nerves are coming alive with pain... It took her two and a half rings to pick up the phone. "Scully," she answered, swallowing to counter the hoarseness she heard. "Agent Scully? I don't know if you remember me, my name's David Tickle. I'm from the Renton, Virginia Sheriff's Department?" Renton, Renton, chasing werewolves, early 1997. One previously undiagnosed case of paranoid schizophrenia, a poorly buried settler circa 1750. Three days during a very bad year. "Yes, Officer Tickle, of course. What can I do for you?" She remembered Tickle as a smart one, well-read and sensible, who probably could have done better than a bedroom-town sheriff's department if not for what looked like an early and accidental marriage. "Got an ugly, ugly one here. I was wondering if you and Agent Mulder might have a few hours." Ugly ones, Scully thought. Ugly ones are always children, or young, young women, usually sex. Sex is ugly, violence goes without saying. "What's going on?" "Nanny, twenty-two years old, French girl on a work exchange, kidnaps the kid she's taking care of, runs to a motel and then tries to OD herself on sleeping pills. The kid had some too but it looks possible that he might have taken them himself. He's seven, who knows. Girl claims the parents are involved in some kind of ritual abuse and she had to save the boy. She's got a bit of a history, currently being treated for depression, but nothing really off the wall like this. I've interviewed the kid, sort of, and there's definitely something going on." "What do you mean?" Scully pulled a pad of paper close to her even though she almost never made notes. "His delusions, or whatever, are a lot more sophisticated than the girl's and they don't match. He didn't get it from her. She's talking about ritual Satanic abuse and he's talking about... well, I don't know what he's talking about. Girl doesn't have any history with this, no interest in the occult, no Marilyn Manson records, nothing." "What about the boy's parents?" Scully asked. "That's why I want you guys out here soon... Parents are real good people, well-off, professionals. They're crushed and they have no idea what's going on. We had a warrant and the house is clean, and the boy's story... well, I'm just remembering last time. Another sudden and undiagnosed case of schizophrenia in a town of 12,000 and I'd be wondering if there's some kind of public health threat." "Have you got anything to fax me? I can probably get up there early this afternoon." "I'll send you what I've got. Social Services has the boy and they're treating him like an abuse victim. I don't know, it just seems wrong, you'll need to hear it all for yourself." "I'll call you as soon as I know when I'll be there." Scully pulled out her cell and speed-dialed. "Mulder, it's me." He sounded as if he were waking up, gradually zeroing in on the sound of her voice. "Hey, Scully. The office hasn't burned down?" "Believe it or not we might have a case, Mulder, someone actually called us in. I'm driving out to Renton this afternoon." "Their werewolves come back?" "No, that deputy called and said he wants us to interview a boy whose nanny claims he was the subject of ritual abuse." The fax machine was starting to whir. "It's gonna take me about an hour to clear up and meet you unless it's an emergency..." "Actually, Mulder, I was just going to drive out there myself." "Um, okay." Mulder's line was silent for a moment. "How old's the boy?" "Seven," she replied. "I've got it, Mulder." "Yeah, I know. Call me if anything comes up. Be careful." "You be careful, too." "Don't worry, Scully, I don't think Alex Krycek is that much of a bookworm." * * * Mulder put his phone back down, nodding at the older man who'd been glaring at him over his books as he'd talked to Scully. Oy you, the library is for reading, not talking on that cellular walkie-talkie machine or whatever. He glanced up at the clock in the reading room, squinting slightly. Scully wanted to handle this one on her own for some reason. There'd been so little they'd been allowed to do, and Mulder could tell it had been chafing on Scully as much or more than him. It had freed Mulder to catch up on things that the FBI had no interest whatsoever in, but Scully seemed to need to feel as though she were actually doing what she was being paid for. The recorded voice of the doomed female cosmonaut in her apartment last night had bumped up against one of the remaining, crumbled stands of Scully's walls of denial. "Okay, Mulder, this is where we get off." "What?" "It's too good. It's too easy. It's a setup. It's breadcrumbs." "Even if it's a trap, Scully, that doesn't mean we it's not worth investigating." That wasn't how he meant to say it, and they both knew it, but Scully won what argument there had been right there. "Mulder, I admit there's something unexplained happening. I have seen the evidence myself. But there's enough evidence for us to work on right now without rushing after anything new." She noticed that Mulder's look had changed. A year ago, he would have looked at her as though she were a difficult child that he was tired of humoring. He looked away for a moment, perhaps conscious of the fact that she would no longer accept that from him, yet unsure of what to do in its place. "So what do you want to do?" "Let's work on what we have right now and try to make something coherent out of it." Make something coherent out of it, he thought, leaning back in the library chair and rubbing his eyes. My girlfriend is driving out to Virginia to interview a ritually abused child? My partner is? Scully is? Coherent. That's the problem. Crimes are rarely coherent; they follow an internal logic that you can understand if you can get deep enough in the mind of the criminal to see from his eyes. The UNSUB almost always wants you to understand, that's why they take hearts, cut off ears, leave reminders, but there's nothing at the center but the wreckage of a broken mind spread out over many lives. And once it starts actually making sense you're losing it, you have to remember where you're starting from and be able to work back to that more or less objective interpretation of reality. I've had the privilege, he thought, of being exposed to so many conflicting yet internally coherent versions of the truth that I'm about ready to cut off some ears myself. Do they all make sense, or am I able to convince myself that anything makes sense at this point? I lost track of any starting point except Scully months ago, and every time I work my way back there I'm less inclined to set out again. * * * I DON'T THINK ALEX/?/KRICHEK IS THAT MUCH OF A BOOKWORM Spender leaned back in the chair, rubbing his eyes. The terminal glowed green in front of him, a line from the NSA computer sniffing out and transcribing hundreds of thousands of cell-phone and satellite conversations all over the world and delivering Mulder and Scully's to him. The computer guessed it was a name of some kind, inserting a space where it had heard Mulder do so. By now it would know Mulder's speech patterns well. At least they stayed away from phone sex, Spender thought. He had no idea how the computer would try to render that. Krichek, Krycszk, Alex, Alexander, Al, he thought as he turned to his PC and cracked open the database. Al Krichek. Sounds like a plumber, or a tow truck driver. After this, get a print of the fax that deputy sent Scully, just for the files. Then run Mulder's library card, see what he pulled out of the archives. Then at two I have to go lie to Skinner about the fact that I spend all day spying on two other agents and maybe him too. Then I'll come back and see if they were on the phone again, and see if Mulder's sent any email to that FAA woman. Then I'll go out after work and get a picture of them tattooed on my chest. Jeffrey Spender, President, Obsessive X-Files Division Fan Number One. Me and One-Armed Wilkins. He turned back to the database computer. Well, I'll be dipped in shit, he thought. Alexander Krycek (ALIAS) (REAL NAME UNKNOWN). Suspected terrorist, possible murder indictment, impersonating a federal agent, supplementary files out the ass with Mulder's and Skinner's names all over them. Possible indictment... murder of Melissa Marian Scully... P for print and Y for a picture and... The picture snapped up into high resolution: boyish face, good-looking, slightly arrogant. Spender felt his balls curl up and try to hide somewhere under his throat. He didn't really need to see "DISTINGUISHING MARKS-PROSTHETIC ARM (RIGHT, ABOVE ELBOW)" to know this man had bought him a few beers and taken the odd manila envelope from him. * * * Child Welfare Services Renton, VA 1:38 PM "I'm Special Agent Dana Scully, Federal Bureau of Investigation..." A tall, heavily built black man in his late thirties interrupted her, and the receptionist went back to ignoring her. Tickle looked a little heavier than he had last year, and tired. "Agent Scully? Thanks for coming out here on short notice." He began to lead her down the hallway to her left, past the "Child Welfare Services" sign. "I think we might have an hour at the most before things get strange out here." "What do you mean?" "We just had a French consular lawyer show up and we can't talk to Laure Villiers until they sort out what they're doing with her, which is probably going to a be a psych assessment in DC." He stopped outside a door. Dana glanced through the window and could see a low table with crayons and construction paper. "I also just got a call from the station; there's news crews coming out from DC. We told them that the boy and the nanny are in County Regional Hospital, but I don't know how long that's going to keep them away." Dana looked into the room again and saw that the boy had taken a seat with his back to the door and was scribbling away at something. He had dark hair, almost black, and his little blue sweatshirt had a number 98 on the back. "Nothing brings them out like the promise of devil worship..." "Thanks. I'll see what I can do." She saw Tickle taking up a position in front of the door, broad back nearly blocking the small window. Damn it, she thought as she flashed her badge at the social worker straightening a pile of children's books. The boy's name was... was... "Hi, Jared." He turned around. "Hi." He looked at her. "Okay. You came." He turned back to his paper, picking another crayon. "I haven't finished yet." She walked up beside him, bending down. "I'm Dana. Can I sit down?" "Yup." He looked at his crayons, picking up and studying green, settling on gray. They told me to draw this for you." "Who told you, Jared? Your parents?" The boy shook his head. Purple this time. "Did Laure tell you?" He put down his crayon. "Is Laure okay?" Jared asked. "Yes, she's fine. She's still a little sick but she's okay." Scully replied. "Good. She was really scared." Jared finishes his line carefully. "So why were you drawing this for me?" "They told me to. They said you were coming. Sorry I'm not done yet." Black, now. "It's okay, Jared. Who told you I was coming?" "I'm not finished yet, Dana. Just a minute, 'kay? I think the nurse has coffee over there, you can drink it if you want." "No thanks, Jared." "There's apple juice, too." He didn't look up as he said it. He put the black crayon down and studied the piece of paper. "Okay, maybe I will." The social worker had left the room. Dana walked over to the counter against one wall. She took a tiny blue plastic cup and poured apple juice from a box, then returned to her tiny seat. Well, at least my feet reach the floor on this one, she thought. "There." Jared announced. He didn't look like a serious boy. He was slightly round-faced and cheerful, but he gave the impression that he was doing something very important. He pushed the paper out in front of her. "What's this, Jared?" Two purple lines cut the paper in three equal parts the short way. In the lower left corner there were several small stick figures, and a little globe in green and blue. At the top right, several black squares, one large, a couple of smaller ones around it. Nope, no Satan in this one, Dana thought. In the central space were a few more stick figures, directly in the middle of the column. Their heads were elongated, almost heart-shaped, with oval eyes. They were drawn in gray. "They told me to draw this." His small finger hovered over the gray figures. "How did they tell you that, Jared?" "In my head. Like on Voyager. That's just what they look like. It's not really what they are." He paused. "There's a lady too. She's hard to understand, and really scared. They said she's sort of in jail, but she didn't do anything wrong." An underwater voice, counting, reentering, heading into fire, Dana remembered. "This is where we live. That's the earth, this is space. There's other people here, too, like aliens but they're mostly like us." He pointed around the leftmost column. "The middles... when they come here, they're aliens, like that, but that's not really them. It's like they're playing a computer game, almost. We can't cross this line." He pointed to the first purple line. "This in the middle here, is where they live. They make sure we stay here, on this side of the line." It wasn't difficult to follow. The initial psychiatric interview Tickle had faxed her had shown him to be bright, but not in an unusual range, no previous emotional or psychological difficulties, and as based in reality as any seven-year-old. He'd obviously heard something from someone, but where, and why? "What's over here, Jared?" "There's another line. That's why the middles started talking. They tried to explain it to me. Over here, the black ones, they're bad." "What do you mean bad, Jared?" "Like monsters. Except they don't have bodies, and the middles try to keep them over there." The sun was streaming in through the playroom's windows as a seven-year-old described a complex dualistic cosmology to her. "The middles said that some of them did something wrong, and the black ones are starting to get out." "How?" "If they can get out, they can break the lines there so all of them can come." "They want to come here?" "Everywhere." "When do you talk to the middles, Jared?" "All the time. Right now." He shivered once. "They said to tell you that you know who the lady is. She's an astronaut. She went into space and she never came down until now." There was nothing unusual about the boy, his eyes didn't glow, nor his voice echo. Scully knew this feeling, nerves prickling, belly hollow. It took her a moment to formulate her question for the boy, in the silence broken only by remembered voices. "Have you talked to anyone else about this?" "Just Laure. And David, the policeman, and Susan." Scully guessed Susan was a social worker, or a nurse. "I didn't tell them too much. I was supposed to wait for you." "Not your parents? Nobody at school?" Wait for me? Scully thought. "Uh-uh." I don't know whether I'm sorry Mulder's not here or not, she thought as she got up from her chair. Tickle was rapping on the door, and he cracked it open and leaned in. "Agent Scully, someone's setting up a camera by the front desk." She turned back to the boy. "Jared, are you going to be okay?" He looked at her strangely. "Yeah. I'm not sick." "I'm going to come back with a friend of mine, tonight if I can or tomorrow morning, and I want you to talk to him too, okay?" "You mean your boyfriend?" "What?" "He has brown hair, and he wears a suit, and you've been together a very long time." "Who told you that?" "They did. They know you." "I'll come and talk to you as soon as I can, Jared." "Okay." He turned back to his crayons. "Don't forget your picture." She picked it up, rolling it loosely. Tickle herded her down the hallway in the opposite direction from the front desk, where she saw TV lights. They rounded the corner and he stopped suddenly, cutting her off. "Now I want you to tell me what the hell is going on, Agent Scully." "I'm going to have to talk to Agent Mulder first. He's a... he has much more experience in these kind of cases." "I want to know why the hell that boy asked for you." He watched Scully lean against a wall. "What are you talking about?" she replied. Somehow, it seemed to the deputy that she wasn't entirely surprised. "He knew yours and Agent Mulder's names. He just said to call you." "Why didn't you mention that before?" "Because this is all wrong, Agent Scully. I may not be an FBI Special Agent but I can tell when something is fucked up, and this shit is fucked up." He leaned back and glanced down the hallway, then back to her. "If he told you the same shit he told me either I am on a un-fucking-funny version of Candid Camera or if I went anywhere besides to you two with this shit..." He slowed for a moment. "Look, I'm sorry. I don't know what the fu... what's going on here and I was hoping you might. I know these people, I know all these people. It's good to know Becky and Derek Keelor aren't killing goats in their basement. But... some of the things that boy told me and the social worker... and then he just looks up from his crayons and says 'call Scully'. " Oh, good, Scully thought. I'm getting equal billing now. Maybe I have my own listing in the Weird White Pages. She stood up straight. "I'm going to have to talk to Mul... Agent Mulder about this. This isn't a hoax per se, but it's probably not what it seems. I think it would be best if he stayed here. He said he'd talked to you and Susan?" "She's one of the child welfare staff, yeah." "It would be best for all concerned if you could try to keep this quiet for the next day or two. When's the girl's psych assessment?" "I don't know. I think the French consulate guy was going to be doing that. There's someone coming from DC on Monday to talk to Jared though." "Where are his parents?" "I told them to go home," Tickle responded. "I tried to make it sound as good as I could but they're not allowed to see him until Monday. Technically, you're not either, and I don't know if I'll be able to slip you in here while the media circus is going out there." "I don't have any jurisdiction here right now," Scully said. "I can't tell you what to do until I talk to Agent Mulder." "Yeah." The police officer looked down the hallway again. "Maybe the shrink will just come in on Monday and tell us Jared's been sneaking downstairs to watch Millennium." * * * She was a safe three miles onto the 95 before she pounded hard on the steering wheel, twice. She could feel the massive gears turning around her, around him, as though they were tiny bright pins in the mechanism. Critical for the moment, no doubt, but easily replaced. The machine would chew on, great grinding wheels leaving splinters behind. * * * end of part two of seven s o k o l part three of seven by khyber khyber@citizensofgravity.com rated nc17 for graphic violence and mature content full headers in part one of seven * * * X-Files Division Office 5:23 PM "So how was Renton?" Mulder had at least 300 pages of photocopies and the VCR set up. He hadn't gotten to do one of his vaguely professorial presentations since Chaney, Texas, the specifics of which Scully generally preferred to forget. She had regained her composure on the long drive back to DC and had settled into a general irritatedness-irritated at whoever was trying to set them up, at the general principle of being set up, and at the even more general principle that being set up was part of their normal work routine. She dropped Jared's drawing on Mulder's desk. Mulder traded her, handing her a neatly folded slip of paper. NOT YOUR USUAL. Krycek's neat capitals again. "Shit," Scully swore, dropping herself in the chair across from Mulder. He held up the drawing she'd handed him. "Scully, all these times we've gone on long car trips and you've never shared your crayons?" "That is a Jared Keelor original, as described to the seven-year old artist by means of telepathic messages by what he calls the 'middles', represented in the center of the page and who it seems we can identify with little gray men." Scully rocked the chair back slightly. "I should also add that this particular piece was commissioned at the request of the EBE's depicted for one Dana Scully and her 'boyfriend,' as the artist put it." "I knew we shouldn't have done it in the field that time. They saw." Scully was somewhat relieved to see Mulder's even-I-can't-believe-this-shit look cross his face as he hung his head back over the edge of the chair. She explained the rest of the story, including Jared's description of the "lady astronaut," trying to keep as neutral as possible given that Mulder didn't exactly appear to be eating it up. "Scully, I hate to say this..." He spun his chair away from the desk and headed to the VCR stand. "This came by courier today. I didn't get it till I got back from the library. The address label said it was from Sherry Tsang but it had that note inside." The tape started suddenly. There were voices, sounds in a different language. Russian, and something else. It was a meeting room of some kind, with natural light. A round table with a few chairs. Two men entered, one white, short, heavyset, with a thick shock of silver hair and a red face. The other was a tall young man, East Indian, lean strong muscles in a summer suit. He pulled out the chair for the older man, and sat down just at the edge of the frame. "Spot the G-man, eh Scully?" Mulder said softly. The older man harrumphed, and looked directly at the camera, saying something in Russian. The young man responded. "Okay," the old man said, in a thick accent. Another man sat down beside the old Russian, directly across from the young man. He was Indian as well, almost stereotypically so, in some stylish update of a Nehru jacket with matching trousers and small wire glasses. He was slim, and his head was shaved. The camera jerked sideways to include him, the young man opposite excluded except for his arms resting on the table. Mulder paused the tape. "That's Dr. Vijay Pandhu. He was briefly a very big name in the late 70's and early 80's in parapsychological research. He started out as a skeptic, trying to debunk Buddhist lamas' claims of reincarnation. Somewhere along the line he ended up changing his tune and did a very provocative lecture tour-- I heard him speak once, in England-- regarding fingerprinting people's auras in an attempt to try to find them in future incarnations. He dropped out of sight for the most part in 1987, '88." Mulder restarted the video. "We will do it in English then, for our American friends," the Russian said patronizingly. "Academician Tsvigun, we would like to ask you a few questions about your work on the Soviet space program in the early 1960s." Pandhu's voice was musical, slightly hypnotic, a rich collection of layered accents. "Good, good, we did good work," the Russian said jovially. "Though I was not an Academician then, I was a captain in the Air Force, and then the Strategic Rocket Troops." "I would like to ask you some questions, if I may, about Galina Kovalyova." The Russian chuckled. He seemed jovial, a friendly old man. "Sure, what is it now anyway. Galya was good, not like the others, not just somebody's daughter or a stupid, dull Komsomol girl. She was a good Communist, sure, they all had to be, but she could really fly. Most of them, they would take them up once in the back seat of a MiG trainer, make sure they don't puke, call them a test pilot. She flew jets, even one of the MiG-21s, they were new then. Not that it really mattered, in the capsule you didn't really have to do anything anyway. But she was still better, seriozhna, a real Soviet officer." In Russian, he asked something of the young man, whose arms disappeared from the field of view. "That was why they picked her, I think, to be first. It was very uncertain, and very dangerous. But she very much wanted to go, and it was her duty." The summer-suited arms placed a glass of water beside the Russian, who picked it up and took a short swallow. "I was the deputy... po angliskiy... safety officer, range safety officer. The launch went well enough, it wasn't as sophisticated as now. Everything was all right until the separation of the capsule from the final stage, the insertion into the orbit was wrong, wrong altitude, wrong trajectory, and we could tell from the radar track that the last stage had broken up. Captain Kovalyova reported that the separation had been very rough, but she was all right and could not see any damage to the capsule. She was supposed to do eleven orbits, that was going to be a huge slap in the face to the Americans whose best man had only managed one. So we decided to go ahead with the mission as planned while we tried to figure out how to get her down." He took another sip of his water. "This was not the space shuttle. If things did not go according to plan you had to make it up as you went along. She was too high, and too..." he lifted an arm and inclined it, tracing an arc with his finger, "tilted and elongated, elliptical. We didn't know yet how to plan an acceptable reentry trajectory from that kind of orbit, so everyone sat down and tried to figure it out." "The flight was still a secret?" Dr. Pandhu asked. "All flights were secret then, until they were over. The Americans, too. You don't want to admit failure when your national reputation is a matter of national security. You've probably never heard of Captain Gary Childs, United States Air Force, either. The flight was supposed to take three, three and some days, I don't remember. Captain Kovalyova was good, I told you, she turned off all the lights, unhooked as many of the sensors and instruments as she could to save power immediately, before we even told her things did not look so good for getting her down in time. You have to keep in mind, you know, the Vostok was basically a chair in a little metal sphere. You could not get out, move around, do anything, it was like being in a jet fighter, really." "It was seven days-- seven days-- before she reported that the air was getting very bad. I mean, we knew, after three, four days the filters would be breaking down. She had not turned the lights on since the first day, and I think she was disregarding our instructions to turn the heater on when the capsule was out of the sun because she would sleep then, but you could hear her teeth chatter, sometimes, as she slept. She had cut into her pressure suit to get at some of the water from the cooling system in it. We didn't know what to do. There was no way to make a safe reentry. The jets, the attitude control, on the capsule did not have enough fuel to correct the orbit she was in. She knew this, I told you, yet she stayed there for ten days while we dithered, no light, no heat, no food, a little water, sleeping to save her air." He picked up the glass in front of him and then set it down again without drinking. "It was the morning of the eleventh day. We had worked out a possible trajectory that would bring her down in the water north of Hawaii, and had diverted Navy ships there. This was not an American capsule, ours were supposed to come down on land, so, if she did come down we had to be right there. But it was not, not good chance. We had not heard from her in nine, ten hours, and we needed her to manually fire one of the thruster burns. I say, we were certain she was dead. The temperature in the capsule had been ten, fiteen below for days, no food, bad air. Then suddenly, there she was, 'Sokol zdyes,' that was her call sign, 'sokol,' falcon. We explained to her what we were going to try, and she says 'That is good, I am very honored to be the first Soviet woman in space but I would very much like to come down now.'" The Russian smiled. Scully felt herself smile as well. First. That mattered. The first, the bravest, the furthest, throwing branches down on your brothers from the top of the tree. "We all laughed, because even though she sounded terrible you could almost hear her, you know, smiling, and she was seriozhna, a very serious girl, no jokes, it was the closest we had ever heard her to making a joke. So we began the burn, the course correction to bring her out of orbit, and it worked at first. It was shallow, long, but it looked possible. This wasn't with a computer, it was yelling 'do it now!' Galya was calling out the readings, we didn't really need them but it was something for the cosmonaut to do to keep them, you know, busy. Then my superior, the safety officer, he runs down to the men who are plotting her trajectory and then to the phone that goes to Moscow. She is coming down, but the trajectory is too long, she is going to come down somewhere just near Seattle, where there are many American navy ships." The Russian leaned forward on the table, his shoulders hunched. Now he drank. "You remember the time. It was 1961. The order came to destroy the capsule, to keep it from falling into enemy hands. There is a range safety device for this, a simple explosive charge, but it did not respond. They fired the thrusters again to change her trajectory, so the capsule would burn up. There was not much fuel left, it was not immediate. She would not have known, when it happens it happens, but she stayed there, calling the numbers, when we knew that we had killed her. I remember her saying 'I will reenter!' and then the capsule breaking up on the radar." "So there was an order given that resulted in her death?" Dr. Pandhu asked. Scully jerked perceptibly at the change of voice, as if waking. Mulder glanced at her, and she dismissed his concern with a small wave. "Yes, from Moscow, I suppose. It was bad. None of us slept for days after and we had not slept during the mission either. My boss, the safety officer, he got very drunk after that and I had to take his pistol away, he was going to shoot himself. Then, nobody talked about it. We said that a MiG had crashed, and made her a Major, and her mother buried an empty box. But what were we supposed to do? It was the time, even with Khrushchev, if she had come down to the Americans the KGB would probably have shot the whole lot of us. And the Americans would have done the same thing, don't lie to yourself." "Thank you, Academician," the Indian man said gently. "We have all done things in service of politics. I thank you for this. It is possible, you know, that we might do some good for Major Kovalyova still." He turned rapidly, facing the camera, said something quickly in neither English nor Russian. The picture snapped to black, then blue as the tape ended. Mulder was silent, looking at his partner. She seemed to be studying her thumbnail, specifically the left one, hands clasped on top of her knees. "Thoughts...?" he led. "You think this is real?" she began quietly. "Tsvigun's for real, looked him up on the Internet. Pandhu... fits vaguely within his documented research interests, especially if you follow where he's leading." "Based on wrongful, violent death, this would be a haunting, Mulder?" "Scully, look, even if you're undecided about the existence of ghosts, or something similar, you have to admit that within the literature and the study on the subject there is a strong correlation between the manifestation of a ghost and violent or wrongful death. Galina Kovalyova was murdered." "Well, within the right literature there's also a strong correlation between leaving your door unlocked and wandering little girls eating your porridge. But we're not talking about a ghost, Mulder, we're talking about antique Russian space capsules falling out of the sky with ...biological material... in them. And radio transmissions, and... it's all very concrete, Mulder, even if it doesn't make any sense. Oh, and need I add that seventy per cent of our information is coming from one Alex Krycek?" Mulder patted his large pile of papers and waved Jared's drawing. "I always thought of Krycek as more of a watercolors guy, Scully. Like I said, regardless of the source, something is going on here." "Well, there's no denying that, Mulder." She looked at the boy's drawing again. "I wish... I wish it wasn't like this. The spaceship, the cosmonaut, if it's true it's fascinating, it's inspiring. She should be remembered, like Yuri Gagarin or John Glenn or Neil Armstrong." Scully paused, unfocused and quiet. "That's the only way to really kill heroes, to forget them." "Do you have any idea how crazy I am about you right now?" Mulder said softly. "Oh, I've known that you're crazy for quite some time. I'm just kind of going with it now." "I'll buy dinner if you promise to get misty about space exploration at least one more time," he offered with a disturbing sincerity. "Maybe. But if you're still trying to convince me that this is a space haunting by eleven PM, I'm withholding sex." "Oh, is that so?" he chuckled. "Yep," she nodded nonchalantly, rising and beginning to pack up the day's papers. "Is that how it's gonna work?" "It sure is. I should have thought of this years ago." * * * Ft. Meade, Maryland 5:52 PM Alex Krycek was sick of airplanes. I don't even know what fucking day it is anymore. I know I'm on the early side of the country now, he thought as the guard slipped his card through the reader and the door hissed open in front of him, allowing him down a hall of briefing rooms. "Why is he here?" the smoker asked Vijay Pandhu. The dark-skinned man glanced over his shoulder at Krycek entering the room, then resumed his relaxed, slightly sideways position in the chair. The smoker stood up, tugging at his jacket. "He's not cleared for this." "Does it matter at this point?" Dr. Pandhu replied. "He killed the FAA inspector. Why?" Dr. Pandhu shrugged. "You said you had something to show me. You first, then we can ask questions." He gestured at the television. The smoker shrugged, shaking off Pandhu's condescension. "This is from the remote viewing session last night. You weren't present." Surveillance camera, ceiling corner of a white room, gray table. One man in fatigues facing another, books open in front of one. There was a blood pressure cuff attached to the other, and an electrode running into the open neck of his jacket. He reeled off a string of numbers. The other pressed his finger to an earphone. "Verified, begin." Cuff-and-electrodes, whom Krycek assumed was the 'remote viewer', snapped his head up. "Time advancing has made change in information given to you necessary three eight five nine." "Verified, continue," the controller replied. "We have been acting as mediation between separated reality entities beings in different frames of reference unobservable to each other four nine three three." Each word was stressed, the 'viewer' nodding forward on the first syllables. "Verified, continue." "Maintenance of our superiority in psychic countermeasures is becoming difficult this transmission may be compromised seven seven one eight." "Verified, continue." "Frame of reference separated from yours inhabitants growing in strength due to unknown factors. Offensive action likely two nine four five." "Verified, continue." "Countermeasures to offensive psychic activity are being circumvented in order to provide point of entry through periodic orbital psychic phenomenon six three one eight." "Verified, interrupt, query." "Query, proceed." "Specify periodic orbital psychic phenomenon." The viewer's head jerked, and his mouth made an exaggerated motion. His flat Midwest voice wrapped itself around a set of female consonants. "Sokol, zdyes." His mouth stretched again, grimacing, male again. "Remnant, psychic, other frame of reference inhabitants unspecified method utilise to open door for offensive action and movement five seven eight four." "Verified, continue." "Transmission compromise likely door is being constructed based on remnant phenomenon must be stopped, interrupted, phenomenon is cyclical and strength increasing six one four nine." "Verified continue." "Transmission compromise imminent, transfer to direct viewing, transmission may be jammed or replaced. Oh God..." "David, verify." "It's a vehicle, human, aerospace, spherical. Current position orbital, unknown, occupant one, female, status unknown. Vehicle may be a psychic phenomenon, strong presence, nonterrestrial, nondimensional I am being contacted Ohhhhhh..." The viewer rocked back in his chair. Krycek noted that there was a belt around his belly, and small chains on his arms that would allow him to manipulate the paper and pencil in front of him but not reach anyone else or himself. "David, withdraw, beginning jamming." "They want bodies they have been there so long we have been here so long" The viewer's head snapped back and he screamed, raggedly, loud enough that the microphone snapped and distorted. His arms twitched, restrained, and Krycek saw his feet kicking frantically. The controller across from him stood up, backing away from the table. "Increase jamming, I need medical and emergency, this is an unplanned transfer, requesting egress..." The man he had called David screamed again, and there was a popping sound. Krycek saw a dark line appear along one of the straining arms, the fingers suddenly dark with blood, then the other arm. Blood spilled from under the man's hairline as his scream rose in pitch. Suddenly there was a wet, ripping noise, a band of flesh tearing up from the man's arm, peeling back lengthwise, lifting and flapping like a useless tentacle. Then more. The man's arms were bloody pinwheels of waving ribbon flesh, slick red bones and tendons flailing and snapping underneath, still restrained by the chains. His forehead was trying to split and peel forward and backward, and there was a great pool of blood underneath his chair, odd wiggling movements inside the legs of his pants. It was quiet, suddenly, except for a muffled sob from the controller. "Clear, clear, jesus christ clear, get somebody in here oh jesus oh jesus." Pandhu still sat comfortably in the chair, but Krycek thought that if the furniture was suddenly whipped out from under the Indian he would hover there, held by sheer tension, balancing on the flexed toes of one foot. The smoker punched the stop button and turned to Pandhu. "You didn't attend the remote viewing because you knew what was going to happen. You have been in contact with the Colonists somehow and you knew about this, all of this. What more do you know? What was that message?" "If it was not for our group you would still be swapping experiments with your 'Colonists,' the extraterrestrial equivalent of a neo-Nazi motorcycle gang! Do not threaten me and do not presume to bull your way into what you cannot understand!" Pandhu waved his hand dismissively. "I can give you no more specific information beyond what you have probably already discerned. The Colonists, as you have called them, have had some role in restraining an apparently atavistic entity, or entities, which may be partially or completely extradimensional or exist in a psychic mode. They released it, on purpose, for reasons of their own, and now they have lost control." "I know many other things about the 'Colonists' and their activities, but I am not one of you. Our group operates on trust and respect. I have disclosed the truth on the matter of real urgency, what you just saw there." "Did you disclose the truth to Fox Mulder?" "What does it matter to whom we disclose the truth? And no, I did not. Not yet. But I reserve the right to do so as should any compassionate being on this planet!" Pandhu stood up from the chair and walked directly to the smoker. "You have seen the reports, my friend? The French consular dispatch, not a hundred miles from here? The Chinese fortune teller in Paris speaking Russian? The supposed mutilation deaths of three young women involved in a Wiccan ritual in Scotland?" He turned away from the smoker for a moment, composing himself. He spoke quietly. "The Gatekeepers, those my group are in contact with, are trying to warn anyone who can listen that the others are trying to slip through. For some reason they cannot. When they try to exist here that happens, that... destruction of the host. They are doing something, something related to the space capsule crashes in Washington. I have my suspicions which I will share when I am more certain." "Go to your group, as will I. You and your... Consortium... have an inkling of the danger. If we cannot discover and prevent what is happening within a short time, I and the others of my group will release the information everywhere." The smoker's stiffness returned, his initiative. "Involving Mulder is a mistake. He is not motivated like you and I, Doctor. We have duties. We have responsibilities. Mulder cares for nothing except what he finds." "For the time, my friend, that may do." Dr. Pandhu turned and walked quickly out of the room. Krycek stood. The smoker was gratified to see the young man slightly unnerved. "Congratulations, Alex, you're cleared," he said, tugging at a half-pack of cigarettes. * * * Krycek almost-jogged down the hall after Pandhu. The Indian stopped and turned towards him. Krycek looked around. This whole facility existed inside a cloak of secrecy, but within nothing would be secret. There was no harm in saying it here. "He's right, you know. About Mulder. He's... irresponsible. He has no concept of the implications of what he does." Pandhu glanced at Krycek's arm. "Your opinion of Mulder is not... colored?" "It's based on experience." "Mr. Krycek," Pandhu turned and started walking again, "your opinion is noted. I will proceed along the course I think is appropriate. Mulder is one man, as are we all." Pandhu stopped, turning to Krycek again. "His usefulness will end, as will all of ours, eventually. When that happens, don't worry, he is yours." * * * South Side Gym Washington, DC 7:40 PM "That's real good, you got some good stuff. Your footwork is excellent and you got good speed on your left. But you have to watch it up here." Skinner tapped the young Cuban kid's sparring helmet with his glove. "You gotta stay frosty. Soon as I offer you anything you're getting hot and jumping at it. You're getting too excited. Against a more experienced fighter that's trouble. You've got the rest of the skills coming together good as long as you learn to fight cool. You work on that and you're gonna whip any younger guy around. All right?" "Thanks, man." They popped their gloves against each other and swung over the ropes. 'Age and treachery' was still working pretty good for him, he thought. He had to admit to a caveman tendency; he couldn't work out in a gym with women one-third his age bobbing around in sports bras, fake kickboxing bullshit, or stationary riding in front of a movie screen while some "personal fitness consultant" pretended you were on a bike tour. He liked this place. It was rough, young, but there was a lot of respect between the older guys here--himself, a couple of black and Mexican cops, lots of blue-collar city workers--and the kids picked up on it. And it smelled right, too. Well, it smelled like a moderately well-used jock with an overtone of mildewed brick, but that was right under the circumstances. He sat down on one of the benches. Rolling one shoulder backwards, Skinner admitted to himself that the kid had got one real good one in there even if his old reflexes managed to dodge most of it. No paperwork this weekend, he'd decided. Tonight was quiet night, time to go home alone and make sure he was well rested. His latest rebellion against common sense was Margie, a smart-talking thirty-one-year-old network...something... analyst... something... who also happened to be a regional tae kwon do champion. He was quite certain she'd tried to kill him in a unique way last weekend, and they were going to drive out to the coast tomorrow afternoon. It was the first time they wouldn't be kidding, not saying "oops, we went to dinner and ended up having sex again." His gym bag rang or, more precisely, his cell phone rang inside it. Maybe after this weekend Margie would have his cell number, but not yet. Damn and hell. "Skinner." "It's Spender, sir. I don't think we should talk on this line." Damn and hell. * * * "You know this guy Krycek?" Spender had rolled the window down to let the smoke out. The older man had smiled indulgently. "Oh, yes." "Did you know he was calling himself Wilkins, using bogus Bureau credentials to get me to spy on Mulder?" "I certainly had my suspicions," the smoker responded. "You confirmed them for me the other night." "Why didn't you mention this?" "Because I'm trying to preserve your access, Agent Spender. You didn't need to know until it was time to move against Krycek and his handlers." No leverage, Jeffrey thought. I'm the low man on the totem pole here. "Skinner wants to take him down," he said. "He's going to put something together off the books, keep it out of channels until he's got Krycek in cuffs." The smoker studied the lit end of his cigarette thoughtfully, as if it were new to him. "That's not an entirely bad idea. Something overt, based in the process of law. Krycek knows where a lot of bodies are buried, might try to make a deal. It could give us leverage. You're going along with it?" "Right in the middle." "That's good. It's important that Skinner trusts you, knows he can count on you." He stubbed out his cigarette in Jeffrey's ashtray, climbed out of the car. He turned around before pushing the door shut. "Be careful. Krycek's a dangerous man, and he will not go down easily." * * * Somewhere in Washington, DC Sunday, May 31 Evening "Dr. Pandhu, you have made a grave error by informing Agent Mulder of this affair." The fat man, Angelo, was unique among his company in that he played no games with his eyes. He glared straight at you, unblinking, like a moray waiting in its cave. "You forget, as always, that there are others in this game. You do not represent the entirety of the world or the opinions of all its leaders." "You know what the world is ready for! Not this!" the Englishman's chair spun around. The outburst startled the smoker, though nothing would betray that. It was enough for him merely to be there. His return to events, to the game, had given him power within the loose structure of the upper levels. His old clients and supplicants had flooded back to him, to his appearance of immortality. "Keith," Pandhu began, leaning towards the white-haired man, "how long have we known each other? Listen to me-- it does not matter who is 'ready' and who is not. We must open ourselves to all possibilities. Your Project-- for all its scope, for all its grandeur-- never envisioned anything like this. Neither did we." "We have mechanisms in place to mobilize the necessary resources to deal with this," the fat man began. "These mechanisms do not operate openly. To give Mulder the information, to encourage him to dig deeper... a grave error." He turned his moray face to the smoker. "I'm afraid the time has come." "I'll have Mulder and his partner brought in. I believe they will be useful here, even willing, knowing what they know." He paused, lighting a new cigarette. The Englishman shook his head slowly. "Terminate them." The light burned, two inches to the side of the cigarette, pausing, moving carefully over. "Are you certain?" "Our group will not stand for this," Pandhu stood from the chair, straightening his jacket. "You will force our hand." "We cannot afford to have any wild cards, Vijay. Not now." Like all of the Englishman's pronouncements it carried a layer of dutiful regret. "Not when all plans must be reconsidered." He looked at the smoker. "You have your instructions." "Yes." It was difficult, always a mind game, who was in the position to decide when a meeting was at an end. Pandhu simplified it for them. "You are making what will be the first of many grave errors, Keith." He strode out of the room, made taller by indignation. The smoker nodded. He hadn't heard anyone call the Englishman 'Keith' in many, many years. * * * "I must speak with you." He had heard Pandhu behind him, softly speaking to his driver in another tongue, presumably telling him to wait. The smoker turned to him, but said nothing. "You are interested in protecting Mulder, aren't you." "The woman, Sherry Tsang. Why did you have Krycek kill her?" "I wanted to impress a sense of urgency on Mulder," Pandhu answered, looking away from the smoker and surveying the cars in the parking garage. "My observations of him indicated that he was not pursuing the investigation with the vigor I had expected. Mr. Krycek's involvement made them wary." The smoker exhaled, spoke. "I believe Mulder is more useful in ...other arenas," he said. "To keep him away from the new project on the West Coast was necessary. It was too unknown, too volatile. To eliminate him is shortsighted. If we eliminate him, we must also eliminate Agent Scully, another piece I believe is valuable. A list begins to form. The repercussions will be too great, and our options for the future will be limited. Just because circumstances have changed, we should not avoid long-term planning for the new conditions." "I care nothing for Mulder, except that he is useful to us. You saw what we are dealing with. He is already on the scent, I have made sure of that. We must encourage him. He will bring us what he finds because he will have nowhere else to go. I assure you of it." "You seem very confident of Mulder's investigative skills," the smoker said. "His resources and actions have been severely limited." "Strictly speaking, it is not so much what I wish Mulder to find as what I wish to ensure finds him." Pandhu sensed something. The smoker was evading him, just barely, almost imperceptibly. "I cannot do anything on the basis of your assurances, Dr. Pandhu. I can take certain steps to ensure Mulder's survival in the short term, to give him, you might say, a break." "Thank you. It will be for the best." He nodded to the smoker, perhaps a sixteenth of a bow, and returned to his waiting driver. * * * FBI Headquarters Washington, DC Monday, June 1 1998 11:30 AM In the elevator, I take Scully's hand again, our wrists crossing, unmistakable. Scully, as always, launches herself forward as soon as the doors open, head tilted down at first and turning up during the longest stride she can possibly take. It's only the slight swing of her arm that reminds us of our connection and our hands drop, fingers brushing, half a Scully-step onto the fourth floor. Skinner had called down to the office with one of his always-polite requests that we both present ourselves immediately, 'if not fucking sooner' the understood imperative. * * * Scully had come over to my place Friday after work and dinner and didn't leave till Sunday afternoon. It seemed like we both had permanent little smiles pasted on ourselves by sometime late Saturday morning. This, despite a three-hour Friday night shift of arguing over every case ever printed in English of material hauntings. Eleven had come, and I decided to stop trying just in time to be paid off with one of Scully's unbelievable, must-be-something-to-do-with-anatomical-knowledge blowjobs which are probably leaving ectoplasmic ecstasy phantoms rattling around my apartment building. "I told you you couldn't do it." "Well, did we have sex, Mulder?" She rested the point of her chin on my hip. The hungry, eager sound of her when I had erupted in her mouth a few minutes before was still slinking around my brain, catcrawling. "Don't laugh, Agent Mulder, this is an issue of importance to our commander in chief." Scully straddled me, all motion and wriggle, her hips pushing her soft, wet sex in an oval on my belly. She leaned forward. "Agent Mulder, did you, at any point in that evening, insert your penis into Agent Scully's vagina?" "Not as I recall, ma'am." "So, technically speaking, did you have sex with Agent Scully? Did you insert your fingers into her, Agent Mulder? Did you rub her clitoris, perhaps?" Her hair fell around both of our faces, curtaining off her words from the rest of the room. "Uh, I don't think so..." "What did you do with Agent Scully? Did you leave her tight, hot, wet pussy empty?" Scully's face was two inches from mine, her eyes closed, her breath hot, lips parted. "I didn't do a thing to her, ma'am. I barely laid a hand on her." "Let me speculate, Agent Mulder, did she suck your thick, hard cock until you came in her mouth?" Her mouth was a half inch from my ear, her hips rocking against my belly, her breasts settling on me. "As I recall the events of that night, that could have happened..." "That's rather self-centered of you, Agent Mulder. You did nothing at all to relieve Agent Scully's obvious sexual tension? Certainly, Agent Mulder, she must have been dripping wet, hot?" "You're right... I was in serious neglect of my duties..." I cupped Scully's ass with one hand, reaching between her legs and feeling her sticky-hot-slippery-sweet with the other. Her hips jerked eagerly, thrusting my two long fingers one joint inside her. "It's not too late to make it up, Agent Mulder..." I yanked her gorgeous ass up towards me, looking up to watch her settle her arms on the wall, settle in, wriggling her hips to a just-so position. Her little clit, poking out just a bit from its soft shroud, brushed right over my nose as my mouth met her second, softer, wetter one. I thrust my tongue up inside her while gently sucking, French-kissing her sex, and felt Scully's groan vibrate down her spine. Reaching one hand up from behind her ass, over her thigh, I could just tickle the shaft of her clit with one fingertip. Looking up past her taut belly and the sweet swells of her breasts I could see her smiling, eyes closed, biting her lower lip while I nipped at other, still lower ones. Scully trimmed herself to a neat, small, sparse triangle, the silky bloom of her sex almost completely bare. I'm not picky about these things, but the idea that Scully would do something intimate to herself, for an intimate purpose, drives me crazy. "Yeah, Mulder, yeah, mmmm..." She was leaning forward, against the wall at the head of my bed, getting leverage to move herself back and forth so I could alternate between thrusting my tongue inside her sweet depth and sucking on the bud of her clitoris. She held herself with her hips pushed slightly back, bent forward and her forehead pressed against the wall, my nose pressing into her soft patch and my lips on her clit. I pressed up on the underside of it with my tongue, gently bringing my teeth down on top, rolling it and sucking and rocking back and forth slightly, returning in miniature what she had done to me a few minutes before. I was throbbing hard again, amazingly, my cock begging to bury itself in Scully's tight, beautiful pussy. "Ohfuckohfuckohfuck..." Scully's ass was slick with sweat, her muscles clenched tight, strong thighs twitching as she struggled to breathe. She came in hard, short, shuddery rushes, not one big explosion, except for the sudden rush of wetness that ran onto my chin. Her spine sagged, and she slipped back down my body, panting, her sex burning against my chest and my nose just above her navel. I pushed her down, sliding her compact body along mine, somehow my cock nudging once against her inner thigh before sliding right into her. Her groan was subsonic, straight from her chest into mine where she pressed against me. It was like being suspended in liquid, high-pressure honey, the inside of her swollen and soft and wet. She lay still, knees pulled up on either side of my hips, and I rocked myself up into her hard and fast, feeling her fingers fluttering against my biceps, her head pressing up under my chin as I thrust up inside her. I could feel whispers from her, breath passing over my nipple, but I couldn't hear over the creaking of the bed and the faint wet sound of our joining. I gripped her beautiful rear tightly, spreading her, speeding up the pace of my thrusts. "Comeoncomeoncomeon..." I heard that, felt Scully squeezing me, thought about licking her, fucking the pretty delicate opening that my tongue had probed. It was hard, almost forcing it so soon after I had come before, twice as draining, and my body dropped away from me as the bed spun. I was brought back by Scully panting against me, squeezing my arm slightly. "Jusgonnanomovekay?" I recognized that as 'I'm rather tired, and believe I will lie here on top of you for a while and rest, that is if you don't mind' in post-orgasmic Scullese. She lay, and I ran my hands drunkenly up and down her hips until the night's persistent heat carried me away as well. * * * I know Scully had woken up about seven-thirty, pulled on a pair of my sweat pants, gone out to the living room where last night's papers were still strewn around, and spent about twenty minutes shuffling things around, trying to decide what our productive lead for the day was. Then she came back and snuggled under the covers again after returning to woman-scented nakedness. At nine-thirty it was my turn. I looked at my yellow pad from yesterday-- do we drive out to Renton and try to convince them to let us see the boy? Try to track down Vijay Pandhu? Something reminded me that it was a Saturday morning, a sunny, beautiful Saturday morning, and there was a beautiful naked woman, with whom I was very much in love, in my bed. I'd had enough sex for one twelve-hour period, but I wanted to feel the sun glowing through closed eyelids, warm on one cheek as I lay the other on her belly. I got off the couch, turned off the coffeemaker as I went back to the bedroom, and did just that. We're both so far down the food chain of social animals by this point that neither of us really remembers exactly what it is we like doing, and we spent most of Saturday morning sitting on my couch looking through the weekend paper, casually suggesting things to each other. A couple of art shows, a small jazz festival-- wait, we do remember that neither of us like jazz--trying to decide which repertory theaters looked from their ads like they had air conditioning as mine finally lost its brave battle about eleven o'clock. "Art," I concluded. "Galleries always have air conditioning." "Mulder, do you know where any of these places are?" "Yeah, I think I went there once." I pointed over the top of the section she was holding. "But that was a while ago, I think it was 1990, it might not be the same place, or it might have moved, or burned down, or..." Scully started to laugh. "Next goat-sucking monster we meet, let's ask him what normal goat-sucking monsters do on a Saturday afternoon." "I'm pretty sure you can get a ticket for goat-sucking on Saturdays unless you've got a permit." "We've got badges, Mulder." Watching Scully give in has become one of my favorite pastimes. Not giving in to me, that's too easy. It's the moments in which she gives in to herself, looking at a beaded anklet which would never go with any of her suits, or laughing at a thong-clad juggler on a unicycle as we wander through the street market. Pointing at things without the look that she's drawing a cold crosshairs on them. She bites her lip as part of nearly every emotion and moves quicker, less precisely. She likes oranges, things she can eat with her hands, things that are sickly sweet. * * * My apartment waited for me Sunday evening, tapping one subdued, homey foot. I wondered how it smelled-- but one of cancer's lingering gifts to me was an almost total deadening of my olfactory nerves, a severe limitation to two out of five senses. There are, I suppose, worse things that can happen to a pathologist, especially one with a sweet tooth and tendency to get big in the hips. I knew how I would smell-- womanly only in nature, with scentless, neutral man-soap and man-shampoo replacing artificial femininity. I wondered how I smelled yesterday evening, in Mulder's t-shirt and a pair of old scrubs. Wine and sweat, curry and shrimp and two bouts of lovemaking in sixteen hours, pleasantly fouled. Ninety-four degrees and humid, Mulder had created a web of unreality with ice and 7-Up and ludicrously cheap Bulgarian red, his CD player swapping The Band and BB King, Mulder's "old-guy music." It felt like the misspent college life I'd never had, and I told Mulder so after I'd had a half-gallon or so of medically recommended fluid replacement. "So what are you taking?" "Not medicine. I'm a doctor already. Something I don't know. History, maybe, archeology. Yeah. Archeology." The room swam a little. We're both lightweight drinkers, out of practice. "Master's?" he asked. "Yeah, but not serious. I did serious. I want to stay in grad school forever, have them dedicate a cubicle to me when I die without ever getting a degree. You?" "I'm in film school, film studies, whatever they call it." "We'll be totally unemployable, Mulder." "I'm a rich kid, remember? The New England Mulders. Trust fund baby." "What about me? I don't want to work hard enough to get scholarships." "You're hot. You'll work something out." "I'll just find myself a rich kid and live at his place." The world narrowed around us, the humid atmosphere closing us out of the bedroom first. Mulder brought the second bottle of wine, the last bottle of soda and the rest of the ice in an ice cream bucket. It's our bucket, I was reaching for that the first time we kissed. We needed the supplies, as the night would soon shut us out of the kitchen. Neil Young was the last disc before the stereo passed beyond our reach. I willed myself to remember-- the song about the hurricane, make love to that sometime. Eventually we were forced off the couch, into the center of the floor, and finally I lay directly on top of him. "I don't have a car," he says. "Never got around to buying one. Besides, I look way cooler reading Proust on the bus." "Maybe that's how I met you." Our speech is slowing, warm spaces stretching between our words. "On the bus." Mulder's breathing lifts and lowers me slowly. "You kept looking at me, looking away, so I just started staring at you until you broke out laughing. You were tan, looked so alive. Freckles everywhere. You'd spent the summer digging somewhere." The floor has finally dropped away beneath him, and the warm night has drawn tight and opaque around us, morning as far away as the now-unreachable bucket of ice. "I was on an island, in Greece. In the ocean. I stood on ground where people lived for five thousand years and raised goats and ate grapes and looked at the sea and fell in love and died." This last space between our phrases stretched out into sleep. * * * She dreamt of the sky again, felt cold dry air battering at her cheeks as she grinned with joy. Then she was on her back, her limbs leaden and her chest constricted, heart pounding. A vibration like continents grinding roared under her spine. It was illogical, inconsistent, and she woke herself to see if the weight was Mulder's arm across her in the too-warm darkness. * * * Skinner's face was grim, hard, brutal, directed to his desk, his papers, anything except the two agents in front of him who glanced at each other and at the chairs in front of the desk. "When you were in Washington State, against orders may I add, you had some contact with a Sherry Tsang, an accident inspector with the Federal Aviation Administration?" "Yes sir," Scully answered. "Sherry Tsang is dead. She was shot in her home sometime after Wednesday. Seattle PD were calling it a bungled home invasion at first until they found out nothing was missing. I guess NSA showed up at the crime scene with a very good idea of what they were looking for. Agent Mulder, your name has been mentioned in connection with some documents in her apartment." "She's dead?" Mulder fell into one chair, his face falling into his hands. "It's Krycek. It's fucking Krycek and whoever's running him," he mumbled. "Have you heard from Smokey lately?" "These were classified documents, Agent Mulder. Documents that the NSA is calling stolen." "Fuck the documents, fuck NSA." Mulder rose, hands on his hips. "This just became a murder investigation." Skinner showed no response. "Seattle PD is perfectly capable of handling a murder investigation, Mulder, and they'll request our assistance if they need it. What do you know about these documents?" "I don't know anything about that, sir." Mulder spat. "I didn't think so," Skinner said, and began writing on a notepad. "You can return to duty now. Be available for questioning." "Sir?" Scully said incredulously. "I said you're dismissed, Agent Scully." "What do you know?" Mulder growled at him, both hands slamming onto the top of Skinner's desk. Unflinching, Skinner looked up at them for the first time. He held out the notepad for the younger man. Mulder took it. Skinner glanced over at the table by the wall. There was an ashtray on it, with a single cigarette butt. Scully moved close to read the note as Mulder nodded to Skinner. THEY'RE COMING IN ONE HOUR. GET OUT OF HERE. * * * I CAN SENSE YOUR LIES. "Really," Pandhu replied out loud. It wasn't necessary, but he found it easier to control the conversations when he forced himself to order the words, construct the statements. WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO GAIN? "Since when do you ask the questions, my friend?" The room was small, and its occupant appeared to spend most of its time in meditation. ON RARE OCCASIONS, YOUR MOTIVES ARE NOT TRANSPARENTLY OBVIOUS. "You and the Consortium deserve each other, you know." Pandhu said with a hint of a smile as he looked into the huge dark eyes. The lack of reflection was disconcerting, as if someone had simply forgotten to draw the eyes in. It paralleled the creature's presence. Its voice was there, or nothing. There was no sense of being, no awareness of another mind. Pandhu knew this was something the Colonists cultivated to distinguish themselves from what they saw as repulsive psychic intertwining. YOU CLAIM TO SEEK KNOWLEDGE. WE ADMIT TO SEEKING DOMINATION. I THOUGHT YOUR KIND MADE A VIRTUE OF HONESTY. "Humankind considers anything a virtue that makes death seem one moment further away." YOU HOPE TO TAKE THEIR SIDE. "The ones the Consortium calls the rebels, you mean. If they only knew." YOU'RE ALREADY IN CONTACT WITH THEM. "We are... aware of each other. I am aware that to put right what your group put asunder, very specialized knowledge will be required. Knowledge which might add to my unique perspective." EVEN THE MUDMINDS WILL SEE YOU FOR THE ABOMINATION YOU ARE. Mudminds, Pandhu recognized, was the Colonists' term to describe the 'rebels.' "Abomination? Such a strong word. What would the rest of your group think of your position now? Helpless, powerless, captive, yet still alive? I thought your kind made a virtue of honor." It was a fascinating experiment. There were a few items on a low bench on one side of the room. Among them, the silver device, the weapon the Colonists used against each other, lay untouched. It moved occasionally between Pandhu's visits, as if the room's occupant had picked it up and contemplated it. WHEN I CHOOSE TO DEPART, I WILL HAVE THE DECENCY TO RETURN UNAWARE OF MY PREVIOUS FAILURES. "Then you may be doomed to repeat them." The creature's presence was gone; it turned its head away, looking at the blank wall opposite. It desired to be alone. * * * Outside the King Edward Washington, DC 1:14 PM Jeffrey Spender. Jeffty Fucking Spudner. It was pretty much the worst possible combination, Krycek thought as he hammered his last clip in, trying to figure out a good way to look nonchalant while getting off a fire escape. Some God who considered himself a real funny asshole had given Jeffy Spender the looks and general demeanor of a weasel, a heaping helping of the wrong kind of smarts and then, just for laughs, a set of balls that had been redirected from the production line where they made brass Clydesdales. He'd just been pasting Spender's story about Scully driving out to Virginia for a consult involving a French national onto something Pandhu had said to Smokey earlier and zoned out for no more than half a second when he heard Spender say: "By the way Krycek, if you don't want a leg to go with that arm I'd suggest staying real cool and taking your piece out." There are a lot of people, something has to happen, some random factor. He took his gun out, holding both hands up in the air. Spender will lose it as soon as somebody screams, Krycek thought. He looked through the window behind Spender and saw fucking Skinner and two other agents piling out of a Crown Vic. Krycek smelled the fruity scent of the waitress's hair gel behind him, and decided to make his own luck. BANG drowned out the sound of the waitress gasping through the hole in her shoulder from Krycek's upraised gun as he threw himself sideways, trying to rise and oh SHIT Spender is fucking COOL, he didn't even BLINK and he pulled the gun out from under the table, didn't just reflex-pull when Krycek fired. Krycek spun himself behind the waitress, dragging her up as she sobbed and tried to fall. He blew another shot into the couch right behind Spender as Spender rolled out into the aisle. Krycek backpedalled, dragging the shrieking girl with him, her blood slippery on his plastic arm. "Everybody down! FBI!" Spender roared in a voice Krycek had no fucking idea lived anywhere in the little weasel. The idiots in the aisle were throwing themselves out of their booths, helping Krycek, fucking up Spender's shot. The waitress was starting to pass out, getting heavy. "Agent Spender!" Skinner yelled from the doorway. "On your right! Gun!" Spender yelled, literally climbing over two guys who'd thrown themselves and their chicken wings on the floor. Krycek spun, heading down the aisle towards the kitchen and the cans and snapping one shot off at head height towards Spender, then one towards the door just to fuck things up. "Let her go, Krycek!" Skinner, he thought. He banged through the kitchen door, kept backing into the storage in the back. He knew from checking out the place weeks ago that there was a door back here, but where... Then he saw it, surrounded by empty blue plastic racks. The girl faded on him, dead weight dragging, and he dropped her just before the corner so Spender or whoever came first would have to stop and see to her. The back door moved as he ran toward it and Krycek blew three rounds into the wood, heard someone scream "FUCK!" Please god let this open OUT... Krycek flew through the door, hearing a grunt from behind it and spinning, running backwards. One gray suit was down behind the door, blood on his sleeve, and he fired at the other, getting lucky and clipping him top of the thigh, under the vest . Something snicked past Krycek's shoulder and he felt brick splinters spatter on him as he turned to run. Then there was a gray flicker stooping quickly out the open door. It was Jeffrey G-Man Spender pounding after him like a bat out of fucking hell. Shoot or run, Krycek decided he was already turning and went with the latter, bailing down the alley. There was an almighty SMACK on his fake arm as the BANG from Spender's gun lapped the brick walls. Krycek let the impact and his arm flying out in front spin him around and pirouetted while moving, snapping two rounds at Spender behind him, zigging out onto the sidewalk out of the alley and getting lucky on the traffic as he ran across the street. He ran down one block, staying low, into another alley, thanking some local kid for pulling down a fire escape. A metro police squad car turned down Krycek's alley as the howl of sirens dispersed themselves into individual telltales whining down between buildings. It crawled forward, the cops inside scanning the doorways and dumpsters. He hung on the escape, trying to scrunch himself into a corner, find any goddamn cover at all... Chance time, Alex, he thought. Good thing you stopped at the second floor. Krycek swung out, off the fire escape. His feet slammed HARD-- jesus good thing I wore my motorcycle boots-- onto the hood of the cruiser and he dropped two caps through the windshield, into the driver's chest. Fortunately, he slumped, holding the brake down as the motor idled. "Get out of the car!" he screamed at the cop in the passenger seat. He's gonna stall if I make him do it himself, Krycek thought as the young guy stepped out slowly. "Turn around!" The cop complied. Krycek hammered him in the base of the skull with his trashed plastic arm and he fell forward, moaning once. Lifting the man's gun as he rolled him over, Krycek literally ripped the shirt off him. He didn't need the buttons anyway, throwing his leather into the front seat. Searching quickly, he saw the unconscious cop's hat in the car. After slipping the shirt over his black tee and shoving the tails into his belt, Krycek clambered in, shoving the driver's dead body out and wincing at the mess he was about to lean back against. Pulling the hat as low as he could, he let the car creep forward, out of the alley. Just let me get a couple of blocks, he thought. Don't make eye contact with cops, people. Don't look at the windshield. No one did. * * * Fox Mulder's Apartment 2:47 PM "Marty? It's Whiz. Listen, I got that press kit ready, if you guys want to come by the Core and pick it up, I'll be here for the soundcheck around four." "Was your life as Marty more exciting than I'd ever imagined, Mulder?" He didn't respond, but rewound the message and played it again. She looked around the apartment casually. Video surveillance? Audio? Was there a team on the way right now? Scully definitely recognized the voice this time-- it was Langly. Mulder held up his hand as she started to speak, glanced up at the ceiling, then at the window. She ducked down the hallway, into the bathroom, and Mulder heard the shower starting as she called out to him. "Are you going to just stand there and listen to wrong numbers all day, G-man?" He met her just inside the bathroom door. They had run from Skinner's office, spent ten minutes in the basement gathering files. Splitting up, meeting at a Hertz, getting another car. Her voice dropped to a throaty whisper. "Was that Langly?" "Yeah. Something's got to be wrong there too." They'd gone to a movie, crazily enough. No one would expect them there. They should be trying to get on a plane, keeping Scully's promise to drive out to Renton, doing something that people in trouble are supposed to do. So they spent two hours at a matinee, watching an asteroid threaten the earth. Mulder chuckled in the wrong places, and Scully tried to ignore the gigantic buzz that sat in the front of her mind, like a misfired headache. Mulder insisted that they had to get to his apartment. "Does he really have something for you?" "He must, we've got other signals if they just have to go underground." Scully leaned her head sideways against the cool wall of the bathroom, eyes briefly distant. "This is getting bad fast, Mulder." When she returned her focus to him, she saw him glancing through the open door into the hallway. His mouth started the first syllable of her name, cut off by the tips of her fingers. "No," she stopped him. "Whatever Langly has, we're going together." There was a sharp CLACK from the front of the apartment and a ringing metallic sound over the hiss of the shower. Scully felt the body-warm metal of her sidearm against her cheek, realizing she had drawn it without thinking. Mulder, his gun drawn as well, was looking in the mirror, which gave a slight angled view of the living room. There was a shuffling sound down the hall, a floorboard creak from the entryway. Scully glanced into the mirror. Mulder saw her, and nodded. She stayed low, swinging around, crouching half behind the doorframe, aiming down the hall into the living room. In the yawning, latent microsecond it took for the rounds to fly, Scully saw that the woman was quite good-looking, even beautiful. Tall, brunette, much younger than she, broad-shouldered and heavy-breasted, wearing fashionable sunglasses and a fashionable suit and carrying a fashionable machine pistol one-handed. The woman's slightly daring blouse puffed under her collarbone as one of their bullets slammed into her, and the lapel of her suit shifted as another tore into her belly. There was a thump and a clatter as she fell backwards, sitting down hard against the far wall, her gun skittering across the hardwood. The man had been caught with his momentum forward, and looked over at his fallen partner, stumbling to stop moving forward as Scully tried to scream "Free-" It was a soldier's body, thick and broad, short hair, suit too tight, and he turned with his weapon raised. Mulder's bullet tore through the side of his throat and he sagged to his knees. Scully heard her partner running into his bedroom, heard things hitting the floor. Scully ran forward. The man was dead; his neck was open and ruined and no breath rasped out. The brunette shifted against the wall. There was a stain on the paint behind her, the splatter from an exit wound and a gory smear where she had shifted. She reached up to her face, straightening her sunglasses, head lolling up towards Scully. She raised one hand, holding up a finger-gun. "Bang," she whispered, then winced, and her hand struck the floor heavily as her face turned down again. Mulder came out of the bedroom with a shoebox. "Scully... we have to move..." Dana steeled herself, patting the woman on the hips, then on her chest. She felt something bulge in a breast pocket and reached in, pulled out a set of car keys on a numbered tag. The young woman's chest was still, and her blood was on Scully's knuckles when she pulled them away. She held up the keys as they jogged out into the hallway. "They might have called in our cars." Her voice sounded gasping, out of breath, at least to her. Mulder ran back to lock the door behind them, and pointed to the stairwell door at the other end of the hall. A door across the way opened, an elderly head poking out. "The police are coming!" Mulder shouted. "Stay inside!" The head turtled back in, door slamming obediently. "This is really gonna fuck up my lease..." he said as they started down the stairwell. "I left the shower running, too." Scully felt a vibration against her hip, and Mulder's phone rang at the same time. Glancing at him, Scully took her phone out and dropped it between the flights down to the basement. Her partner did the same. The rush of fear and necessity was wearing off, and she felt loose and weak from the neck down. We just killed two people, Dana thought. No badges, no arrests, no warnings. She had a gun and I had a gun and I saw her first. There was a bounce and a crack as their cells hit concrete and stopped ringing. * * * end of part three of seven khyber@citizensofgravity.com