s o k o l
part four of seven

by khyber
khyber@citizensofgravity.com

rated nc17 for graphic violence and mature content
full headers in part one of seven

* * *

The Core Nightclub 
Washington, DC 
4:15 PM 

Mulder's hand has slipped lower on the bare skin of my back,
fingers gliding slightly under the waistband of his ratty cutoffs.
We'd improvised on the clothes. I let him do it for now, to calm
him down. He and the doorman, who'd been overt in his appreciation
of certain of my secondary sexual characteristics, had spent four
seconds silently ratcheting up the testosterone to a point where I
was afraid someone was going to pee on a fire hydrant.

The reason clubs are dark, apparently, is that they are inevitably
dumps which require shadow and alcohol to look like some place
where you'd honestly consider speaking to a stranger. Mulder scans
the space quickly, probably imagining it in full swing. Langly's
voice booms out of the scuffed monoliths at each side of the
stage. 

"I'll be right back, people, time for me to attend to my own
career... five minutes." 

THE MANTS-- Half Man, Half Ant, All Asshole-- sprawls over
Nashville Pussy on top of Drive Like Jehu in a palimpsest of
magic-marker boasting on the huge concrete pillar in the center of
the floor. Tonight, if I haven't forgotten what day it is, the
posters declare Citizens of Gravity, with special guests Kittens
and Local Heroes, Retard Nation and Feed Bag. 

Langly's hair is gone; he has a thin buzz of pale blonde on a
thinly sculpted head. His smile is broad, cold and fake. 

"Marty! How ya doin', man?" He throws his arm around Mulder's
shoulder. Mulder quickly falls into the act. 

"I'm okay, Whiz. What's up?" 

"Come on, let's sit down." Langly, or Whiz, motions us to one of
the tiny ragged tables that surround the large open space in front
of the stage. They're bolted down, of course. I notice that Langly
has three rings in one ear, two in the other, and the piercings
look red and new. "We finally got those press kits done." I perch
on the edge of the table, as neither Mulder nor Langly actually
sit. "I thought maybe if you guys were heading out west you might
want to show these around a little." He hands Mulder a thick white
envelope.

"We got all the stuff on disk, too, the sound clips and
everything." Langly glances back at the stage, the Citizens of
Gravity, or perhaps Kittens, making an unpleasant noise that
carried threats of growing up to be a deranged howl. "I gotta get
back to work here, man. Soundcheck. Good seeing you." His eyes do
not come back to Mulder's at all. 

"Um, yeah, we should get together some time," Mulder says, waving
one hand lamely, trying to establish some sort of connection.

"Yeah, cool. I gotta go." 

"Take care," Mulder says to Langly. 

"Yeah, I guess I will. See you around." 

He calls for the kick drum, thump-thump-thump-PPP with reverb as
the hulking doorman watches my butt go down the stairs. Mulder is
silent, dark, tossing the thick package in one hand, catching the
long side, then the short side, then the other long side.

* * * 

As he walked down the hall of the apartment block, the smoker
wondered what the neighbors must think. He imagined that living on
the same floor as Fox Mulder had to be trying at best. 

"Who's in charge here?" he asked the patrolman at the door. 

"Lieutenant Grieves, over there, sir." 

"Thank you." The photographer looked up at him, smelling cigarette
smoke, and decided against saying anything. Authority hung off his
shoulders like a mantle of invisible velvet. He stepped carefully
over a smear of blood, and led the officer that the patrolman at
the door had indicated into the hallway off the living room. 

"Lieutenant, I'm going to ask you a few questions and then I'm
going to have to ask you and your men to leave." 

"On whose authority?"

The smoker didn't even remember what the name on the identification
was, but it did say 'National Security Agency' and looked very
impressive. 

"This is a national security matter, Lieutenant. My team will be
here shortly to take care of this." Grieves turned back towards the
living room. 

"Pack it up everybody. We've just been informed this is a federal
matter." He glanced back at the smoker, then turned to his men
again. "Leave everything here. Let's roll."
 
"Okay, you had some questions?" The new cigarette, the lighting of
it, didn't draw any unusual attention from the cop. 

"Did anyone see the shooters?" 

"I'm guessing you know the resident is one Fox William Mulder,
Special Agent, FBI? Or so they tell us?" The smoker nodded. "Well,
man down the hall in 48, name's Willem Krystof, made Mulder and a
red-haired woman, about five-two, leaving the apartment carrying
sidearms after he heard the shots. Matches the description of
Mulder's FBI partner, one Dana Scully. We're pegging them as the
shooters right now, but we wanted to clear with the Bureau before
we issued warrants." 

"And these two?" He gestured with his cigarette at the dead
bodies. 

"Nothing, no IDs, haven't run pictures or prints yet. We're
guessing pros, or... something that you guys would probably be
interested in." 

"Have you spoken to anyone at the Bureau?" 

"Just the usual channels, they haven't had anyone down here." 

"Thank you, Lieutenant. If this becomes a matter in your
jurisdiction, we will be in touch." 

"I hope not," Grieves said, pulling out his cell phone and walking
towards the doorway. "I hate this kind of shit." 

As the police packed their equipment, the smoker looked down at the
bodies. The woman he had seen around, the man he didn't know. They
had to be the Englishman's people, her with her expensive
sunglasses and her expensive gun. It was his sort of foolishness,
to think he would somehow 'ensure' that the job was done right. 

The smoker knelt.

Who was it, he wondered as he looked up into Mulder's hallway. They
had fired from there. Perhaps they had been in the bedroom. Agent
Scully would have pulled the trigger first, of that he was certain.
Her instincts that way were stronger. Skinner and Mulder had both
had their chance and never taken it. He was sure that Scully would
shoot him without a second thought.
 
The smoker stood and walked over to the front door, closing it. The
apartment was empty now, and he picked up Mulder's phone. 

"I need to speak to him, please." Puff, a long one, saving up. He
heard his old colleague begin to speak. "I'm at Mulder's apartment.
You should hire better people." The Englishman's aged righteousness
crackled back at him. 

"You are letting the immediacy of the situation interfere with your
judgment." Puff while the other fumbled, then the smoker cut him
off. 

"I will take care of Mulder and Scully. You've made my work
difficult enough already with the incompetence of your
subordinates." 

There was a knock at the door as the smoker's people arrived to
remove the fallen. He hung up the phone, smiling thinly. The
Englishman-- Keith, take his name-- was back on his heels. As were
the others, reacting, trying to head off multiple threats at once.
Expecting him to be a dutiful assassin, to fall in line. 

"There's your break, Agent Mulder." 

* * *
 
FBI Headquarters 
Office of the Deputy Director 
4:35PM 

"Walter, I'm gonna do what I can. With Agent Spender's statement
this angle about why you felt you couldn't plan this operation
through normal channels might do something." Spender watched
Skinner studying the carpet as Deputy Director Dean Schoen gently
rearranged the coals under the AD's ass. One, there was a dead
patron in the bar, origin of bullet unknown, but one of the agents
Skinner had brought along had fired at least two rounds in the
building in addition to Krycek's bullets. Two, there was a dead
Metro cop, shooter matching Krycek's description. Three, one of
Mulder's contacts was dead in Seattle with a possible sighting of
Krycek and a very pissed NSA. Four, no Krycek. Five? Spender just
lumped two dead pros in Mulder's apartment, a wounded agent, a
wounded waitress, and a colossal public fuckup under Number Five: a
gigantic ball of shit steadily gaining steam. 

On the good side, as far as the Bureau was concerned, they had a
convenient AD Skinner to dump everything on. In addition to having
gone cowboy on the totally off-the-books operation that produced
the disaster downtown a few hours ago, he could also be used as a
target for all the shit that flew out of the giant rolling mass
that was gaining on Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

Who, of course, had found this an opportune moment to elope or
something. 
Spender's mind whirled. He'd stood in the middle of the street,
hands on hips, swearing to himself as the police tried to block
traffic and sort out who'd been shooting at whom. Spender figured
he could have walked out of their confused cordon with his gun in
his hand. Which was probably more or less what Krycek did, he'd
thought at the time, before he heard about the police cruiser. 

"Walter, I'm suspending you from your desk duties and rank,
effective immediately. I'm going to hold the District off but they
may be pushing for charges. The only reason I'm not taking your
badge and your gun right now is because I want this Krycek or
whoever he is, and Mulder and Scully in DC and under control. There
are a LOT of people who want to talk to them right now." DD Schoen
looked at Skinner meaningfully. "This is all coming back to this
X-Files operation, Walter." 

"Understood, sir." 

"Spender, you're suspended with pay for three days. This is to
facilitate the investigation. Make yourself available; there won't
be a reprimand on your record if you cooperate." The DD didn't even
really look at him as he said it. Spender spoke up, feeling his
face flush.

"Sir, we had him. I had Krycek this far from me. He can't have gone
far."

"Oh, I am very aware of that, Agent Spender. You're both dismissed
for now, but consider yourselves on call. And one more thing,
Skinner." 

"Sir?" 

"Mulder and Scully are your people. Off the record, Walter,
Spender, they are on some very exclusive wanted lists. If we don't
find them first..." 

"Thank you, sir." 

* * *

Mulder couldn't ignore the handpainted sign in the window of what
looked like a good place to get lost for a couple of hours. SIMPLY
I AM THE KING OF THE BEST HOMEMADE DONAIR KEBAB SANDWICH. How do
you put that in the white pages, he thought. S for Simply? Or in
the yellow under Donair? The fluorescent lights were not yet on for
the evening, and the old-style glass cabinets and assortment of
travel posters of Lebanon made the place look slightly appealing.
They took one of the tables, a block of formica with mismatching
benches, and Mulder began scratching at the flap of Langly's "press
kit." Scully started as a young man appeared beside the table. 

"Just coffee, please," she said.

Mulder added some kind of murmur to her order. 

"Three dollar each, no coffee only." He probably wasn't the King.
Mulder flipped a twenty dollar bill at him, and the King's servant
helpfully pissed off. Scully picked up the first ream of papers to
come out of the envelope. It was a long strip of computer printout,
twenty or thirty pages still folded together from a high-speed dot
printer. 

"I think Frohike gave us a summary at the beginning of this."
Scully scanned the first few pages of something that looked
extremely technical. 

"There's a couple more disks in here, too." Mulder glanced at a
handwritten note that fluttered out, leaving the envelope empty. He
flipped it up between two fingers for Scully to read. 

"HEAT ON. GOING TO GROUND. TAKE CARE. 
-F" 

Scully glanced over Mulder's shoulder at the door as if Frohike's
"heat" would suddenly appear, then returned to the printout. 

"This is what they got from Twelver, apparently. It looks like he
broke down what were supposedly telemetry transmissions associated
with the crashes-the one we witnessed and the one we were given the
information about. According to this he couldn't isolate the ground
station the capsule was communicating with. He claims it's
consistent with similar transmissions from early Soviet spacecraft.
The transmissions were identical." She turned the page, then
another, referring back to the summary. "This is strange, Mulder...
In each case there's a second transmission that appears to be going
to the craft." 

"I didn't give them any data like that from the crash we were at. I
didn't have any." 

"I know... it says here that Twelver had received that data from
another source... as well as another identical transmission from an
earlier event. It says here that there was a report of a similar
crash off Vancouver Island eleven days before the first one we knew
about. That would make ours the third." 

"So logic would dictate that there's going to be another. It's
recurring, Scully, like almost all hauntings. It's even periodic,
Scully, every eleven days. And how long was the flight, on the
video? Eleven days." 

"Logic dictates there's no such thing as a haunting, Mulder. And
none of the literature you came up with, even you admit, shows
anything close to a material component like what we've seen." 

"Have you got a logical theory, Scully?" 

"Yes, we're being set up. Seriously. By Alex Krycek and God only
knows who else, probably with the aim of getting us killed. And you
can't deny that, Mulder." 

"Scully, whether or not Krycek is playing some kind of game with us
there's just too much evidence. There's some kind of major
unexplained phenomena. It's bigger than just whether or not we're
working on the X-Files." 

"Even if that's true, Mulder, someone is very determined that we
not investigate it." 

"When has that stopped us before?" 

"Jesus, Mulder! A week ago you were hanging back on this because it
was too easy!" 

"Scully, look at it!" He lowered his voice, but the Prince was busy
slicing meat. "Sherry Tsang is dead. There's two killers dead in my
apartment. It's not that simple. Why set us up and then try to push
us off? And what about Jared Keelor? Even if Krycek is playing with
us, there is more than that going on here. Someone's playing
against Krycek, too, and I want to know why."
 
Scully looked over his shoulder and straightened up. Mulder spun
around quickly from the waist and just about knocked over a bowl of
tabbouleh from a tray presented behind him. 

"Twenty bucks is dinner easy, you start on this and I bring some
donair and shawarma, okay?" the kid said. Mulder realized his hand
was on his weapon, and casually withdrew it and faked a smile as
they were presented with the King's appetizer combo. 

"Yeah, yeah, that's great, thanks..." Mulder hung his head,
pressing his hands into his temples. "Scully..." 

"I know, Mulder. Look..." She folded her hands in front of her,
elbows on the table. "Mulder?" He looked up. "We have a couple of
options right now. One, we get in touch with Skinner and put
ourselves under FBI protection." 

"No. We're sitting ducks that way, and whatever is going on here,
really, in the big picture will keep developing. This is different,
Scully. Someone is actually gunning for us. How much protection do
you think the FBI will give us from Cancerman, or the Pentagon?" 

"Okay, two, we try and lie low on our own for a few days and figure
out who's after us and for how long. Maybe this is temporary."

"What if we find out by car bomb?" 

"Fine, Mulder. You have a better idea?" 

"Scully? I think we should try one more thing. Just hear me out
here." 

"I'm listening." 

"We should go to Renton... follow up your lead there. That's the
part that doesn't fit. Everything else points straight back to an
official coverup, or back to Krycek." Mulder picked up a wedge of
pita bread and pulled it into two pieces, studying it. "And it
doesn't make sense, Scully. I don't think Krycek's working for
them. Not whoever sent those two to my apartment. This case, the
Vostok, it's tying it all together somehow but... someone wants us
on this, and someone else doesn't." 

Scully felt her anger ebbing. He was thinking, not just chasing,
not blinded by the pursuit. "Whoever, or whatever, was behind that
boy's story wanted us. I want to try to find out why... that's the
best way of getting whoever is on our back, whoever killed Sherry
Tsang, off. Let's eat, wait till the traffic calms down, and then
get out to Renton. If we find out what's happening there, it might
be important enough to give us some leverage." 

It was nearly an hour later when Scully said they should probably
start moving. As they walked out of the shop, Mulder stopped just
outside the door. 

"I don't know about King," he said, "but that was a damn good
donair."  He looked up, studying the evening sky. "Scully, how bad
do you think this is?" 

"On a one to ten, I'd say about an eight point five?"

"Do you trust me?" 

"Mulder, not now..." 

"Scully. I mean this. I'll show you when we get there. This is
something there might be no going back from." 

"Mulder..." She moved in close, her hand reaching up to his temple
and slipping into his hair. His face was still as she watched his
eyes filled with something she could not define but knew somehow
signified her as surely as a name. His hands settled on her hips,
and they took a moment to themselves on the sidewalk. "I made that
decision already..." 

* * *
 
Kwik-It Postal Services 
Washington, DC 
6:45PM 

Mulder walked up to the PO boxes, picking one in the middle of the
rack. He unlocked it, sorted through a few envelopes including one
large, padded one, stopped as if thinking about it, and cleaned the
box out completely. We left, and that was it. 

It wasn't one of the moments you would imagine as being eternal, as
being defining, as a tremendous spike in the wave of your life. 

I didn't realize this was the moment when we crossed over, when we
in a sense truly became ourselves. 

* * * 

"Hey Danny, how you doing?" he began. I watched, leaning against
the car while pretending to fidget in a purse that contained a Sig.
Mulder leaned into the phone booth. I'm looking out. My man is
making a deal while I cover his back. 

Yep. Definitely losing my mind.

We'd thrown together what we had between two overnight bags and the
office before we went to the club, to try and look a little less
like narcs. Mulder had a black t-shirt and jeans, I'd been forced
to improvise with a blouse, a black sports bra, and a pair of
cutoffs Mulder used for basketball. 

We certainly didn't look like narcs, anyway. But even with
ninety-four degrees plus humidity I wasn't used to feeling quite
this much breeze. 

"Yeah, things are a little fucked up, it's temporary. How's that
T-bird running, anyway? Yeah, that's what I mean, is that still on?
No, don't tell me, is it still cool? Okay, thanks, man, I'll see
you around. Yeah, you take care too." 

I'd tried not to goggle when we pulled the car over and Mulder
started checking the dozen or so envelopes. I knew Mulder had
money, both from before his father died and especially since. I
knew that if he cashed in or sold everything that it would probably
slip over seven figures into some number which is more or less
meaningless to a woman whose main financial choice of the past five
years was to not buy a new car so she could keep her wardrobe up. 

Nothing really prepared me for the leap between not feeling as
guilty when he buys dinner all the time and seeing him checking
through 'around a hundred and thirty thousand' dollars in cash the
way Ahab would go through the five hundred we would take on
vacation. There were other envelopes, too, five or six of them, the
padded kind you use for shipping. He didn't discuss them, just
shoved them into his overnight bag. 

I have an idea what this is already; Mulder's paranoia is anything
but fatalistic. It starts with the revolver on his ankle and
extends from there, I know, to a web of schemes with the Gunmen and
a variety of other contingencies hidden, cached, planned. He says
it's his inner Jew; you never know when they might come for you.
When I still had a car, the moment I was back on the job after my
abduction, he carefully taped a ziploc'ed revolver like his, two
reloads, and a stack of twenties under the carpet in the trunk, two
boxcutters inside the trunk itself, and another in the back seat. I
knew this would be some version of the same, something planned for
when dark imagination failed everyone but him.

* * * 
Kelly's Bar 
Washington, DC 
5:54 PM

"There's one thing I still don't understand," Spender said as the
waitress set his club sandwich down. Skinner raised an eyebrow. 

"If Krycek is working for some kind of shadow agency or the NSA,
why did he shoot his way out of there instead of just letting us
take him in and then having them spring him? He's gotta be either
freelancing or working for somebody else." 

Skinner looked into the bottom of his glass. He'd ordered a triple
bourbon and a beer chaser. Spender, not quite certain of the
protocol in such situations, had decided to join him. After Schoen
had finished with them, Skinner had stood out in the hallway for
well over a minute, silent, staring through the opposite wall, then
said he was going to go get something to eat.
 
"You're right." The older man killed half the bourbon in one shot,
holding the glass up. Spender could see Skinner setting up his
office, mentally, over the drinks and the sandwiches. 

"Agent Spender, if nothing happens to change the circumstances
here, I'm finished. I am going to take the fall for this. I might
anyway. Regardless of whether I was in the right or not, I made
serious miscalculations that killed people." 

"What are you saying?" 

"I'm saying you were following orders. This whole operation to
snatch Krycek was mine. Give it a few days, go play some golf.
Then, if nothing else has come up, go back to Schoen and tell them
everything." 

"Sir, with all due respect, no way." 

"Save your ass, Spender. I'm got enough martyrs to deal with." 

"Sir, I fucked up. I believed Krycek, I went behind your back, I
spied on FBI personnel for who the hell knows who. It's probably my
fault that woman in Seattle is dead. Mulder and Scully have
professional killers after them, probably including that psycho
fuck Krycek." 

"Spender..." 

"Sir, if this doesn't get straightened out they can bust me right
out of the Bureau. I don't care. If this is how things work I don't
want to play. You tried to do the right thing. I'm trying to do the
right thing now. Now what do you need me to do?" 

"Eat your sandwich and tell me everything you told Krycek. What do
you know about this case Mulder's onto...?" 

* * * 

DC Municipal Impound Yard 
8:40 PM 

They had pulled into a municipal impound lot well over on the east
side, in a neighbourhood Scully imagined was best described as
"industrial," or perhaps "post-apocalyptic." Mulder had told the
patrolman on duty that he was a friend of Lucy's and flashed him a
fifty. The cop swaggered over to the control shack and came back
with a full sergeant, which struck her as a bit of extra rank for
eight-forty on a Friday night. 

"So can I help you folks?" the officer said around his toothpick. 

"Yeah, we're just doing an audit here, you know?" Mulder flashed
his badge, and Scully could see a small wad of bills rolled up on
top of his shield. The sergeant inspected Mulder's ID, after a
fashion. 

"You need any questions answered, give me a holler..." 

* * *

"Mulder, is this what it looks like?" 

"What does it look like?" I answered. 

"Like DC police selling impounded vehicles on the black market,"
Scully grumbled to me as we walked away from the two cops. I'd read
a novel once, I don't remember who by, where these twins who
thought they were just whispering to each other were actually
telepaths and hadn't realized it. I'm reasonably sure Scully's lips
had moved.

"Did that guy there say anything about selling me a car?" 

"I'd say tell that to the judge, Mulder, but I'm afraid I wouldn't
be kidding." She didn't leave, though, and began looking up and
down the ranks of vehicles. She headed for the trucks. I'm not
ashamed to say that, even as a man, I don't know a damn thing about
cars beyond what I had to learn in the Academy. Gas goes in and
they move. 

"You sure we might not want to look at something less conspicuous?"
It was a Suburban, and it looked vaguely like a shiny mammoth.

"Mulder, I have a feeling we might need the space," she said
quietly. I looked in the back, and winked at her. She pretended to
ignore me. "There's lots of room for the dogs..." she said fairly
loudly. 

"Pop the hood for me and look like you know what you're doing." Her
voice dropped again. I fumbled uselessly at the door handle, then
tried to walk casually over to where the two fine examples of DC
police were watching us. 

"You guys got keys for that Chevy over there?" They flipped me two
keys on a piece of cotton string, with a numbered tag attached. 

"Nine grand," one said. "It's a ninety-five. Six-point-two diesel,
I think." 

"Hey, honey, it's a six-point-two diesel," I said as I walked back
to Scully. 

"Yeah, I figured that part out," she said as she unlocked the door
and hauled herself up into the driver's seat, cranking it as far
forward as it would go. She brought it to life with a very
truck-sounding roar, and leaned down to me, whispering again. 

"We can go about 300 miles on one tank of fuel and sleep in it if
we have to." 

"And there's lots of room for the dogs," I replied, knocking on the
door frame and heading back to the shelter at the front.
 
"I just need to call my bank, if that's cool with you?" 

"Look, are you out of your..." I pulled out a stack of bills from
inside my jacket. 

"Relax, I'm just fuckin' with you guys." I cracked the tape and
counted ten hundreds off the top, then dropped the rest. The senior
one's toothpick dropped in consideration as he thumbed quickly
through them. Non-sequential, unmarked, totally random. 

"Always happy to see a satisfied customer," Toothpick said. "Would
you be interested in our extended warranty plan?" He guffawed and
smacked his partner on the shoulder as I walked away. Scully didn't
look like she was going to be moved from the driver's seat, so I
walked around to the other side of the truck and climbed in. 

"Y'know honey," I said, looking over my shoulder into the back of
the truck, "they even cleaned it up for us. I guess it's not true
what they say about used car salesmen." 

"Really, this is okay, Mulder," she said, ducking down to hunt for
something, "of the five felony charges that could be laid against
us based on the past twelve hours this one is by far the least
serious. Ah, there we go." Scully found the button to raise the
seat. 

* * * 

Department of Social Services 
Renton, Virginia 
10:50 PM 

Tickle was waiting for them as they pulled up. There were a few
lights on in the long, two-story building. 

"You said Jared was still here?" Scully asked. They had called
Tickle from a roadside phone, and Scully had told him that they
believed the boy's life might be in danger. The officer might have
made half a blink at our decidedly off-duty attire, but nothing
more. Either Tickle was a very cool customer, Mulder thought, or
there wasn't any sort of APB out on them. 

"It's a typical bureaucratic fuckup. They can't send him home until
the psych assessment is done, and the doc didn't make it out here
today." 

"Who's been staying with him?" Scully asked as they waited outside
the front door. 

"Well, Sharon..." Tickle peered through the glass. "She was gonna
come let us in. Maybe Jared woke up or something. Hang on..." He
started sorting through a large key ring. "I got a key here, it's a
county building." Mulder's jaw twitched. It didn't escape the
officer's notice, and he rummaged faster.
 
"Mulder, look!" Scully pointed inside. There was clearly an
outstretched arm, a woman's, just visible down the hallway where
Child Welfare services was located.
 
"Got it!" Tickle grunted, shoving the door open. They ran down the
hallway, the cop leading. Mulder skidded to a halt by the woman's
body. It was the social worker Scully had seen on Friday, lying on
her back, eyes glassy. There was a horrific rent in her belly, and
a trail of blood dragged from the playroom. Half her left cheek was
pulled away, hanging in a bloody flap just above her chin. 

"No way that was Krycek," Mulder said, and jogged to catch up. 

"Jared!" 

Tickle called out from the doorway as Scully stopped beside him.
Her gun dropped limply at her side, and Mulder heard her gasp as
the policeman ran into the room. He caught up, and the three of
them stood stupidly in the doorway, Mulder looking over Scully's
head. 

There was so much blood... 

The boy knelt in the middle of the carpet, beside the little table.
There was a great spatter of blood from the center of the table,
trailing onto the floor to where he was, then another great spill
that turned into the trail the dying woman had carried into the
hallway. Jared whined a steady note, his voice choking and
catching, rocking back and forth. His head lifted. His eyes, oh my
GOD Scully heard herself whimper, his eyes are gone... 

Mulder held her, his hand snaking out to grab her wrist. Something
told him, something that crawled down into his belly and balls like
a frozen snake, not to let her go. 

Tickle rushed forward as Jared raised his hands imploring and such
skinny, little-boy's hands they were, slick with blood and so
pale... then Mulder saw light and realised that the ribbons that
hung from the boy's arms were not the remains of his pajamas, and
that he reached out to Tickle with naked, raw, bloody bone held
together by tendon and blood and somehow Mulder knew.

...hate...
 
"sssssoooooo LOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNGGGGGG" Jared's little voice rose to
a child's scream. The thin, ravaged remains of his hands plunged
forward at Tickle and the big man cried out in time with the boy,
trying to pull himself backwards as little bones punched into his
belly, clutching and clawing at the life there. The man and the boy
rocked back and forth together for a moment, their voices rising
and falling in time with their motion, underpinned with the awful
sound of the ruination of flesh. 

Mulder's mind did not let him clearly remember, later, what he saw,
but it seemed as if something tried to thrust itself out from
Jared's face, bursting his poor little skull outwards in a shower
of blood and fragments. 

The sounds all stopped suddenly, except for the heavy, wet slump of
Tickle's large body to the floor. 


* * *

ete kholod, it's so cold...

I do not want to open my eyes because if it is this cold, I am on
the dark side and there will be nothing to see. The blank of the
earth will obscure even stars to remind me that I am as far from
home as anyone has ever been. The nightmare aspect of it is  gone,
waking up and clenching my eyes closed so I could force myself into
acceptance of the fact that I was still here, still in my little
sphere.
 
The mist from my breath floats in the cabin, gradually congealing
into large, fuzzy snowflakes that melt into vapour when I am on the
sun side, just long enough to refreeze when I pass over into the
dark. The switch I have built for the radio is just above my knee,
I reach out and fumble the wires together with my gloves. The tiny
red lights wink at me and they are worth ten degrees of warmth. I
swallow twice, dryly, trying to bring some moisture to my throat so
my voice will not be a rasp.

"Sokol zdyes, Sokol is here."

The radio murmurs in response, something I cannot quite understand.
The first two days I wanted to stand. Now--six? Seven? How long was
I asleep this time? I feel as if I have forgotten how to stand.

"Sokol zdyes, slushayu, I hear you, do you hear me?"

The murmur is louder this time, the transmission is a steady throb
of  something that is not static. Perhaps it is my ears, something
with the pressure.  But there is a voice, or many voices. I start,
and release the wires without crimping them together. The voices do
not stop, and it is not the radio, and I am very far from home and
not at all alone.

* * *
Renton, Virginia
Tuesday, 2 June 1998
3:12 AM

The human body deeply dislikes being awake between two and five
o'clock in the morning; the machine is programmed to accept that as
the core time in which it absolutely must sleep in order to keep
functioning. 

And besides, it's dark. 

It would stand to reason, then, that only something of tremendous
import can cause human activity at these hours.

And it's usually something bad, Spender thought as he stood out in
the hallway staring blankly at his notepad. The cotton wool that
had wrapped itself around his thoughts on the drive here hadn't
dissipated; it had just turned into a dark, tangled nest of webs
and dust complete with chittering spiders and dried husk-corpses
entombed in ratty silk. He had stood in there, changing angles,
running his hands through his hair in different combinations, until
the coroner finished the pictures and the cops all started looking
at each other as they realized that someone was going to have to
separate the bodies on the floor. Everyone in the room knew that
the mess of Tickle's guts would spill out on the floor in a ropy
pile, and that the horrid ribbons of flesh on the boy's arms would
dangle and perhaps brush someone who was close, and his poor ruined
little head would probably just fall apart. And then, someone would
have to pick it up.

Spender took refuge in horror-- mumbling "Who did this? Who did
this?" to himself as he circled the gory mess. Then he stepped on a
child's book, probably swept off the table, with only a little
blood on it. Where the Wild Things Are. Oh, of course, the wild
things did it, Spender thought. That explains everything. A sick
chuckle burbled up through his clenched throat and he quickly
brushed past the two cops in the doorway.

"What do you..." Skinner addressed him as he tried to get a grip on
himself in the hallway. As he looked up, Skinner turned, breaking
into a run down towards the front of the building. Spender dropped
his notebook and started following as he saw another figure stop
just by the empty reception desk, flashing an ID to the policeman
there. The smoker looked up, seeing Skinner in almost a full run,
and turned casually. The cop goggled as the big man grabbed at the
lapels of the smoker's jacket. The smoker turned, almost slowly,
ducking under Skinner's arms and spinning around once to come up
behind the FBI man, facing him as he skidded to a stop.

The cop was clever enough to say "shit" when Skinner's gun came up.
Then Spender, never one to be left out, drew his weapon and they
all stood there, glaring at each other.

"Mr. Skinner," the smoker began tiredly, "do we have to go through
this bullshit every time?"

"What are you doing here?" Skinner lowered his gun. "What do you
know about this? Where's Krycek?"

"Where are Mulder and Scully?" Spender mentally slapped himself,
and decided to shut up and let the big boys sort this one out.
Easier for all concerned if he played dumb right now.

"I'm looking for you, Mr. Skinner, and Agent Spender as well if
he's determined to follow you." The smoker looked at the younger
man for a moment, then back at Skinner. "I don't know where Alex
Krycek is, nor do I know where Mulder and Scully are. They can't be
far, it's been less than four hours since Mulder made the 911 call
that brought us all here. I am, however, fairly certain I know
where they're going."

"Washington... the crash." Spender said. Skinner moved closer to
the smoker again, hands on hips.

"Is that what this is all about? That Russian spaceship?"

"You have no idea what this is all about. If Agent Mulder tries to
go there, they will be killed. I can guarantee it. I've done what I
can to keep them alive. Find them and keep them somewhere. I will
try to contact you again."

"Why should I trust you?" Skinner growled.

"I'm the one who's supposed to kill them in the meantime. And
besides, haven't I been right before?" He smiled thinly, and began
the motions of tapping out a cigarette from the red and white pack.

"What's going on here?" Skinner asked, his voice raised, his big
man's hands turned outwards at his sides. The smoker began to walk
away into the dark, a match flaring.

"Everything."

* * *

She woke when his body twisted suddenly and he gasped, as if he wer
caught in a net and pulled somewhere where he couldn't breathe. His
legs twisted in the motel sheets, pulling them away from her. She
rolled around, before even coming fully awake, whisper-shushing in
his ear and touching his shoulder, pressing herself against his
side. Then recent memory came back to her as well, landing and
settling its reality on her as consciousness strengthened.

"Bad dream." He blinked, swallowed. "Roche had you. I was in the
office, and Samantha came to the door. She gave me a heart, one of
Roche's hearts, made out of green silk, satin, from your pyjamas. I
knew you were dead." Scully threw an arm and a leg over him,
pushing her head under his chin.

"No one will take me." It was a new one for her, but only in the
details. She had learned in only a few weeks of sharing beds with
Mulder that she and Samantha were ghostly sisters in his
nightmares, endlessly calling his name or bearing news of the
other's fate.

"Somebody already has."

He'd told her once that nothing gave him nightmares, qualified that
statement later, and then in the end it turned out he'd been lying
all along.

"That was before."

Mulder's trembling stilled, and his arms eased around her. One came
around her shoulder, holding her to him, the other reaching across
his body so his hand rested on her thigh where it stretched over
his hip, onto his belly.

"Time is it?" he mumbled. She raised her head, squinted across his
chest at the motel's clock radio.

"Almost five." Settled her head back on his breast, her hands still
but nervous. "I felt something there tonight. I've never run away
before." She felt Mulder's body transmit an affirmative to her in
the way they fitted together.

Flying down the hallway of the county building with her heart and
her guts in her throat, Mulder clutching at her wrist, a prickling
blanket of terror laid over them as the rank stench of torn bodies
followed.

"I felt like I'd looked into Hell."

* * *

6:46 AM

He was sitting on the bed when she stepped out of the bathroom,
wrapped in a better robe than she would have expected for the
motel. It was mildly comforting that there was at least a small
part of her that wanted to forget everything and saunter up to him,
pull her robe open, take his large hands in hers and run them over
her clean, slightly damp body until she made his expression change
from sleepy-boy into something very different.

Mulder was fiddling with one of the envelopes he had picked up
yesterday afternoon. He started to say something, cut himself off,
looked away from her. She walked up right in front of him, slipping
herself between his knees as he sat on the edge of the bed with a
sheet drawn around his waist. He looked up, and his expression did
change, serious and wanting--the expression he wore when he needed
her to understand. He pressed the envelope into her hands.

"Scully, I..." She tilted her head, inquiringly, rubbing her hand
on his bare shoulder. "I love you, Scully."

She opened her mouth. It was hard to say, in some ways, the
ultimate admission of human weakness when given without
qualifications and said outside the humid shield of sex. He reached
up, stroking the side of her face, fingertips in her wet hair. She
kissed his thumb instead.
  
There was something slippery in the envelope, a plastic bag.
Pulling it out, it was heavy, black plastic, rolled around what
felt like a small, thick pamphlet and a little package.

"Mulder, what on earth..." She sat down slowly on the bed next to
him. The plastic uncovered a wallet and a black, hand-size book.
She flipped it over to look at the front cover. It was a Canadian
passport, stamped with a crowned coat of arms in gold. She glanced
up at 
Mulder and flipped to the second page, stiffened with plastic.

McMurdo, Tricia Joanne. Canadian. Date of Birth 7 Jul/ Jul 66.
Place of Birth Antigonish Can.

The woman in the black and white picture could be mistaken for a
few years younger than she was. She had red or dark blonde hair,
clear redhead's skin, and large pale eyes. She was quite
attractive, in a slightly reserved way.

She was Dana.

Scully pulled open the wallet--black, leather, a little mannish but
more efficient than a pocketbook or purse. It looked worn. Money,
about six hundred dollars in twenties and fifties and about a
hundred in green and purple Canadian bills. Cards. A bank card, a
Canadian bank, Tricia J. McMurdo. A Visa card, same bank, same
woman who shared her face. 
Plain white card with nine digits in black, Canadian social
insurance. A library card for the Toronto Public Library system. A
video store card. And then her again, a different, older picture,
glasses and fifteen pounds heavier, on a driver's license from the
province of Ontario. Tricia McMurdo has a fourteenth-floor
apartment in Toronto. She pulled them out one after the other.
Mulder's voice cracked slightly as he spoke.

"It's not all good. The passport's valid, so's the driver's
license. The social insurance number, the vehicle registration in
the back of the driver's, and the library card and stuff are fake,
they're for cover. The bank card and the credit card are real.
There's about seven thousand US in the bank account. It's a savings
account, you don't have checks. The address is real, but don't go
there, it's a cover. The phone number's real, with a woman's voice
on the answering machine.  You can pick up messages from it."

"Mulder, where did all this come from?"

"I started it a while ago. Things have to have histories: credit
cards, bank accounts. The guys do this as a sideline." He spoke
quietly. "I guess there's CIA people, mobsters, who might need an
out someday. Sometimes women who can't get away from someone."

"Who's Tricia McMurdo?"

"I don't know. No one. Just a name. I'm not saying we need to use
this now, Scully. But after last night I'm kind of running out of
ideas. I just think... maybe we should be prepared." 

She didn't ask the obvious question in response.

"When did you start putting this together?"

"Ninety-six... after the desert. If anything happened to me I
wanted you to have a way out if you wanted it. The guys were
supposed to wait two weeks, less if it looked bad, and then tell
you about it."

"You have all this too?" She put the passport down on top of the
little pile of forgeries.

"Yeah. Mine's all here." The spirit of a frugal ancestor suddenly
made Scully want to ask how much he had spent on this. This wasn't
cheap, this was serious crime. All that time, everything that
happened... 

Her hand was back on his shoulder. She looked up at him.

"Was that if something happened to me?"

Mulder half-laughed, and he shook his head.

"If something happened to you. Right." He paused, his voice
quieter. "There's a building, in DC, apparently the secret mountain
hideout of the mighty Consortium, where they have meetings. Langly
and Byers wouldn't have helped me, but Frohike would. It just would
have been a matter of getting in the front door."

"What if a piano fell on me?" Scully rubbed his neck and tried to
smile.

"I'd look really stupid walking into a moving company with an AK-47
and eighteen pounds of Semtex strapped to my chest." He leaned in
against her, ducking to rest his chin on her shoulder. She nuzzled
in a little closer, realizing that her smile had failed despite his
joke. It wasn't a joke really, nor a surprise, she reminded
herself. The violence in him was a narrow but terrifyingly deep
streak, and so hard she was surprised it didn't show on an x-ray.

"Vodka," she whispered. "And... some borrowed, non-prescribed
medication." There you are, Mulder, I've said it, she thought.
Almost wasted your money. She watched Mulder look out between the
curtains, trying to pretend she hadn't said what she did. You knew
I'd die for you, that's easy for us, but die over you, like a poor
little Capulet debutante? You didn't want to know that, did you. 

People moved in the parking lot, getting an early start, urging the
dog into the van. 

"We have to stop doing this, Mulder. We need them back."

"Who?" he asked her.

"The people we were before."

"Do you think that's it, Scully? Before what? Before we... what?
When was that, anyway?"

"I don't know. Maybe it is." Scully paused.

"Do you think you would go back, if you could? Back to before
we..." he asked, his voice tentative.

"Oh, God, no. No." She rocked back and turned her head, pressing
her cheek against his neck. "Why did you plan this? All along, you
said that everything was in the X-Files, the answers would all be
in there for everything, and all along you had this, you had plans
for us to get 
away...?"

"Because I was sure that somehow, if it all went wrong, we would
still be together."

* * *

Mulder is conscious now, still bleeding from his head and I can't
feel my leg. They've set fire to the house and it won't be long
now, I hear them singing their hymn upstairs. I'm slumping into his
chest and his arms are around me and it's getting hard to breathe,
the ceiling is going and I can feel the sparks and embers on my
back. His voice is curling around me, coming through his chest and
up through his throat, I feel it all the way up until his lips are
in my hair. Scully, Scully, he says my name, and he says it will be
all right and then the sun comes for us.

* * *

Federal Detention Center
Washington, DC
11:43 AM

"So what have they told you?" Skinner asked, straddling the chair
backwards. He couldn't remember the last time he'd interrogated
someone who didn't smoke. The last time he'd interrogated someone
as an agent, he'd been wearing a polyester suit, possibly with tan
shoes.

"Tax evasion, about 40 counts of fraud, twelve conspiracy to commit
fraud, some customs stuff, possession of child pornography, there's
probably more." John Byers leaned back in the chair. "I don't think
they can make a lot of it stick, they won't have much admissible
evidence. The story, which incidentally is true, is that we did
some network security audits for a couple of front companies with
Asian gang connections. That was all strictly above board, but the
FBI is trying to intimidate us into giving access to our files
under that pretext."

"Child pornography?" Skinner asked.

"The nuclear option." Byers smiled thinly. "No sympathy for
perverts. We were running a news server on the service provider we
had going. There was probably that kind of material on it
somewhere, just like it would be on any commercial server, or on
America Online, for that matter. As the carrier, we're not
responsible. It'll never stand up in court."

"Why do they need to lean on you? They've got warrants for your
computer systems, right?"

"That doesn't mean they can get anything out of them." Byers
allowed a note of self-satisfaction to creep into his voice.

"Do you have material related to Mulder and Scully and the X-Files
on there?"

"I'm not going to say one way or the other. They might have all our
servers, they might not. If they change their minds about my bail I
might be more helpful. I might not."

"Have they been asking you about Mulder?"

Byers shrugged.

"Look, John... they are in extreme danger," Skinner said. "We're
trying to find them for their own safety. At least six people have
died already."

"Then maybe they're better off not being found." Byers looked up at
the fluorescent lights for a few seconds, then leaned forward with
his arms on the table. "We all had exit strategies. Strange as it
may sound, this is mine, more or less. In a few months I'll walk
out cleared of all charges and I can go back to being John Byers,
with my car lease, my magazine subscriptions, my apartment. And,
most likely, a syndicated weekly Web column on privacy and
electronic freedom issues. This part of the system works, Mr.
Skinner. Langly, Frohike... the FBI, the 
NSA and IRS all working together will never find them in a decade
if they don't want to be found, because that's what means the most
to them. Being on the outside."

"What's Mulder's exit strategy? Where is he going to go, Byers?"

"What would he never give up?"

The younger man leaned back in the chair, and it was very clear
that he had nothing more to say. 

* * *

"Did you have any luck?" 

Spender glanced up at Skinner in response, perching on the edge of
a table in the hallway, flipping through a pair of printouts.

"Not really. Mr. Byers there will probably walk in three hours when
the decision against granting him bail is overturned. He's squeaky
clean thus far. The worst thing they honestly think they'll get him
on is accessory to tax fraud. As for the others, we got "Ringo" 
Langly, born 1965, questioned pretty much on a monthly basis for a
variety of phone fraud and minor drug stuff from '84 to '91, when
he drops off the face of the planet. Arrested on possession with
intent to traffic in '89, case was thrown out and he won a
harassment settlement against the Detroit PD for some serious
money. Since then, he hasn't even had a card at a video store. And
check this out--Thaddeus Melchior, aka Melvin, Frohike, born 1951,
Cincinnati. US Army, served two tours in Vietnam as a corpsman, won
himself a Bronze Star. Got out, bounced around the West Coast, got
a couple of DUIs, and then he gets sent up for armed robbery in
'79. Knocked over a bank in Oregon with two accomplices. Serves
three years, model prisoner, paroled, and he pretty much fades.
Ex-wife had him declared legally dead in California in '91, which
is pretty funny because he held a business license in Maryland that
year. Mr. Byers there is all legit, he's the front man."

Skinner snorted.

"Byers said nobody was going to find them." 

"I think he's right," Spender said, offering Skinner the file. The
older man waved it off. 

They walked outside. Skinner looked around the parking lot. He'd
forgotten what a bitch it was to try and find your own BuCar when
you didn't have your own executive parking space.

"So what do you think?" the older man asked.

"It would take months of sniffing to find these guys and get these
files on them for a bunch of weak fraud charges, and then nobody
moves on them until everybody's looking for Mulder? It's complete
bullshit." 

"Yeah, Jeff, that's definitely bullshit."

It was hot, damp, and Skinner was quite certain that he hadn't
slept in twenty-four hours. As he went to the car he yanked at his
tie, pulling it right off, and saw Spender gratefully doing the
same.

"Okay, I see two options." Skinner started the car and waited for
the rush of the air conditioning before shutting the door. "One,
they're going to try to continue their investigation. Obviously
it's important somehow. If they were in Renton last night they
might have a better idea than we do what the hell is going on.
There's definitely a lot of wheels in motion here." The big car
drifted around the lanes of the parking lot, lining up with other
federal employees getting out for lunch. "Two, they disappear like
their friends here. They've never rabbited before. Mulder's gone
underground and Scully's lied to cover for him, but only to keep
working, never just to take the heat off."

"Sir, was that before they..." Skinner actually smiled, and giddy
fatigue was catching up with Spender as well.

"Agent Spender, the correct term is 'knocking boots'," Skinner
replied. "And I honestly don't know. Those two, there's a lot of
water under that bridge and I don't know how much of it I've really
seen." Skinner took the car up the onramp onto the expressway.
"You're thinking that they might just run, if they think they have
something to lose besides an X-file." 

"It's possible. I mean, Scully just about... just about died in
Pennsylvania not even two months ago." The younger man paused,
Skinner reminding himself that Spender's mother was still missing.
"There's a hell of a lot to indicate that this is all one final
play to get them out of the way, whatever it is they're in the way
of. But we don't know that Black Lung wasn't just jerking our
chains last night, either."

"I can't just let them go, Jeff. On top of anything else, I don't
want them out there alone."

* * *

United Airlines Flight 782
Washington, DC -- Seattle
Business Class

Eventually I drank enough rye so that the blonde stewardess' face
stopped trying to peel off her skull in a bloody ruin every time I
looked at her. I was ferociously drunk, twelve ounces drunk, but
part of my brain stayed stubbornly sober, curled like a hooded
snake and whispering to me. I had spent the night in a safe house,
not Consortium, one from the bad old days. I didn't watch the news
because I didn't want to know, but I walked right through the
airport so I knew someone must have been looking after me by that
point.

I'd already looked blearily out the window, wondering if Mulder was
down there, and if so, if I could make a sizable chunk of the plane
fall on him by hauling the emergency hatch open and decompressing
us. Preferably while he was fucking Scully. Actually, with my luck
it would miss them by ten feet, and I'd live, except that I'd
probably lose two of my three legs this time. 

Ahhh, third leg. I kill me, I thought, and marveled at how the stew
managed to keep me busy with the ice. What a pro. Then the snake
uncoiled again, wrapping around my bicep, or what was left of it.
The smoker told me about it, mind-fucking bastard that he is. 'It
feels so good to put my arms around you.' The smoker dared me to
laugh, and I did. Not because I'm jealous of any of that
sentimental bullshit. I've watched him and Scully fuck and while
they're obviously the best each other has had, I've been better. It
wasn't even the arm, so much, that kind of thing is an occupational
hazard, it's that I now have a permanently implanted memory of
frosty air and fallen leaves and campfire smoke and a bunch of
Russian kids with a flensing knife hacking away at my arm while
they kneel on top of me, and trying to break the bone, and trying
to figure out how to get through the tendons, and then when I knew
that I was ruined, at least it was over. Then one of them pulled a
burning log out of the fire, and it wasn't quite over yet, and
there were other things to smell besides the leaves.

Yep, Mulder, you really fucked up autumn for me. That was almost as
funny as my third-leg crack earlier, and certainly deserved a nice
swig of whiskey. Capping Scully's sister sucked as well, though
your dad did have a big, big spin of the karma wheel coming.
Typical Mulder. Doesn't give a damn abut something until realizes
he's lost it, or almost lost it. That poor Kazakh kid was a fucking
mess, I'm a lousy seamstress, though I guess that wasn't really
your fault. Nor, I guess, is the fact that I am now privy to the
whole demons-from-beyond-invading-Earth-and-fucking-shit-up thing
which I wouldn't believe if I hadn't seen the backup viewer who'd
managed to disprove the theory that you couldn't strangle yourself
by shoving your own hand down your throat. That was, of course,
after she'd managed to implant a notebook in her handler's skull to
the extent that he wouldn't be using it anymore except as a
planter.

Oooohhh, god damn am I funny.

This was not how it was supposed to work out. The difference
between you and me, Mulder, is this was just my fucking job,
Mulder, I didn't want to know. Now I'm the one running around with
a head full of snakes and demons and black oil and who the fuck
knows what and they just had a little job for me Mulder, just play
partner with you for a few months, then make sure they get away
clean with the redhead.

The stew's head was starting to split open again, and fortunately I
still had two-thirds of the bottle left.

* * *
Wednesday, June 3, 1998
Washington, DC
9:40 AM

The phone rang in the sleek Jaguar sedan, "secure" light blinking.
The Englishman had left standing instructions, explicit ones, that
he would take only the most urgent calls in the car.  That was for
businessmen, merchants, men in a hurry for reasons of no
consequence.  He picked up the phone, irritated.

"Yes?"

"Sir, there's an urgent videoconference meeting at the Center."

"Concerning what?"  He despised urgency.  The urgency which
required such things as videoconferencing was a product of the past
two decades.  It was not real urgency, merely impatience.

"There's been a serious exposure, sir, and there's a problem at the
Embassy."

"Do you mean the Embassy in Nevada?"

"Yes, sir."  He immediately replaced the phone.

"Driver, to the Center... immediately..."

* * *

"Very well, we can't wait any longer.  The others will have to be
briefed later."  The fat man took his seat as the Englishman
entered the dark-paneled room with the incongruous video displays
mounted on a center table.  There were three others: the smoker,
the fat man, and another American, a man almost as old as the
Englishman, who spoke rarely, but with impact. On one screen they
could see Pandhu, and on another two other men currently in Seattle
on that project. On a third was the Russian liaison, in the grim
gray room of the Russian embassy that the KGB used to use. On the
screens which intervened, one facing each chair, the face of a full
Air Force colonel flickered in.

"We're ready then?" the disembodied soldier said.  The picture
flicked to a video feed, grainy colour, wriggly Farsi script across
the bottom. "Iranian television broadcast these pictures late last
night."  The camera walked around what looked like some sort of
fallen industrial building, grounded in a scrubby sand dune, then
flipped to an helicopter view. Triangular in shape, with a dome
structure in the center, a scar cut a hundred yards long in the
brush where it had obviously ploughed in from the air at some
speed. "As we can see, gentlemen, it's obviously a Colonist-tech
craft.  All of the American and British craft are accounted for, so
we have to assume it's Colonist-crewed.  It may have been
attempting to reach the emergency landing site in Afghanistan. The
Iranians were claiming as of this morning that it's a US spy
satellite, but they are eventually going to get inside if they
haven't already.  We've got CNN and the BBC under control for the
time being but Russian, French, and Italian media are picking up
the story."

The smoker looked at the older American, the quiet one.  His jaw
was clenched tight and his hand gripped the arm of his chair.  He
said nothing, of course. The smoker gave him a small, sympathetic
smile.

The picture flipped again, with the legend "GROOM LAKE BASE" at the
bottom of the screen.  Figures in decontamination suits clustered
around another craft, which crouched on its thick, stubby machine
legs on a concrete runway.

"This is another Colonist-crewed craft which entered US airspace on
the standard trajectory for Groom Lake early this morning.  It
crossed the coast in daylight at six hundred knots, descending from
above ninety thousand feet, probably orbital.  It was sighted by at
least five civilian pilots, shadowed by four interceptors from the
California Air National Guard, and has been reported on radio news.
 The craft landed at Groom Lake.  When no activity was observed for
an hour, a contact team entered.  The nine Colonists on board were
all dead, and there were signs of considerable violence.  We don't
have imagery yet due to the effect of the craft's electronics on
recording equipment.  We do have this."

The fat man's breath caught, audible through the room.  The
videoscreens showed a gurney enclosed with a rigid plastic shell. 
Inside was a tangle of gray and green and amber.  The camera
careened over to it, swung overtop.  The team had arranged the
Colonist in more or less the order its limbs were supposed to be
in, fragile cartilaginous skeleton exposed amidst ribbons and
gobbets of torn flesh.  The smoker's eyes narrowed slightly. The
colonel continued.

"According to the agreement we have with the Colonists, we placed
these remains inside the antechamber of the Embassy.  No activity
was observed. We have sensors that can detect vibration and
movement inside the structure placed outside the perimeter of the
nullifying field, but we didn't even detect normal movement."

The picture switched to the trapezoidal blockhouse perched between
two large hangars.  More isolation suits milled around outside.

"As you know, gentlemen, we have no way of entering the Embassy
proper short of blowing a hole in the wall.  We're not going to
take any action in that direction without consulting you, the M12
committee. That's the current state of play. We've had no signal or
contact from any of the normal Colonist channels, nor have any of
the subsidiary bases reported any activity."

The fat man leaned forward slightly to speak into the microphone
next to the video screen. "Colonel, what's the latest intelligence
on the craft in Iran?"  

"We don't have anything right now, sir. We have to find out where
it is before we can get satellite imagery on the site. Based on one
partial radar trace it's probably somewhere in northwestern Iran."

The Englishman turned to the older American.

"Direct all assets towards locating the craft.  When it is located,
a Protocol Four decision will be made," the Englishman said.  The
old American nodded almost imperceptibly.  The smoker and the fat
man both glanced at him.  Pandhu's voice erupted from one speaker.

"Keith, have you taken all leave of your senses? Do you know what
you are saying?"

"Protocol Four," the fat man said.  "The control and dissemination
of information regarding the existence of extraterrestrial life
represents a critical security interest of the Allied nations.  As
such, the MAJESTIC Committee is empowered to employ national armed
services through Protocol Two to prevent the dissemination of such
information by other states."

Pandhu continued from the remote station, nearly shouting.

"Keith, you fool, you're looking in the wrong direction!"

"Dr. Pandhu! Do you have any information that may open other
options for us?"

"What options?  You're still following the old Project, Keith!
Can't you see what's happening?  They're all dying, Keith, just
like the remote viewers and the psychic sensitives and all those
other reports you're trying to keep secret as well.  It's not about
your Colonists and your secrets any more!"

The Englishman ignored Pandhu and turned to the smoker.

"Prepare the lists under Protocol Seven.  Agent Mulder's
termination remains a priority." He reached out to mute the video
feed from this room over the network. "I will be traveling to
Seattle to take charge of the project there. Alex Krycek has
provided me with a list of the materials and information that
Pandhu already gave or intends to give to Mulder. In keeping with
his previously demonstrated sterling character, Mr. Krycek has
offered to assist our cause while maintaining watch on Pandhu and
his contact with Mulder or anyone else."

The Englishman sat up straight in his chair, a quietly triumphant
look on his face.

"We have a unique opportunity here, friends. The vaccine may not be
successful, but the Colonists appear to have handed us the means by
which we can defeat them."

* * *

end of part four of seven

s o k o l
part five of seven

by khyber
khyber@citizensofgravity.com

rated nc17 for graphic violence and mature content
full headers in part one of seven

* * *

Charleston, West Virginia
5:43 PM

Dana Scully would never have believed, after finishing her
undergraduate years, that she would unload two hundred dollars at
Val-Mart-- especially on clothes.  She was offered the option of
dressing too old or too young, and instead took a uniform approach.
 Two pair of too-blue blue jeans, two white t-shirts, one black
t-shirt, one men's denim shirt (small, $12.99, our everyday great
price!), one pair of cheap hiking boots, one pair of cheap
sneakers, one ball cap, one pair of sunglasses. Two bras, four
panties, one pure trailer-trash pushup bra, and two boxes of 9mm
ammunition from Sporting Goods.

She remembered as she approached the cashier that she was carrying
a pimp-worthy roll of hundreds in one pocket of Mulder's warmup
bag.  Scully fumbled around to pull out a few bills instead of
unrolling the whole pile in front of customers who were hurrying to
get home in time for Springer.  Mulder was at the other end of the
strip mall, buying maps and (hopefully) bullshitting his way
through getting a couple of prepaid cell phones.

She glanced at the TV in the mall food court as she walked out
towards the parking lot, drawn by the SPECIAL REPORT slug across
the bottom of the screen.

"DC police are still saying nothing about the apparent mob-style
execution of two policemen sometime Tuesday evening at a Southeast
impound yard..."

* * *

Office of the Deputy Director
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Washington, DC

"You have got to be kidding me!"  Spender barked at Deputy Director
Schoen.

The previous day had been a complete loss, ten solid hours of
combined metro police and FBI grilling him and Spender about
Monday's disastrous attempt to corner Krycek. Disastrous and fatal,
Skinner reminded himself. Today they'd managed to escape into the
files and notes Mulder had left on his desk, and found out from
internal security that the surveillance files Spender had been
working with had disappeared.  The voice and fax intercepts were
completely gone, and the video and audio material appeared to never
have existed.

"That's enough, Agent Spender!" Schoen barked right back. "I know
you're involved in this case, but do the math. One of Mulder's
contacts turns up dead in Seattle.  We got two dead pros in
Mulder's apartment. Mulder calls in a 911 from Renton, Virginia,
for three more murders, a social worker, a cop and a seven-year-old
boy.  What's the connection here?"

Spender bit down on his reply, letting Skinner do the talking.

"How about Alex Krycek?"

"Walter, we can't even prove there is an Alex Krycek," Schoen said.
 "We've got warrants for Mulder's and Scully's arrests on two
counts of first-degree murder and they're wanted for questioning in
connection with four more."

"That's insane! The security guard at Sherry Tsang's apartment made
Krycek on the scene in Seattle! The man is a known killer!"

"So are Mulder and Scully, Walt, it's all in how you write it up." 
Schoen paused for a few seconds.

"There's another thing," he said. "I'm going to need all the files
you have on Mulder's last investigation, the trip out to Washington
State. It's all classified Top Secret for the time being.  The Air
Force said that we'll have access for evidence purposes if it's
required."

"This is such bullshit!"

"I said that was enough, Spender! There is too much going on here
and we are not going to be able to get a handle on it until we have
Mulder and Scully available to answer a lot of questions.  I'm
assuming from your tone that you'd prefer not to participate in the
effort to locate them."

Spender had already turned around and started walking out the door
by the time his badge fell on Schoen's desk. Skinner reached out
and picked it up.

"Dean, go easy on him.  He got taken by Krycek, and he wants to
make it right."  Skinner paused for a second.  "He hasn't taken a
second off since he called me Friday night about Krycek."

"So what's your story, Walter?"

"You've seen the reports on the X-Files.  I can assure you that's
only been the half of it.  It was only a matter of time before
someone tried to shut them down permanently." What the hell,
Skinner thought, and continued. "If you say you don't know what I'm
talking about, Dean, you're a liar. I'm not clean.  If you are,
then you're the only one."

"Not all the decisions that get made for the right reasons are
pretty ones, Walter," the Deputy Director replied. "It's a big
country.  It's a big world, and guys like us know there's a big
picture.  Stay on this, Walter. Stay in position and maybe we can
do something for them."

Skinner stood up from the chair.

"I have three weeks sick and three weeks annual leave.  I'm taking
it right now."

* * *

The nature of individuality lay at the root of the dispute between
the grays, Pandhu reflected as the first door, hissed shut behind
him. A Colonist could lie, it could hate, it could covet and beg.
The second door opened into the Colonist's cell and he entered. The
others, the ones who called themselves Gatekeepers, had only the
faintest vestiges of personalities. They observed; they acted as
conduits for information. The difference between the families was
most obvious in their manner of suicide. A Colonist would kill
itself out of despair or arrogance or enmity, or to deprive its
captors of the opportunity to exploit it. A Gatekeeper would simply
die when it found itself in an unfavorable position with no
possible benefit to its collective.

The empty black eyes swung up to meet him.

IMMORTAL SOUL.

The Colonist mocked him. To them, it was meant as a high honorific;
applied to Pandhu, a jibe at his nature.

"What are the Gatekeepers trying to do?"

THEIR WEAKNESS IS THEIR UNDOING.

"Why do they need the humans?"

THE FOOLS MADE A BARGAIN. 

"What sort of bargain?"

THEY CHOSE TO BE LESS THAN THEY COULD BE. IT IS THE NATURE OF LIFE
TO STRUGGLE AND SURVIVE, TO GROW. THEY CHOSE TO LIMIT THEIR
POTENTIAL. IT IS THAT WHICH FAILS THEM NOW.

"It's your kind that makes the fatal mistakes. Unleashes the forces
you can't control."

DEFEAT IS FOUND EVERYWHERE. VICTORY IS ONLY FOUND IN BATTLE.

The Gatekeepers, Pandhu thought, would not even have a concept of
"battle." They would simply understand it as a particularly
wasteful and desperate expenditure of resources to achieve some
unique aim. The Colonists, with their unbending morals, their stern
pronouncements, their judgments, their embrace of strife-- it was
implausible that it was not the Colonists who were the rebels.

"To control what you've unleashed, what will we need? What is it
that your incomplete brothers want to give to the human?"

PROPHECY. HE NEEDS TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS.

"How what ends?"

EVERYTHING.

"They hate you so much that they wouldn't share it with you?"

THERE ARE NONE AMONG US WHO MAY BEAR IT.

"None who are...?"

COMPLETE SOULS.

"This is very interesting information."

INDEED. ESPECIALLY FOR YOU.

The Colonist's eyes widened, and it blinked rapidly several times.
It made a rare vocalization, a sort of gasping hiss. 

"You seem distressed."

The force of the Colonist's will was obvious. Greenish-amber veins
stod out along its neck and wrists as it strained. Its thoughts
betrayed nothing.

IT APPEARS I SHALL DIE IN BATTLE.

Pandhu stepped back, recalling the violence of others taken by
these forces.

"Shall I leave?"

YOU HAVE SEEN SO MANY OF YOUR OWN DEATHS. YOU WOULD DO ME AN HONOR
TO WITNESS MINE. I SHALL NOT COMPOUND MY OWN DISHONOR BY ALLOWING
THEM CONTROL.

The Colonist clenched its jaw shut, as if refusing some egress from
inside its skull. It rose from the small chair and stood with its
arms outstretched. Pandhu wondered if it was an intentional parody
of a crucifixion; the Colonists had a limited understanding of, or
interest in, human philosophy. They had little but scorn for what
they knew. An awful wet gurgle came from the creature's throat,
something that Pandhu realized was the Colonist's vocal apparatus
rending and tearing inside as the gray refused to make a sound. It
stiffened its posture and for the first time Pandhu sensed the
Colonist's presence, its mind, as the dark presence gained ground.

The Colonist was proud.

The creature's arms twitched, snapping and popping sounds coming
from its joints. Pandhu could see tendons thrum and snap like
spastic worms under the papery skin. Its huge eyes collapsed
inwards, honey-coloured liquid oozing from the ruined sockets. The
jaw dropped wider than Pandhu had ever seen a gray's mouth open,
and then with a hideous tearing noise the lower mandible wiggled
obscenely and popped off, smacking to the floor. 

The Colonist nodded its ruined head at Pandhu, once. He was aware
of its departure as its ruined body collapsed to the floor in a
heap, all of the bones disjointed. Pandhu could sense the invader
retreating as well. It was confused and angered by its inability to
utilize the Colonist's body for even a few moments of glorious
destruction, denied by the gray's ferocious final defense.

* * *

Three more minutes and he was going to get nervous. Scully had said
she would meet him out in front of the supermarket with the
truck... now eighteen minutes ago, according to his watch.  It was
muggy and hot again and he stayed under the big awning, stepping
awkwardly out of the way as people pushed by him with carts.  He'd
only managed the maps and a couple of bags of groceries. When he
was looking at the cell phones, he remembered Frohike's warning
about not starting to use one's "new" credit cards anywhere near
where the "old" you would be expected to be.

They hadn't come to a firm decision yet on exactly what they were
doing. After their mutual breakdown yesterday morning it wasn't
something either of them really wanted to consider in concrete
terms.

"Come on!" A weirdly cheery horn beeped, and something low and
white jerked to a stop in the loading zone.  Scully motioned to him
from inside the old sports car. He jogged across to her, squinting
in the sun.

"Just get in, I'll explain." She was fiddling with the seat, though
as Mulder folded himself into the little Datsun 260, he realized
that the whole vehicle was built for someone her size to begin
with. Half-seated, he tumbled as far as he could into the cramped
interior when the car made a happy, burbling rumble and leapt
eagerly forward. "Sorry," Scully said. "It's been a long time since
I drove a stick..."

"What happened to the truck?"

"The police from the impound yard are dead. I saw it on the news.
This was the only thing in the parking lot with a For Sale sign on
it. I traded him the truck."

"You could have told me you were having a midlife crisis," Mulder
said, yanking on the seatbelt. The tires squeaked and the car
lurched again as she shifted into second. "Jesus!" He glanced into
the back seat, saw her huge ValMart bag and his sports bag with
their cash and false documents.

Cash and false documents, he thought. Rock and fucking roll.

"Do you have a better idea, Mulder?" She slammed the stick into
third, the tires squeaking again. The car was too fast for the road
in this gear, and he found himself pressing a phantom brake pedal
as Scully wove in the traffic.

"No, no, it was a good call." She had decided to drive south, it
appeared, or at least that was the direction with the least
traffic.  The inside of the car was dark gray leather, and it
smelled slightly of cigarettes though the ashtray was clean. Scully
wore sunglasses-- new, cheap-looking-- and seemed to have settled
into driving, her hand still resting on the ball of the shifter. 
Summer sun cut by the window frame slashed a line of light and dark
across her thighs. When they pulled up behind a truck, she
downshifted and punched it hard, pressing Mulder back in his seat
and howling past the eighteen-wheeler. It shrank into a sun-chromed
miniature in the mirror before she let up, the needle hovering over
ninety. 

"I had one like this for a year and a half before I went to med
school.  I took Missy when I went used car shopping."  She wore no
makeup, and the circles under her eyes were clear and betraying.
"Ahab was less than impressed, I think largely because it was
Japanese."

"He should have been happy. You wouldn't have been able to see over
the dash of a Camaro or something. Much safer this way."

"Bad move, Mulder. I was just thinking that Adidas bags full of
cash and ammunition, sports cars, being on the run-- it's
practically a recipe for scorching sleazy motel sex. Then you just
had to open your big mouth."

"Ouch," he winced. He tried to glance nonchalantly at the
speedometer, which was still over eighty. "We should probably be
trying to avoid speeding tickets, especially since I am pretty sure
this thing has a kilo of hash in the wheel well. I didn't know
those little feet could weigh so much."

"You're right. Just... just felt like going fast," she said
distractedly.

Mulder rummaged in his bag, pulling out the thick folder of files
on the Vostok.  Scully glanced over at it.

"So where are we driving it?" she asked. She stared at the road,
trying not to show any emotion or even interest.

Mulder opened the file.  The pictures he'd taken, burnt coils of
wire and instrumentation scattered in the damp grass. "If the
pattern holds, we have... until sometime late Saturday evening.
That's when the next manifestation should be." Falling from sky and
history at six hundred miles per hour. An unmarked and unfinished
face on a suggestion of a body. 'Why am I here?' she asked Mulder
with her unfinished tongue.  Every time there is more of her, as if
the spirit is somehow reforming itself, learning from each
experience.

This, of course, didn't constitute an answer.

"I'm not ashamed to say that I have followed you.  I'm proud to
have followed you. And even when I questioned you, I think that you
have always done the right thing. I've said it before, Mulder.  I
wouldn't change a thing."

* * *

Modell shot Scully, then he and Mulder shot each other, Skinner
willed to the coroner's assistant who stood in the middle of the
room, rubbing his forehead. No one had to know any different.
Mulder hadn't been very cooperative in this, seeing as how Modell
had been smashed beyond recognition from the shoulders up with a
chair, before somehow managing to reload the revolver and shoot
Mulder in the face while Mulder stood over Scully's body with his
back to Modell. Fortunately they hadn't turned up any family who
would want to identify the Pusher's body.  A cop was bagging up the
gun they had picked up off the floor.  Skinner walked over to him.
Read my mind, boys.  Please.  The sergeant in charge looked at
Skinner, looked at the coroner's assistant figuring out how best to
move the dead bodies apart. The piece stayed in Skinner's desk at
home for almost two weeks before he did a little work with a hammer
and chisel and dumped it in the Potomac.

* * *

The strange, underwater sound of the Russian voice in the Gunmen's
office. It was empty now, Mulder imagined, probably all carted away
to be puzzled and pried for the secrets of where the three wizards
had flown to from their tower. His own apartment had two dead
people in it, of course.  He imagined Krycek tearing through
Scully's things, the game now over except for the hunt. "Kill
them," the smoker would have said. Why do you all want a ghost?
Scully says there's no such things as ghosts. Did the ghosts talk
to Jared Keelor? Did the ghosts rip the flesh off his poor little
bones?

Mulder felt as if he was looking back at himself, beckoning to
himself, waiting to feel the pull, to lose himself in the chase
again. I'm too tired, too run out to start anyway, he thought, but
he knew that it had never stopped him before. He slowly closed the
file of questions, aware
without seeing of Scully watching him.

"We'll keep going south, hole up again tonight. I think we should
try to call Skinner tomorrow morning, figure out our next move when
we've got some space. If someone's going to start calling us cop
killers I'd rather not be near DC."

* * *

South it is?  Yee-haw?  What do I say?

Mulder is still flipping through the files.  I almost want him to
leap at me and say we can't just let this go. There's something
here that I want to do that I can't explain. It's not supposed to
be like this. We're supposed to drag ourselves from the wreckage of
the mothership, kiss passionately, and then we get to go home.
We're the heroes, damn it. But Mulder's eminently non-bulletproof,
and I am one chip away from...

Oh, shit.

"Mulder, the implant. They've... they've done things. What if they
can find me?"

He closed the file.

"You think they wouldn't have already, if they could?" Mulder
replied.  "I don't think it works like that. I don't think the
smoker and his friends have as much control over that particular
situation as they pretend to."

"Can we take that chance?"

"We can't exactly take it out." Mulder stuffed the file back in his
bag in the back seat and rolled down the window. "Anybody tries to
abduct you, I'm just going to abduct their ass, shove something up
there and see how the fuck they like it."

It's his pimp-voice, the same one he uses for variations on the
theme from "Shaft" that Isaac Hayes never imagined. He's joking,
again. But I remember, some nights, before I could just reach
across and touch him. I chased the monsters crowding at the edges
of sleep with dark, guilty, giddy imaginings of Mulder. Mulder,
large hands and blazing dark eyes, turned loose among the men who
had taken me, doing the terrible things that I wouldn't admit to
wanting to do myself. I just shoot people, and it's not the same.

* * *

His tail was obviously a professional who wanted to be noticed, the
smoker thought. He tail was wearing dress shoes, making plenty of
noise that echoed through the parking garage.

I've got to stop meeting like this, the smoker thought. Good line,
he'd remember that.

"Yes?"  He turned around. The young Indian man held up his hands,
then reached slowly into his suit jacket. The smoker reflected that
Pandhu's operative would have been a good match for Keith's
departed assassins, fashionable and expensive looking.

"Consular staff?" the smoker asked as he took the cell phone the
young man held out to him.

"DGMI, military intelligence. Your student visa procedure has some
serious holes.  Hit speed dial one."

The smoker tapped the phone.

"I'll have to have a word with someone about that." The other line
rang once, and was picked up.

"Hello, my friend!" Pandhu said. "Is the man who gave you this
phone alive?"

"Yes, of course."

"Good, good, he's one of my nephews," Pandhu chuckled. "Family's
important, don't you think?"

The smoker waited several seconds before answering.

"Yes, I suppose it is."

"I never had children myself, but I am Uncle Vij to many..."  He
trailed off.

"So what did you want to talk about?"  The smoker took a few steps
away from the young man, who was standing patiently, waiting.

"Keith has children, you know," Pandhu said.  "Grandchildren. I
think he may have a lot on his mind."

"Yes, I know." And he was old, the smoker thought. Keith was one of
the very first, a man of a different era, breeding, and background.
Keith was concerned with his own legacy, with his name. He knew
that he was unlikely to retain power or probably even live until
the Project came to fruition. It drove him to acts of gallantry--
or foolhardiness-- to make his indelible stamp on future history.
The smoker heard sounds of shifting and motion on the line.  Pandhu
was sitting down, he thought.

"Are you really ready to follow Protocol Seven now?"

"I am evaluating the situation," the smoker replied.  The lists
were updated quite conscientiously, he thought. They were one-way,
of course, you could get on but you would never get off. The task
had grown so much, though. Back when they started maintaining the
lists, they had perhaps a hundred people in total. You could put
them in a school gymnasium on a military base, begin the processing
there. The Protocol Seven lists took up eighty thick binders now, a
page per name. Of course, it was all on computer, probably one of
the ever-popular digital tapes. 

You can't do the actual processing by computer, though.

"I know you have already stalled in your supposed pursuit of Agent
Mulder."

"Is that so?"  the smoker said, looking at the young man.

"There are many things I can't explain to you at this time. I'm
supportive of that course of action, though, as long as we don't
lose sight of him completely. On another note, you saw the
images... related to the embassy?"

"Yes, I did."

"You remember, of course, the incident at Fort Meade, with the
viewer?"

"Of course, it was very interesting."  The smoker had gone home
that night, such as home was, and had a very large drink. It was
both liberating and terrifying to see something that could not be
attributed to mere human violence and stupidity.

"This project, here, where I am, is central to the successful
management of this situation."

"Oh really?  That's very interesting as well, thank you."  The
wheels turned, everything speeding forward.

"Listen to me, I am sounding like one of your group now," Pandhu
chuckled. "Please, continue the course of action you have very
wisely chosen.  If you can meet with me at some time in the next
few days, it would be very good."

"I will see what I can do on those issues."

"Then we have an understanding, my friend! It's good that we both
have a... a common vision of what is important."

"Yes, yes, one more thing, Dr. Pandhu," the smoker said.  The
younger man noticed him almost grinning.  "I have discussed certain
staffing issues with you before, as you recall."

"Yes, of course," Pandhu replied.

"I think you are likely to find that the opinions I shared with you
regarding Mr. Krycek have proved correct."

"Oh, really?  Interesting, everything is so interesting these days.
 I will definitely take that into consideration."

"Good.  Goodbye, Doctor, I have several urgent matters to attend
to."

"Goodbye.  Always remember what's important, my friend."  The
smoker clicked the phone off, handing it back to the young Indian
man.


* * *

Crystal City, Maryland
9:17 PM

"Yeah, you sure about that?  Look, thanks, that's great, I owe you
one." Spender smiled into the phone. "Okay, that works. The rest of
this week is looking like hell... maybe next weekend?  All right,
talk to you then.  Take care."

"What was that?" They were at Skinner's apartment, having relieved
themselves of their office space for the time being.  Spender put
his cell phone back on the coffee table.

"MacEvoy in Forensics," he said, sitting down on one of the chairs.
It was a nice chair. Skinner rented the place already furnished.
Even now, it was one of the things he couldn't bring himself to do.
He'd never bought a piece of furniture alone. "Good news and not so
bad news. The rounds that killed the woman in Mulder's apartment
were from Scully's gun. Mulder got the guy. They have ID's on them
now.  Both former military, definitely pros."

"Anything on the bodies from Renton?" Skinner had found his stock
of FBI favors rapidly evaporating in the wake of his suspension.
All his friends were at a high enough level that they had to cover
their own asses.

"Yeah, that's the good news, in a way.  The social worker and the
cop appear to have been killed by Jared Keelor, aged seven. 
There's prints, skin and hair, everything.  He literally tore them
apart with his bare hands.  It doesn't make sense, but there's
nothing on Mulder or Scully.  If Mulder hadn't made the 911 call we
wouldn't have known they were even there."

"What killed the boy?"

"They don't know.  Massive internal trauma with no external cause. 
They can't call it homicide unless they figure out how it happened.
 Mulder and Scully are still the only witnesses, though." 

Spender had copies of Mulder's files spread out on Skinner's coffee
table. It was definitely still a smashed antique spaceship,
unfortunately, or two of them if he was reading what looked like
military intelligence documents correctly. Skinner was in the
kitchen, calling up boxing buddies at DC Metro police.  The younger
man stood up from the couch, looking out over Skinner's balcony.
Why is this worth trying to kill two federal agents? What does this
have to do with the Renton horrorshow?  Oh, and let's not forget
asking why it's important enough for me to be Alex Krycek's bitch
for a couple of weeks?

Skinner stepped back into the living room and put the cordless back
in its cradle. Spender was looking out through the curtains of
Skinner's third-floor condo.

"Somebody's staking us out."

"Where?" Skinner peered out the corner of the window into the early
night, careful not to pull the blinds open.

"There," the younger man pointed. "Blue Crown Vic. They just got
chased out of your residents' parking by that Jeep there, moved
over to that lot... there, and nobody got out."

"Good eye."

"What do you figure," Spender asked, "DC police, FBI, or Men in
Black?"

Skinner stepped back from the window.

"I think it might be a good sign for the time being.  Whoever it is
probably isn't friends with Alex Krycek." Spender nodded, sliding
down from the window and onto the couch.  "What'd you get?"

Skinner looked back at the phone, as if expecting it to provide
assistance.

"DC Metro is being real cooperative, considering. There's enough
guys over there who know me that they're ready to believe us about
Krycek. I think they're hoping to hush up the black-market angle on
that impound yard, too.  There was some suspicion these cops were
dirty and it was an ongoing investigation, but they'd rather not
blow it open if this is the end of it.  Off the record, there's an
eyewitness from their internal affairs department who saw two
people matching Mulder and Scully's description walk into the yard
and leave in a green Chevy SUV late Monday evening."

"Do we have plates?" Spender asked.

"Not likely."

"A couple in their thirties in a green SUV. That narrows it right
down."

"We have to assume that Krycek, or the smoking bastard, or whoever,
is already one step ahead of us."

"Then why'd he come to Renton the other night?"

"I don't know."  Skinner suddenly stood straightened up, striding
purposefully into the kitchen. "You want a beer?"

"I want ten beer," Spender replied. "Ten beer and a woman.  I want
Alex Krycek to bring me ten beer and a woman."

"Start with one." Skinner held the bottle out to the younger man. 
"Beer, that is." Spender dragged long on it as Skinner sat down on
the other end of the couch. They drank for a few minutes.

"I think we should go to Seattle," Skinner said.

"You think Mulder's going there?"

"If he's not, whoever's following us hoping to pick up a lead will
go there too. And if that's where the center of this really is,
Krycek will go back there eventually. And if that's where Mulder
and Scully are going..."

"Critical fuckup mass."

"What?" Skinner turned sideways.  Spender was damn hard to follow
sometimes.

"If you put all active participants in any situation in one place,
it exponentially increases the possibility that any one
participant's plan will get totally fucked up. Usually seen at
weddings and family reunions."

"They teach you that at the Academy?"

"Naw, I just made it up right now.  It's got a certain elegance to
it, doesn't it?"

"When'd you get to be such a wiseass, Spender?" Skinner's bottle
clinked empty on the glass coffee table and he stood up, heading
into the kitchen again.

"Who cares? If I wake up and this is really happening I'm just
going to shoot myself anyway."

Skinner came back into the living room with two more beers.

"Completely off the record, and with the qualification that this is
really bad career advice," the older man began, "you're a better
man than the Bureau deserves some days."

"I helped make this mess. I want to help clean it up."

"That's enough right there, Jeff. If more of us had thought like
that along the way... maybe things would be different. I know
you've had a rough few months, and... this, what you're doing,
takes a lot of character."

Spender watched Skinner for a few moments, waiting until the moment
passed.

"You sound like my high school football coach," he said. Skinner
snorted in response, taking a long sip. "So, Seattle."

"There's something going on there. If Mulder and Scully are staying
on the ground, under the radar, we can beat them out there,
hopefully have Krycek nailed to a fucking post and have things
cleared up so they can surface when they get there and get real
protection."

"Then we'd better get going."  The younger agent looked at his
beer, and took another long pull on it. Skinner stood up. He hadn't
managed to stay seated for more than half a beer. Too jumpy, too
tired to stay tired.

"I'll get some tickets. Flight back is on you if we're still
suspended."

Skinner punched numbers into the phone as Spender reassembled the
files on the table with one hand, pulling out the maps and copies
of Mulder's notes.

"Flight's at twelve-twenty," Skinner said. "Red-eye. You got
anything to take care of?"

"Like what?" Spender asked, standing up.

"I dunno." Skinner shrugged. "Feed the cat.  Make any calls.  You
got a girlfriend?"

"Are you asking me to go steady?"

* * *

North of Nashville, Tennessee
11:21 PM

The little Datsun had what Scully said her father had called
two-sixty air conditioning: roll down two windows and go sixty.  It
hadn't helped much, even when they tried it as two-eighty-five, and
they had spent part of the afternoon and early evening asleep in a
picnic area, planning to drive through the cooler and less
inhabited night. The sun was long down and Scully was still
driving, seemingly by default.  Mulder didn't think the seat went
back far enough for him to comfortably work the clutch anyway.

"So you used to have a little white sports car?"

"Blue," she said, and he could tell that she had cut off a small
smile. "And it wasn't like this. Whoever had this car has done a
lot of work on it. Mine was pretty fast, though, especially if you
asked my mom."

"I have kind of a hard time seeing it," Mulder grinned at her,
teasing.

"There was a short stretch, maybe eight months, when Missy and I
were first both definitely adults and friends.  We hadn't always
been. I grew out of the baby fat, lost my virginity, felt less
insecure, finished my year of college, and she stopped rebelling
just for the hell of it. We had a lot of fun; we'd go to parties
together, sometimes take off for the weekend.  We could get away
with more, from Mom and Ahab, if we went together. She'd lost her
license for a year for drunk driving when she was twenty-one,
anyway, so I always drove her around."

They had decided on Nashville, temporarily. 

"Where's the state in the union you're least likely to go
voluntarily, Scully?"

"Tennessee. Alabama. Missouri. Anywhere in the Cracker Belt."

"Woman after my own heart. Know anybody in Nashville? Ever been to
Nashville?"

"Can't say I have."

"Me either. Nashville it is."

There was no indication they'd been followed further than the
impound yard in DC, or at least they hadn't heard their names on
the radio.  They'd put together a plan of calling two or three
contacts each and giving the impression they were traveling
separately, trying to get as much information as possible on what
they might be facing if and when they surfaced.

Scully looked over at him.

"You know, Mulder, I saw you perk up when I said 'virginity'."

Mulder chuckled.

"So what was your big adventure?  The big defining moment of Dana
Scully's briefly misspent youth?"

"Well, it certainly wasn't losing my virginity. Probably... One
time, I was twenty-one... I was home for the summer.  Missy got me
really stoned and we went to a rock concert."

"You got stoned?"

"Oh, yeah. The first and only time in my whole life. Missy ended up
driving us because I couldn't do anything except laugh. We drove to
the stadium at maybe eight miles per hour, stopped for Mcdonalds on
the way, the whole thing."

"What was the concert?"

"Phil Collins."

"Oh, Scully."  Mulder put on an exaggeratedly pained expression. 
"Every time I think I'm discovering something wild and different
about you..."

"What?" she laughed.

"You got high to see Phil Collins? That's just, that's not even
wrong."

"Well, it was a big step for me."

The morning had been the worst, grim and edgy, alternately clinging
to each other and then pulling away.  They took their newfound
freedom, the gradual slipping away of their ability to pretend to
withstand anything, and blatantly misused it. Every time Mulder
seemed distant and haunted she'd felt a sick, self-centered urge to
try and go him one better. I'll see your sister and raise you a
daughter. They'd driven right through the night until they were too
tired to see, slept in the car for four hours, then had a petty,
passive-aggressive fight about which direction to go.  Then they
realized that neither of them had eaten in sixteen hours, and had a
sobby, slobbery makeup over truck stop breakfasts.

"Was that the last concert you ever went to?"  Mulder asked.

"A rock concert?  I saw U2 in 1988.  That was it, though, except
for..."

"Well, yeah, being narks doesn't count. I haven't been to one since
I was in England.  There was just so much going on then, even for
me.  It's too bad we're old now."

"I have eight months until my thirty-fifth birthday, Mulder, I'm
not old yet."

"So are you telling me it's okay to forget that one?"

"It wouldn't be any fun if I told you in advance."

The car's engine chuffed suddenly, stumbling, and the dashboard
lights flickered.  The radio dissolved into static, the volume
rising and then abruptly quitting.  Scully stared irritatedly at
the dash for a moment, then noticed Mulder's jaw dropping as he
looked up through the windshield. The car stalled out and began to
coast, everything dark, as the white light flooded in from above
them and a hollow roaring sound rose over the rumble of the wheels
on the highway.

* * *

hello, is there anybody in there, can anybody hear me?

Scully?

Oh god, Scully's screaming...

* * *

I am a vessel inside a vessel, I am a deadly cargo, I am a warhead,
a bomb for the soul.

It does not really matter if I have control of my body, as I seem
to, as there is nothing for me to do. I am pushed to a corner of my
own mind as the others investigate me, rearrange me, rewire me as
the mother of their monstrous selves. They have changed something
inside me that I can withstand their energy, that the mind and the
core of me is not driven mad simply by their presence. I know what
their presence, their arrival when they try to tear the walls of
reality aside to walk through, does to the living. They have shown
me.

I was not surprised to discover that I am no longer among the
living. I remember now previous deaths, previous life and
succeeding half-lives. The first, remembering Comrade Gagarin's
story, telling myself that the awful scent and sound of my craft
vaporizing around me was normal, it would pass, that the streaks
and sparks of flame were normal. That even if the streaks and
sparks were a bad sign, that it was almost over, that at any moment
we would be to an altitude where my pressure suit should protect
me. That it would be fitting, a fine story to tell the girls, that
after almost freezing for ten days right at the end I was afraid
that I would melt. Then I saw elemental fire reach for me through
the rim of the hatch.

I am a creation of theirs. They have dragged my poor soul from its
confusion to build this body on my memory of myself, to serve as
their beachhead.

My second life I remember only pain, not thought. I remember
choking for what amounted to my entire life.

I can look down, I see. The viewports are down by my feet. There is
a tiny reflection in the glass, and I look no different. I am one,
and multitudes, thousands at least. And we all wheel around this
great globe that is no longer my home, our little sphere of metal
and frost, rubber and wood, waiting to plunge back into the rich
depths of life. They will open the door, and we shall all rush
forth. I wonder how long they need me, when shall my children kill
me.

Of my third life I remember that there must have been enough of me
to hold whatever this is that I believe to be me. I hovered in
unlife animated only by their terrible energy. If I could have
moved my hands, I could have opened the hatch blown us all into
vacuum.

They won't let me, and they let me know that even if I could end it
once, we would just rebuild me again.

When I look at the earth I feel separation, and loneliness. My busy
children feel hunger, and envy, and anticipation.

* * *

"Scully!"

There is something over him like an eclipse, a corona of white
light around something dull and round. It moves, letting more light
suffuse it, and he sees its eyes. It steps back then leans forward,
inclining its head and lifting a spindly arm. It does not point;
its fingers do not seem accustomed to that. His wide, wondering
eyes follow the arm. He can see her legs, bare in her shorts, shoes
still on her feet. He notices that he cannot move; and his head is
suddenly released enough that he can crane his neck around to see
more of her. Her body now, illuminated from below by soft yellow
light. The blocky table she lies on is featureless on its sides.
She is motionless, though he senses her breathing.

The first communication comes as a shock, a burst of static inside
his
head.

UNHARMED UNDAMAGED UNAWARE UNHARMED UNDAM

The static refined itself, almost like a radio being tuned.

THE OTHER IS NOT HARMED. THE OTHER IS UNAWARE.

"Let her..." go. He discovers it is not necessary to speak, and
that there is something in the atmosphere that makes sound distort.

SOON. WE MUST COMMUNICATE WITH YOU.

Why?

WE ARE GOING TO DIE. A TASK REMAINS INCOMPLETE. YOU REQUIRE
INFORMATION.

What? Let Scully go! Let her go and I'll listen.

THERE IS NO TIME.

?

IT IS NOT GOOD THAT IT IS LIKE THIS. PLEASE READY YOURSELF.

?

The gray, for that's what it was, there was nothing else he could
see
besides the light and part of the floor but it was real, it turned
its head down slightly and it said sorry? and it has something in
its hand...

They tell him about monsters then, and he did what everyone does
when they are a child and they are told stories about monsters.

* * *

Seattle, Washington

"In time, life forms become so advanced that they are no longer
distinguishable as such in the way they once were. Matter is
transitory. It is awareness, existence distilled to knowledge and
spirit, that endures."

Pandhu maintained an office here, in a suburban house. There was a
flag out front; it was probably a consular property. The smoker
found something infuriatingly self-righteous about the room, with
its understated Swedish furniture and its racks of books about the
moral triumphs of developing nations.

"But for all the power of age, and time, and spirit, the laws of
physics are inexorable. Perhaps somewhere astronomers on a little
blue star mused in their time about the contraction of that
universe as the ancient souls around faced the dilemma of eternal
life in a finite space. And in time, they were all that was left.
Their universe was crushed by the last great heartbeat of their
reality.  The next beat brought..."

His brown hands spread in a gesture of encompass.

"They have waited, friend, and watched, somewhere... and evolved,
over time, in the way of things. They have a memory of a reality
greater than what they have sustained through sheer force of will.
A reality like ours. They want to come back."

What kind of point have I reached, the smoker thought, when nothing
sounds like madness to me any more?

"This woman, the cosmonaut. She is a sign of their power, an
unintentional one. She is their power, seeping through the fabric
of reality that separates their dimension from ours. The bodies
that have been found, her body, represent the power they are now
perfecting... the power for the soul to give itself form and shape.
She is recreating herself, based on her memory of life, with every
cycle of her death."

Pandhu leaned back in the swivel chair, satisfied with his
explanation.

"She is their womb, my friend, the mother of demons waiting to be
reborn."

"What you describe is beyond science," the smoker said.

"Of course."

* * *

"Please... Scully... Let her see..." The one standing over me turns
ninety degrees sideways, looking at her. The gray elephant-skinned
head turns back briefly in my direction.

WAIT NOW.

Two others step to either side of Scully's head, looking down at
her. Her eyes are closed. One of the two staggers slightly on its
spindly legs, as if struck, and looks up at the one standing over
me.

DAMAGED. INCOMPLETE PROCEDURE PERFORMED. TAKEN BY THE OTHERS,
BEFORE.

They hurt her.

NORMAL PROCEDURES ARE TO DESTROY ONES TAKEN AND DAMAGED BY THE
OTHERS.

No! 

NO. SCULLY IS OUTSIDE NORMAL PROCEDURES. SCULLY IS IMPORTANT. YOU
HAVE BEEN INFORMED OF THAT. SCULLY CANNOT BE ALTERED.

What do you mean?

IT WILL BE CLEAR IN TIME.

The huge eyes blink, slowly.

* * *

"You're making a play, aren't you," the smoker mused aloud, trying
to regain the initiative.

"What?"

"You want the body of the Project, with your group as the new
head."

Pandhu looked infuriated, his gentle face twisting.

"You don't understand, do you?  Have you heard a word that I said?
This is so far beyond the conception of politics that..."

"Dr. Pandhu..."  The smoker stepped forward and put his knuckles on
the thin wood of the Swedish desk. "I understand you perfectly. I
do what I can. I have always done what I can. I make decisions and
alliances based on power. I always have. In the past, I followed
those I trusted. Now I am making those decisions myself."

"Are all human lives equal, my friend?"

"In the final accounting, yes, they have to be. There are
variations, of course. The foundation of our beliefs is the
equality of mankind. If all men were not created equal, then power
would cease to be an exercise of will, become an entitlement. Those
who believe they are entitled to power are rarely capable of
wielding it. Sacrifices are sometimes necessary to properly wield
power."

"What about your son's life?"

"I don't know what you're talking about. I don't have a son."

"You have not raised a son, you mean," Pandhu rotated slightly in
the
chair. "Or have you?"

"Don't be ridiculous," the smoker said, too loud.

"We need men like Fox Mulder.  We need men like your son, men who
believe."

"You don't know what you're talking about."

Pandhu looked out the patio window.  It was raining on the deck. 
The smoker wanted to do something else. He was tired. He wanted to
sleep at night, rise in the morning, read the newspaper.

"You said the Colonists are responsible for releasing these
entities, allowing them access to this world," the smoker said.
"Why did they do this?"

"They face defeat. Here, and elsewhere. It is an act of desperation
even greater than their collaboration with your Consortium."

"So Keith was very close to the truth when he wanted to ally with
the rebels, the ones you call the Gatekeepers."

"It's unlikely that he would have been able to do so. You have
little to offer them, and it is not in their nature to bargain."

"Keith would have offered them a world."

"That was your mistake in the first place, after the war." Pandhu's
voice held a trace of bitterness. "Dazzled by technology, flying
saucers, hints of terrible weapons, you bowed and scraped. The
Colonists needed our world. The Gatekeepers don't."

"Then why deal with them? What's the exchange?"

"Do you know what we learned from the ones you call the rebels, my
friend? While your Colonists were throwing you crumbs, teaching you
to fly spaceships and rearrange a few building blocks of matter
like sand castles? We didn't make that mistake. We didn't approach
them, bowing and begging."

Vijay Pandhu rose slightly, smiling. His pose stayed strangely
relaxed, reclined in his chair. The smoker saw the Indian's crossed
knees rising above his desk, as if the chair was rising to give him
a podium for the close of his speech.

"They taught," Pandhu said.

The smoker was not aware of his cigarette falling to the floor,
scattering a tiny flare of ash and sparks across the black tip of
his shoe as Pandhu straightened his legs, standing on nothingness,
rising in the air over his chair, the tips of his shoes hovering
just over the desktop. He looked down at the smoker, his bald head
just short of the ceiling, smiling as if at his own little joke.

"And we learned."

* * *

"Let me go," Mulder whispered. "Just let me go to her." His limbs
returned to him, and he sat up on the table. The gray stepped
carefully out of his way. It's so small, he thought distractedly,
walking over to Scully.  There were small things on the floor,
conduits and housings streamlined for small shuffling feet to walk
over. Scully looked asleep, warm and alive. He was grateful for
that.

The knowledge, the package they were so sorry to give him, sat in
his head like a black mirror with everything on the surface.  The
very presence of it felt foreign and strange, intruding. There
should have been more, they knew, after everything that had passed
between their kind and Mulder's, but there was just so little time
left.

All their heads cocked sideways now, a little pack of ugly gray
dogs. Mulder settled on the edge of the table Scully lay on, the
oblong, asymmetrical patches of light under her a soft
yellow-green. He was crying, he realized, feeling his sinuses fill
and wide streaks slipping down his cheeks.

"Scully?" No sign, except... perhaps her breathing changed
slightly. He leaned forward, resting his hand on her shoulder and
laying his head on her breast, nuzzling to part the denim of her
shirt so his cheek felt the slow beat of her great fiery hero's
heart. The yellow-green light around her strengthened, became a
halo, then a brilliant corona. It glowed through the weave of her
clothes, through the delicate skin of her ears, even faintly
through her slender hands. A gray head nodded to him.

* * *

Seattle, Washington

"So you know our smoking friend has been meeting with Pandhu on the
side," Alex Krycek said. "I don't know what about, unfortunately."

"Yes," the Englishman replied. "That's always been his failing. He
considers himself a man of action, but he plays games, doesn't act
when bold action is what's required."

Krycek opened the red-bordered manila folder.  There were several
magnetic-strip access cards inside, and several pages of
organisation charts.  All the material was marked PROTOCOL
SEVEN--MAJESTIC CHANNELS ONLY.  He flipped through a list of some
seventy-odd locations.  Lions Athletic Hall, Wichita, Kansas.  Sgt.
Robichaud Auditorium, Fort Bragg.
Community Sportsplex, Athens, Georgia.

"Why me?" Krycek asked, holding up the folder. "I'm not really a
desk job kind of guy. I'm more... hands-on."

"I know I can trust you, Alex. You're a man of action, especially
when you don't have other options."  The Englishman considered him
for a few seconds. "Besides, Alex, you've done this kind of work
before, haven't you? Panama City... Tegucigalpa... These will just
speak English, and probably have fewer children."

"Why now?" Alex asked.

"We don't want to leave any possible avenues for our new weapon to
be used against us. All who have undergone Colonist procedures must
be considered as... compromised."

"How many?" Krycek scanned the list of processing centers. Three
for DC, one for Idaho and Montana together. The black helicopter
crowd will be so disappointed to learn they're not first priority.

"Eight thousand, four hundred, give or take a few. Only two dozen
in Group I.  You'll be pleased to know that Dana Scully was
recently promoted, so they're both an immediate priority--as is our
smoking friend."

"When do we begin?"

"There will have to be a brief period of accommodation, until we
secure the cosmonaut and begin our exploitation of her. For right
now, he still controls the military resources we are relying upon
to make the recovery. If they are suddenly presented with a...
tactical situation, they might choose to support the devil they
know."

"So, Monday? Monday's always a bitch," Krycek said. Desk job it is.
He'd reached an accommodation with the reptile in his head that,
Alex detachedly realized, probably meant he was going insane. 

And so be it. When it all comes down, as it inevitably will, he
would stand tall on the mortifying pile of his own mighty workings
as the equal of any monster that would come to claim him.

He wanted to cut Scully's head off. Nothing personal, nothing
macabre, he'd shoot her first, but Mulder would love that.  We took
her, we let you find her, let you play your little games, now it's
all done Mulder, here, catch a falling red-haired star. He'd never
intentionally cut off a head before, and it's not like anyone would
be keeping track.

* * *

North of Nashville, Tennessee
11:30PM EST

"Okay, try it now..."

Mulder pushed the clutch in and turned the key. The car rumbled to
life, shaking as the big engine spooled up.

"What was it?" he asked, leaning out the open door as Scully
lowered the hood, rubbing her hands on her too-large shorts.

"Gremlins, probably," she said, looking down at the hood. "Weird
little car."

"Have to remember to check the Lemon-Aid book next time you buy a
car in a mall parking lot.  Want me to drive?"

"Yeah, sure. Just carry me in when we get to a motel."

"Scully, that's so romantic."

"Not with the usual choice of Southern motels.  I just don't want
my feet touching the floor."

Scully curled up in the bucket seat, bunching up the denim shirt
she'd been wearing over her tee and tucking it under her head on
the inside of the door. Her eyes slipped out of focus for a moment,
gazing at herself in the dark night reflection of the
passenger-side mirror.

"Are you okay?" She blinked, starting, pulling slightly tighter
into
herself.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine, I'm just exhausted."

"Just... go to sleep, I'll get us there." Mulder reached across to
her, tangling his fingers in her hair as he pulled back onto the
suprisingly quiet interstate. She nuzzled against his hand for a
few seconds, and then stilled as her breathing steadied.

The black mirror spun in his head, casting painful reflections.

* * *

Several had gone already, calling out when they could no longer
hold their consciousness against the bludgeoning invasion of the
others.  A swift fall of sharp metal and the body fell useless to
the deck plates. The lights inside the craft glowed feebly and
randomly as the black ones tried to invade its orderly mind, and it
retreated to only that which was absolutely necessary to maintain
itself. The grays did the same, huddled in a small group in front
of the last few panels that gave bright lights and orderly truth. 
Small hands fluttered on bony shoulders and hips, bodies and minds
touching each other to strengthen their last moments and those of
their conveyance. The craft moved at its full capacity for the
first time in what could truly be called an age, like a horse
running itself to death, a streak of fleeing glory moving itself
beyond where any of the young ones, the humans, could ever find it.
The others who moved within the ship's mind coiled themselves in
rage, realizing that they were trapped in the determination of the
ancient craft and its small occupants.

The planet and been warm and wet and green, impossibly green once,
before the young ones were even considered. The surveyors had
fanned out among the great and uncaring denizens of the blue-green
globe whose bones and sinews now hardened or flowed black and
volatile under its surface. There had been giant insects, jeweled
and starlike, that fluttered around them agitatedly, butting for
pollen against gray skin.  They themselves had been younger then,
with less knowledge and less accompanying responsibility.  Now they
only had the memory of it, but that memory itself, of the yellow
light and the warm mists and the fantastical, doomed creatures, it
still stirred the old feelings.

It had been good.

There was a small flurry of shining motion as perfectly aligned
reflexes worked in time, thrusting shining points through delicate
skin. The atmosphere vented out of the body of the failing
conveyance, silencing the sound of small devices and light bodies
falling to the floor as the last few panels winked out. The ship
felt its occupants leave, moving to another place of which even
they were only dimly aware, and it undertook its last
responsibility in a brief blaze of white light.

* * *

Northwestern Missouri
Wednesday, 3 June 
6:30 AM 

"Hmmm... how long have I... what time is it?" Scully looked up
blearily, curled in the passenger seat. Dawn was breaking behind
them.

"About six-thirty." Mulder looked strange, feverish.

"Where are we?" she asked, sitting up. "Where's Nashville?"

"It's still in Tennessee." She looked irritated at his glib
response, rubbing at her face, looking around at the prairie
rolling past.

"Mulder, where the hell are we?"

"Missouri somewhere, closing on Iowa." he said quietly, with a
color of shame.

"What the hell? Stop the goddamn car!"

"Scully, I can explain, please..."

"No! Stop the fucking car right now!" Scully slammed her fist
against the window glass, once, twice. Her eyes widened, and her
expression changed from anger to shock. She started to double over
as Mulder pulled to the side of the highway, grabbing at the
dashboard. A small fist hammered against her thigh, then the glass
again. Scully shoved the long door open as she stumbled out onto
the dry grass, taking a few long strides, her fingers dragging
before she fell to her knees. Mulder slid over the hood of the car
to run up beside her, crouching down to place his hand on her
shoulder.

* * *

Look, I am one of you, she had tried to say at one point. I had a
supervisor. I had a mask. I know how it feels when you sweat into
the cap. I am one of you, please don't put anything else inside me.

* * *

"Don't fucking touch me!" He fell backwards, landing on his
tailbone and his hands.  "Why didn't you tell me?" 

Scully curled herself up into a ball on her knees, the top of her
head pressed against the cool ground. As Mulder pulled himself up
to a sitting position, she rolled over on her side, knees still
pulled up to her chest. He noted in the Compendium Of Everything
Scully that this was a new one, a worse one. Her face shone with
tears in the sunrise.

* * *

The light was so beautiful. I never realized it was so simple
before, everything is right there. Cassandra is so lucky. What are
those lights? What are they doing my god they have no faces...

* * *

"Oh, God, Mulder, what happened? Something happened... they took me
again, didn't they... oh God..." Scully reached around to the back
of her neck with a trembling hand, her fist pounding into her flesh
from the awkward angle with desperate force. Mulder crawled towards
her.

"Scully... no... it wasn't like before... they took us both... they
told me." He slid his arms under her, feeling her stiffen as he
held her upper body in his lap.

"What..?"

"They tried to explain. The Russian spaceship..." Mulder sat up
straighter, pulling himself together. He looked away from her for a
second, towards the horizon. "It's not a haunting, it's...
something else. She's trying to come home. Next time, in a few
days, she'll succeed. It's like Jared Keelor told you. There's
others, other beings, who are helping her, using her as their
conduit to come to this world."

"So even the little gray men are counting on you."

"No, actually, you. It was supposed to be you." He curled in on
them, gathering her close to himself. "When you were abducted, they
couldn't do it right. The men from the Consortium, the ones who
took you, were trying to duplicate the alien experiments without
knowing how. It was kind of like doing surgery without
anesthetic." 

He nudged her hair away from her face so he could look at her
profile.

"I'm not sure I completely understand yet. There's something about
your abduction, what they did to you, and just the way we are. We
have to do this together."

* * *

(cold and stale, like car exhaust in winter, the scent of myself...
it's been months since I could smell anything, why now and what...)

All in a rush, Dana's stomach lurched as she looked down between
her orange-clad knees and saw stretches and sprays of blue and
white. She heard herself gasp.

* * *

Mulder heard her intake of breath, suddenly, looked down at her
wide open eyes. She looked at him for a second as if not
recognizing him. He could feel the question coming, but her lips
made the wrong motion, the wrong sound.

"Shto dela...?" Scully blinked hard, swallowed, shook her head
slightly. "What do we have to do?"

"Make sure she dies, or doesn't come... she's already dead, there's
something they do that makes new bodies, new selves. But we can't
kill her. I don't know how to explain it. It's in the wrong
language."

"Why don't I remember?"

"Everything that's happened to you... they said it was too much
already.  You were unconscious. Nobody hurt you, nobody even
touched you. I think they were sorry."

She shook softly with resigned laughter.

"The little gray men are sorry?"

Mulder's voice was neutral, quiet, reciting the facts.

"They're gone. If they didn't leave... they were afraid the others
could use them, possess them, the same way they will the woman in
the Vostok."

"Are they coming back?"

"I don't know. I don't think they know."

We could probably drive to North Dakota by the end of the day, if
we wanted to have an anniversary of sorts. It wasn't supposed to
happen like this. We were together, we were fighting them, kissing
before swinging out into the abyss. Maybe it just slowed us down,
made it less easy to dodge when the hammer finally fell.

"Why didn't you tell me earlier, when it happened?" she asked.

"I don't know. I... I don't know if I remembered then. I don't
think I'm completely in charge right now." Somehow, that was the
answer she'd expected, that she knew to be true.

"Why us, Mulder?"

"I don't know," and he felt that he was lying, though he couldn't
say why.

"Why is it always us?"

* * *

end of part five of seven

s o k o l
part six of seven

by khyber
khyber@citizensofgravity.com

rated nc17 for graphic violence and mature content
full headers in part one of seven

* * *

Jackson County, South Dakota
6:43 PM

They slept through the afternoon in another motel room, Mulder
crashing hard and Scully less so. They wanted to drive in the
night, minimize their chances of being seen. Mulder felt as if his
internal clock was shut off completely. The past twenty-four hours
was like a badly constructed narrative, occasional scenes separated
by unexplained gray space, the settings arbitrary and
inconsequential. 

He wondered if grays could lie, wondered what they would consider a
lie. It was clear to him that they'd received a strong suggestion--
a push, he reflected bitterly-- and were following it. They'd been
tweaked, altered, to make sure that things would work. He'd tried a
variety of experiments on himself, wandering down familiar mental
paths. The road to Stonehenge, winter solstice with Scully, 2000,
an imagining of the future that had literally kept him alive on one
or two occasions, was now ill-defined and uninteresting; he
couldn't recall how hard to throw to make it from third to first;
couldn't remember the directions to the Vineyard summer house.

He sat on the bed, legs outstretched, hand resting on Scully's hip
as she slept. Her sleep was untroubled, he could tell. 

Of course it would be; they needed her to drive, needed her strong.
He couldn't imagine how angry she would be-- actually he could
imagine, and it was a matter of will, not would-- when she
realized.

Scully was getting up, going into the bathroom. Time had passed;
the sun had set and the room was nearly dark. Have I been asleep
too? Mulder wondered. He watched her, stretching up with her back
to him as she removed her T-shirt. He loved the lines of her back,
the muscles of her shoulders, the enticing sweep to her small
waist. The one-sided light from the bathroom spilled around the
curved edges of her silhouette to illuminate...

"Scully, wait."

"What?" she responded quietly, turning her head in profile. 

"Your tattoo's gone," he said in an oddly neutral tone.

"You're kidding."

"I'm not, look." She turned around, looking over her own shoulder
in the bathroom mirror.

"Oh, my God.." The skin was as it had been years ago. The snake had
apparently made some headway, caught up with its tail and vanished.
Mulder was suddenly kneeling at her side in the small bathroom, his
fingers tracing the skin. 

"I can see it here, it's like the scarring is still there. I've
seen tattoos removed before, but not like this. I think the ink's
just been leached out." 

"You think they did it?"

He shook his head.

"I've never heard of that before, but I can't think of anything
else." He peered at the slightly silvered circle on her skin,
looking for some other clue he was certain he wouldn't find. He was
conscious of her hand suddenly moving up to the back of her neck.

"Mulder, check my neck," she murmured urgently. He rose, pushing
her hair aside. The skin here looked perfectly normal, which it
shouldn't; the little surgical scar should be right here, he
thought. He knew it, knew it well. He pressed lightly; the implant
should be there to the touch, a tiny hard spot.

"Scully, there's nothing here."

"Nothing? Is there any sign of..."

"No, there's no scar, not even the old one, there's nothing, it's
all gone." Lacking any better way to deal with this development,
Mulder pressed his lips softly to the back of her neck. It was as
if he'd suddenly turned a page in his mind, finding the answer.
"Wait. It's gone. I know it's gone."

"How do you know?" Their eyes met in the bathroom mirror, him
standing behind her. He turns, walking back towards the bed.

"I just do."

"Mulder, what about the cancer...?" she asked, incredulous.

"You don't need it anymore. That's gone too," he replied, sitting
down heavily on the edge of the mattress.

"You just know this?"

"Yeah, I do." He pressed his hands together, leaning his face into
them. She came forward into the shadowed room, unselfconsciously
bare-breasted. The back of her hand brushes against his chest, then
rests on his forehead, gauging. 

"Mulder, you're running a light fever. How do you feel?" He returns
the gesture, fingertips across the upper slope of one breast, then
resting his hand on her forehead. She was warm, warmer than usual,
her skin dry.

"Probably about like you do," he said. He scooted back on the bed
and she lay down as well, on her belly. The light of the bathroom
threw them into relief, the wrinkles in his t-shirt tiny mountain
ranges, her bare back a broad and gently rolling plain. They were
silent for a moment.

"Do you remember the whole drive here?" Scully asked, her voice
tentative in the dark.

"No," he responded. "You?"

"I remember driving," she said carefully.

"Hungry?"

"No. I should be."

"This is in the literature, you know," he began. "Abductees find
themselves..." then he chuckled sadly, "...saying really stupid,
obvious things." Of course she knows that, he thought. She's got
the eponymous X-Files to prove it.

"Find themselves driving to major public works projects in
Pennsylvania," she finished for him. It was quiet again. His hand
moved into the middle of her back, slowly exploring the unexplained
absence.

"When we're done with this, we are refocusing the X-Files, okay?"

"Yeah?" She rolled over on her side to face him, comforted that his
eyes strayed immediately to her nakedness.

"Yep," he nodded slowly but determinedly. "We are sticking
exclusively to Bigfoot."

"Oh, right, because the woods work out great for us."

"I'll bring sleeping bags," he said, giving her a ghost of a smile.
She moved closer, arranging herself to rest her head on his thigh.

"Have there ever been any Bigfoot sightings in Cancun? Can we go to
the beach?" She sounded almost wistful.

"There have been multiple corroborated reports of Elvis surfing
near San Diego. I don't know if we could get a federal warrant,
but..." She rolled over onto her back, her head still on his thigh.
He felt her intake of breath, deep sudden inhale and exhale as her
hands came up to cover her face. "Oh, God, Scully..."

"Sorry, honey, my alien hybrid daughter from the first time I was
abducted died in San Diego last Christmas. I don't know about San
Diego." He heard soft, bitter laughter rather than tears. It was
terrifying and unfamiliar, yet fitting. "I just don't fucking know
anymore." She rose up, straddling his legs and leaning forward,
leaning her forehead against his. A fuzzy line of shadow ran down
the middle of her face, dark on one side, light on the other. He
imagined her eyes luminous. She began with a deep breath.
"Mulder..."

"Yeah?" She held his face in her hands, her eyes closing tightly
once to blink back tears.

"I need you to need me," she said in a soft and deathly serious
tone. "I will drive you, fly you, carry you, kill for you, anything
you need until we're done. You can't question me, you can't ask me
how I am, because I'm not okay. Because when we're done, when this
is over... I am going to blow into a million pieces, and you're
going to have to help me put them all back together, okay?"

His face was distinguished mainly by its ability to convey his
emotions through minimal changes, making the depth of sorrow now
evident seem almost like a disfigurement. She could see him
starting to say her name as he suddenly changed, normal expression
returned, his head turning to look towards the window. His eyes
seemed to lighten, go far away.

"Mulder?" Oh, God, she thought, watching his lips move, as if
speaking a few words to himself. What does he see, how does he
know...?

"Scully, get your gun, get in the bathroom, turn out the light,
cover your ears hard."

As she scrambled into the bathroom, she considered grabbing for
Mulder's shirt where it lay across the bed. Then she realized it
might be a useful momentary distraction and stayed partially nude.
She saw Mulder crouched behind and below the bed, so if he rose
he'd be facing the door. He gestured quickly, pointing at himself,
then skimming his hand across the floor towards the opposite wall.
She noticed that he had his Sig in his right hand, revolver lying
on the floor behind him where either of them could reach it if need
be.

Scully heard a scuffling noise outside the front window, then the
clatter of glass breaking. She pushed her fists up to her ears, gun
in her right hand. 

Mulder couldn't describe what it sounded like. There was just the
beginning of something and then his ears rang, drowning out
everything else. He could tell there'd been a flash on the floor on
the other side of the bed, his vision protected. He heard two dull
pops over the ringing, realized Scully was firing through the
window from behind him and he rolled sideways, collapsing his knee
and falling onto his side

this better work or I am a sitting duck

his upper body emerged from the cover of the bed as the door came
fully open, a body crouching with its hands pointing forward and
up. Mulder fired instinctively, three times, saw the body fall
backwards. He scrambled back behind the bed. Scully ducked around
the bathroom doorframe as low as she could, and their eyes met.
Mulder mouthed "count thirteen" and she pulled behind the doorframe
again.

She'd counted Mississippis ever since hide-and-seek, but she knew
Mulder was a one-one-thousand man and counted along like that,
feeling the connection. Thirteen was a Mulder idea, comforting now
that she followed it, if someone else counted ten we'd get to react
to them and if they were counting fifteen we'd get the drop...

Two-one-thousand

She's okay, she's okay, she's okay. Are there more? These guys
always seem to come in twos, you can't travel in a group of more
than two without it getting to be a hassle

Three-one-thousand

That was stupid, standing like that in the window with the motel
sign behind him, I think I hit him twice, one in the neck or head
for sure

four-one-thousand

She's okay. Scully will probably scoot around behind me, up to the
head of the bed and peek up from there. I'll go out where I did
before, no one saw that move except the guy I shot and Scully, and
she'll expect me to do it again

Five-one-thousand

He's all right. I might be able to get out this bathroom window but
he couldn't.

Six-one-thousand

Osselhoff. Last man I shot was Scott Osselhoff. Except the guy
yesterday.

seven-one-thousand

tattoo's gone, where did it go, Mulder will probably go right again
so I'll go left to the head of the bed, I can probably fit under it
if I need to

eight-one-thousand

Osselhoff. KITT, I need you! Their car or ours? They must be
looking for ours. How did they know? What did we do wrong, what did
we do wrong, think like Langly...

nine-one-thousand

Mulder will have to drive if we bug out under fire, I'm a better
shot and my night vision's better

ten-one-thousand

Oh, God, what do I do if they hit her, I'm not a doctor, she's the
doctor and she's so small a bullet would rip her apart there's a
certain symbolic elegance to it all if she dies now, chip-talisman
NO

eleven-thousand

if there were more, they'd have pulled the guy at the door out,
he's in the way, no way out except the front door, maybe they'd
leave him

twelve-one-thousand

NO she is alive and wait there's no one else here, I don't feel
anyone

thirteen-thousand

heart rate's down a little. How did he know? How did he know? I
don't want to do this. I want to call for backup. I want to stop.


* * *

Seattle, Washington
Thursday, 4 June, 1998
1143AM

Angelo Veccione's offices were the same everywhere, the smoker
thought.  Or, more properly, they weren't. They were always someone
else's, "a friend's." Here he appeared to have taken over the
manager's office in a deceptively cheerful-looking real estate
concern. He could have something more impressive or secure, but his
clients, his connections, were people who did business face to
face. They valued respect and personal contact. Angelo signed
Christmas cards, had one of his assistants keep track of birthdays.
They'd worked together for decades, and he knew that Angelo was
sensitive about discussing his connections overtly even with
someone as close as they had been. He would simply say that he had
a lot of friends.

Angelo rose up from his friend's desk, nodding at his man standing
by the door to leave them alone. His demeanor was different in
private, breaking not infrequently into smiles, and given to an
occasional expansive Mediterranean gesture of the hands. 

"I'm glad you're here. Why don't we go get something nice to eat,
we'll be stuck up in the woods all weekend."

"No, Angelo, but thank you."

"Can I offer you a drink, at least?" Angelo didn't wait for an
affirmative, opened a cabinet behind the desk and began pouring
some of his friend's Scotch. He gave the smoker a glass and looked
out the wide window of the office, a dozen stories up. "I should
apologize," he said.

"For what?" the smoker responded, leading him.

"For what happened."

"I would have done the same to you under the circumstances." The
smoker smiled. "You never know, I still might." He didn't touch his
drink. His health was always on a narrow edge these days; bullets
in the chest tended to do that. Angelo looked disappointed, faraway
for a moment.

"We've come a long way, haven't we?"

The smoker set his untouched drink on the corner of the desk.

"Keith's making the wrong decision," he began, walking up behind
Angelo. "He has always been too enamored of fighting the good
fight. Besides, his men are scientists, engineers. They frequently
confuse what could be with what really is."

"You operate within the military, the bureaucracies, structures of
power. Perhaps your ability to think creatively has been
inhibited." Angelo turned and took his seat behind the desk again.
"The vaccine may have worked once, but that's not a weapon. It's a
defense, a bargaining chip at best. Unless you know something." 

"I don't think we have all the relevant information. This... woman,
this ghost, and what she brings. It may not be something we can
control."

"You've been speaking to Pandhu," Angelo said.

"Of course." The smoker made a dismissive gesture with the tip of
his cigarette. "I try to keep an open mind, until a course of
action is clear. You should know that."

"At the Trinity test," Angelo said, "the first atomic bomb, some of
the world's greatest physicists, men who had worked on the
Manhattan Project, were placing wagers on whether or not the test
would set off a spontaneous fusion reaction in the atmosphere--
destroying the entire world. Risks must be taken."

"In 1944," the smoker responded, "some Allied generals counseled an
armistice with Germany in order to turn the combined forces of the
West against Stalin. The opportunity was there, but to take it
would not have been wise. It would, however, have been very
creative."

Angelo nodded in acknowledgment, but shrugged.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked.

"I think we need to reopen this matter," the smoker replied. "We
should hear Pandhu out. We should certainly retract the Protocol
Seven orders."

"Based on our knowledge, these courses of action are mutually
exclusive."  The fat man was back in his meeting mask, unblinking.
"If the cosmonaut is here, then the persons on the Protocol Seven
lists may pose a danger."

"If we carry out Protocol Seven, then all of our research, all of
the work will have been for naught." Angelo heard an unusual
sincerity in the smoker's voice. "We will be destroying our own
laboratory, and burning the records of our experiments. It's
ridiculous."

"Risks must be taken," the moray mouth replied. The smoker leaned
forward onto the desk, then realized it was pointless. He turned
away from the fat man, taking his turn to look out the window at
the spread of harbor below.

"So it's all to come down to one throw of the dice, then." He
studied the tip of his cigarette. "Abandon everything we have
worked for, so Keith can try to live out his Nelsonian fantasies,
save the realm?"

"A decision's been made, old friend." Angelo looked away,
concentrating on a spot on the wall.

"Did you know I'm a father, Angelo? I have two sons."

"I didn't know that."

"Well, the work. They hardly know me."

"I imagine you've done what you can."

* * *

"How did you know?" she shouted over the engine's frantic growl and
whine, the ferocious ringing still in her ears.

Scully had fired an AK-47 on a course once, seen its wounds in an
autopsy bay. She wanted one now, with its huge man-killing,
car-shredding round. That gun would laugh at a car, the metal body
just making the bullet tumble so the entry wound would be a ragged
crater, the target dying of shock. 

"I don't know!" he yelled back. "It's just happening!"

She almost wanted to see lights behind them. It would be an SUV,
top-heavy and full of soft black-clad bodies with spines that snap
and organs that rupture. Skulls meant to protect against the
occasional branch or in extremis the claw of a cheetah, not
pavement at ninety miles an hour. She knew she could hit a tire at
a range that would surprise the faceless casualties as they felt
the vehicle skew, the front end digging in and sparks flying as the
vehicle's fatal roll began.

Pain lanced into her head, dancing across her brows and arcing to
the base of her skull. She recoiled from herself, from the
chattering voice in her head that wanted to see things split open.

"Mulder, something's wrong..."

"It's okay. It's... they can't get to you anymore. You'll be okay."

* * * 

The smoker cornered Krycek against a wall. He had two men with him,
just as Alex did. The temporary Seattle locations had turned into
Mafia hideouts, everyone who was worth it with their own
bodyguards. Krycek knew he was outmatched. His men weren't quite
certain enough of things yet to stare down the man they called
Smokey.

"What the hell kind of operation are you running, Alex?" The smoker
held up a fax, a half-dozen pages. There were crime scene photos on
them, turned into monochrome cartoons. A petite woman slumped over
the steering wheel of an SUV. Blood spattered onto the starred
windshield from the inside. The bullet had come from behind her,
obviously taking a large chunk of her face with it on the way out.
Further photos illustrated this in some detail. 

"Her husband died on the operating table," the smoker noted.

"Probably gang-related," Krycek shrugged.

"There is no room for these kind of mistakes! There never has
been!"

"Actually, yes, there is.  It's called acceptable losses."

"I was deciding what acceptable losses were before you were a load
that should have been swallowed, you little fuck."

"Call it evolution," Krycek smirked.

"It's not too late for you to get out of here before you're
completely out of your depth, Alex."

"You too." None of the four bodyguards was quite certain, after the
fact, which of the two men had drawn first. There was a loud rustle
of fabric and safeties snapping on both sides, and Alex Krycek and
the smoker glared at each other over their sights. Krycek's gun
wavered slightly below the older man's eye socket. The other
pointed directly between Alex's eyes and just above the bridge of
his nose.

Alex smiled.

"You know what's coming, old man."

"And you don't, Alex."

"I'm going to enjoy this when it happens."

"Another time, then." the smoker said. This was right, he thought.
Reducing things to their fundamental elements, to finality, to
violence. The others don't know how to play this game, he thought,
as Krycek and his men walked away shrugging their jackets into
place like a bunch of young toughs. They can order violence,
murder, they believe they can direct it. A flea believes he can
control a wolf because he can make the wolf scratch.

* * *

April Air Force Base
California
August 1979

It was the longest the doctor had ever seen him go without bringing
a cigarette to his lips. He had stood for nearly three minutes in
the hospital corridor, silent, not looking into the patient's room.
It was not that he was expressionless in that time, but that the
expressions were unreadable.

"You're certain?" the man finally asked.

"Yes. It's a matter of days at most. There's just not enough... her
immune system's completely broken down. If it's not this secondary
infection, it'll be another one, or it'll be the residual toxicity
from the last round of test procedures. We just don't know enough
about the hybrid metabolism yet. I'm sorry."

"Let her go," he said. He waited a moment as if he might have had
something else to say and then thought the better of it. He walked
away down the hospital corridor, hands beginning automatic motions
of fire and smoke.

The girl was fourteen, would have been lovely if not for her
pallor, if not for the papery, deathly translucency of her skin, if
not for the dark tracings of veins visible nearly everywhere. The
respirator had been removed early that afternoon, and weak lungs
continued out of habit and the bloody-minded persistence of life.
The breaths were a tiny fraction shallower every time, each
heartbeat a few milliseconds further from the last. It had been
coldly noted that this was an expected reaction of the hybrid
metabolism. It was trying to slip into a hibernative coma, slowing
the rate of failure and hoping for cool preserving temperatures.
They'd tried that with a previous subject, unsuccessfully, and
there was no point prolonging this experiment.

It wasn't out of pure heartlessness that her body was alone; the
shutdown of some hybrid metabolisms had on occasion proved
volatile. She was observed from a distance, but such family as she
had had already made its final observances.

The heart the hybrid metabolism expected was a product of a
different ecosystem, capable of maintaining a steady rhythm at a
glacial pace, but the heart it sent rigidly ordered, alien
instructions to was of human stock. During the night it reached its
limit, the achingly slow, shallow beats becoming a weak and failing
flutter. It was at this point that the girl's eyes opened. They too
had once been lovely. The hazel irises were now washed out in
blooms of greenish blood.

She was beyond pain, but it still would have been a surprise to any
who had been close enough to see her poor eyes brighten and her
pale cracked unkissed lips part, moving slightly. If they had, it
would have been marked down to a final kind delusion, all the more
so as one near-inaudible word was formed.

"Fox..."

Some distances away, a man curled up in the passenger seat of a car
pulled over to the side of a road. Dawn was about to break, grayish
light cast over him and the woman on the driver's side. She dozed,
a beautiful face showing faintly worn lines of concern. The man's
eyes were open, bright with tears, and his arms were held tight
across his chest in a child's gesture.

"Samantha..."

* * *

Montana
Thursday, 4 June 1998
After dawn

Scully felt as though she had slept for a few hours, waking with
the seat back as far as it would go. She didn't remember stopping,
didn't remember what the last point on the highway had been.
Detachedly she realized it would be beautiful, driving through
mountains. Could we come back some day? She stretched her arms out
in front of her, listening to her joints crack, then found a bottle
of water in the map pocket inside her door. She didn't remember
putting it there, or drinking the first half of it. It was cool and
flat tasting, but better than she'd prepared herself for. Scully
had the strangest sense of unfulfilled deja vu, something to do
with awful, tepid water that tasted simultaneously of metal and
rubber. 

Her lover's long body was uncomfortably jumbled in the seat beside
her. Mulder was speaking to his own dreams, insensible. She had a
flash of trying to wake him while it was still dark, but he would
rouse only for moments at a time and would not speak, only gaze at
her.

She'd seen the sunrise in her own dream, preceded by an arc of
crackling flashes, clearly defined bands of color over a black
curved horizon. She'd seen this picture before. This was sunrise
from space. She was cold, so impossibly cold.

Ete kholod...

They had flown over the highway through the previous night,
checking the radio occasionally to find out if they were officially
fugitives yet. Their ears still rang, and they jabbered frantically
back and forth at high volume in the dark. Being on the run after a
firefight was not something they'd covered in the Academy,
especially if you were on the Bobbie Sue and Billy Joe side of the
equation. 

Then the radio started being funny, and Scully noted that Montana's
Jesus sounded very, very Protestant. Mulder wondered aloud why the
worldwide Jewish conspiracy wasn't doing him any damn good lately.
A charming local lunatic, his Radio Shack microphone busting into
overdriven blare, recommended to aim for the head "when the FBI
come for you like they did in Texas and North Dakota." Scully
chewed her lip and closed her eyes briefly, nonetheless pushing
Montana's "reasonable and prudent" to a ninety-mile-per-hour
extreme. 

"This isn't my usual after-action response," Mulder had noted.
Scully had agreed. They were both brooders. 

"Something's giving us an endorphin rush," he'd continued. "Trying
to cheer us up, keep us going. Good human doggies." His hand had
pounded the inside of the door.

"Mulder, we're both exhausted, we're probably just... freaking
out," she'd finished lamely. She was distracted, her limbs feeling
strong and sinuous, her mind giddily preoccupied with feelings of
power, awareness of her weapons. 

"No, this is part of it," he'd said, leaning forward, his head
against the dash. "This is probably their idea of doing us a
favor-- keep us partially aware, throw us a cookie when we stay on
track." He'd looked over at her, saw her squirming in her seat.
"Don't fight it, it just gets stronger."

It just gets stronger, she thought, as she looked at the state
highway rolling by. Mulder was speaking, and it had snapped her to
awareness, at least of an intellectual sort. She didn't think
driving was going to require any conscious input from her.

"Scully?" His voice was insistent; he'd been trying to get her
attention.

* * *

"Hey..." I answer.

"Do you know how long a million years is, Scully?"

"What do you mean?"

"I do... I know what it looks like from the outside. It's curved,
it's the outside of a sphere, it just looks flat from where we are.
 We're points, we just move forward on top of time. The other ones,
the ones from the other side, the ones inside of her, they're
lines. They don't begin and they don't end. They're left over from
before." Mulder's eyes have a terrifying intensity, and when he
speaks it reminds me of the primal nature of his intelligence, the
raw genius at the base of his mind, and the thin boundary between
genius and madness.

"Things that man was not meant to know," he says, smiling weakly
and rubbing at his eyes. "We have to keep moving. I think I'm
carrying something."

He's sitting straight up now, his eyes bright.

"They're using me to transmit information somehow. I don't think I
can carry it for too long."

"What kind of information?"

"I can't explain. It's like they balled up the entire Encyclopedia
Galactica in a condom and I swallowed it, and it's starting to
leak." He chuckled. "I'm sorry, Scully."

I was going to ask what for, then I realized how silly that would
sound.

"I'm sorry too, Mulder."

He's quiet for about a minute, obviously trying to decide where to
take that.

"What are you sorry for?"

"I'm sorry that we're here."

Probably two minutes. I see Mulder having an entire conversation
with himself.

"I'm serious, Scully... the passports, the money, everything. We do
this thing, this... it's not too clear to me yet, and then they'll
let us go. Let's go, beautiful, let's go somewhere with no guns and
no Morley cigarettes and no Alex Kryceks and I'll name all the
stars for you... you probably know them all already but I think I
might know some new ones now."

"Could you really stop?" I shouldn't ask him serious questions.
He's half-delirious. Hell, so am I.

"I need to. I don't know what to believe anymore, and I don't think
it matters whether I believe or not. I find one truth, it gets
taken away, replaced with another. Maybe they erase my memories,
maybe I invent them." He pauses. "Right now I remember being in an
alien spaceship. Right now I can say they were this far from me,
Scully," he holds up his hands a foot apart, "this far. Maybe
tomorrow it'll be a secret military aircraft and rubber alien suits
and hypnosis again. Next week I'll be trying to convince you I was
on Santa's goddamn sleigh and there were these tiny little fucking
reindeer."

"And at the same time, I know we have to go to Washington looking
for a ghost spaceship, because there's something we need to do
that's more important than anything else, and every time I start to
realize what it is, it slips away. It's like someone's playing a
shell game in my head. What if I'm just going crazy, Scully, what
if I'm just going crazy and it's going to get us both killed?"

I realize that I don't need to drive, not with the same part of me
that's listening to Mulder. That's being taken care of. This is a
discussion we should have lying down, looking up, somewhere quiet
with grass under our backs and clouds scudding overhead.

"You're not going crazy. I believe you, Mulder, I believe that we
are here, now, for a purpose because I have to. It has to matter."

(we're holding hands between us, and I tap our twined fingers in
the soft grass to make the point)

"I understand something now." He turns his head to face me (I can
feel the slight movement from his other hand pulling up random
blades of grass and rolling them between his fingers), looking
giddy and rueful at the same time. "Souls, Scully baby, we're old,
old souls..."

"What do you mean?"

"A base pair, Scully, we're a base pair. Out of all the original
group, thousands, the whole... there's only us left. Two souls.
Everyone else has accomplished what they were supposed to do, and
they've moved on."

He's silent for a few seconds (turning his face back up to the
sky).

"She's dead, Scully. Samantha's dead. I saw her die. I think she
knew I was there. She's moved on now. That's how it works... it's
learning, completing yourself, over lifetimes and lifetimes and
lifetimes... Samantha finished. She's gone."

"What are we supposed to learn, Mulder?"

"I think we're completing something.  In all our lives, we have
always been around each other, but we have never been like this.
We've never been together. It's the final configuration. Last trip
around. Wow. We're really, really cool." It's that giddy smile
again.

"You're saying this was destiny, Mulder?"

He focuses then, the smile gone and facing me again.

"No, it's just the only way it can end." He pauses, thinking. "I
don't know what lives we lived. I just know how the system works,
because they knew. I can see it on our skins. When I look at you I
realize that I'm looking at myself, at the future. Oh, Scully."
Mulder's eyes open wide, his lips moving slightly as if talking to
himself.

"Mulder? Mulder!"

"I'm getting it now. I had to know what they are, how they came to
be, so I can help the cosmonaut. I've got something for her,
Scully. Something she needs to move on. Something you need."

"Something I need?"

"That's why this is so wrong, that's why this is happening. She
can't be here, because she's already here. Scully, she's you."

In this moment, isolated, more conscious of the imagined scent of
grass than of the real stale air in the car, it makes sense.

"Something will happen, Scully, it's... it's beyond our control
this time. Just keep going, close to where she'll be. We'll know
what to do. We have to."

* * *

Seattle FBI Office
10:14 AM PST

"We got something!" Skinner looked up at the sound of Spender's
voice. It was the only favor Skinner had left to call in the
Pacific Northwest. One of the Seattle ASACs, Paul Richards, had
been a drinking buddy in the early Eighties. That connection had
gotten them an empty desk and a land line, a computer with an
Internet connection, and not too many questions.

"What?"

Spender was combing through daily updates from field offices.
Skinner was cold-calling state highway patrols under a variety of
pretenses.

"Minneapolis Bureau got a call from a county sheriff's office in
the ass end of South Dakota wondering what the FBI is doing in his
jurisdiction. Eyewitnesses reported a shootout at a motel in
Davison County and a bunch of guys in black SUVs claiming to be FBI
agents... it's them, it's gotta be them." Spender smacked down the
fax paper on the shared desk. 

"What?" Skinner, on hold, put his hand over the mouthpiece of the
receiver. He saw Richards leaving his office and waved him over.

"Eyewitnesses say that there were two alleged FBI men shot dead,
both definitely men," Spender emphasized. "Bodies were removed by
the alleged FBI before the county sheriff arrived, county sheriff
calls the FBI in Minneapolis. They, of course, don't know what the
fuck he's talking about."

"Anybody see the shooter?"

"No. Light-colored hatchback heading west on I-90 might have been
the shooter."

"Time?"

"Nine-thirty PM last night."

"Anyone looking for that car?" Skinner asked, giving up on the
Wyoming highway patrol and hanging up. Spender was flipping rapidly
through a road atlas they'd borrowed from the office, Richards
looking over his shoulder.

"You ever been to South Dakota?" the younger man asked. "Four hours
out from there," he slid the map in front of Skinner, "they could
be anywhere in four states, and they're not going to stay on the
interstates if they think they're being followed." Spender's brow
wrinkled for a second, looking at the map. "Wait, no they can't."

Skinner nodded.  

"They're coming to Washington, right?" Spender continued. "You
can't just blow west through Montana, you have to go through
Billings and Butte. Or they go all the way through Wyoming... No.
They're still gonna have to go through Butte or Missoula. Northern
Idaho doesn't have back roads unless you're a goat, and not if
you're in a hurry." He noticed Skinner looking at him curiously.
"My mom and I moved around a lot when I was a teenager. I lived in
northern Wyoming for a little while."

"How much of a hurry are they in?" Richards asked. He was a tough
customer, more of a cop than an agent, with too much of a tendency
to say exactly what he was thinking to advance past his current
station.

"They're probably trying to be in Olympic National Forest somewhere
by Friday night, but I'm not sure they know exactly." Skinner said
quietly and evenly. "They may be kind of making things up as they
go along. They're damn good agents but they're ...unconventional."

"What do you mean by that?" Richards asked carefully. "Look, Walt,
there's fuck-all we can do about this unless you want the whole
thing to go public. If I saw that fax from South Dakota any other
day I'd file it with the black helicopter sightings and forget
about it, let Minneapolis worry about it. I mean, I can call
Minneapolis and suggest they send somebody out to South Dakota, but
that'll take a day at least. They'll probably just tell me to fuck
off anyway."

The heavyset Seattle ASAC looked around the room and lowered his
voice.

"I can put an APB out to state highway patrols if you can promise
me your people aren't gonna go Bonnie and Clyde if someone tries to
pull them over."

Skinner rubbed his forehead, glancing at Spender. Richards nodded
at the two men and gave them the privacy he sensed they were hoping
for.

"You think something's trying to take Scully again?" Spender asked
quietly. "Like Ruskin Dam? Like my mother?"

"If Mulder thinks that's happening he's probably handcuffed to her
right now, and he's not going to be stopping for state highway
patrols."

Spender exhaled and studied his shoes for a moment.

"Sir, have we considered the possibility that we're missing an ally
here?"

"What are you getting at?"

"Big Tobacco said he was trying to keep Mulder and Scully alive,
assuming he's not lying. Besides, that South Dakota thing wasn't
him."

"You're probably right. A straight-up hit like that is not his
style, especially one that doesn't work. What's your point?"

"You and I might have a lead here he doesn't know about. He may
have the resources to try and sweep them up if he knows where to
look."

"Are you saying we should cooperate with him? Hand them over to
him?"

"An approach might not hurt. I don't see what else we have right
now. At least then we'd know where they are."

"You're thinking a little too far outside the box, Spender."
Skinner tried hard not to snarl, but he could feel his jaw
tightening as he said it. Spender looked frustrated.

"Sir, with all due respect, have you got a better idea?"

"You don't have the experience to be dealing with people like him
on even terms." Skinner glared at a passing Seattle agent who
wasn't minding quite enough of his own business. "He'll feed you
your balls before you know what's happening. You've already got the
wrong people interested in your career."

"I don't have much of a choice in that. Maybe I can work it to my
advantage." 

Skinner snorted.

"Don't end up like me, Jeff. There's always a price."

* * *

"Do you remember how we got here?" she asked quietly, her finger
tracing a vertical pattern in the condensation on the outside of
the paper cup. She couldn't remember what was inside. Probably
water-- the impulses were thus far ruthlessly practical.

"I think so." Mulder pulled the lid off his cup, looked inside.
Water. He was afraid to unwrap his burger. He probably hadn't
thought of bacon or cheese. Christ, what if they were vegetarians?
He almost giggled.

"Honestly." The truck stop looked as if it had grown in a modular
fashion, absorbing formerly independent buildings as it went. A gas
station here, a diner there, a pathetic motel, all given the same
paint job. The diner's front wall was entirely glass-- filthy
glass-- and the dull gray skies outside announced that they were
now officially in the Pacific Northwest.

"No. I have no idea." He sighed, rested his elbows on the table.
"It's getting worse. I'm waiting for a craving for sweet potato
pie."

"Yeah." She didn't take the bait. He reached across the table,
enfolding her small hands in his without looking around first.

"Scully... look. I can't explain how I know this, but I do. It's
going to be all right. I can see, Scully, you don't die." She
looked away from him, out the glass separating them from the
parking lot.

"So that's what constitutes a good day now? What about you?"

"I don't know how to explain," he began. "I see it... for me, it's
without the breaks, without my own... changes. I wouldn't know.
It's... it's irrelevant from the point of view I have."

"It's not irrelevant to me."

"I know I don't die because you don't."

They were silent long enough for Scully to drink half her water.
Mulder wondered if it was a sign of rebellion to leave his burger
untouched.

"I'm not afraid, Mulder. I don't know why. I'm more curious than
anything else. Does this end tomorrow? Are we going to wake up and
find ourselves in the Arctic next week? Are we going to find
ourselves at all?"

"I don't know."

"What if this is it, Mulder? This parking lot? What if this is the
last thing I remember?"

* * *

The room is small and not clean, meant for a single dead-tired
trucker on a tight schedule. The bed is some weird size between
single and double, the carpet dusty except for a strip of
half-assed daily vacuuming, the television bolted to the wall on a
steel bracket. The door slams and Scully's small hand fumbles the
bolt shut as two large hands lift her up, her strong thighs
clasping around his hips as she is lifted to six-feet-plus,
face-to-face altitude.

Never done this, he's thinking, never lifted Scully up like this,
clothed, against the wall, to feel her squirming and pressing and
tearing at our clothes.

She imagines she can feel their hearts pounding together as they
press close, hammering from behind ribs.

He holds her up like this with his hand on her bare, warming back
as she pulls her T-shirt over her head, fingertips scraping against
the absurdly low ceiling. Everything has to happen at once and it's
not working, everything's in the way, they want to look into each
other's eyes, to kiss, to get her bra off, to be everywhere in each
other at the same time.  

His hands are on her face as she rides on top, tracing the fine
bones of her skull and the joining points where she's sensitive--
scalp to forehead, ear to cheek, throat to jaw. He wants to touch
everything once, be certain to remember every inch so he could
shape her blind from river clay and kiss her to life. She won't
close her eyes, not for a moment, not to blink away these goddamn
tears or anything. 

His big hands are on her breasts, palms circling on her nipples,
sliding down her sides. He loves her round calves, her little
ankles. He's told her so, and they both remember and smile as his
hands encircle her there. She's saying his names, both of them,
even the one he hates to hear. He does it too, serious, afraid that
in her name he almost never says there might be some part of her
that he doesn't know yet.

Inside, he thinks, I'm inside Scully, she's surrounding me. She
leans forward and her face is filled with a sweet and knowing
sadness, eyes closing as her cheek presses against his chest. He
feels the wetness of tears against his breast but her body doesn't
stop its sinuous, desperate motion. Her hips roll back and forth,
drawing her up and down his length. 

Their bodies continue to move, rocking with gentle urgency. Her
seashell liquidity envelops him, shared heat and tension building.

what's going to happen?

I don't know, Scully, I don't know

they won't let us stop

we can't, if we don't do this everything ends

I want to remember this time, Mulder, I won't let them take this

no, this is ours, we're, oh God, Scully

He feels it hit her as she gasps with something that sounds like
surprise and they slip back to singular unities as the urgent coals
burst aflame. As her body pulses around him he releases as well,
thrusting upwards deep inside her. Scully begins to speak, to urge
him, but her voice trails off in a ragged whimper as she feels the
unmistakable push and throb of her lover's release inside her.

Stirred alive a last time, the embers light with a stunning and
violent brilliance. Bright trails of sparks flare in the night sky
before darkness closes in.

* * *

Langly stands on the front step, waiting for the police and the
useless ambulance. Inside, Frohike sits on the floor, one leg
tucked under him, head lolled forward and sobbing. Byers is
crouched behind him, arms around the smaller man's shoulders in a
strange pose for any other time. 

He's angry with her. He had never known Scully to be impatient, but
in the end she hadn't even kept to her own plans. In the kitchen of
the little rented cottage is a plastic grocery bag with small,
solid apple-bulges visible; she'd initially planned for one night,
anyway, maybe a morning walk down to the beach and a swim (no, she
wouldn't do that to her mother, would want the body found), but
that had apparently fallen by the wayside. Damn her, Byers thinks,
we'd have been here by then, it took about ten minutes after she
left the graveside service for her story to fall apart and twenty
to trace her credit card to this rental. Beside the grocery bag is
a bottle of red wine, a smaller bottle of vodka, and four
prescription bottles, neatly lined up. She'd moved up her own
schedule there, it appeared. On the couch beside her is a small
box. He hadn't gone to look like Frohike had, but he could see from
here photos, handwriting. Most of them are still neatly piled in
the box, only two or three removed and placed on the table in front
of her. 

If she'd even gone through them all we still might have made it,
Byers thinks. I would have frozen, tried to talk, but Mel or Ringo
would have dove for her. She would have had a defensive reflex, and
it would have been a sorry sight as she punched probably Frohike in
the face but he still threw himself on top of her, and Langly
ripped that bastard silver Sig out of her hand and skated it down
the hardwood hallway.

* * *

end of part six of seven

s o k o l
part seven of seven

by khyber
khyber@citizensofgravity.com

rated nc17 for graphic violence and mature content
full headers in part one of seven

* * *

"Skinner."

"Where are you, Walter?"

"I'm on vacation, Dean."

"Good. Seen anyone I know?"

"Mickey Mouse, and Goofy. I'm in Disneyland."

"I heard you might be visiting friends in Seattle."

"Of course not. I'm in line for cotton candy as we speak. What's
going on?"

"There's been some developments here. Somebody from one of the
other three-letters has gone to a Federal Court judge and adopted
the two pros that Mr. and Mrs. Spooky shot."

"What do you mean?"

"They're claiming it was a legal search under a counterintelligence
warrant. Classified documents of some kind? I may have mentioned
this before? Does this sound at all familiar?"

"Possibly."

"Yeah, anyway, I realize you're on vacation, but if you see them
getting on Space Mountain, tell them that they've gone from a very
beatable manslaughter to a possible federal murder one."

"That's bullshit, Dean."

"There may be two more dead federal employees in South Dakota,
though apparently it's sensitive because the agency in question may
have been interpreting their jurisdiction very, very liberally...
Walter?"

"Yeah, I'm still here."

"If these assholes get all the right paperwork together, Mulder and
Scully could be really fucked when they come up for air."

"I hear you."

"Say hi to Mickey."

Skinner killed the call on his phone, certain that Schoen had
nothing to add that he really needed to hear. He looked around his
hotel room and wished he had a real bottle-- getting a buzz from
the minibar would have required too much mixing.

He'd liked to have kissed Scully once, just to find out what it was
like. He wasn't sure if he'd ever really wanted her, or if his
protective instincts were just to prove he could save something, do
something that added up to a net positive no matter how dirty his
hands got. He hated that about Mulder, hated about himself that he
did, that Mulder had never had to compromise himself to save
anything.

Then he realized how full of shit he was to say that and wished for
a bottle again. He weighed the phone in his hand and put it on the
room's desk.  Two minutes later he was in the hotel's lobby, on the
probably-not-wiretapped pay phone, dialing a number he'd committed
to memory and rarely had occasion to use.

* * *

"She was sick, Scully. They made her so sick and weak. She wasn't
afraid any more, she was just so tired."

Scully had tried to catch herself out, to look for the sun before
thinking of where it would be, but there it was. Maybe Mulder had
put it there, she thought. The hills, the grass, they were probably
his too. She'd have put in an ocean.

"I think I spoke to her. I tried, I told her to sleep, told her I
was there, that I'd take care of her. I didn't think it would work.
It was one thing to know that moment was there in her life, to know
what happened, but then I was there, with her."

The physics of it were impeccable; the grass warmed by the sun, but
the ground cool under her back.

"I saw Samantha die, Scully. I was there."

If she concentrated, though, or perhaps stopped concentrating, she
could feel the steering wheel in her hands.

"How?"

He was half-sitting, leaning back on his elbows as she looked over
at him. He had the faraway look she recognized; he hadn't thought
of how to put whatever he was about to say into words before.

"Everyone else... all the other souls we're with. I can see them
anytime, anyplace, past or... future, too. But it's not the future.
It's hard to explain. Whatever I'm doing, time's irrelevant."

"That doesn't make sense." Her words seemed harsh enough to settle
between them, crushing the grass with their shape. "Sorry, I'm
doing my default response. It does, in purely theoretical terms of
viewing the totality of finite space and time as an external
observer."

"Is that possible?"

"Well, at that level, if you allow for sufficient abstraction of
the admittedly theoretical physics involved to permit the existence
of such an external observer, who does not have a physical or
temporal frame of reference that can be objectively described,
virtually anything's possible."

"It does make sense. It's the souls that matter, that's what I can
see. It's the souls that continue. We exist outside the universe
but live within it."

"That's not inconsistent with any number of theologies, including
ones drawn in crayon."

"That's why they're so dangerous; there's no place for them here.
They can't exist here without destroying something."

"Can anything, at some level? Metabolic processes, oxidation,
radioactive decay."

"I see what you mean. But they're souls that... it's so hard to
explain. This isn't their universe anymore."

"Ia Cthulhu ftagn?" Scully intoned, a rare intentional silliness.

"I always wondered how you pronounced that." She could tell he was
smiling, though she was now watching clouds. "No, it's... they're
like her/you. They're here already." She could hear the smile
disappear, turn thoughtful.

Elephant. No, trilobite. She tried concentrating/deconcentrating
again, wondering about the steering wheel. She felt the cold worst
on her face, her skin so dry she thought it would crack off in
sheets like ice, and in her thighs that felt like long lumps of
frozen dough. She'd tried to keep moving, every fifteen minutes,
but she had no clock, kept losing track, couldn't count, and when
she did move she would start shivering all over. When the light
comes into the capsule again, check the attitude first, make
certain we are not tumbling, carefully twist the radio wires
together, remember it all because the ones who follow me, the
second woman, the seventh, they will need to know these things... 

"They're the Colonists, from before. Or the future, depending on
how you look at it."

Her breath caught in two throats in three places at once.

"You okay?" he asked gently. Touching doesn't seem to be part of
the game here, she thought, normally he would but we are not where
we are. "Scully?" Did she see him, here, or was she in the car? He
must know, be able to tell us apart. 

"I wonder if this is what it was like for me before," she said
carefully, forcing down the tremble in her voice, "when I took
Cassandra to Ruskin Dam. I wonder if I was alone. I wonder if I'll
remember this."

"Memory seems to be infinitely changeable. You're not questioning
how we're here, having this conversation?"

"I already know there's no plausible explanation." She'd pulled up
a few blades of grass, studied them. Dirt. Perfectly good dirt. We
have our very own earth. Grow carrots, tomatoes. "Besides, I don't
really want to know."

"When do we go back?" Scully said after a while. The
cloud-trilobite had stretched out into a long, striated span of
muscle fiber.

"Whenever we want, I guess."

"I suppose we have to."

"This time, yeah."

* * *

Seattle, Washington
Waterfront district
4:39 PM

"All right, name your price," Skinner growled, looking
uncomfortably around the warehouse office. It was dingy green-gray
and would have smelled of smoke anyway, but the man he was meeting
appeared to have had time for one cigarette already. 

"Price for what?" the smoker asked with a hint of amusement. He'd
seated himself behind the old, cheap desk, the chair squeaking at
the slightest movement. Skinner gave him a look of disgust.

"Mulder and Scully."

"I don't have them." The smoker laughed outright this time. Under
the single overhead light he looked almost unnaturally healthy,
much more than Skinner would admit him a right to. "I may soon. I
wish I did. It would be a lot simpler for everyone."

"We might have information to help you locate them. You're
protecting them from someone, aren't you. The rest of the country
club?"

"Mr. Skinner, it might surprise you to know that I have other
things to do than act as guardian angel for people who are, at
best, occasionally useful to me. But, nonetheless..." He rose from
the chair and reached inside his jacket, pulling out an envelope
and offering it to Skinner.

"There's a map in here. Be at the location indicated tomorrow at
dawn and wait four hours." Skinner took the envelope as the smoker
paused. He seemed oddly informal, as if he'd allowed Skinner behind
the wizard's curtain. "If Mulder and Scully don't appear, assume
that they are dead. No tricks, no catches, no price. I can't do
anything more."

"Care to explain?"

"They'll be coming to me, if they haven't already." The smoker
shrugged. "They don't really have a choice. If everything happens
as planned, they'll be free to go."

"Except for the murder charges. Those yours?"

"As a matter of fact, yes. I said they'd be free to go. What
happens after that will be up to them."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"If I wanted them dead, they'd be dead. But we're entering
dangerous times. The lower profile they keep, the better for
everyone."

"How do you plan to sell Mulder on that?"

"Oh, that'll your problem, Mr. Skinner, if indeed it's a problem at
all. After everything that's happened I don't know if they'll want
to be... tied down. Exposed. You never know what might come through
your window. I certainly didn't." The smoker turned to leave.
Skinner raised his voice slightly, tried a tone of threat.

"What if I said I had information about your project here in
Washington? Information that might go public?"

The smoker barely paused, and stopped just short of chuckling.

"I'd say you should have thought of that angle before, planned your
lie better." Skinner felt his face burn with embarrassment. He
tried again.

"If Mulder isn't working on the X-Files, what kind of leverage do
you have against the rest of the Consortium?"

"Who says I'll need any?" The smoker sounded almost jolly as he
descended the metal staircase to the darkened warehouse floor.

* * *

Skinner's first thought was that he must be slipping. He heard loud
footsteps behind him as he stepped off the metal stairs down from
the warehouse office, spun rapidly, reached for his weapon.

"What the hell was that? What did you have to talk to him about?"
Spender stepped out from a shadowed area, gestured towards the
partially open door of the warehouse. Skinner felt momentarily sick
as the adrenaline dissipated.

"Jesus, Spender. How did you get here? Did you follow me?"

"So, what, you suddenly decided it was okay to think outside the
box?" The young agent was red-faced, angry.

"I'm already compromised, Jeff. I'm already dirty. One more roll in
the mud isn't going to hurt me like it would hurt you."

"I need to know this shit! I'm not just some rookie agent here.
They've got my mother, for God's sake."

"That's why you went along with Krycek in the first place, isn't
it."

"Yes, it is. Fuck." Spender stared at his shoes for a moment,
calming himself. "I wasn't sure it was legit right from the
beginning. But I thought if I played along, if I got something on
Mulder, or even on you, maybe I'd have some more leverage." He
started walking towards the warehouse's main entry, then clearly
made a decision to speak, stopping in his tracks. He spoke to
Skinner without turning around. "I spent a lot of hours on them. I
know what the X-Files division has been doing since Scully came
back from Pennsylvania, and I can tell you that they haven't even
got a goddamn file with my mother's real name on it. She's still
Patient fucking X."

"Look, Jeff, that's not entirely their fault... I haven't given
them a lot of room to work lately."

"I don't care whose fault it is. It doesn't matter. You give Mulder
a choice between Dana Scully or his sister, or my mother, and we
know what he's going to choose. I don't blame him. We all have to
do our own crusades. I'm just going to have to do mine."

* * *

They're sitting quietly when they're found, staring out the
windshield of their little white car, its engine stilled. The road
is barely more than a single lane, hacked out of and surrounded by
dank, closely packed forest. On one side the brush conceals a
significant drop, careening down over an steep and uneven slope.
The car's long doors open simultaneously and they step out. The
woman slings a small backpack over one shoulder. She is small,
verging on tiny, and wears cutoff jeans and a man's sweatshirt far
too large for her. He is tall and lean in a plain gray t-shirt,
equally plain blue jeans. They seem unaware of each other at first.

They meet side by side in front of the car, slowing slightly.
Joining hands, they walk in a shuffling, stiff fashion, like
children acting out a second-grade marriage. Her eyes are raised,
his downcast. Both seem vacant, preoccupied. The three men who find
them are unaccustomed to the place, dark-skinned, used to
close-packed humanity and warmer climes. One of the men steps
forward, looking around nervously, and gently guides the pair
towards the waiting van with his hand on the tall man's shoulder.
The other two men jog to the small car and crouch behind the open
doors, straining to push it off to the side. One of them notes the
smell in the cab, the scent of contained bodies. He's a sensitive
man, imagines that he would have known from the odor that it had
been a man and woman inside the vehicle even if he hadn't seen
them. The two lean in behind the car's tail for a final push,
shoving it down the incline to tear haphazardly through the brush
and crunch to a halt twenty yards below.

* * *

It had been a few years, the smoker thought, since he was conscious
of the presence of someone who wanted to kill him. Not an assassin,
someone who would, but a real killer, someone who wanted to. He
knew Alex was out there, within five hundred yards, waiting until
the rules changed and he could take his shot.

Pandhu closed his cell phone and gave it back to his aide. He
nodded to the young man and said a few quiet words. Pandhu
approached the smoker as his aide stayed a respectful few yards
away.

"I've heard from my people," Pandhu said. "They have secured Mulder
and Scully. I'll have them brought out here, of course."

"That's good news," the smoker replied. "Does Mulder have the
information you require?"

"It seems that he does, yes."

The smoker's driver also moved to a distance. He didn't affect an
SUV for himself like the others. He and Pandhu leaned against the
large sedan. Something about the outdoors created a certain
informality.

"Why was it necessary for them to... act as intermediaries?" the
smoker asked. Pandhu removed his glasses, studying them idly.

"I don't know why the Gatekeepers act as they do. In some
calculation of their, Mulder is in the right place at the right
time. To the extent I presume to understand their motivations, they
are strongly driven by a belief that key events are determined by
fate rather than action."

The smoker puffed silently. Pandhu continued.

"They take this interest in our world, in our existence... simply
because they see certain outcomes as part of a course of events
that must unfold, beyond considerations of good or ill. The
entities exist outside this course of events."

The smoker had resigned himself to the fact that mistakes had been
made-- things they should have realized long ago. The seeming
contradictions in what they believed were the Colonists' actions.
All along the Colonists had been fighting a war in the background.

"If the plan goes Keith's way," he asked. "If they hold the...
woman, the cosmonaut. What happens then?"

"It's happening already," Pandhu began quietly, his voice unusually
introspective. "It will begin with those who are sensitive, and
unaware. Those who have had contact with alien consciousness; the
Colonists' experiments, or yours. Violence, hatred. I believe some
are already feeling it, acting on it. Young Mr. Krycek seems a
little unstable, doesn't he. The woman, Scully, she was taken in
one of your experiments as well, was she not? Perhaps her as well."

The smoker nodded, more as an indication to continue than an
acknowledgment.

"The entities will take them first, probably within days. They will
be the harbingers, murderous and maddened prophets animated by
terrible energies. Keith's method's are right, even if his goal is
wrong. The majority of the subjects on your extermination lists,
your Protocol Seven, will be the second generation as the woman is
the first. Your work, yours and the Colonists, have provided them
with a ready beachhead."

It was a classic analytical error, the smoker thought, to idealize
our opponent-- to ascribe to them infallibility, unity of purpose,
rational and unconflicting motivations.

"In time the entities will decode the secrets of matter in this
universe outside of the tiny orbital laboratory they have been
working in. It may be centuries. It may be hours. They will emerge
from air, water, earth, forms limited only by their own
considerable imagination. It is a science, of a sort, beyond our
comprehension."

The Colonists had attempted the forcible colonization of an alien
world, through a bizarre and elaborate scheme of biological
infiltration. Of course. An act not of conquest, but of desperate
survival, faced with defeat on another front of which we were
unaware. 

"Your Gatekeepers, they do not have the power to prevent this?"

"As you said yourself, power is not inherent, but in the exercise
of will. Again, their motivations are unclear." 

"As are yours."

"The information which the Gatekeepers have imparted to Mulder will
empower me to prevent the entities' transfer to our world via the
woman."

"And what besides?"

"Still you accuse me of seeking power," Pandhu chuckled. "You
cannot conceive of anything else. Perhaps I seek knowledge?"

"Need I remind you of the relationship between the two?"

Pandhu only smiled in response. The smoker looked out across the
large clearing. The Consortium site flattened about two hundred
yards of underbrush each way. It amazed him how Western
civilization would bring the same things everywhere. Wheels. Guns.
Uniforms. Parking lots. Our little spidery flying machines. Our
invisible structures by which we impose order upon ourselves and
our relations.

"Most of the personnel at the landing site will follow my orders,"
he said. "I frequently work within the military structures." He
didn't meet Pandhu's eyes. "If we act decisively at the right
moment we should be able to present the others with a fait
accompli."

"How do you wish to deal with them?" Pandhu asked nonchalantly. The
smoker considered as he opened a matchbook. Pandhu found it almost
impossible to track the transitions from one cigarette to another.

"As they tried, and failed, to deal with me," he responded after a
pause that he seemed to find satisfying.

"How do you wish to deal with Mulder once I've recovered the
information I require?"

"Ensure that he and Scully are kept safe until we take control of
the situation."

"We have an agreement, then."

"We have a shared purpose, Doctor Pandhu."

* * *

The young men, duskily foreign and soft-spoken, were polite about
the restraints and even said something about 'under the
circumstances'. Their captive didn't struggle. The chair was
probably distantly related somehow to dentistry. The restraints on
his wrists and ankles were solid circlets of steel a half inch
thick and two inches wide, presumably with the intention of keeping
him in place even if his skeleton turned traitor and decided to try
to go it alone.
 
Once he was suitably restrained, they stepped back towards the door
off to his right. The room was longer than it was wide, bare except
for the restraining chair and a small folding table. They waited in
silence for a few minutes, not speaking among themselves, until a
slight, neat figure of an older man appeared and quietly dismissed
them. 

"Hello, Mr. Mulder."

His greeting wasn't returned. Pandhu stepped closer to Mulder's
chair, his manner familiar.

"I remember you, you know. You asked incisive questions. You wanted
to know more. So many people just wish to reinforce their existing
biases."

"Can we get this over with?" Mulder rattled the cuffs on his wrists
by way of explanation for his impatience.

"I apologize for the restraints. It's just a matter of the
circumstances we're operating under. But we have a little time, Mr.
Mulder. I'd like to know what you're feeling. This is a rare
opportunity."

"You'll know soon enough, won't you?"

"But that will be different. Come on, Mr. Mulder. You've received
quite an education. What does it mean?"

"It's not meant for our minds. I can feel the trails of vibration
that connect all lives on this planet, past, present and future,
but it's not giving me much on whether the Braves are gonna have
any depth in the bullpen this year."

"It's a matter of perspective, I suppose."

"If I want to, I can hear any mind I can imagine, right now. I just
can't understand any of them. It's pointless. That's, it's
hilarious actually. All these minds, all these souls connected, and
we're all alone."

"Any of them?"

"One."

"That must be reassuring. The space between one and infinity is,
itself, infinitely smaller than that between zero and one. Can you
sense her now?"

"I can sense that you'd better hurry up and get this done or she's
likely to show up and kick your ass. That's generally how it works
with us."

"They don't understand lives, Mr. Mulder, how glorious and
brilliant these transitory things of ours are. To be one of them is
to be a page in a vast encyclopedia."

"Like you."

"Whatever do you mean, Mr. Mulder?"

"Aren't you beyond human? Isn't that what you think?"

"Oh, but I am human, Mr. Mulder. A thousand times over. A thousand
lives past."

"Now you want the future," Mulder said softly.

"Can you see the future that clearly?"

"There's no point. It ends how it ends." Mulder felt as if he was
sharing his conversational duties with a co-writer, another Mulder
who apparently knew things he didn't.  

"Then if there is only one outcome, knowledge of the outcome
grants... infallibility, does it not?" There was an eagerness in
Pandhu's tone.

Mulder felt himself smile in response, saying nothing.

"Perhaps you just lack perspective, Mr. Mulder. It's time to take
what I need. I've enjoyed this conversation."

Mulder was aware of a bright, soundless flash. He wasn't sure
whether it had taken place outside of him, or in. He blinked his
eyes to clear them, spots wheeling frantically. Pandhu was gone...
no... as Mulder's vision cleared he saw the man lying against the
wall at his feet, moving slowly.

Pandhu coughed, rolling over onto his knees and rising slowly,
wiping blood from under his nose. He studied it on his fingertips,
rubbing them together.

"You knew."

"Apparently you didn't."

Pandhu nodded, as if impressed.

"I merely misunderstood the nature of this. In the past, such
burdens tend to be carried by one great soul, not two damaged
ones." Pandhu swayed on his feet, his voice strengthening. His arms
lifted out slightly to the sides. His fingers moved slowly in some
unconsciously intricate pattern, blood staining his left hand. He
regarded Mulder intently. "You have the key, but she is the code.
No matter. It's what you have that I'm really interested in. You
think you can keep it from me? That I can't just take this from
you? That I can't take your place?"

"You can't. It's not for you." It's me and it's Scully, he thought.
We're going to do this one thing. Just this one.

"Only you are worthy, then? No one else can be trusted with the
secrets of the future?"

"You don't understand. There's not much future to know. Me and
Scully... everyone else around us is gone. They're all gone. Almost
everyone's gone."

"Nonsense, Mr. Mulder." Pandhu straightened his jacket, tugging at
the lower hem and approaching Mulder again. "There are more people
in the world than there have ever been. Where have they come from?
Who are these souls?"

"They're like you... finished... just going on, spinning out the
rest of the cycle. You think you're some kind of demigod. You just
remember what came before, your pasts." Mulder laughed quietly.
"You've just got a bad case of deja vu." 

"It comes with certain benefits. I've been a king, Mr. Mulder, and
a slave of one." Pandhu's face came in close to him, the angle
strange. "Died of starvation, of childbirth." Strange to
impossible. Pandhu's smile was gentle, almost teasing. His chest
hovered about six inches above Mulder's. Mulder glanced down, saw
that Pandhu's feet were no longer on the floor. "There are things
in human experience that you could only dream of." 

Pandhu closed his eyes. His body stretched out parallel to the
floor, floating in space with his face, blood-streaked upper lip,
eight inches from Mulder's. Mulder's ears began to ring, a babbling
murmur of voices crowding each other out.

"Don't do this," Mulder shouted. "You'll just be vulnerable to
them. They'll destroy you before you can destroy her." Pandhu
didn't respond at first, not even registering the volume. Seconds
passed as the ringing in Mulder's skull became a roar. He felt his
awareness withdraw, leaving his limbs, centering in the base of his
skull and his spine. Mulder could almost feel dark-skinned fingers,
more than ten, multitudes, reaching through his skull and
rummaging. The light in the room seemed to dim, sucked into the
space Pandhu occupied. 

Mulder's vision tunneled and blacked out.

"You're telling me the truth," Pandhu said. Silence. Pandhu stood
beside Mulder's chair again.

"It had to be this way." Mulder's throat was dry, his voice shaky.
Or it should have been, he thought, hearing his own words as if
spoken in his voice by another tongue. "You brought us here, played
the part you had to. There's only one way it can all end and you
can't avoid it. It doesn't matter what we try to do."

"Indeed. It's time for us to go our separate ways, Mr. Mulder."
Pandhu gave him an odd hybrid of a nod and a shallow bow, placing
his hand over his heart, and turned to leave.

"Hey!" Mulder rattled the restraints on his wrists. "Fuck...
wait... damn it."

"Don't worry." Pandhu turned halfway around, his hand unconsciously
leaving a smear of blood on the door frame. "I'm sending someone
for you."

* * *

The Indian men she assumed were Pandhu's had separated them as they
reached what she supposed was the next landing site; taking her out
and driving away with Mulder. He'd nodded at her, reassuringly. She
tried to memorize the layout as they walked; five large prefab
trailer-type buildings in a row, of which she was in the farthest
left as they approached, unsure of the cardinal directions in the
dark. A sixth, differently constructed trailer was slightly
separate; she guessed from the SUVs parked outside it that it was
some kind of command point. She saw uniforms, uncertain in the
distance what service, and unmarked black fatigues-- dozens of men
at least.

The double-wide trailer was divided into cells with a narrow
hallway down the center. Her cell was about seven feet by five,
with a shelf she could sit or lie on built into the long side. The
barred door appeared to be cardlocked. Everything was plastic or
aluminum, even the bars--built light, she guessed, so the whole
unit could be carried by helicopter. If she had a crowbar, and was
a hundred pounds heavier, she would bet even money on being able to
break out. She'd tried a dozen kicks, lying on her back and lashing
out with both legs-- rewarded each time with a promising shudder,
but no apparent cumulative effect. Her feet hurt, and she'd gotten
up from the floor shaking with tension, surprised at her own
desperate violence. There was a strange, crawling, familiar feeling
of familiarity here-- of worse to come. 

There was a bottle of water that she didn't trust. She could feel
the surrounding forest's humidity, cool and damp, even though she
couldn't see it, she felt as though it slightly quenched her
thirst. She could hear the dull growl of diesel generators and
probably two helicopters. No voices; she appeared to be the only
occupant of the entire trailer. 

She heard footsteps, the floor panels in the hallway sounding
slightly loose. Then something even her deadened sense of smell
recognized.

"I specifically requested a no-smoking room."

"You're starting to sound like Fox," he replied. "I suppose that's
to be expected. I hear you've become quite the killer, too."

"What are you doing here?"

"I'm rescuing you."

"In exchange for what?"

"A moment of your time, Agent Scully. I need to appeal to that...
rational mind."

"I refuse to play your games."

She disappointed herself by starting slightly when he stepped close
to the bars with a quickness that seemed unnatural.

"You don't have a choice," he hissed, stabbing his cigarette at
her. He stepped back slightly and spoke in his usual tone. "You've
never had a choice. Duane Barry didn't give you a choice. Your
cancer didn't give you a choice. Your daughter, Emily. You think
that was coincidence, that was fate, God's will?"

She looked around the tiny cell: no apparent conveniences, seeming
too flimsy to really hold a person... a human... for very long. Oh,
Lord, she'd been here before. These aren't cells, these are cages,
cages for test subjects...

"We own you, Dana Katherine Scully. We own you down to the last
strand of your DNA. When Fox saves you from these perils, it's
because you're still useful to me, and I choose to reward his
diligence. In fact, that you and Fox ever met was my doing."

"Go to hell." Her teeth clenched together as she said it. 

"I can't protect you and Fox anymore, you know."

"Is that what you think? That you've been protecting us?"

"If you had any idea. You're still alive, Dana."

"Stick with Agent Scully." If I had that crowbar, she thought, knew
you were coming, I would have bent the bar, broken it loose at the
top, left it in place and waited for you and burst out, swinging
the crowbar with both hands, smashing your fucking skull, you fall
backwards first, catching yourself on the opposite bars, there's a
defense wound where I break your radius and ulna on the second
stroke and then your skull on the third, crushed between the bars
behind you and my weapon in front. I just keep going and going
until you're fucking pulp and I smash the pointed end into your
chest, straight down like you're a vampire, your blood spattering
up on my face.

"But I feel we've been through so much together. It's almost as
though we're family."

"Fuck you," she whispered, her voice rasping harshly. The little
smile he had developed disappeared.

"You and Fox no longer serve a purpose, Agent Scully, at least, not
in a way that will make you inviolate, allow you or others to
bargain for your lives as you have before." He studied his
cigarette for a moment, then leaned in again. "Do you remember this
place, one like it?" He gestured into her cell, down the narrow
hallway. "We can bring you back."

He looked as if he had completed an unpleasant duty, and continued.

"Something's going to happen. If I succeed, I won't tolerate
further interference from you. If I fail, you'll be killed the
second you're found. I suggest you try to prepare for both
possibilities. There's a footlocker in the hallway. All your things
will be there. Go out this door, turn right, out the door at the
end. There's no sentry there. Agent Mulder will be in the second
trailer to your left. There will probably be a sentry between the
first and second trailers. If you make it that far, go up along the
fire road to the west until you reach the crest, then go a mile
north along the ridgeline until you reach another road. You'll be
met there."

"Met by who?"

He flipped the keycard through the bars.

"Your remaining friends. You should probably hurry."

* * *

She made herself as small as she could, crouching in the shadows
under the nose of the first trailer. The footlocker had held a
neatly packed backpack, all their documents and tightly rolled wads
of cash. She found that the smoker, or someone, had screwed a
silencer onto her weapon, mismatched powdercoated black against the
silver.

She would hazard a guess that it was three or four in the morning.
The area was lit with blindingly bright lamps on tall poles at
opposite ends of the complex, throwing harsh sprays of white light
and leaving dark streaks of sharp-edged shadow. 

No time. She had no time. She could see the man's back and legs,
standing between the trailer barely twenty feet to her left. If he
turned around he'd see her, a flash of pale legs in the shadow--
she was still wearing her shorts. If she managed to scoot across to
the shadow of the second trailer, across seven feet of crushed turf
and mud, what then? What shape was Mulder in? Would she have to
drag him?

She moved quickly, coming up four feet behind the man, just out of 
arm's reach if he turned around. He looked impossibly huge, as
though his Kevlar-suited back were ten feet across and three floors
above her.

"There's a gun pointed at your head," she commanded. "Don't make a
sound or I will kill you. Get down on your knees." She heard the
man's sudden, sharp intake of breath, saw him stand in momentary
confusion. "On your knees!" He complied, slowly, still facing away
from her. "Slowly, unsling your rifle. Throw it under the trailer
to your right. Now put your hands on your head." Scully moved to
the right, pressing herself against the trailer, until she stood at
ninety degrees to the sentry. He had a pale, hard face, partially
in clear-cut shadow. He glanced over at her. "Eyes forward! Turn to
the left and face that trailer."

Jesus, Scully thought. I haven't got handcuffs. He might, but I
can't search him, he could take me in a second. She looked
frantically down the narrow lane between the two trailers. Maybe
she could get him in one of the cells, get into Mulder's trailer
before... no, he'd just...

This time there was no moment of inevitability, no time to think.
Her gun coughed twice as the man spun in a crouch, launching
himself forward. She was already moving by the time he stopped,
lying face-down, his hands clawing in the mud. 

* * *

"Hi, Mulder."

"Hi, asshole."

Pandhu had been gone less than five minutes, Mulder thought. If
this was his idea of sending the cavalry...

"I heard you'd be here." Alex stood beside the chair with his head
cocked, studying Mulder. "You look tired."

"You look crazy." Mulder said this with a faint tone of surprise.
It was true. Alex's face was a study in gleeful intensity, like
Jerry Lee about to let rip on a flaming piano.

"You're mistaken, Mulder. This isn't the crazy face." Alex circled
Mulder's chair, grabbing the headrest to give it a good shake.
"This is the I-don't-give-a-fuck face. The crazy face comes later."

Krycek straddled the foot of the chair. Mulder had already tried
his best to break the restraints before, and was sure that even the
idea of driving a hiking boot into Krycek's nuts wouldn't help.

"Well, if you let me up, I'm happy to get crazy." Mulder gave a
thumbs-up from one restrained hand. "Ghandi send you in here?
That's a great way to thank me for keeping his head from
exploding."

Krycek rubbed his right hand as the brief flare of lights dimmed
and Mulder felt a warm pain beginning to seep through his jaw.
Still leading with the right, Mulder thought, shaking his head to
clear it. That plastic left is going to hurt when he gets around to
it, though.

"Know what your problem is, Mulder? Besides ingratitude, I mean."

Keep him busy. Keep him talking. She's coming.

"Closet fags with crushes on me keep handcuffing me, telling me
meaningless bullshit, and then going all S and M?"

"Actually, it's not your problem. You are the problem. Everything's
just gotta stop for you. Way I understand it, that goes back, boy,
a long way. That was supposed to be you, not your sister. But Fox
was a special boy." 

"If I kiss you back, will you shut the fuck up and leave me alone?"

"How about sweet, sweet Scully? She shouldn't have had to go
through that, but no, luck of the draw, of all the offices a dame
coulda walked into, she had to walk into yours."

Krycek leaned in, grinning.

"I knew, Mulder. Not what they were doing to her specifically. But
I knew what they did to them, how they come out after, what they
leave behind. I felt bad at the time, watching you, but it was hard
to follow. Sometimes you'd just sit there and stare at that little
cross. Other times it was like you'd forgotten about her
completely."

"Look, just fuck you, okay? Has this monologue got a point, or can
we just skip to the hitting?"

Now would be a good time, Scully, he thought.

"And, of course, that's where my story begins. The wonderful
memories I owe to you, Mulder. Head full of black oil. Do you know
what the oil does to keep you alive, Mulder? You know you can't
starve to death, die of thirst? Doesn't mean you don't feel it. It
just won't kill you."

Mulder pursed his lips at him, an imitation of a kiss. Krycek led
with the right again, harder this time. Mulder blinked hard. He
could feel his lip swell, feel air cooling the new blood on his
cheek. He smiled at Krycek, jerked his head towards Krycek's gloved
left hand.

"So when you use the other one, does it really feel like someone
else?"

"You tell me."

Mulder's head swam in the aftermath of the blow. How the hell could
someone Krycek's size hit so fucking hard? Krycek had landed a
straight jab on his left temple, just above the eye. He was vaguely
aware of Krycek rubbing at his left arm, as if striking Mulder had
hurt the stump. The younger man's eyes lit with violence.

I know Scully is coming. She has to come. I know how this ends,
Mulder thought. We're getting out of this. They said we're getting
out of this. 

Right Mulder, a Krycek-shaped voice in his head said. Who told you
that? Santa Claus? Rudolf? Marvin the Martian? Which one was it
this time?

Krycek flexed the fingers of his right hand, his left hanging limp
by his side. Mulder could see him looking for a shot, trying to
decide whether to start breaking bones. The younger man sighed,
contemplated his work for a moment. He shook his head in mock
frustration.

"You know, Mulder, I'm just not feeling this. I think I'm gonna go
have a little chat with Scully, okay?" He jerked his thumb over his
shoulder, started to turn away from Mulder's chair.

"Stay here, you sonofabitch," Mulder almost yelled. Krycek turned
back and put on a pained expression.

"Don't worry about that. She's not my type." He stepped in close,
leaning into Mulder's ear. "Besides, I hate it when they freeze up
on me. Ruins the mood, how does she put it, when her body
remembers. Right, that's it. My body remembers. Which makes me
wonder." Krycek stood up straight, looking off into an imagined
distance, pretending to ponder. "Think she's totally honest with
you, every time it's happened? Never taken one for the team, lay
back and thought of the X-Files?"

Mulder hissed something between his teeth that Krycek didn't quite
catch, but which nonetheless gave him immense pleasure.

"So don't worry, St. Scully's virtue will be intact. Can't promise
anything else, though. Want me to bring you back a holy relic? Some
of that hair?"

Mulder smiled, wide, gleaming, predatory.

"I'm gonna kill you this time, Krycek."

"Are you?"

"Oh, yeah."

I should have closed the door, Krycek thought as he turned around,
feeling air move, feeling that slowing of time as adrenaline
frantically tried to surge far enough to make muscle memory and
reflex take over. He expected to smell smoke, was surprised at the
flash of red hair, the barrel of the gun pointing up at him rather
than across.

"No," she said, "I am."

* * *

"Holy shit." Mulder gasped. Scully shoved her weapon into the back
of her  belt, briefly fumbling with the added length of the
silencer. She'd stepped over Krycek's body, not looking down,
carefully arranging herself so as not to step in the rapidly
spreading evidence of her kill.

"Are you... Mulder, you're hurt." She laid the back of her hand on
his cheek briefly. Mulder smelled burnt gunpowder. Scully twitched
as if remembering something and began working the restraints on his
wrists. 

"Fucker has, had problems expressing his feelings." Mulder rubbed
his jaw and sat up slowly. "Woozy. Not from this, from before." He
reached down to free his ankles as Scully mumbled a brief apology
for not having noticed. "Scully, where are we, anyway?" He looked
around.

"You don't remember."

"No... oh... Tennessee. We were on our way south. You told me a
really embarrassing Phil Collins story, then... aw, shit..." He
rubbed his face with both hands, then exhaled slowly. "I'm missing
a lot more than nine minutes, aren't I?"

"You're not alone, Mulder. I think it's been three days."

"We were gone for three days?"

"No, I remember being brought here. I'm sure we're in Washington,
the ground's wet and there's pine trees everywhere. I think we came
most of the way ourselves, the same way I... took Cassandra to
Ruskin Dam. Some of it will come back to you, I'm starting to
remember pieces."

"Where were you?" He slid off the seat, reached out to take
Scully's hand. 

"Locked up two trailers over."

"How'd you get out?"

"Cancerman. The cancerman helped me escape."

"This is sounding like the weirdest three days I've forgotten since
my second year at college." Mulder looked at Krycek's body and
carefully leaned down. Krycek's gun was in a shoulder holster,
easily accessible under his outstretched arm. Mulder took it,
checked the clip. He avoided looking at the face ruined by Scully's
bullet.

"Next time, let me. If it gets out that my girlfriend killed Alex
Krycek for me I'm gonna look like a real pussy." The joke fell more
than flat, slipping and falling grossly in the spill of blood.
Scully's hand withdrew, her arms folding under her breasts as she
looked blankly at her handiwork.

"I think he was going to hurt you, Scully. The things he said..."

She exhaled heavily and placed one hand awkwardly on his shoulder,
still looking down.

"Not now, Mulder. Let's get out of here."

He led, walking carefully to the open door of the room and peering
quickly each way down the narrow corridor.

"Scully?"

"Yeah." She'd positioned herself behind him. Her gun was out again.
He pulled back into the room, gestured sheepishly for her to go
first.

"I got no idea where I am, where we are, or where we're going, and
I think you're ahead on that score right now. Maybe you should
lead."

She smiled briefly before stepping into the corridor.

"Now. Now you say that."

* * *

Outside the command trailer, one man moved close to another. Both
wore uniforms and answered to complex chains of allegiance that the
uniforms did not completely describe.

"Mike, how many of your guys are in there?"

"Just Davis. There's one of the Brits, Gillis or something, and one
of the New York guys."

Two SUVs trundled up, disgorging a double handful of simpler, black
uniforms. Weapons clacked and protruded, legs and mandibles of a
disjointed black insect.

"Think you can get Davis to come out?"

"Aw, shit, Ron, what the fuck...?"

Finally, another man left the passenger seat of one of the trucks.
His overcoat hung still in the pre-morning calm. He stubbed out one
cigarette, spoke quiet words to a black uniform while he prepared
another. The soldiers both noticed him, felt the world realign.

"It's Smokey, Mike. He's got the place sewn up."

"What is this, some kind of coup or something...?"

One soldier laid a hand on the other's shoulder, his voice quietly
pleading.

"It's a suit thing, Mike. They're gonna do it whether we play along
or not. Look, brother, there's gonna be bodies here in a couple of
minutes and it doesn't have to be any of us. Just get Davis to come
out here."

* * *

The Englishman remembered the first time he'd heard a gun go off in
an enclosed space, how his ears rang. It had been in Hong Kong. He
spun around to watch Angelo's man stumble back against one of the
chairs, his dead tumble to the floor preceded by his gun. The fat
man started to rise, wasn't allowed to finish as one of the
black-clad soldiers raised a rifle, freezing him in place. The
smoker brushed past the two soldiers in the lead-- avoiding
Angelo's eyes, Keith noticed.

"What is the meaning of this?" Keith demanded, steeling his voice. 

"What did you expect?" The smoker looked around the small command
post, finally returning his gentle gaze to the Englishman. "That I
would return penitent, like a kicked dog?"  

"Is this about revenge, Charles? Petty revenge?"

The smoker smiled briefly at the near-forgotten sound of his own
name. He wondered if Keith would be the last ever to use it.

"Don't be silly. It's about power."

* * *

Mulder reflexively ducked when he heard the pop of gunfire, then
realized it was far behind them, only the higher frequencies rising
up over the low roar of the base's generators. Four, five shots,
then nothing more as he looked up the hill to where Scully was
leading. 

She'd steered them off the road, where they dragged themselves up
through the heavy brush about fifteen yards off to one side. 

Scully turned, and dawn suddenly broke over the ridgeline they were
climbing, spilling sunlight into the bowl below. Her mouth dropped
open, and her eyes widened.

"Mulder, look."

He turned around, squinting west. High above, in the early morning
clear, he say a small crescent of white and a glimmer of metal. He
scrambled up to Scully and crouched beside her as the tiny shape
resolved in the distance. The parachute was white, unreadable red
markings on it, a tiny sphere hanging below.

"What's that?" Another white crescent, smaller, higher, falling
more slowly.

"Second parachute," he said. "That's what's supposed to happen.
That's her." He rose, tugging at her arm. "Scully, come here. I
know what we have to do."

* * * 

A mother should be proud of ambitious children.

The viewport of the capsule was charred and blackened by re-entry,
but I could still see glorious dawn break over the mountains at
thirty thousand meters. They loved the mountains, loved anything
with texture, shape, form, because it can be destroyed, crushed,
used to crush. A choking, sulphurous smell clung to us after the
ejection seat fired and hurtled us into the sky. They used my
senses, tasted the volatile chemicals, and excitedly sang to each
other of a moon composed of nothing but volcanoes, shredded by its
wrenching tides and leaking its molten entrails into space. Just
before the parachute snapped me upright I could turn my head inside
the restrictive helmet to see a dark expanse of sea far to the
west. They noted it, imagining boiling, vaporization, and the
pressure of depth.

I was incidental to them at this point, allowed control only of the
basic physical functions necessary to bring us to the green, green,
beautifully flammable space below.

"Galina."

* * *

I hear Mulder's voice in my ear, in his chest against my back, and
I don't recognize what he says at first, but then I do and the
ground drops away from me.

* * *

I can feel the catch of fear in her chest, feel her stiffen. It's
like everyone's first jump. I whisper to her, to this earthbound
sister of mine, in a voice that my children will not hear. I want
her to relax, know the joy of flight and the freedom of sky.

* * *

"Oh, Mulder, I can hear her, she's here..." Scully's head leans
back against his shoulderas she opens herself. Small strong arms
stretch outwards pulling his, fingers entwined.

* * *

I can't. It's a momentary inconvenience to them, in their consuming
love for me, for my children to prevent me from motion, prevent me
from interfering with our descent.

* * *

His fingers tighten around hers, his jaw tightens. He is conscious
of something, this beautiful feeling he realizes he's known before.
It's  her, it's all of them, it's the Scully-chord vibrating
through his bones. The power of it echoes back through the moments
and decades before, like a string forever tuned with his. He sees
blue eyes, brown eyes, green, lit with the same pale light. He
pulls her in to him, wrapping their arms around her body.

It's her. He can tell it's her, even in this echo of a past
symphony. He'd know her anywhere. It's not all here, there isn't
enough left of the stage to support the entire weight of the Scully
orchestra. But there's still the bass swell of bravery, a tympanic
rumble of action, and a sweet  alto of careful wonder. 

He can hear Galina's voice as well, or maybe it's Scully's voice,
or she and Scully have worked out some sort of temporary
arrangement. It's practical; they'd do that.

"Mulder, you have to help us. We can't..."

He realizes he can. It's simple in execution, in what it means to
her and all of them, impossibly complex in another way that single
souls don't need to understand to let it happen. He feels himself
smiling gently because it's so Scully, which she was.

"It's all right. You were there. You did it." The body in his arms
is familiar, yet not, the way he knows his voice must be to her.

"You did everything you could. It's all right to let go."

He shows her how it works, how things have to end and start over
and why, as his own understanding of it slips away.

* * *

I am so glad to have known this, even if it is just a sudden
harmony at the end of this strange and terrible coda to my life. I
know where I belong. I can feel my little sister's arms surround
me, and our lover's besides. And mine are free. My movements and my
destiny are all mine.

I hear a voice-- perhaps it is hers, mine, his, perhaps Maria
Fedorovna with her three Fascist kills and her big machinist's
hands at the controls of the Ilyushin biplane.

"Let's go, little falcon. Let's fly home."

This first. I reach up, smacking the release knob for my helmet
visor, then wrenching at the large buckles on either side of my
neck. I push up, my helmet rattling away from me and falling. 

The harness buckles are designed to release easily if one knows the
trick. The strap between my legs goes last, so I pitch forward,
accelerating rapidly towards the dawn. This is how I love freefall
in any case, diving like a dart, the thrill of velocity. My
children are shouting, maddened, but I am pleased to share this
with them. The wind tears at my face and I spread my arms. I am in
the sky. 

Ya lastochka, ya tchaika, ya sokol. 

* * *

Mulder's breath burned in his throat. He still felt woozy,
exhausted, sucked-out. Scully had more energy, and his longer legs
barely made up the difference. He stumbled through the brush,
tripping himself. Scully was lower, nimbler. He could hear her
breathing, loud and sharp and regular, as though she were on a
treadmill. There was no trail, just a thinning of vegetation from
the pressure of wind and rain. They ran just below the ridgeline, a
fugitive's path.

"There," she gasped, stopping and bending over at the waist. The
line of the hill broke suddenly forty yards ahead into a man-made
angle, the curve of a road visible. She was conscious of Mulder
running up behind her. Her head itched, her hair unkempt and
tangled with humidity and sweat. She counted back; it had probably
been four days since she'd bathed.

The recollection hit her ferociously, desperately coupling with
Mulder against the wall of a tiny room, her hand fiercely gripping
a coat hook for support. What day had that been? She straightened
up, meeting Mulder's eyes. He was actually grinning at her.

"What?" she asked.

She knew 'what,' wasn't so sure about 'how'. 

When their feet met the gravel of the fire road, their bodies
turned different directions at first. Realizing, they turned back
towards each other, almost bumping, before picking a direction and
setting off at a tired jog.

"He said friends?"

"Yeah," she panted.

"We have friends?"

* * *

"Agent Scully! Mulder!" The sedan crawled round a curve thirty
yards behind them as she spun, seeing an arm waving out the window.
It accelerated towards them, then came to a gravel-crunching stop.
The driver's door opened, then the passenger's.

"Sir? What are you doing here? Agent Spender?"

"Long story," Spender broke in. Mulder looked almost irritated.
"Looks like we have an unlikely mutual friend."

"Cancerman?" Scully asked.

"Cancerman." Skinner sighed, looking up and down the road. No one
else was visible, though he could imagine a dozen snipers in the
heavy brush and trees to either side. "We're getting you out of
here."

Mulder noticed the older man's attention to their surroundings.

"I don't think we were followed. I heard gunshots back there. I
have a feeling that for once we weren't the most interesting thing
going on."

"You both okay?" Spender asked, drumming his fingers urgently on
the roof of the car.

"Yeah, fine," Scully said. "Let's go."

The tires quieted as they left rough gravel for smooth concrete.
They started passing buildings, businesses, people starting their
days. Most moved like them, east towards Seattle. They were in the
back seat of the  rental car. Mulder flipped idly at the ashtray
and did most of the talking, short acknowledgments to Skinner's
statements and questions. Scully leaned her head against the
window, her expression unreadable as words bounced around--
cigarette, murder, self-defense, warrants, NSA, arrest, yes, no, I
don't know.

"You're sure Krycek's dead?"

"I can tell you the last thing that went through his mind was about
nine millimeters across," Mulder responded. Skinner grunted,
nodding.

I'm five-three in heels. I weigh one hundred ten pounds. Damn it,
what am I supposed to do. It's okay, Mom, nothing will happen and
if it does that's why I carry a gun.

Skinner looked in the rearview, trying to give Mulder some kind of
masculine acknowledgment, some kind of soldier-gesture. Mulder
shook his head slowly.

"No... it was Scully," he said quietly. She straightened up,
arranging herself in the seat and glancing at Mulder. Their hands
crept together, hers on top of his on the backseat line children
would fight over.

"Sir, we have a favor to ask you," Mulder began. "Probably the last
one for a while."

"Mulder, we can offer you all the protection the FBI can give."
Skinner glanced over his shoulder as he spoke. "We can take care of
this. There's a bunch of agendas in play here, lots of horses to
trade. But I don't think your taking up the X-Files again, or even
working in the field again, is going to be an option for a while. I
don't know if that makes any difference..."

Their fingers twined slightly tighter.

"I appreciate that, sir, but... we're gonna do this ourselves for a
while."

"Agent Scully?" Skinner asked.

"Sir, if it's possible..." When she spoke, Skinner recognized the
voice as the one he'd known. Clear, slightly husky, not
expressionless but giving away little. It was a beautiful voice. He
was going to miss it. "I'd like you to contact my mother. Tell her
that I'm all right, and that I'll be in touch with her when I can."

"I'll do that."
 
* * *

9:48 PM
Sunday

Cedar Coast Motel
Port Orford, Oregon

"This okay?"

The flimsy door of the shower clicked shut as his arms slipped
around  her, one hand briefly stroking her wet hair before settling
on her naked hip.

"Yeah, yeah, it's good," she replied. Soap and shampoo had been
abandoned a few minutes before in favor of just standing under the
warm water.

"Just wanted to be close to you." She smiled at the quiet
endearment.

"Thank you."

Outside the motel unit sat a small, beat-up Japanese truck that
had, until recently, sat outside a service station displaying a
"For Sale" sign. It was less comfortable than the bus they'd been
on overnight, but it so far seemed capable of going wherever it was
pointed.

"Mmmm. I'm so tired."

The round table in the room beyond held sunflower seeds, a
local-brand granola bar (half-eaten), water, diet sodas,
ammunition. Looks like a party, he'd said.

"Rough week," he whispered, swaying gently with her under the
spray. Their clothes were puddled around the motel room, awaiting
as-yet-unspoken plans to see if anything in the laundry room three
units down worked.

"Oh, yeah," she said quietly.

She pressed backwards, arranging herself against him. Her heel to
his instep, her calf against his, her rear pressed against his
thighs, soft bulge of his sex against her lower back, the hair on
his chest just above her shoulder blades, leaning her head back
until she nestled in below his chin. 

"Mulder... you said things you probably don't remember."

"Probably."

"Do you want to know what they were?"

"I don't know... do I?"

"You said you knew your sister was dead."

He was silent and probably expressionless though she could not see
his face without twisting herself around. She could feel his
resignation nonetheless.

"They... from what you said, it was their experiments," she
continued.

"I know." His voice vibrating through her back. Their bodies had
sealed together under the water. Rivulets ran around them but not
between. "I don't want revenge. I know it happened that way because
it had to. I wish she hadn't had so much pain. I wish that she
hadn't been so afraid for so long." 

He pulled his head back, and she felt their bodies parting
slightly. Mulder nuzzled the wet hair at her neck aside with his
lips and nose.

"Same way I know that your chip's gone, that you don't need it
anymore. I wish you hadn't gone through that, but in the end..." He
kissed her there where it had been, and then stood up straight,
gathering her in again. "I'm still not sure about the tattoo,
though," he laughed softly. "I guess they didn't get it."

"Probably some metallic element in the pigment, Mulder."

"Did you just speculate about the mechanics of alien technology,
Dr. Scully?"

"You just speculated about their aesthetic sensibilities." She
didn't know how to say it, didn't know how to ask. "Mulder..."  She
took one large hand in hers, pulled it down to where it spread
water-slicked over her lower belly.

"I don't know, or I don't remember."

"Oh, boy," she whispered, feeling a reflexive sob at the end of the
word and a hitch in his chest too. This was it, she thought, this
should be crying time, but she was just too exhausted. There wasn't
enough water in the well. "Are we doing the right thing?"

"Define right."

She felt something she remembered, a luminous burst, a tiny perfect
star of her very own. Unquenchable light, weak and distant but she
could turn herself towards it, swooping and accelerating, cold dark
matter boiling off in a trail of brightness behind them. Comet
thoughts, and the smile to herself was tiny but very real. He
wouldn't think to believe it from her, and someday she'll surprise
him.

"This feels right."

* * *

Three weeks later
FBI Headquarters
Washington, DC

Spender took one of the seats in front of the AD's desk.

"Any news?" he asked, by way of an opener. Skinner didn't look up
at first. He moved papers around.

"Theories. The warrants are still out. Not much active
investigation since they aren't believed to be in the country or to
pose a danger to the public. I think someone's just trying to keep
them underground."

"Mulder's building, Hegal Place, was owned by a numbered holding
company out of a shell office in St. Kitts," Spender said. "It sold
last week, fire-sale price but still a lot of money, low seven
figures."

"Really." Skinner's tone betrayed only mild professional interest.
He stood, partially turning his back on the younger man to look out
his office window.

"Want me to pass that on to anyone?" Spender offered.

"No," Skinner said, looking over his shoulder at the younger agent.
"I don't think it's very relevant. Lot of people moving assets
right now, getting into tech stocks. Coincidence."

Spender nodded assent. Skinner turned around, again looking at his
desk as if to refresh his memory from notes.

"Anyway, Jeff, the reason I called you in here today. I'll get to
the point--I need someone to take on the X-Files. I'd like you to
do it, on a trial basis, give it six months and see how it goes.
It's not a life sentence to the basement. If nothing else, you'll
end up heading a division for a while, at least on paper."

"All right, sir."

"There's not much of a budget, so you're going to be alone for now.
Over the next couple of months I'll try to shake loose enough for a
partner for you, if we decide to keep the division going. Think
about who you might want."

"I prefer brunettes."

"I've had enough of that for one decade. Go to bars like the rest
of us." Skinner almost snapped, didn't appear to be making a joke.
He opened one folder, removed another from inside it, and offered
it to Spender. "Here. You'll probably need this one."

Red-bordered, hand-stamped, individually numbered like all of them.
His first and his very own.

CASSANDRA SPENDER

"Be careful, Special Agent Spender."

* * *

finis

* * *

Author's Notes:

Again, everyone-- bugs, FoxEstacado, and Cathryn
Fuller. Take a bow, please, ladies.

I can't overstate bugs' contribution to this story. At least one
critical plot/thematic element, probably the biggest one in the
story, is all hers; or, well, it may have been mine in a
subconscious sense but I didn't see it until she pointed it out to
me. And, the fact that this story has anything resembling narrative
continuity-- that's bugs too.

Fox Estacado narrowed her eyes at me when I too flippantly said
that I felt fine about cherry-picking buts of the mytharc I liked
and ignoring bits I didn't, and forced me to go watch most of S4
again. She's really intimidating when she does that eye thing.

Cathryn edited this beast by hand, 370-some pages in hard copy by
snail mail. I have the marked-up manuscript to prove it. Cathryn
is a real copy editor of unbelievable skill, with the lightest
and most incisive hand you can imagine. When she's done, the text
doesn't seem any different, just oddly and indefinably better. 

There are two short followon pieces to "Sokol," entitled "Dancing
Skeleton Day" and "Terminus Post Quem." They will be archived in
the usual places.

This story has been in progress since the summer of 1998, with the
major periods of work being in 1999, 2002-3, and 2005-6. It was,
since the beginning, conceived as an "End Of XF As We Know It"
story. Another long "Post-XF" sequel was originally planned,
but thematic elements from there have since been incorporated into
"Sokol." I'm not planning to come back to this particular world. 

After all, I've kind of trashed the place.

I also want to acknowledge the people who were betas and
early readers back in the initial phases of "Sokol"'s life as a
WIP in 1998-2001:

AgentSabine
Alanna
Annie Sewell-Jennings
Bidie Mccucholl
Brianna Drake
Kelly Shuford
Rachel Howard
Terma99

I've never been one to beg for feedback, but I have just dropped
71,000 words for your (hopeful) enjoyment, so it would probably be
good for your karma to send me back a couple of dozen:

khyber@citizensofgravity.com

The truth is still out there.

 -- Khyber, 17 March 2006