By Vivian Wiley
vivwiley@yahoo.com
 

From: vivwiley@my-deja.com
Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2000 15:41:04 GMT

EQUILIBRIUM
By Vivian Wiley (vivwiley@yahoo.com)

Timeframe:  Post-Requiem

Disclaimer:  The characters and situations of the X-Files are
the property of Fox and 1013.  No infringement is intended.  No
profit will be made.

Disclaimer, summary, rating:  No, thanks.

Feedback:  Gratefully accepted at vivwiley@yahoo.com

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Chapter 1

How do you direct a manhunt for a man you know is no longer
anywhere on the planet?

It became some weird existential riddle that dogged Skinner in
the initially horrifying and then mind-numbingly repetitious
days that followed his return from Oregon.  The simplest answer,
'look among the stars,' although having a certain poetic
quality, was not an option.  At least not in the corridors and
briefing rooms of the FBI.

How do you sit through update after update, listening to your
agents tell you that they have made no progress without telling
them you never expected them to make progress?  How do you
continue to provide them guidance and leadership, suggestions
for new places to look, while trying to look properly impatient
with the fact that they hadn't yet found Agent Mulder?  Knowing
all the while they weren't going to find him.

How do you learn to function without sleep so that you can
direct the hunt for Mulder 12-14 hours a day at the Bureau and
then continue the hunt at night with the only hope you really
have:  an improbable and probably not entirely trust-worthy
group of allies who are using resources you would, on balance,
really rather not know too much about?

The last, at least, was an easier question to answer.  He had
long ago learned how to function for extended periods of time
with inadequate sleep.  He was not as young as he had been, but
rage and fear and a sense of time running out were powerful
stimulants.  He lived on coffee and adrenaline, driven by the
need he saw in Scully's eyes.

But he could feel the ragged edge of control slipping through
his grasp.

He'd told Scully in her hospital room that he would tell 'them'
the truth, that he could not deny what he had seen.  He had
meant it.  He'd felt the conviction rolling through him--a
tsunami released by a dam that finally gave way.

He was so sick of losing and he wanted the righteous clarity of
telling the Truth and taking a stand against the various shadows
and petty bureaucratic regulations that had confined him for so
long.  But, as so often before, he'd been stopped, forced to
regroup.  Surprisingly, it had been Scully who'd reined him in.

"Don't tell them, sir."

He'd been heading for the door of her hospital room, shaking and
exhausted.  Torn by the competing emotions of  the unexpected
hope in Scully's news, and his own lingering hopelessness and
sense of guilt over Mulder's disappearance.

He stopped without turning back.  "I already promised you that
I'd keep your..." he hesitated, almost saying 'your and
Mulder's' although she hadn't told him anything more than the
stark fact of her pregnancy.  He continued, "...your news
confidential."  It hurt him that she felt she
had to reinforce her request for secrecy.

"No.  That's not what I meant.  Don't tell them about the ship,
sir."

At that he turned around to meet her lucid gaze. In his
weariness he couldn't make sense of her command.  "Why?"  Aware
of a sharpness in his tone he was powerless to control.

"It won't do any good."  She smiled slightly.  "Look, I've been
where you are.  Literally.  I know how much you want to help,
but you won't be as effective if the Bureau thinks you've
cracked up."  She raised a hand, forestalling his protest.

"I know how much you want to tell them what you saw out there,
but I also know how they'll react.  You know how many times I've
gone after Mulder, trying to pull him back from the brink of one
chase or another.  You know how many times he's come after me.

"You also know that most of those times we were only able to
undertake those searches because you were protecting us. Turning
a blind eye to unexplained absences, taking the heat for us when
we missed yet another staff meeting, or failed to make a
reporting deadline.  You were there covering us, opening the
ways for us to search."

Her voice faltered just slightly, and for the first time since
he'd turned back, her eyes dropped to the sheet that she held
taut in her fingers.  He followed her gaze, surprised to realize
her knuckles were white from the force of her grip on the cloth.

"We have to find him, sir.  And I'm going to need your help. You
won't be able to do that if you are being questioned and treated
with suspicion because you suddenly profess a belief in aliens."

When she looked up again, her eyes were clear, but beneath the
placid surface he could feel the turmoil circling and spiraling
through her. "All those times, you were there protecting us from
the top as well as you could.  Who would protect you?"

The challenge caught him unaware, and he stared at her in blank
silence for a long minute as he cataloged his colleagues,
weighing their power, their allegiances, the favors they owed
him.

Finally he shook his head slightly, a tiny acknowledgment that
she was right.  He raised his eyebrow.  "You want me to lie?"

"I wouldn't ask that.  I'm just suggesting that there are ways
of...finessing the truth.  Telling them what they need to know
without committing yourself to a report that could lead to
suggestions of early retirement. Space ships, airplanes....they
come in many shapes and sizes, you know?"  There was the tiniest
hint of laughter in her eyes, but her tone remained level,
serious.

He watched her for another moment, understanding that she knew
that he was suddenly wondering how many of her and Mulder's
reports had been finessed.  "Convenient omissions? Vagueness at
key moments of description?"

Then she did laugh. "That's the spirit."  Instantly sober again.
"I hate that I have to ask that of you, but I have to find him.
And the Bureau won't find him no matter what you tell them."

That sobered him, too.  Realizing she was right, and his report
on Mulder's disappearance would have no impact whatsoever on
their finding him.  The thought staggered him a little.  He felt
the world tilt around him while he desperately searched for
purchase.

How were they going to find Mulder?  Where would he even start?
He had been thinking of the manhunt they would launch--the
full-scale use of Bureau resources to find Mulder.  He was
annoyed with himself for not seeing sooner that the Bureau's
resources would be of little use. His chest tightened as he
began realizing how far out of his depth he was.

Scully read his sudden fear and confusion, and began getting out
of bed to walk toward him.  He stopped her with an impatient
gesture.  "You're right.  We have to approach this
carefully--keep all avenues open and not raise too many
suspicions.  Bad enough I lost an agent under my command. If I
tell them exactly what I saw, I'll simply be put on
administrative leave and sent to counseling."

The word 'lost' echoed between them.

He walked over to where she lay, once more tucked under the
covers. "We'll find him, Scully.  We will."  He touched her
briefly on the shoulder and walked away.

Behind him, as the door was closing, he heard her murmur again,
"We'll find him. I have to find him."
 

The report he finally filed was a carefully crafted amalgamation
of the truth and slightly shaded fiction.  The crash of the Navy
plane provided him a starting point for the half-truths he
wrote. He managed to describe the bright lights and the craft he
saw in terms that could be interpreted to apply to a half-dozen
experimental military aircraft.  He carefully glossed over the
exact reasons he and Mulder had been in those woods at
that time of the night.  The on-going Bureau initiative to close
and archive old cases gave him another half-cover for what he
wrote.

There were a number of hard questions from his superiors and the
other ADs about his version of events.  But he had questioned
Mulder on enough of these types of reports to anticipate the
majority of the challenges.  He also had a great deal of
practice lying to people.

The report was filed and he assumed command of the investigation
into the disappearance of Special Agent Fox W. Mulder.

The official story about Scully's hospitalization was that she
had been felled by a minor flu, and become dehydrated.  She was
returned to active duty almost immediately, and joined the
Bureau hunt for Mulder in an advisory capacity.  Since it was
her partner missing she wasn't allowed to assume the role of
Agent in Charge.  That unhappy responsibility fell to Special
Agent John Chen, a 10-year veteran who had made a name for
himself in kidnapping cases early in his career, and had since
moved on to violent crimes.

Skinner selected Chen because he was a conscientious and
work-man like agent.  Bright and hard-working, but not noted for
wild leaps of logic or intuitive hunches.  Skinner needed
someone who would doggedly pursue what little hard evidence
there was and not get in the way of the "real" but extremely
unofficial investigation that Krycek, Marita and Mulder's odd
friends were undertaking from deep in the shadows.

There were brief moments of guilt, when Skinner sat and listened
to Chen's frustration over the failure of any of the evidence to
lead to any real trails toward Mulder. When this was all over,
he promised himself, he would see to it that Chen was assigned
to an investigation where he would be guaranteed to shine and
earn his next promotion.

Skinner despised the waste of resources that the investigation
was causing.  In one particularly dark night he began to tally
the total costs of the FBI investigation.  He stopped after his
calculations reached $250,000.  It did not give him much comfort
to realize that on the scale of massive investigations the costs
were relatively small.  A quarter of a million dollars was a
quarter of a million dollars.

But, he allowed the investigation to continue.  Doing so meant
that Scully didn't have to, for the time being, take on any
regular cases, or be assigned a temporary partner.  It also made
it easier for her to take time off.  Any time away from the
office was explained away as her following up on leads from old
cases that might have a bearing on Mulder's disappearance.  He
also held out a small hope that the Bureau's resources might
uncover some small clue that would help them.

Then there were the nights.

Krycek and Marita were leading the secondary investigation.
Scully was directing their efforts, but couldn't take charge on
a full-time basis. They had discussed the option of Scully
taking a leave of absence from the Bureau to run the shadow
investigation, but ultimately they agreed that her absence would
raise questions from a number of sources that they couldn't
afford.  They knew that much of the conspiracy had been wiped
out 18 months ago, in the immolation at El Rico Air Force Base.
But none of them believed the shadows had been completely
destroyed, and it seemed safer to assume they were being watched
by a number of people.

The other investigation ran on wholly different principles and
approaches than the investigation he was overseeing with its
staff of dozens and nearly limitless resources. But it was the
investigation he knew was the only real hope of achieving their
objective.  Mulder's strange friends, whom he had last seen in
Mulder's hospital room last year when Mulder had been found
after that wild jaunt to Bermuda, were beginning to generate
leads through a variety of Internet-based contacts.

Krycek and Marita were pursuing the leads as quietly as they
could, and also hunting down contacts and possibilities from
their former lives. They would disappear for a day or two at a
time, sometimes together and sometimes singly.  Then they would
reappear bearing news, almost always negative, but occasionally
pointing them in a new direction.  Their gains were
frustratingly small and so far had yielded nothing except to
confirm the things that Skinner and Scully already knew.

Skinner sensed a strange tension between Alex and Marita, but
couldn't spare the energy to think about it too long.

He did not trust Krycek, or Ms. Covarrubias.  Their appearance
in the FBI building had been a little too conveniently timed.
Their story and offer of help too perfect.  Skinner believed in
the possibilities of human redemption--of people changing, and
deciding to fight for the right side--but he couldn't bring
himself to believe it of either of them.  The only thing he
trusted was that he had no other viable options for the
time being, and so far, at least, they both seemed genuinely
committed to helping find Mulder.

It had been a shock to see Alex again, clean, professionally
dressed, looking almost like the agent he might have matured
into.  Krycek had made no mention of the hold he had over
Skinner.  The palm pilot control was not in evidence when they'd
made their unexpected visit to Skinner's office, demanding to
see Mulder.  But the implied threat was there at the back of his
former agent's eyes.

Skinner wondered if the elusive Ms. Covarrubias knew of the
devices in his blood.  He wondered exactly what her game was.

It was something of a shock to realize that already three weeks
had passed since Mulder's disappearance in Oregon.

There was so little time to think.  Days eaten up by the official
investigation, and the endless bureaucratic tasks that never
ceased even when there were agents missing.  Nights given over
to working with his other team, trying to sort out the facts
that Byers, Frohike and Langly uncovered against the information
that his agents had brought him. Winnowing out leads, trying to
make decisions about which of the more fantastic possibilities
they should pursue.  Trying to decide in every moment who to
trust, how to proceed, having no one to share counsel with.

The lack of sleep was beginning to wear on him.  As was the lack
of privacy.  The only time he was alone anymore was the few
hours of sleep he got on odd nights, or when he was driving from
the Bureau to the Alexandria warehouse where the Lone Gunmen, as
Scully called them, had set up a base of operations.

His skin felt paper thin. He felt the continual presence of
others around him--sandpaper scraping him rough, raw, painfully
exposed.  He was not, he knew, a people person, never had been.
The combined weight of his sense of guilt over losing Mulder,
and the erosion of his resources in running these dual
investigations was catching up with him.

Sitting in his car that night, a brief pause while he gathered
strength before entering the warehouse, he thought again about
what he'd seen in Oregon.  The wonder and terror of realizing
what it was that was passing over his head, the sick, sure
knowledge that Mulder was on that thing, the wrenching
comprehension that nothing now could ever be the same.

His declaration to Scully that he could no longer deny what he
had seen had been a lifetime in coming.  He was no stranger to
the unexplainable, and the time had long since passed for him to
move beyond his own fears and "look further."  He recalled with
a certain melancholy the speech he'd given Mulder when the agent
had almost resigned when Scully had gone missing four years
earlier.  Even with all that had already happened to them at
that point, they had all been younger and more naive.  He felt
the force of his years pressing down on him; gravity was heavier
these days.

He shook himself from his reverie.  There was no time for regret
-- that could come later.  Scully had passed him in the hall
today and said Langly had uncovered something that looked
promising.  In her voice had been a spark of hope that he hadn't
heard in over a week.

He walked into the warehouse, praying, as he had done every
night for the last three weeks, for a miracle.

End Chapter 1
 

Chapter 2

Miracles seemed to be in short supply these days.

At least as far as their investigations into Mulder's
disappearance went, they had been experiencing a distinct dearth
of miraculous revelations. Even simple good luck seemed elusive.

Scully sighed and pushed her hair out of her eyes. She was
leaning over a table in the Gunmen's headquarters, and her
gesture fought a momentary battle against gravity and
lost--lank, weary strands tumbling back in place to partly
obscure her vision.  It scarcely mattered.  There was nothing
there to see--the infra-red satellite image of the woods
remained stubbornly blank.

"Damn it."  She whispered the words, aware that she was merely
venting her frustration; vocalizing the tension and lost hope
that seemed to permeate every inch of the warehouse.  She
pinched the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes against the
lack of evidence; then she straightened and turned away, walking
a few steps toward the back reaches of the warehouse where the
extra equipment and cots were stored.

Too long, they were taking too long.  They had to find him.  She
needed to find him.  The thoughts thrummed through her, taking
over the rhythm of her heartbeat, changing her rate of
breathing.  It was the thought that drove her every moment, that
echoed underneath everything else she did.

This, she realized, was what he had felt when she went missing,
when she was abducted, not once, but several times.  But this
was also different.  Mulder fundamentally believed.  In himself,
in the righteousness of his quest, in infinite possibilities.

She knew too much, had seen too much, and had begun to lose what
little belief she had left.  There was still faith, but that was
a different matter.  She was not a pessimist, but she was a
realist who saw things in very cold terms.  And Mulder seemed
further away with every passing freezing moment.

She could feel the others behind her.  Sense their own
frustration and their muted worry about her.  She allowed
herself one humorous half-thought: if only they knew. They
thought she was consumed with worry over Mulder, and she was,
feeling his loss aching down the very axis of her soul.  But
there was this other factor, this other need driving her.
The  news she'd received in the hospital, that no one other than
Skinner knew.  The news that was its own miracle.

But there was no time to think about that right now.  It was all
too complex, snarled beyond any hope of untangling.  There was
this news about a new life that was hers, and rightly also his.
But, she did not know, really, what it meant.  She needed to see
him to know what to do. To know what this would mean for them.

She turned back to the friends who waited.

"It's no good."  A flat statement, trying to contain her own
uncertainty and fear.

"No, it's not.  I'm sorry, Scully.  I thought..."  Langly's
voice was almost inaudible.

She cut him off.  "I know.  We'd all hoped that this would be
the
confirmation...."  An acknowledgment both of the tremendous
risks that Frohike and Langly had undertaken to obtain the
image, and the fact that the risks had been for naught--there
were no usable data on the film.

"We'll just have to wait for Krycek to report in." She did not
add, as she wanted to, 'if he reports in.'  She did not thank
them for their efforts.  She had so few words left, and they had
so many tasks left before them.

"I'm going to step out back for a bit.  I think I need some
fresh air."  A rueful shrug that conveyed her sudden
restlessness. "Will you let me know when Skinner gets here?"

Langly had already turned back to his computer, surfing the web
once more, searching more sites to hack, bulletin boards to read
to look for some small strange clue.  Frohike, though, still
watched her steadily. He gave her a brief nod.  In his eyes she
saw an unexpected sympathy and weary sorrow that threatened her
steadiness for the first time in days.

She hurried out the back door, taking deep gulps of the cool
night air, her face instinctively turning upward--eyes seeking
the stars.

"Where are you, Mulder?  Where?"  and then no longer aloud,
because they were words she couldn't voice. I need you.  Come
back. Come back to me. I don't know what to do without you.

Another ten seconds of longing and then she cut off her stream
of thoughts like the ruthless automaton so many thought her to be.
There was no time for that sort of self-indulgence, and in the
final analysis it was also wrong.

She longed to have him back, but she also knew that she could
and would survive without him, if she had to.

There had even been tiny moments--no longer than the space
between her heartbeats--when she was selfishly glad that he
hadn't been there for the first few days when she'd learned the
news of her pregnancy.  His absence had given her time to absorb
the news, try to adjust to its strangeness, to refit her life
around this new truth.

She had always been a person who needed time to formulate her
opinion.  While Mulder could leap from the suggestion of a clue
into a wholly formed theory in a matter of seconds, she needed
more.  She needed time to weigh the evidence, consider all the
data and the various theories they might support, and to arrive
at her conclusions cautiously and safely, with a clearly marked
trail to show how she got there.

Life on the X-Files did not always permit her that luxury, but
it was how she worked best, what made her most comfortable.  And
over 7 years, she had learned to react quickly, to even leap
ahead of Mulder sometimes, to surprise him when he arrived at
his conclusions only to find her already there.  But it was
something she did reluctantly, or only in fun.  For
the deadly serious matters, she relied on the old habits--the
careful calculations, the deliberate testing of hypotheses.

But the old habits failed her now.  How do you weigh the facts
of the unbelievable?  How do you calculate the impossible?  What
hypotheses should she test now?

Her initial joy had almost immediately given way to something
darker, less certain.  Impossible for her not to allow all the
possibilities to run through her mind, consciously and
unconsciously.  She awoke in the middle of the night, drowning
in images and visions that ran the gamut from finding herself in
a suburb with a white picket fence and a mini-van, to finding
herself once more on an alien ship, the victim of new experiments.

The thought of the ship in the Antarctic, and the other time
that she had known something grew inside her was an icy slap.  A
horrifying possibility that the scientist in her could not
ignore.

She had been pronounced barren by human doctors.  Human doctors
who could and clearly had made a mistake.  And yet, and
yet....she had also run into too many human doctors in league
with things that were not completely of this earth.  Could one
of them have implanted something in her?  Could she be nothing
more than a human test tube?

The third night she had been back from the hospital, she had
spent the entire night pacing her apartment consumed by that
terrifying prospect.  What was growing inside her?  Was it the
simple miracle of Mulder's child, or was it something else
entirely?

Too early for sonograms to tell her anything, and she wasn't
sure that even if she had a sonogram it would tell her what she
needed to know.  She thought again of the frozen embryo she'd
stolen from the cryolab seven years ago, in a desperate attempt
to save Mulder that had ended in his return, but also the death
of the man they'd called Deep Throat.  Could one of those be
what she carried?

If it was, would she know only when it was too late?

By dawn she had been exhausted, consumed by the emotions of
worry and terror, depleted from simple sleep deprivation.

But facing that watery gold light of  the rising sun, she had
realized that on some level it didn't matter.  This was the hand
she had been dealt.  She would play it out.  She had time.  She
thought she had at least some time.

And then she had all too much time.

Despite actively participating in two investigations, it seemed
that there was still too much time to think. To brood about the
possibilities and imagine what might be happening to him.

To wonder exactly where he was.

She'd listened to Skinner's tale of what happened in Oregon with
a familiar sense of being balanced on the knife edge between
incredulity and belief.  She had seen a ship like that in the
skies over Antarctica--for a moment only and through ice-blurred
eyes--and seeing it had scarcely believed what it was she saw.
Later, she would wonder if she had hallucinated the whole thing,
but Mulder's descriptions of what he had seen when he rescued
her from the icy goo had stirred memories and a sense of "yes"
that was impossible to ignore.

And so, believing Skinner, she was now torn between a sense that
they would need a miracle, some kind of other-worldly
intervention to find him, and an all too mundane sense of
irritation that they were simply facing a foe who had to be
outwitted, out-thought, and who would eventually, must
eventually fall before their will and intelligence and
resources.

She was tired of this divided life.  Everything she did, it
seemed, had a subtext, a counter-weight.

She was an agent of the FBI by day, advising an investigation
into the disappearance of her partner.  Her partner, who was
also her lover.  She was a scientist and asked for her opinion
of evidence and chemical analyses and patterns of clues.  What
she wanted to tell them was they were looking on the wrong
planet.

At night she directed another investigation entirely, working
with a group of people she couldn't begin to explain, and who
she felt, unfairly, were some kind of strange inheritance she'd
received from Mulder.  A collection of eccentric relatives
bequeathed to her without her consent.

The Gunmen had long since become familiar to her, part of her
landscape, but she was always uncomfortably aware that they were
Mulder's friends and a part of his life that she would never
really understand.  They were her friends, too, she knew, but it
was still difficult for her to put her weight fully down when
she was around them.

Then there were Krycek and Marita.  Their participation, she was
still afraid to really think of it as help, in this
investigation was a surreal element that made her wonder
occasionally if she were about to wake up at any moment, like
Dorothy, to discover that it had all been a dream.

She did not know what to make of them.  How to deal with them.
She didn't trust them, and had the strong sense that Skinner
didn't either.  Yet, they were there, and she seemed to have no
choice but to accept their aid. Given the Gunmen's general
reluctance to make public appearances, it had been useful to
have Marita and Krycek out there beginning to chase down the
more improbable leads during the days while she and Skinner were
at the Bureau.

But it worried her to have so little control, so little chance
to see what they were really doing.

By this third week, though, she would have traded whatever
little control she still had for a break, any sort of break in
either of the investigations.  Nothing had surfaced for the last
six days in the Bureau investigation, and the latest round of
intelligence gathered from the Gunmen's hacking had yielded
nothing.

Krycek was out in Oregon, or at least that's where they thought
he was.

A week ago, Langly had caught wind, through one of the MUFON web
boards, of a strange light and energy surge in the woods just
north of the area where Skinner had last seen Mulder.  Hacking
into surveillance systems of nations that Scully didn't even
want to know about, Byers and Langly had found a series of
images of the area that looked startlingly like the energy
readings and images that had shown up on the same systems the
night Mulder had vanished.

There had also been secondary readings, strange images that
seemed to show objects falling from the sky.  Later images of
the same area revealed unusual infra-red images that looked like
humans, or something like humans in the woods, miles from any
hunting territory or inhabited areas.  A hypothesis was quickly
formed that the aliens, or whatever you wanted to call them, had
returned some or all of the recent abductees.

Scully wanted to fly out to Oregon right away.  Skinner wanted
to send someone from the Portland Bureau to check the general
area.  The Gunmen had argued for contacting one of their friends
in Seattle and having her drive down, vociferously protesting
that no one in any official capacity could be trusted at this
point.

While the argument was raging in the warehouse, they hadn't
noticed Krycek quietly slipping out.  An hour later they got a
staticky call from Krycek who was aboard a jet headed for the
West coast.

He'd called again to tell them he'd reached the area that showed
the strange readings on the satellite photos.  He had found
evidence of some kind of craft landing, but there had been heavy
rains the previous two days, washing most of the trace evidence
away.

Then there had been silence for two days, until two o'clock one
morning, just as Scully had been preparing to leave the
warehouse to snatch a few hours sleep, she was stopped by a
sudden commotion.  Skinner had already departed.  Scully knew
that no matter how early she got to the Hoover Building the next
morning, she would find him there, already on his second or
third cup of coffee.

"Scully!"  "Dana!"  Byers' and Frohike's voices had clashed,
overlapping and echoing in the open space.

Tired as she was, it had taken her a moment to react.

"Scully?"  Byers' voice strangely high-pitched, urgent.

She turned back, wondering what the sudden excitement was.

"Look at this."  Frohike was staring intently at the screen of
his computer, the blue-glow reflecting back on his glasses and
skin turning him into a cartoon character, strange and almost
unrecognizable.

She leaned over his shoulder, looking at the map on the screen,
the glowing green 'X' superimposed over a section of what
appeared to be a Federal Park.  "What am I looking at?"

Byers clicked and dragged, manipulating the image, zooming
outward, until she realized the 'X' marked a spot just west of
the area of the Oregon woods where they presumed Krycek was
investigating the crash site.

"What....? Who sent this?"  Her voice sharp with something she
didn't want to recognize as hope.

A glowing green 'X,' so silly, so like Mulder.  She let out a
breath, hope draining away as quickly as she had glimpsed it.
"This is from Krycek?"

"We don't know," Frohike's eyes never left the screen, "but we
think so. The email came in with all the headers stripped out, a
beautifully elegant job of bouncing it through numerous servers
and services.  I think I traced it back to a primary server in
Eugene, Oregon, but it's only an 80% probability."

Langly, who had been taking a nap in the back area, suddenly
materialized behind her.  "Who knew the one-armed dude had such
mojo?  Do you think he used a meta--"

"Agent Scully, there was another attachment in the e-mail,"
Byers cut off Langly, smoothly drawing their attention back to
the computer.

The second attachment proved to be a photograph of what appeared
to be a heavily guarded and very well camouflaged compound deep
in woods.

"X marks the spot," Frohike chanted, then looked up at the
consternation on the others' faces. "What? C'mon, someone had to
say it."

They all turned and looked at Scully.  She realized they were
waiting for her to say something, make some decision, order some
action.  She stared back at the screen, willing her exhausted
mind to come up with something to say.  Anything.

She resorted to fact-finding.  "What did  the e-mail say?"

"There wasn't anything else.  Just the attachments."  Frohike
shrugged.  "It got routed through so many servers there's an off
chance the text got stripped somewhere, although it's more
likely the attachments would have gotten lost.  Maybe he, or
whoever sent it, didn't want to risk saying anything."

She felt the frustration welling up.  "Then why bother even
sending us this?  What does he want us to do with this
information?"

"It's obviously something important."  Byers looked like he was
struggling to add something to the thought.

She turned back to the screen.  "Ok, I'm not sure what we've got
here, but we should check it out.  Can you guys connect with
some of the satellites and get confirmation of these images?  If
there is something in this compound it should show up on some
kind of scan, some kind of energy or heat reading.  Right?"  She
looked at the group of men clustered around her, searching for
confirmation.

Heads nodded. Langly's eyes began unfocusing and his fingers
twitched slightly, as though he were already clicking away at
his keyboard, slipping through the security nets of a half-dozen
systems.

She ran a hand through her hair, "Look, I'm so tired I can
hardly stand up anymore.  See what you can find out about this
area, and we'll go from there tonight, ok? Maybe by then, we'll
have heard something else from Krycek."

It had taken two days for the guys to get uplinked with the
appropriate satellites. The area on the map was strangely and
suspiciously "dark," not captured on any of the 100 or so
regular satellites that sweep the country capturing and
recording billions of bytes of data on a daily basis.  It wasn't
until they accessed two ultra-secret satellites, one of
which was a highly experimental satellite of the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Administration, also known as DARPA,
that they found images of the area.

And those images, tonight, had proved to be dark as well.
Blank.  Devoid of any useful data.

And there was still no word from Krycek.

She realized she was standing in the dark, unconsciously running
her fingers along her collarbone, expecting to find the chain
and cross that she had worn for most of her lifetime.  Mulder's
absence was palpable in so many ways.

Behind her she heard the familiar sounds of the Gunmen's chatter
interrupted by the deeper sound of Skinner's voice.

A question, and then she heard his measured steps walking toward
her, the staccato sounds of his shoes against the concrete
giving way to the crunch and slide of leather against gravel.

"Scully?"

She turned, shaking her head. "No..." trailing off as she saw
from his eyes that he already knew.  Byers, who seemed to be the
only one who wasn't slightly afraid of Skinner, must have told
him as soon as he came in.

She fought an urge to go to him and simply lean against him for
awhile, to feel the strength of another human being, to share
this sense of loss. No one else, she thought, really understood.

He watched her steadily, the faint reflection of the lights from
the yard on his glasses turning him into an enigma.

"No word from Alex, either."  It always surprised her when
Skinner used Krycek's first name.

"No."

Skinner looked up at the stars, seeming to search for an answer
among them, much as she had done earlier.  He appeared to be
weighing some momentous decision.  He shifted a little, and when
he looked at her again, there was no glare on his glasses, and
she was amazed at the indecision she suddenly saw there.

"So, what now?"  It hadn't occurred to her that he was also at
the limits of his resources and ideas.

"I don't know."

"Me, neither."

Their shared silence was shattered by the ringing of the phone.
The line for which only four people had the number, two of whom
were standing in the star-filled night.

The caller was not Krycek.

End Part 2
 

EQUILIBRIUM, by Vivian Wiley (vivwiley@yahoo.com)
 

Chapter 3

Somewhere in Oregon

The advantage of working for the good guys, he'd realized, was,
in general, far fewer people shot at you.  Of course, it also
meant you got to shoot fewer people.  But, then, life is a
series of compromises.

Krycek ducked behind a tree, counted to four, then sprinted
madly across the clearing to the relative cover of a group of
bushes on the far side. A bullet whined and thunked somewhere
into the mud behind him.

Fuck.  Not good.  This was seriously not good.

Still, up to this point, there had been a heartening lack of
weapons displayed so far on this little jaunt.

He was getting old, he reflected.  Out of shape.  Of course,
even a month or two in a Tunisian penal colony is bound to have
certain negative impacts on a person's body.  You get a lot of
practice fighting for your life, but there is limited
opportunity for aerobic exercise--building up endurance.

He snorted as he began running through the woods again, zigging
and zagging. Maybe he should retire and start a special
conditioning camp for mercenaries.  Fuck that Tae Bo shit, what
you really needed in life was a class that taught late night
woods sprinting and bullet avoidance.

He decided not only was he getting old, but hanging out with the
wrong element--or was it the right element?--was clearly making
him start to lose it.

He kept running.

Behind him, oddly, the sounds of pursuit gradually slowed and
then faded to nothingness.  It worried him.  A lot.  In his
rather extensive experience in such matters, that usually meant
something far more dangerous than men with automatic weapons was
taking over the chase. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He ran until his lungs burned and breathing was almost
impossible.  When he finally slowed, he was still in the woods,
but knew he was near the edge of them.  Walking hurt, and he
could hear his gasping, wheezing breaths shaking the stillness
of the night.  There had been a time when stealth was much
easier.

Still no sounds behind him, or before him.  What the hell was
going on?  This wasn't at all what he'd expected, but then, what
was in the woods hadn't been anything he'd been expecting,
either.

He began hearing the sounds of traffic, and realized he was only
a few yards from the road.  He paused just short of the tree
line, watching, listening, trying to figure out what to do next.
Waiting seemed like the best thing, but also the most dangerous.
He needed to get out of here, but wasn't sure that emerging from
the little cover he had was a great idea. He waited until he
could draw two breaths in a row without feeling fire through his
chest, and then casually sauntered out to the road side.
Mile marker 352.  Damn, he was two miles from his car.  Oh well,
what was a little more exercise tonight?

He started back, moving along the edge of the  trees so he could
easily duck back in to the woods if he needed to, or could
sprint across the road if something came out of the woods.  It
was good to have options.

The night was pleasantly cool, and the sweat on his body rapidly
cooled and then dried,  leaving him slightly chilled and vaguely
sticky, but nothing he couldn't live with.  The stump of his arm
ached--running with the prosthesis always chafed, but without it
he always felt so unbalanced, unsymmetrical.

This had certainly been a wasted trip across the country.  Well,
not entirely, he'd gotten some interesting information, although
it wasn't the information they'd hoped for, and it got them no
closer to finding Mulder.  On the upside, the trip had had the
virtue of getting him out of DC for a while and away from those
fruitcakes in the warehouse, and the weary suspicion in Scully's
gaze.

It also bought him a momentary distance from Marita.  He
shivered, abruptly chilled in the night air.  Damn that woman,
she was so.....so, what?  He couldn't quite find the right word,
but he knew on some deep animal, instinctual level she scared
the shit out of him.  Nothing overt, mind you.  Her surfaces
were seamless, the edges polished to glassy smoothness.  Almost
no cracks or imperfections.  She radiated calm, helpful
assistance.  It was, he had decided almost as soon as
he met her, a dangerous cover.  There was something else there
that he had yet to decipher.

If he looked hard, now, he could see a few fine lines on her
face.  Deep in her eyes lived just a hint of the terror and
torture she had suffered through as a Consortium vaccine test
subject.  But he sometimes wondered if he could only see those
things because he wanted to.  Because he had lived through the
same things and needed to believe that she, too, must
have been marked by the experience.

He thought the others probably saw nothing but her calm
confidence, her air of certainty. He knew there was turmoil
beneath that surface, but carefully controlled, and leashed.
She might be one of the most dangerous people he had ever known,
which was saying something.  He only wished he could figure out
who that danger would ultimately be directed at.  In moments
when he was being honest with himself, he would admit
that it was the sense of danger she radiated at almost unseeable
levels, more than anything else, that had attracted him to her
in the first place.  He'd always liked playing with fire.  He
had the scars to prove it.

He'd left her for dead in that facility, and had not regretted
it.  It would have been a convenient severing of the tangled
bond they'd forged. Leaving him once more completely
unencumbered and unfettered.  It would have uncomplicated
things.

It hadn't worked out the way he'd wanted, like so many of the
half-formed and quickly conceived plans in his life.  And when
she'd shown up like some hallucinatory mirage in the Tunisian
hellhole where he'd been rotting, he'd thought maybe she tracked
him down simply for the pleasure of killing him herself.  As
usual, she managed to surprise him.

That she came as the smoking man's lackey was both surprising and
worrisome.  It did not fit with what he knew of her, or at least
suspected her of. He knew that she knew more than she had ever
let on about the scope and breadth of the conspiracy's plans,
and had always had the distinct impression that maybe she was
some kind of mole for yet another shadow group. Some outside
power that existed somewhere between the official bureaucracies
of agencies like the FBI and Interpol, and the deep shadows of
the old men's conspiracy.

There was a duality about her that he recognized, knowing it in
himself.  She had other loyalties, but he could never figure out
to whom or what. On some days he wondered if he'd simply let his
imagination run wild and that she was nothing more than the
unambitious assistant that she always seemed to be.  But then
they would talk in the dead of the night, exhausted from bouts
of wild fucking, and her words would betray a mind that was
twisted, devious and illuminated by an intelligence that made
him shiver.  And then the next morning, in daylight, she would
once again be nothing more than Ms. Covarrubias, who did the
research and delivered the messages.  She was like a set of
parallel mirrors, reflecting images back into each other into
infinity, only as you looked into the mirrors, the images of her
at two and three levels back became blurred, indistinct, almost
as though they were reflecting an entirely different shape.

This time had been no different. She remained a cipher.  She had
arrived as apparently nothing more than an efficient functionary
of someone else's plans.  She had arranged his release and
travel out of Tunisia with a ruthless efficiency that left him
breathless.  She'd alternately bribed, threatened and flirted
with appropriate officials, and within 6 hours of her appearance
in the Porj he found himself on a plane bound for New York, with
a London stopover.

After her one small flash of emotion on first seeing him, she'd
said almost nothing else.  She'd provided a few more details
during their discussion in the shower room in the prison.  Then
they'd journeyed back the US with barely a dozen more words
exchanged between them.  He knew only that he had been summoned
back to the world of the shadow games by the smoking man, and
that somehow Marita was also involved.

Twice he'd nearly apologized for leaving her, but the words died
silently in the face of her implacable silence and the flat
nothingness in her eyes when her gaze glanced past him.  It was
as if she'd smothered her fury at him under some blanket of
asbestos indifference.  He thought, however, that he would still
face some kind of reckoning from her.

In the meantime, there were proving to be certain benefits to
resuming a relationship with her.  Danger really was the
ultimate aphrodisiac.

A truck rushed by on the road, and Krycek found himself
unconsciously shifting deeper into the woods.  So much to think
about.  So many variables and this trip hadn't made sorting out
all the puzzle pieces any easier.

He was half-way back to the car when it occurred to him it might
not be there, or there might be people watching it.  He stopped,
trying to consider his options.  Fuck it, he'd go back to the
car and if there were people there he'd deal with them when he
got there.  He was tired of trying to predict what his life,
even in the next 15 minutes, would hold.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Naranja, Florida

The public park was overrun with families and children.  A cool
front had arrived out of nowhere, bringing with it a brief,
welcome relief in the oppressive heat and humidity of the early
South Florida summer.  It was an afternoon for picnicking.

Shrieks and giggles of children chasing each other around the
grassy areas mingled with the low chatter of work-weary adults
who drank their beers, and talked about all the work issues
they'd sworn they weren't even going to think about this
weekend.

Frisbees sailed with lazy grace, decorating the sky with orange,
green, blue streaks. Hamburgers and hot dogs grilled on
barbecues, the hazy sharp smell of smoke drifting and mingling
with the scents of sunblock, sweat, and warm grass. Dogs slept
in the shade.  Teen lovers snuck off to the relative privacy of
the bushes while their parents shrugged and watched their
furtive disappearance with an amused melancholy. Let them have
their fun--the realities of 60-hour work weeks and mortgages
would come all too soon.

The bees came from the west end of the park.  The low hum first
mistaken for an over-zealous gardener starting up a
weed-whacker.  But the hum became a buzz and then a growl, and
the giggles of children became shrieks, and the blue skies were
blotted out by roiling, terrifying cloud of black and yellow.

In all, 80 were attacked--swarmed, covered with living suits of
buzzing nightmares. The chaos of the scene was impossible to
imagine or recount afterward.  People could only resort to
cliches:  "I don't know how to describe it...."  "It was
unbelievable..."  " I never saw them coming..."

It was only later, when the media began covering every emergency
room in town, and showing the pictures of the pathetically tiny
victims, that they realized only children had been stung. Each
child had received over 100 bites.  No one over the age of 18
reported so much as a single sting.

Miraculously, not a single child died.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Krycek's car was exactly where he'd left it.  There were no
footprints except his own in the soft ground around the vehicle,
and he watched the car for a long time from the cover of the
woods before finally approaching it.

It did not explode when he started the ignition, which he
considered a good sign.

It occurred to him that the responsible thing to do would be to
call the others.  Give them an update on his lack of progress
and find out if there had been any new developments in this area
since he'd bugged out to investigate the energy surges the geeks
had found out about from their weird little Internet friends.

He was not feeling particularly responsible.  Anyway, nothing he
could tell them would be very helpful at this point, and he was
ready to go home.  Home?  DC was home?  Interesting.  Maybe not
so much 'home,' as away from this fucking fiasco. And, maybe
back in DC he'd at least be able to get in on some decent
action.

Alex had realized a long time ago that he what he longed for
most in life was action.  To be in motion, to avoid the deadly
periods of calm, quiet, and above all, contemplation.  He did
not want to think.  He wanted to have an objective and a plan
and timetable for achieving it.

It was sitting around thinking that invariably got him in
trouble.  He wasn't stupid, but he had never quite learned to
control his impulses.  To think through the long-term and
short-term consequences of his random moves.  Short-term
gratification was always too attractive, and he'd snatch any
opportunity, only later realizing that he'd traded away much
larger winnings in favor of the immediate profit.

Still, by and large, he'd done reasonably well. In the wake of
the Antarctica disaster and the Consortium's loss of that ship,
the Brit's words that "survival is the ultimate ideology," had
been widely quoted in the smoke-filled rooms that echoed with
recriminations and blame-laying. It was a fitting epitaph, and
the first time Krycek heard it, he'd whispered back to himself,
recognizing, with a small shock, his personal philosophy
distilled into five words.

It wasn't only survival, though, it was the joy of leaping
recklessly into action.  Anticipating the thrill of a chase,
terrorizing someone into submission, or stealing the artifact
that he could sell and finally get away from it all.  Only he
knew, deep in his soul, that retirement wasn't really all it was
cracked up to be.

The joy of action is precisely what had brought him out here to
Oregon this time.  The simple satisfaction of movement, doing
something, anything, rather than listen to the three stooges
yammer endlessly about beta band transmissions, low energy
radiation, and conspiracies.  Some of their theories were
amusing, of course, but they were such children in
their imaginings, and he found himself strangely reluctant to
open their eyes to the true darkness that threatened to swallow
them all.

And, what had this trip netted him?  Exactly nothing.  Or at
least, a lot of not-useful-right-now things.  He'd found that
compound in the woods, and had been unable to resist sending the
glowing 'X Marks the Spot' map back to Scully and boys.  It
should have been the answer.  It certainly, from the initial
distance that he was able to survey it, seemed to fit
the profile of a Consortium research or abductee compound.

But it wasn't.

He'd managed to get past the first perimeter of guards, and onto
the base.  Working quietly toward an area that looked like it
was a barracks of some kind, he'd nearly been discovered by a
group of soldiers patrolling.  They wore uniforms that had no
insignia at all, and he was astonished to hear them speaking a
strange mishmash of English and Russian.

Three hours of careful scouting later, and he had his answer.

It was a covert base, no question about that, but it turned out
to be a debriefing camp for fucking Russian former KGB and
military defectors. From the bits of conversation he picked up,
and the handful of documents he was able to glimpse in one
colonel's office he slipped into, it appeared that these
defectors were flying in stolen experimental aircraft.

The once-proud Soviet military had turned into slowly crumbling
disaster, but money from somewhere was still financing some
rather interesting experimental weapons development.  In
particular, the Russian Air Force had found some deep pockets to
finance the R&D of airplanes that were even more invisible to
radar than the American Stealth fighters.  Or, so the documents
in the colonel's office suggested.

Krycek's Russian had been learned in boyhood and was mostly
idiomatic; his technical vocabulary was weak.  There were words
in the documents describing these planes that the defectors had
flown in that he couldn't quite decode. He was left with the
sense, though, that this wasn't merely cutting edge technology,
but somehow that the crafts were partly organic. It didn't make
sense to him, but he realized that there was little point
standing there trying to figure it out.  The base was
interesting, but obviously wasn't going to lead him to Mulder.
Maybe he'd come back later.

He left the base as quietly as he'd entered.  There was
something fishy about the structures and the aircraft that he'd
been able to glimpse through the open doors of some of the
heavily guarded hangars on the compound.  Something about the
shape and color of the flyers that tugged at his memory but
wouldn't resolve into anything useable.

One craft in particular caught his eye--huge, trapezoidal,
gunmetal grey with strange blue markings--completely
unaerodynamic, it didn't even look like it could or would fly.
And yet looking at it, he felt a strange ache in the pit of his
stomach, almost as though he were experiencing the drag of
G-forces as he lifted up through the atmosphere.  He found
himself moving toward it with no recollection of having decided
to breach the hangar's perimeter.  He stopped himself and backed
away, checking over his shoulder to make sure he hadn't been
observed.  Had he been prone to imagining such things, he might
have said that it called to him. He was not prone to such
things.

He kept moving, quietly, quickly away and back toward the back
corner of the fence he'd been able to climb over.

It wasn't until he was past the outer fence that he'd screwed
up.  He'd assumed he was in the clear and had just headed out
across country back toward his car, when he'd run almost
headlong into a foot patrol unit.  He'd had about 3 seconds
warning of their presence, so he had already been on the move by
the time they realized there was an intruder.

It still worried him vaguely that they had given up pursuit so
easily.  He shrugged to himself; maybe they got the occasional
teenage hikers and just needed to scare them badly enough to not
come back.

Whatever.  He was out and alive, and that was victory enough for
tonight. He'd watch the rearview mirror carefully on his drive
back to the airport, and worry about contacting his....partners
in the morning.

End Chapter 3

EQUILIBRIUM, by Vivian Wiley (vivwiley@yahoo.com)
 

Chapter 4

The Gunmen's warehouse

"No, I don't want you to bring it down here."  Frohike was
hunched over the phone. His voice seemed to be torn between
bemusement and fright, and the knuckles of the hand that
clutched the receiver were literally white.

"No."  He looked up as Skinner and Scully re-entered the
warehouse, an unreadable emotion blurring his features.  "Look.
I still think you have the wrong person.  I don't have an Uncle
Chester.  Never did."

Scully looked over at Byers and raised her eyebrows in question.
Byers shrugged and shook his head.  Apparently nobody knew what
the hell was going on.

"Okay, okay, fine.  If you're in that big a hurry.  We'll be
here."  He placed the receiver back in its cradle and just sat
looking at it.

Langly was practically vibrating with impatience.  "Well?  Who
was it? What's with the Uncle Chester thing? I thought both your
parents were only children? What's this dude bringing down?
How'd he find this place?"  The breach in their careful security
was only an afterthought.

Frohike was still staring at the phone as he answered. "That was
some lawyer dude named Penders.  Or so he said.  Claimed to
represent my late Uncle Chester who died recently and left me a
legacy."  He shook his head again.  "I don't know how the hell
he found me.  And I don't have an Uncle Chester."

He looked up, confusion now the predominant emotion.  "I don't
know what to tell you.  The dude knew exactly where we were.
And he insisted that he had to bring me this thing tonight."

Scully felt Skinner move sharply beside her.  His voice was
tight with a harsh urgency that reminded her that nothing could
be trusted.  "You think this is a trap?  What is this 'legacy'
that the lawyer wants to bring you?  What time did he say he was
coming?"

Frohike looked like a deer in headlights under Skinner's intense
glare.  "I don't know, man.  I never heard of this guy before.
I swear to you, I have never had an Uncle Chester.  It must be a
mistake. He's got to have me confused with someone else."

Everyone stood in uncomfortable silence that was finally broken
by Langly breaking away and loping toward the back of the
warehouse.

"Langly?"  Byers called after him.  "What are you doing?"

"Getting the fuck out of here.  What do you think?  That dork,"
he jerked his head back toward the despondent Frohike, "just
told the dude to come on down.  I'm not waiting around for the
men in black to come crashing through the doors."  He snatched a
duffel bag and began quickly stuffing random items into it.
Grabbing whatever his hands touched and throwing it in the
bright green bag.

Frohike shook himself out of his stunned reverie and moved over
to the bank of computers that were arrayed on the tables in the
middle of the space.  His hand was reaching to turn off the
first one when Scully stopped them.  She had found some measure
of clarity out there in the night air.  She could feel quick
impatience at their panic rising up through her.

"Stop it!"  She was surprised to find a sharp tone of command in
her voice.  Langly dropped the bag, startled into paralysis.
She'd even surprised Skinner, she thought.

"Look, someone clearly knows we're here. If They, whoever they
are today, wanted to take us out, they wouldn't use a
complicated ruse like some imaginary uncle of Frohike's. If they
wanted to, they would have simply blown up this whole block,
right?"  She waited for that to sink in for a moment.

She felt rather than saw Skinner's nod of assent behind her.

"I think we should just wait and see what this is all about.
Maybe someone is actually trying to help us.  We've had help
from unusual sources before..."  Her voice trailed off as she
thought about the number of people who had tried, or seemed to
try to help her and Mulder over the years and how many of them
had wound up dead.

"Anyway--both Krycek and Marita are out there checking into
things, maybe they had to go through an intermediary to get us
some information."  It was a weaker explanation, she knew, but
not implausible.

"I don't know.  I still think we ought to get the hell out of
here."  Langly's edginess was catching and she could see both
Byers and Frohike casting worried glances toward the front
entrance.

Skinner stepped forward.  "I don't particularly like it either,
but," he ticked off the points on his blunt fingers, "one, it
looks like someone has found us.  Two, I agree with Scully that
if they wanted to take us out they could have found a far more
efficient way of doing it than this. And, three, whatever this
stuff is, it could be useful.  We should take precautions, but
let's just accept the delivery."

"Easy for you to say, Skinner, you're not the one who's going to
have to deal with this lawyer dude and maybe get his head blown
off."  Frohike was not impressed by the arguments.

Skinner shrugged, staring down at the nervous man. "The lawyer
doesn't know who you are.  I'll take the delivery if it'll make
you feel better."

"It'll help, but I'm starting to be with Langly.  Maybe we
should just cut and run and retire to Maui."

The ringing of the door buzzer cut off further arguments.  A
scan of the video surveillance units at all doors revealed only
a thin, balding man carrying a box at the front entrance.

Frohike jerked his head at Skinner, who sighed and went to open
the door.

"Yes?"  Skinner was not giving any ground.

"Good evening.  I'm Larry Penders, I'm here to see Mr. Melvin
Frohike about the legacy from his late Uncle Chester."

"I'm Melvin Frohike."

The lawyer's pale blue eyes expressed mild surprise.  "I was
under the impression that you would be....er.....not quite so
tall."

"I hit my growing spurt since Uncle Chester saw me last."

"Ah," the cultured tones were smooth, no trace of an accent, "so
you remember your uncle?"

Skinner was clearly enjoying messing with the lawyer.  "Not
really, but since I don't remember him, I can only assume that
he last saw me when I was an infant.  By the way, how did you
get this number?"   His grin was positively feral.  Scully was
suddenly glad she was on the other side of it.

Penders seemed mesmerized.  "I was given it when I got the
instructions to contact you on behalf of my firm about your
uncle.  We've handled his business affairs for years."

"Your firm?"

"Yes, Schmidt, Klein and Waldham."

Skinner narrowed his eyes, and seemed to be deciding whether to
ask the guy for identification.  Instead, he inched a step
forward, nearly touching the box the lawyer held.  "Is that my
legacy?"

"Er...", the lawyer glanced down at the object in his hands, as
if suddenly remembering why he'd come. He thrust it forward as
far he could. Skinner didn't move at all. "Here.  Your uncle was
sure you would need this."

Scully moved forward smoothly. "Did Fro....Melvin's uncle have
any other messages for him?"  She placed a hand lightly on
Skinner's arm.

Penders looked at her, dazed, seeming to wonder if she'd
materialized out of thin air.  "And you are?"

"A friend of the family."

"Hmmm...Uh, no.  There weren't any other messages. Here."  He
pushed the box toward Skinner again, who automatically brought
his hands up to hold it.  "I'm sorry for your loss.  Good
night."

Watching Penders walk away, Skinner mused, "He didn't ask me to
sign anything.  Didn't ask me to prove I was Frohike.
Something's wrong.  And I'm left holding this damn box, and I
suddenly wonder if it might contain a bomb.  Scully, you might
want to move away from me now."  His tone never varied, polite,
almost conversational.

Tired of it all, she simply reached over and took the box from
his hands, walked it over to the table, where she put it down,
none too gently--she was amused at the flinch that Byers
couldn't suppress at the muted thump the box made hitting the
surface--and opened the cardboard flaps.

In the box was a small antique wooden chest.  In the chest was
two million dollars in cash and instructions for accessing an
off-shore account in the name of Melvin J. Frohike at the Banco
Verde Bahamas.  The account had eight million dollars in it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Foum Tatouine, Tunisia

The desert was endless, barren, completely predictable in its
sandy sameness.  Unvarying in its indifferent harshness,
unyielding heat and unceasing blowing sand.  They had changed
all that.

The older man had never quite lost his German accent, despite
his fluidity in at least five other languages, despite the fact
that it had been over 40 years since he last set foot anywhere
near the Fatherland.

"Don't worry--what little is left of Them has forgotten we or
this project are here.  The fires that destroyed my former
colleagues burned more than just their bodies.  Whole systems
and empires were reduced to cinders in that immolation."

"But--"

"Yes, there were survivors, but I have never considered Aston a
real player.  There is still that American....the smoker,
Spender, or whatever he calls himself these days, but he was
always a flunkie, a mere functionary.  He never had the nerve or
vision to truly take action."

He turned away momentarily, gazing out over the surprising green
rows of vegetation, springing bright and surreal from the desert
floor.  He seemed, today, uncharacteristically uncertain, almost
hesitant.   When he resumed speaking, his listener had to move
slightly closer to catch the words.

"But there has been recent...activity.  We are going to have to
step up our work.  The preliminary vector tests have all gone
well, and I think our casualty rate is acceptable."

A sigh beside him broke his reverie.

"Yes, yes, I know--in a perfect world, there would be no
casualties from this, but it is an imperfect world, and we are
rapidly running out of time and options."  A brief pause while
he studied the man next to him. "Your....all of your idealism
always surprises me.  An unexpected thing."

He shrugged away his apparent puzzlement.  "I long ago learned
that science is full of the unexpected."

"Anyway, with the recent activity in North America, I feel we
are at a cross-roads. A month or two at most, and we will have
to be prepared to go fully live."

The man next to him finally spoke, "What about the information
from that mercenary?  The man with one arm who was here a few
months ago.  I thought we agreed that we would be given more
time to work on the information he brought to us.  We have
nearly finished decrypting the data that he brought us from the
ship.  Even the little information we managed to decode and
incorporate a month ago made the second round of tests far more
effective."

The German lifted his hat and ran a hand over his face, up over
his scalp.  Weariness informed every line in his body.  "I
know--I wish we had more time, but we don't.  We will soon, I
think, be faced with the choice of saving most people, or none.
What would you choose?"  He did not wait for an answer, but
plowed ruthlessly on.

"Besides, we are still missing one critical piece of the
information, and that mercenary is in the penal colony in Porj
Sidi Toui.  At least the last I heard.  We can't go and question
him without possibly alerting the remnants of the organization I
used to belong to.  We both know that is an unacceptable risk."

Blue eyes met blue eyes for a long tense moment.

Finally the younger man averted his gaze.  "I know.  I just...."

The German took pity on his colleague.  "Try not to think about
it.  This is not an easy decision, but it isn't yours, so don't
take on the guilt. There is no time for such foolish, bourgeois
luxuries.  Events have been set in motion, and we have only the
choice to react, or be reduced to ashes like our former
associates.  Yes, a terrible cost will be paid, but those
cost-benefit calculations are not really your concern. There are
reasons that you are the scientist and I am the manager."

Anger sparked briefly.  "Maybe because I was engineered that
way."

"Maybe, but it's more than that.  It's simply that engineered or
not, we all have different talents.  It's what makes us human."

The pale skin freckled so badly in the desert sun.  The brown
spots shifted and blurred as the younger man snarled at him.  "A
poor choice of words."

"Not really.  I always choose my words carefully."

Strughold watched the red-haired man wheel around and stalk
away.

~ ~ ~ ~

Somewhere near DC

A talent for organization is what had first brought her to the
attention of the group that eventually owned her soul.  Or at
least tried to own it.  It is a dangerous thing, being
ruthlessly efficient, but also useful.

Marita Covarrubias put down the phone with a grim satisfaction.
Done.  Now they would have operating capital.

Men.  Always rushing off into the great unknown without
considering the logistics.  The practicalities of how they would
pay for plane tickets and rental cars.  Illegal bribes to
appropriate and inappropriate officials.  Besides, there was a
certain sweet irony to plundering one of the smoking man's
various off-shore accounts to finance this effort to
put a stop to his "legacy."

It worried her slightly that the first account she had tapped to
provide Frohike's inheritance had been emptied very recently.
It shouldn't have been.  She had checked the balances of all the
accounts just hours before the smoker's death, and each had been
well over $10 million.  The empty account gave her a mild
headache--a premonition of another wild card out there, but she
pushed it aside.

The smoker was right--the time was at hand, and she couldn't
afford to spend too much of it worrying about variables over
which she had no control.

A talent for organization underpinned with a ruthless
practicality and an ability to discard all moral judgments or
considerations on her way to achieving her goal.

She sighed in the quiet room, smelling the soft scents of
expensive leather and the sweet dust of old books.  She would
miss her library, her sanctuary, but if Skinner and Scully and
the rest of them didn't accomplish their mission, there would be
no sanctuary left for anyone anywhere.

She sighed again. It really didn't seem to matter which side she
was working for, they still seemed to need someone to clean up
after them.

She wondered briefly how Dana Scully put up with it all, then
decided she didn't care.  There was so much she didn't care
about.  And, there were other matters to attend to.

She picked up the phone again, dialed one of the dozens of
numbers she had memorized, and waited patiently for the answer.

On the fifth ring, a sleepy voice answered, rough, deep, "Yes."

"It's me," cool, controlled, as ever. "Did you verify the
information?"

"Yes, I've just returned from the second site.  There's no
question that it's the same test pattern, but the results
are...different. I haven't finished analyzing all the data
yet--"

She felt a fine edge of impatience cutting through. Just once
she would like to deal with someone who didn't always make
excuses. "When will you have the results? What do you mean
different?"

"There were no fatalities at site two, and only 15% fatalities
at site one, and those mostly among victims 50 and older."

She thought she had moved beyond surprise.  "No fatalities at
site two?  How is that possible?"

"I don't know. I'm still working on the samples.  We know that
the pathogen has mutated once before, but I honestly don't
understand what this is.  Or exactly where it came from.  I
thought all the labs had been shut down."  He was becoming
agitated; scientists were such a fragile lot.  She needed him to
calm down, to concentrate on the important developments.

Lying had become second nature so many years ago that it was
almost first nature. She adopted her most soothing tone. "I
thought so, too. And, we're not even sure it's one of our labs.
There were always other projects on the fringes of the larger
work.  Anyway, we need to figure out what we're dealing with
first."

"Well, I should have results within 48 hours."

"Call me with the results in 24 hours."

She hung up the phone with a quiet click.  She could wait 24
hours more. There were other events to set in motion in the
meantime.

She glanced at her watch.  Alex would be back in town in less
than 6 hours.  Furious, empty-handed, confused over exactly what
it was he had found, and he would find his way here.  She was
not entirely displeased at the prospect.

Theirs had been like any other office romance--partly fueled by
the thrill of the illicit, the temptation of the forbidden.  The
shadow masters had known about it, of course, and disapproved in
their stuffy, tweed and smoke way. But neither Marita nor Alex
had been considered important enough to bother reprimanding.

Their encounters were sporadic, fierce.  Their couplings felt
like lightning strikes of energy streaking through them, leaving
them shattered, twisted tree branches cast to the ground in beds
in anonymous hotels in cities across the world.

On her most rational level, she knew that the liaison with Alex
had always been a mistake--he was a survivor, not useful as a
long term partner.  He was ridiculously bad at strategic
planning.  If she'd had his full level of access she would have
owned the universe by now. Literally.  But the conspiracy had
been the ultimate boys club, and at critical moments she was
always excluded.  Alex had so many opportunities and had
continually squandered them for small short-term gains.  Not her
ideal mate, certainly.

But, he was beautiful, and she was a woman who appreciated
beauty.  And he had an array of interesting talents in bed.

Since she'd yanked him out of that Tunisian hellhole, he had
been spectacularly attentive--had very nearly made up for
abandoning her to die in that medical facility. No, not really,
but she was certainly enjoying his quite transparent efforts to
make her forget what a rat bastard he could be.  It had amused
her to see his obvious confusion when she'd casually reinitiated
their physical relationship.  She thought he probably fell asleep
most nights wondering if she would murder him as he slept.  And yet,
he kept coming back to her bed.

Let him grovel a while longer, she could at least enjoy herself
on this final journey through the shadows.  She decided to go
take a nap.  With any luck, she would get very little sleep
tonight.

In the meantime, she had one last task for the day.  She opened
her email program.  What was that American rhyme? Eenie, meeny,
miney, mo....catch a computer hacker by his toe.  It
was....Byers' turn.  Yes, Byers, with his serious demeanor, and
sweetly out-of-date suits would appreciate the significance of
these emails.

She had just finished composing and sending the two emails--one
apparently from Florida, and second from Italy--when the
familiar beep alerted her to incoming messages.

The data in the first transmission stopped her cold for a long
moment.  This was unexpected.  Extremely unexpected.

The second message unfroze her--jolted her into movement--her
reaction propelling her out of her chair, and into restless
pacing around the room.  Desperately trying to use physical
movement to burn away the sudden nervousness and fright.

Too soon.  This was much too soon.

End Chapter 4

EQUILIBRIUM, by Vivian Wiley (vivwiley@yahoo.com)
 

Chapter 5

AD Skinner's Office

It seemed to Skinner that he was always indoors--in windowless
conference rooms, artificially lighted warehouses, or in his car
passing between one or the other.  Time blurred and collapsed
around the edges until he never knew what day of the week it
was, let alone what time it was.  He had only the vague sense
that it was always too late, or too early.

So it was a shock to find someone in his office.

A hasty glance at his watch indicated it was 10:30 in the
morning, a notso unreasonable time to have a visitor.  Given
that he'd passed a number of agents in the hallways on his way
back to his office, he assumed it must be a week day.

It still didn't explain why there was an United States Air Force
Colonel standing in his office.

"Can I help you, Colonel?"

The man in blue turned sharply toward Skinner, but did not
salute.  "Colonel James Rodden of the United States Air Force,
2nd Battalion, Intelligence section.  Are you Assistant Director
Walter Skinner of the FBI?"

Skinner suppressed the impulse to reply that, no, he was Elmer
Fudd of the CIA, and provided the simplest possible answer.
"Yes."  His tone no doubt betrayed both impatience and a slight
hostility.  It was how he viewed the world these days.

Col. Rodden was about 5 feet, 10 inches tall and looked like
he'd
probably held the state wrestling championship in whatever state
he'd grown up in.  The uniform did nothing to disguise the
tightly compacted muscles that framed his body. He bore no
resemblance to those strangely over-inflated men who spent hours
a day in the gym.  He simply looked like he could very casually
rip your arm out of its socket without breaking a sweat, and
that he just might enjoy doing it. His skin was the color of
Starbucks espresso and his eyes were colder than permafrost.

Skinner had no doubt which sub-section of Intelligence Col.
Rodden belonged to.

"You've been running some investigations in the woods of Oregon,
near Bellefleur."  His tone was also compact, precise.  Skinner
waited.  There was undoubtedly more.

"We understand that you have a manhunt underway for one Special
Agent Fox Mulder.  He's not there.  We suggest you look
elsewhere."  It was not exactly a suggestion.

Skinner considered the gamut of responses that he could make to
the suggestion and decided that none were particularly optimal.

"I see."  He watched Col. Rodden for a long steady minute, then
shrugged. "Okay."

Col. Rodden's eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.  "OK?  That's
it?"  His tone, although mild, suggested disbelief.  "This isn't
a joke or a test, Skinner."

"I never thought it was.  I appreciate the information--if
Mulder isn't out there, then we're wasting valuable manpower,
and I can redirect the resources."  His tone, too, remained
mild.  He looked at the floor for a moment, and then almost
casually looked up again and asked, "Do you have
any suggestions about where I should be looking for him?"

He was surprised to realize that he'd caught Rodden off guard.
There was a shade of delay before Rodden answered, "No.  But I
can assure you that your man isn't where you have your agents or
that unofficial investigator looking.  You should redirect your
resources away from an area that could wind up getting one of
your agents in a different sort of trouble."  Another brief
pause.  "And, you should probably be more careful about
sending that particular unofficial individual out on his own.
He might wind up losing something valuable, like another
appendage.  Or, he might sell you out." Rodden's tone indicated
that he didn't find either scenario particularly upsetting.  He
was delivering another message entirely.

Skinner allowed himself to count to three before reacting.  He
wasn't exactly sure what it meant that Rodden would reference
Krycek and the unofficial investigation so openly, but he was
sure it wasn't good news. It also raised a couple of interesting
questions about whose message Rodden was actually delivering.

"Thank you for your concern."  Skinner permitted himself the
tiniest edge of sarcasm.  "It's so rare to have this level of
cooperation between Executive Agencies."  His eyes narrowed.
"Officially or unofficially." He waited to see if there were any
other messages the colonel would deliver.

Rodden looked through him for an interminable while, and then
pivoted sharply and walked out of the office.  At the door,
without turning back, Rodden added. "And Skinner?  There's very
little of interest in Alaska, either."

Alaska?  Who the hell was in the Alaska?  What the hell was in
Alaska?  By the time Skinner realized that he was sure there was
no search for Mulder underway in Alaska, Rodden had long since
vanished.
 

The day dragged on forever, a steady flow of administrivia,
meaningless update meetings, and the petty annoyances that
define the life of a federal bureaucrat.  It struck Skinner, not
for the first time, that he was eligible to retire.  Between his
military service, and his time in the Bureau, he had enough
years in federal service to retire with a pension.  It seemed
more and more attractive.

Driving from the Hoover Building across the bridge to Alexandria
that night, he was momentarily distracted by the dark play of
the water of the Potomac. He thought about the quiet cabin by
the lake in Michigan where he and Sharon had once spent a summer
vacation.  He remembered a time when things had been simpler.
He remembered that time flowed only in one direction and that
the present was anything but simple.

He arrived at the warehouse to find barely controlled chaos.

"And don't you go fucking cowboying off into the wild blue
yonder again, Krycek.  We will decide who is best suited for the
mission, got it?"  Scully's voice was raised in uncharacteristic
vehemence.

Ah, so Alex was back.

Krycek muttered something in response to Scully, and two people
instantly responded.  He thought he heard Frohike's voice, but
it was Marita's words that cut through as he walked in the side
entrance.

"That's scarcely the point, Alex.  This is personal for you, as
well, as I recall.  Anyway, this mission is likely to require
some specific expertise and access that I'm not sure you have
anymore.  This isn't some little camping trip in the Oregon
woods."

Krycek started to reply and then lapsed into a slightly sulky
silence.

Byers cut in, "I'm not sure we should be talking about just one
mission.  There's the other emails that we got..."

He was cut off by Frohike, "Look, we've got limited
resources..."

Langly joined the fray, "No, we don't, you just got all that
moolah, and..."

"Hey--shut up, it's mine, but I meant people, you moron.  Yeah,
we can use the cash for tickets and shit, but who's actually
going to get on these planes to go check out all these so-called
clues? How's your Italian, hacker boy?"

Krycek seemed to recover from his sulk, "You're all idiots if
you think I have any desire to go up there into a frozen
wasteland and get chased by more men with guns...."

Scully picked up her thread again, "Did I say you were going
anywhere?"

"Listen, you..."

"HEY!  What the fuck is going on?!"  Skinner's roar overrode all
the babble, which cut off like a door being slammed, until all
that was left was the slight echo of Skinner's words rattling
around the far corners of the warehouse.

He hadn't yelled at anyone in a very long time.  He'd forgotten
how good it felt.

Everyone except Marita started to speak again, and he cut them
off with an abrupt gesture.  "Scully?"

"Well, sir, we have a bit of situation.  There's the information
in from Italy and Florida, but that really seems to be of
secondary importance to the new data from north of Fairbanks.
The decision to be made, of course, is which of us to send, and
how to cover our tracks.  If Krycek goes..." her words tumbled
over each other--a headlong rush.  He could hear the tight
thread of anger weaving through her voice again, could see
the tension building back as quickly as it had dissipated.

"Scully?"

"Sir?"

"I just got here.  You're going to have to back up.  What
information from Italy and Florida and what the hell does Alaska
have to do with any of this?"  He thought again of Col. Rodden's
visit and felt his gut beginning to tighten.

"Oh. I'm sorry.  I forgot we didn't have a chance to brief you
by phone on your way over.  We couldn't get through." She tilted
her head slightly.  "Is there something wrong with your phone?"

"No, I was on the phone with Freeh."  At her surprised query,
"Director Freeh?" he motioned for her to continue.  "I'll
explain later."

She paused for a moment, gathering her thoughts.  The others
waited behind her, arrayed in a strangely formal semi-circle. A
restless chorus to her narrator. The Gunmen on the left side of
the arc--Frohike, Langly and then Byers; a small gap and then
Marita and Alex, who always stood just at the edge of each
other's personal space.

"Late this afternoon, Byers received two emails that seemed to
report the results of some kind of test. The emails reported on
separate, but similar, events in Sicily, Italy, and a south
Florida town called Naranja.  The test subjects appear to be
essentially random civilians, and the method of the test seems
to involve swarms of bees."  She was looking at him directly as
she delivered the news, and it was impossible for him to hide
his reaction.

He instinctively looked over at Marita, to find her watching him
with her usual cool facade, but for just a moment, he thought he
saw a strange flash of emotion swim through her eyes.

He looked back at Scully. "Did the civilians develop blisters
and fevers and die?"  He couldn't bring himself to mention the
specter of smallpox. And then, because honesty with Scully was
an old habit, "We've seen something like this before. A couple
of years ago, it was during your...."

"I know, sir.  I remember reading Mulder's notes on the case
when I got out of the hospital.  But that's the strange thing.
Like that attack in South Carolina, the victims of the bees were
primarily children, but in Florida, not a single child died, and
in Italy, very few people died, and they were all older, and
tended to have other health risks."

Once again, he found himself seeking out Marita's eyes, almost
as though he were trying to get her to weigh in on this
discussion. She shook her head, her face calm and smooth as
always. Skinner mused that Marita had an eerie knack of seeming
so confident that no one would ever really question her.  Even
Krycek seemed vaguely afraid of her.  He thought he'd
never met anyone more confident and sure of herself.  Even
Scully, by comparison, seemed almost volatile, a loose cannon.
Marita was nearly inhuman in her patience.  He wondered at what
cost it had been acquired.  After a brief pause, Marita
responded to his silent inquiry.

"I don't know.  The Consortium was experimenting with bees as a
vector for spreading the alien virus. Agent Scully, you were
caught up in that whole process, as you may recall.  But the
domes were all destroyed, so far as I know, and after
the...incident, in Anarctica, the men never spoke of the bees
again.  Alex?  Do you know anything?"  Her bland tone
did not quite cover the subtle jibe.

"The labs in Arizona were the only other place where the bee
project was still being worked on. But the work was still in an
experimental phase. They were completely re-engineering how the
virus would be carried, and all those experiments were burned
when the rebel aliens took out the lab a year ago."

Skinner had the impression that the Alex's information had
actually surprised Marita.

"Okay, so what happened with these bees? What do we think it all
means?" He found himself longing for the days when he had run
investigations that had mundane clues:  bits of clothing, fiber,
blood, footprints.

Scully glanced back at Marita before continuing.  "We're not
sure.  In the email about the Florida attack, there were some
attachments that appear to be followup notes by doctors on the
victims--all of whom, by the way, were children.  The notes are
from different medical professionals, but each says that despite
receiving numerous bee stings, so many that most of these
children should have died from sheer insect venom overload, the
children have quickly and almost miraculously recovered
completely.  Most of the writeups go on to say something like
this...."

She walked over to the computer table, picked up a printout.
"This is from a 12-year old girl's family physician.  It's
typical of the dozen or so reports that were forwarded to us."
She read:

"Sandy is doing very well.  I have discontinued the antihist
treatment, and see no signs that she will have any scars from
the numerous stings that covered her body.  In fact, I am
surprised by how few of the stings are still visible at all.  I
am also a bit surprised by Sandy's psychological and emotional
reaction to all this.  She seems, just in a few days, more quiet
and thoughtful.  I suppose that such a traumatic experience
would change anyone, but the depth of her questions, and the
complexity of the explanations that she understood surprised me.
I've known her all her life and it seems like she suddenly
matured overnight."

She looked up at him again, her features slightly blurred by
fatigue, worry and confusion.

"What about the information from Italy?"

"Very much the same."  She looked at Marita again, a sharp
suspicion briefly evident.  "Fortunately, Ms. Covarrubias knows
Italian, and was able to translate that information for us."

A woman of many talents, indeed.

Scully continued.  "The only difference in Italy, and there was
much sketchier medical data available from that incident, is
there appear to be more side effects among some of the
adolescents.  I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but there
are reports in the files from Italy that after the attack, some
of the teenagers were reporting hearing 'strange voices' in
their heads.  The local physician was worried about
trauma-induced schizophrenia, but it didn't fit the classical
pattern.

The voices phenomenon lasted only a few days, though, for most
of the youth.  Only two of the 50 or so teens continued to
report them a week after the attack.  From what we can gather,
the Sicilian attack took place about two weeks before the
incident in Florida."

"When did the Florida attack occur?"

"Ten days ago."

He considered all that he'd been told, and couldn't find a
thread to connect the information to anything else they'd been
working on.  He and Mulder had run into the bees, but this
didn't feel like anything that would lead them back to the
missing agent.  A thought nagged at him.

"What about Alaska?  Where does that fit in?"

"Alaska?"  She was clearly still thinking about the bees.
"Oh--that. It doesn't.  At least we don't think it does."

She turned to Byers.  "You want to explain about the readings?"

Byers stepped forward.  He always seemed a little awkward, just
slightly off-center, as though he wanted to be anywhere but
where he was, and might simply turn and walk out, away from all
the madness.  And, as ever, when he began speaking, Skinner had
the sense of a professor launching into a lecture.

"We had just finished looking at the data on the bee attacks in
Florida and Italy, when we got another high priority email from
an anonymous source." He paused and looked at Langly, who just
shrugged.  Apparently the plethora of untraceable emails had
ceased to worry them too much.

"This email detailed a series of sightings up in Alaska of
unknown flying objects.  Moreover, a check of the European Space
Agency satellites and the JPL orbiters showed the same anomalous
readings we saw in Oregon right before you and Agent Mulder went
back there.  The readings in Alaska were bouncing around for a
while, but have been holding steady in an area about 200 miles
north of Fairbanks for the last 6 hours.  We think there's
another ship there."

Byers stopped for a moment and caught and held Scully's glance
before he continued.

"There's more.  We took a look at the last 72 hours of data from
JPL and the ESA.  It's intermittent, but there is a clear path
for the readings up to Alaska.  It looks very much like the ship
or whatever it is, originated in Oregon."

Skinner felt his breath leave him.

"Do you think it's the same one?"  He turned to Krycek.  "What
did you see out there?"

"Nothing alien.  At least I don't think so. There was a base out
there, but it's some weird military place.  I'm not sure whose
military, though. I heard as much Russian as I did English, and
none of the uniforms had any sort of insignia."

"Is it a mercenary training center?"

"No--something else.  There were a couple of big hangars on the
base. And there were some really funky looking airplanes in
them."

Rodden's visit began to fall into some kind of context.  "What
do you mean funky looking airplanes?"

As Krycek began describing what he had seen, it was, strangely,
Marita who stopped him, and began asking a dizzying array of
technical questions about the craft in the hangar.  After about
five minutes of interrogation, she turned to the rest.

"What Alex saw are probably a form of hybrid alien aircraft.
Not quite what you have seen previously, but close.  The Soviets
were only partial partners in the consortium.  The Politburo and
GRU sub-agencies that represented the USSR to our organization
were always suspicious of the larger organization, which they
regarded as being part of the decadent west. We always suspected
they were running their own programs--experimenting with alien
technology. They denied it, of course, but we had enough moles
to know that some tests were underway.  Now that the Russian
army is in such disarray that they aren't being paid for
months at a time, it's probably easy for the Americans to lure
pilots into stealing airplanes and defecting to the West.  The
compound Alex saw is probably a debriefing center."

Her explanation was a little too ready, a little too smooth, but
it jibed with Rodden's visit, and explained about 80% of the
situation, he thought.

"So, what about the readings that moved from Oregon to Alaska,
could those have been a test flight of one of those aircraft?"

"Possible.  But unlikely. The hybrid craft always had a
noticeably different energy signature than the real ones."

That raised some interesting questions.

"So what do we think is in Alaska?"  He felt a strange
anticipation.

Scully resumed her spokesperson role. "Some alien craft.
Whether or not it's the same one that took Mulder isn't clear,
but I think we should go check it out."  He ached at the
undercurrent of hope he heard in her voice.  Don't count on
this, Scully.  You know how often we have been led down the
wrong path.

"Yeah, despite the warning I got today, I think you're right.
but I think you're going to run into some resistance up there."
He was already assuming that she would be traveling.

He briefly recapped his encounter with Colonel Rodden.  "Ms.
Covarrubias, Krycek, is there, was there a Consortium operation
in Alaska?"  Strange to be discussing such things so
dispassionately.

Marita replied.  "No, I don't think so.  There were very few
operations in North America outside of the Southwest."

"Then why do we think this ship went to Alaska?"

Marita's gaze flicked briefly toward Scully before returning to
coolly meet his eyes.  "Maybe because some things grow better in
the cold."
 

The argument about who would go to Alaska to investigate the
energy readings had raged for almost two hours.  Scully had been
ready to pack her bags and get on the next plane heading
anywhere north or west.  She did not seem to feel that she
needed a teammate.

Skinner, knowing her condition, knowing what it was like to
travel under that sort of emotional duress, didn't want to send
her alone.  But he couldn't go with her.

The phone call that had tied up his cel phone on the drive
between the office and the warehouse had been from the FBI
Director's secretary.  Freeh had called an extremely rare
meeting of all Assistant Directors for three days from now, and
his secretary had made it clear there were no excuses for not
attending the meeting.  Even your own death.

That left Krycek, Marita, and the Gunmen.  The Gunmen, although
also clearly reluctant to let Scully go to Alaska on her own,
had made it plain that none of them could or would undertake a
long journey like that.  They were resolute in their stance that
any sort of public travel would be hazardous to them.  Despite
Skinner's assurances that there were not dozens of federal
agents waiting to snatch them from the streets, none of the
Gunmen could be persuaded to go.  Frohike very nearly gave
in, but finally retreated, muttering, to his computer.

Marita had not indicated with even a twitch of her eyebrow that
she was interested or willing to go to Alaska.  She made some
vague statement about pressing in-town business she needed to
followup on, and then lapsed into an impenetrable silence.

When it became apparent that Krycek was going to be Scully's
traveling companion, they both nearly rebelled.

"With all due respect, sir," her attention was riveted on
Skinner, as though he were the only one in the room, "I don't
think I need backup. I'll go up and check out the situation, and
if necessary, I'll get back up from the Juneau office."  Her
tone was at its most clipped.

"You might not have time."  He understood her reluctance, but
didn't trust her impatience. She had studied the fine art of
impulsive rescue under a master.

"You can't think that one person," she glanced over at Krycek
with barely veiled contempt, "will make enough of a difference
if it's a really tough situation."

Krycek wasn't thrilled either, "Don't kid yourself, princess,"
his contempt wasn't veiled at all, "I'm not exactly dying for
this assignment, either.  But, Skinner's right.  You shouldn't
go alone, and if we run into resistance maybe one of us can stay
alive long enough to call for some real help."

"Which we would get from precisely where, Krycek?  It's not like
anyone here can exactly call in the 3rd Infantry."

"You're the one who said you could get help from the Juneau
office."

"It's a 10-person office, including the secretaries."

"Then why did you bring it up?"

"I don't know."  She turned back to Skinner, exasperated, ready
to leave, to move.  "I can go alone.  I'll attract less
attention if I'm traveling on my own."

"No.  Alex is going with you."  He had the odd sensation of
sending children out into an unpredictable world.  "The
uninhabited areas outside Fairbanks are too easy to get lost in.
And there are a number of hazards--both man made and natural."

She glared at him, and he was reminded of all the times she had
defied him. He wanted to find the words to tell her that he
would give anything to go with her, but he couldn't.  She
shouldn't be traveling into the hinterlands by herself, so it
would have to be Krycek.  He hoped she wouldn't force him into
issuing a direct order.

He softened his tone marginally.  "Depending on what you find,
and how long you're gone, I'll meet you guys up there.  But, I
can't leave town until after the Freeh meeting.  All the ADs are
on travel ban effective tonight.  Go up there.  Scope out the
situation.  We don't want to lose any time."

He could read her unhappy acceptance of the situation, but was
greatly relieved to realize that she had accepted  the
arrangements.

"Ok, we'll leave as soon as possible.  Frohike, when is the next
flight leaving for Seattle that will connect to a Fairbanks
flight?"

"There's the United flight out of Dulles at 6 a.m. Do you want
me to book the tickets?"

"Yeah--we'll take that one.  Krycek, meet me at the terminal no
later than 5:15."  She left without saying goodbye to anyone.

Skinner turned away from watching her walk out the door to find
Alex watching him--anger mixing with a haunting need in his
eyes.

"I don't work for you anymore, old man.  What makes you think
I'm going up to Alaska to let that red haired bitch order me
around?"

"You're going, boy," the dark familiar anger, but now underlaid
with something else, "because you're in this for revenge, for
whatever personal gain you can get out of this, and the best
place to do that is on the front lines and you know it."  He
wondered why they were having to play out this particular drama.

The silent struggle of wills had a preordained conclusion.
Krycek gave a curt nod.  "I'm sure you'll be getting updates
from the road."

End Chapter 5
 

EQUILIBRIUM, by Vivian Wiley (vivwiley@yahoo.com)
 

Chapter 6

It seemed to Krycek that he would have been very happy to live
his entire life without being given definitive proof that Dante
was right.  At the very lowest and most desperate reaches of
Hell--the level, he remembered through some odd quirk of memory,
that was reserved for traitors--things were not hot, but a
frozen lake of ice.  Cold--surely there was a more vivid word he
could find--icy, frozen, frigid; nothing seemed quite adequate
to describe it.  He was so tired of the cold, the bone-numbing
chill, the arctic air.

And they hadn't even reached Alaska yet.

He suppressed another sigh and refrained from looking over at
Scully. The last time he'd done that, he'd made the mistake of
making eye contact. He was surprised to discover that he seemed
to be  unable to build up any sort of insulation against her
implacable disdain. This was going to be one very long fucking
trip.

For the first hour or so, he had found it amusing.  Her studious
aloofness was so melodramatic.  He felt like a junior high
school boy who'd been found kissing another girl during lunch
time, and was being given the cold shoulder by his steady.  He
almost said "I get it--you're ignoring me." But provoking her
that directly seemed like a bad idea. Beneath her frosty surface
he could sense a deep, mature anger and he could only pray to a
god he barely remembered that he would be several continents
away when she remembered exactly all the reasons she might want
to see him dead.

He was really going to have start traveling with women he hadn't
either left for dead, or whose kidnapping he'd helped arrange.

The temptation to show up with just moments to spare for their
flight from DC to Seattle had been nearly overwhelming.  Her
little "meet me no later than 5:15" command had rankled him
about six different ways, and the impulse toward mindless
rebellion was ingrained.  He'd been there on time, though,
figuring that maybe if he showed in small ways that he could be
a team player it might make the trip a little less unpleasant.

So far it hadn't seemed to help.

Thank god the flight was half-empty.  They'd been assigned seats
next to each other--he was planning to kill Frohike in a slow,
unpleasant way when they got back, although he thought he might
have to compete with Scully for the privilege.  However, the
entire row next to them had been empty, so immediately after
takeoff, he'd moved over to it and left Scully in sole
possession of the three seats on the right side of the plane.

After waving away the predictably disgusting airline
breakfast--a
significant component of his long-term survival strategy was to,
at all costs, avoid eating airplane food--he'd settled in to try
to sleep away as much of the flight as he could.

He'd watched in envy as Scully had tucked up her legs and been
able to lay her small frame across the row of seats and
apparently drift off to sleep.  He shifted around, the minuscule
bit of fluff the airline called  a pillow was only minor
cushioning against the unyielding arm of the seat digging into
his back.  At least he could stretch out his legs.

He found himself watching Scully, again.

Throughout his long association with the strange game they were
all caught up in, he had on a number of occasions drawn the
assignment of Mulder and Scully watcher.  There were days when
he thought he knew more about them than they knew about
themselves. But then he would catch them watching each other, or
watch them exchange one of their glances that seemed to rewrite
the secrets of the known universe in less than 2.3 seconds, and
he'd realize that he would, in fact, probably never know another
human being the way those two knew each other.

It was his considered opinion that that was a good thing.  He
was very sure he never wanted anyone looking straight through
his soul the way she saw Mulder.

But there were those long periods of surveilling the two of
them, and nothing much to occupy his mind except on those rare
occasions when one or the other of them got too close to the
truth, or to the wrong lie. And so he would watch them.  Not the
agents, but the people, and play the game of trying to figure
out what made them tick.

Mulder was easy, actually.  All brain and hurt feelings. All he
wanted was someone to believe him, and a fairy godmother to
point him toward the aliens' ball.  It made him easy to
manipulate, and made even his unpredictability predictable in a
way.

Scully, though, had never made as much sense to Krycek.  First
of all, he continued to be surprised at how little she played
Mulder.  As well as she knew him, she had to be aware of how
readily she could have had the boy following her around on a
leash, and yet she almost never made any attempt to sway Mulder
with anything other than the force of her own beliefs and
reasoning.  It seemed like such a waste of time.  All she
would have had to do was occasionally bat her eyelashes and say,
"Oh Mulder, of course I believe you," and she could have had
anything she wanted.

And Krycek was reasonably certain he knew at least one thing she
wanted.

She was such a contradiction.  The quintessential rationalist,
she could dissect situations with a calculating, dispassionate
eye that Krycek found himself envying.  Her brain, he thought,
must be like a set of finely honed scalpels that sliced
information into tiny categorizeable bits of data.  She had an
astonishing ability to sort through all the madness that she
encountered and find the information that would best
support a rational, scientific explanation.  She was right, most
of the time.

And yet, occasionally, she would go haring off on a wild chase
of her own.  He had seen her surrender to impulse, and each
time, he was caught off guard, breathless at her sudden audacity
and daring.

He thought Mulder probably had no idea exactly how dangerous she
could be.

He'd been contemplating exactly what was going on between Mulder
and Scully when she'd suddenly sat up and caught him staring at
her.  She held his gaze, her fury burning away the last of her
sleepiness, until he'd been forced to drop his eyes.  Damn.  He
hated feeling guilty for no reason--he didn't even waste time
feeling guilty for all the reasons he did have. He was
contemplating the weaving pattern of his jeans when he
heard a sudden muffled sound from her and then she'd abruptly
dashed up the aisle to the toilets.

She must have made the mistake of eating the airplane breakfast.

He'd turned his gaze out the window and waited for the plane to
land.

Mercifully the layover before they picked up their connecting
flight to Fairbanks was short.  They were the only two people in
the back part of the plane, so he was surprised when Scully
settled into the aisle seat of the set of three he was sitting
in.

The empty seat between them didn't seem like nearly enough
buffer space. But all she did was reach in her backpack and pull
out a set of maps. She glanced around to make sure they were
still alone.

"Okay--here's the Gunmen's best guess of the location of the
signal. It's pretty much due north, but also a bit west of
Fairbanks.  There are roads, of a sort, leading to the area.
The infrareds and other images the guys have picked up suggest
an installation about twice the size of the one you say you saw
in Oregon."

He let the jab pass without comment.  Definitely a long fucking
trip. Maybe if he didn't wind up killing her it would work off
some of the bad karma he'd accumulated over the years.

They studied the maps together and reviewed the logistics
arrangements of where they would pick up their vehicle and
camping gear.  As they began discussing strategy, he was
surprised to find her iciness giving way to a cool, professional
civility.  She didn't take bullshit well, but if she
thought you made a good point, she didn't fight you on it. She
was also not inclined to argue purely for the sake of arguing.
It was a pleasant change.

By the time they reached Fairbanks, they'd already been
traveling for 12 hours, and still had two hundred miles of back
country roads to drive. The latitude of their position meant
that daylight extended long past 10 p.m., but it was after dark
by the time they reached the area they'd tentatively identified
as the first stopping point.

The maps supplied by the guys had been accurate to an almost
frightening degree.  Too bad the US military couldn't get stuff
this up-to-date; might have spared themselves some grief with
Chinese embassies.

Given Krycek's experience with the foot patrols in Oregon, they
weren't sure how close to the base they would be able to
approach unobserved. Fortunately, like the other base, this
installation abutted a national park that had lots of hiking
trails.  The plan was to check in at the campground, set up camp
like any vacationers, and then begin reconnaissance work with
the little bit of night they would have.

They picked out a spot that seemed the most removed from other
campers and began the tedious process of hauling all the gear
out of their vehicle and setting up at least a minimal camping
site.

There was only one tent.

Krycek, who hadn't really been paying attention when they'd
picked up all their supplies, couldn't decide how to react.
Scully seemed to have no reaction whatsoever; simply unloading
it and calmly beginning to roll it out.

"Can you hand me that hammer, please?"  She was setting one of
the
stakes.

"Where's the other tent?"

"What other tent?"

"The one for the other of us." He couldn't identify the source
of the slight panic he felt rising in him.

She paused, her hand still reaching out for the requested hammer
and looked up at him, her face barely visible in the moonlight
and the minimal lamp light.  "There's only one tent, Krycek.
Now could you please give me the hammer?"  He swore he could
hear amusement in her dry tone.

Fuck. She'd noticed the panic.

"Why do I have to sleep outside?  It gets fucking cold up here,
even in the summer."  Great.  Now he was whining.  Amazing how
extreme fatigue and traveling could render even a stone killer
into a four-year old.

She stood up and looked him in the eyes for a long,
uncomfortable moment. Then she brushed by him and picked up the
hammer.  As she was walking back, she tossed over her shoulder.
"In as much as we'll get to do any sleeping here, I rather
presumed we'd be sleeping in shifts.  Ergo, one tent. You want
to unload the rest of the gear?"  He didn't quite trust the way
she was shifting the hammer in her hand.

He helped her finish setting up their site without further
comment.

They had about a half-mile hike to the hill the maps indicated
would give them the best view of the base.  He was amazed at her
steady, quiet pace through the forest.  He was so tired he could
hardly put one foot in front of the other, but she simply flowed
through night.  He'd been through the FBI Academy and knew that
there was no training she'd received there to account for her
stealthy competence.  Another piece of the puzzle, and he had no
idea what it meant.

They passed a number of "Restricted Area.  Do Not Enter.
Trespassers Will Be Arrested and Prosecuted" signs, and began
moving more slowly--alert for possible alarm systems or patrols.
Finally crawling the last few yards to the crest of the hill,
which was covered with scattered clumps of trees and a clearing
of tall grass that gave them a clear view of the base.  They
moved out into the grass and lay there withbinoculars, scanning
what was, as promised, a large military-type base. He couldn't
shake the feeling that it had been just a little too easy to
get there.

The compound was not particularly well camouflaged.  Some
rudimentary foliage and tenting, but it was too big to hide
successfully.  It was at least twice the size of the one he'd
seen in Oregon, and had large groups of buildings; as well as an
open space that from this distance might be runways or training
areas.  There were jeeps sweeping back and forth, and
groups of men moving in formation in various areas.  They
couldn't see how far back the compound stretched.

Like the base he'd seen in Oregon, this one seemed to be
military, but it was not quite clear whose forces.  The soldiers
they could see all wore generic battle fatigues, and none of the
jeeps or other vehicles had any identifiable markings.  They
were too far away to hear anything, so couldn't determine if
Russian was being spoken.

For the middle of the night, there was an usual degree of
activity.  The men seemed to be  preparing for something, but it
wasn't possible to determine what.  Scully got out a notepad and
began taking methodical notes.

"Five large buildings, three of which appear to be hangars, on
the west end of the compound.  At least one jet-length runway
apparent, and maybe two; not possible to determine at this
distance.  Krycek, how many men do you think are down there?"

"We've seen at least eight units of ten to fifteen each.  It's
the middle of the night, so we're probably seeing half of the
force at most.  But, we also don't know what's on the far side
of the compound."

She scribbled a few more lines, and then went back to watching
the activity through her binoculars.

Laying in the grass, scanning the base through his lenses, he
could feel the fatigue of the journey washing over him.  He felt
the tug of sleepiness pulling him down further and further away
from the here and now.  A few minutes of rest, just a few.

A sudden wave of sound from their left ripped him from the fog
that was creeping through his brain.  They both sat up quickly,
as an aircraft came tearing out of the sky.

At first it was nothing but a wash of noise. A jumble of
sounds--grinding mechanical rhythms underlaid by a humming that
he could barely hear, but that he felt rattling his bones.  Then
a pop! and lights blinked on just above them--bright searing
whiteness that seemed to have a weight and intelligence. He felt
it looking for them, hunting them out through the night.

Instinctively they both threw themselves back on the grass. He
felt, irrationally, like a mouse cowering as the ominous swoop
of owl wings overhead signaled impending death.  A millisecond
later, the runway on the base lit up, and the craft screamed in
to land.  It glided to a halt at the far end of the runway, and
then turned and taxied back toward the hangar closest to them.

On the ground, the craft resolved itself into a more
recognizable form. It looked very much like the American F-14
jet fighter, but it was much bigger, there were strange
attachments on the undercarriage, and the engine noise was not
consistent with an F-14.

As it approached the hangar, the doors slid open with a clang
that could be heard clear across the field.  The craft taxied
in, the doors closed and the night resumed its near-silence.

Oddly, the hangar was empty.

Krycek looked over at Scully, to find her watching him, one
eyebrow raised in a familiar gesture of surprise.  He shrugged.
"It looks a little like some of the planes I saw in Oregon, and
no, I don't know why the hangar was empty."

An unreadable emotion crossed her face. "Okay."  She turned back
to the base.  Then picked up her binoculars and scanned the
middle section of the runway again.  "Hey--take a look down
there.  The activity's actually picked up.  I think they're
expecting something else tonight."

He watched the figures in uniform running back and forth.  Some
groups were rolling out some kind of cording along the edge of
one of the runways, and other groups seemed to be setting up
sandbag bunkers with large guns.

"I don't know what they're expecting, but I sure as hell don't
think it's going to be friendly."

She sighed, and for the first time he could hear her own
fatigue. "Damn. I guess we'll be here for a while."

He was still feeling the lingering effects of the adrenaline
rush from the plane's sudden appearance.  Almost off-handly he
said, "Look, why don't you rest for a bit.  I'll wake you up if
anything happens."

He was surprised at how readily she accepted his offer.  She
simply nodded, and they moved back to the largest stand of
trees. If he sat on the roots of the one at the edge, he could
still see the base clearly. She moved a few paces into the cover
and he could hear her shaking out the sleeping bag she'd brought
with her.

The night rapidly became chilly and then cold.

So much of his life had been spent waiting, and watching. He
felt his body sliding into the strange fugue-like state that
he'd learned to adopt on these long shifts. He had developed
small routines and habits to keep himself in that middle-ground
state of wakefulness, but not full consciousness.  He didn't
even realize that he'd picked up a small twig and was
methodically snapping into millions of tiny splinters until
Scully moved sharply behind him. The small percussions of the
snaps were the undercurrent to his drifting thoughts.

"Krycek." He jerked upward toward fuller consciousness.

"What?"

"Could you cut it out?"  He could tell she was making an effort
to be civil.  It took him a moment to figure out what she was
talking about. He looked down at his hand, almost surprised to
see the remains of the twig.

"Oh.  Yeah." He resumed staring off toward the encampment.
They, too, seemed to have settled in for the night, after the
last hour or so of preparations.  Nothing stirred on the
runways, or in the hangars, which seemed to be dark.

The silence around them was nearly complete.  There were small
animal sounds in the distance, and the occasional gust of wind
would send a dry rustling through the still, but it felt eerily
like the entire area around the installation had
been....sanitized.  He suppressed a small shiver.

Her sudden movement was shockingly loud.  He felt her rising
behind him, and then heard her as she moved away from the
sleeping bag, and sat against a tree about four feet from him.
He could just catch a glimpse of her profile out of the corner
of his eye. He kept looking stubbornly straight ahead.

"I thought you were going to get some sleep."  His voice, he was
pleased to hear, was entirely level.

"I wanted to...just couldn't seem to get to sleep."  Her voice
betrayed her weariness.

"What's the matter?  Afraid I'd murder after you drifted off?"
He'd meant it to be a sarcastic jibe, but thought that some
other tone had crept in.

"No." Her voice soft, almost a whisper.  A pause that lingered
and deepened.  "Why did you come up here?"

For a startled instant, he wasn't sure if she was talking to him
or to herself.  Even as he answered her, he thought it was a
little of both.

"Skinner told me to."  He figured she wouldn't miss the fine
edge of irony in his voice.  The truth was so much more
complex--something deep and convoluted-- he could barely
articulate it to himself, and he damned well didn't owe her any
piece of his soul.  Skinner had a great deal to do with it, of
course, but it was far beyond any simple explanation.

In his peripheral vision he could see the small shake of her
head.  "And of course, being the good little soldier that you
are, you obeyed?"

Again he was aware of a conversation taking place on at least
two levels.

"Yeah, something like that."  And then before he could stop
himself, "Why are you here?"

He didn't expect her to answer.  "I had to do something.  Move.
Get out here and look for him."  Her whisper didn't hide the
undertone of naked longing.

Surprising to hear his own restlessness voiced by Scully.
Strange to feel this sympathy for her.  "I know what you mean."

The silence that followed lasted so long that he thought maybe
she had fallen asleep where she sat.

"What made you do it?"  She kept surprising him.  He was
beginning to wonder if it was all women who confused him, or if
he just kept meeting the wrong ones.  He wasn't sure exactly
what she was asking him, but knew it had to relate to all his
numerous treacheries and betrayals.

He could treat it as a rhetorical question, just let it die, or
deflect it with the nonchalant sarcasm he wore like a second
skin.  But somehow the long journey, the clear sense of being
thousands of miles from anywhere,  and the pre-dawn darkness
gave him a strange sense of immunity.  For just this moment he
felt insulated against all that lay behind them.

"Power.  Survival."  Not the words he expected to hear himself
say.  The truth cut the night into razor sharp shards.

He could hear her sudden indrawn breath.  She hadn't expected
him to answer.  He waited with a strange sense of anticipation
to see how she would respond.

"Was it worth it?"

"Is anything ever worth it?"  But compelled by an honesty he
still didn't understand.  "I'm still here, more or less."

He felt her move again, could feel her gaze prickling along his
consciousness - she turned to look at him for the first time
that night.
 

Almost no light in the clearing, but he could see her eyes so
clearly.

Watched him for a long, considering minute.  "