Consequential Loss

BOOK 1

Part 1

So which was it to be: an alien bounty hunter or Alex Krycek? The throbbing glow of an extraterrestrial spaceship or the dim outline of a delivery truck?

He turned, looking for the third option: Walter Skinner and sanity. Saw nothing except a pulsating curtain of light and that single narrow strand of darkness, a slender blindspot in the ship's beam. In the shadows, the gray outline of a man, one arm raised above his head, a ghostly silhouette against the blackness behind.

Shifting through three-sixty degrees, Mulder looked for the miracle that wasn't there. Now or never. Panic too close to the surface to consider the consequences, he sought out the breach in the shimmering wall and found it again. Story of his life, running from the light into the dark. The shadows had never looked so inviting.

EARLIER THAT DAY - Washington DC

Scully's mother seldom called during what she referred to as "working hours" and knew better than to call Scully at the office. Which meant that when Maggie called Scully on her mobile at 11:45, Scully was obliged to take it seriously. She nodded an excuse to the Lone Gunmen and headed into an empty corridor.

"I'm fine, mom."

"You didn't sound fine last night."

Scully, frowned at her mother's insight, thought back to the previous night. She tried to recall the words she'd used, wondering if she could wiggle out of them now. Mulder had flown to Oregon, but she hadn't felt well enough to join him. How the hell had she made a slip like that? She never admitted to being ill. No wonder her mother was concerned enough to call again today. No reply at Scully's apartment. Of course she'd try the cell phone. "Really, it's nothing to worry about. Must have been one of those 24-hour flu things."

"You told me here's no such thing."

Scully closed her eyes, wondering why she'd even said it. "OK - you got me. Probably food poisoning."

"You were thirteen when you told me that."

Scully could hear the proud smile in her mother's voice and couldn't help but smile as she replied. "Clostridium perfringes, maybe."

"I'll bring you some food over."

"Mom."

"Or are you flying out to Oregon now?"

"No," said Scully, fighting to keep at least a semblance of a smile in her voice. "Mulder will probably be back before I could even get there."

She closed the call and returned to the office, chin up, shoulders straight, walking proud and tall, defying anyone to see weakness in her stance. She was dismayed by the expression of concern on Byer's face.

She'd shrugged the Gunmen's questions off the day before. They'd been surprises that Mulder was traveling to Oregon with Skinner. "I've work to do here," she told them. Frohike had insisted on driving her home that night, reminding her that dizzy spells and city traffic didn't mix.

When they resumed work again today they did so only after asking oblique questions about tiredness and food. They'd insisted on supplying fruit juice and pastries, despite Scully's insistence that she wanted neither.

"Time for lunch," said Byers, before Scully even had chance to return to her chair.

Langly looked up at him, obviously ready to tell his colleague that he had to be insane before catching the look in Byer's eyes and turning to stare at Scully's pale face instead. "Yeah, time for a break," said the blond, stretching his arms behind his head as he rose.

Frohike had already taken up position at the door and was holding it open, making it clear to everyone that the decision had been taken; they were going to take a real break and not just call out for sandwiches or a pizza.

Byers moved towards Scully, cornering her for a moment. "He'd never forgive us if anything happened to you. We'd never forgive ourselves."

Easy for them to say. She needed to be ready; Mulder was going to need help and he was going to need it soon and, though she couldn't pin down exactly what it was that she was afraid of, she acknowledged the fear to herself. To Byers she admitted only a bare minimum about tiredness and stress, knowing that he would be reassured by a show of honesty, however incomplete.

Lunch was lunch. Eaten fast and tasting of dust and cardboard. While the others indulged in tall cups of caffeine rich java, she stuck to water. Even that was hard to swallow. She hustled them back to work as quickly as she could and they agreed that she'd compromised, but insisted that the next meal break would be a longer one in which they all got to sit down.

Stress? She'd thought working with Mulder was stressful, but not working with him was far worse.

He was out there looking for that UFO and she was stuck in DC. Mulder's orders. Since when had she listened to an order from Mulder? Smiling a little, despite the queasy feeling in her stomach, her thoughts drifted back to their first case and a night in an Oregon forest. Special Agent Dana Scully, the rookie kid drawing her gun on the town's sheriff. Mulder, acting as the voice of maturity, shaking his head and ordering her to stand down. God - she'd been so young, so naive, so excited to be in the field. A partner, not just another agent.

If she hadn't been feeling so damned sick, she'd have ignored his little speech about not wanting to risk losing her. Rejected that idea as well, as the dizziness returned full force. She'd have ignored his words? Not possible. How could she, not when they were practically a declaration of love, or as close to one as you could reasonably expect while standing outside a meeting room in the middle of the Hoover Building. Thank God for Skinner, at least she knew Mulder had backup he could trust.

Didn't stop her feeling sick to the pit of her stomach though.

She threw herself back into her work and was grateful that the Gunmen seemed equally absorbed in theirs, huddling around computer screens looking for anomalies on satellite feeds.

Hours later, she was rifling through the files, still searching for a pattern, knowing that something in there was calling to her, perhaps trying to tell her something that she didn't want to hear. The call was getting louder, more insistent. She read the list of names again and this time the mists cleared. "This just can't be."

Frohike reacted first. "What are you looking at?"

"Medical records. Billy Miles and other known abductees in Bellefleur, Oregon. They all experienced anomalous brain activity."

Byers continued the thread. "Electro-encephalitic trauma."

"Which is exactly what Mulder experienced a few months ago."

"I don't understand," said Langly.

And Scully didn't want to understand either, but suddenly the pattern and its implications were only too obvious. "There was something out there in that field. It knocked me back because it didn't want me. Mulder thinks that it's me that's in danger of being taken."

Mercifully, Frohike drew his own conclusion. "When it's Mulder who's in danger."

The dizziness was back, the sick feeling in her stomach rose; the awful pounding in her ears reached a crescendo. Knees buckling, she gave in to the gray.

Mulder's first attempt to open his eyes nearly made him throw up. One hell of a hangover: dry mouth, fuzzy vision and a definite dose of seasickness. Make that carsickness, he corrected, getting some kind of lock on his surroundings.

Krycek and the hole in the wall of light.

Maybe if he curled up on his side he could avoid actually vomiting. That proved to be easier said than done. Reopening his eyes he saw what he already knew; his hands were cuffed to the vehicle's walls.

Spread-eagled, flat on his back on the cold metal floor. Experimenting, he realized that his feet were free. A squirm later, he found the outline of his backup gun still strapped to his ankle. Which information might help later, but it sure as hell didn't help him now unless he could pull off some kind of contortionist trick and wriggle the gun out of its holster, hold it between his feet, draw it up into his manacled hand, and do it all without shooting himself.

Even sliding out of his shoes proved to be a tough job. His attempt to focus on breathing just made him more aware of the taser burns on his chest. Trying to bend his knees made him groan.

"They say that waking up is hard to do." Krycek was singing. The bastard was actually singing. A Neil Sedaka impersonation of all stupid things. "Now I know; I know that it's true."

"Breaking up is hard to do, asshole," snapped Mulder.

"Whatever you say, Mulder. How you doing back there?"

"Unfasten these cuffs and I'll draw you a picture."

"You're fine."

As the ship rose into the night sky Skinner's first rational thoughts had been of inevitability. Mulder's mission had drawn him to this place and to this fate. Angry, he cursed his brain for feeding him platitudes. Mulder had been here because no one else had the guts or the insight to do the work. Skinner was here as his lone backup because even an Assistant Director couldn't brave the ridicule that would follow a decision to send a team of agents to investigate a clearing in a forest. Actually, even if he'd wanted to, he wouldn't have trusted other people with the task.

It had been easier to do the job himself. Except of course if he'd done his job then how could he have lost Mulder? Scully never had. She'd never looked the wrong way at the vital moment. She'd never let go of the rope when Mulder had been playing on the cliff's edge.

The deputies Skinner called to the scene showed up fast but short-handed. Ray Hoese was missing; Billy Miles and his father couldn't be reached. The locals feared the worst. So did Skinner, but he wasn't ready to admit that yet. If nothing else he would get evidence of the abduction. Mulder deserved that much. If there were to be any meaning to this, then it would come from revealing the truth.

A couple of hours later and a team from the Bureau and a cluster of state troopers had been added to the mix. The infrared cameras on the helicopters patrolling overhead found nothing to record. A slight discrepancy regarding the ground temperature in the clearing. Very slight. "Fungi," suggested one of the pilots; "An underground spring," suggested another. The search teams went into action with flashlights, performing a first sweep of the woods, but found no sign of a missing man, or of anything else.

Requests to military and civilian air traffic controllers for information on abnormal radar activity drew a blank.

When dawn broke, the ground search began in earnest. Tracker dogs and men on foot walking in well-drilled lines. The Bureau forensics team pressed on in puzzled silence, diligent but perplexed. Some of them raised eyebrows at Mulder's array of laser monitors. Some of them were foolish enough to let their amusement show. Skinner's glare demanded silence and respect.

Despite their efforts, the bottom line was that so far they had no evidence of strange activity, and they had no clue as to how a federal agent could disappear without a trace from under his boss's nose.

The clearing itself was unmarked except for the heavy and obvious traffic of the search teams, police vehicles and helicopters. No scorch marks to mar the tree line. No giant pad prints where the ground had sunk away under a space ship's weight. Nothing to see except the evidence of their own investigation. The locals had opened a couple of gates to give them better access to the site but had found neither molten metal locks nor charred and splintered wood.

"A lot of vehicles have crossed the area, sir. We can try a few tire casts but it'll be a needle in a haystack."

Skinner stared at the forensics specialist who was busily trying to state the obvious. It took him a moment to catch on. These people thought Mulder had driven away from the scene, or maybe been kidnapped at gunpoint by some heavy with a SUV? Skinner almost laughed. How the hell did Mulder and Scully put up with this? "Just make sure we don't miss anything. Document the area. I want everything, photos, measurements, chemical residue analysis. Anything out of place. Something took off from this site. It flew out of here. I need to know what it was."

The agent stepped back, looking mystified, then nodded and walked away.

From Krycek's perspective it was a time for celebration; a moment to applaud a rescue mission conducted in haste but flawless in execution. He'd driven deep into enemy territory, risked injury and death, and he'd brought his target out alive and intact. In another time and place he'd be a hero. Unfortunately in this one, he'd assaulted a federal agent and was now transporting him in chains across state lines.

However, in his favor was the fact that he'd planned this journey, or one very like it, so well. The capture itself might have been fortuitous, miraculous even, given that Mulder was only seconds from disappearing into the belly of an alien ship, but most of what had happened since had been planned for weeks. Get Mulder at a moment when his defenses were down. Force him to listen to uncomfortable truths. Show him the files that would explain to him why danger was no longer simply a fact of life, but an immediate threat that required emergency intervention.

Years of Mulder-watching had given Krycek the knowledge to map out a strategy. On the one hand, Mulder wouldn't want to listen; he'd need to be made to. On the other hand, a helpless Mulder was a dangerous and unpredictable risk to himself and others, likely to gamble everything on a single throw of the dice just as he had in Tunguska. Mulder needed to be confined but he had to feel as if the situation was not completely out of his control. A balancing act certainly, but Krycek was confident he'd found the right approach.

A taser had persuaded Mulder to get into the van. Chloroform had bought Krycek enough time to chain the agent securely to its well-prepared walls, and enough access to inject the agent with the nanite army that could mean the difference between success and failure in this mission.

Since Mulder regained consciousness, Krycek had maintained a continuous thread of carefully rehearsed explanation. He'd successfully closed his ears to Mulder's anger and insults.

Carefully focused, he stuck to the necessities and chose not to respond to Mulder's pointed and mostly legitimate accusations by answering with lies or near lies, or even with speeches in self-defense.

The only real weapon he had in this game was that he was right. One hundred percent certainty that Mulder needed to listen; complete confidence that if the agent actually heard what was being said then he would act on it.

"Resist or serve," Krycek insisted again. "Another few years and that'll be the only choice anyone gets. Only difference is you have to make that choice now."

Krycek knew that Mulder was starting to weaken when, after hours of argument and angry rebuttal, the tenor of his responses had changed from a, "Why?" to a, "Why, right now?"

"Same reason that ship nearly took you. Anomalous electrical activity in the brain. You're changing, Mulder. Changing fast. What the aliens didn't realize is how much further you can go. They would never have let you escape tonight if they'd known. They would never have let you go once they got you on that ship."

"Changing?" grumbled Mulder, his tone suggesting that he considered the idea to be a joke, though not a very amusing one.

"Your genes were modified before birth, afterwards there were chemicals and surgery. You're becoming what you were designed to be."

Mulder's voice wavered, bouncing along somewhere between exasperated and lost. "They didn't have the technology for genetic manipulation back then."

Krycek smiled, knowing that he was winning. No denial that something was happening inside Mulder's head, merely a feigned skeptical stance on its origins and meaning. "The Consortium has been borrowing alien technology for a long time."

The reply was studiously bland, delivered by Mulder as if it was all somebody else's problem. "So what was I 'designed' to be?"

"A secret weapon. So secret that Bill Mulder never told his Consortium buddies about you."

That seemed to break Mulder's trance, the response was snapped back. "He didn't tell me either."

Krycek flinched and wondered if he could change the subject. Unfortunately he wasn't quick enough.

"Perhaps he would have, if you hadn't killed him." Mulder suggested, his voice dropping into a venomous hiss.

Krycek could only be grateful that while Mulder still had a gun he couldn't actually reach it. It was too soon for this discussion. Keep moving, he reminded himself. Keep on track. Stick to the plan. "You asked me why it has to be right now. Because as of a week ago Strughold's back in town and he's seen your latest hospital reports. He wants you."

"Strughold?"

"Klaus Strughold, an old 'friend' of your father. The Consortium's a shambles. El Rico Air Force base, old age, faction fights - most of the old leadership are dead, the rest are useless. They're like a ship without a rudder, thrashing about but going nowhere. Strughold's stayed out of the squabbles for years. Now he's come back to take charge."

"And he's got time to read my hospital records?" said Mulder, sounding mockingly amused.

"He's got time to offer a reward for your capture."

Krycek had it in black and white, albeit couched in terms that would make no sense to anyone outside the elite group of operatives who got their orders direct from the top. Money and a new life for the man who brought Mulder in alive. A death sentence for anyone who killed Mulder or left him mentally incapacitated. A blanket approval to kill anyone who got in the way of the operation.

Mulder response sounded more resigned than angry. "You kidnapped me for the reward money?"

Krycek was the one who suddenly sounded annoyed. "I'm keeping you out of his hands, same as I kept you off that ship. I'm giving you a choice."

Mulder was silent, which was a victory of sorts for Krycek, even though the angry outburst had been unplanned. He checked the clock again and thought about the route they were taking. With any luck, by the time they stopped at the motel, Mulder would have too much on his mind to even consider running away.

Pregnant?

The ER Doctor's first response was a, "Well, duh," look of bewilderment that a seemingly intelligent woman, another doctor in fact and one who was clearly of childbearing age was so easily struck dumb. "Recent sexual activity?" he said, obviously not quite sure what he was going to say next.

"Well - "

"Did you practice safe sex?"

"No, but - "

The doctor shrugged.

"I had IVF treatment. Three courses. And nothing. I didn't think. I don't understand."

The doctor, whose expression had been growing increasingly concerned, suddenly smiled as he realized that the news was presumably unexpected rather than actually unwelcome. "Congratulations."

They wanted to keep her in overnight. "Just for observation. You're obviously dehydrated. We fix that and the dizziness should go. But I'd like to run a few tests to be on the safe side. You should see your OB-GYN doctor as soon as possible - make sure there are no complications, hormone imbalances, no special precautions you should be taking given your difficulties conceiving."

Dazed as well as dizzy now, she lost track of his words and didn't even debate the point. Whatever it took. Whatever they thought best. Pregnant? A baby? She allowed her index finger to brush lightly over the imaginary bump in her belly, trying to visualize the soft skin of her child's head. Mulder, she thought, "You have to come home now. You have to see this."

She swallowed down the dread she'd been feeling, decided to blame the butterflies on unruly hormones. Of course it didn't help that she couldn't reach Mulder's phone. "Out of service area," said the voice at the other end. Skinner's phone was just as unobtainable, which was oddly reassuring. Brooding over phone reception in an Oregon forest? She chided herself for indulging in ridiculous fears.

When Frohike came in, she nearly fainted again. It was written all over his face, screamed out in the slump in his shoulders. He shook his head. "It's Mulder. He's missing. Skinner's organizing the search."

Seven years to get here. Mulder had to come home.

Part 2

According to Krycek, they were just outside Boise. Also according to Krycek, "It doesn't matter where we are. We won't be here tomorrow."

Mulder disagreed; disagreement was mandatory. According to Krycek they were stopping so he could get a few hours rest and so Mulder could get a first look at the files. Mulder, still manacled to the walls of his metal prison and with no real view of the world outside, could only guess that meant they were now in a motel parking lot.

Krycek leaned across the back of the seat to release Mulder's left hand. "I can't drag you to the room, Mulder - too many witnesses. You're just going to have to walk quietly in there with me and then I'll show you the files. I know you don't want to make it easy for me, so I'm going to make it easy for you. You try and run; you raise an alarm; you struggle with me in any way and I'll shoot anyone who sees. Understood?"

"Fuck you." The voice of grim compliance.

"Save it for when we're alone. You don't need a pile of dead bodies to prove that you didn't choose to come with me."

A bluff? Had to be, didn't it? Krycek wouldn't just shoot a bunch of innocents in cold blood, would he? Mulder thought not, but then he'd misread Krycek before. In any case, after hours of being strapped down, he probably wasn't in any shape to take on Krycek and win. The tingling numbness in the fingers of his left hand seemed to confirm it. In any case, the main thing was he still had his backup weapon and there would be other opportunities, provided he didn't spoil his chances by acting too soon and losing the element of surprise.

Krycek handed him the key to the other manacle. "Touch that ankle holster and I'll blow your foot off," he said.

Krycek knew about the second gun and hadn't taken it? Too confused to focus on being angry, Mulder struggled to free his right hand. Finally loose, he tried to stretch his fingers, had to clench them again as the blood ran in and the pins and needles took hold. One more reason to wait for a better moment.

"Nothing stupid, nothing brave," said Krycek. "I'm going to open the door and you're going to step out as if you've been asleep back there and you're happy to be heading to a real bed. Ready?"

Mulder scowled.

Krycek nodded. The van door opened and Mulder kept his eye on Krycek's gun hand as the man showed him the mouth of a pistol nuzzling out from behind his leather jacket.

Krycek passed Mulder the cardkey using his prosthetic hand. "Room 17. Don't test me, Mulder. I'm too tired to play games."

"You never do anything else."

A twenty-yard walk to the room. "Open the door."

Mulder did as he was told, not sure why he was being quite so obliging, but certain that he didn't have a choice. His fingers still didn't feel quite right, but they were at least functional again.

Krycek nudged him towards the center of the room, cold metal against the back of Mulder's head. A solid clunk as the door closed behind them, Mulder could only assume that Krycek had used his foot.

Mulder turned to face him, ready to go ballistic.

Krycek's right hand was holding Mulder's Sig Sauer by its muzzle. Lying in the outstretched plastic palm of his left hand was the weapon's clip. Krycek pushed the gun's grip towards Mulder. "Take it."

"What?" mumbled Mulder, temporarily lost. The indecision was over and done with in an instant. He reached forward, grabbing the weapon and its ammo. A brief visual check found both items satisfactory. The balance, the feel, confirmed the verdict - his gun, his bullets. All present and correct - so far as he could tell.

Krycek was digging around in a bag filled with paperwork. Mulder slid the clip back into place and pointed the gun directly at Krycek's chest.

Krycek ignored him, carried on searching through the documents, emerging with a manila file as non-descript as all the others in the stack. "You should start with this one."

What the hell? Mulder's anger flipped from ice to fire. He should kill the bastard. His finger twitched towards the trigger; the realignment of muscles so familiar that for an instant his mind felt the briefest flicker of déjà vu. The sensation caught him unawares, reminding him of who he was and what he was, and for all Krycek's preaching in the car about him becoming what he was designed to be, he was still Fox Mulder and he was an officer of the law.

Fed or not, he was furious, and there was no avoiding that. He lowered the gun, pouncing forward, sending Krycek tumbling into the wall and the bag of papers flying across the floor.

"Asshole," complained Krycek, and Mulder silenced him with an arm against his throat.

"What is this, Krycek? You drag me here in chains to read a file!"

Krycek glared, and Mulder, recognizing that it wasn't realistic to expect a choking man to reply, gradually eased the pressure on his neck. Realized that he'd eased the pressure too far when Krycek's foot crunched into his shin leaving him off-balance and easy prey for an elbow to the ribs that sent him crashing into the wall.

To Mulder's surprise, Krycek didn't follow up with an arm to the throat or even a knee to the groin. A brief stand-off as some of the fire in Krycek's eyes faded, and then Krycek took a step back, shaking his head, looking down at his left arm. "You could have trashed the elbow joint. You know how long it takes to get new parts made for these things?"

What? Mulder stood up straight, looked at the prosthetic and then back up into Krycek's face. The man looked genuinely hurt, insulted, offended even. He surely couldn't be expecting an apology?

Krycek finally shook his head and turned away. "Read the file, Mulder. Read that file and then decide if you need to read the others. You're pissed; I know that. Let's just take that as a given and get on with the job."

Sighing, Mulder let his head fall back against the wall, pushed away again with his foot to move towards the small desk and wondered why he was still listening to this. He could just walk out of here. Hand to hand they were a pretty even match. Krycek would have to shoot him to stop him and, though he couldn't explain why, Mulder was confident that he wouldn't do it. If only because Mulder was now carrying two loaded weapons and might forget all that stuff about being the good guy if he was wounded or threatened.

Mulder picked up the phone.

"Don't," said Krycek. Mild, like a reminder, not harsh like an order. "If you call her, they'll know you aren't on that ship, and nothing will stop them from hunting you down."

Mulder frowned, irritated that Krycek had guessed who he was calling. "She needs to know." They'd already had this conversation on the road. According to Krycek the Consortium was so eager to capture Mulder that they wouldn't care how many alarm bells they rang or FBI agents they brought into the fight.

"She's safe as long as you're on that ship. Soon as they hear you're on the run, they'll take her." Krycek paused, looking carefully at Mulder. "Read the file." He waved vaguely towards Mulder's cellphone, wallet and ID where they rested on the bedside table. "You have time to think. Give yourself an hour, then decide."

Two hours later and, with a couple of cups of coffee and a plateful of steak sandwiches that Krycek had brought back from a neighboring restaurant inside him, Mulder was still reading. Still digesting files and images and trying to make sense of terms like merchandise, enhancements and failure rates. His own file, this one dating back only as far as the incident with the rubbings from the alien ship, and the strange brain activity that had seemingly ended abruptly under a surgeon's knife at Cancerman's direction was a sickening mix of clinical precision and euphemistic spin.

The enhancements were going to make the merchandise fail catastrophically. Untreated, the flaws would inevitably lead to early termination. The report held out one faint hope - with the right drug regimen and suitably sophisticated life support systems, maybe only the body would die.

His head hurt. He hurt. The file was wrong. Yet it didn't feel wrong. The file sounded like it knew exactly what he'd been going through over the past few months of hospital visits and doctor's appointments. In fact it sounded like it knew rather more than he did about both the underlying cause and the prognosis. None of the possible outcomes mentioned in the file held any appeal. Which left him one option, and that was to disagree.

Not that disagreement helped, he'd disagreed with everything so far on this journey with Krycek and yet he was still here, sitting in a non-descript motel room, having been kidnapped and transported in chains across the state line into Idaho. If he didn't have anything solid to charge Krycek with before, then he certainly had it now. He glanced at his wrists, noted the way the bruises were darkening. It struck him that they could have been worse; at least Krycek had adjusted the cuffs to fit correctly.

"Your choice," said Krycek, playing with the TV remote, not actually moving off CNN, and not even looking at Mulder.

Choice? Like there was any kind of choice. Stay invisible, play dead, and maybe do something that, according to Krycek, might be useful and possibly even critical to the future of mankind, or make a phone call to Skinner or Scully and look forward to spending the next few years as the Consortium's chief lab rat. Assuming of course that such intervention by Strughold and his associates didn't arouse the curiosity of the aliens as well. "Why the hell should I believe you?"

"What have you got to lose? Stick around and you may learn something. Or walk out - now, next week, next month. Only difference is if you walk out now, then by this time next week you'll be wishing you were dead."

Mulder snorted at that. If he stayed with Krycek, then maybe by this time next week he would be dead. Just walk out, walk away now. Pick up the phone and call Scully. If he was in trouble then it was Scully he needed. For once his gut agreed with his brain - just call her, they said.

If he was in trouble then her phone would be tapped and that would lead them straight to him. Which was OK because he'd planned for this kind of eventuality. More accurately, they'd planned for it, even if Scully had tried to act as if she was humoring him in a hypothetical discussion not preparing for an eventual life or death struggle. Run, hide, switch to one of the fake identities the Gunmen had helped him to arrange and then get a message to Scully. Easy.

So why was he still listening to Krycek weave tales of Consortium infighting and genetic engineering?

Commonsense was screaming loud and clear, so why was it so hard to walk away? His fully loaded Sig Sauer and turned-off, but otherwise fully functional, cell phone were reassuringly close to his right hand, resting on the bedside table in the Extended Stay hotel alongside his credit cards and FBI credentials. How long had Krycek been using this room? Did he have a whole string of places like this, permanently on call, just in case he needed to transport a federal agent cross country?

The guns were the biggest problem, their implications profound, and currently well beyond his ability to analyze. The loaded Beretta had never left his ankle holster. Krycek had handed the Sig Sauer back to him as soon as they'd entered the motel room.

Ice cold and furious, Mulder had pointed it directly at his captor. Infuriatingly, Krycek had chosen to ignore it. Even when Mulder followed up by slamming Krycek into a wall, Krycek had done no more than reciprocate the move. Mulder could already feel the bruise forming on his elbow. Just another one to add to the collection.

The guns, according to Krycek, were a gesture of good faith, which didn't help Mulder resolve the confusion. Krycek and fucked up were probably synonyms.

Good faith or not, Mulder still remembered the rest of the story. Tasered into submission in the back of the panel truck. Flopping into oblivion as Krycek held the chloroform-soaked rag over his nose. Chained down and unconscious. Waking up nauseated, disoriented and restrained.

Now he was half-lying, half-sitting on a bed in a room with an assassin for hire and the knowledge that if anyone was looking for him then they would certainly be looking in the wrong place. Another look at the gun, another glance at his bruised wrists as his hands clenched into fists. His breaths coming closer together as the thoughts chased through his brain.

Krycek picked up on his discomfort. "If I hadn't knocked you out, you wouldn't have any choice."

Mulder shook his head, amused disbelief as his lips pulled wider in a grimace of a smile.

Krycek turned to face him. "You'd have run straight back to Skinner and the Consortium would have picked you up at the motel in Bellefleur." He looked back at the TV screen. "Or you could have gone on that ship. I'm giving you a choice - live on your feet, or die in a cage."

"Why? Why are you doing this, Krycek?"

"Why does anyone do anything?"

Great, just great. Now Krycek was playing shrink games with him.

Krycek was watching him, far too cool, far too controlled for Mulder's liking; his voice too sure in its delivery. "You're the profiler. You work it out. Everything you need's in those files."

By the time Skinner found himself stammering through his carefully prepared speech in Scully's hospital room Mulder had been missing for more than 36 hours. What exactly do you say to someone whose other half had been stolen from right in front of your eyes? "I lost him. I don't know what else I can say. I lost him. I'll be asked... what I saw. And what I saw, I can't deny. I won't."

Even as he spoke, the words sounded pale. What had he seen? A UFO? A military experiment? A bright white light? All he knew for sure was that Mulder was gone and that he had no idea how to bring him back.

After more than a day spent hunting for evidence in an Oregon forest, he knew that exposing the truth was an easy commitment to make in the privacy of his own thoughts, but that without compelling evidence it would be a much harder thing to deliver in front of the Bureau brass. Too easy to lose the truth in a sea of rationalization and ambiguity. Skinner didn't care. He was ready and willing to nail his flag to a UFO that only he had seen. It was the least he could do for Mulder and for Scully. Wasn't it?

Would it do any good to tell the truth? Would it do anything more than get him transferred or sidelined and wouldn't that leave Scully isolated and alone? What did he really know? The burning determination to deliver the truth at any price was already fading and he hated himself for it. He replayed his own words and felt their inadequacy. Even here, in the calm of Scully's hospital room, faced with the only audience that might believe him, he couldn't say it out loud. Couldn't tell her that an alien space ship had stolen her partner.

He needed to get out of this room. Scully needed his support; she didn't need to see her boss collapse under the weight of knowledge that she'd struggled with for years.

She was talking to him and all he could think about was running away. He didn't run. A Marine doesn't run. Aching at the stiffness he saw in her posture, the agony in her face, he stood his ground, and forced himself to listen as Scully struggled to tell him something in return. Cancer, he thought, when she took too long to explain why she was in a hospital bed. What if Mulder came back only to find Scully dead or dying? He locked his muscles and made himself wait it out.

What she said was nothing that he'd been preparing himself for.

"I'm having a hard time explaining it. Or believing it. But - I'm pregnant."

AN SUV IN UTAH

"He killed my father," said Krycek, sounding resolute but matter of fact.

Mulder snorted at that, amazed. He'd been ready for another pointless argument; he hadn't been ready for this. When he'd demanded an explanation for his father's death, he'd anticipated excuses and evasion. A rhetorical question delivered somewhere between statement and accusation. Even to Mulder, the words he'd spoken seemed to lack the passion and gravity they deserved, driven more by ritual than necessity. He wondered vaguely if he was still drugged. But it was too late to retreat now. He'd asked the damned question and now he had to face Krycek's reply. Voice shaky with disbelief. "You're saying you killed my father as revenge?"

"I killed him because I was ordered to."

"Then why are you telling me - "

"Because he was a player. He was up to his neck in it," barked Krycek, coming in loud and clear, and then suddenly letting the volume fall again. "And you know it."

Yes, but. Yes, but, what? Head throbbing, the logical aftermath of hours of drugged sleep and a bumpy ride strapped down in the back of a van. Even after an edgy few hours rest in an anonymous motel he was still exhausted. When had Krycek slept? Why did he care? Why was he even listening to this? And yet there was something here; Mulder could feel it. Some truth was standing there, just out of reach, and he had to chase it, because that was who he was. "Why was your father killed?"

Krycek took a moment to respond, seemingly left off-balance by the question. He frowned, fingers dancing over the steering wheel, then swallowed, eyes still locked on the road ahead. "To protect you."

The investigation into Mulder's disappearance was by the book. What it lacked in inspiration it made up for in numbers. Three days after Mulder's disappearance Skinner got a polite advisory visit from Deputy Director Jana Cassidy. "Step away, Walter. You're too close."

Not close enough. One look at Scully as she stood on the edge of the task force briefing, looking exhausted and angry, made it clear that when it mattered he'd been too far away.

Kersh on the other hand looked pleased to be here. Skinner reconsidered it. Not pleased, Kersh wasn't gloating, not exactly. Perhaps it would be fairer to say the man looked like he was in his element then? Yes, that was it. Kersh was relishing the chase, a tangible X-File to battle against.

"He ran or he was taken," said Kersh, politely arrogant, a newly promoted Deputy Director talking to a passed-over Assistant Director with more years on the clock and more enemies in the shadows. "We all know the drill. Mid-life crisis? Mental breakdown?" Kersh licked his lips and shrugged. "Some perp with a grudge? Some of the Bureau's finest are working on this. Go home, Assistant Director - get some rest - Agent Scully, too." Kersh stared at Skinner for a moment, the polite facade shifting to something more like a challenge. "Unless you've remembered something more?"

"I told you what I saw." In fact Skinner had told the whole task force about a light that hid rather than illuminated and an object that surged up into the night sky but didn't appear on radar and didn't leave any trace on the ground. Mumbled comments had followed from agents who should have known better, quickly stifled when Kersh raised his head and grunted a wordless warning.

The luxury of ignorance, thought Skinner, trying not to care and failing. How the hell did Scully stand it? He glanced in her direction and realized that she couldn't. Emotions masked but too close to boiling over to keep entirely bottled up, pain seeping into her eyes. Maybe he should take Kersh's advice, just for tonight. Drive Scully home perhaps? She needed to keep her strength up, but he thought that was probably the last thing that she'd want to hear.

"I'll be back in the morning," said Skinner, ignoring the tight-lipped grimace on Kersh's face. "First thing. If there are any developments overnight, I'd like your team leader to keep me informed."

Not waiting for Kersh's reply, Skinner started towards Scully, pausing briefly en route to speak to the agent running the manhunt. "Agent Doggett - keep me apprised, any time, day or night." Skinner handed him a card that included his home and cell phone numbers as well as the official ones.

He kept it together as he spoke to Scully. "Nothing's going to happen tonight. Why don't you come back fresh in the morning?" A question delivered as an order.

To his relief, Scully nodded, squaring her shoulders before carefully gathering up the files from the table in front of her. He recognized the body language: exhaustion, emotional and physical, was dampening her movements, forcing her into awkward robot steps. He doubted that she'd risk a sleeping pill, so he doubted that she'd sleep. But she could have a little solitude; put her feet up; close her eyes; cry it all away. Whatever she needed to do to recharge her batteries and recover at least a little of her strength.

It sounded like a plan. He helped her slide her arms into her jacket and pretended not to notice that the tears so carefully withheld all day were now dancing on her eyelashes waiting for their chance to fall.

"Let's go," he said.

She nodded, turning her back on him and moving swiftly towards the door.

Part 3

Days of hard driving had taken them down through Utah across Arizona and into New Mexico, continually crisscrossing and doubling back on themselves, covering hundreds of extra miles in order to follow Krycek's preferred roads.

"Less surveillance, fewer cameras," Krycek had said, looking at Mulder as if he was uncertain whether the agent was being difficult or merely dumb for actually daring to question the route. A hard smile as he'd added, "Or you could go and lie down in the back and I'll put on my ski mask if you think that'll make us less conspicuous."

Snaking their way past volcano country, they stopped again, this time for groceries, and Mulder knew that meant that they were almost "there" even though Krycek had been describing "there" as "soon" for several hours now.

Krycek glanced briefly at Mulder as they entered the store. "Whatever you want," he said.

Mulder shrugged, mind blanking on what or how he was supposed to respond to that. He was going shopping with Krycek? In what universe?

A single wistful look at the payphones by the door and Mulder followed Krycek deeper in. Seeing well-stocked shelves but unable to focus on their contents, he turned his attention back to Krycek. The man moved steadily from shelf to shelf, loading up the cart without a moment's hesitation or doubt, seemingly working to some kind of mental checklist. A month's worth of supplies maybe?

Krycek threw two different brands of toothpaste into the cart and that was just plain disturbing. He acknowledged Mulder's surprise. "It's the kind you always buy," he said, and Mulder's brain jumped briefly between admiration at the man's preparedness and anger at the intrusion, before sliding into profiler mode and storing the information away for later analysis.

Another couple of hours on the road and they were finally stopping, somewhere close to nowhere, not far from the Oklahoma state line, in what looked like an abandoned quarry. Krycek parked the recently acquired pickup truck under the shady entrance to the main building.

No fanfare. No announcement of home, sweet, home. Just, "I'll start the generator. We need to get unloaded."

The generator shuddered obediently to life. Mulder, freezer bags in hand, followed Krycek up the stairs, surprised to find curiosity temporarily overruling his anger and discomfort, and even his desire to pick another fight.

The heat made the three flights of stairs more of a challenge than Mulder was ready for, reminded him of sleepless nights and migraine-addled days on the drive down here and even from the ones that had come before.

The site manager's accommodation, actually the top floor of the main office and storage building, was airless and agonizingly hot. Looking disturbingly familiar with the place, Krycek moved swiftly to open windows and turn on air-conditioning units. Mulder could only hope that the generator was up to it. By the time they completed their third trip from truck to apartment, the air was a little more breathable.

Krycek had taken the food into the kitchen and Mulder wasn't surprised, when he looked into the room, to see that the fresh and frozen food had already been put safely away.

It was hard to discount the feeling that Krycek was working to a script while he was flying blind. How often did Krycek do this kind of thing? How long had he been preparing for this particular scenario?

The place smelled stale and disused despite Krycek's obvious familiarity with it. The blend of avocado green fittings in the kitchen and orange drapes in the living room betrayed its age. Yet it was still in remarkably good shape, fully-furnished and everything intact.

The cushions on the couch were plump; their corduroy covers still crisply ridged not patchily smooth. The kitchen was stocked with a full complement of pots and pans. The appliances were clean and seemingly in good condition, despite the yellowing of the plastics and the dullness of the metal surfaces. Nothing was old and battered, but none of it was new.

They could have been walking around inside the set for some 1970s retro movie. Except for the boxes of groceries, the new cell phones bought en route for cash, and of course the TV, microwave, DVD player and all the other electronic goodies that Krycek had brought along for the ride. They'd switched vehicles twice more after the first stop in Idaho, unpacking and repacking items, and adding to the collection of objects as they did. Finally switching to the beat-up pickup truck with its New Mexico plates just before their final food and refueling stop.

Mulder considered the signs of previous occupation. At a guess, based on the tarnished metal of the door handles and the labels on the older cans in the cupboards, the operation had been abandoned twenty, maybe even thirty years ago. A sick feeling in his gut. "They left in a hurry."

"You could say that," agreed Krycek, talking from one of the bedrooms as he unpacked a suitcase only to immediately pack an overnight bag. "I'll be gone for a couple of days. There's food, water, fuel for the generator. Don't contact anyone." He lifted his right arm to point at the case that housed the satellite phone. "For emergencies. Real emergencies."

"I know," grumbled Mulder, parroting words that he didn't quite believe and yet couldn't actually bring himself to discount. "If they know I'm alive and free, the Consortium will come after me. If they think I went on that ship they'll just have to wait and hope that I'll be returned."

Krycek looked at him, paused from packing until he was sure he had Mulder's attention. "This time they mean it. They thought... It doesn't matter what they thought. You're their only chance - they'll do anything to get you."

Tired of the repetition, exhausted by going round the same tight little loop of conversation, Mulder completed Krycek's speech for him. "Unless they think I'm beyond reach."

"You touch that phone - you sign Scully's death warrant. If they know you're alive, they'll take her as bait to draw you out."

As if Krycek hadn't repeated the statement a dozen times in the past two days, and every time he made the speech that was always the sucker punch. Mulder groaned at being caught by it again. He really should be used to it by now. His words came out fighting, coolly sarcastic. "So I should just sit here while you - do - what?"

"Something I should have done a long time ago." Krycek pointed to another small case that Mulder assumed contained a laptop. "Password's vengeance. If you need it, the car keys are behind the visor." Made sure that Mulder heard the word need.

Fine. What did it matter anyway? Krycek was going to run off to do God knows what to God knows whom and Mulder was going to stay home and play house.

Just give it a few days, Krycek had said. Give yourself time to read the files and think it through, Krycek had insisted. Stand up and fight smart and maybe one day you'll return home a hero, or make the wrong call and die a lab rat's death.

Mulder glanced at the satellite phone. The perfect opportunity to make the wrong call. If using it could kill Scully then he might as well blast the damned thing to bits now. Plenty of bullets left for whatever else he might need to do.

"Where the hell are you going, Krycek?"

"Why? Worried about the ghosts of miners past?"

There was more truth to Krycek's jibe than Mulder dared hear. He suddenly realized that he didn't want to be alone. Shouldn't he be glad to see the back of the treacherous bastard? If what he needed was a brief pause to collect his thoughts and analyze the files that Krycek had supplied, then wasn't solitude an advantage? Three days on the road with a killer for hire wasn't a relationship, not even a pragmatically made business alliance. It wasn't even the beginning of one.

Of course he didn't trust Krycek; how could he? "Not planning on committing any felonies are you?"

Krycek paused from his packing, offered a slight smile, his eyebrows high in mocking salute. "Nothing of interest to the Bureau."

"How the hell do I know that this isn't just a trap, that you won't call your Consortium buddies as soon as you leave here?"

"Why would I wait until we got here to do that?" Krycek's mocking smile faded. "Stay or go. I'm not your jailer."

But he was, and Mulder knew it. It stung Mulder that Krycek knew it too. All he'd had to do was push the right buttons - Scully, tests, invasion, truth, resistance - and the agent had fastened the manacles on himself. Mulder turned away, feigned sudden interest in the contents of the kitchen cabinets and didn't look round until he heard Krycek close the apartment's door.

The sound of the pick-up's engine drew Mulder to the window. A swoosh of dust and Krycek was gone.

Alone and wired so tight he was ready to start bouncing off the walls, Mulder decided to test the boundaries of his alleged freedom. The car hidden behind the big doors still worked. It started first time. It even had fuel and water, at least if the gauges were to be believed.

Mulder's own weapons were loaded and, based on the damage they did to an old Coke can foolish enough to come into range, he concluded they were fully functional.

He tapped his jacket pocket where it hung by the apartment door and felt the reassurance of spare clips.

Even the shotgun in the closet near the top of the stairwell with its supply of what Krycek described as magnetite cartridges looked like the real thing. Krycek's explanation of those had fallen somewhere between vague and infuriating. "If you weren't sure if you were shooting a werewolf or a wolf, you'd still want the silver bullets - wouldn't you? It's all on the computer."

The apartment made as little sense as the rest of it. It was too comfortable, too well appointed. Not merely out of time with its seventies color schemes but out of place as well. Too expensively furnished, too city in its design to be out here in the heart of an abandoned quarry.

Clearly it was a trap. Yet if it was a trap, then it was a good one. All the comforts of home and enough rope to hang himself.

SCULLY'S APARTMENT

The apartment looked wrong, as if everything had moved three inches sideways perhaps. It even smelled wrong, though logically not enough time could have possibly elapsed for that to be true. Scully pressed on into her living room, knowing that it wasn't really the apartment that was off.

Skinner had driven her home. It surprised her that she'd allowed him to do that. She'd excused the lapse as being for his benefit rather than hers and hadn't invited him in for coffee. Forcing a brisk goodnight, she'd insisted on carrying in her own laptop and briefcase, and hadn't allowed the mask to slip further.

It was the first time she'd been completely alone since Mulder disappeared. It had taken every ounce of her resolve and her OB-GYN's blandishments to keep her in that hospital bed while the FBI looked for Mulder in Oregon.

The Lone Gunmen had enlisted her mother to play guard dog. When she heard that Skinner was coming back to DC, she knew what had happened. There was no way that Skinner would have left the scene unless Mulder was truly gone.

Why was she making coffee? She didn't want coffee.

A brief shiver of nausea and Scully could recall the look of anger and concern on her mother's face as she left her house that morning.

"I have to go back to work, mom. It's my only chance to find him."

"You said that there's nowhere to look."

What Mulder had never really accepted was that the truth sucked. What her mom had to accept was that, "I have to try."

"You don't just have Fox to think about."

As if she didn't know that. As if that thought hadn't been replaying on a tight little loop since the moment the doctor told her that she was pregnant. Of course, that thought had had to time-share with another that asked how the hell could she be pregnant and a third that demanded that she find Mulder.

Mulder wasn't findable, was he? But what if Mulder was in one of those mysterious boxcars that had carried her away? What if the same men who made the chip that was wedged in the back of her neck were experimenting on him in some railroad siding?

So what if he was? They still wouldn't find him. Seven damned years and all they had to show for it were cabinets full of files and bodies full of scars. Must do better, Agent Scully. Had to.

Pregnant? How on earth could she be pregnant? What about that trip with the Smoking Man? Surely he couldn't have done something to her? Just because the man was offering miracle cures didn't mean that she'd been a recipient of one herself. She would have known, wouldn't she? Just because she'd woken up from drugged slumber to find herself in a strange bed wearing only her nightclothes didn't mean that - don't go there.

Maybe all those hormones she'd taken during the IVF treatment had more effect than her doctors believed. Maybe it had triggered her body to function again, found a lone undamaged ova and worked its magic, despite the odds against. Maybe science got lucky for once?

Perhaps it was Jenn; maybe it was Mulder's genie who sent this to them as a parting gift?

Maybe God had heard her prayers?

Did it matter? She was pregnant. She had someone else to think of apart from herself. Someone to care about other than Mulder.

The shower sluiced away the day's grime, but neither refreshed her body nor touched her mood. She headed for the bedroom, forcing herself to go through the motions of life knowing that if sleep came tonight, it would be from exhaustion not relaxation.

The screen was annoyingly small. The lack of Internet access frustrating at best, agonizing at worst.

Apart from breaks to fix a few sandwiches and make the occasional pot of coffee, Mulder had spent most of the past two days submerged in a mire of files. The deceptively small laptop was carrying at least 50,000 pages of data. Some of it as text. Some in complex relational databases that he hadn't really begun to get a handle on. Some of it as image copies of old documents, faxes and handwritten notes.

He guessed he'd at best skimmed the barest surface of maybe a tenth of the material. Some files documented thousands of different test subjects being put through hundreds of tests. Others discussed project personnel: their deployment, management and funding. Then there were the equipment lists, site plans, project timetables, proposals for new tests, step-by-step instructions for old tests, briefings on the care and handling of human guinea pigs so as to cause the minimum ripple in the wider world. Mountains of it.

Some of it seemed to date back to the fifties. Some of the memos might have been older still. The most recent material appeared to be around a year old.

To make matters worse he had no decent tools to search the files. If the Gunmen were here - but no, he'd come this far and, though the temptation to jump into the car, drive to the airport, board a plane and make copies of the hard drive before dropping off the machine at the offices of the New York Times was almost overwhelming, he wasn't quite ready to succumb. What he would do though was drive into town tomorrow. Wherever town was.

He looked at the map. None of the names rang many bells, though the idea of a Texline or a Wheeless held a certain appeal.

The siren call of a library and public access terminals caught him again. "Anonymous and untraceable aren't the same thing," said a memory of John Byers sounding awfully like his conscience. They'd debated this kind of thing before, looking for the perfect solution for a hypothetical life on the run. "You can set up a fresh Hotmail account every day, but if Scully gets an email from it on a site where she can be seen, then with the right access somebody can trace the source IP address and they've got a location for the sender. You need to control the line to disguise it."

In any case, even if he used a suitably roundabout route to contact her, a birthday greeting in one of the dailies, a question on a non-related newsgroup using keywords that only Scully would spot or one of the other methods they'd discussed, he still couldn't do it. Still must not do it.

What was he going to say? "I'm alive and well. See you later." Would a message like that from Scully have stopped him from worrying if their situations were reversed? Would a rider instructing her to act as if she'd never seen the message lest she trigger some worse tragedy for them both reassure her? Or would it just make her more determined than ever to track him down?

It wasn't that long since Scully went off on that joy-ride with Cancerman. All the "fines" in the world wouldn't have stopped him from worrying or from searching.

Best if she thought he was on that UFO. Nothing she could do about it if that was his location. No foolish risk she might suddenly feel driven to take to try and bring him back. In any case, once he had a better handle on the data and understood Krycek's claims that he'd been "designed" as a secret weapon then he would find his way back to her and they could talk about this face to face again.

There were other reasons to go to town though, even if finding the right kind of town was easier said than done. He tried to guess how far he'd have to travel to buy an external hard drive to create a disk image, and a DAT drive for easy duplication. Which gave him another dilemma: he knew the jargon but, without the Gunmen, the reality was that he'd be buying blind.

What if he bought the wrong thing and screwed it all up, destroying data rather than copying it? Could he risk taking the machine into a store to get advice? Maybe he needed a city? Sure, but if he went to Albuquerque or Amarillo why not just get on the next flight home?

Because Krycek said that he mustn't and Mulder had almost bought into Krycek's request for a voluntary delay before resurfacing. A time for reflection and research. Just a few days to think it through and understand all the implications. But that never-quite-agreed-to deal had been made before Mulder had seen the contents of the laptop. The Gunmen needed to copy this. Scully needed to see it. The world needed to know.

It was all or nothing. Stay silent, as Krycek advised, and bide his time until the right opportunity arose or scream it from the rooftops now and hope that full exposure could offer a different kind of security?

He looked back at the screen again. Of course the idea of thousands of test subjects in a database wasn't actually incriminating at all. You could chose to believe that the columns reflected voluntary answers to an opinion survey on the lovability or otherwise of some brand of coffee rather than the voltage level at which the victims passed out during testing, or the brightness of light to which they could be exposed before permanent retinal scarring occurred.

Volume of data wasn't enough, not when the keys to the databases and report cards looked like scruffy memos or back of an envelope doodles rather than highly confidential, critically important documents on which billions of dollars and maybe even billions of lives might depend. The absence of anything that even approached an abstract or a management summary in the files he'd examined just made it worse.

The files were mostly raw data; the sheer quantity acting as a kind of bizarre security, the lack of indices providing another layer.

It occurred to him that perhaps the explanation might be just that simple. These might be working copies of the files. Databases left open on some scientist's machine. Photocopied notes from someone's desk. Incomplete snapshots of encrypted files captured by some PC keylogging virus. The kind of thing a trusted second string like Marita Covarrubias or even a treacherous son of a bitch like Alex Krycek might get access to.

Despite years on the X-Files he really knew very little about the Consortium, its organization or its intentions. Adding what he'd now read in Krycek's files to those little hints he'd been offered by people like Bill Mulder and Deep Throat in the past, he could only conclude that in the early years the leaders were honestly enthusiastic about their task.

Enthusiastic enough that, according to the laptop, they'd offered themselves as the first human guinea pigs. Throwing the net wider, they turned their attention to the military. When that resource proved inadequate, they looked further afield, and the nation became their laboratory.

At the same time they improved their techniques for managing the memories of victims until all that could be seen was the occasional error in which somebody would talk about aliens and airmen but the world would hear only hysteria and hallucination.

The leadership's faith in their project was seemingly strong enough that they continued to include themselves in the tests. At any rate they included their wives and children, and even the occasional husband, in the trials.

So far as Mulder could tell, the first of the genetically modified offspring to survive gestation was born in 1958. The majority of that year's crop died within days. By 61, survival rates were better, mostly because they'd scaled down their ambitions - brains or brawn, telepathy or radiation resistance, and so on.

Had Bill Mulder looked down a list of features and chosen which ones his son was to possess, knowing the more boxes he ticked, the less chance of the kid surviving? Perhaps it was a lucky dip, a random choice by an anonymous technician, though that hardly seemed likely. Not if dad had the kind of power that Krycek suggested.

Which bits of him were real then? What came courtesy of mom and dad and what had been manufactured in a test tube? He'd accused his mom of having an affair with Cancerman. If he was reading this right then daddy could have been a mix and match of a dozen men and some things that weren't even men at all.

His mind flashed to thoughts of flounder genes implanted into strawberries to act as antifreeze and he wondered if surviving trips to the Arctic and Antarctic said more about him than he wanted to know. Maybe it explained the swimming thing. Shit. He almost laughed, thoughts racing past the possible via the improbable into the bizarre. Too much information and too little knowledge.

He'd found his file or at least what was probably his file if the folder he'd found in the vaults of the Strughold Mine years ago was right. 61/292544 documented changes made before, during and after fertilization, but the combination of technical complexity and the lack of searchable cross-references made it hard to see what it meant beyond the bare fact that "something" had been done.

So far, all he really knew was how big this thing was, how little of it he understood, and how badly he needed help.

Stretching back in the chair, angry muscles complained and tired eyes took the opportunity to blink closed. He was still low on sleep, lower still on energy.

Sleep, he thought, offering himself the only escape route he was allowed. He didn't want sleep; he wanted Scully. Permitted the words to escape from the cage in his head and bounce around in his conscious thoughts, relishing the moment of freedom even as he braced himself against the pain of memory.

Unforgivable. The word spun and he closed his eyes a little tighter as if that could block the images from closing in. He thought back to their last night together, to a tired motel room on the edge of an Oregon forest. "So much more you can do with your life." A moment of truth hiding the lie within.

God, he'd wanted her that night. Wanted to lose himself in her. It hadn't even been her body he'd craved; he'd wanted her soul. At least he'd had the guts not to follow through. At least he'd been able to stop at comforting her. He'd kept the promise he'd made to himself the day the neurologist in a Philadelphia hospital finally stopped using phrases like, "there's a danger of," and started talking about a, "need to prepare yourself," instead.

They'd had one week together before the doctor's verdict was pronounced. They'd made love three times in that extraordinary week. Three times. He'd had longer one-night stands.

"Your timing sucks," he muttered, snorting in a lungful of air and wishing for something he was scared to admit to wanting, even in his head.

Ashamed, he remembered his relief as Scully let him off the hook after he got the new prognosis. First of all she'd agreed, without so much as a questioning look, to his declaration that he needed a couple of weekends alone to sort out things related to his mother's estate. Then, after a week in a hospital bed suffering from the after-effects of an assault by tobacco larvae, she'd accepted his claims of tiredness and a need to sleep it all away.

"Should have told her," he said, wondering momentarily if Krycek or someone had the place bugged and was going to use talking to himself as evidence of something later, then laughed at the thought of just how insignificant that particular symptom would seem compared to the rest.

Couldn't tell her. Hadn't come up with a way to tell her. Telling her would have made it real. Telling her would have been dangerous - what if she'd said they should make the best of the time they had left together?

Better to back away. Better to retreat. Better not to die in her arms. Not slowly, not with her eyes betraying love and pity and concern as deterioration set in and the drugs became impossible to avoid.

"Sorry," he said at last. Not sure whom he was talking to, thinking that maybe it was himself. He'd tell her; next time he saw her, he'd tell the truth. Explain about the brain disease, the headaches, the warnings in the doctors' words.

And now he'd also have to tell her about the things he'd read in these Consortium files that said he was a freak and that it might be necessary to keep the freak alive, whether he wanted to stay alive or not.

A shuddering deep breath and he opened his eyes, forcing himself to come back to the here and now.

The cell phone that he wasn't supposed to use, despite there being no paper trail linking it to him, blinked "No Service" which was hardly a surprise. He turned it off again, not wanting to see the words.

The satellite phone was the worst possible solution. If someone was waiting for him to resurface then that would simply give them an early warning.

If he got this lot back to DC then he could get it out in front of the public. The Bureau had people who specialized in unraveling paper chains, tracking money movements, and identifying falsified and anomalous employment histories. They were good at it, and with this kind of documentation as a starting point they could achieve a lot more than he'd ever done.

If he was going to make a break back to DC, then the faster and more directly he did it the better. If they thought he was on that UFO, then they wouldn't be actively looking for him. Which meant if he moved fast enough now then he could fly home and, with some electronic magic and a little luck, he'd have passed on everything that Krycek had given him before anyone realized he was back in town.

Everything that Krycek had given him? He sighed, throwing back his head, closing his eyes for a moment. Krycek's computer. Krycek's files.

Didn't matter. Those files should be out there and one way or another he was going to make sure that's where they went. Besides which, there was no way they were Krycek's files in any sense other than that he'd stolen them from his employers or maybe been handed them by someone like Marita. Fine. Mulder would leave him a receipt from the FBI to indicate the removal of property. If Krycek dared, maybe he could get the Bureau to reimburse the cost of replacing the machine.

Mulder was going home.

Another yawn, more rubbing at tired eyes and aching temples. He thought about the drive to the airport. Hours of driving on empty roads. It would be a long night. A sudden flash on a conversation in a car. "The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that over 190,000 fatal car crashes every year are linked to sleepiness." Special Agent Alex Krycek told him that - a lifetime ago.

Despite the source of the information, he accepted the glimmer of truth. He might need to be on top of his game to get home safely. A few hours sleep were a necessity. What mattered was that the decision had been taken. Tomorrow he would be going home.

Part 4

The Lone Gunmen had a lot of information but from Skinner's perspective none of it was useful.

The evidence, such as it was, fell somewhere in the range circumstantial, incomprehensible and inadmissible. Magnetic anomalies, lights in the sky, reports on MUFON bulletin boards. Plenty of coincidences, suspicions and observations, but nothing that Skinner could offer to Kersh as proof of an alien presence and of a quasi-governmental conspiracy to hide it.

The Gunmen were arguing over the interpretation of satellite thermal images in densely forested regions. His eyes slid towards Scully again, trying not to make it too obvious that he was watching her. He realized that he had nothing to be concerned about on that score; she didn't seem to know that there was anyone else in the room. Eyes wide open, mouth pulled into a flat line, Scully sat, slumping a little in the chair, staring at her lightly interlaced fingers, as they rested in her lap.

She was tired, that much he knew. She was lost in thought, that much he understood. He ought to respect her privacy and pretend that he'd noticed nothing but he couldn't do it. He'd always prided himself on protecting his people and he'd failed to protect Mulder. He wasn't going to fail her.

"Scully." When she didn't stir, he tried again. "Dana. Come on. Let me take you home."

"I'm not tired," she said, her tone equal parts exhaustion and stubbornness.

Skinner nodded. "I know. And you won't be tired tomorrow."

To his relief, after a moment's thought her fingers drifted to touch her stomach and she smiled. The expression lost in an instant; the new tension in her jaw threatening to pull tears from her eyes. She rose, nodding once towards the Gunmen before heading for the door.

Something about cars changed the rules. Maybe the borrowed security of metal walls or the artificial privacy of enclosure. Whatever it was, it gave him permission to speak. "When you were missing, he never stopped looking. Even when he was working other cases, he didn't stop."

Her face was turned away from him, eyes fixed resolutely on the view from the passenger window, but the stiff set of her shoulders told him that he had her full attention. "It blinded him. He nearly killed Duane Barry. It nearly got him killed. He went after the Smoker. He wanted revenge. He gave me his resignation."

That last piece of information actually provoked a, "Why?" from Scully and he could only guess that she'd never heard that story before.

"He was scared of losing himself - to vengeance, to anger, to a foolish mistake. He wanted to be there when you came back. You've got to do the same for him. He'll need you when he gets back."

The night had been too short or possibly too long. Not enough sleep, too many dreams. Instead of waking up rested, he'd jumped directly to agitated. Thousands of ants scrambling across his flesh. Millions of thoughts chasing in angry procession through his brain.

Genetically engineered by Bill Mulder to fight a war to save the world. Really? Not unique in that respect, there were thousands of files on that computer. So what was supposed to be so different about him, what made him so damned special? Of course, he only had Krycek's word that he was in any way different to the thousands of other failed experiments. Gibson Praise was "special"; they'd seen the brain scans to prove it. It hadn't helped Gibson or anyone else.

Being "special" had hospitalized Mulder last year, a set of drawings sending his brain into a toxic overload that hadn't ended until Cancerman's butchers chopped out the offending parts. At least, that's what he'd thought they'd done, what the brain scans Scully had insisted on afterwards seemed to suggest. How could he possibly matter to them now, if he hadn't mattered to them then? According to Scully, when she found him in the bowels of the DoD it looked like they'd decided to let him die.

"Changing," that was how Krycek phrased it. Mulder didn't know whether to feel impressed or insulted by the careful neutrality of the word. Changing for the better or the worse? He already knew about some of the changes. Changing from Regular Tylenol to Extra Strength. Changing from screaming nightmares when he was asleep to terrifying hallucinations when he was awake. Changing from thinking that Scully loved him to knowing it.

Not the kind of secret weapon that Bill Mulder could have had in mind. Not much of a weapon at all. He tired more easily these days; minor illnesses were hitting him harder. He was taking longer to recover from the aches and pains of everyday life, and the cuts and bruises of everything else. He'd blamed most of it on age and the rest on whatever was destroying his brain.

The neurologist had been telling him for weeks how close he was to a relapse that could hospitalize him. Same problem as before, a brain running so fast it couldn't even be bothered with minor details like muscle coordination or speech. The doctor had offered no solutions, simply suggested a cocktail of drugs that might temporarily suppress the storm. Drugs that if he took them would render him unfit for duty.

He hadn't even needed to think about it. The sickness was the result of an X-File and he'd never just given up working an X-File because it was dangerous or because his chances of success were low.

He hadn't told the doctor about the telepathy that had accompanied the previous incident, not wanting to add a diagnosis of psychosis to the file. It wasn't as if he was hiding anything, there had been no glimpses into other people's thoughts this time, just pain in his head and a frightening weakness in his movements as the agony took hold.

When the doctor pronounced the death sentence it hadn't even been a surprise. Not that he'd resigned himself to death, never that. Just that he'd always understood the dangers of his job and he'd always accepted them, if not with grace then with resolve.

Faced with one last chance to capture a UFO, how could he resist? So he'd gone to Oregon. Twice. Alien miracle denied, he'd jumped at Krycek's offer of another kind of revelation. He could admit that now - now that he'd been hit by far more information than he'd bargained for.

The only thing the Consortium's documents didn't explain was why they suddenly wanted him. If it was true that they wanted him, and he only had Krycek's word to go on there, despite the passionately worded memos demanding his capture in the files. Anybody could have written those.

If Krycek had been playing him then he'd played his cards well. The thought of keeping the brain alive as the body died was more frightening than death itself. Wasn't it? Which brought him back to Krycek and this place and what the hell he'd been doing for the past week. Nothing in the files suggested that Krycek had a miracle cure for the brain disease. So what did Krycek have planned? Did he also have a scheme to keep the brain alive?

Enough!

Shuddering, he quickly cleaned the breakfast plates, partly from habit, partly because it seemed like an admission of inadequacy to let Krycek clear up the mess. Better remember to empty the trash as well, he thought, amused by his brain's drift from the global to the trivial in the space of a few heart beats.

The car was too hot; he opened all the doors and loaded the paper files that Krycek had given him into the trunk along with the warm jacket he'd worn up in Oregon a week ago. The thought of returning to DC made him smile. He hadn't checked the weather forecast, had scarcely looked at the TV at all, just knew it would be beautiful there.

The first scream made him go for his gun. He spun, weapon at the ready, but saw nothing. The second scream was painful, gut-wrenching in its intensity. He ran out of the building, but found no explanation for the sound. No vehicles, no swirls of dust anywhere nearby to indicate movement. He turned slowly, looking into the blank landscape and saw no one, walked quickly around the building and saw no place to hide.

Another scream, the woman couldn't be more than twenty feet away.

What the hell? It had to be something to do with the shape of the quarry. He'd only done the most cursory of examinations of the site in the past three days, content to declare it flat and saucer-shaped with a single rocky ridge along one edge. Some kind of echo affect, focused by weird geography and odd atmospheric conditions?

What he knew for sure though was that he was miles from anywhere. If he could hear a scream then that meant he was probably the only person who could help. Another agonized howl rang out - female, fearful, soul-destroying. Somebody was killing her. Where was she?

He ran further from the building, hoping that by relocating himself he might get more sense of the direction the screams were coming from. Angry shouts instead, a procession of insults and abuse, sharp words from somebody standing right behind his back. A litany of, "Bitch. Whore. Die. Slut. Lying. Fucking." Building to a crescendo of furious contempt.

Mulder spun, gun solid in his right hand, left hand steadying his grip, ready for action. He screamed out a litany of his own. "Federal Agent. I'm armed. Come out where I can see you." He wasn't surprised that no one replied. The woman screamed again, more painful than before, but fainter. Mulder knew what that meant - she didn't have long left.

With nowhere else to go, he started to run towards the only place he could imagine anyone being able to hide. Ran past cannibalized cutters, abandoned crushers and the skeletons of heavy conveyors, ignored burned out cranes and trucks, dodged rusty backhoe buckets and ducked under the remains of excavator arms. Still shouting out FBI mandated orders to, "Stop," and, "Identify yourself," as if he was expecting them to be obeyed.

The screams stopped and so did Mulder, tumbling to the ground, face and hands hitting the dust simultaneously. His body curled up on contact with the earth and he closed his eyes, felt the shudders of pain fold his limbs a little tighter.

Ants crawling across his flesh, an unscratchable itch that started in his fingers, creeping across his eyeballs, pooling in his ears, scuttling through his thoughts, burrowing its way into his brain.

The man was still there, still screaming out words of abuse and hate, swirling in frenetic overlap with cries of horror and dismay. "She's dead. Oh, God. She's dead." Mulder heard the man's words, loud and clear, heard the mix of disbelief and panic in them and was quite sure that the words had never been spoken out loud.

He'd been through this before, or close enough to this. Collapsing in the hallway of a university, losing touch with reality in an FBI elevator, trembling and out of control in the padded cell of a DC hospital.

Voices mingling and merging, screaming and crying, demanding that he help, begging him to hear. He heard, of course he heard. Didn't want to hear, but didn't have a choice.

Was this how it felt to be special? Electric shocks of pain catwalking along his spine. He wrapped his hands over his ears, but it made no difference to the noise. A cacophony of terror and sorrow.

Hiding from them, he turned in on himself. Mind fluttering back to decades before and the sound of Samantha's cries, agonizing shivers of shame as he heard Scully scream his name on the night that Duane Barry stole her away, his mom sobbing out her goodbyes to an empty phone. So many screams. Perhaps he'd always heard them; maybe he'd just been able to ignore them until now.

Scully hadn't wanted to take the day off, but she was grateful now that Skinner, bristling with concern despite addressing her in full AD mode, had insisted that she at least stay away from the office today.

Last night had been the roughest yet, perhaps simply because the sheer accumulation of sleepless nights had all caught up with her at once. She needed sleep; she could admit that to herself even if she couldn't admit it to anyone else. Pills were out of the question. She considered milder alternatives but even the smell of chamomile tea made her feel queasy.

Actually, everything made her feel queasy. She sipped at a glass of watered down orange juice and tried to ride it out. Lying in bed just increased her awareness of being awake. And alone. The TV made a poor companion but it didn't nag, it didn't ask her how she was feeling; it didn't pity her at all.

The vivid horror of the dreams was no surprise. Men in white coats poring over test tubes and Petri dishes, working in stark white rooms where centrifuges spun and autoclaves sterilized. Inevitable that she should dream of experiments and genetics when her body was responding to a whole new chemistry of its own.

She didn't like all that nightmare talk about breeding programs, nucleotide sequences and mutagenic reactions but in the circumstances it was no surprise that her sub-conscious chose to label her fears with terms drawn from X-Files and medical science. While other women feared the "abnormal" or the "damaged" in general terms; her brain had no shortage of specifics.

Her head was pounding and the Tylenol box was looking more attractive all the time. She was loathe to use anything, but her doctor had reminded her that putting up with too much pain could be more dangerous to the child than the drug she was trying to avoid. Particularly as there was no chance of being able to eat until the worst of it had passed.

How much of this was stress, she wondered. Maybe she should talk to someone? Not Skinner, he looked as lost as she did, even if he had plucked up the courage to order her to stay home.

Mulder had been missing for a week. It could be months before they brought him back. Months in which she had to be strong and if being strong meant admitting that her body could sometimes be weak then she could learn to do that as well. She'd learned to handle a lot of things in the past few years. She just missed having Mulder's faith to lean on while she did.

Ten days after Krycek stopped Mulder from walking into a rendezvous with hell on board an alien spaceship, he couldn't avoid the feeling that he was another rescue mission.

He checked the pickup's clock even though he'd read it five minutes before. Stubbornly, it confirmed that five minutes had passed.

He'd planned on being away for two or three days, and would have felt comfortable even if it had taken four, but he'd been gone for six days, fourteen hours and a lot of minutes and he was still miles from the quarry. Shouldn't have left Mulder alone. Not for this long. Not at all in fact.

He'd planned how to handle Mulder's captivity with care and precision, mapped out alternate routes to the quarry starting from any of half a dozen prearranged stopovers like the hotel they'd used the first night in Boise. A logistical nightmare to set up, even using money ripped off from a consortium slush fund, but it had been flawless in execution. Even the shopping trips on the journey down had gone smoothly.

Mulder's response to being allowed to keep his guns had been particularly gratifying. Krycek had manage to bypass years of distrust and even the hours of discomfort the agent had experienced after his capture in that one grand gesture.

Everything was perfect - except for the timing, which had gone hopelessly awry. Should have killed Spender before the trip to Oregon. Should have killed him a month ago, a year ago, a decade ago. As it was, he'd been forced to kill him at a highly inconvenient time simply to stop him from going into hiding and escaping his fate again. No choice. Had Spender lived there was always a danger that some macabre residual connection brought about by that transplant of brain tissue from Mulder to him could have led the Consortium directly to their hiding place.

He wondered if Mulder knew about that link, if it had ever run both ways, if he'd realized just how much of his private life and thoughts Spender had seen in the past few months. Probably not, Krycek decided. Probably better off not knowing.

So he'd killed Cancerman. So what? What was the big deal? Nobody cared whether the old bastard lived or died, not even his one-time friends and colleagues. What Krycek had omitted from the equation, perhaps intentionally he now realized, was the fear factor. The other Consortium bosses were scared. It just was not kosher for one of the hired help to kill his chief and then to get away scot-free.

Even though he had done them all a favor.

No good deed goes unpunished, he noted, lips shifting into an uncomfortable smile before tightening again.

The trip up to DC had gone smoothly enough. A helicopter ride from Albuquerque with a pilot who owed him a favor and knew nothing about the Consortium. Another hop using an alias that had never been linked to him. And finally a very public flight, using a Consortium supplied credit card, from Portland to Washington, suggesting that he'd flown home having monitored the FBI's failed hunt for Mulder.

After killing Spender, he'd actually driven halfway to Dulles airport before he'd admitted that he couldn't take the same route back. Shouldn't have left a witness alive. When he killed the Smoker, he should have killed the nurse as well. It was Marita who said that another killing was unnecessary, that it would be enough to drug the nurse, buying them a few hours head start.

A head start was all they needed, she said, and Krycek agreed that the Consortium's bosses would guess who'd made the hit even without the nurse's account. Which had given him a problem: it would have aroused Covarrubias' suspicion if he'd killed the nurse. Driving to Dulles, he'd suddenly realized that by the time he reached the west coast he'd be on the Consortium's wanted list; so he'd taken the next exit and driven south.

He'd run, run so far and so fast that he'd nearly led them directly to Mulder's door. Recognized the tail almost too late and been forced to double back on himself, eventually leaving a couple more dead bodies in his wake. Mercenaries, not much to feel bad about there. Cancerman's old cronies had put a price on Krycek's head: a million dollars to the man who took him out.

Maybe he should feel flattered? Not quite as good a deal as the one being offered on Mulder, but if kids could die for a few bucks or a pair of running shoes then who was he to say that a reward like that should be ignored? Hell, in other circumstances he'd be interested in the job himself. He shook his head, amused and horrified to be feeling quite so hyper. "Sixteen hours straight driving does that to you," he said, hoping that hearing a voice, even his own, would help to keep him awake.

Things weren't running according to plan, but he'd lived with an axe over his head before and he could live with it now. The artificial hand smacked into the steering wheel and he regretted the empty gesture instantly as he reminded himself just how easily it could have done real damage, how tough it would be to get precision prosthetic repairs done in the middle of nowhere and just how fast the Consortium would find him if he had that kind of work done in a city hospital.

The fact was he was too damned easy to track and when Marita said, "Canada first," he should have jumped in her car and gone with it. She hadn't believed him when he'd replied with, "Mexico," but then disbelief was to be expected.

"Just so long as it isn't Tunisia," she'd said, and he'd nodded. They would meet again; they always did. Getting out of the country would have been the smart thing to do. He just hoped she'd made it off the continent before the goons started monitoring all flights.

The trouble was, with a price on his head, he was hardly a suitable bodyguard for Mulder. Not the point, he reminded himself. He didn't have an option in the matter. He'd kept Mulder away from that spaceship and brought him down here for good reasons and those wouldn't be served by leaving the man to his own devices in the wilds of New Mexico.

He checked the clock again, another five minutes, another four miles, still a couple of hours to go. Couldn't take any risks on unfamiliar roads. He needed to get back there. He just hoped to God that Mulder would be alive when he did.

The FBI's manhunt was winding down.

The agents were divided. Half of them looked on Scully with pity in their eyes; their sympathies honestly given to the grieving widow of a soldier officially classified as missing in action but most likely dead. The others managed to combine the pity with a little contempt. She'd seen that look before too, on the faces of cops dealing with abused wives, in the eyes of agents interviewing women who seemingly knew nothing of their monstrous partner's misdeeds.

She wasn't quite sure which reaction she preferred. What the hell did they know about her? What did they know about Mulder? They thought they knew him, but all they really knew were the tabloid headlines of his life - the ups and downs of his FBI career, the outrageous expense claims, the designer suits and the smart-ass remarks. They knew nothing.

"It seems to me that you're holding something back, Agent Scully," said Doggett. Business-like but polite, and with maybe a little less of the damned pity and a little more determination.

"Such as?"

"Why you're so certain that he didn't just walk away."

Because he wouldn't - didn't really have quite the right ring to it. She squared her shoulders, and looked Doggett coolly in the eye. "Because I know him," she said. She knew him and they didn't. She knew what they were getting at with their pitying glances and guarded words. They thought the basement pariah had taken one look at the auditor's report and the doctor's warnings, realized that his working life would soon be over, seen professional failure and death as his only prospects and he'd run away to hide.

Of course not. If he were convinced that the Bureau had become a hindrance not a help then Mulder might turn his back on them. But to turn his back on her? Not possible.

What about those brain scans that Doggett had showed her? Mulder had lied to her about those, hadn't he? What about those mysterious weekend trips? What about the freshly carved gravestone?

But no, there were logical explanations for those anomalies: fabricated records from some unknown source, maybe even a false trail left by Mulder himself to mask whatever he was really doing on those missing days. Whatever the explanation, the fact remained if Mulder had a choice then he would certainly be at her side. If he had only a glimmer of a choice then he would have found a way to tell her that he was alive.

Doggett frowned. "Sometimes it's the people closest to us we hide from the most."

Part 5

Another stop for gas and a detour around an emergency bridge repair had helped push Krycek's "away" time to something like six days and twenty-two hours. Call it a week, he told himself, surprised by his attempt at evasion. Couldn't be helped. Anyway, by now Mulder was either OK or not and whichever it was then a clear head and a cocksure demeanor would be useful.

The truck he'd switched back to the night before kicked up dust and stones in a cloud behind him as he swung onto the quarry's track. He slowed a little, not that it improved things much. Why the hell did it have to be in the middle of a damned wasteland?

The trouble with remote places is that every movement's visible, and every change logged by a satellite's high-resolution cameras is obvious. Krycek had to assume the place was still checked from time to time. Just so long as it was only from "time to time" then there was nothing to worry about. Only the desperately unlucky or the cavalierly foolish would get caught by a routine trawl.

The aliens had no reason to look at the place at all. When they destroyed the men working the site back in 76 they'd also delivered a warning shot to the Consortium's chiefs. They'd left behind sensors to look for trucks of magnetite leaving the quarry, but provided those weren't tripped then the place was not somewhere they would want to linger.

It wasn't a place that anyone would want to linger. Swallowing hard, Krycek pulled up in front of the office building, tucking the vehicle carefully under the shade of the unloading bay and away from a satellite's prying eyes.

He checked the storage area first. The car's doors were wide open, the trunk half filled with old file folders and Mulder's clothes. By the look of the spider working to set up home in there, the elderly Ford had been like that for a while. He checked the gauges, it had been moved at some point during the week but it hadn't gone far. Just enough to check that the thing was working, perhaps.

"Mulder," he shouted.

No reply. Not that he expected one. The man would surely have heard the pickup coming. He would have wanted to see whoever got out and Krycek would have spotted the surveillance in return.

Krycek ran up the stairs, two at a time, hoping that Mulder wasn't watching him right now. He wouldn't want the agent to mistake urgency for concern. Pushing the apartment's door open, he did a quick tour. No Mulder. No surprise there. The kitchen counter told him what he needed to know. The evidence: a glass that had once contained water and an open box of Tylenol.

Krycek grumbled his complaints to keep the instinctive desire to rush outside and start shouting Mulder's name from overriding his judgment. "Got a headache, Mulder? Feeling a little rough? Why don't you go and lie down? Course not. That'd be too easy."

When then? How long had Mulder been gone? The computer that Krycek had turned on as soon as he walked into the living room had finally come up. A few swift keystrokes and it was telling him more things that he didn't want to know. Hundreds of files opened, some quickly closed again, others obviously brooded over for hours. All happening within three days of their arrival here. Which meant that Mulder hadn't touched the machine for the past four days.

The map on the table told him that Mulder was preparing to run away, back to an airport, back to DC presumably. Annoying perhaps, but understandable. Yet he hadn't taken the car even though from the looks of things he'd been preparing to. Surely Mulder hadn't invited someone to come here?

A quick test said that the satellite phone hadn't been touched. The cell phones were way outside their service area.

If someone had come for Mulder then it had been unsolicited and therefore almost certainly unwelcome. Yet there were no signs of a struggle. The shotgun was standing unused in its home close by the door. The knife on the kitchen table had no bloodstains on its blade. From the look of the eggshells, breadcrumbs and milky cereal debris in the trash, Mulder's last meal had been breakfast. A big breakfast. Bacon fat in the pan. Plates and cup left to dry on the rack.

Mulder was up and awake and preparing for the long day ahead. The long journey ahead? Even the towel on the edge of the tub confirmed it. Mulder was a slob, but a tidy one. He might have left the towel in a heap after drying himself, but he'd have hung it up the next time he went in the room.

Mulder had taken a change of clothes, bought in an anonymous Walmart on the journey down here, and placed them in an overnight bag by the table. Maps, sunglasses, weapons, ammo, notepads. The bottled water had been cold when Mulder put it there, the dribble of condensation obvious from the puckering of the paper that he'd stood it on. The paper was bone dry now of course. Which thought made Krycek shudder a little. Mulder had left this room days ago and even if he'd taken water with him then it was unlikely he'd taken enough.

Mulder's service weapon was missing, but the spare clips were still on the table. So was his ankle holster with the compact automatic tucked safely inside. Just the laptop to slide back into its case and a few more things to throw in the bag and Mulder would have been ready to leave.

Which begged the question: he was ready to leave, so why hadn't he gone? Why was the car still here?

A surprise attack catching him off guard just as he was preparing to go? It seemed unlikely. Mulder, who sometimes seemed to lack the instinct to survive, nonetheless had proven himself to have all the required skills. In the area immediately surrounding the building there were no indications of a struggle and no signs of vehicles other than their own.

Krycek looked at the guns again. Anyone taking Mulder would have wanted the weapons as well or else they'd have taken the opposite stance and left Mulder's Sig Sauer on the table along with the others. They'd certainly have wanted the laptop. Everything pointed to Mulder having walked out of the building of his own free will and without any particular emergency action in mind.

Unless it had started, unless his brain had forced him into action? Three days - might that have been long enough? But where the hell would he go without the car? Unless he'd been too ill too drive?

A taxi? It would have been a cool move on Mulder's part except for the impossibility of calling one on an out of area cell phone, and of course then he would have taken his stuff, not just left it here. Had he gone on foot to a callbox somewhere and become disoriented? Somewhere being the appropriate word. So far as Krycek knew they were at least twenty miles away from anything that might offer such a thing. A private house then? Another quarry maybe? Something, miles away.

He shifted his gun temporarily into the prosthetic hand as he scratched behind his ear. OK. He'd seen all there was to see up here. Mulder had been out there somewhere for days so a five-minute pause for reflection was a necessity not a luxury, but the time for contemplation was up. Krycek knew he'd taken too damned long to get back.

He hadn't seen any vultures circling on the way in but then why would they need to circle if dinner had already been served? If Mulder was still alive then Krycek was going to kick his ass.

Water, thermal blanket, knife, flashlight, duct tape, drugs; he looked for anything else that might be useful. A moment of sudden recall and he was struck by the irony. "As you do to Mulder and to me - you do to all of mankind." The smoking bastard's final words: equating himself with Mulder, equating himself with humanity in general! Krycek threw his dirty laundry out of the backpack he'd taken to DC and replaced it with a rescue kit of emergency supplies.

Start at the office building and work outwards. He'd have to go on-foot, at least this first time, though he would probably need the truck to bring Mulder back. If Mulder could make a noise then Krycek needed to hear it. Maybe if he made the signal to Mulder loud enough? "I don't care what you call me, Mulder. Just call me."

Stopping at the rusty control panel by the outside door he studied the terrain, reminding himself of the lay of the land before delivering a short hoot then a long one, on the quarry's blast warning siren. He paused for an instant, then gave a long, short, long blast more. If Mulder had gone out and couldn't make it back where would he have holed up?

He surveyed the horizon to get his bearings. Caves to the east. Abandoned heavy machinery to the north. Nightmares where east met north. Thirty men dead in less than fifteen seconds in a radiation blast that had left machinery intact but had destroyed life in an instant. The consortium's clean up crew had used explosives to destroy anything that might tempt looters and burned or buried anything incriminating, then left the site as fast as possible afterwards. Krycek had read the report years ago but hadn't realized how significant the place was until this last few months.

Nodded to himself. Northeast then.

Almost resigned to walking, he listened for a moment more and was rewarded with a soft woof of sound. A single shot from some distance? A pistol. Mulder's? In the city, he wouldn't have heard the sound at all. Out here the problem was the echo. Both the distance and the direction it had come from were difficult to gauge, but it sounded like it came from the northeast, which was exactly as he'd anticipated.

None of which mattered much compared to the big picture - Mulder was alive and conscious, and not so very far away.

How much ammo did Mulder have left to signal with?

"Show some sense," Krycek mumbled, willing Mulder to read his thoughts. If Mulder was in one of those caves then he was probably going to need a few bullets to guide Krycek in. Certainly, relying on Mulder to shout loud enough was a long shot at best. Krycek was just relieved the man had been up to the job of squeezing the trigger.

He decided to take the risk and use the truck. The shotgun and pistols were loaded and ready to go; he patted his pocket to confirm the spare rounds were in there.

Taking it slow, he headed out across the rutted surface of the quarry, mindful that years of storms had rearranged the dust, hiding potential hazards like jagged rocks and discarded tools. After a moment he stopped and turned off the engine, shouted a, "Now," and fired a single shot.

Another gun replied. OK. Right direction but still some distance to go. He corrected his course and kept moving.

When he repeated the routine for the third time, the reply was loud enough that he could hear the zing as the bullet hit metal. "Good man," Krycek admitted. He was not only getting close, he now had the added advantage of knowing that Mulder had some heavy machinery parked in his firing line.

If he'd known Mulder was in good enough shape to speak only when spoken to and not to waste bullets or vocal chords on moments when no one was listening, then it'd have saved him a lot of worry. Allowed himself a glimmer of relief at that.

Another drive. This time he knew exactly where he was heading.

Not in such good shape, Krycek realized as he approached the cave's entrance. Good shape and Mulder would have started walking towards him. At the very least, Mulder would be sitting outside ready to make himself known. Krycek shouted again and caught a brief glimpse of Mulder coming to the mouth of one of the caves and then ducking back inside again.

"Poor bastard," he murmured, an accidental response swiftly tamped down. Still it had to be bad if Mulder couldn't even venture outside. How the hell was he going to get Mulder back to the main building?

Krycek drove right up to the cave's entrance. Just inside, he found his target sitting on the ground. Arms clinging to bent knees, head resting on his chest. A ragged bundle of a man, panting as if that last sortie into the cave's mouth only a few feet away had exhausted him. Krycek spotted the drum of water that Mulder had presumably been relying on and tried not to guess at the kinds of hazards that might have been stewing up in there, then wondered if maybe the gamma rays had sterilized everything they hadn't killed. One thing at a time, at least Mulder was still alive.

"What? You aren't going to hold a gun on me?" asked Krycek, desperate to see Mulder react. He moved to sit at the agent's side, pinned the water bottle he'd brought with him in place between plastic hand and jean-clad knee to open the top before pushing it towards Mulder.

A faint shrug of acknowledgement but no words. No action either.

"Drink the water." This time Krycek lifted the bottle to Mulder's lips. "Come on, tip your head back." Krycek cursed the prosthetic arm; accurate enough to use to hold a weapon steady as he loaded a fresh clip, good as a club in a fight, but not even up to the job of maneuvering a dead weight federal agent into a suitable position to drip water down his throat. Sudden flicker of memory at a parched journey on a rusty ship. Maybe he should just throw the water at him?

Fortunately Mulder seemed to get the message, lifting his head and sharing the task of positioning the bottle.

Krycek, remembering the warnings he'd heard in too many encounters with EMTs, suddenly felt compelled to say something. "Not too fast."

Mulder obviously felt a similar compulsion to reply. "Fuck you, Krycek."

Krycek had supplied Mulder with water, chocolate and a couple of Valium, and even then it had taken three attempts and a lot of pushing and shoving to get him moving.

Mulder had scrambled, crawled and finally clawed his way into the truck's passenger seat, babbling in pain, tears misting over his eyes, clutching his head as all the evils in the world paraded across his thoughts in sickening panoramic technicolor, surround-sound and feely-vision.

Well, perhaps not all the evils of the world. Maybe it was just those in a fifty-mile radius or so.

Since undergoing a little butchery at the hands of the Cancerman's quacks he'd felt the pain lingering in his head. Throbbing from quiet to loud, sometimes fading to a whisper, but ever present, an angry tingle that had sometimes turned into a roar of hurt. The brain scans taken since the surgery had shown only the damage and hadn't offered any possibility of a cure.

Yet, even during the worst of the pain and disorientation of the past few weeks the telepathy had never risen above a murmur, easily ignored as empathy or insight. But now there was no denying it; the quarry had brought it back to full strength. The peculiar caves had offered some protection from its affects. This apartment for whatever reason seemed like sanctuary.

Krycek was keeping out of his way and had been doing so ever since the brief incident when he'd attempted to manhandle Mulder into the shower. The reasoning behind the move, Mulder now admitted, had been benign and well-intentioned. Days of grime and sweat to scrub away and a fever to bring down.

Krycek's black eye, though satisfying, had been pure dumb luck; an ill coordinated lunge that took Krycek by surprise with its wild inaccuracy. A comic flailing of arms that had ended with the man stumbling backwards as he tried to keep Mulder from falling out of the bathtub.

The showerhead had delivered the knockout punch. The recollection as he glanced over at Krycek's slowly darkening bruise made Mulder smile. Scowling, Krycek handed him a bowl of soup and walked away. Mulder didn't say thanks.

Drowsy, a handful of Valium tended to have that effect noted Mulder, uncomfortable with the self-diagnosis. Fresher though, the shower had helped, mentally and physically. The food and drink was letting him feel a little more human.

Feeling better because Krycek was here? The irony bothered him. Little bubbles of laughter rose in his chest at the thought of how low you had to get before Krycek's presence constituted an improvement. "Got any more chocolate?"

Mulder could see Krycek weighing up his options; could see the moment of indecision as the muscles in Krycek's shoulders tensed. An explosion was imminent - laughter or violence? "Shit," Krycek grumbled, turning smoothly to face Mulder, a sour expression on his face.

Mulder laughed and Krycek looked horrified which made the agent laugh even more. Mulder shook his head, blinking hard, trying to chase the snorts of amusement away. Hysteria - just what he needed. Krycek vanished back into the kitchen and Mulder let his head drop low, struggling to combine breathing with laughter and failing miserably.

When Krycek returned he was carrying a glass of milk, which he placed on the table at Mulder's side. "Valium doesn't really work very well on you, does it?"

"Didn't I warn you about that?" said Mulder, hiccupping through the snorts.

"Drink the milk." Just a glimmer of a smile on Krycek's face now. "So what next - Thorazine, Haldol, Prozac - chloroform?"

Bastard. Mulder scowled; Krycek was taking his life in his hands with that little reminder of their trip down here. He glared up at Krycek and saw that the flickers of a smile had been replaced by a full-fledged flame. Anger fought briefly with amusement and Mulder raised a single finger in ironic acknowledgement. "They make it worse. Suppress my ability to control it."

Krycek nodded. "I saw you at the hospital when they took you in last time - you were pacing."

"I'd have run if I could."

"Is that what happened here?"

"I heard screams. They sounded so close. I thought - "

"You thought they weren't just in your head."

"I was outside, checking the car. Getting ready to go."

"Stealing my computer?"

"You're surprised?"

"Going back to DC?"

"I left it too late. I got out there and heard the voices - screaming. I ran towards them and it got worse. But I'd gone too far, couldn't get back, had to take shelter in the cave." Mulder paused, not ready for the conversation but aware that this might be as ready as he would ever be. "Krycek - I know what you've done to me."

"Me? I just did a few repairs."

Mulder's eyes slid shut. He didn't know what Krycek had done, not really. Just knew that Krycek had brought him here for a reason and that whatever "changes" had been happening before were nothing compared to what was happening to him now. Knew that running back to DC was no longer an option, at least not without heavy sedation and a nursemaid at his side. "How?" he finally hissed.

There was a rapid-fire urgency in Krycek's delivery that belied his too even tone. Rehearsed words. "This place amplifies the signals, gets the neurons in your brain excited - just like they did when you saw those drawings of the markings on that ship. The nanites I injected should slow things down enough that your brain can reroute the information flow - so you don't end up gibbering in a psych ward again."

"A spin-off of your father's work?"

"Your father's too."

"I should kill you for this," said Mulder, conversationally casual.

"Yeah, you should. But you won't. You found your files?" asked Krycek, tipping his head to point at the computer and getting a brief nod in reply. "The most interesting file is in the 73 series of course, that's when you really start to see the end results. Telepathy, ESP, the usual stuff."

Of course. The thought more sobering than any drug. "Was Samantha taken instead of me?"

"Bill Mulder thought if he hid you, it would be enough. They'd take one look at her new test scores and assume she'd lost it."

He'd seen this at the Strughold Mine, his file overwritten with hers. Had they done the same in the computer records too, deliberately transposed results to hide him? Had Samantha died because she wasn't what her tester's had anticipated, because she wasn't him? "But the merchandise was fragile and it broke," said Mulder, recalling the jargon they liked to use in their reports.

"They blamed it on hormone changes - pumped her full of drugs to try to stop it."

Mulder shook his head, not wanting to believe.

"Why not? Half the world's top gymnasts were getting the same treatment."

Fucker. He should kill the rat bastard, just to wipe the smile off his face. But the fact was Krycek's smile wasn't there anymore and it was the truth that hurt, not just Krycek's rendition of it.

Krycek's voice was quiet, good psychiatrist trying to coax the overwrought patient down from the ledge. "How does it feel?"

Mulder studied Krycek for a moment, saw an expression that on another man he might have mistaken for concern and responded to it, despite it being Krycek. "Like hundreds of radio stations all playing full blast, all wanting something. But I can ignore them, if I focus. Can't focus when I'm high on drugs."

"And now?"

"Just whispers. All I can hear is you."

Krycek flinched, turned away, kept it brisk and business like. "The building's coated in a special paint. Same thing the shotgun cartridges are filled with."

"Kryptonite?" asked Mulder, not quite laughing.

"Magnetite."

"Which does what?"

"Best I can tell you is it acts like the control rods in a nuclear reactor - regulating the effect. It can even stop it temporarily. Too much and it acts as a shield trapping the signals within itself. The right amount and it directs it, creates a kind of positive feedback, amplifying it. It affects some kinds of cell activity so drastically that it's toxic to certain lifeforms."

"So all I need is a hat made out of foil, painted with this stuff?"

Krycek shrugged.

Mulder moved in for the kill. "Or maybe that's what you need. To keep me out."

"You don't want to know what's in my head."

Perhaps not, but he needed to know. Don't profile your friends; it had been a self-preservation mantra since Quantico. But Krycek had never been a friend. He could feel Krycek's discomfort, but got no sense of the man beyond that. Later maybe. Once the drugs had worn off completely.

Today was another milestone. This was the first slideshow Scully had watched down here in the X-Files office since Mulder disappeared.

Too many memories demanding her attention, competing with whatever Doggett needed to say. Pictures of puncture wounds on a young victim's body in Bellefleur, years ago. Vampire activity in Texas. Photos of crop circles in an English field - she briefly regretted that scene; she could have joined him on the trip, used the opportunity to see a little more of Mulder's life. But no, it would be wrong to regret such a choice, she'd had a journey of her own to make right then.

She looked across at Skinner and wondered if he could guess what she was feeling. He shifted in his seat, looking uncomfortable, and she realized that he could probably understand it too well.

Not now, she told herself. She could deal with the memories and the emotions tonight, when she was alone. Right now, she needed to focus. Doggett had told her that he had new evidence and offered to provide her with a sneak preview before he presented the information to the team meeting. Scully had suggested they invite Skinner, partly as an ally, but also because he was the last person to see Mulder and therefore probably the one who had the most to offer in terms of interpretation.

She forced herself to sit up straight and looked expectantly at Doggett. He responded by pushing the button to bring up the next slide. Tire track 7A, Sequence 3, read the caption. "Vehicle 7 crosses the tracks of Vehicle 1 right here, showing it reached the site after Agent Mulder and Assistant Director Skinner."

"And there were no other vehicles on site with that tire pattern?" said Scully.

"It's the spacing between wheels that's the giveaway. That's why the forensics tech noticed it."

Scully nodded, not sure if she was hopeful or horrified. "They're sure?"

"They checked them all, police and Bureau, pool cars, rentals - they interviewed everyone on site in case one of them used their own vehicle without logging it. No one brought it and no one saw it. We're looking at a Dodge Ram Wagon, on that site for no good reason. We believe," said Doggett, bringing up another slide, "that it exited through this gate. No one can recall unbolting it that night, yet it was open. We're checking for prints."

Skinner rubbed his hand across his mouth. "I think - I'm sure - we would have seen it. If we were followed onto the site. I don't..."

Doggett was carefully soothing but professionally firm. He sounded as if he was talking to the victim's family not two FBI colleagues. "You said it yourself. A bright white light. You couldn't see Agent Mulder. If it had lights mounted on its roof..." He shrugged, leaving Scully and Skinner to fill in the blanks.

"That's not what I saw," said Skinner. "I know what a floodlight bar looks like."

Doggett nodded. "OK. That's all we have for now. We're checking with hotels, motels, gas stations, parking lots, airports, anything in a two hundred mile radius where they might have logged details of a vehicle passing through that night."

Scully frowned. "You're thinking what? That someone kidnapped him?"

"You tell me. I think he got in that Dodge, whether that was willingly or unwillingly I can't say."

Part 6

There were things that Scully couldn't believe and things she didn't want to believe. Tonight, lying on Mulder's bed, surrounded by the sights, smells and sounds of his apartment, with a stack of images from a brain scanner and the contents of an FBI file folder spread out across the linen she could almost imagine that he was in the bathroom, maybe brushing his teeth, or perhaps resting on the coach in the living room watching some late night TV.

She didn't want to believe that he was gone and she couldn't believe that he'd left her. Not by choice, never by choice. If she lay very still, curling herself around his pillow, allowing the comforter to sit high on her shoulders and drift down to rest on her ears, then she could almost imagine him; almost imagine them, as they'd been that last night in Bellefleur.

"There's so much more you need to do with your life. There's so much more than this."

Remembering his voice, the comfort and strength she'd drawn from it. The warmth of knowing that she wasn't alone any more. "Touched by others but never held." She'd once believed that of herself, imagined that was her destiny. But he'd touched her and he'd held her and yet those words about something more, that had meant so much as he said them, were starting to sound different now.

"There's so much more you need to do with your life."

Your life? He couldn't have done that to her. Couldn't have bound her soul to his and then said goodbye. It wasn't possible.

She sat up, pulling the images from his last brain scan towards her again, dissecting them, as if by staring for long enough she might be able to see what he'd been thinking as they were taken. She'd tried the obvious things, compared them to the scans made during the episodes with the alien rubbings a year before. Contrasted them with the images produced following his recovery from Cancerman's exercise in brain butchery. Not quite a match for either. All of them were Mulder's and, so far as the Bureau's imaging labs and the Lone Gunmen's edge analysis software could tell, none of them had been faked.

Perhaps they'd been taken by Cancerman's DoD cronies a year ago and now they'd been given to Doggett to spread doubt and confusion? Perhaps, she admitted, and perhaps the datestamps were correct. Perhaps Mulder had spent three months lying to her about his movements and his health, hiding in plain sight, without her even noticing.

Could she really have been duped like that? She knew he was tired, run down, a little ready with excuses to be apart on days they could have spent together. She'd thought perhaps the after-effects of the tobacco beetle larva had been a little harder than he'd admitted.

She knew that they were both intensely private people, who sometimes needed space no matter how close they felt. She knew that he was still grieving, for his mother, for Samantha. He might have declared himself "free," but moving on, however welcome, was never an easy thing.

It had suited them both; he hadn't pushed and she'd been grateful. She'd assumed that he was just trying not to monopolize her nights in the way that he already dominated her days, and that he was patient enough to give their new relationship time to settle before demanding more.

Now she felt ashamed that she'd been so happy to go along with it. How could she not have known? How could she be so focused on failed fertility treatment and disappointment that she hadn't seen what he was going through?

Yet, despite brain scans, gravestones, tire tracks and that damnable "your life", she still couldn't believe that he'd left her. But as the tears started to flow faster all she could hear was the mockery of a voice that said that maybe she simply didn't want to believe.

The bruises on Krycek's face had developed into multi-color contour maps and Mulder still hadn't quite worked out whether to laugh or apologize.

"What now?" demanded Krycek, sounding like his patience with his role as care-giver was already wearing thin.

Mulder had eaten, consumed enough liquid to feel a little more alive, taken a shower, caught a few hours sleep and was mostly running drug free again. Let the interrogation begin. "What kind of work did your father do?"

Krycek scowled. "What did yours do?"

"No idea. Maybe you can fill me in?"

That seemed to help ease them past the deadlock. Krycek pulled in a lungful of air. Head tilted back as far as it would go, he closed his eyes, snorting as he reopened them again. "My father worked for yours."

"And?"

"He was a doctor. Neuro-surgeon."

"Did he do something to me?"

Krycek heard the accusation and snapped at it. "Sure, Mulder. You're the God damned center of the universe. Of course he did something to you." A heavy gasp of an exhale. "He hid you from the fuckers who'd have sliced your brain up and spread it out on slides."

"I don't understand."

"You don't want to understand. Read the damned file. 95% plus on telepathy, with a rider that says it was probably a dash of attention deficit disorder that held you back and recommending a few drugs to correct it." Krycek shook his head, his voice softening just a little when he spoke again. "Bill Mulder was terrified. There were hundreds who'd had the same kind of genetic modifications, but there was still a big spread of abilities. He knew what was happening to kids who got scores like yours. If they made it past the first month of tests they were veterans. If they made it past two, they were vegetables."

"They died?"

"What do you think? Remember that rubbing from the alien ship? Imagine being exposed to the real thing, day in, day out."

"Why were they doing it?"

"They wanted to communicate - thought maybe the aliens would rate them above animals if they could pull it off. If nothing else it woul