The soldiers had the dubious honor of collecting the remains, and transporting them to the hanger on level six. The makeshift litters were made using buckled cabinet doors. The procession was armed, and every member looked about, expecting to see armed men appear from around every corner.

The blacked out staircase was a nightmare in the dark. Scully led the soldiers upward, her pistol held next to her head. She had to adjust her grip at each landing, because the glove prevented her from easily fitting her finger inside the trigger guard . But it was easy to think about her gun, and the narrow swath of stairwell she carved out with her light.

Easier than thinking about anything else. Like the sundered bodies behind her. Or the inky darkness pressing in about her. Much better to concentrate on the sound of your own breathing echoing in your ears, than the idea of viri crawling all over your suit. Far better to concentrate on the heavy sounds of the team ascending the metal stairs, than the confounding partner she was leaving behind.

Soon, she had reached the last doorway, and she stopped, gesturing for the rest of the team to stop. A suited man with a rifle quickly pushed his way past everyone else, and joined her at the doorway. She brushed her light along his chest, reading the name Peirson.

"Peirson, on three. Okay?" She was winded just by the weight of the suit and tank, and the stress showed in her voice.

"On three. Um, Scully . . . Do you mean the door?" He sounded lighthearted, and not in the least fatigued.

The other soldiers had been as silent as pallbearers for several minutes. Now they all bustled with rough humor. Until the Lieutenant randomly smacked someone in the head.

"Knock it of, all of you! Peirson, on your own time!" Scully flushed behind her mask as the Lieutenant upbraided his men.

She decided to ignore it. "One." She stepped up alongside the wall.

"Two" Both spoke in synch as Peirson moved up in front of the door, his rifle at the ready.

"Three!" She spun the latch unlocked as he kicked the door open. Then he stepped left, and covered the left side of the hanger, while Dana spun out into a trapezoidal stance. She brought the gun down to her side when she was sure there was no one on her right.

"Hey, El-Tee! We're clear up here." Peirson slung his rifle over one shoulder, and held the door open for the rest of his team.

A series of remains, each tentatively identified as belonging to one individual, were then slowly deposited in the makeshift lab by the SEAL team.

Scully looked through the open hanger doors at the night sea, visible only as a gray field. She wondered just what turned this place into a killing ground. It was her job as pathologist to find out what.

"Time to go, Mulder." Pryce was holding a small flashlight as he stood in the open doorway to the room in which the men had died. From the way he cast the beam back and forth, frequently looking around the hallway, the charnelhouse bothered him.

"Hey, Agent Mulder. We have to get back."

Fox had long since ceased to sift through the ashes for shell casings. He'd even given up tracing the holes in the walls with his hand. Now he stood in the center of the twisted mess, his evidence baggies gripped tightly in his hand, and both arms wrapped about his chest.

Whitman turned from where he'd been taking samples. "Sir, are you okay?"

Mulder stopped looking around the room, instead intently peering at the ceiling. He didn't see Whitman approach him from behind.

"Sir-" Whitman tapped him on the back, and Agent Mulder spun about, the muzzle of his pistol shaking in the young doctor's face. Whitman let out a yelp, and fell backward onto the floor.

"Jesus H. Christ! What the hell do you think you're doing?" Pryce closed in on Fox, his hands in fists. Fox raised a hand to his mask, and switched his radio back on.

"Sorry there." He holstered his firearm and helped Whitman to his feet. Whitman was still shaking.

"Sorry? Dammit! Get a light on Whitman, and I mean now!" Pryce started going over the other USAMRIID officer's P3 suit with his own light. "Check for punctures. And I mean NOW!"

"Oh Jesus no. Not, not . . . like them?" Whitman's voice had gone soft and thick.

Hadat grabbed his hands and pulled Whitman about to face him. "Not a chance, son. Just breath deep in there. Breathe." While he spoke, Mulder turned his Bureau Flashlight on the kid's back, checking him quietly.

For two tense minutes, the four men panicked, and prayed. Whitman was checked from head to foot, and no punctures could be found. But before Whitman could let out his breath, Major Pryce had rounded on Mulder.

"Goddamn it. What were you thinking, turning off your radio?" He was furious, and still wasn't calmed down. "You could have killed that kid! Either tearing his suit, or shooting him."

Mulder picked up his baggies of evidence before answering. "You were making too much noise for me to think. And Whitman startled me is all. Besides, the safety is on my pistol."

"Agent Mulder, if any one of us punctures our suit, we would be exposed to whatever is on this rig." He grabbed the leather strap of Fox's shoulder holster, shaking him for emphasis. "Do you get it?"

Mulder pulled away. "I'm sorry. But you can relax, there's no virus here."

"And now you've got a medical degree too. I'm not impressed."

"Well I am. But you're right about one thing; it's time to get out of here."

"We're not through with this one." Pryce pointed at him sharply.

"No, we're not. Just go prove for yourself there's nothing here."

Pryce spun and slammed the door behind him. A nearby pipe hissed, its seal undoubtedly broken. Mulder took Whitman by the shoulder and helped him out of the room.

"You okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. And I know it's not your fault. The Major just gets like this." They quickly started up the stairs.

"I guess neither of us is in a good mood." Mulder swung the flashlight behind himself at odd intervals. He thought he heard something scraping the metal floors.

"No problem. Uh, Mulder . . ." Whitman paused. "Just leave your radio on, though."

Reaching the door to the hanger, Mulder stepped through before locking it. "No problem."

Dr. Scully was already talking to the USAMRIID team by the time Mulder made his way across the cavernous hanger to her. The other doctors were talking to her from across one of the charred corpses. Fox stepped up to the foot of the examination table, chilled by the sight of these rubber-suited doctors calmly talking over maimed and burned body.

Dana interrupted Pryce with a raised hand as Mulder approached. "Good news or bad first."

"I'll take the bad first. Seems appropriate somehow." He started to rest his hands on the table, then rethought the idea. Although the suit was sealed, he imagined he could smell the body.

"Well, according to the level and penetrance of tissue damage, that room was over four-hundred degrees centigrade." She gestured toward the remains, its joints flexed and locked by the heat. "That was enough to destroy most of the evidence, including any information on the possible presence of a contaminant."

"But you've got good news." Fox managed to keep facing her, silently glad for the mask that hid her eyes.

"Yes. Peirson and I conducted scrapings, based on some bloodstains he found in the hallway." Dana reached behind her, and Peirson handed her several small cases. Each had a soft waxy substance lining the bottom.

"Gee Doctor Scully, you and Peirson seem good at scraping." It slipped out past gritted teeth before he could stop himself. She'd brought his temper up, and it took hold faster than he could think.

Dana froze for a moment, biting the tip of her tongue. She didn't know what to do when her partner and friend undermined her in front of her colleagues. If it were anyone else, she thought, I'd just dismantle them. Shit.

Peirson turned on Fox, but said nothing. He just touched her back softly through the suit.

Dana stepped away quickly. She was sure that Peirson meant well, but he was just throwing gas on the fire. And she now had the other doctors' attention, but for the wrong reasons.

She cleared her throat. "We. . . I inoculated several varieties of bacterium samples we brought from the Elliot. Over the last hour and a half, no plaques have formed." She set the samples down and turned to Mulder. "That means no virus has killed off areas of the bacteria."

"Well, that fits in with what I found down below." He swallowed an acid comment, and tossed his baggies of evidence onto the metal counter. They rattled sharply at the twisted foot remaining on the corpse.

Dr. Scully waited patiently. She knew how Mulder liked to explain his ideas, and knew that he'd simply be more difficult now that he was angry.

Hadat wasn't nearly as patient. "What exactly did you find, Mr. Mulder." He purposefully omitted Fox's title.

"Aside from a lot of ashes, not too much." Hadat threw his hands up. "But all the shells I collected had expended firing caps. They expended all their ammo, and nothing cooked off in the fire."

"So they shot one another. That still doesn't explain why." Pryce was interested in this, against his better judgment. In the midst of that mausoleum, he'd forgotten to check for shells.

Surprisingly, it was Dana that answered. "They didn't shoot one another. None of these remains showed any sign of bullet wounds, though all had compound premortem fractures of the long bones, and substantial soft tissue damage."

"Did you find bite marks?" Mulder found himself talking to his partner normally again, pulled into their relationship by the mystery at hand.

"Not really." She was uncomfortable with the way he was dropping into his usual role, as though nothing was wrong.

"Not really?" Inside his heavy mask, Fox's head tilted ever so slightly at this. "What does that mean?"

"What? Oh . . ." Actually, she was having a hard time keeping her mind on the autopsy results. Dana was still marveling at the way Fox could shift gears, both personally and professionally. "One victim, an unidentified male, was found to have a six point five centimeter circular hole in his skull, located three centimeters above his brow ridge. The brain was destroyed, and I found fragments of bone within the soft tissues. There was no corresponding exit wound."

Pryce picked up the folder Dr. Scully had been writing in earlier. "That's nice, doctor. But that sounds like a pistol wound. Large caliber, wadcutter round."

"That's what I thought at first. But there are some anomalies here." She picked up the severed head and held it out to Major Pryce. "As you can see, there are deep grooves in the bone along the sides of the entrance wound. Unless someone filed the edges of a bullet hole after this man was shot . . ."

"Well, that's not likely." The doctors turned to look at Mulder again. "I found metal shrapnel about the room, stuck in some furniture in a few places. It looks like a stray round set off a kerosene can nearby. Those men were firing randomly, and one of them hit the kerosene they'd brought with them. Then whatever they were shooting at got to them before the flames did."

There was a long moment of silence, while four medical doctors stared at the small pieces of metal lying in the palm of his hand. He glared at Scully, knowing she couldn't see him, wanting her to say something. The moment was broken by a low, appreciative whistle over their radios. "Damn. That's a hell of a reconstruction there, Slick."

Hadat spoke up gruffly, "There's no way you can be certain of all that, that, . . . conjecture."

The Lieutenant slowly walked up behind Mulder, and took the fragments from his hand. He brought each piece close to his goggles, and inside his suit he bit his lip.

"Well, people, that setup fits these fragments, the shells, and the bodies. Sounds like a pretty good call to me." Quiddis let the fragments tinkle softly to the examination table. "So does this mean you suspect they were killed by a wild animal in the middle of an ocean?"

"I've got lots of ideas. But we'll need to search this rig top to bottom for more evidence." The radio static broke Fox's smooth voice repeatedly.

Peirson interjected his own thoughts as he stepped up behind Dr. Scully. "Evidence? Like this isn't enough for you? Some kind of big dog killed them. That Soviet satellite was testing something, it came down, and their pet project killed these people." He waved over Dana's shoulder to the shriveled body on the table. "It's biowarfare, and it's not our problem. We scorch the rig and go home."

Major Pryce held up his hand, stopping the young man. "What's this about a satellite?"

A loaded silence descended immediately over the team. Scully realized sharply that the entire SEAL team was heavily armed. From the quick head movements from the suited USAMRIID team, they too had the same thought.

And Peirson was just inches behind her.

Her breath caught, adrenaline spreading like a cold snap through her chest. Dana was suddenly conscious of just how thin her P3 suit was. A drop of sweat slid from her mask's headband and ran down her temple tremulously. She stiffly turned away from Peirson, her ice blue eyes wide behind their goggles.

As she turned, she saw Peirson's whole body tense under the rubber of his suit. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have-"

Now Quiddis barked at him, "Secure that mouth, damn it!"

Quiddis slapped futility at his mask, wishing he could scratch an itch under his jaw. Behind him, his men rubbed gloved fingers together, feeling the sweat-soaked rubber between them and their weapons. Quiddis looked up in the air, and swore softly.

He brought his head down, and spoke softly. "Okay. I'm going to pretend you never heard a thing. So are my men. Right?"

Ever so softly, eight men joined in. All sounded embarrassed, upset. Peirson watched Scully's stiff frame, and spoke only to her. "Of course."

Fox cleared his throat, and spoke loudly. Scully nearly jumped at the noise. "Well, now that we all know what were not talking about, an air force jet tracked something reentering the atmosphere around here."

"Mulder!" Scully and Quiddis both cried out, the tones entirely different.

Ignoring Dana, Mulder rounded on Quiddis. "How much do you want to die here, Lieutenant?"

Quiddis unsnapped the embossed leather cover to his sidearm. "Are you threatening me, Agent Mulder?"

Impossibly, the temperature in the dark hanger dropped again, and Dana suddenly found she couldn't hear her own breath in her ears.

"No, I'm telling you. If we don't know exactly what's going on here, we are going to die." He leaned forward intently. "But not because of me. Because whatever killed these men will kill us too."

"I'm talking national security." The Lieutenant's voice went up.

"So am I. What if you drag the next plague home with you? What if it goes through sealed suits?" Mulder paused, knowing that he had made the claustrophobic confines of everyone's suits feel like traps. "If the doctors here can't figure out what happened, that's it. None of us go back. Ever."

Lt. Quiddis turned around slowly, his mask scanning his men. No one needed to see his face to understand the shock written on it.

"Do you get it? No one would risk bringing you home until you can prove you're okay. And there's a warship out there, waiting for us. Now, do you still want to keep secrets Lieutenant?"

Scully held her breath. This was a dangerous game he was playing. How this man would react was damn near unpredictable, and she wondered whether Fox would goad him over the edge.

Quiddis circled back to the USAMRIID team, and rubbed his gloves together. "An E-3 picked up a CIS satellite, dedicated to biowarfare projects. It dropped into the ocean near here, and we think the workers spotted it, and brought the capsule onto their rig. We're here to find the capsule. Need anything else?" His voice was tired.

Hadat thought for a moment before speaking. "What was in it?" Even he sounded guarded.

"That's all I was told. A CIS biowarfare lab in space." He grabbed a lab stool and dropped onto it, slapping his thigh with his hand. "And Peirson, fuck up like that again, and you'll never see another mission."

"Yes, sir." Neither man looked at one another.

Mulder jumped in. "Okay, so its time we search the rig."

"Mulder," The tight note in Scully's voice brought him to face her. "When did you last see Glad?"

Mulder didn't answer. He simply spun sharply, scanning the hanger for Glad. He stopped, lost in thought while the SEAL team tried to contact him over the radio.

Quiddis jumped to his feet. "The spook isn't answering. Think he's . . . sick?"

Fox turned on the soldier. "No. He's insurance."

Colonel Ryan White tore at the fittings to his sealed suit. He managed to free himself of its sweaty embrace, and with it the last vestiges of 'Sergeant Glad.' Gone was the man who had sparred with Agent Mulder; now, he felt untouchable in his element. Ducking, he retrieved his MP5 again. Rising quietly, he kicked the suit into a dark corner, and slung the submachine gun over his head. The small nightvision visor fit about his temples, settling into the groove worn by the mask. Now he was ready.

The rusty hatch that lead out of Platform Two loomed before him in the pitch darkness. Through his visor it seemed an unsteady admixture of deep green shades as he unlatched it and threw it open.

Beyond it was a dark gray field, lit up by the stars overhead. He could hear the crash of the waves against the pylons below him, and smell the raw sea air. But most important, he saw the web-like shape of the gantry that linked Platforms Two and One. It bounced and rattled under him as he crossed, the muzzle of his weapon searching above him, along the windows of the crew quarters.

He found the door into the crew quarters sealed shut. The gangway led only back to the hanger, forcing his hand.

He pulled from a thigh pocket a thin coil of white plastic, known as Det-cord. He pressed it into position about the edge of the doorway, plunging the detonator caps deep into it on either end. He ran quickly for cover behind Platform Two's doorway, before triggering the explosives.

The small whooshing thump burned a thousand degree hole in the door, and blasted it inward. The noise of the metal hatch crashing to the floor seemed louder than the explosion, for the quick concussion wave was pitched too low to be heard fully. Again, Col. White ran down the gantry, this time ducking into Platform One.

The suit radio was still tucked to his ear, the microphone sealed up. He'd heard the discussions going on, and knew Quiddis wouldn't do the job.

Thankfully, he thought, oil burns well.