Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Do you think you're indestructible and no one can touch you? Well I think you're disposable, and it's time you knew the truth... - One of My Lies (Green Day) Vol 2. Week 51 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal
Setting: Season Four Episode: Tunguska
Black, oily substance coated the slide under the microscope lens. Scully's eyes blurred as they tried to focus, burning at the strain of too many hours staring at nothing more than a grease slick. She sighed, pushing away from the lab table, her head throbbing with the effort as she rubbed her forehead viciously with the heel of one palm. Hours she had been at this already, long hours, the comatose Dr. Sacks notes, watching the video of the procedure, the spray of the dark liquid as he cut into the rock, the screams as he collapse, inert to the laboratory floor. So far nothing explained the death-like stillness of his body's function, nor about the fluid, where it came from, and why it had the effect it did on him.
"Any luck on an identification?" Pendrell tried to keep up his positive spirit though he looked and sounded as exhausted as she did. Scully smiled wanly and shook her head at the fellow red haired man, leaning back on her lab stool and staring blandly at the cold, white instrument in front of her offering her no answers…only further headaches.
"So far it looks just like oil."
Pendrell wrinkled his nose as he moved towards the microscope himself, one blue eye staring through the lens to study the smear himself. "Where did it come from?"
"My first guess would be that it came from the hydraulics of the drill that Dr. Sacks was using but I had a maintenance team go through the lab already and they said everything was in working order. Video from Dr. Sacks work, however, shows that the spray occurred at about the same time he began cutting into the rock sample Mulder and I brought him, indicating that could be the source."
"But he was just cutting a rock." The look of dubious doubt from Pendrell was hardly surprising to Scully. Frankly she was more surprised she hadn't seen it out of the head of the SciCrimes Lab much earlier, considering some of the things she'd asked him to analyze.
"You ever hear of Daniel Trepkos, Agent Pendrell?"
Recognition lit almost instantly on the young man's face. "Yeah, sure he was that cracked genius out of Cal Tech, worked in geology and robotics. He disappeared on some mountain a few years back."
"He didn't disappear," Scully murmured thoughtfully, rubbing fretfully at the dull ache along her right eyebrow. "He dug too deeply, and pulled up a sample with something inside of it he couldn't handle." Poor Jesse, she sighed, remembering the young, graduate assistant who'd followed Trepkos up the mountain and died because of it. "Mulder and I worked that case, we know what happened though the army doesn't discuss it. An entire team was wiped out by what they found in that rock."
If Pendrell's eyes got any wider they would fly off his face in a minute. His Adam's apple worked frantically, as if priming itself to try and make some sort of articulate sound. It must have worked. "You and Agent Mulder…you're serious?"
"What do you think the X-files are, Agent Pendrell? We deal with strange things everyday, or haven't you heard the rumors?" She couldn't help but tease the other agent a little. She knew that Pendrell of course had a peripheral knowledge of what they did, logically he understood it was strange, unexplained cases. But it was one thing to know that Spooky Mulder dealt with crazy phenomenon and another to experience for oneself. Pendrell's eyes rolled wildly from the microscope to her and back before he collected himself, roughly clearing his throat as he tried to affect a nonchalant shrug.
"And is that what we are dealing with here…more of what Trepkos found in that mountain?"
"No," Scully replied promptly, feeling slightly guilty for worrying Pendrell as he slid in what he probably thought was an unobtrusive manner away from the sample on the microscope. "No, this is different. This seems to be petroleum based substance, and judging from the type of rock that is a possibility. We know it was smuggled out of Russia, which since the end of the Cold War has become a free-for-all for Western interests eager to plunder the country for its mineral resources."
"And Russia has plenty of them," Pendrell agreed, still eyeing the slide suspiciously as if he expected it to suddenly infect him from across the room. "Companies are paying millions of dollars to get into the country and find out what's in there to try and get a foot in the door."
"A rock containing oil from a new source would be big money if the right people get their hands on it," Scully agreed. But as logical of an explanation as it was, it didn't feel right. It didn't explain the condition of the geologist, and it didn't explain why Krycek felt this rock was so important. She thought back, something pulling at her memory. "There was a case Mulder and I worked on earlier in the year…"
"Another strange infection from some other rock?" Pendrell was clearly going to be spooked by her story from now on.
"No, not quite." Her words did little to assuage Pendrell. "There was a French salvage ship, the Piper Maru, it wandered into San Diego. All of its crew displaying radiation burns…all of them but one man. He had been underwater on a dive at the time. He was unaffected, but his dive suit was covered in a slick, oily substance just like the substance here." Pieces were starting to click together disturbingly in Scully's mind, she could almost literally here the sound of them as an alarming pattern started to form.
"Mulder found the diver in his home in San Francisco days later covered in this same substance. His wife was found in a Hong Kong bathroom two days later, same thing. And Mulder and Krycek…." Krycek had disappeared from the car he shared with Mulder and hadn't been seen again until he turned up in Queens days ago. He said he had been found in a missile silo in North Dakota….ironically where they had been themselves looking for Krycek.
"When Dr. Sacks began studying the rock days ago, he mentioned that it contained fossilized bacteria, perhaps from Mars, he couldn't be sure."
"Dr. Sacks was infected from something in that rock." Pendrell's alarm rose again, though he made no move further. Despite the strangeness of everything Scully was telling him in that moment, and undoubtedly this had to be the weirdest thing she'd ever asked Pendrell to help her research, at his heart he was a scientist. And she could see the curiosity in his worried expression. He wanted to know what was going on here as well, which is why Scully had asked him to help her on this. Outside of Mulder, Pendrell was one of the few she could trust in the FBI with any of the strange things she uncovered, and certainly the only other scientist who could view these things from her perspective.
"We don't know, but I do know that if this is the same substance we found off the Piper Maru, it could contain a life form that has existed since before humans were even a mote in God's eye. And it's hard telling what that sort of ancient life form could do." Was this what the Piper Maru had stumbled on months ago? Not nuclear material for a bomb, but rather an ancient substance that could be played with…manipulated….perhaps turned into a bioweapon to be used by the government, tested on innocent and unsuspecting people.
Scully felt her mind reeling as possibilities, conclusions, and threads of logic came slamming into it as years of unanswered questions began to make a certain horrifying sense. How did Mulder deal with this everyday, the awareness of knowing? She swallowed hard, her head aching at the weight of what was starting to come together.
"Agent Scully….you all right?" Pendrell's concern cut through the aching swirl of her thoughts and she met his worried gaze, smiling tightly.
"Yeah, its just…things started to finally make a weird sort of sense." Her murmured vagueness was confusing to him, she knew that, but it wouldn't be confusing to Mulder. "Excuse me, Agent Pendrell." She slid from the chair she had been perched on, her fingers reaching for her phone in her pocket, already dialing Mulder's number as she made for the hallway.
He picked up on the first ring. "Mulder."
"It's me," she breathed, just restraining the rush of ideas that pressed to pour themselves out of her. "Mulder, Dr. Sacks….I think the fossilized remains he found in the rock were not what he assumed they were. I think he found a substance similar to what we saw on the diving suit from the Piper Maru last winter, the same, oily substance."
"What is it?" His voice was garbled over the cell phone, the sound of noise and loudspeakers from somewhere muffling him.
"I don't know yet, it could be the ancient bacteria that Dr. Sacks was referring to when we spoke to him." She paused for a breath. "Mulder, this could be the very substance the Piper Maru was looking for. What if this substance…this bacteria in this rock is what these men have been after all along? What if it wasn't nuclear material down there after all but this, the key to all of their biochemical machinations for the last fifty years?"
Mulder was silent on the other end for long moments, as if considering this. "It's a possibility, Scully, but we won't know till we know till we know where the rock comes from and why it's so important."
"Where it comes from?" The loudspeaker sounded in the background again. "Are you still in New York?"
"I won't be soon, I'm heading to St. Petersburg."
"Russia?" The word sprang out of her so forcefully it rang down tiled hallway loud enough for Pendrell in the lab to glance towards the glass window and out towards where she stood. "Mulder, why…."
"Look, I won't be going alone, Krycek is going with me. Conveniently he speaks Russian."
That did not in any way make her feel better. "His parents were immigrants." She remembered that from Krycek's background report. "Mulder, we have no diplomatic jurisdiction to pursue this overseas…"
"I've already got diplomatic papers, Scully, and my flight leaves in half-an-hour. I'll let you know when I land."
"Mulder, this is crazy, you can't just run off to Russia like this?"
"Would you mind feeding my goldfish while I'm gone?"
Damn him and his goldfish. "Mulder, listen to me, you can't run off there, not without letting Skinner know."
"No Skinner. The less he knows the better, we need someone who will have plausible deniability if something should happen."
"And you expect something to happen?" Memories of Mulder in Alaska, Iowa, New Mexico, Puerto Rico, and many other places where he'd run off without her with only half a plan sprang to mind. "I can't just drop everything and get to you in Moscow or St. Petersburg if something were to happen."
"Not asking you to, Scully, I need you to stay with Dr. Sacks and find out what that fossilized bacteria is and if that is what infected him."
How far would he go with this, her reason screamed…she'd asked him that earlier that day when he was so dead set on pursuing this rock. How far would he go and how far could she follow him? He wasn't asking her to follow him to Russia, but to stay in the lab, to find out what she could about the substance, about the doctor's condition.
"You still think it's something extra-terrestrial?" Why did she even have to ask him that?
"The rock was shipped from the Tunguska area, Scully, the sight of a massive meteor impact in the earlier part of the century. If there are fossilized bacteria in that rock likely it came from that crater, and I can't think of anything more extra-terrestrial than that. Keep looking on your end, and I'll let you know what I find on mine."
He sounded so confident…he always did. "Mulder…be careful on this one. I don't know if I will be able to get you out if something goes…"
"I'll be fine, Scully. Hey, at least I'm telling you before I run off and do the stupid crap this time."
That at least did make her smile. "Right. I'll cover with Skinner in the morning."
"Thanks."
"And Mulder." One last warning sprung to mind. "Don't trust Krycek. Whatever his reason for us to know about that rock, he's only interested in it for himself."
"On my list of things that will happen when hell freezes over I think the Red Sox winning the Series and me trusting Alex Krycek are on the top of that list. But I'll keep an extra eye on him, just in case."
"He's standing there listening to this, isn't he?" A smile had worked its way on her lips.
"Handcuffed to me as we speak. I'll call you when we land." He clicked off without any goodbye, Mulder rarely used formalities when speaking to her on the phone. She stared at the device in her hand thoughtfully for long moments, imagining Mulder and Krycek in Russia, of all the things that could possibly go wrong, of Mulder lost and trapped there without a way out. That sort of situation was becoming the norm in their partnership, Mulder rushing off were angels feared to tread, relying on Scully to hold it all together for him.
How far could she follow?
"Hey," Pendrell's warm smile at the door caused her to look up, meeting it with one of her own. "No offense, but I'm alone in here with the fossilized, Martian Death Flu, you plan on running any more tests tonight?"
"No." She was too tired to think, she realized, her head twinging painfully. "I'll run the sample through the labs, see what I turn up. Let's call it a night, we'll fly back to DC in the morning."
Relief flooded Pendrell's face as he grinned. He was happy to get away from whatever it was they had been studying, thoroughly disturbed by it now. "You and Mulder must lead some pretty fantastic lives if this is the sort of stuff the two of you investigate all the time."
Scully chuckled dryly, her thoughts on her partner in Russia. "You don't know the half of it Agent Pendrell."