Fox Mulder: Go ahead.
Dana Scully: No, you go ahead.
Fox Mulder: No, no, no. Be my guest.
Fox Mulder: I know how much you like snapping on the latex.


14

Special Agent Lance McClain still wasn't completely convinced of the existence of extra-terrestrials.

He was, however, convinced that there was more going on here than just the delusions of his wild theorist partner.

They had returned to the room after the desert, but Lance was pretty sure that neither of them had really slept much. Keith was gone just after dawn to meet up with Shirogane and the others to examine the piece of debris, which Kogane had practically spooned all night long. Lance had opted to try for another hour of sleep he didn't catch, and after getting coffee from the gas station next door, went to the motel office and called for a cab to give him a lift to what he was mentally referring to as "the lab."

Lance used this time to try to come up with an alternate explanation for the debris, but by the time Pidge let him in through the side door to the garage, he still hadn't come up with anything.

He braced himself as he entered through the door by the garage, stepping by Pidge, but he wasn't sure he was ready for the explanation Keith and Shiro had come up with during his absence.

"Agent McClain, I'm glad you're here," said Shirogane, meeting him by the door and ushering him toward the computer screens. "Keith—Agent Kogane—and I have found…"

From behind them, Pidge cleared their throat. Shiro nodded apologetically. "Excuse me, Pidge was an instrumental part of the operation."

Lance sighed, turning back toward the computers, where his partner was waiting, his sleeves rolled up and his jacket folded over the back of his chair. "What've you got?"

"So," said Keith, his eyebrows lowering on his eyes, "we've analyzed the chemical makeup of this piece of…"

Pidge cleared their throat as they brushed past Lance, grabbing his coffee out of his hands as they went. "I think you mean I analyzed the chemical makeup…" They took a sip of Lance's coffee, scrunched up their face, spit the coffee back into the cup, and handed it back to Lance. "A little less cream next time, bud." They patted Lance on the shoulder.

"Dr. Gunderson analyzed it, excuse me," said Keith, turning from Pidge back to Lance. "And what we found was… unusual."

"Unusual how?" asked Lance.

"Exactly!" said Keith. His eyes were lit up, and he leaned forward a bit, elbows propped on his knees, as he continued to explain. "At first, nothing seemed to be strange. Normal metals and stuff you'd expect in a piece of machinery. Then, there's a slight pulse. Something else."

"What?"

"There's the question," said Shirogane, gesturing to Lance with his prosthetic while pointing to the computer screens with his other hand. "We don't know what it is. It's nothing that's ever been observed on Earth before."

Lance tried to make his eyeroll seem less obvious than it actually was. Keith pointed to the screen. "Look. It's right here. We can't seem to place the material. And it seems to help keep the thing, whatever it was, together."

"It did it a lot of help when it fractured in the atmosphere or on impact," said Lance, his eyes scanning over the numbers and figures on the screen. They seemed to check out.

"That's the thing," said Keith. "And please, don't dismiss this right away—what if the same people who came to collect last night…" He trailed off, losing his words for just a moment before catching them again. "…what if they had a hand in taking it down in the first place?"

"It would explain why they wanted to cover it up so efficiently…"

"But it would also mean that whoever they were, they know that this was coming in advance."

Lance raised an eyebrow. "So you're saying…" He felt a vibration in his pocket, and pulled out his cell phone. One glance at the caller ID, and he took a step back from Keith and Shiro. "Sorry, I've to take this call…"

He backed away from the others, still clutching his coffee in one hand, and stepped out of the garage into the hallway that connected it to the rest of the house. He could see from there Hunk working in the kitchen, washing dishes, which explained why Lance hadn't already seen him in the garage.

He stepped into a side room and closed the door behind him, finally answering the call. A familiar, gruff voice met him from the other side of the line.

"McClain, I don't often have to wait for the fifth ring for someone to pick up," said Assistant Director Ross through the phone.

"I'm sorry, sir, I…"

"Yeah, I don't care," he grunted. "Listen, I don't know what you're doing out there, but you're causing trouble."

"What?" asked Lance, hunching over the phone a bit.

"Nothing big, or stated explicitly, but let's just say, I'm getting a lot of pressure to bring you back into the garrison." He paused. "Listen: I don't know what you're doing down there, but it seems like it might be important." Lance glanced at the door in the small, dark room, and closed his eyes, nodding. "I can't be a part of it. There are people who want me to reign you in, and they aren't asking, if you understand me."

Lance thought he could hear a waver in he man's rough voice. He nodded, realized he was in a phone conversation, and said, "Yes, sir."

"So I'm officially telling you to stop working on this case," he said, his voice almost mechanical. A brief pause, and then a string of numbers; "5551103." He paused again. "You'll come back," he said, as if he hadn't just listed off a string of numbers, "with all of the facts." He stressed the last word in a way that just sounded unnatural. Lance ran through the umber in his head once more, making sure he hadn't lost the rapid-fire digits.

"Yes, sir," said Lance, repeating to himself the digits, in his head.

"Remember, McClain. The facts."

The phone clicked off, and Lance held it to his ear soundlessly before lowering it from his face. He slid his phone back into his pocket, and he leaned back against the wall.

Ross had said to shut down the investigation, but, judging by his tone and that string of numbers, he had meant something else entirely. He was just covering his butt, which meant…

Someone's got the Assistant Director under surveillance. That mean that whatever this thing was, it was way over his head. He glanced around the room he had closed himself into for the first time. It was a laundry room, a washer and dryer against the back wall. A basket of dirty clothes sat in front of the washer. A cross from where Lance was leaning was a cabinet, underneath which was a drying rack.

It wasn't the drying rack or the cabinet that caught Lance's attention, though, it was the spiraled cord that hung down from an old phone someone had stored on top of the cabinet.

Assistant Director Ross had asked for the facts. But he hadn't, had he? thought Lance. No, he had pronounced it just right so that Lance could make the connection.

The fax.

15

After some quick and frankly pretty unconvincing excuses to his partner, Shiro, Hunk, and Pidge, Lance left the garage to "go check up on something real quick."

He had then walked as quickly as he could without power walking down the street to Cairn's main part of town. He was lucky that though it was a small town in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico, it still had a Post Office. It was the only place he could really think of that would have a working fax machine in this town.

He opened the front door and found that the inside of the Post Office was just as hot and dry as the outside. Lance dropped his coffee in the trash by the door—he didn't need any more diuretic than the heat, causing him to sweat under his jacket. He approached the counter, where a single woman was waiting for a customer. She was probably in her mid-fifties, and the heat didn't seem to bother her in her neatly pressed uniform.

"Good morning," said Lance, raising his hand in greeting.

"Morning," said the woman, looking to him but not returning his smile.

"I was just hoping to use your fax machine…"

"Okay. I'll need the cover page on top, the others below, and a number for the other fax. It'll be five cents a page, not counting the cover page, on both outgoing and incoming." She sounded as if she were a robot, with a mechanical and rehearsed efficiency.

Lance stopped and hesitated. "Oh. Okay, yeah. Can I, um, borrow some paper and a pen?"

The woman on the other side of the counter raised one eyebrow but turned to the die, gathered two pieces of printer paper and a ballpoint pen, and slid them across the counter to Lance.

"Thanks," said Lance. He first scribbled the string of numbers at the top right of one of the papers: 5551103. Then, he wrote in quick, block handwriting:

To: Garrison
Fr: Blue

His next page, he scribbled in quick handwriting in the center of the page:

What?

Lance turned to the postal worker and offered an uneasy grin. "What's the return number?"

The woman looked to Lance with such disinterest Lance thought it was weird that she looked up at all. The apathy her expression carried almost scared Lance. "555-7031," she said.

"Thanks," said Lance, scribbling the number on the cover sheet and handing both of the papers across the counter to the woman. "And if there could be private, uh…" He fumbled to the sweaty inside of his jacket to find his badge, which he flashed to the woman. "This is all strictly confidential."

She raised one eyebrow attain. "Okay, hun," she said, turning from him to a small fax machine and punching in the number sending them through with a creaking and shuffling set of noises that made Lance wonder how old the fax machine was. Of course, the fact that it was a fax machine at all spoke to that.

A moment later, the machine came to a rest. The postal worker picked the papers from the tray and passed them across the counter to Lance. "That'll be a nickel. I'm assuming you're waiting for a response?"

"I think so, yeah," said Lance, folding the papers and tucking them into the pocket of his jacket where he kept his badge. As he did, the fax machine behind the counter came to life, beginning to print. "That was quick, eh?" asked Lance, a grin on his face.

His grin was not returned. She waited another moment for the printing to cease—it was more than several pages—and paged through them briefly before handing them over to Lance. "That'll be seventy-five cents."

Lance pulled a dollar out of his pocket and handed it to her. She was ready with a quarter practically before he had handed her a bill. Lance nodded, took the papers, and took a step away from her. Then, he stopped and turned back to her, using the pen to scribble his name and phone number on the corner of one of the papers and handing it to the woman at the counter. "If anything else comes in for me, please call me right away."

The woman looked to him before looking at the paper slip and putting it next to the fax machine.

"Thanks," said Lance, hurrying out of the Post Office, papers in hand and Kogane's number half-dialed already.

16

Keith joined Lance a little after Lance had gotten to the diner, and Lance had already ordered coffee for the both of them. Keith had something resembling a scowl on his face.

He slid into the booth. "Alright, McClain, why couldn't you have just come back to where I already was? We were in the middle of—"

"We're off of the case."

"What?"

Lance sighed, gesturing with his hands as he spoke. "I got a call from Assistant Director Ross this morning. After what we'd found already, he found out that someone else, someone high-up, was also interested in this, and keenly interested in keeping us away from it. I think they threatened him, and he officially put us off of the case."

Keith's eyebrows came together in anger, but Lance held up his hands before his partner could speak. "But don't worry. Kind of. He did give me this." He slid the small stack of papers across the table to Keith. Keith looked to Lance, his eyes narrowed, and picked up the papers to investigate them closer.

"This is…"

"Someone high-up," said Lance, "and I don't know how high—hell, I don't even know if their position in the government even actually exists—wants whatever we found in the desert. And they want us desperately to not find it."

Keith didn't say anything. He paged through the papers, the typed-out pages of information. They detailed vaguely-worded assignments to New Mexico, around the same time as when they had left DC to investigate the crashes.

"Do you think that this means we'll have to report back…?" Lance trailed off, and Keith met his eyes as they fell downward.

"Officially? Yes," said Keith. His eyes flitted back to the papers for a moment before returning to Lance. "But, I know I haven't taken many vacation days yet this year."

A grin pulled at Lance's cheek. "I guess I'll have to call mine in a little early."

Keith's face held a grin now, too. "Stress of the first case, and all." He turned back to the documents as Lance took another sip of his coffee.

The waitress came to the booth and dispensed some more coffee into Lance's mug. Keith seemed to notice his own mug for the first time and began to drink from it as the waitress walked away, his eyes still poring over the documents in his hand.

"With these, we'll take the next step. We can figure out what it is about this that the people in that car didn't want us to know," said Lance, gesturing excitedly with his hands as he spoke. "And then we can…"

Keith stopped mid-sip and practically slammed the cup of coffee down on the table, splashing a few droplets over onto its laminated surface. He shook the paper he was holding at Lance. "This!"

"What?" asked Lance. He reached for the paper, but Keith jerked back, gesturing to it all the same.

"It says right here: 'Agents dispatched regarding new developments in the Kerberos Program at…' Then there are the coordinates of the first impact site." He looked from the papers to Lance. "The Kerberos Program."

"Shirogane's old program."

"Do you know what this means?"

"Yeah, but—"

"Everything he's said is true." Keith paused, looking down to the papers again, as if to confirm what he was reading. "I mean, I didn't doubt him, but I mean, this is proof."

"Keith, let's not get too far ahead of ourselves," said Lance. "I mean, it could be connected to the original research mission or the spacecraft or—any number of things."

Keith shook his head. "This," he tapped the paper with the middle finger of the hand not holding it, "is what we need to follow up on. Because we have the most credible—newly credible, thanks to this leak, but still totally credible—source."

"Keith, I don't think we…" said Lance, catching Keith's arm as he got up to leave the booth, bushing back against the table as he did.

"We're going to do this," said Keith, turning back to Lance with his eyebrows low over his eyes, "because I've been right every sept of the way on this case, and all you've been doing is reporting back to Ross, the higher-ups who are fighting us over this, and God knows who else." His eyes, cold, lingered on Lance for another moment before yanking his arm away from Lance's grip and stalking toward the exit.

"Oh yeah?" asked Lance, calling out after his partner. "Well, you've been reporting to…" He paused for a moment, thinking. "…someone else! I bet…"

Keith didn't turn back to face Lance, though a few of the other patrons of the diner did. Lance held up a hand to all of them, in apology for the small spat, and sat back at his table. He stared at the papers left on the table for a moment before picking up his coffee and draining the rest of it. Keith's voice ran through his mind, something he had said to Lance on their first day together. "They just sent you here to spy on me. They think I'm crazy." He had denied it then, but it really was true. And now that he couldn't report back—to the bureau, the case was closed—what was his position? How could Kogane trust him to do his part in the rest of this investigation into whatever it was they were investigating? He sighted, and when the waitress came to refill his coffee, he instead asked for the check.


The Cigarette Smoking Man: Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him.