A/N: Okay, let me just tell you-this was a hard chapter to write. It's way different from the rest of the fic, and it's fricken LONG. Like, 4000 words longer than any other chapter long. It's an important part of the story, and it deviates a bit from the slower pace, so buckle up!


Kerberos


Jose Chung: For although we may not be alone in the universe, in our own separate ways, on this planet, we are all... alone.


17

The inside of Shirogane's house was almost eerily normal, like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. When they wat around his small kitchen table, little notepad out in front of both agents and Keith's phone between them and Shiro, set to record, it seemed almost as if they were about to have a perfectly normal conversation. Keith pressed a button on the phone's recording app and sat back in his chair, nodding to Shirogane as he did. Lance noted for the first time, as Shiro nodded back, just how deep the scar across the bridge of his nose seemed to be.

"This is Special Agent Keith Kogane, accompanied by my partner, Agent Lance McClain…" He didn't even turn his eyes toward Lance, but Lance didn't really expect him to. "…and we will be speaking with Takashi Shirogane about his experience in the Kerberos Project." He gestured across the table. "Shio, identify yourself for the record."

"Of course." Shiro leaned a bit closer to the cell phone in the middle of the table. "Takashi Shirogane, second in command in the Kerberos Program."

"Thanks," said Lance. Shiro nodded to him in appreciation, but Keith made no acknowledgement that he was speaking at all.

"Go ahead," said Keith. "Start from the beginning, and tell us everything you think we need to know."

Shiro nodded, took a deep breath, and began.

18

Okay, so I'm an astrophysicist, but my specialty is astrogeology. I study rocks, minerals—pretty much anything in space. My mission was conceived about six or seven years ago—NASA decided that they wanted to know more about the outer radius of the solar system, especially with bodies around Pluto and in the Kuiper Belt. Some of the derive was related to the ninth planet theory, some of it was about getting a clearer view about the outer radius of what we had orbiting our sun, and some of it was plain old scientific observations.

The thing was, we needed to travel out further than we usually did in order to operate the drone we were going to be using as a part of the operation. The problem was the precision. We weren't just landing on the planet and roving around, no, we were approaching multiple bodies and taking samples, analyzing them on-site with the drone. This meant we needed to be able to control it with enough real-time precision to get the job done.

I was brought on a little later in the program, actually. Dr. Holt had already put together the parameters for the device, and his son Matt—also past his doctorate, but it's easier to not refer to them both as "doctor;" you know how it is. Anyway, the mission as simple enough when you get right down to it: we shuttle the new control craft with the drone out past the asteroid belt to get a better position. Then, we release the drone to continue on toward the edge of the solar system. The control craft would orbit one of Jupiter's moons—Ganymede—from where we'd control the drone.

It was a long way, yeah, but we don't know about the outer solar system. It's a little crazy that we weren't even sure if there was a ninth planet out there or something, some larger body… When you think about how much we're learning about exo-systems, it's almost embarrassing how little we know about our own systems. That's what we were out to find. What's the Kuiper Belt even fully made of? How did it form the way it does? These are the questions we were looking to answer.

It was a pretty well-known mission, you know—there were some news outlets that reported it as the "next step in the space race," nudging forward the world in general toward further space exploration. That wasn't what we were really going for, but it was nice to have the spotlight back on space. The furthest manned space mission has that kind of effect. Agent McClain, I'm sure you've seen the outcome of this media frenzy in the funding of your own work, in one way or another. Yeah.

I know that Dr. Holt was very enthusiastic about his research. This was the culmination of his life's work—this was really his project, not mine. He had gone over everything so many times, making sure that everything was just where it needed to be. He was particular like that. I remember one time, in a simulated flight test, Matt brought in a sandwich—something he'd picked up in the cafeteria or whatever, and he'd brought it in as we were setting everything up. I didn't think it was that big of a deal, but when Dr. Holt noticed, he got really upset. Not angry—I don't think I ever saw Dr. Holt mad. But he wasn't happy, and it was… weird. He was so slow and serious, the way he asked Matt to leave, and it scared Matt a whole lot more than I think it would have if he'd just yelled at him. There was a quiet seriousness in his voice. After Matt had exited, there was the most uncomfortable silence I've ever experienced as Dr. Holt and I kept working.

I don't mean to make Dr. Holt seem like some kind of tyrant when I'm talking about him like this, and I really want you to know that. He cared a lot about this project, and he cared a lot about his son. His way of showing that was the extra care he took in every part of the project. Like—there was this one night, and we'd both stayed way too late, working on some of the specifications for the drone itself. When Dr. Holt realized that it was going on nine-thirty, he suggested we get out of there and get something to eat. I agreed, of course, because I guess I'd forgotten to get hungry while working, and it just sort of hit me all at once.

We ended up at an Applebee's that wasn't too far from the lab, and we got to talking. He was talking mostly about his family. He mentioned his wife, and how she was very anxious about him and Matt leaving on a mission together, especially one as far-off and as dangerous as this. He mentioned the way Matt was excited, and had practically begged him be his pilot. He'd given in, I guess, because Matt was "the only pilot he'd really trust with his life." Then, he took a swig of the beer he was drinking, and added that if any pilot was going to kill him in space somehow, he'd want it to be someone he could yell at afterward. He was funny like that.

Then, he mentioned his other kid, Katie, and how he was most worried about her. She'd been going through a rough time at that point, I guess, and his face really fell when he talked about it. He had almost postponed the project so that he could stay around with her, help her through whatever was going on, but he knew that she'd hate that. Instead, he was determined to get back to her safely, make sure that everything worked out for her. That was why he was so carefree, why he was so careful about getting everything right. He had people to get it right for.

What? Oh, me? I guess I had stuff going on at home, too, but I was young and I was ready for anything, you know? I'd spent my post-grad time just analyzing the same samples everyone else had analyzed a million times before, from Curiosity or whatever. This was my chance to do something larger, to really make my mark on history. That's what I was focused on, really.

You know, thinking back, the interaction I had with a scientist from SETI just before we left seems like it was a whole lot more significant now than it had at the time. She came to the lab a few days before the launch, and everyone was frantically going over all of the parts of the operation as many times as we could. I think she knew there was no way she was going to be able to talk with Dr. Holt, so she came to me while I was checking the stock of sample containers, being sure they would be clean and secured correctly for the drone to use them, when she came up from behind.

"Excuse me, Doctor Shirogane?" she asked, and I almost jumped; I definitely lost track of the containers I was counting. I sighed and turned to her.

"That's me," I said. "And you are?"

"Doctor Angela Sattler," she said, extending her hand. I took it, and shook. Her grip was firm. "I'm here from SETI."

"Oh?" I said, and I could tell she wasn't sure what to make of my reaction. "How can I help you?"

"Yes, well," she said, adjusting her glasses and holding a folder out to me. I took it. "I know the Kerberos Project has a pretty specific objective that doesn't concern the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but…" She trailed off, and I didn't interrupt her. "I was hoping that you might keep an eye out for anything that might…" She trailed off again, there, and I figured this time I could help her along.

"If we find anything that might indicate the presence of extraterrestrial life?" I offered. I raised an eyebrow. "It's pretty far from the sun to be habitable for any life we could imagine."

Dr. Sattler nodded. "That's true," she said, "but there's a possibility that we detected radio signals from some object just outside of the Kuiper Belt, and we—" She blushed at this point, so I offered her a smile, to try to lighten the mood a bit. "It's not that we're normally looking for an extraterrestrial communication. It's not set patterns. Instead, it's chatter."

"Chatter?"

"Radio chatter, as if there's something out there, communicating with something else."

Now, I just stared at her, because it seemed to be something unreal. I mean, she had a basis she stood on, and up until then I had never doubted the veracity of the SETI Institute. But just by probability, there really wasn't much of a chance of there being an alien spacecraft on the edge of our solar system. So I told her I'd keep my eyes out, that if I saw anything, I'd let SETI know, and that I had a lot to do at the moment; I'd check the file that she had given me later.

She wasn't about to let me go, though. As I turned around to go back to my counting, she caught my arm, and I turned back to her. "Takashi—excuse me, Dr. Shirogane—please." Her eyes were locked on mine, and they were serious, not pleading. "If you do find anything, report it to us. I have reason to believe public agencies would not have this information further scrutinized, as we would." She narrowed his eyes as the end, to emphasize her point, and I just assured her that I would.

I wish I actually had. That would have made everything easier for me, looking back, but hindsight is 20/20.

The launch went perfectly. Everything on time, down to the second, nothing even getting close to the edge of the margins of error. I figure that goes to the hard work of the whole team, but I'd attribute it to Dr. Holt, who had put so much work into making sure that everything was just right, every step of the way. Matt, too—he had spent countless hours in the simulator, making sure that he was able to interface with the shuttle's controls as easily as if he were just driving a car. As we pulled away from Earth, it was like the worst turbulence I'd ever felt in an airplane, but bumpier. When we breached the atmosphere, though, it was even smoother than I could have imagined.

It was calm, and that wasn't something I'd expected. I mean, I thought it would be slightly more tense, after all of the high tension before we had launched. But once we were out of the atmosphere, all of that kind of… melted away. I guess that all of that frantic preparation lead to being in just the right place for us.

It took us about a year to get past the asteroid belt, and I'm not going to lie, it felt like even longer. I liked the company of Matt and Dr. Holt, but just the three of us all the way up there got a little monotonous.

We read a lot of ebooks, did little anti-gravity tricks with pretty much anything we could think of doing, and even figured out how to use the propulsion of the ship to create just enough "gravity" for us to do our exercises—the ones that made sure our muscles didn't turn to jelly—with some kind of resistance. Matt made a joke at one point that when we got a little further, he'd be the second-strongest man in space. Dr. Holt had raised an eyebrow and said "I think you're not as strong as Shiro, so you'd be third." It took Matt a minute to get that one, Dr. Holt and I laughing the whole time.

Everything went according to plan—we dealt with routine maintenance issues, and had a few close calls while navigating through the asteroid filed, but we didn't' have any major issues during our journey out. Sort of—sort of the "calm before the storm."

We arrived near Jupiter at just after 450 days into our trip, and we were able to successfully enter the orbit of Ganymede without much issue. The tricky part was calibrating the ship so that it would orbit the moon without being pulled into the massive gravity of Jupiter itself, but of course Dr. Holt had adjusted for that, and the craft was able to automatically re-calibrate itself to stay in orbit once we got going.

Once we relayed the message back to the ISS and to Earth that we had arrived, we immediately got to work. We knew that this was the defining moment for us—we had to be very precise about launching the drone, to make sure that we had the right velocity coming around the orbit to really launch the drone in the right direction.

Once it was launched, my job started for real. I had to navigate the drone, once it got to the edge of the system, to the different bodies it was going to collect data on. It was going to be hard to do, because I wasn't really sure what I was going to be looking for. The Kuiper Belt is totally uncharted territory, so whatever I found was going to be totally new. That was exciting, and interesting, and instead…

I guess we found something new.

Um…

19

"Guys, can we take a break? I'm sorry, I…"

"It's fine," said Keith, reaching forward and pressing the record button on the phone app. "Don't worry about it."

Shiro nodded, stood up, and fiddled with his prosthetic as he faced the sink, away from the two agents. Lance looked to Keith, who hadn't taken any notes during Shiro's explanation. He didn't have any notes on his own notepad, other than the name of the SETI scientist—Angela Sattler—and a few question marks after that. The rest of it, he had already heard before. Shiro was right when he had noted that it had been an important leap in space sciences—Lance's current observations got pushed through when the Kerberos Project launched, and he was even able to receive time at Arecibo for observations. And after Shiro had gotten back, the new public opinion of what had happened with Kerberos had shunned him back to his office and data collecting again.

He looked to Keith, who was watching Shiro intensely. Lance figured that he'd already heard this story—when Shirogane had gone public with it, it had gotten very popular in certain circles, and those were the types of circles he was sure Keith kept tabs on. He knew about it because it was a part of his discipline, but he had never bothered to listen to the details. He had avoided anything that Shirogane had said because it seemed to just be making a mockery of space sciences as a whole. This guy came back from space and started spouting all of this to make up for the complete failure of his mission…

NASA had let him go, and while he had tried to get people to listen to his story, it made much more sense to believe a reputable scientific organization over the words of one paranoid astronaut. Not even SETI was interested in what he had to say, since NASA had reported even before he did the results of his disastrous mission, and their account was much more reliable and sensible-sounding. His story had sort of died out after a while, apparently for everyone except people who were interested in that sort of thing—people like his partner.

Keith turned toward Lance, and they made eye contact for a brief moment—the first time Keith had really looked him in the eye since they had talked about the fax in the diner the other day. Lance found himself reddening with some sort of shame, but he wasn't sure where it came from. He turned away just as Keith did, and he looked back to Shirogane.

It seemed like he really believed in what he was saying. This story was true to him. It was plain to say that he meant what he said, and he wanted desperately for anyone to believe him. Lance watched as Shiro looked out the small window over his sink, which had a thin film of shading on it to deter people on the outside from being able to see in. Whatever had happened, whether Shiro was telling the truth or not, he had lost his arm to tell them about it. He had faced public scrutiny from the press and from the scientific community, and now he lived out here in the desert, a disgrace. He really had no reason to keep lying, if he was.

He really believed in what he was saying, and Lance had to give that, at least, to him. That didn't make the idea of an extraterrestrial abduction and encounter any less fantastic as a plausibility.

Shiro turned back from the sink, took a deep breath, and sat down, his eyes going from Lance to Keith as he spoke. "I think I'm ready. Sorry—it's just…" He paused; took a breath. "It's a lot."

"Thank you, Shiro," said Keith, holding his hand out across the table, laying it down just beside the phone to show his proximity as support. "Just go at your own pace."

Lance felt like he should say something, too, to reassure Shiro, and said "This is really helping, getting your perspective directly."

Keith looked to him, narrowing his eyes a bit, and Lance could tell he was trying to figure out whether or not he was being genuine. Lance wasn't sure if he was or not. Shiro's eyes tilted together at the outside in a half-smile, and Lance deliberately didn't acknowledge Keith's look. Keith looked to Shiro.

"Are you ready?" Shiro nodded. Keith pressed the record button on the phone again.

20

About three days after we launched the drone, it went offline. I tried everything I could—re-establishing the link, resetting the ship command, checking the circuitry, all of that. There wasn't anything I could find wrong on our end. Dr. Holt was calm when he methodically went through very one of the craft's numerous systems for any sign of error, and Matt just nervously sat at the helm. I contacted the ISS and then Houston and relayed the information, and they asked me a series of questions I'd already asked myself about the drone and if I'd checked everything and if everything was in line—it was clear that they'd thought that it was my fault. And that made sense, I guess, but at that point I was pretty sure that it wasn't anything I'd done. The thing had just… stopped working.

Now, we spent about a say in orbit without any connection to the drone, which was a difficult thing to do. There was an air of anxiety that you could practically breathe. The craft wasn't large, and it seemed more than ever like it was tiny, pushing in on all of us. It was more than just claustrophobic. It was oppressive. None of us knew what exactly to do. We knew how to repair the drone, how to deal with it if any of the major functions stopped working, but to lose contact completely? That was something none of us, I guess, was equipped to deal with.

I…

It was at the end of that day when the screen—the navigation screen for the drone—came back to life. I wasn't near the monitor, but I heard the sound from the display. A grating sound, metal on metal, and it filled the ship. When I got to the screen, Dr. Holt was right behind me, and there were a few flashes on the screen—filled with static, a digital static unlike what I'd ever seen before. There was something-something that was interfering with the signal. I hadn't seen anything like it before. It was flashes of color intermitted by spikes of light and noise…

Dr. Holt suggested we try to adjust the cables on the inside of the system or something like that, but after that, the picture cleared up a bit. The drone wasn't in space, that much was clear to see. It was in a dark but lit hallway of some sort, metal walls and floor, being dragged forward by something just outside of its view. But it was being dragged—wherever it was, there was gravity, or at least a way to simulate it.

We were orbiting a moon of Jupiter. There was no one around to take our drone.

The video cut out just after that. I'm not sure if it was deliberate or if the drone just finally shut down, but it was enough to send a chill down my spine. Dr. Holt withdrew into himself and went back to the control area with Matt. I sat in the chair in front of the drone control station and just stared at the blank screen for a while. I tried to wrap my mind around what had happened, but I couldn't come up with any possibilities of what happened to the drone.

I'm sorry, I know this isn't what you're looking for, but I felt—you know that feeling when nothing matters? When it feels like nothing you can do will change anything and that your entire life was for nothing? Despair. That's it. And never had I felt it until then. I felt like there was nothing I could do at all, even while I knew that I had to do something.

I'm sorry, I'll get back to it, I—yeah, I know. But that's not what you want from me. I know full well how important this whole thing is. I…

The power went out. The lights, the controls, everything. I mean, not everything—the life support systems were still running, and the propulsion system was working well enough so that we weren't pulled off course of the orbit, but…

Neither of you have been in the dark in space. Space is dark, and it's everywhere. There was nowhere for us to go, and the system was out. Matt was at the controls, trying every switch he could, but nothing was really working for him. Dr. Holt was keeping a façade of calm, watching him as he was working. I could feel my heart beating harder as I looked through the window of the craft, ahead of us, and I saw the violent orange and redness of Jupiter swirling below us. We moved, seemingly slowly in relation to the size of the giant, and it would have been something totally sublime if we weren't completely terrified.

Then, the craft swept around so that the small window was facing them.

Look, I'm sorry, Agent McC—Lance. This isn't going to seem like it's real. You're not going to believe me. But I'm—I'm telling the truth. And you might think I'm delusional, but this is what happened to us.

The ship—it wasn't like a space shuttle or something, it was sleeker, more oblong, more of a single piece than something constructed. There was probably some sort of window on it, but we couldn't see it—we couldn't see any indication that there was any break in the outside, any entrance or exit, any apparatus for communication at all. It was sleek, and it was large, and it was facing our craft, moving steadily closer to us.

I think Matt called out, asking what it was, but I looked to Dr. Holt. He had his eyes locked on the thing as it moved closer to us, and we rotated so that we were looking at it dead-on for just a moment before we continued to turn. Matt was pulling at the controls, trying to move the craft, call for help, do something.

The thing opened up, like a big mouth—hinged, almost, but not a hinge. There was nothing but darkness inside, at least from what we could see, as we were pulled in. We were like a small fish being engulfed by a whale, and there was nothing we could to take control of the situation. We couldn't do anything but sit and wait for whatever was going to happen to happen.

I remember saying something to Dr. Holt about keeping alert, about making sure that we stayed aware of what was going on even as the mouth of the other spacecraft closed around ours. Then, I'm aware of there being more time, but I don't remember any of it. It's sort of a blurry dream and then darkness, and I can't see any specific parts of it.

When I came to, I was laying down on a table, strapped down by my wrists, ankles, and waist. There was a light suspended over me, and I did my best to strain my neck to see my surroundings. I could see there was some other form on a table nearby me, but it didn't look like it was human. I didn't know what it was, and I could see nothing in the shadows of the room. It was cold, and I could breathe—I didn't know how I could breathe. I wasn't in the craft. I wasn't with Matt or Dr. Holt. I wasn't wearing my clothes—only a thin layer of cloth in a sort of gown made of a material I didn't recognize. I wavered in and out of the haze, strapped there to that cold, metal table, for a while. I have no idea how long I was there, and I'm not sure I want to know.

When I woke up for the last time, the thing on the table next to me was gone, and I could feel fear crawling up from my stomach to get caught in my throat. A noise came from the far side of the room, a clanging, short and sharp in the small room, but I didn't see it's source at first. The light was on right above me, and I couldn't see the periphery of the room.

Then, it stepped toward me. A tall, grayish purple humanoid. It had a dull yellow color for its eyes and a thin coat of fur covering its body. It wore a kind of bodysuit, like a wetsuit for surfing, but not exactly. It moved closer to me, and I was surprised at two things: its similarity to human taxonomy, and the large saw-like instrument it held in one hand.

"Who are you?" I asked, "and what is this place?"

The thing hesitated for a half a second, but was not deterred by my speaking. It continued toward me, and began to raise the tool. It said something aloud, but didn't seem to be addressing me. I couldn't understand what it was saying; its language was so alien that I don't think I could even recreate the noises that it was making at all.

Something responded to it, I think through a speaker somewhere in the room, and I couldn't understand what it was saying. The alien standing over me, however, definitely got the message in some capacity, because it leaned in closer to me and…

I tried to pull away, but it wasn't worth it. The saw thing—the saw, it vibrated, and that made it very easy for it to…

Sorry, I…

The alien left me after that, and I felt myself drifting toward that unconscious place I'd drifted to more than a couple of times after I'd been brought onto the craft. I was pretty sure I screamed while it cut—I'm pretty sure I screamed afterward. I was only half awake, whether from the pain or whatever it was they were doing to me to keep me drowsy, I don't know. The bleeding stopped pretty quickly, and I think that was something they did. I'm not sure if…

I fell asleep fully again, and when I came to, there were two of them in the room with me. One of them was using a needle to probe a vein in my arm, the arm they'd left me, and the other was inspecting my neck and head. I tried to jerk my head away, but it didn't do anything but agitate the alien who was trying to work with the needle. It pressed something on the table—I couldn't see what exactly, because my neck was held down—that caused another clamp to come from the table and lock down my upper arm, just below the armpit, to make sure that I would not move and cause more problems for it again. "What are you doing?" I asked. I think I was trying to yell, but it wasn't working, like they had taken from me other than just my arm. I tried to pull away but could not, and I felt the needle prick again and the room swam. I was out before I could do anything more.

I woke up at some point, and the restraints were gone from my arm, stomach, and ankles. I w

As hazy at first, and I didn't want to push it. This could have been a trap, and I wasn't interested in getting on the bad side of these aliens. They had made it perfectly clear that they were not interested in just making conversation. After lying there for a while, I knew that I couldn't just lie there, because I would fall back into the sleep. I wanted desperately not to do that, to let them do whatever it was they were doing.

I felt my chest seize up, but it was a different fear than I had felt back on the Kerberos spacecraft. I wasn't held up because of my inability to do anything to help my situation. I knew that there was still hope. I had a purpose now, a goal. Survival.

I rolled onto my left side and pushed myself up into a sitting position. It was a lot of work, and I realized for the first time that I had lost a lot of blood and that I had not eaten for a long time—the exact time, I wasn't sure, but a while.

I got to my feet, wavered, and found my balance. It was difficult with… It was difficult to find my balance with just one arm. It threw me off, at first. But I caught myself, figured it out. I tried to get a good grip on my surroundings. The metal floor was cold below my bare feet, and I felt vulnerable in the weird gown they had put me in.

I went in the direction I thought I had seen the alien come in through when it had come the first time, but I wasn't able to find a door. There wasn't a door, I mean—I wasn't able to find one. There had to be some way in and out of the room, but there wasn't a door in the sense that I had expected.

Instead, when I moved close enough to one part of the wall, it simply opened up for me—the whole wall—but there didn't seem to be any door. Just the wall, splitting apart from some seam I couldn't even perceive. I stepped through it carefully as it closed behind me.

The hallway looked familiar to me. Dimly lit, smooth metal. There wasn't much to distinguish it from the room I had just left, except for its shape, but that didn't mean that I wasn't going to recognize it immediately. Already burned into my mind was the image from the screen of the drone, the hallway down which it was being dragged, scraping against the floor.

I winced and picked a direction. I think it was the opposite of where the drone was being dragged—at least, that's what I thought at the time. I wanted to distance myself from where it went. That was my first move. Because where it was, they were, too.

I stumbled down those hallways, and I am surprised I wasn't caught. I was almost caught when I was about to creep through an intersection with another hall when two of the tall, dark lavender aliens entered from a side-room. I pushed myself back against the wall, into the shadows left behind by the poor lighting, and waited, my heart pounding with an intensity that I thought would be audible and give me away.

They passed the other way, though, and I waited until they were well outside of my vision before I began to move again, following them. I wasn't sure which was to go, but I had already made enough progress in this direction that I figured it was my only real choice. Even though it was a massive and strange spaceship, it was still an isolated space, and I was going to find the end of it one way or another. I would be able to find the craft. When I did that, I would be able to get us out of there.

I…

I'm a little… I didn't go back for them. I knew that they had to be on that craft somewhere, and I—I didn't have time to find them. I didn't have time to go back for them. I didn't know where to even begin. I don't… I don't know where Matt or Dr. Holt are. Still. They might still be on that craft, and I…

I…

I'm sorry.

I, um… I made it to what was the closest to a doorway I'd seen on all of the sleek ship not that much later. Two red vertical pieces of metal stood out of the wall, about four feet from each other, running from the floor to the ceiling. There weren't any seams, any intersection between these pieces and the solid metal of the rest of the ship, but the color and the way that the two pieces were raised from the rest of the wall made them really stand out against the rest of the near-featureless hallway. There wasn't any apparatus to open the door—no knob or lever or anything like that—so I just put my hand near it, reaching out.

The door opened. It did from the middle, opening vertically, just as the other had before. It was quick, and I stepped inside quickly, letting it slip shut behind me.

I immediately ducked into the shadows. I have a theory about these aliens—I think that they're extremely photosensitive, and that's why their whole ship was only slightly lit, dark in most of the corners. It might be why they had such a plain design scheme, without too many distracting lights or colors. Of course, that's conjecture—sorry, I know you're looking for the facts, not what I think about it. I just—that's what was running through the back of my mind as I ducked down, a larger, broader alien standing a bit in front of me, at the center of the room. It stood at some sort of control panel, which didn't seem to have much of an interface. It had either buttons or a touch-display in the same plain metal as the rest of the spacecraft, and the keyboard was laid out in a semi-circular pattern. The alien's fingers worked their way across the keyboard as darkened images flashed across a screen in front of it—a screen that didn't seem to have any luminescence. Just a plain image of what it was, as difficult to see in the dark room as anything else. The alien didn't seem to have any difficulty with its work, however, and was intensely interested in whatever it was doing.

It is a good thing that it was, because had it been even remotely turned toward the soundless and featureless opening in the wall I'd used to gain entrance to the room, I would've been caught immediately. I slunk back into the shadows, staying silent, watching. I felt clammy, and was worried that it would have some way of detecting my fear, like a dog. It worked through a couple of different things on the screen—some images I didn't recognize, some images and what seemed to be a kind of writing that was totally unrecognizable to me—a completely different alphabet from anything I'd ever seen on Earth.

I shrunk back into the shadows as slowly and carefully as I could, watching the alien with fascination and horror. If it turned around and saw me, I was going to be taken back to that room and…

The door opened again. I scrambled back a little further, finding something like a smooth corner of the room, and held my breath as another of the aliens entered the room. It went to the other, saying something that was completely unintelligible to me. It was agitated, gesticulating as it spoke, and the alien who was here at first, the larger one, followed it out of the room, the door closing behind it. I couldn't be sure—again, I had no idea what they were saying to one another—but I had the feeling that the fuss was about me. I was missing, and that was a problem. Which meant that they knew I was gone. It meant that I didn't have much more time before they found me, once they started looking.

I waited a minute or so, however, before I came out of the shadows. I might have been in a rush, but I was also more scared than I had ever been in my life, so I had to be as careful as I could be. My eyes stayed on the area of the smooth wall that was the door until I got to the control panel, expecting for one of the aliens to come in through it and catch me at any given moment.

When I turned to the panel, it was about level with my upper chest and head, meaning that I had to crane my head upward to see the display. The aliens really were taller than I was, and I'm not a small person. I reached up with my hand and tried to press the buttons on the strange semicircle keyboard with inhuman alphabetical symbols, but the screen reacted before I even made contact with the metal, changing the screen from the writing that was displayed to a series of images. They were of space, cascading through—different planets, systems, nebulae, that sort of thing—and they finished on a familiar sight.

"Earth…" I muttered, staring in awe at the blue and green globe displayed on the screen. I stared at the image on the screen for a moment before reaching up and tapping another symbol, just to see what would happen. A series of images opened up, superimposed over the image of Earth. The pictures were of me, and Matt, and Dr. Holt—we were sleeping. We were sleeping in the sleep-pods in the Kerberos craft. I tapped another key, and the pictures of us disappeared, replacing themselves with an in-depth schematic of the Kerberos craft. It was detailed in a way I couldn't comprehend, down to the tiniest details of mechanical precision. The parts were labeled both in English and in the strange alien language.

I was horrified and fascinated at the same time. I had seen something like this before, of course I had, but I was a key part of the Kerberos Program. The fact that this kind of detailed plan was on an alien spaceship, that meant—that meant that…

They knew about the Kerberos Program. They knew about Earth. Which meant that they must have been observing us for a while, waiting for us…

I'm…

I hit a few more keys, frantically—I should have been more calm about it, but I wasn't. It was—I wasn't calm. I hit some keys and some new images flashed, some text that matched the symbols on the keyboard but didn't look anything like letters at all. The screen cycled through images of Earth, the Kerberos craft, more text, and then the whole screen went black. I took a step back from the console, recoiling, and it began to move. The whole console, it began to move downward, sliding slowly into the floor. It didn't make a noise—nothing in this ship made a noise—but that didn't mean I wasn't terrified that it would somehow alert the aliens, they would come back, and I would be caught again.

I darted back to the corner of the room, crouching in the shadows, falling backward into the wall a little bit as I did. I still wasn't completely adjusted to the loss of my arm. It was…

It was weird. And I was scared.

Goddam, I was scared.

The console slid downward, and it disappeared into the impossibly smooth, seamless floor. I stared at the place where it had disappeared for a moment before a crack opened in the floor, larger than before, widening into a circle about five feet in diameter. It rose about six inches from the floor and rested there. It was barely noticeable, really, in the low light of the room, and I crept forward toward it only once I was sure that it hadn't made any indication to any of the aliens that I was in this room. With one last glance over my shoulder, I scuttled over to the circle, squatting low, and observed it.

There was really nothing different about it from the rest of the room—it was the same metal, the same smoothness, and the same eerie otherworldliness. I reached out with my hand to touch it, and when nothing happened upon contact, I carefully stood back up and stepped into the center, looking around the room from there.

The circle began to descend. I watched as the room ascended around me, and I held my one hand at the ready, clenched in a fist, in case anything showed up as I went downward. I watched as the floor rose around me, and I was enveloped in darkness for a brief moment as the floor reclosed above me. I had the vague sensation of a descent, but I couldn't be sure. I was conscious of the dull aching of my shoulder where my arm once connected, and I used that as an anchor point to keep a handle on my placement in space at all.

A crack of dim light appeared around the bottom of the circle, but to my newly dark-adjusted eyes, it seemed to be blindingly bright. The circle below me continued to descend as a large and cavernous room manifested itself around me. The dim lights ran down along the top, leaving shadows throughout the high-ceilinged room. It took longer than I liked, crouched on the circle of floor, to get from the ceiling down to the floor. The whole time, however, I paid attention to the strange, egg-shaped pods that populated the room at sparse intervals.

They were the same metal as the rest of the ship, it seemed, but at varying sizes, all large enough to fit at least a couple of those large aliens inside. Some of them seemed like they would be able to hold a small house inside of them. I looked down to see the circle of floor meld into the rest of the floor as if there were nothing there at all, and I was in the room, on the floor. I stepped tentatively forward toward the closest egg-shaped monolith.

I reached for it, my hand stretched out in front of me. I pulled my arm back as soon as the metal began to pull away in an arch-shape, about the right size for one of the aliens that ran the ship. I ducked backward, just in case it had reacted to another alien and not to me, but there were none of the tall purple figures around. I waited just a moment longer than I really needed to, and when I emerged from the shadows, I took a few hesitant steps forward.

The first thing that I was assured of was that this wasn't the way the aliens reproduced—the egg shape must have been entirely coincidental. There was no reproductive apparatus in here, that much I could be sure of.

What took me by more surprise was the Kerberos craft, sitting neatly in the center of the egg, its edges brushing up against the sides of the outer structure. It was lit with a barely perceptible light from below, but I would have recognized the shape of it anywhere. The craft was inside of the egg, which meant, logically following, that the rest of the eggs…

I moved forward more quickly now, with less hesitation. This was something I could work with, something familiar. I could use the craft. I could get out. I could—

I moved to the entrance hatch, which was left open, probably from when the aliens had first captured us. I put my hand out to it in order to begin to help myself into the craft, and the hole in the side of the egg closed up behind me, leaving me inside with the Kerberos craft. I turned from the smooth, featureless inside wall of the egg to the more familiar spacecraft and tilted my head up to peer inside. I wondered for a brief moment if there was an alien inspecting the inside who would come out at me, but I was too preoccupied with getting into my ship. Getting somewhere I could be in control again.

Luckily, I guess, there were no aliens inside.

I'm sorry, that wasn't a good joke, and…

God dammit.

What? No, I've got it, I just…

I did find Dr. Holt.

I found…

I found what was left of him. And I'll leave it at that.

I…

I think the information's in the full report I left with SETI. I don't know if they kept it or not. I can give you a copy later, I just…

I moved him out of the way. I left…

I put him outside of the craft and closed the door, because there was too much…

I didn't find Matt. I didn't see him there, and I still don't know where he went. He's probably still on that ship, but I doubt he's still alive. How would he be? I felt what they did to me, and…

I sat in the pilot's seat and flipped a few switches. There didn't seem to be any power in the craft—not at first. It was not until I felt the vague sensation of movement that I flipped the switches again, activating a few of the auxiliary systems on the craft. I caught my breath in the back of my throat, looking over the control panels for any indication of working systems. I didn't put any thought into how I was going to get the craft out of the egg—I would get to that when I needed to—but I could get this running again, and I could escape. I could get out…

Then, I noticed the small window in front of the control panel. I didn't see the smooth gray inside wall of the metal egg anymore. Instead, I saw the rows of eggs, placed throughout the hangar, dozens of them, and I realized that the egg was above them, and the egg was moving. I pressed a few of the controls on the panel in front of me to no avail; the egg was moving forward with the Kerberos craft—and me—inside of it, and I had no control.

I strapped myself into the seat and grabbed ahold of the controls. The egg raced toward the far wall of the large room, I could see that, and I could also see the aliens pouring out of different doors that appeared in the smooth walls at regular intervals. They were gesturing, but I couldn't see them clearly through the thick glass and couldn't hear what they were intoning to each other—not that I would have been able to understand it, anyway. A few of them began to fire upward—I'm not sure what kind of weapon they were using, because I couldn't really see, but they were definitely taking some sort of shot up at me. At first, this scared me, but then I realized that it meant I was doing something they didn't want me to do. They didn't want me to be moving in this egg. That meant that I was either going to get out, or they wouldn't be able to get me back. I guess, I would either escape or die. And I would rather die than go back there.

The egg gained velocity, and it moved without wavering toward the far end of the room, and I instinctively held up my arms against the impact at it was about to hit. The egg on the outside re-formed itself around the craft, and I have to assume that I passed through the metal wall in some way. I know, it doesn't make sense, but the technology they had was somewhere far ahead of ours…

The egg's inside wall remained completely featureless for what may have been a minute but was probably much shorter after that. I could feel my heart pumping in my chest, and my one hand on the controls seemed, to me, not to be enough. This was a three-person craft, and there was no way that I was going to be able to pilot this thing on my own, and I was still in the egg

The light went off inside of the egg. There wasn't much to begin with, but when it went out, I was in a totally enclosed space with nothing to light my vision other than the few lit indicator lights on the control panel in front of me. I could feel waves of panic coming over me, but I was able to swallow them back down when something appeared on the inside of the egg's wall just outside of the Kerberos craft.

There were lines of the language of the aliens, the foreign alphabet moving in ribbons across the inside of the egg wall, a faint flow in the complete darkness. I couldn't understand it, but it was the last thing I remember before the acceleration.

I don't know how it worked, but the gravity was preserved in the egg. But that meant that when it accelerated, I could feel it. I don't know how much it accelerated, but I estimate more than 10 Gz. I passed out completely.

When I woke up, I was hurtling through the atmosphere toward Earth, the egg gone. Thirty seconds later, I made impact with the Gulf of Mexico. An hour later, I was recovered by the Coast Guard. I had been in space for only a year and a half. My return trip, one that had taken us over a year on the way out, had taken less than a week, perhaps even shorter.

I—I can't explain it all. I'm…

21

"I'm sorry, that's what I have." Shiro's hand shook a little bit as he took a sip from the glass of water. He placed it down on the table in front of him, right back in the place from where he had taken it, and looked back to the agents, though he didn't make eye contact with either of them exactly. "Is there anything… Anything else you need to know?"

Lance looked to Keith, trying to judge his reaction. His partner's face was statuesque, frozen in concentration at what Shiro had been saying. Lance wasn't exactly sure that he'd seen Kogane's face move at all the whole time Shiro had been talking. "Keith?" asked Lance.

He snapped out of the daze. "Yeah, sorry," said Keith. He reached forward and pressed the stop button on the cell phone recording and slid it toward him on the table. "Shiro: thank you. You don't know how helpful this is going to be for our investigation."

"Neither do I," said Lance.

Keith's head whipped toward Lance, his eyes daggers, stabbing into Lance's.

"Thank you, Shiro," said Lance, turning away from his steely partner and offering what he hoped was a soft smile. "We will take this all into account during further review of the case."

Shiro was looking down, his hand fiddling with a joint in his prosthetic. He raised his eyes slightly to Lance, and he nodded. "Yeah."

"Thank you again," said Keith, addressing Shiro. Lance could feel the hostility in his voice, all of it directed at him. "I will let you know what comes up. Take—take some time for yourself. I'll call you."

Shiro nodded, and Keith got up from the kitchen table, taking his jacket as he went. Lance stood up just after, retrieving his pad of paper from the table. He had only absent-mindedly taken some notes, nothing of much import. He wasn't going to forget what Shiro had just told them. He knew that much. He pushed his chair in behind him and followed Keith silently through the living room and out the front door into the New Mexico evening. He closed the door behind him, leaving Shiro behind them, alone.


Mulder: We've both lost so much... but I believe that what we're looking for is in the X-Files. I'm more certain than ever that the truth is in there.

Scully: I've heard the truth, Mulder. Now what I want are the answers.


A/N: I really hope you enjoyed that MONSTER of a chapter! Now that we've got the personal abduction narrative involved, things are really going to get moving! We'll get back to more of the hands-on investigating in the next chapter! Thanks so much for reading!