When the truth hides When the truth hides
An eternity goes by
On the fault line
Between then and now.
—Geddy Lee, "Grace to Grace"

Dana Scully thanked God that she'd chosen to join the FBI, and not the Navy.
On the tray before her was a quantity of barely-identifiable organic matter, which she intellectually knew to have been derived from the finest ingredients government funds could buy.
And she feared for the safety of her country. If armies (and presumably, navies) move on their stomachs, and this was the fare being fed to the fighting men and women, then the United States could be in big trouble.
Then again, she thought, maybe this food had been subjected to tests of top secret and highly sophisticated weapon systems.
In any case, her surroundings were far more interesting than the food. To her left, Mulder was toying with his food. He was crafting a hypothesis, she supposed, that explained his entrée's uncanny resemblance to the Alien Black Oil.
Across the table from Mulder, Colonel Mackenzie was attacking her chow with gusto, apparently oblivious to its appearance. The three of them were still waiting for Commander Rabb.
Mulder looked at his plate, then over at Scully's then at Mackinzie's. Scully caught his eye. He shrugged.
"That's an impressive ring," Mulder said to Colonel Mackenzie, indicating the diamond on her left hand.
"Why, thank you, Agent Mulder," she replied.
"Commander Rabb?" Mulder asked.
Mackenzie seemed momentarily taken aback. "Why, no, actually," she said. "Why would you think that, Agent Mulder?"
Yeah, why would you think that? Scully thought.
"Well, the two of you seem very close," Mulder said.
"We are," Mackenzie replied. "We—all of us at the JAG office—spend a lot of time working together. Actually, Mick—my fiancé—worked with us for several months. That's how we met."
And, as if on cue, Commander Rabb walked into the Officer's Mess, and sat down at the table.


Sam would have been irretrievably lost on the carrier if Al hadn't been with him. As it was, he was worried that he'd been delayed too long conferring with Al—that the others might start to miss him.
He walked into the Officer's Mess, and spotted Colonel Mackenzie, and the FBI agents sitting together. He walked over, and sat down next to the Colonel.
"Harm—aren't you going to get something to eat?" Mac asked him.
Sam looked over at the specimen—he could think of no better word—on Mac's plate. Any stray thought of hunger fled from his mind.
"No, I think maybe I'll get something later," he said.
"Now we're all here," Mac said, "Did you guys get anything out of the suspect?"
Sam looked over at Mulder. "Nothing useful," he said.
"Not yet, anyway," Mulder added. "We may need to interview him again."
Mac nodded. "Then I think we may have done better than you. I found a highly unusual note scratched onto a surface in the engine room." She put the notepaper on the table between the four of them.

"Ziggy C1459: 9E0WV0AIV"
Sam could sense Al peering at the note over his shoulder. "Looks like a note you might leave for yourself," Al said. "A coded cipher, with the key. If we knew the system, which we don't." He tapped at the handlink. "The good news is that it's fairly straight-forward, once we find the system for the key—it's only a matter of time. The bad news is that Ziggy says it could take five or six hours."
"Do you think Lieutenant Richards is responsible for that?" Sam asked.
"It must be fairly recent," Mac said. "Otherwise it would have been painted over."
Mulder turned the paper around so it was facing him. "If it's a message of some kind, who was it meant for?" he asked. "If the saboteur had been successful, the message, along with the whole ship, would have been completely destroyed."
"Maybe it was some sort of mnemonic Richards was using in order to remember the steps in the sabotage," Scully suggested. "We know for a fact that he is not actually familiar with the reactor's workings."
"Assuming that this note was left by Richards," Mulder said.
"Uh, Sam," Al said, "I may have been a little overly-optimistic a minute ago. Even assuming that Ziggy can decipher this code, and that it is the name of the true saboteur, there's another problem. You're an officer of the court. You need real evidence to arrest and stop whoever it is."
"So, how can we find out where this message did come from?" Mac asked.
"I think I have an idea about that," Sam said, to both of them.