When Doggett walked into the office, Mulder was completely engrossed in something he was reading. Taking the excited gleam in the other man's eyes as a bad sign, he suppressed a groan. Mulder being eager about a case was never a good thing in Doggett's opinion. " Where's agent Scully?"
" I think she said something about grabbing tea." Mulder replied without even looking up. " Maybe something about coffee too. I wasn't really listening."
" Don't let her know that." Doggett quipped.
" Yeah..." Mulder wasn't paying attention to him either, obviously. Doggett shrugged and went to his desk to work on a case file for the last thing he'd worked on.
Scully appeared two minutes later with two coffees and a tea. Mulder finally looked up then. " Oh, you're back. We need to discuss this file." He said, giving it a healthy shake.
" Why?" Scully asked dryly. She looked surprised that he'd even noticed she was gone in the first place.
" There have been two deaths, just like the ones that occurred shortly after you and I got back from Antarctica-"
" How did you get back?" Doggett interrupted to ask.
As usual, Mulder ducked the question. " - with people seemingly having their insides ripped out from within. Do you know what this means?"
" That I'm gonna have nightmares tonight?" Doggett offered.
" No. It's evidence that those...evolved pathogens we encountered are still in existence somewhere, and the one that bothered Gibson probably got away somehow." Mulder replied. Doggett made a mental note to ask Gibson what the hell Mulder was talking about.
" Mulder," Scully protested. " We haven't heard of anything like this for five years. Don't you think that a...organism like that would have killed far many more people in the intervening time than this?"
" Maybe it was hibernating." Mulder insisted stubbornly. " Not too many things burst out of your chest, you know."
Doggett was going to open his mouth to ask how many times Mulder had seen the movies in the Alien series when the phone rang, and Skinner requested them all in his office.
Mulder was the last to leave, giving the folder a sad look as he followed the others out of the office.
"I don't like this." Skinner said to the man on the other end of the phone.
"You don't need to. You just need to follow orders." Kersh hissed, hanging up on him.
Skinner sighed as he hung up. A moment later his agents trooped into his office. "Sit." He commanded.
"Are we in trouble, sir?" Mulder asked, a glint of humor in his eyes. " I've been a good boy this week, so your invitation up here is a surprise."
Skinner looked faintly amused. "I've called you up here because you are being assigned to a new case."
"All three of us?" Doggett asked, looking askance at Mulder and Scully.
"Yes, all three of you." Skinner said, looking directly at Doggett. "I'm sorry to do this to you, John-"
"Why sir? They're not bad to work with." He grinned, ignoring the dirty looks Mulder and Scully shot him.
Sighing again for the second time in as many minutes, Skinner removed something from his drawer and slid it across his desk. "Here are your plane tickets."
Mulder picked the stack up and passed them out. "Montpelier? What's in Vermont besides Phish, Ben & Jerry's and the Vermont Teddy Bear factory?"
"There have been some cattle mutilations. Occurring at the rate of approximately one mutilation a week."
"Aren't there more people than cows there?"
Skinner ignored the question, since Mulder was just asking it to annoy him. "Kersh promised the locals that we'd send the three of you there to look into it."
"Why does Kersh care about mutilated cattle?" Scully asked.
"Because one of the farmers who lost stock is a former general and friend of his." Skinner grumbled. "As I was saying, Doggett, I'm sorry to have to include you on this case because the instructions were ' I promised to keep them there until this damn thing is solved, so tell them to pack a couple of suitcases.'"
"But..." Doggett sputtered. "It could take weeks to catch something or one going after cattle. Monica-"
"Will have Gibson and I to look after her." Skinner interrupted. "Kersh is adamant that you go with Mulder and Scully- who I'm sure are equally reluctant to leave their children. But frankly, if you can't deal with this sort of thing cropping up, you should have stayed a cop." He concluded sharply.
"I'm not refusing the assignment, if that's what you're implying." Doggett said stonily. "I'll have to make her understand." But he continued to mentally fret about leaving his pregnant wife for an indeterminate time.
Scully gave Skinner a sharp look. He was rather rude given how little Doggett had protested. "I guess I better call my mother..." She said, wishing that their nanny hadn't gone home right before Christmas. Anita had been great with the kids, but she was up to her elbows in vampires at her real job, so Scully knew there'd be no persuading her to come back to DC. Up until this assignment, finding another nanny didn't seem to be necessary with Maggie's adamant insistence that she wanted to helping out, but she hated to ask her mother to take them for an assignment with such long-term potential.
"I was hoping for a vacation anyway." Mulder deadpanned.
"Good. You'll be leaving on Monday." Skinner said flatly. Since it was Friday, that didn't give them much time to prepare.
After a few more minutes of instructions, the agents trooped back out, looking far less happy than when they'd come in. Skinner picked up the phone and dialed Kersh. "It's done." He said shortly.
"Good." Kersh said tersely before hanging up on him.
It wasn't really his idea to send the X-files agents to Vermont, and he didn't know any general. Skinner, however, was not lying to them, because it's the story that Kersh had feed him on orders from someone else.
It still goaded him that Folmer was calling the shots. Once his subordinate, but now the new syndicate's figure head, he effectively had say over any matter that might compromise what they were trying to do in preparation for the invasion in 2012. Things like keeping Mulder from meddling with the reemergence of the evolved pathogen that he crossed paths with several years earlier.
Mulder's leap was the correct one, but he didn't have it quite right. It hadn't burst from the chest of the man he'd been sent pictures of; it had merely eviscerated the man. Nor had the pathogen had not been hibernating prior; it'd been contained. At least it had been until a fatally stupid attendant natural selected himself out of existence after allowing the creature to get too close to him- close enough to kill. Since that night three days earlier, they'd been looking for it.
To their horror, they learned that it evolved more than they'd known, time allowing for changes great enough it to infect others with the substance that had caused it to incubate in someone. Until then the black oil itself had to be present to cause infection, now it seemed as though the creature was secreting black oil all on its own. In retrospect they ought to have know this was a possibility- in a single season a flu virus can mutate several times, rending the vaccines used against it in the fall ineffective by the end of the winter. Their mistake had been to think of it as a creature alien yet like them, not as a virus.
The last thing they needed then, while they tried to deal with this mess, was an overzealous crusader mucking things up jumping into things blindly. For the first day or two they held hope that the pathogen would be recaptured before Mulder got wind of it, but that was before they learned it had infected two people and that some well-meaning cop had responded to Mulder's call for leads involving MOs matching open cases.
So it became necessary to remove Mulder, along with Scully and Doggett by extension, until they were able to contain the problem. And it was beginning to look like that might take quite a while now that there were two people, at least, infected. The old syndication might have let Mulder stumble around playing with the pathogen, hoping that it might kill him and get him out of their hair for good. Folmer knew better. Mulder was plan B. If their scheme for dealing with the coming invasion failed, they were counting on Mulder being there to pull their bacon from the fire. While it was impossible to keep Mulder from every life-threatening situation he put himself in without arousing his suspicion, Folmer would do his best to steer him away from any dangerous ones involving the grays and the invasion. The new syndication was also smaller, so their focus was solely on the aliens for now on; not that Kersh was all that grateful for the reduced interference.
In the spirit of keeping Mulder alive until 2012, Folmer had ordered Kersh to send the agents north, many states away from the last sighting of the pathogen. Not that it was a wild goose chase, there really was something worth investigating going on in Montpelier, it just was not as high a priority as they were making it up to be for the agents.
Thinking about his part in the duplicity, Kersh groaned quietly. He couldn't stand to be under the syndicate's thumb again, no matter who was running the show or for what reason. Folmer liked to think that the new syndicate had a noble purpose, but Kersh knew that the smoking man had thought himself justified in his actions as well.