Chapter 7
6:34 PM
"You were waiting for security to show up," Kara said into her earpiece. "They brought a battalion."
"Almost seems like a fair fight," Mulder said.
"I don't like hurting human beings," Kara said as she saw the troops start to pull out. "I grant you they barely qualify but still…"
"I didn't ask you to break your moral code," Mulder said. "Just to distract them."
"They're not going to waste their ammo on her. They know better." Alex said from headquarters.
"Then convince them you're worth their time," Samantha Mulder said.
"I'm good at that," she said as she flew right at time.
"Doesn't seem quite fair we're using the Girl of Steel as a distraction," Jefferson said.
"It's about misdirection and that's what we're going to need." Stein said. "Ready?"
The two grabbed hands and became Firestorm.
The Mulders had been standing more than fifty feet away and had known it was coming. Nevertheless, both of them jumped back a little.
"It never gets old," Fox told his sister.
"What?"
"Witnessing the paranormal." Mulder shook his head. "Well, can't waste the opportunity. Find the weakest wall and drive a hole through it."
Firestorm nodded and ascended about ten feet. It took them less than ten seconds for them to do exactly as Mulder had instructed.
The Mulders than turned around, and were both shocked and not surprised by what they had seen. Despite the discussion and explosion within twenty feet of them none of the clones had reacted. All of them were still doing the work that they had been since the invasion more than an hour ago.
I don't understand, emanated from Firestorm.
"I do," Samantha heaved a sigh. "The process has clearly been more enhanced over the last twenty years. They've taken even more out of them then I thought.
What are you talking about?
"When I first saw them twenty years ago, Jeremiah Smith told me they were incapable of language or emotion," Mulder said sadly. "Essentially he was telling me that whatever parts of the process that allows for humanity isn't in them. Now it's been developed further. They've taken out the parts of them that allow them to deviate from anything but their tasks. They're not drones; they're practically machines."
So even offered the chance for freedom they don't have the instinct to escape the Stein part of Firestorm said.
Mulder walked over to the male clone = the young Kurt Crawford, he presumed and managed to guide him away. "We could open the doors as wide as we want, they're not going to want to run," he said sadly. "The only thing we can do is leave with what we came for."
"No," Samantha had a look in her eye that wasn't quite sane. "We can see if there's one instinct they haven't bred out of them yet. Fight or flight."
"What are you talking about?" Mulder said.
I think we all know. This was Jefferson talking. Just because the slaves like working the fields doesn't mean the plantation should stay standing.
The prison break had been Mulder's idea. What his sister was suggesting truly appalled him. "You can't be serious."
"According to you, the goal of the Task Force is to destroy the Project. This is part of it." Samantha said grimly. "At the very least, this will tell us whether or not the clones have the capacity to understand and react when their lives are in mortal danger."
"This isn't an experiment," Mulder said hotly. "These are living creatures."
"You think I don't know that?" Samantha lost her cool for the first time since Stein and Jefferson had met her. "They are a part of me. Do you really think I want to be around to watch eight year old versions of me be…" She couldn't finish the words. "But they're not real people, either. They are a science project that will be used by powerful people and alien creatures to dispose of the human race. I don't want to do this, Fox, I really don't. But we can't save people unless they want to be saved. I would think you would know that by now."
At his core Mulder understood this, just as he knew that there were going to be countless times throughout this job that he was going to have to make decisions just like it. "If we do this," he almost whispered, "and they just stay here, we're no better than them. Just a bunch of men and women playing God."
That is what Miss Danvers and Mr. Queen and Mr. Allen and all the rest of us have been doing for years, Stein was talking now. Being a hero means you have to make hard choices too. And it means that even invulnerable or the fastest man alive still means you can't save everybody.
"Twenty years ago, I put a gun in his face," Mulder didn't need to tell them who he was talking about. "He actually seemed proud of me. Said I was becoming a player. I've managed to live my life and suffered so much loss, but I don't think I ever became what he and his cronies were. "
"You're a leader, Fox," Samantha said. "The difference is no one important was listening to you. So the stakes always seemed small. Now you know what the consequences are. Now your decisions have impact."
"They do," Mulder said. "But that still doesn't make them binary." He looked at Firestorm. "All right. This is how we're going to do it.
STAR LABS
"All the metahumans, time travelers, fricking aliens," Caitlin said to Cisco. "And for some reason, Lisa Snart is the thing that gives you the creeps."
"What bothers you the most, Ramone?" Snart said slyly. "The fact that she's talking with Scully or that every five seconds, she stops to flirt with you?"
"Hey, Scully can handle herself," Cisco emerged from the brown study he'd been in ever since Lisa Snart had been brought in the previous night. "Hell, she might even encourage your sister not to be so frigging overt with her looks."
"Tell me the truth, Snow," Mick asked. "Scully and Mulder, they really spend their entire career in the Bureau not jumping each other every five minutes?"
"They have a fifteen year old son. Scully gave birth three weeks after giving notice. Since I know math has never been your strong suit, I think the answer is yes," Caitlin shook her head. "It doesn't mean they weren't devoted to each other in every other way."
Leonard looked at her. "She's a Fed, which gives her a license to kill. She grew up Catholic, and that kind of upbringing can mess with your head. Did that combination do something to mess with her head?"
"What are you getting at?" Barry asked.
"First talk with her, we get into this weird religious discussion," Mick told him. "She casually tells us that she knows she's going to Hell. Snart and I have met killers with less certainty about their fates."
Understandably, this shocked the members of Team Flash. "Maybe it has something to do with her son," Barry said carefully.
"How much are you comfortable sharing with us?" Snart was being unusually tactful for him. "Mick and I know that she and Mulder lost a lot of family when she was in Bureau. Her sister was murder, she nearly died of cancer during her abduction; she was pregnant when Mulder was taken…" Snart trailed off. "And the kid's not here."
Team Flash exchanged glances. "You're going to find out anyway so we might as well tell you," Caitlin finally said. "During the course of the abduction Scully, like so many of the other women who were experimented on, was rendered barren. "
Snart and Mick both winced at this. "Then how…"
"Not even they are sure," Cisco said. "They told us it was the old-fashioned way, but every time we've asked Scully about her son, she never goes into specifics. All she'll tell us is that she thought he'd never be safe, so she gave him up for adoption. And it was done in such a way that she could never know who his parents were. This ended up being meaningless as we found out just three weeks ago that they knew where he's been all this time."
"Really makes the two of us look like the small-timers we are," Snart said, with less than his usual brio. "Did Mulder make the decision with her?"
Barry sighed. "He was in hiding at the time. I'm pretty sure she's been estranged from the rest of her family ever since."
"Holy fuck," Mick shook his head. "Since there's no point in hiding him any more, they trying to find him now?"
"We know where he is, we've been waiting on the word to bring him in," Caitlin said. "They refuse to give it."
"Why the hell not?" Snart asked.
"The reason they keep feeding us is that they need to keep him safe, and William – that's his name – is in danger as long as he's around them," Barry told him. "But that's just crap. I don't see how he can be any safer away from his parents then surrounded by a literal team of heroes and the protection of two government agencies. It's the same reason Oliver gave for keeping his son away from him when he learned about him, and it holds even less water with them."
"I think neither of them has the courage to be in the same room with the child they just gave up," Caitlin said softly. "They are dealing with a burden that must be so heavy I doubt Supergirl could lift it. The more years that have gone by, the harder it is to face it. No wonder she thinks she's going to hell. She thinks a sin that can't be forgiven."
"I never spent much time in the church, but I know enough mobsters to know that they believe in things like penance and atonement," Mick reminded them. "Compared to some of the shit they did, this is an easy sin to repent. Find their kid, and beg him to forgive him."
"Our father did a lot of shit to me and Lisa," Snart said without a trace of snark. "She kept giving him chances to make good; he kept blowing them. I learned first that there are some things you can't apologize enough for. My guess, she and Mulder, they are terrified of him saying he will never forgive them."
Barry, who had spent so much of the last few months uncertain if he could forgive himself for what happened to his father, could only nod.
"For all the flaws you see in her, Ramone," Snart said. "My sister still has something of a heart to her. I spent much of my life trying to protect her from bad influences, many of whom were my father. When Lisa agreed for Mick and me to bring her in, she wanted to sound out Scully before she signed on to our little adventure."
"Why? She must trust the cops less than you guys do," Cisco asked.
"I told her about the talk Mick and I had with her. Both of us said we thought we could trust her," Snart said. "Lisa said she wanted to do the same. I can't imagine what she wants to ask her."
"Leonard is my big brother," Lisa was saying to Scully. "And like all big brother, he thinks it's his job to protect his sister even when she's grown up."
"I have a big brother too," Scully said slowly. "I think it's in the DNA. They never quite grow out of it."
"To be fair, there are lots of things out in the world that are dangerous," Lisa said. "Even before particle accelerators exploding and aliens flying around the sky. But you knew that long before I did." She fixed Scully with a stare. "Or did you?"
"If you're referring to my skeptical attitude towards the paranormal," Scully began.
"Skepticism is healthy. Skepticism has kept me and my brother alive and out of prison for awhile. But there's skepticism and just being in plain denial. And based on what I hear from Lenny and Mick, you've had a tendency to lean very heavily on denial."
Scully wasn't sure why the opinion of this woman, a cheerfully confessed criminal and someone her own brother thought needed protection from the harsher elements of the world, should matter so much. Then again, considering the world they were now neck deep in, she had a feeling she was going to need to do a lot of explaining to people and Lisa Snart was as good an audience as any.
"We can't go into life blindly," she began. "We need to have a scientific basis for everything we see."
"Hey, I flunked chemistry twice in high school. I can't argue about science. But I'm pretty good when it comes to believing the evidence of your senses," Lisa said shrewdly. "And if I saw Bigfoot, or a werewolf or a vampire, I'd be inclined to believe it. Maybe I'd want some proof beyond a handshake, but I'd accept that there was weird shit out there if I saw four, five things like that. From what Lenny tells me, it took you six years at the Bureau to finally admit that there might be some basis in reality for the weird stuff is was your job to investigate. I know cops generally are hard-nosed, but this strikes me as a little excessive."
"It's more complicated than that," Scully said weakly.
"How many aliens tried to kill you before you acknowledged they might be real?" Lisa asked.
"I lost count," Scully admitted.
"I may not be as clever as my brother, but I think one would be enough for me." Lisa's tone changed. "Level with me woman to woman. Were you afraid you were admitting you were wrong or that there was more out there than you'd learned in school?"
The question had been put to Scully countless times by Mulder over the years, but never quite this way. Perhaps because it had usually been put in terms of frustration or anger at her skepticism, not the idea that she was afraid.
"Your brother told you what happened to me," she found herself saying.
"Only that you disappeared for three months," Lisa was trying to be tactful and it didn't suit her. "Someone or something used you as a science experiment for that long, left you for dead, and when you recovered you found they'd given you some nasty parting gifts."
Her experience had rarely been related that bluntly by anyone before. Curiously, Scully found it refreshing. "Mulder and I still can't agree who was responsible," she said. "Which would you rather being taken by: aliens who are trying to figure out what makes humans work or scientists who know how they do and are trying to find out how much they can do before you stop working?"
She hadn't referred to it that bluntly before and it clearly was the right phrasing to use. "Aliens," Lisa said instantly.
"Why?"
"Because not being from this planet, they could be forgiven for not knowing better." Lisa said simply. "Scientists studied humans. If they don't know by now, they have no business testing us to find out."
Scully wasn't sure she should feel better or worse about what happened to her now. "We're pretty sure it was the latter who took me," she said. "With Mulder, it was definitely the former. And maybe it doesn't matter as much as I said because both of us were basically left for dead."
Lisa took this in. "You still haven't answered my question."
Scully found herself smiling. "Mulder always tried being tactful with my beliefs."
"Tact is not a Snart family trait," Lisa told her.
"It was very difficult to accept everything I saw," Scully said. "Mulder always said he wanted to believe. To an extent, what I wanted to believe was that there was a rational and scientific explanation for everything that I had seen. "
"Even when they were aliens being able to shift their shapes into anybody they wanted to be?" Lisa remained doubtful.
"For the record, Mulder did shift his own beliefs about four years in," Scully pointed out. "Someone in authority told him there was a bigger conspiracy going on to make him believe that aliens existed and for the better part of a year, he tried to fit his belief to fit that dogma. He was even willing to reverse his position on my own abduction and aliens that he encountered during that period. It's not as impossible as you would think if you come up with evidence that persuades you."
"That must have thrilled you," Lisa said neutrally.
"It didn't actually," Scully admitted. "Mulder walked around like a limb had been cut off and he was still feeling phantom pain. Hell, I actually tried my hardest to believe in aliens almost to overcompensate. It wasn't a good look for either of us." Scully sighed. "When he was…taken, I did everything in my power to try and look at cases the way he would have. And I just couldn't do it. Even after seven years of seeing everything I had, of fundamentally believing in what I had seen, I just couldn't take on Mulder's role. So yes, I was stubborn and fixated on the rational. But honestly even after everything that's happened and everything's that's going on now, I don't think Mulder would have me any other way."
Lisa clearly wanted to seize on that remark, but just then Barry spoke up. "Are you sure about this, Cisco?"
"It's the basic signature Felicity's been using since we met her two years ago; I'd know it in my sleep," Cisco said. "Where exactly did you say she and Team Arrow were going?"
"I didn't," Barry said slowly. "But based on the coordinates I'm seeing, I have a sinking suspicion that they've gotten there."
"Just give me another second," Caitlin tapped some more keys. "Overwatch, this is STAR Labs. Where the hell are you calling from?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," Felicity's voice crackled over static.
"I recognize the coordinates. I literally saved all your lives there. " Barry said. "Please tell me I don't have to do it again."
"Now, no. Later? That's an open question." They recognized Diggle's voice. "Are Mulder and Scully around?"
"I am," Scully asked, looking down at the board. "John, what the hell are you and Oliver doing ten miles south of Kazakhstan?"
"Ok, funny story," Felicity said nervously. "You remember that group of ninja clad assassins that nearly overran Star City about a year and a half ago?"
Scully wanted to put her head in her hands. "Why on Earth would you go there?"
"Sara Lance used to date their new leader," Barry said.
"Of course she did," Scully shook her head. "Did Mulder know you where going there for help when you asked to go on this little Asian getaway?"
"Actually, he very specifically asked not to know where we were going," Felicity said truthfully.
"All right, that was fairly sensible by Mulder's standards," Scully admitted. "Please don't tell me you went out to the Middle of Asia in order to recruit a team of assassins to fight on our side."
"That seems to just have been an unintended bonus," Diggle said slowly. "This was honestly more of a reconnaissance mission than anything else. We wanted to know if they knew anything about this conspiracy."
"And did they?" Barry asked.
"They very well might," Felicity said. "Hence our little check-in."
Scully suddenly realized where they were calling from. "You're not calling us to check in. Oliver Queen never tells you where he's going until it's too late to stop him. "
"They clearly know your friend well," Snart said, impressed.
"And right now, you are in a former Soviet republic. Which means that you are within 'easy' travel of Siberia as well as any number of places that the Russian end of the conspiracy could well have been knee deep in." Now Scully did put her head in her hands. "This was so much easier the first time around. Back then, all I had to worry was being held in contempt of Congress."
A long pause on the other end. "Well, at least I don't have to come up with a crazy story about what Oliver and Sara are up too," Felicity said in her manic cheerful way.
"Please tell me they at least know Russian," Scully didn't look up.
"He has a track record with the Russian mob," Diggle said.
"Of course he does."
"You've got a fix on their locations," Caitlin was trying to sound more hopeful.
"We have every satellite within a hundred mile radius following them," Diggle told them.
"You'll lose them." Scully was speaking in a very pained tone. "Just tell me, when the inevitable rescue mission is called for, John, could you call your wife first? She's used to your friend doing this kind of stuff; if we're going to violate every conceivable agreement we have with the Russians, I'd at least like a competent agency responsible dealing with all of this."
To their credit, neither Diggle nor Felicity dared say this would never happen. "Barry, could you stay on standby? We may need your help when things go wrong," Felicity said instead.
"You don't need to ask that," Barry agreed.
Scully finally looked at Lisa. "You were right about this job stretching the credulity of my beliefs. Right now, I'm feeling something that's even more unbelievable than the existence of aliens or vampires."
"What's that?" Lisa Snart asked.
"I actually feel sympathy for Alvin Kersh."
CANADA
Kara had been leading the military on a merry chase for the last ten minutes, but was getting increasingly worried with each successive minute. She'd heard the sound of an explosion five minutes, but there'd been nothing from below since then. No sign of Firestorm or the Mulders, or any of these so called clones.
She'd tried using her X-ray vision below her but whatever structures were beneath them must have been lead-lined. Her vision couldn't penetrate it.
Finally, she heard a sound in her ear. "Supergirl, we need you to go a quarter of a mile east and then wait," her sister told her.
"What exactly is supposed to happen next?" Kara asked.
"We're not sure," Alex said slowly. "But there's a possibility it could get very ugly very fast.
Kara needed no second bidding. It didn't take her long to find where she needed to be. She just needed to follow her nose. Something – a crop that she couldn't identify - was burning. She smelled it even before she found the hole it what was clearly a hidden structure.
The Mulders were outside and so were two children – that had to be clones. They were standing about a hundred feet away from the hole.
"Is that where they are?" Kara asked.
Samantha nodded.
"Shouldn't we get out of here?" Kara asked.
"We need to wait," Mulder said.
"Firestorm will catch up with us."
"That's not what he's waiting for." Samantha said slowly. "He wants to see if any of the rest of them comes out."
It took a few seconds for Kara to process what she was hearing. "How many of them are in there?" she asked.
"Enough," Mulder said plainly. He looked at Kara. "You have to get them out of there."
It took a moment for Kara to recognize the look in Mulder's eyes. It wasn't that she hadn't seen countless times before every time someone asked her to save a loved one who was trapped in a danger that no human could rescue them from. It was that, up until this point, she had never seen that same look in the eyes of Fox Mulder. Perhaps it was because he had gotten so tired of being unable to save so many over the years that he wouldn't dare wish his own personal desires on anyone – even someone with superhuman abilities.
Now there was something close to desperation in his eyes.
"Fox," Samantha said in an eerily calm voice. "Don't make her do this."
"We can't do nothing," Mulder said obstinately.
"We gave them their freedom. We forced them to see if they wanted it. That's everything we can do." Samantha was trying to use reason with a man who wasn't going to see it.
"They're innocents," Mulder insisted.
"Only because they don't know any better."
Mulder had to know that this was a futile cause. But he'd spent his entire career chasing futile causes. "Please," he implored Kara.
Kara was going to do it anyway – it was who she was – but this simple word just floored her. The anguish in that tone just hit her in a way that she was completely unused to from a person this stoic.
"Supergirl," Samantha warned. "You do this; you'll spend the rest of your life regretting it." Samantha's certainty was just as frightening as her brother's anguish.
Kara did what she always did; she followed the path of the light.
Samantha was absolutely right about what she said.
When she was inside the structure, she saw Firestorm flying above them. You couldn't tell what expression was on the metahuman's face or body language, but there was something genuinely disturbing about it. It looked like the world weariness of both parts of him was aged tenfold.
For the first time in forever Kara wished her senses were only human. That somehow she was incapable of not seeing everything in the way that a human being could, not being able by necessity to take in everything that they were seeing. But in those ten seconds she observed the scene, she had perfect clarity.
There were clearly dozens of clones still there. How many of them had been there from the start was never going to be clear even to her because there were pools of chemicals coagulating near the base of the burning crops. The smell was staggering, and Kara didn't know if it would have been worse for it to be burnt flesh rather than the odor of a chemical fire.
A few – very few – of the clones were near the exit. Three, maybe four were standing by the exit, as if considering the cost-benefit analysis of whether they should stay here. One Samantha Mulder clone actually had her hand on her chin, as if she was trying to solve a particularly complicated long division problem.
The rest of them were all standing within inches of the fire. At least half of them were engulfed in flames, slowly burning. Their flesh did not redden or turn black. Rather they dissolved. Several of them were in the act of doing so right now.
The other half just stood there. None of them were moving. And many of them were watching as their fellow clones erupted into flame with a placid calm on their face. Yet even that was not the worst part.
None of them made a sound. Even the ones who were being baked alive remained utterly silent as their flesh began to pucker and bubble and turn into chemicals. Kara almost idly remembered that when the Bounty Hunter had attacked Mulder twenty years ago, the Samantha clone who'd been watching as he lumbered after Jeremiah Smith had screamed in fear or agony. It seemed that twenty years of 'progress' had managed to get that particular stimulus out of them.
And it was that more than anything else that got Kara out of her paralysis. Moving faster than she thought was possible; she managed to fly out five of the clones. She didn't remember putting them down before she was back in there. She lost count of how many trips she made – logic dictated there were at least five or six more. But she was about to go back in again, when she heard the voice of Firestorm.
You can stop now he said gently.
The implication registered clearly. She looked down at the clones that she had saved.
There was no change in any of their expressions. She didn't know if they were capable of gratitude, which frankly she didn't want, but it was the utter indifference of their expressions that finally broke her.
They didn't care they'd been saved. Maybe they didn't even realize how close they'd come to dying in the first place. Most likely of all, maybe life didn't matter to them at all. Individuality had been bred out of them and if that was what happened, then maybe there was no point to being alive in the first place.
A rage filled Kara Danvers. This wasn't the unbridled rage that came from being exposed to red Kryptonite. This was a purer, more hostile fury. Ever since she had taken up the mantle of Supergirl, she had always tried to control her emotions because she knew what she was capable of if she ever lost control.
But seeing this – seeing a species that looked human but had clearly had everything that qualified them as such bred out of them, thinking that this was what the Syndicate was willing to do in order to colonize this planet; remembering the utter blankness on their faces as they had greeted their deaths – it was simply to much for the Girl of Steel to bear.
Without a single word, she launched herself skyward.
Stein and Jefferson separated. "This ain't good," Jefferson said bluntly.
"I told you that she shouldn't go in there," Samantha in a lecturing tone to her brother.
"She should have just let them die?" Mulder said.
"How many of them are there?" Samantha said bluntly. "Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? In what scenario did you see this quest going where there weren't going to be massacres like this all of the world? You know what these people have done to millions of human beings over the decades? Did you really expect to show any more compassion to them?"
Mulder was looking at his sister with something verging on hostility for the first time. "I can't think of people or alien human hybrids as if they are pawns. I never have been and I'll never be able too."
"I know that, Fox," Samantha turned gentle. "But if we've just walked away with our clones, even after all this destruction, we might still have been able to get out of her relatively unscathed. Instead this rescue did the one thing we can't afford to do: it will make Supergirl take the gloves off."
Mulder looked at his sister. "Good."
Samantha blinked for a moment, as if she wasn't sure she'd heard right.
"Agent Mulder, do you realize what your sister is telling you?" Stein asked.
"I think she's telling me that I've just released an invulnerable force that bullets can't stop whose only regard for human life is in regard to the mission," Mulder said in a cold tone. "As you all know that's exactly what the Syndicate has sicced on me and Scully for twenty years. I'm kind of curious to see how they deal with one of their own, particularly one where you can't stop them by piercing the base of the neck."
Samantha's tone and body language completely shifted. "Fox, you can't just make her do this."
"I didn't dose her with Kryptonite," Mulder said bluntly. "And I didn't send her in there knowing that would happen. I am not the arbiter of Kara Danvers' psyche, nor am I some Machiavellian manipulator like all those old men. But full disclosure: I do know that we're going to have to get down in the muck and mire to beat the Syndicate. They never played fair before and they won't start now. They've had no problem showing me what they're capable of. We have to do the same."
"Mulder, these soldiers are just flesh and blood," Jefferson said.
"I'm glad to know you didn't use the term 'human beings'," Mulder said. "I've spent my entire career dealing with monsters of every shape and size. But I have to tell you some of the most monstrous creatures I ever met weren't demons or vampires or even serial killers. They were men in suits or uniforms who were willing to die for their cause and not even question it. The men in those trucks may not know exactly why they've been called out here or what they're protecting. But at some point every one of them must have had a question about the ethics of what they were doing and they chose to aid in these monstrosities regardless. You said the clones in this farm didn't know any better, so it made no difference if they lived or not. These soldiers did. What makes them deserve a different fate?"
Mulder's monotone had a way of disguising his true emotions. None of them – not even Samantha – was familiar with the coldness in this tone.
"You said you didn't want to play God," Samantha finally said.
"And I said I don't believe in God," her brother countered. "And if he's there, all he does is read the box scores. He's never cared about slaughters before; what makes this any different?"
Most of the people who'd known Mulder during his career at the Bureau thought he was crazy. This was the first time any of them would have had evidence.
"Forget God, this is how people like Luthor and Waller play," Stein said logically.
"And the Smoking Man and his minions, I'm well aware of that," Mulder now sounded almost detached. "I always got the feeling I was allowed to investigate because I was never considered that much of a threat. Maybe I need to prove them wrong."
Samantha actually backed away from her brother.
Jefferson looked at Stein. "Think we'd have a chance of stopping her?"
"I don't know, Jefferson," Stein said. "I'm not sure brute force would work in this case. Someone has to talk her down. And there's only one person who can do that."
The clarity that ran through Supergirl in all her actions was gone; a white-hot rage dulled her senses. The soldiers who had arrived on the scene had formed a barricade.
Under other circumstances, Kara might have laughed. These soldiers had anything in their arsenals that might hurt her? But she wasn't amused. She was angry. And whereas on occasions when her range had overcome her she had taken it out on natural resources, now she was past that.
If Mulder had known what was going through Kara's mind – that these soldiers who represented everything that was evil about the Syndicate were no more human than the clones she'd just seen slaughtered – he might have been impressed that she'd reached his level of logic. Whether he would have considered this a manipulation on the level of the Syndicate was not clear; in a moral sense, this was fairly obvious to anyone who'd read the files relating to the human experimentation the Consortium had been responsible for, leading to the death camps that Scully had once found. This evil may have been far more banal than the fiendishness of so many villains that Kara – and indeed everyone else that had been assembled had ended up fighting over the past few years – but that made it no less horrible or deserving of retribution.
But in neither case were either Mulder or Kara really thinking at all. What they had seen was so appalling that both representatives of justice – one the human standard, one the moral one – had decided that it needed to be acted out in the most visceral ways. Neither had thought; both had simply reacted. And now this army was about to face the consequences.
Kara flew straight at the soldiers. Some of them did stand their ground and fire, while the lion's share did run away. The ones who kept firing clearly did so based on the fact that in all prior engagements, Supergirl reacted to humans with non-lethal force. Technically, this happened too – except that Kara grabbed two soldiers and shot up two hundred feet in the air.
"Who sent you?!" she shouted in a tone that should have deafened both of them.
Neither soldier noticed that their weapons had fallen to the ground. Both of them had lost their nerve when their feet had disappeared from terra firma.
"Please, please let us go!" one of them managed stammered.
"Given your situation, you might want to rethink your choice of words."
This was something that Supergirl had never said to anybody, let alone a human being. At least one soldier lost control of his bladder at this.
"We—work for Luthorcorp!" one of the soldiers said. "We got an order to head out here because of a security breach."
"They really sent this many people for a case of corporate espionage!" Kara's tone had, if anything, gotten louder.
"The Luthors have guarded this area for the last six months! The last month they've doubled their security forces!"
"And no one bothered to ask questions as to why a battalion was in the middle of nowhere?" The question might have been humorous had the tone not gotten angrier.
"Everyone knows that Luthorcorp has always had strange ideas on what they consider valuable1" the other soldier said frantically. "If they want to give us this much money for watching nothing, who are we to argue with the whims of rich people?"
It was obvious this was true, which didn't calm Supergirl down anymore.
"We've told you everything we know!" one of the soldiers said. "Please don't hurt us!"
"Well, if you don't know anything else, then you don't have any value. And if you don't have any value, then I don't need you any more."
Very gradually, Supergirl eased her grip just enough for the soldiers to feel it.
"You don't kill people!"
"I won't here," Supergirl said. "Technically it will be the gravity that does that."
"I have a family!" one of the soldiers screamed desperately.
"Well, I'm sure they'll get a good benefit package in exchange for not asking question as to why you never came home." Kara had just about released them when she heard a voice in her ear.
"Kara. What are you doing?" her sister said.
"Half the world thinks I'm as a big a monster as the creatures I fight," Kara said without lightening her tone one iota. "If I'm going to get accused of it, I might as well see what it feels like to do it."
"This isn't funny, Kara."
"If you saw what I did in that field, you wouldn't be laughing either." Kara said grimly. "Hell, if the shoe were on the other foot I'd be talking you out of putting a bullet in these soldiers now."
"I'd be wrong to do it then, and you're wrong to do it now," Alex said calmly. "I understand your impulse – of course I do – but you can't give in to it. You've talked to Oliver and John. You know what it costs. And this won't stop anything."
"Maybe not, but I'll feel better," Kara said.
"Trust me, you won't. You, you'll feel infinitely worse. You'll be carrying this for the rest of your life. And for what? The Syndicate considers them expendable. They won't miss them when they're dead."
"Then what difference does it make?"
"Look them in the eyes, Kara," Alex said slowly. "Look at the faces of the men you're going to kill. Because if you do this, every time you close your eyes, they will be all you see."
For a very long moment, it really seemed like Kara wanted to do that anyway. Then she flew back to the ground and released them.
"Run. I won't be chasing you. But I seriously suggest you find alternate forms of employment." Kara didn't even look at them as they ran away.
She turned around to face the soldiers who had remained paralyzed as they had watched their comrades in arms be flown through the air with the greatest of ease.
"I now have two separate messages, one of them for the boots on the ground, one for the people who sent you," Kara was quieter, which didn't matter: the battalion was hanging on her every word.
"For those of you who somehow didn't think I was capable of doing this, you now know better," Kara said bluntly. "You're going to go back to the people that sent you here and make sure this gets sent up the chain of command. On the off chance none of you knew what you were guarding, I'll make it simple: they were on the middle ground between human and alien. And since I'm honor bound to protect the more helpless among both species, places these piss me off twice as much as normal transgressions. Your bosses have spent decades perfecting them and really didn't care if you protected them or killed them off. So that tells just how little regard they have for life in general. All of you might want to consider if that's someone you really want to get a paycheck from."
"Now, I'm not naïve enough to think just because I can't see them that there aren't cameras out everywhere recording every detail of what's happened here, including the last ten minutes. So here's my message for those of you up the chain of command. Should any footage of me end up on YouTube or the Dark Web, you might want to consider how willing I was just to kill a couple of pawns. I'll have far less scruples about doing the same to anyone higher up the food chain. "Kara's eyes had the steely shade her sobriquet implied. "I realize this would create a lot of publicity for Cadmus or Luthorcorp if that footage were to show up because it proves what I'm capable of. You're not going to let that happen for that very reason. I know you don't operate on an honor code. Don't make me break mine." She hesitated. "End of message."
She took off and landed back with Mulder and the rest.
"I'm not sure who I'm more upset with right now," she said to Mulder. "You or me."
"I didn't plan for that happen." Mulder said truthfully.
"Neither did I. It still did." A touch of humanity came back to Kara's voice. "What does that say about either or us?"
"I've never considered myself a leader, and certainly not a hero," Mulder said softly. "And if there was some part of me that wanted you to act like that, I'm not worthy of either description."
"You have the excuse of being only human," Kara said sadly. "I don't have that luxury."
Samantha sighed. "We'll save the philosophizing for later," she said sadly. "Right now, we need to get the fuck out of Dodge."
Kara nodded. "You take the ones you saved before," she told the group. "I'll get the rest back to the DAO. I suspect I have a major lecture coming from my sister."
"Lucky you," Mulder said. "Scully's going to give me one with even fewer holds barred. And I can't fly away when she gets mad."
Everyone winced.
"Too soon?" Mulder asked.
AUTHOR'S NOTES
The scene that I'm talking about at the beginning is the classic confrontation between Mulder and the Smoking Man in 'One Breath'. In all those years on the X-Files, Mulder was never capable of the kinds of actions that Smoking Man and the Syndicate were. Is he now considering what he has to do to win and that's why he turns on a dime?
The decision to give up William haunted Scully in the revival of The X-Files, so I don't think that would change here. But it's still not entirely why she thinks she's going to hell.
The shift in Mulder's beliefs came in one of the weirder X-Files arcs in Season 5. I'm still not sure more than a quarter of a century later why Carter and company did it as he just went back to his old beliefs the same season. Scully's struggles to fill Mulder's role were one of the better things of Season 8, and I wanted to deal with her as well as try to explain her fixation on rationality long after it became a plausible plot line.
Maybe I went too far with the Kersh line? Should I have stuck with Skinner?
Supergirl's scene in the field was one of the most agonizing things I've ever written. I made myself do it to amplify the stakes of what has been going on and what everybody will be facing going forward.
Mulder making a 180? Honestly, after all the shit he went through in his career I'm kind of shocked he kept his idealism as long as he did. The line about God just reading the box scores may bother people, but its actually a direct quote from the Season 7 episode Orison, and it pretty much expresses Mulder's personal feelings towards religion which were always harsh on the series.
I wanted Supergirl off the leash, just to show the bad guys what she was capable of. She has a strict moral code too, but it always seemed unfair that the villains were the only ones who could ever break it on that series.
We're heading back to Russia in the next episode. A familiar face will appear, not the one some of you thought
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