"Thank you for your cooperation," I spoke doggedly as I put my identification back into my suit pocket. I blinked slowly at the secretary at the desk, wondering to myself what I thought I was doing when a hand grabbed me and lead me to elevators. I stared at the doors, waiting for them to slide open without any revelations coming over me. I felt perfectly calm, maybe too calm I thought as the doors slid open and hands escorted me inside. The doors closed and we began an escalation down...basement level five.

I turned my head slowly to see who was with me. Chiana was behind me carrying a satual. How she got passed whatever security there was to where ever we were I couldn't fathom. I felt nothing alarming. I actually felt very much myself but I was more than sure I should have picked this moment to at least be suprised, especially with an apparently large memory gap between alien abduction and thanking someone's receptionist. I looked to my left at the woman standing beside me with an intense look of determination on her beautiful face. Black hair enfolded the empowering features of a woman coolly in control of the anger and determination that pierced through her eyes and pursed at her thin lips.

"Do you think I should mention I'm starting to feel like I've been deamonicly possessed?"

She cut a glance at me that could have taken down Skinner and send him groveling to his knees for mercy. I felt myself smiling.

"Maybe you could just tell me where I'm going and why? Usually when I'm a party to some kind of break in I'm aware of it. It's not like I'm trying to be imposing or anything while I'm being lead around by so many beautiful women in leather."

"You're as obstinate as Crichton," she spoke quietly as a fact she seemed to find not completely disliking as she opened her own satual and pulled out a rather large handgun style weapon. "We're at the HollowTree base. Crichton is down here."

"You know that," I stated without straying my eyes. "Enough to go in slinging a gun around?"

"This base isn't even real agent Mulder," she narrowed her eyes on me as she used her other arm to grasp her side. "It's a frelling ship that can virtually attach itself to anything and incorporate it. We were sucked down to this, because this Kimlar is frelling insane."

"And CyberGen, where the ship you came here on is supposedly owned by?"

"Just more of Kimlars little technology games to make himself look niece and legitimate on your world. Don't take me the wrong way Mulder, this man is far more into advancements than I have seen as a PeaceKeeper. We were on this thing once... I can find him."

"He should have never told him he came through a wormhole." Chiana muttered. "Aeryn -"

"The Sentients should have warned us he was a criminal when they had the chance." She cut in.

The elevator stopped, Aeryn slipped out first limping badly. I began to move when Chiana slipped in front of me and grabbed me by the back of my head. She pulled me down and my eyes widened as her other hand began to search the inside of my suit and down to my hip as she kissed me. She looked down, cocking her head lightly.

"Just in case I don't get a chance to do that later," she smiled and twisted away from me, bouncing after Aeryn.

I followed with a very warm rush of sensations washing through me. It felt like all my emotions had decided to flood in all at once from the sensual kiss to the mad dash to make it down the hall without loosing them. They came to a stop in a crossing of halls. Aeryn raised her weapon, staring down the one hall that certainly didn't match the white stream and gray cement floors. This one in particular was reddish brown and almost into a hexagon shape with a black floor streaked with lightning's of silver where light flashed through them like some kind of network. Aeryn glanced to me and then limped inside, wincing with a grateful nod as Chiana came in support of her.

I slipped in, taking Aeryns arm as I wrapped my other hand around her waist and ignored her stare.

"Do you have any sense of military training at all?"

"No," I smiled. "But I am the planetary expert on aliens."

"You couldn't possibly understand what's going on."

"Maybe not, but I think you could use the help."

****************************

She shot the door open. I don't think it was the most discreet thing to do if we had made it this far without detection as anyone to be alarmed about but I don't think it would have mattered to Aeryn either way. We stepped into a dark room where John Crichton lay on the floor in his pants and T-shirt. I helped her try to get him to his feet, checking him over for any visible wounds as he flicked his eyes open. They were rolled to the back of his head almost euphorically as he moved in our grasp. I touched the circular burn marks to his temples, unsure of what they were when Aeryn nudged her head to the back of the room. I looked. Across a wide window screen I could see a second room in the dim lights were a table was bearing a device on it meant to hold someone's head perfectly still. The chair to it was laid over with straps. Across from it was a half circular computer board. I looked back to Aeryn as she narrowed her eyes and heaved as we stood Crichton up.

"It's Kimlars version of the arora chair," Aeryn stated as she tried to get Crichton to stand on his own with a purse of her lips. She smarted him against the cheek with her open hand. "John, can you hear me? We need those co-ordinance you set into the transport pod. John..."

Her voice was so gentle, so soothing despite her rugged treatment of him as I helped her bring him out into the hallway. Crichton rolled his head, groaning deep within himself as he sluggishly brought one leg forward in a drowned attempt to walk on his own.

"Aeryn..."

"I'm right here, John." She nodded to me as she pursed her lips again and hoisted him with a grunt of her own in pain. I turned down the hall she indicated as Chiana stepped in front of us with her weapon raised, checking the halls to be sure our passage was clear.

"We're getting out of here," she explained softly. "Can you manage to stand on your own? You're frelling killing me."

"I'm trying to," he managed to speak in the pouring sweat that flew from his lips like spittle. "My brain is fried. Scorpy..."

"Scorpius is no where near us," Aeryn said as we followed Chiana into the largest hanger I had seen.

It was at least eight stories tall and possible just as wide. Right in the center of it was a machine works I could not possibly begin to describe but the ship Aeryn had called their transport pod was in the mid section of it, its nose aimed at the wall where a blue light swirled like a massive vortex. At first I thought it was just an illusion but the realness of it captivated me, causing me to stumble and sending us all to the floor with Aeryn unable to support Crichtons weight. The events that followed were somewhat confusing to me. I saw a brilliant flash hit me in the chest. It sent me flying against the wall and I began to slide down it. I don't know what hit me, all I could gather from it was that I was paralyzed.

Chiana fired, running for cover as she was fired back upon by starry disks of light. I looked for thier source in the agonizingly slow motion of my bodies ability to respond to me as Aeryn struggled to get Crichton towards the pod. I stood as he came towards us. He was a tall man, seven foot easy but slender. He looked almost like a Gray they had called the Sentients but he was much more passable towards human and his skin was more like a grayish blue. Crichton crumbled to his hands and knees, Aeryn falling with him with a cry of pain as she landed on the knee of her wounded leg. Chiana cried out, racing back towards them as she fired at Kimlar. She grasped Crichtons arm, trying to help Aeryn get Crichton back up again while I remained frozen in place.

Aeryn glanced back at me and threw something that hit me in the shoulder and bounced to the floor.

"Come on, let's go!" Chiana called out, flinching as a bright light hit her in the shoulder. It sent her sprawling to the ground. I felt my body tense in reaction as what ever Aeryn threw at me exploded in a red light. I felt free again and lunged for Kimlar, grasping his weapon and struggling with it until he snatched me by the back of my neck and pushed me down to the ground. I wretched myself free enough to shoot my hand out to his throaght. I squeezed, wrenching my lips tightly with the force I could only desire to be strong enough to crush his larynx like butter in my hands. His thin liped mouth gaped as the weapon dropped and his long fingers groped for a grip on my hold. I heard what I hoped was engines starting up as he pried my fingers away and hoisted me into the air with my arms stretched out. I looked back at a tumbling, strobbing flash of lights as the transport pods tail flared. Like an explosion it shot out of the tower and into the swirling blue vortex. A hollow scream escaped from Kimlar as I was thrown. I felt like I was free falling, the cayotic sensation of my life hanging on a willful nothingness coursing through me in a long moment of silence before I hit the floor, and then felt the pain. I raised my head and fumbled for my gun, cocking back the hammer as I watched Kimlars back racing away from me. I nearly squeezed the trigger off before I remembered, this guy was supposed to follow them. I fired my shot, hitting the wall just inches from his body. He made that hollow scream again like a sighing gasp from the depths of hell as his long legs picked up their pace.

I drew to my hands and knees and struggled to my feet. I wasn't badly wounded but the wind had been knocked out of me and my head was spinning. I thought I might be sick as I made my way back through the halls and into the elevator. I only hoped I would get out of here in time. The last thing I wanted to be was the stow away of some- Thing, on some ship I could scarcely even comprehend.

********************************

The cool air hit me, bursting into my lungs as I ran out of the double doors and booked it as fast as my feet would carry me out of the large drive way. Behind me lights shined with such frightening brilliance I felt illuminated by them. I hit the fence and climbed, my breath coming painfully. I hit the top when I heard something like metal being ripped apart and a rush of air came crashing around me like a tidal wave, knocking me clear across the other side of the fence by a few feet. I rolled over, my body feeling like a tattered mass of pain like a bad tackle at the field goal. The only thing I saw was the blue vortex swirling in an empty field. Then it was gone.

I stood, adjusting my coat as I noted the car of one Gemini Curtis in the near empty parking lot. I came to it, easing my head down to gaze in at the sleeping agent still holding his stire foam coffee cup in his hand. I tapped on the window with my knuckle, trying not to smile as he flinched and sent coffee flying every where. He rolled down the window.

"You scared the hell out of me Mulder!"

"It's unbelievable what you can sleep through Curtis," I commented as I reached into my pocket and handed him John Crichtons recorder. "Do me a favor, see that this gets to Jack Crichton. Tell him his son had to leave again."

"Leave?" He gaped at me. "What, did you find him?"

"I'll give him a copy of my report," I peered into his car. "You ought to clean that up before you turn this thing back in."

******************************
 
The massive crowd of media made a roar of questions, the lights of their cameras flashing as they took pictures of Jack Crichton stepping up to the podium. I saw a man whose eyes were lined with red from the tears that were still moist to his cheeks as he laid the papers of his statement in front of him and cleared his throaght.

"We have conclusive, substantial evidence to believe my son, John Crichton is indeed alive," he began. "The reports given to me through a tape recording from John Crichton suggest that he found a worm hole that day we believed the solar flare had taken his life. I cannot reveal all the evidence within our knowledge of my sons temporary return to earth through another worm hole. But know, I do believe what happened was no hoax. My son is still alive and I know someday, he is going to return to us. When he does, hopefully we will be waiting for him with open arms, and minds open enough to accept and embrace this one chance that there is indeed a way to warp space and travel from one point to the next through these holes. He is trying to get home and I know my son well enough, that I believe him."

I turned the television off from my couch, laying my head back as I pressed that one all purpose button. Sometimes I think I call Scully just to hear that ill-contented sigh of rationality trying to defy the brazen suggestions of all my supposedly preposterous ideas. Some days I live to hear that little pause of silence suggesting my conclusions have defied not only science and the laws of physics, but perhaps even broadened her aspects of those physics and just how vastly laid the field of our universal concepts can become. From one discovery to the next, until her reasoning and mine actually fit together like the lacing of ones fingers between each other into a perfect fit.

"Scully."

"Yo, Scully." I smiled as I played with the hologram chip Chiana had slipped me of Scorpius announcing the wanted criminals I just helped escape from the world that wanted to see at least one of them return to. "Frell."

There was a small pause of silence.

end

12/2/00