Renegade
By XFBandit

Edited by Scott Carr

Disclaimer: Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, Walter Skinner and any 
other tangentially mentioned characters created by Chris 
Carter remain his copyrighted property, and the property of 
1013 Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. No 
infringement of copyright is intended. 

Classification: XNoir, Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe
Rating: R (language, adult themes)

Spoilers: None that I can think of, but a familiarity with 
the show through at least Season 5 is pretty much required. 
There are some indirect spoilers regarding Skinner's 
background, but for the life of me I can't remember which 
episode.

Feedback: Please. Author can be reached via 
drambo@sonic.net for comments, suggestions, condemnations 
and so forth.

Personal note: I'm baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!


1

   I sit.
   I sit and I watch and I wait.
   I am patience itself.
   I do now know how long I have waited here, and I
do not care.
   Time has become meaningless to me.
   In many different ways.
   I close my eyes for a moment, searching for the 
stillness inside me. I reach for it effortlessly, a small
sigh sliding out of my body as I find my inner peace.
   I am still.
   As calm as Death.
   Once, I would have smiled at that weak joke.
   I haven't smiled in months.
   I haven't laughed in over two years.
   The last time I had sex was with a five-hundred 
dollar whore in Amsterdam seven weeks ago. 
   I didn't want to sleep with the whore.
   I didn't want to sleep with *anyone*. 
   I had to.
   So many months without physical release was affecting 
my performance. 
   Slowly and carefully, they explained to me why it had 
to be done. 
   I tried to argue, pointing out that I had gone for years...without.
   It was different now, they said.
   Before, it didn't matter if my performance was imperfect.
   That was before...

2

   I shift slightly, and feel her move somewhere 
behind me.
   I open my eyes and lift my head slightly, catching her
reflection in the window glass.
   She stands, her back to me, her eyes focused on the 
door to the apartment, her slim hands gently grasping a 
tiny .45ACP pistol. It's small enough to easily conceal
on her petite body. She carries it loaded with man-killing
hollowpoints that make a hole the size of a half-dollar going
in and a stop sign coming out.
   Spaced evenly on her belt are four extra magazines 
for her pistol.
   Screwed to the front of the pistol is an ugly-looking 
silencer.
   She has one job, and one job only.
   Protect me until my work is done.
   I see her shift slightly, hitching her right shoulder.
   If I close my eyes, I can see the wound.
   Brussels, nine weeks ago. 
   We thought they were onto us, but it turned out to be 
a push-in burglary attempt by a teenaged street gang.
   They saw her gun and pulled theirs.
   It wasn't much of a fight.
   The only reason she caught one in the shoulder is 
because there were four of them, and her weapon only 
holds six.
   She double-tapped the first three before she ran dry.
   She took the hit in her shoulder while she was reloading.
   Even then, when she was at her most vulnerable, she stood
between them and me, calmly reaching behind her back
to find the fresh magazine, slapping it home, thumbing the
slide forward and putting two evenly spaced holes in the
last one's forehead.
   She dragged the bodies into the apartment and closed 
the door.
   Sixteen minutes later, I did my job.
   We left them there.
   The authorities found them pretty quickly, but by 
that time we were in another country.


3

   A voice whispers in my ear; clipped, electric, 
distant and vacant.
   "Position one, check," the voice says.
   I nod, waiting.
   "Position two," she says behind me, her voice so soft 
that I only hear it in my earpiece, even though she's less 
than ten feet away.
   "Three," I say, completing our hourly communications check.
   "One, all clear, no movement."
   Silence fills the room again.
   "You ready?"
   I nod without turning to face her.
   Then, lifting my head again, I see her standing right where 
she was, facing the door. One hand is off her pistol, 
resting on the radio clipped to her belt, one finger 
pressing the VOX switch, keeping her question off the air.
   I lower my gaze and the tool of my profession comes 
into my view.
   Custom-made by a man in Smithsville, Arkansas.
   When I heft it in my hands and put it to my shoulder, 
it stops being an inanimate object and instead becomes part 
of me, an extension of me, a wood and steel finger that I 
point accusingly at the men who have brought my life...our 
lives...to this point.
   When I touch my cheek to it, the world snaps into 
view, ten times, fourteen times larger, quadrasected by two 
hair-thin black lines that meet in a cross on which I 
crucify them.
   I said before that I am patience itself.
   I am also Judgement.
   Retribution.
   Revenge.
   Sixteen separate cities. Nine down, and after today, six to go.
   In all that time, she has never asked me why.
   She knows.
   Scully, the warrior with ice for blood and steel for a heart,
as fierce a fighter as any army has ever known. But inside her,
a warm place, a warm soft place that will not let her do what I
discovered I have a natural ability for.
   She cannot kill in cold blood.
   But she can defend me until her dying breath as I do what she cannot.

4

   There were six of us.
   One, the sentinel. 
   He watched from above for as long as he was able, 
feeding information, money and equipment. 
   The day he ducked into a taxi only to see the head of 
the man standing behind him explode in a spray of blood and 
bone and brain, he left them and came to us. 
   Once, he was my boss.
   When he joined us, he knew that he would be taking
orders instead of giving them.
   We had a job to do, and we needed soldiers.
   As he had once been, he was glad to be again.
   Like all front-line soldiers, he knew the risk he was taking.
   So it was no surprise when the risk took him.
   Tokyo. I sent him there to meet a man from Geneva with 
information that I desperately needed.
   Sensing a trap, Scully insisted that I send Skinner
instead of myself.
   Tokyo. 
   First, a brush-pass on a crowded commuter train. 
   Ostensibly, it was to pass a small microdisc 
containing an encrypted text file. What Skinner didn't know 
was that the hand passing him the disc also hid a miniature 
needle.
   He never felt the injection.
   But the injection wasn't what killed him.
   The six men that followed him from the train back to 
his hotel didn't kill him.
   They followed him from the hotel to the airport. Two 
managed to slip aboard the flight back to the states, and 
continued to trail him all the way to Washington. 
   What killed Skinner was a 210-grain .223 bullet 
crashing through his skull at over 1200 feet per second, 
fired at a distance later estimated by Frohike to be almost 
1,300 feet, one of the longest kill shots in recorded 
history.
   The second shot would have taken me out if Scully 
hadn't reacted.
   She pushed me down and away, dragging me from the 
kill zone.  By the time the voices around us switched from 
curious mumbles to terrified screams, the shooter was long gone.
   We had the disc.
   It was garbage. 
   The file was gibberish.
   We got word to the man in Geneva, and he ridiculed us 
for our lack of sophistication, insisting that the 
information was still with Skinner. Evidence that we could 
never miss. Evidence specifically designed to answer all 
our questions.
   Again, it was Scully that salvaged the op.
   She found the evidence.
   Inside Skinner.
   Where it had always been, waiting to be discovered.
   After almost fifteen years, the evidence began to 
finally fall into place.
   The truth.
   The lies.
   Their horrific plan.
   Before, I thought I'd understood the scope and 
purpose of the Project. Only after Scully found the 
truth did I realize how wrong I'd been.
   Through the sources I'd spent a lifetime building, I 
heard that a man had once said that one man couldn't 
fight the future.
   When I discovered the truth, I remembered that 
statement and laughed.
   I laughed because I wasn't fighting the future.
   The future was coming back to fight me.

5

   "Movement," the voice in my ear said.
   Without opening my eyes, I reach for the rifle.
   It comes into my arms like a familiar lover. 
   Warm, almost.
   Comfortable.
   The buttplate nestles into the socket of my shoulder, 
and my cheek melds against the wood.
   Opening my eyes, the world doubles, then trebles.
   The crosshairs are centered on the front door of the 
house across the street.
   I wait.

6

   The voice in my ear is Frohike, the genius-madman 
who had his dial turned one click past lunatic the day his 
two best friends vanished in a cloud of smoke, fire and 
twisted, molten metal.
   The bomb was meant to go off exactly one minute 
later, when Skinner, Scully and I were supposed to be 
inside the van.
   If the bomb was meant to scare us, it succeeded.
   If it was meant to stop us, it couldn't have failed more.
   Before, the three friends had been loosely associated 
with Scully and me. Technical advisors, sounding boards, 
procurers of equipment and exotic technology. On that day, 
Frohike bonded to us as a brother, together until the 
end.
   But he too lacks that thing inside himself that is 
required to pull the trigger on an unarmed man.
   I don't.


7

   If we are caught, we will not be tried as terrorists.
   We have killed nine men and have seven more scheduled to die.
   We have no doubt that if we are captured we will be killed.
   We will die mysteriously in custody, shot attempting 
to escape, murdered in a jail brawl.
   They cannot allow us to testify.
   They cannot allow us to tell what we know.
   Their paranoia is misplaced, Scully believes, 
pointing out that the things we know, the facts that motivate
us would never be admitted in any court of law, unless it was
a psychiatric hearing.
   No one would believe us.
   There is no one in authority we can go to. We tried.
   For ten, almost fifteen years, we tried to work 
within the system.
   We got close once, too close.
   They sent signals, messages.
   Early on, they killed Scully's sister.
   They killed my father.
   Burned my office down.
   Took Scully, raped her in ways unimaginable.
   Satisfied that we had learned our lessons, they left 
us alone then. 
   They left us alone until we got too close again.
   Then the messages started.
   My mother, dead of a stroke.
   Scully's mother, a victim of a hit-and-run car accident.
   Her older brother, the innocent victim of a drive-by 
shooting in the District as he left the Navy yard for a 
hastily called meeting that later turned out to be bogus.
   The deaths mounted, the message becoming clearer and clearer:
   Stay Away.
   We tried working within the system.
   And then we became our own system.


8

   It's not aliens.
   Not in the classical sense. Not in the 
extraterrestrial sense.
   They don't come from another world.
   But they're not from here.
   Confused?
   So were we.
   Until Scully figured it out.
   Skinner's body gave us the evidence we needed.
   Plain as day. 
   As striking as Scully's beauty.
   As obvious as...
   Pick your metaphor, choose your hyperbole.
   Whatever phrase you want to use to describe something
so painfully fucking obvious that I wanted to smack myself
over missing it for close to two decades...that was the truth.
   If you could build something that would travel faster 
than light, do you know what the hardest thing to solve is?
   Not the fuel.
   Finding the fuel is not the problem.
   That problem will be solved in another four hundred years.
   It's not building something strong enough to 
withstand the tremendous forces of acceleration approaching 
lightspeed.
   That's only two hundred years away.
   It's not finding someone stupid enough to ride the
rocket. I could make a phone call now and find thirty
people willing to strap that fucker on and take it for a spin.
   When the US Navy Submarine School in Groton, Connecticut holds 
courses on underwater navigation, students are told that a 
good enough navigator, given a stopwatch and a precise 
enough map can drive a passenger car coast to coast with 
the windshield painted black.
   The students that grasp this concept immediately 
will become great navigators.
   The problem in travelling faster than light is that 
you never know where in the fuck you are going to end up 
when you drop out of lightspeed.
   Or, maybe...when.
   Once you break the barrier the rules start to change a little. 
The forces of faster-than-light travel tend to have an adverse 
impact on delicate technologies like navigation equipment.
   No mechanical navigational instrument can be built that
would survive the journey.
   No *mechanical* instrument.
   Biologic instruments, on the other hand, don't fall 
prey to the same rules as mechanical things.


9

   "Target acquired," the voice says in my ear.
   My hand throws the bolt, chambering a round.
   Without thinking about it, I test the wind by closing 
my eyes and listening. A slight crosswind. A quick glance 
to my left, and I see that the wind is moving right-to-left 
at about four to six miles an hour. At this distance, it 
will have little if any effect on my shot.
   But I adjust anyway.
   Holding a little left and high on the target, I watch 
him move.
   He's one of them.
   He's carrying the same thing inside him that Skinner was.
   A marker.
   A tag.
   A biological road map.
   They all have it.
   They all asked for it to be inserted into them.
   They asked to be marked, branded.
   Scully discovered the truth.
   The substance she found in Skinner's body was 
something that she had never seen before.
   Something no one had ever seen before, because it 
hasn't been invented yet.
   Something that with the right instrument can be 
detected from a great distance.
   That instrument being a fully developed...human brain.
   The brains of those that come after us.
   Two and a half million *years* after us.
   They're not from another planet.
   They're from here.
   But they're not from *now.*
   Somewhere along the line they figured it out. 
   If they come back here, to now, and pick up their 
evolutionary cycle, they'll gain another two and a half 
million years on Darwin.
   And like ungrateful children, they don't care about 
their parents.
   To them, we're outdated relics, antiques. 
   Good for nothing.
   Parasites.
   Bugs.
   And they mean to exterminate each and every one of us.
   Scully holds out one hope.
   One tiny ray of hope.
   If we take away their roadmap, they won't be able to 
find their way back.
   Nine down.
   Seven to--
   The trigger breaks cleanly. It's a surprise, as it should be.
   I'm moving before the echo begins.
   In the instant between two heartbeats when I pulled 
the trigger, I knew the shot would go true.
   Frohike tells me later that the bullet entered his 
head slightly forward and below his right ear.
   Scully tells me what damage that did to him.
   There wasn't enough time for his brain to realize what
happened.
   One moment he was walking, talking, a living buoy.
   The next, he flopped to the curb, twitched twice and died, 
a tunnel the diameter of a garden hose through his medulla.
   We're moving before the echo dies.
   Scully's out the door before me, sweeping the hallway 
with her piece. "Clear," she calls over the radio.
   I move behind her, thinking:
   Ten down.
   Six to go.


THE END