A New World

Series: War of the Worlds, The Equalizer, and The X-Files. Guest appearances in future parts from characters from Due South, The Man from UNCLE, and The Pretender; perhaps from others as the whim takes me.

Standard disclaimers apply. All characters belong to their various creators and the powers that be. Some of these characters belong to Chris Carter, Fox, and 10-13 Productions. I've just invited them over to play for a while, and I promise to send them home when the party's over. Others belong to Universal or Paramount, but it doesn't look like anyone is playing with them at the moment, so I'm going to let them stay as long as they want. Littlehawk belongs to Jan Harley. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Jan, for your wonderful story. I hope you don't mind if he comes over to help chaperone the party; of course, he can come home whenever you need him. Tierney, Lainie, and Kira are mine; they live here.

Constructive criticism is welcomed.

By Wesa.

"We've got to get all these fair-skinned people out of the sun," Control said.

"You're not doing too well, yourself," Tierney told him, looking in concern at his reddening skin.

As the sun had risen higher into the sky, the day had grown steadily warmer. The small group of people, twenty-five in all, trooped steadily across the plain toward a line of dark green vegetation that they hoped signaled the presence of water, where they might be able to find shade for the fairer-skinned among them. Scully had taken off her suit jacket and-with help from Lainie--torn it in half, making a sort of burnoose for herself and giving the other half to Sydney. Mulder instantly tore his own suit jacket the same way, giving half to Debi and copying Scully's burnoose design for his long-lost sister, Samantha, still only eight years old. Ironhorse, Norton, and young Eric Hosteen looked at each other and simultaneously tore off their shirts, volunteering them to Ginger, Yvette, and Suzanne. Father Nicholas Kostmayer, Mickey's brother, took off his black coat and offered it to Robert McCall, who shook his head. "You need it worse than I do, Father," he said, "though if you wanted to share it with my son, I would be grateful."

Ironhorse had taken point, Kostmayer brought up the rear, and all of them were on the alert. They realized that some kind of predator would roam the plains; there was too much meat on the hoof out there for nature to ignore, and they had no weapons.

"You're an astrophysicist, are you not?" Robert McCall asked Harrison. "Have you any idea where we might be?"

Harrison sighed. "I'm an astrophysicist, not an astronomer," he said gently. "I really have no idea, other than to say that we aren't in our own solar system. I may have a better idea after tonight, if it stays clear. But I won't promise to have an answer for you even then."

They continued to walk across the plain. The younger children grew tired and started to fall behind. Mulder crouched and encouraged Samantha to climb up onto his back.

"Papa," Michel pleaded with Kostmayer, "can't we stop to rest for a while?"

Kostmayer shook his head regretfully. "I'm sorry, Michel. We have to keep going. We have to get to water, or none of us are going to live very long. And we have to get your mom and the others out of the sun."

"Let me bring up the rear," Kincaid suggested. "Then you can carry him the same way Mulder's carrying his daughter."

Kostmayer nodded gratefully, crouching to let Michel clamber up. "Thanks. But Sam's not his daughter, she's his sister. She's been missing since '73. They must have had her in stasis, just like Norton," he explained. Kincaid just nodded, accepting the information wordlessly.

**********

When at last they reached the forest, they found that the trees were almost impossibly huge, and underneath them the forest floor was bare except for large colonies of blue flowers. Everyone sighed with relief at being in the shade, but Scully and Sydney insisted that they needed to continue until they found water. "We're all dehydrated," Scully said, "but it could be fatal to the kids."

They continued to follow the slight downward slope of the ground until they found the stream. In truth it was hardly more than a creek, but it was water, blessed water. At the insistence of Kincaid, Ironhorse, and the Company agents, who warned of other possible predators, they took turns kneeling at the water's edge to drink their fill.

Yvette was the one who noticed the berry bushes growing on the streambank. "Hey, this is what they fed us before," she told the others.

"Are you sure?" Suzanne asked, looking around from an intent discussion with Ginger and Kira about how best to get rid of the men for a few minutes so that they could bathe in the stream.

"They look the same," Trudy agreed. "There's one way to find out." So saying, she picked one and popped it into her mouth.

Kostmayer grabbed her from behind and slammed both fists into her diaphragm, causing all the air to whoosh out of her lungs; she lost the berry at the same time. "Don't you ever do anything like that again!" he lectured her severely, scowling down at her.

"You wanna live, you'd better not do stuff like that!" she gasped angrily, still struggling to breathe.

"He's right, Trudy," Control told her. "We don't know the plants here. It could be poisonous."

"We ate them for days on the ship, and nothing bad happened," Lainie protested. "Well, nothing caused by the berries, anyway. And I'm hungry. Besides, what have we got to test them with?"

Beside her, Mulder agreed. "That's probably why they fed us those, so we'd recognize them when we came across them," he said, picking a handful for Samantha and then one for himself.

Eventually the cautious ones gave in and the group stripped the ripe berries from the bush. Rested and refreshed, though not entirely satisfied, the more experienced among them began to discuss where they should set up camp for the night.

The trees and bushes grew too thickly very near the creek, leaving no place to build a fire and giving far too much cover to possible predators. And they had already seen huge lion-like creatures out on the plains. They decided to return to the part of the forest where the trees grew large but not so thickly.

On the way back to the blue-flowered area, they picked up deadwood that had fallen from the trees and watched for any other foods that they recognized from their time on the ship. Something hissed at Debi from a clump of yellow leaves, then slithered away before anyone could see what it was. Norton called their attention to a small birdlike creature wrapped tightly in a web, but there was no sign of the web-spinner. Other birds - or birdlike animals - twittered in the branches overhead, and Control spotted a very small antelope in a clump of thin-leafed plants.

"I need tools," Kira muttered to Lainie. "Keep your eyes open for any kind of stone that breaks sharp, like obsidian or flint."

Paul grumbled from behind them, "Grave robber."

Kira turned on him. "Excuse me?" she said in a voice that threatened violence. "Do you see any graves around here?"

"If I did," he replied, "I certainly wouldn't tell you. You'd want to dig them up!"

"And can you imagine what we'd learn if we did?" Kira retorted. "What's the problem? It's not as if the inhabitants might be human!"

"If they were, would that make any difference to you?" he snapped.

"Of course it would!" Kira exclaimed. "Anyway, it's not as if I killed them myself!"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Ironhorse demanded.

Fearing an escalation of the fight, Mickey gripped Ironhorse by his shoulders and propelled him backward while Tierney did the same with Kira. "What's the matter with you?" she hissed angrily. "The Colonel's a good man, but if you keep on deliberately antagonizing him -"

"Me! Antagonizing him?" Kira protested. "He called me a grave robber!"

"I heard him," Tierney replied. "It's not the first time you've been called that. When did you get so thin-skinned?"

**********

On the other side of their campsite, Kostmayer, Control, and Blackwood confronted Ironhorse. "What were you going to do, Colonel?" Blackwood demanded. "Hit her?"

"Of course not--"

"Well, that's sure what it looked like," Kostmayer told him.

"We're too few to be able to afford to have two people who can't get along, Ironhorse," Control told him. "If you can't keep your sentiments to yourself, perhaps you had better just keep your distance from the woman."

**********

"I can't!" Kira told Tierney in frustration.

"Why not?" Lainie demanded, joining them.

"Because," Kira began, then hesitated.

"Well?" her cousins chorused.

"I - He ... He's the one from my dreams," Kira mumbled.

"What?" Tierney protested, while Lainie just burst out laughing.

Kira scowled at her. "It's not funny! What am I going to do? He hates me!"

**********

"I can't," Ironhorse told Control regretfully.

"Of course you can, Paul," Harrison told him.

"I wish - but--" He shook his head. "She's the one," he explained.

"The one what?" Control asked.

Ironhorse looked at Control steadily. "The one the spirits told me about. God! No wonder Littlehawk said he wanted to tell me about her just so he could see the look on my face!" He turned away and stared at the ground, shaking his head, his hands propped on his hips.

Kostmayer laughed softly. "You know, Littlehawk has a warped sense of humor. I wonder who he gets it from ..." he teased gently.

"That one?" Harrison asked in shock. "How do you know? I thought you never saw her face in the dreams."

"I never have," Ironhorse admitted, "but in the dreams, I always call her by her spirit name. I ... overheard Lainie call Kira by the same name. I know it's her."

"Who's Littlehawk?" Control asked.

**********

Kira and Ironhorse carefully kept their distance from each other while they helped set up camp, arranging stones to create a firepit and stacking their firewood nearby.

"Now what?" wondered Scott McCall. "Anybody got a match?"

"Kira?" Lainie asked. "How do we--" Kira was selecting two sticks from their woodpile. "Aw, no, you've got to be kidding."

Kira looked at her out of the corners of her eyes. "Shut up and find me some tinder," she said, sitting on the ground near the firepit and bracing the larger piece of wood between her feet. She propped the end of the smaller piece in a hollow of the larger.

"Do you know what you're doing?" Scully asked her.

"'Know?' Yes," Kira replied. "'Know how?' Well, I did it once before ... It was a sort of an experiment, you see. To find out if we could do it the same way as our ancestors. Um, if anybody else is more experienced at this than I am, feel free to take over," she said, raising her voice to carry around the camp. She looked at Kostmayer and Kincaid, but didn't dare to meet Ironhorse's glare. No one offered to take over, so Kira sighed and bent to spin the smaller stick in the hollow of the larger while Lainie sprinkled a few pieces of dry grass around the hollow.

Kira was tiring when Kincaid told her, "I think you've got it."

"Get some tinder on it," Ironhorse advised as Kira pulled her spinning stick away from the base and Kincaid dribbled more grass across the smoking, blackened hollow, breathing gently on it. He picked up her base stick and carefully dumped the flaring tinder into the pile of splinters in the center of the firepit. A few minutes later, flames licked up around the firewood carefully stacked above the burning tinder, and as darkness settled in, the group of unwilling immigrants gathered close to its warmth and light.

**********

They slept poorly that first night, tired though they all were. Kostmayer and McCall kept watch early in the evening, relieved by Kincaid and Ginger around midnight, followed by Mulder and Ironhorse until dawn. Harrison was up late and woke early, trying to glimpse the sky through the branches arching overhead so as to get an idea of where they might be.

The next morning they all returned to the creek to drink and bathe, the women going upstream and the men going down. While they were separated, Kincaid discovered a tree from which fell the same kind of nuts they had been given on the ship, and all the men filled their pockets to take as many as possible back to share with the women.

When they reached the place where they had parted company, the women were already there, most of them combing their fingers through their wet hair. To one side, however, Lainie and Kira knelt, examining stones gathered from the creek bottom.

"What do you think?" Kira asked Lainie.

"Oh, definitely volcanic," Lainie told her. "Basalt, mostly. Some rhyolite."

"Rhyolite? Like in Yellowstone?" Tierney asked with a frown.

Kira frowned, too. "That's ... not good, is it?"

"Depends on your point of view," Lainie replied.

"What do you mean?" Control asked her.

She looked up at the men standing on the creek bank looking at them, her gaze travelling across their concerned faces. "Well," she began, "it's good for a couple of reasons -- fertile soil, tool rock for Kira's points."

"But ... ?" McCall prodded.

"But," Lainie continued reluctantly, "you get rhyolite from caldera eruptions."

"Do we have to drag it out of you?" Mulder asked. "What's a caldera?"

"It's a hole where a mountain used to be," Tierney said softly.

"It's what?" Scully asked as the other women gathered around, too.

Lainie sighed. "That's oversimplified, but essentially correct," she said.

"But you got those rocks out of the creek," Ginger said. "They would have come from upstream."

"Yeah," Lainie agreed, "but this stream couldn't have carried them very far. Plus they're not very worn. If we're not right in the middle of the caldera, we're not very far from it."

"This is a plain, not mountains," Ironhorse protested.

"A caldera doesn't always have to originate as a volcanic mountain," Lainie explained. "They can happen anywhere. But this may just be a really big caldera."

"How can we tell?" Sydney asked.

Lainie considered. "If I'm wrong, we'll never know it," she said at last, "but if we find thermal springs or geysers, like there are in Yellowstone, I'll consider it confirmed."

"Should we leave here, go someplace else?" asked the elder McCall, putting his arm around his daughter.

"If the danger was immediate," Harrison said, "they wouldn't have put us here." The others all looked at him.

"You can't know that," Kira objected.

"No, he's right," Tierney told them. "It only makes sense. If you were going to spend a bunch of money - or if they don't use money, a bunch of energy and resources - moving people from one planet to another, would you put them in a place where they were likely to be killed in the immediate future?"

"That fits in with the lack of wear on the rocks," Lainie agreed. "If it hasn't been more than a few years since the last eruption, it's likely to be several hundred more until the next one." Everybody relaxed a little, until she added, "I hope."

End of part 5.