Reunion

by Wesa

Series: War of the Worlds

AU: Forbidden Lust

Sequel to Desperation

Disclaimer: If they were mine, they wouldn't be in this mess. All characters belong to Paramount. I'm not making any money, just trying to correct a mistake.

Rating: PG-13 (language, nudity)

Category: Angst

By Wesa.

"Too late, too late, too late!" Kasey raged, storming through the abandoned alien base. "Why are we always too fucking late? Why do I get these dreams - these nightmares -- if they're not to help us find him?" she demanded of Derriman.

He tried to calm her down. "Easy, Kasey, easy. You're not doing the Colonel any good this way," he told her. "You've led us to two of their bases already. We keep making them have to pick up and move."

"But never in time to rescue him! It's not enough!" She glared at him, her brows drawn together and her forehead furrowed but, apparently realizing he was right, she took two deep breaths and made the attempt he asked of her. She stood trembling with the effort of getting her emotions under control, and asked plaintively, "Are we ever going to find him?"

He put his hands on her shoulders and massaged them roughly, working out the knots he found there. "I don't know, Kase, but we won't give up. We won't ever give up." He hesitated, then asked her the question that had been nagging at him for some time. "Listen, tell me to go fly a kite or something if you don't want to answer, but - There was something, uh, more between you and Ironhorse, wasn't there?"

She looked up at him, biting her lower lip with the effort of holding back the tears that now threatened to overwhelm her. "He was - He is an officer, Bill," she said, correcting herself automatically, as she always did whenever she inadvertently spoke of Ironhorse in the past tense. "He would never have risked his career by making a pass at me."

"But you would have liked him to?" Derriman prodded.

"Risk his career? No." Kasey shook her head. "You knew him as well as any of us; you know the Army was his life. Is his life, dammit!" She stamped her foot in frustration.

"I meant, would you have wanted him to make a pass at you?" Derriman was committed to his line of inquiry, and would not be diverted. "You wouldn't have turned him in, would you?"

Kasey laughed shortly. "No, I wouldn't have turned him in," she replied. "I'd have been on my back with my panties off so fast it would have made his head spin. But it doesn't matter now. We're AWOL. No matter how good the reason, he won't approve of that. Probably the best we can hope for is to be thrown out with General Discharges. If we're very lucky, there won't be any prison time involved."

"You loved him," Derriman interpreted.

She smiled crookedly and corrected him. "Let's just say I was heavily in lust," she said, not admitting it even though she knew it was true.

"Hey, in here!" Stavrakos called. "I think I found some of those bags, those pods Kasey told us about."

"Pods?" Kasey breathed. She was gone so fast that Derriman couldn't keep up.

By the time he got into the passageway, he could hear Kasey exclaiming from another chamber of the aliens' abandoned base, "That's them! These are exactly what I saw in my dreams!"

As he entered, Kasey was drawing her knife from its sheath in her boot and moving toward the first of the pods. "Open them," she instructed. "He's in one of these."

The two men looked at one another and nodded. "Kasey," Stavrakos warned, "Ironhorse might not be in any of these pods. They might have taken his pod with them."

"I know," she replied easily, confidently. Derriman caught at her arm, eyeing her meaningfully. "I know!" Kasey repeated, "but even if he isn't in one of these pods, he's in one like these. Careful," she added as Stavrakos opened the first of the bags. "They're full of slime inside."

Her warning had come almost in time, and Stavrakos mostly managed to avoid the smelly stuff that poured out of the bag onto his boots. "What is this crap?" he asked in disgust.

"I think it's a sedative," Kasey replied, opening the next bag and side-stepping to avoid the slime pouring out. "It might have nutritional properties, too. I hope so; I can't see them taking him out to feed him, and that would explain why he didn't feel hungry. Is there anyone in that one?" she asked, catching the body that fell out of her bag.

"It's a kid," Stavrakos said, his voice shaking with hatred for the creatures who could do this to a young child. "Younger than Debi." He turned with the slime-covered naked body of a boy about ten years old in his arms.

Derriman opened a third bag while Kasey shouldered the unconscious woman she'd found. "Go on and take them out to the truck," he suggested, pausing when he saw the dark form of a man inside. The others noticed his hesitation and waited until he shook his head. "It's not him," he said, drawing the man's body out. "They're all awfully thin, Kasey."

She nodded. "We need to get them to the hospital," she agreed.

They found five survivors in the pods, two men, two women, and the boy, but no Ironhorse. Just two more men who appeared to have starved to death. Kasey stared at the two corpses, trying to bury her fear and revulsion under a passive mask. Ironhorse could be starving as these two men had, but she could do nothing about it unless she could find him!

They put the survivors into the back of Stavrakos' pickup and took them to the nearest hospital, giving them into the care of the emergency room staff and leaving as quickly as possible, without answering awkward questions. As they drove back to their warehouse, no one spoke. All of them were afraid of finding Ironhorse too late to save him from the fate of the two who had died.

They found two more survivors in a cluster of pods the following week, and another six two weeks after that, but still there was no sign of their colonel. All three sergeants became depressed and despaired of ever winning their small war, though it seemed that now many more people knew that there was a problem, just not what it was. There were, however, a few other resistance groups scattered around.

Derriman had made contact with the leader of one such group, and they were to have joined forces, but when they arrived at the other group's hiding place, they found only a lot of scorch marks, evidence that alien weapons had been used. They looked around in horror at what they assumed had happened to the missing men, one of whom had a young daughter. "They got 'em," Stavrakos murmured, his low voice carrying a full load of anger. "Damn it! How did they find them?"

Kasey sat down on a low crate. "How do they get any of the information that they get when they shouldn't be able to? They had a plant; a - a clone, maybe." She crossed her arms on her knees and put her head down on them.

Stavrakos frowned at her. "Who?"

Her head came up. "How the hell should I know?" she flared.

"Hey, hey!" Derriman intervened before the angry words could erupt into a full-blown fight. "This is neither the time nor the place. You two need to let off some steam."

"We spar with each other almost every day," Stavrakos pointed out.

"None of us are sleeping very well," Kasey murmured. "We're tired; we're under stress. Maybe Bill's right, Alex. I vote we go get roaring drunk."

"I didn't think you drank, Kasey," Derriman objected.

She smiled crookedly. "Keeps guys from thinking they can take me out, get me drunk, and get me to do something I don't want to do," she explained. "Let's get into our civvies and go find a bar."

*****

Two hours later Kasey sat with her friends as the two men howled and hooted along with the rest of the mostly male audience watching the stripper dancing onstage. She smiled tolerantly at their enthusiasm, sipped at her beer, and scanned the faces of the people in the bar; she couldn't relax quite so entirely as her companions, and she continued to watch for evidence of the alien enemy. The enemy had Paul, and any one of them might be the one that would lead her to her lover.

Faces, faces ... Kasey gasped, catching sight of a new arrival, and grabbed at Derriman's wrist.

"What?" he asked sharply, irritated at having his fun disturbed.

"Blackwood," she whispered. "I don't recognize the other man."

By now they had attracted Stavrakos' attention. "Feel like playing bait, Kase?" he asked.

She glanced at him dubiously. "What did you have in mind?" she murmured.

He explained quickly, and Kasey nodded agreement. She waited a few more moments for her companions to get into position, then rose and walked deliberately, not too slowly, past the table where the scientist was seated with the stranger. She tried not to be obviously trying to attract his attention; she didn't want his companion to notice her unless Blackwood drew his attention to her.

"Sergeant Coleman?" Blackwood's startled exclamation was louder than she had counted on, and she shook her head at him.

"Not in here," she said in a voice too low for him to have heard in the noisy bar. She indicated the door with a jerk of her head.

"Do you trust her?" the stranger asked Blackwood as they both rose to follow her. His suspicion was a good sign, she thought as Blackwood explained that she had been part of Omega Squad.

She led them to the open market area outside, where the other two men waited. This booth was away from any possible ambush, yet covered with an awning so that they couldn't be seen from above. Stavrakos and Derriman were already inside. "Who's he?" Stavrakos demanded, bringing up his gun to cover the stranger.

"Kincaid," Blackwood warned when the stranger seemed ready to fight. "Sergeant Stavrakos, please." He performed introductions all around. "Are you all at Fort Streeter?"

"We've been looking for you," Derriman replied. "What happened at the Cottage? We came back and everyone was gone. And Ironhorse ..." His voice trailed off at the expression on Blackwood's face. "You didn't know?"

"Ironhorse was captured," Kincaid said when Blackwood couldn't speak. "We got him out, but the aliens had cloned him and sent the clone to the Cottage to kill everybody. He shot Norton, planted a bomb, and was holding Debi hostage when we found him."

Stavrakos caught at Kasey's elbow. "Don't faint," he murmured.

Kasey shook him off angrily. "He wouldn't do that!" she objected.

Blackwood shook his head, explaining, "It wasn't him, Kasey. The clones are alien constructs, and they act like the aliens themselves. It's just that they look like people we know and trust, and they apparently know everything the original knows, so they can get past our defenses."

"The only way to tell them is to look for known scars," Kincaid added. "Clones don't have them."

"So how did you get out?" Derriman asked. "Are the others okay, Debi and her mother?"

"Ironhorse," Blackwood replied. "He had stayed outside to fight the aliens the clone had brought with him, and even though he was still in shock from being cloned, he managed to stagger in afterwards. The clone was claiming that they were the same, and the colonel disagreed, but he seemed to come to some kind of realization about that time, and he ... he shot himself. Under the chin. I think he knew that would kill the clone, too. We just had time to get out before the house exploded."

The sergeants looked at each other. "They don't know," Stavrakos said. The others agreed, shaking their heads.

"Know what?" Blackwood and Kincaid asked, almost simultaneously.

"The second one wasn't the colonel, either," Kasey said softly. "Bill and Alex found both bodies in what was left of the house, and we realized that neither of them had any dental work."

It took a moment for her meaning to sink in, then Blackwood's face split in a wide smile. "He's not dead?" he asked. He turned to Kincaid, gripping him by the shoulders. "He's not dead!"

"Easy, Harrison," Kincaid warned. "Even if they're right and we rescued a second clone, that doesn't mean Ironhorse is still alive."

"No," Derriman agreed, "but Kasey seems to have some kind of link to him. She dreams..."

"Dreams!" Kincaid scoffed.

"She's led us to four of the aliens' bases so far," Derriman told him, "and thirteen survivors."

"Eleven," Kasey corrected softly. "I called the hospital yesterday. Two of them died." She looked at Blackwood pleadingly. "I see it from his point of view, at least when he's awake. They keep them in, well, sort of pod-things." Kincaid and Blackwood exchanged glances. "He wants out, Dr. Blackwood, but he can't tear the stuff the pod is made of ... and I suspect he would be too weak to get away even if he did manage to get out of the pod. They're all so thin."

Blackwood put his hand on her shoulder gently. "We'll find him, Kasey," he promised. "We'll find him."