He stepped as close to the suspended figure as he could without touching the strange, gelatinous barrier, then he paused to consider what he should do. He couldn't risk damaging anything here ... and he had no intention of becoming trapped, as the young woman had been.
But this was incredible!
Forcing himself to turn away, he spun around, scan-ning the amazing room, looking for more clues. With a start, he saw that other small, dim chambers similar to the one that imprisoned Cassandra dotted the walls around him—dim alcoves like empty coffins in a mau-soleum ... empty except for one, which held someone— something—else.
Resisting his unsettling curiosity about the archaeol-ogist's daughter, Mulder moved to the single other occupied chamber in the control-room wall, dreading what he might find there.
"Let's see what's behind door number two," he said.
The figure lay crumpled, a mound of wadded rags and desiccated flesh, as if he had been struck down where he stood. The mummified, hardened remains were distorted like a lump of mahogany driftwood, stripped of all moisture, barely more than tatters of iron-hard tissue that held crumbling bones together.
At first glance Mulder couldn't tell if the mummy was actually human. He recalled similar dried corpses he had encountered while investigating other cases—in a high-schooler's grave in Oregon, in a buried boxcar in New Mexico—desiccated remains, possibly of extraterrestrial origin, possibly not.
With a sense of amazement tinged with desperate hope, he wondered whether this forlorn figure could have been one of the original occupants of the derelict craft. Perhaps even Kukulkan himself?
Scully would never accept that conclusion until she could do an autopsy herself. But when taken together with the other evidence—the buried ship and its artifacts, the Maya carvings of spacemen and feathered serpents— this long-dead inhabitant would be compelling enough even to the most hardened skeptic. Even to Scully.
He turned back to the murky, bizarre chamber that held Cassandra Rubicon, and the differences between the two . . . specimens . . . struck him. Whereas Cassandra hung perfectly preserved in a coffin of petrified light, as if time had somehow stopped for her, the other occu-pant looked as if time had rolled over him with a steam roller and left him like roadkill in the dust. This dried-out corpse had suffered some kind of mishap. Mulder wondered what had gone wrong.
He resisted going inside the mummy's alcove. Not yet. The walls of the main chamber blistered with the pulsing light that sent a vibrating tingle through his head.
A message only recently sent out to a distant people who must have stopped listening a thousand years before.
Tearing himself away from the mummified corpse and the trapped figure of Cassandra, Mulder studied the limestone walls, where metal had fallen away in the main chamber. He saw chiseled images similar to those on the temple at the apex of the pyramid. But these images were less stylized and more realistic.
As far as he could tell, the scenes depicted a tall sil-houetted form, a godlike figure, an alien surrounded by Indians who seemed to worship him ...
or fear him. The godlike image—Kukulkan?—stood accompanied by sev-eral monstrous feathered serpents.
Mulder felt a shiver crawl down his back. These were well-rendered images of the creature he had seen in the moonlit shadows two nights earlier.
Slithering, glossy ... unearthly.
He followed the succession of carvings that paraded across the walls, impressions of the Maya people build-ing temples, erecting cities in the jungle, treating the ancient astronaut with great reverence. In each scene the visitor had his back turned, his head lifted up, his unseen face toward the sky ... as if waiting for someone to come. A rescuer perhaps?
But for whatever reason, Mulder thought, "Kukulkan" had intentionally come back inside the derelict ship, placing himself into one of these chambers to stay ... to die.
Unless there had been an accident.
Mulder approached the young woman's frozen alcove again, straining to see if she had moved—blinked her eyes, drawn a breath... but nothing had changed.
Through the "amber," Cassandra did not look lifeless, though. The flush of blood still colored her face, a sparkle of tiny injuries on one cheek as if she had been sprayed with splinters. Her hair seemed sweat-dampened, her skin dusty as if she had worked her way through the par-tially crumbled catacombs in the pyramid above. She looked exhausted, overheated ... frightened. But not dead. Mulder had seen enough corpses to know.
Assuming that this place was indeed a buried space-ship, he wondered if this could perhaps be some sort of suspended animation chamber, a stasis booth where time would stop for extraterrestrial explorers making an incomparably long journey across the void of space. He had seen the same idea in plenty of science fiction movies ... maybe the aliens had thought of it for themselves.
He searched the walls beside Cassandra's glowing doorway, but found no controls, no status indicator, no colored buttons that might show him how to thaw the frozen substance.
So, instead, he reached out to touch the cold, dim gel himself, imagining that perhaps he could just take Cassandra Rubicon's hand and raise her up out of her glass coffin, like the prince awakening Sleeping Beauty in the forest.
He hesitated before he let his fingertips brush the tangible substance, afraid that it might somehow suck him in as well, like alien quicksand—two specimens for the price of one. But he had to know. He had to risk everything. Mulder pushed his hand through before his doubts could grow stronger.
When he touched the cold gelatinous wall, it ... burst, popping like a soap bubble. Puddles of slick, volatile liquid splashed across the floorplates.
Coughing and gasping for breath, Cassandra Rubicon lurched at him, already running, as if she had paused in the middle of a panicked flight. Dripping wet and horri-fied, she crashed into Mulder and screamed. He reached out to defend himself as she drove him to the floor, pounding him weakly with her fists.
"No!" she croaked. "Leave us alone!" She grabbed the heavy flashlight that hung from her waist and swung it at Mulder as if it were a large metal club.
He reached up to defend himself. Using his best hand-to-hand combat training, he grabbed her wrist, used his other arm to snatch the flashlight away, and pinned her hands in the air. "Easy! I'm with the FBI, Federal Agent. I'm here to save you."
She trembled and held herself motionless, but coiled, vibrating like a tightly wound spring. "There was some-one shooting . . . and a bright light." She looked around, her muddy green eyes unfocused. She smeared thin slime away from her face, shuddering and dazed. She seemed to drift in and out of coherence, as if her brain had not yet entirely unfrozen.
Mulder sat up guardedly, still keeping his eye on her. He knew he must look a frightful mess—battered, mud-died from the climb down the slippery walls of the cenote, sweaty from days of trekking through the jungle. But coated with the volatile ooze, the young woman looked far worse.
He brushed at his shirt. "I take it you're Cassandra Rubicon?" he said. When she nodded, he continued. "You and your team have been missing for over two weeks."
"Impossible," she said, then coughed again, wiping her hands on her pants in disgust. "We just got here a few days ago." She sniffed her wet shirt. "What is this stuff?"
Mulder shook his head. "Your father contacted us a week ago Tuesday. My partner and I came with him to search for you here at Xitaclan." He hesitated, but she needed to know. Better to give her all the shock at once— though he couldn't bring himself to tell her about her father just yet. "I'm afraid we found the other four members of your team dead—shot, and then sunk in the cenote."
Cassandra blinked and looked around, clearing her throat. Her voice was rich and resonant, filled with more anger than fear. "Those men, men with guns,"
she said. "Bastards. What did they want? Who were they?"
"I think they're part of a violent revolutionary group. They've been keeping us company outside tonight."
Cassandra looked down at her fingers, blinking but seemingly not seeing. These events had happened for her only moments before. "So how . . . how did I get away?" She clamped her teeth together and hissed, "Bastards."
"We found the other four, but you were still miss-ing!” Mulder continued.
"I've just discovered you here by accident. You were trapped in ... and I set you free from ... whatever it was you had gotten yourself into."
Cassandra wiped at her eyes and stared at the metal walls around her. But her vision did not seem to focus. "This stuff burns my eyes ... can't see very well."
Mulder used his sleeve to dry her face. She contin-ued talking. "I ran into the pyramid to get away . . . got lost . . . stumbled in here. Then I don't know what hap-pened. Light gushed all around me, drowning me, burning and cold." She sat down on the floor next to him, deeply puzzled. "Did I hurt you?"
Mulder shook his head. "Good thing you don't know karate," he said, rubbing his bruised arm.
Then he suddenly realized that the throbbing SOS sig-nal had ceased as soon as he had released her from the alcove. The diaphanous light throughout the main chamber began to fade. The signal had stopped, and now the derelict ship seemed to be... waiting, settling back to sleep.
Tears streamed out of Cassandra's reddened, irritated eyes.
Mulder wiped her face again and decided it would be too much to tell Cassandra he believed they were inside a derelict ship, an extraterrestrial spacecraft buried beneath the pyramid of Xitaclan. Or that he thought she had stumbled upon a lifeboat. She must have activated its automatic system which placed her in suspended animation.
Mulder stood up and helped her to her feet. Cassandra stretched, flexing her arms experimentally. The cold, wet gel began to dry into a thin coating on her clothes and skin. She swayed dizzily for a moment, then drew a deep breath.
Mulder looked around, but the pulsing signal had not resumed. He wondered again if her actions had triggered a distress call, a homing beacon. Perhaps the original inhabitant had tried the same thing, but hadn't succeeded because his lifeboat had been damaged somehow.
Mulder decided it was time to get moving. "Thanks to your explorations, we know there's a passage through to the pyramid level. Good thing, too," he said. "I don't look forward to climbing the cenote wall again."
"I still can't see very well." Cassandra followed close beside him as they picked their way away from the main chamber, then she asked in a hesitant voice, "My father ... did he come with you?"
Mulder swallowed, his heart leaden. The passages around them grew darker.
"Yes, he came with us. We tried to have him wait for us back in the States, but he wouldn't hear of it. He wanted to help you himself," he said. "But Dr.
Rubicon ... he was another casualty of the people who tried to kill you. I'm sorry."
Cassandra stopped in midstep and swayed, leaning into the rough wall where metal plates had loosened and fallen to the floor. She looked as if Mulder had just punched her in the stomach.
She said nothing but slid down to sit, shuddering, where the wall met the floor. She drew her knees against her chest. She stared at her dirty hands.
Mulder looked down at her, understanding. He quickly ran a hand through his hair, then touched her lightly on the shoulder. She needed to be alone.
"I'll go on ahead and find the way out," he said. "You take the time you need."
Cassandra nodded, intensely weary. With a last glance back at her, Mulder set out, trudging up the slope. His heart pounded, heavy with grief for her, filled with amazement for the things he had already seen, yet with an equivalent amount of dread for what he might encounter up above—the battleground, the snipers, the explosions. He hoped Scully had managed to keep herself alive and safe.
The passageway became dimmer, the walls made of vitrified stone. The deck plates transformed into a lime-stone path under his shoes. He realized he had emerged into the pyramid levels again. Up ahead, he recognized the same area he had seen when he went looking for Vladimir Rubicon, though now he stood on the opposite side of the fallen barrier. Elation surged through him— home free!
Then he turned the corner and came face to face with Carlos Barreio. The police chief's flashlight beam shone through the dimness, pinning Mulder like a moth in a specimen box. Barreio held out a nickel-plated revolver, pointing it at Mulder.
"Agent Mulder," he said. His lips formed a humor-less smile. "I thought I might find you inside the pyra-mid. Unfortunately, I cannot allow you to leave here alive."
Xitaclan ruins, Pyramid of Kukulkan Wednesday, 3:27 a.m.
Reflexively, Mulder took a step backward, but found no escape.
Barreio's police revolver pointed directly at him, unwavering. Mulder could not see the man's finger on the trigger. He would never know when it began to squeeze, when the gunshot would ring out.
Once again, Mulder wished fervently that Major Jakes had left him with his own weapon.
"Let me make a wild leap of logic," Mulder said, tak-ing another gradual step back, "and guess that you were the one responsible for killing the archaeology team mem-bers." He carefully began backing down the corridor.
Barreio, with the gleam of the hunt in his shadowed eyes, stalked after him, gun forward. He answered only with an enigmatic smile, his large mustache folded in the cleft of his cheeks.
Mulder pressed, "So you let the archaeologists uncover new treasures for you—priceless pre-Colombian relics that brought fabulous prices on the black market."
Barreio shrugged his broad shoulders. "Liberation Quintana Roo needed the money."
Mulder took another step backward, the flashlight beam dazzling his eyes.
Barreio seemed amused at his attempt to escape.
"And I suppose Fernando Victorio Aguilar would find customers for you?" Mulder said. "He's in this too, isn't he?"
"He only made himself rich." Barreio growled. "It is distressing to see a man with no drive or purpose other than his own greed."