For Author's notes and Disclaimers please see Clonefic Part 2a.

It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon, the cloned Warrior Princess mused. She was lying on an air mattress, (one of her favorite modern inventions), in the backyard, staring up at the jets passing overhead every few minutes, and waiting for Gabrielle to join her. Next to her sat a small Igloo cooler filled with iced Coke and Pepsi. Clipped to her belt was a small leather case holding a brand new Nextel mobile phone. She'd returned home on a redeye flight and beaten Gabrielle through the door by two hours. The cloned bard had been a bit peeved with her.

"Where have you been all day, Xena?" she'd asked, giving the warrior the look that she used to make the tall brunette feel guilty.

"Uh, I was…"

"I'd been trying to call you all day and the phone just rang for it's own amusement. You weren't here or at the school either. There were some things that happened at the tournament that I really wanted to talk to you about, but you'd disappeared. Xena, I was really beginning to worry." The blonde had given her a piercing look, hands on her hips, one foot tapping. Unable to meet her eyes, Xena had stood looking down at the floor tiles, shuffling her feet. "Gods, Xena, you look so guilty. I knew you were up to something…now spill it."

It had been uncomfortable, though she could laugh about it now. In retrospect, she'd thought her own news had been pretty monumentous stuff. Foiling a terrorist plot single-handedly and meeting the FBI agents. That had been until she'd heard what Gabrielle had to report about her trip to San Francisco. Callisto had been alive! The words had sent a chill down her spine. The only thing that could have been worse to her would have been turning on the TV and finding that Julius Caesar had been elected president. Callisto had been within a hundred miles of her soulmate, and she hadn't been there to slam the psychotic bitch. The Warrior Princess ground her teeth. Her gastric contents acidified to a pH of 1.5. She'd really and truly thought that the martial arts tournament would be a pretty safe place for the bard. Xena couldn't even think of what she'd have done if Callisto had harmed Gabrielle again. Become a monster? Ha! They hadn't seen nothin' yet. She'd been absentmindedly gnawing on the inside of her cheek and she hadn't even realized it until she'd tasted blood.

How could Callisto of Cirra have been alive in 2001? Why had she crossed paths with Gabrielle? The odds that they'd ever have met up were infinitesimally small, even if they'd lived their whole lives in the same city. Xena realized that she didn't even really know her neighbors on the block where she lived. (Well, okay, the house next door was for sale and empty, but the others were occupied. She made a mental note to watch them). In the past, she'd known almost everyone in Amphipolis, and it hadn't been that small a place. Modern life was much more insulated than what she'd once known. Gabrielle's meeting with their deadly enemy was either the world's biggest coincidence, an act of fate, or the result of an underhanded plot. Of those three possibilities, she tended towards paranoia and favored an explanation that included human malice. It was so much easier for her to understand.

Xena had reviewed everything that Gabrielle could remember about her fight with Callisto, and one phrase stood out in her mind. "I remember it as if I'd been there…just like you, my dear." The Warrior Princess was almost sure that this Callisto, who remembered things that had happened after their deaths, was a person much the same as themselves. Her words also implied that she knew what they were. Either Alti hadn't been working alone, or she hadn't been the only scientist to succeed. The Callisto that Gabrielle had killed was almost certainly a clone, created and sent by someone to destroy them. She hadn't been an immortal and she certainly hadn't been a goddess like on the TV show. At least the bard had disposed of her successfully. So, Xena had to wonder, who would appear next? They had a long list of enemies to choose from.

After ranting and raving for an hour and cursing herself for her absence, Xena had quickly agreed to wear a cell phone. A new digital answering machine sat on the side table in the parlor, in response to another of the bard's demands. Gabrielle had been adamant about those concessions and Xena had readily agreed, partly to ease her own guilt and worry, and partly to reconcile with the blonde.

A smile crossed her face when she remembered how excited the bard had been at the store the day before, playing with every available model of mobile phone. At first Gabrielle had been puzzled when the calls kept cutting off. She'd been pressing the button marked "Talk" each time she'd wanted to speak. Next she'd tried pressing "Talk" whenever she expected someone else to speak. The salesman had looked askance at her before going over the basics of cell phone operation and pointing out all the options. It was the walkie-talkie feature that had finally sold her on the Nextel. Gabrielle had been calling her every half-hour since.

The cloned warrior squinted at the sun, reckoning half a candlemark had passed since she'd last heard from her soulmate. Sure enough, her cell phone rang, announcing the incoming call with line of dialog from the TV show character of the Warrior Princess.

"Stop staring at me before I take your eyes out!" She pressed "Talk".

"Hello, anybody home?"

"Hi, you've got company. Two guys from the FBI want to talk to you."

"Be right there…just stall 'em so I can hide all these bodies." Xena heard someone gasp in the background.

"You mean you didn't chop them up yet?" Gabrielle calmly ad-libbed. "What have you been doing out there all this time?"

"They were stringy and the axe ya gave me is dull…"

"If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself I guess," Gabrielle muttered with theatrical exasperation before speaking brightly, away from the phone to their guests, "she'll be right here, after she cleans up."

They hung up simultaneously.

A few moments later, Xena bounded into the parlor in her tank top and cargo pants. Special Agents Phillips and DeMarco looked her over carefully, seeing not a speck of blood anywhere. The taller agent breathed an unconscious sigh of relief.

"Hey guys," the cloned warrior greeted, "care for a drink? Ice water, lemonade, Coke, Pepsi? Whiskey?"

The two agents were standing awkwardly in the center of the room. Gabrielle was seated on the sofa, appearing to be preoccupied playing with her phone, but closely watching them out of the corner of her eye.

"Uh, no. I'm fine…" SA DeMarco replied, then traded a glance with his partner, "we're fine, thanks." Xena smiled at them, trying to put them at ease.

"I say, Kill 'Em All!" The line blasted out of Gabrielle's phone, followed by her giggle and then an apologetic grin. The startled agents were staring at her. She pushed "Talk".

"So, why don't we go into my study and have a chat?" Xena offered lightly, gesturing to a doorway and passing to their right. The agents moved to follow her. As they left, they overheard the beginning of Gabrielle's conversation.

"Hello? Danielle, great to hear from you…how are you? I'm fine, thanks. Nothing much. The FBI is here to talk to my partner...seems she foiled some bank job and the bad guys wound up dead…C'est la vie."*

(*Gabrielle had taken to learning small phrases in foreign languages from websites. Once she'd gotten several down, she'd call someone overseas out of the blue and "chat" with them until they hung up on her. It was a reoccurrence of her older habit of calling foreign countries just to prove to herself that the phone could actually do it. She'd always liked listening to different accents and languages anyway. This had started shortly after Janice Covington had explained telephones to her. Often, the people she'd called had sounded "excited"…at first she'd had no concept of time zones). ~Editor

Xena ushered her guests into Janice Covington's old dining room, which she'd converted into a homey study for herself and Gabrielle. She settled the agents into leather upholstered chairs and then took her own seat, facing them from behind her desk. For a moment, she wished she'd had the foresight to bolt their chairs to the floor.

The FBI agents' eyes were darting around the room. The walls were mostly lined with bookcases holding Janice and Mel's library, along with Gabrielle's more recent acquisitions. (The bard had joined every book club she could find, shortly after Janice's death, and the volumes were piling up). Xena sighed. A large piece of parachute fabric had been draped from the ceiling, trailing down the walls behind the bookcases to the floor, and giving the room the appearance of the interior of a campaign tent. The sections of free wall space between the bookcases were hung with several dozen edged weapons and several fragments of scrolls in display cases. A glass-sided curio cabinet filled with artifacts stood beside a window. Gabrielle's desk was piled high with books, tabloid newspapers, loose pages, diskettes, her computer, and finally topped with empty coffee cups and dishes. Next to it, Xena's matching desk was bare, save for a couple maps and a computer. She cleared her throat to regain the agents' attention.

"So what brings ya to beautiful Columbia, S.C. on this fine afternoon?" Xena asked conversationally. (As if she didn't have her suspicions). She offered them a smile.

"Ms. Pappas, the Medical Examiner has forwarded his findings to our office, regarding the third terrorist's cause of death," Agent Phillips began formally. Humor her, he thought, she's a psycho…just look at this place.

"And?" Xena raised an eyebrow. (The purpose of their visit was as she'd suspected).

"The deceased's intracranial blood vessels were ahemotic. Antemortem exsanguination of the cephalic tissues was complete. Bilaterally, the carotid arteries were completely constricted latero-medially for a length of forty-three millimeters at the level of the 5th and 6th cervicals, congenital malformation doubtful. Petechiae absent. Hyoid intact. No ligature marks discernable. No internal or external hemorrhaging was revealed. Blood chemistry nominal. Toxicosis and narcotic residues negative. Elevated bile production noted. Gastric contents…etc., etc., and etc." SA Phillips skipped down the page. "Technically, death was by idiopathic cerebral asphyxia," he recited, muttering to himself, "never heard that one before." After a pause he continued. "The cause of death is clear, but the mechanism for it remains undetermined." With a sigh, Agent Phillips capitulated, adding, "to be honest, both the ME and the HRT combat instructors are baffled. What happened?"

"I cut off the flow of blood to his brain. His large muscle groups were paralyzed almost immediately. He was dead in under 30 seconds," Xena declared in response to his last two words. The rest had all been double-talk and clinical mumbo-jumbo.

From the cell phone at her waist came Gabrielle's exclamation of, "Uh oh!"

The Warrior Princess gave the agents a sheepish grin and turned off the walkie-talkie feature on her Nextel.

"Oops," she muttered.

The man in the policeman's uniform placed a hand against the window glass, shielding his view to block the strong reflections from the bright morning sun. The space that he searched was deserted, as it had been every morning and evening since September 12th. Everything inside the school, all the equipment, the rack of weapons, even the half-full bottle of water sitting abandoned on the floor, was the same as it had been on that afternoon when he'd walked away. Serena and Gabriella had never come back.

What he'd seen that day had stayed with him. His teachers had been fighting, blade against blade, with fury born of heartache; consumed by a grief that could only be vented through such deadly activity…as though they could slaughter their pain with their warriors' prowess. Their enemy hadn't been the beloved fighter they'd faced beyond the slashing steel, but rather the monstrous acts and monumental losses suffered by both their own country and humanity as a whole. They had been fighting the chaos and the evil, waging a desperate struggle, on behalf of mankind and for their own sanity as well. Alexander Williams understood these things clearly now. On a gut level, he'd understood them as he'd stood in the school's doorway, watching in awe as they'd fought.

Over the last two and a half weeks, his memories of the fight hadn't diminished a bit. If anything, they became clearer each time he played them back in his mind's eye. The compact blonde bearing two skeletonized short swords; just dark blurs whistling in her hands. The tall brunette deftly meeting her with a long sword and a ring shaped blade of steel. And therein was the clue. The ring blade was best known from a popular TV show, only recently taken off the air. Officer Williams had applied the investigative compulsion that had originally prompted him to join the police force. He'd been confronted by a mystery. During the time since September 12th, he'd made some very disturbing discoveries.

The TV show had been called "Xena Warrior Princess". The lead characters had been two Greek warrior women whom he soon discovered had been based on real historic figures. Xena and Gabrielle had been contemporaries of Julius Caesar. On his home computer, he'd called up the historical research and found the notes detailing the archeological finds of a Dr. Janice Covington et al. He'd read the "Xena Scrolls", penned over 2,000 years before by the warrior's biographer, Gabrielle of Potidaea, and translated by Dr. Melinda Pappas. And then the coincidences had begun to pile up.

Drs. Janice Covington and Melinda Pappas had lived right here in Columbia, S.C. For decades they had taught at the university in the center of town. The Pappas family had owned land in the vicinity since the 1690s, and there was still a large house in the family name. A late-1940s newspaper photo of the pair revealed a tall brunette and a compact blonde who were dead ringers for the women who ran the school. The photo had accompanied an article reporting the pair's award of a Presidential Medal of Freedom, an award sometimes given to civilians for heroism in times of war. They had been involved in covert operations against the Nazis. There was more.

His teachers had only appeared a few months prior to the death of Dr. Covington, and they were her heirs, and therefore the heiresses of the Pappas estate. Beyond the house and the land it sat on, was a portfolio of invested interests that were little short of mindboggling. The two women currently lived in the old Pappas house. Their names also seemed significant to him. Serena and Gabriella…they were modern adaptations of Xena and Gabrielle. And they were also almost identical in appearance to the actresses who had played the roles of the warrior and the bard on TV. Alexander Williams had started to dig deeper.

It turned out that they were the long lost grandnieces of the two professors. They'd even shown up at the same time...possibly together. It was just too pat, too convenient to believe. He'd done a search of Serena and Gabriella's origins before coming to Columbia. Here, he had run into a blank wall. Neither one had any prior public records. No drivers' licenses, no property deeds, no loan or bank histories, no voting registrations, no medical histories, and no educational records. It wasn't that they'd been law abiding citizens with clean slates…it was as if they had no slates at all. They had no past before coming to Columbia in June of 2000. There was only one legitimate explanation he could conceive of; the Federal Witness Protection Program. There were many illegitimate explanations he could imagine. The situation made his flesh crawl.

There were ways he could check more deeply, but he didn't have the authority to pursue them on his own. Neither had any outstanding warrants; not even a traffic citation. He was at a dead end, and then, belatedly, he'd seen the newspapers. Quantico, Virginia, September 13th. The 1st Virginia Tidewater Bank had briefly been held by terrorists. Follow up reports noted that Serena Pappas had been one of the nine hostages, all of whom had escaped unscathed. The bank had been stormed by the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team. The news reports had seemed uncharacteristically vague about the "gory" details, almost as if the story was being suppressed. The incident should have been all over the media as the story broke. The three failed terrorists had been killed, and the report said that one had died of "cerebral complications and asphyxia". None had died of gunshot wounds. He remembered Gabriella's claims about a technique that she'd demonstrated on their first evening of class.

On that same day, Martial Times, the leading newspaper of the martial arts, had reported that the women's title at the 23rd National Open Full Contact Martial Arts Championships had been won by Gabriella Covington from the Columbia School of Martial Science. The article had praised her abilities, but noted that her semi-final opponent, Air Force SSgt. Hudson Lykos, had died of nerve damage resulting from an unfortunate accident to her spine during competition. Alex Williams had cross-referenced an obituary picture of the deceased staff sergeant with the TV character played by actress Hudson Leick. Their names were so similar. At first he thought there'd been a mistake. The staff sergeant and the beautiful actress could have been identical twins. It seemed as if Gabrielle had killed her old enemy Callisto.

And finally, there were the cryptic references he remembered hearing. "I guess some of the movements Serena uses with the Chin saber are common to all the Chinese systems that developed later." The systems Gabriella had referred to were at least hundreds of years old; for that matter, the name "Chin" was archaic as well. "I started out by learning some training exercises that could be the equivalent of forms in a modern system." The use of forms to learn an arts' movements was common to all martial arts and had been since the beginning of formal systems. "I haven't worn armor in a long time. She never wore it." "Armor", not padding or protective gear, which they'd disdained. When would either of them have had occasion to wear armor, or have needed to? "Gabriella and I've been sparrin' together for years, and it's been a very long time since either of us was able to complete an attack successfully." But what he'd seen that afternoon wasn't the result of a few years of practice. Such mastery would take a lifetime to attain, and the women were both in their mid-twenties. "A Celtish woman from Gallia…France…taught me a long time ago." Serena's slip had named the modern country of France with the provincial designation from the Roman Empire; he'd checked. "Celtish"? The Celts had been indigenous to the area during the Roman era, before the arrival of the Franks, a Germanic tribe who had unified Gaul around 500 AD. Nowadays, Celt was almost synonymous with Irish. "I guess you could say the Dim Mak derives from it." They practiced nerve point attacks that predated the Dim Mak? The "Deft Touch", along with the "Poison Hand" and the "Iron Hand" were the legendary culmination of the eastern fighting arts. They had been known since before the time of Christ. Serena had completely numbed Marcus' leg and then released the effect. Gabriella had implied that he himself would have died from her attack. He'd never even heard of such techniques, much less actually seen them used. No one he knew had. But they had been practiced by the characters on that TV show. "Are you telling me that she got up, armed herself, crossed the room, and fired on a target while in a transcendental state?" He remembered asking Serena. "I'm tellin' ya that she exists in that state at will." In his experience, no one could do such a thing. The very act of moving required that the psyche reintegrate with the body. It demanded the initiation of internal dialog and the loss of the transcendental state. It had been proven by neurologists using EEGs and MRI to scan for brain activity. To do what she had done while in a state of emptiness would have been supernatural. He still couldn't explain it and he couldn't accept Serena's explanation for it either. The human mind had its limits. It would have been a greater wonder than if Gabriella had performed those acts while sleepwalking.

Yes, they could have actually been the long lost grandnieces of Janice Covington and Melinda Pappas. They could have been aware of the ancient history that their elders had devoted their lives to studying. But they were simply too young to have attained the level of mastery they had displayed. Knowing a thing and practicing it were two different matters. He'd been studying martial arts for 27 years and Gabriella had enacted a fatal attack against him in less than 10 seconds. Serena could have killed Marcus and he never even would have known it. Serena had been present when a terrorist had died of "cerebral complications and asphyxia", and on the same day, Gabriella's opponent in a tournament had died of "accidental" nerve damage. It simply couldn't be coincidence.

The two women were anachronisms, their souls somehow displaced into the present. Though he couldn't fathom the mechanism for it, the impression he'd felt that day, of their being ancient warriors somehow transplanted into the modern world, still rang true with a gut certainty that he couldn't ignore. Alex Williams was a cop, and instinct had saved his ass more than once. He was curious as hell and he yearned for understanding.

As his evidence had mounted, Alexander Williams had kept an eye on the school. He checked it twice a day, towards the beginning and end of his patrol shift. He'd taken to driving by the Pappas house while going to and from work, though it was miles across town from his home. Of course, none of the other students had heard anything from their teachers either. For all practical purposes, the two women had disappeared as mysteriously as they'd appeared. After two and a half weeks, he doubted if he'd ever see them again.

The policeman lowered his hand and turned away from the school's window. He resumed his patrol, but his mind was far from the streets around him.

In the days after meeting with FBI agents Phillips and DeMarco in her study in Columbia, many arrangements had rapidly been made. The soulmates were to temporarily join the FBI's CIRG, (the Critical Incident Response Group). Specifically, they would become a short-term component of the Operations Training Unit, which was responsible for the training and support of Hostage Rescue Team. The following day, Sunday, September 16th, the pair had been given temporary quarters in a dormitory style apartment building in the FBI compound on the grounds of the Quantico Marine Base. They had both immediately felt at home surrounded by the pervasive military atmosphere. The people they'd encountered were familiar types, from the unblooded recruits to the grizzled veteran commanders. They'd spent the day looking around.

If anything, they were both impressed by the level of conduct and organization the troops displayed. Xena was probably most shocked by the absence of a whipping ground. She'd always had to administer corporal punishment to maintain discipline and underscore her authority as commander. (The saying, "letting the cat out of the bag" referred to removing a cat 'o nine tails from the waxed leather sack at the mainmast in preparation for disciplining sailors aboard ship). In every army she'd ever seen, ambitious and insubordinate soldiers had been commonplace…she'd slit a few throats herself when a flogging wouldn't do. Since their arrival, she'd seen not a single incident. Though the younger troops could get rowdy, when confronted, their bearing was one of courtesy and pride in themselves and their outfit. Nowhere did she find the ubiquitous drunkenness and brawling that she knew was typical of soldiers. Initially she'd been astonished.

Gabrielle had found other facets of the modern Corps inspiring. For one thing, there didn't seem to be any of the pervasive pestilence she'd come to expect in military encampments. Syphilis and dysentery weren't rampant. The coughing of tubercular soldiers and the fevered delirium of malarial troops were missing. There were no yellow fever cases, no small pox, no typhus, and no gangrene; not even any lice or ringworm. She suspected that the sick were being aggressively quarantined. Curious, she'd looked everywhere for the hospice filled with death wards and found an efficient modern clinic instead. The soldiers were as healthy as the civilian population…probably even healthier.

Later, the bard had met both officers and enlisted soldiers whose purpose in being at Quantico had been to attend the military schools there. They were actually in organized classes, studying how to become better soldiers, more effective leaders, and more able administrators. She hadn't run across a single illiterate soldier yet…unbelievable, considering that she remembered Roman centurions who couldn't even sign their own names. Most incredibly, some of the troops were studying law. There were regulations and directives for almost everything, and the more serious infractions were handled by the military police and tried in military courts. It was a far cry from a warlord's enforcers, the leader's cruel and thuggish henchmen, who brutalized the men at arms for their own entertainment as well as at their commander's orders. This army had known standards of conduct, consistent procedures, and a legal mandate. It was the armed segment of a civilian government and it had to obey the country's laws and leaders, not the whims of each commander or the vacillating will of a single tyrant or king.

To say that they'd greeted each other's observations with amazement and disbelief would have been an understatement. That night when they'd traded reports, each had been sure that the other was trying to outdo her own revelations with even wilder fictions. (Xena had a difficult time believing, knowing Gabrielle's imagination as she did, while Gabrielle's disbelief had stemmed from knowing Xena's tendency to play pranks). Only slowly had they convinced each other that what they'd seen wasn't a fantasy or practical joke. The cloned warrior had briefly entertained the notion that everything they'd been allowed to see might have been a set up, but the motive for such an involved illusion escaped her. Finally she'd just sighed and accepted it all, though she kept her eyes peeled for inconsistencies throughout their stay.

The FBI had arranged for the soulmates to teach the HRT assaulters using an indoor gymnasium, with access to an outdoor field and track. They'd met the members of the team shortly after their arrival. There were 60 elite members of the HRT in Quantico. The other 30 members were "elsewhere". Of these 60, two dozen comprised sniper teams and the remaining three dozen, the assault teams. The classes the clones would teach were mandatory for the assaulters, optional for the snipers. All 60 members showed up.

They were the best students the soulmates had ever had. In some respects, they were the also best warriors they'd ever met. Each had already been a Special Agent of the FBI before applying for duty in the HRT. Each had been forced to pass through an arduous two-week trial and assessment period. After that, those who were accepted were given another 4 months of training. Considering that more than a few had arrived in the outfit by way of other elite groups, there were no unfit or uninspired members. They were all driven to perfect their skills, substituting competition with each other for the faceless enemy they would someday meet. A point of difficulty for the clones had been the fact that they were women, and they had addressed this issue on the first day.

"My name is Serena Pappas," Xena had begun formally. "My partner is Gabriella Covington. We have been allowed by the HRT's OTU to offer training in our methods of unarmed combat. I know all of you are already highly trained and capable operatives. You've been in combat and faced mortal jeopardy before. You may be wonderin' what we can teach you…what a couple women can teach you, about fightin' hand to hand. I don't blame ya a bit." Here, the cloned warrior displayed a small grin, a grin that was answered by several of their students. The rest regarded her with stony and doubtful expressions. She resumed, issuing a challenge she knew they could understand. "Each of ya is bigger and stronger than either of us. I'm gonna ask how many of ya think you could kick my ass?"

60 hands immediately shot up. Xena grinned a feral grin at that. She answered them, upping the challenge. "I doubt it. In fact, I doubt if ya could kick Gabriella's ass," she continued, gesturing to the cloned bard, "yeah, this sweet 'lil blonde here."

The blonde in question gave the students a guileless smile. Several of the men shook their heads and began laughing. "Whose first?" The Warrior Princess asked, producing a bill. "Here's $50 on Gabriella." For a second none of the men moved…they hadn't really expected that she was serious. Xena winked. "I'll give ya two to one odds."

Finally a tall wiry man at the rear of the group stood up, a smile on his face. He walked to the front of the area where Xena and Gabrielle were standing and introduced himself with a quip.

"I'm Dave Hartford, and I don't mind earning the beer money."

"Special Agent Hartford, you can start whenever you're ready," Xena told him, backing away as Gabrielle moved forward to face him. When they were both in ready stances but he still wasn't attacking, Xena asked, "do ya need me to say, begin?"

The agent moved forward with a few soft calls of encouragement from his buddies. He opened with three quick left jabs directed at the blonde's head. He was measuring and Gabrielle let him come. The first two jabs she turned aside with small movements of her right forearm, the third, she wove away from. Hartford began to throw what would be a hard lunge punch to her belly with his right hand, his strong hand. The cloned bard read his intent perfectly. As he shifted his weight forward, she turned to her left and swung her right arm in a fast windmill motion from the shoulder. Her fingertips struck the musculocutaneous nerve in his right biceps. The shock of the blow alone diverted the path of his punch, but instead of returning to prepare for another punch, the arm dropped limp to his side. He couldn't even close his fist. Continuing in a blur of movement, Gabrielle turned to the right, coming back to face him. Her left arm was pinwheeling just like her right had done before. This time her fist struck a hammer blow against the agent's suprasternal notch, where the manubrium meets the clavicles at the base of the neck. The strike was delivered at a downward angle with only moderate contact, but even so, it drove the tall agent to his knees. And then she stopped and stepped away.

To his credit, Agent Hartford didn't stay down long. His right arm still hung limp at his side and his breathing was labored. He rubbed his sore chest with his good left hand.

"Well, that was impressive," he muttered grumpily.

"Hartford's a girlie," several of the other agents taunted in chorus, though they were smiling. Someone asked, "did ya have to hit our baby boy so hard?"

"Fuck you very much," Hartford groused as he went to sit back down, "assholes."

"Put a cold pack on the arm and a hot pack on the chest," Xena advised, "and they'll both feel okay in an hour. By the way, ya owe me fifty bucks." After a pause, "anyway, you're lucky, she barely touched ya."

At this, 60 pairs of eyes widened.

"The nerve attack disabled Agent Hartford's right arm, but it was only a diversion," Xena explained, "The fatal attack was against the top of the sternum. If the blow had been struck full force, it would have separated the collarbones from the manubrium, broken the costal cartilages and shocked the heart causin' death. Gabriella…."

The blonde clone picked up a brand new brick and held it from one end with her thumb and two fingers, parallel to the floor. She held it at roughly the height of a man's chest. Xena stepped forward, and using the same fast windmill blow, shattered the brick with her left fist. Several of the agents held high enough ranks in various martial arts that they had trained to break bricks or other hard material. Those bricks, cinderblocks, and wooden boards were always supported at both ends, or more rarely simply laid flat on a surface and struck. What none of them had seen done before was the breaking of an unsupported object.

"This is what I call a 'true break'," Xena told them, "and unlike a supported break, it can only be done with an extremely fast strike. The force of the blow is transmitted almost instantly. The brick didn't have time to rebound away before the impact shattered it. If the blow is too slow, the brick recoils from the strike and the movement dissipates the force. In most breakin' techniques, ya shift your body weight behind the blow to attain the power. Remember, speed times mass equals force. It's true of bullets* and it's true of hand strikes too. With this technique, you whip the hand at the target using momentum. Ya saw the windmill movement I used? That long arc builds up a greater speed than the shorter path of a straight punch can."

(*Both Xena and Gabrielle had taken advantage of being in a FBI compound by taking weapons training and spending time on the ranges. Xena eventually decided that guns could be viable weapons in some situations. Long range shooting had captured her imagination after the bank incident. The idea of killing an unsuspecting enemy from greater than archery range intrigued her, and so the cloned warrior absorbed the skills of a sniper. Stealth and concealment were already second nature to her. Accuracy and consistency with the .308 rifle came quickly after she learned to adjust the telescope. She soon astonished the instructors by winning hands of sniper's poker at 100 and 200 yards. The cloned bard developed a preference for handguns and spent most of her time on the combat course, moving through obstacles and firing on unexpectedly appearing targets. She'd found it advantageous to use two autopistols simultaneously, so she practiced the staggered replacement of magazines while holding a second sidearm. It was the updated reflection of her use of paired swords in battle, and as with the swords, she functionally ambidextrous.) ~Editor

Gabrielle continued the lesson. "For a person my size, the straight punch I could have used against Agent Hartford wouldn't have been as effective. I was standing too close to him and needed to aim the strike upwards. The windmill blow and the choice of target would have made my attack devastating. I'll be distributing charts listing the preferred targets for this kind of blow. Take some time to study them and imagine their applications."

"Everybody on your feet," Xena ordered, "give yourselves some room. I want ya to swing your arms in circles at the shoulder like a windmill. First the right arm, and then the left. Swing them forward and then backward. Don't clench the shoulder joint. Do this exercise three times a day. It'll loosen your shoulders and maybe make up for the tightness ya get from carryin' too much muscle mass. Drawback of male physiology, ya know." She said it with a smile though. Gabrielle got out the first aid packs for Agent Hartford.

The soulmates had moved on to more esoteric techniques. On the fourth day they'd presented their introduction to nerve point attacks, demonstrating on willing volunteers. Gabrielle again passed out charts of targets, asking them to study the information carefully. Finally, Xena had shown the men that accuracy was only part of the skill necessary to gain the full potential of nerve attacks. She had brought in a can of Coke from the vending machine in the hall, and held it up between her thumb and the first two fingers of her right hand. Slowly, she'd applied pressure with her fingertips. The can had deformed, buckled, and finally burst, spraying soda all over. The cloned warrior drained what remained inside the can and then passed it around. On the side where her fingertips had been, they could easily see two spots dimpling the sheet metal.

"Ya don't train to harden your fingertips by strikin' with 'em. The Chinese believe it hurts the flow of the Qi in certain meridians of the body and can lead to blindness. What I want ya to do is what I just showed ya. Squeeze a full can until you can make the top pop. Do it with both hands, three times a day for ten minutes, squeezing and relaxing over and over again. You can also do fingertip push-ups."*

(*The fingertip push-ups are done in sets of 30, keeping the fingers slightly curled, not reflected back as is the natural tendency. Eventually, the number of weight bearing fingers is reduced. First the little fingers are withdrawn, then the ring fingers, until the push-ups are being done on the two largest fingers and the thumb. Alternatives include doing the fingertip push-ups in a handstand position, starting with sets of 10.) ~Editor

On the fifth day, the clones had overseen their students as they attempted to apply the nerve pinches on non-lethal targets. They'd broken the agents up into pairs of partners and had them face each other in lines. The idea was that they'd be able to quickly spot anyone who keeled over in trouble. So far it had been the most challenging class. It took most of the day, but by the end of the session, most of the agents had been consistently able to numb their partner's legs and arms. They would all be sporting bruises from the incorrectly aimed and overly violent application of the techniques. Gabrielle had reinforced their explaination about the finesse aspect and why they were training to harden their fingers.

"I should tell you that it really doesn't take much pressure to affect a nerve," the blonde said, wrapping an arm around Xena's waist and dropping her to the floor with a subtle pinch of her sciatic nerve, "if your aim is perfect. Deviate from the target by even 1/16 of an inch though, and you're relying on the pressure wave traveling through the tissue from the strike to affect the nerve. When these techniques were first developed, they were applied against armored enemies. Hardening the fingertips allowed a warrior to make a successful attack while breaking through wicker, leather, or lacquered bamboo armor. Nowadays it helps when you can't be completely sure of the target."

Xena had released Gabrielle's pinch to the nerve in her buttock and had regained the use of her leg. "You are in so much shit," she stage whispered to the blonde with a wolfish grin.

After two weeks, the clones had introduced the agents to breaking techniques, disabling nerve attacks, and a series of joint locks and dislocates more efficient than any the FBI trainers had seen. They'd also inspired their students with a demonstration of the state of emptiness. For this demonstration, Xena had caught a series of five arrows that Gabrielle had fired at her in rapid succession, with her ears plugged and her eyes blindfolded.

That night, lying under the star flecked canopy that they'd transplanted from their bed in South Carolina, the soulmates spoke of their precedents for teaching secret techniques.

"I think the students are doing great, Xena…they're certainly learning faster than Eve or Hope did. We've already shown them more than we showed anyone but our daughters."

"Yeah, that's for sure," the cloned warrior agreed, chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip. "They're learin' fast alright. Always helps when the student's are interested. I guess I don't mind teachin' these techniques now, because I don't expect to be fightin' these guys next season or next year. Even so, there'll be plenty of things we won't teach…like all of our weapons skills, plus tracking, stealth, and vanishing." After thinking a bit she reminisced. "Ya know, I remember when we rescued Eve in Rome. We'd almost made it out of the palace when that Praetorian leapt out of a doorway. I put the "pinch" on him, but then I had to drag Eve away. She was so fascinated, just standin' there watchin' him die like it was the greatest thing she'd ever seen."

"She was pretty obsessed with killing after her twelve years under Caesar's influence, and she had absolutely zero* compassion." The bard sighed. It had been so tiresome dealing with the violent and coldhearted Livia. The first few months, she'd thought she'd kill her, Xena's daughter or not.

(*Gabrielle enjoyed the Arabic concept of zero, not to mention the ideas of numerals and decimal places. Early on, she had gleefully performed calculations on large numbers, amazed at how orderly the system remained even when multiplying or dividing. Trigonometry and algebra, with the Greek or Roman counting systems, would have been unthinkably cumbersome to her. For a week she'd awakened Xena by muttering formulae in her sleep, until the Warrior Princess had put an end to it by buying her a calculator. Gabrielle had been ecstatic. Xena had received gratuitous sex.) ~Editor

"Ya nearly killed her a few times yourself," Xena chided, reading her thoughts.

"Gods, Xena, she was insufferable. I finally lost it when she tried to treat me like a servant...Hurry up with that food strawhead, Curry my horse, Bring me some wine…" Gabrielle had affected a spoiled and snotty persona to which Xena chuckled softly.

"Ya finally did slap her around a bit as I remember."

"Well, enough was enough. She really did act like the Bitch of Rome. Sour milk for Romulus and Remus. Honestly…Get over here and scour the mud off my boots you two-unciae peasant…I could have ripped out her liver and eaten it in front of her," the bard seethed at the memory, adding, "and anyway, I'm over three and a half cubits tall…."*

(*In Roman measures, an uncia was about 1½ feet, roughly equal to a cubit, though cubits varied by locality, being the distance from the point of the elbow to the tip of the middle finger…hence the expression, "givin' 'em the cubit". Of course, Livia's reference could also have meant a two-ounce peasant, a real lightweight, or the sixth part of an As, a Roman copper coin of low value, indicating a pauper. That Gabrielle automatically took it as a comment about her height is somewhat telling about her.) ~Editor

"Depends on whose cubit," Xena muttered under her breath, drawing a sharp glare and a smack across the belly from her soulmate. She grinned in the dark. "I'll admit, she was a handful for a while there, but havin' ya put the pinch on her and dump her in that lake was the start of straightenin' her out, hehe."

"Gods, Xena, I can't believe I did that," Gabrielle said. She sounded astonished and even still guilty because of her fit of temper over two thousand years before. "I put the pinch on her, kicked her over the bank, and just walked away. She was choking and sputtering in the water, and I was willing to let her drown."

"I was sittin' by the fire countin', ya know," Xena replied, "knew she'd been getting' under your skin for days, 'an I figured you two had to get stuff squared away. Sooner was better than later I guess. Eventually I pulled her out at around twenty-somethin'."

"She did treat me better after that," Gabrielle remembered with a satisfied smirk.*

(*This incident, in much altered form, may have appeared in the TV episode "Forgiven" in which Gabrielle finally batters Tara with her staff. Though the soulmates encountered a few youthful wannabe tag-alongs, anyone who'd acted as aggressively towards Gabrielle as Tara had would probably have wound up disabled or maimed by the Amazon Bard. "Forgiven" was an endearing morality play that both of the clones had found laughable. The "Urn of Apollo" was an archaic Thracian slang reference to habitual drunkenness during daylight hours, as in, "Look, Meleager's been tipping the Urn of Apollo, and he's passed out before the zenith." In the Pelopennese, the "Urn of Apollo" referred to the morning chamber pot.) ~Editor

"Seemed like it took forever to get her to drop that pissy attitude 'an carry her own weight on the road though," Xena remembered, "and I was really surprised she wasn't a better fighter. I mean she had all those tutors and coaches in Rome. She was a Legatus."

"I can understand it perfectly, Xena. No one wanted to get on her bad side. Everyone from Julius Caesar on down coddled her, and it wasn't because they loved her. Caesar knew what he was doing, creating an indulged psychopath. Then he gave her command of a legion and turned her loose. Spoiled brat. He'd basically created a legal warlord."

"Still wish I coulda seen him die!" Xena spat.

"Anyway, Eve turned out okay in the end, I guess," Gabrielle added, trying to calm her soulmate's mood. Anything to do with Caesar still set her off. "I mean, by the time we went back to Rome, she was pretty sane. You did have to spend a lot of time fixing her fighting skills and teaching her how to survive. Realizing that she hadn't been taught very well was part of what finally broke through her bitchiness."

"Yeah," Xena agreed with a grin, "nothin' like getting' your butt kicked three times in a row by a 'two-unciae peasant' to make a girl listen up." After hearing the low growl from Gabrielle, she added, "Compared to her, Hope was always such a sweetheart…such a fast learner too."

"As the proud birth mom, I'll agree to that," the placated bard happily proclaimed, "though she spent most of her time with the Amazons." After a few moments' pause, she continued. "They taught her everything she needed to know and gave her a home and a family when we couldn't." By the time she had finished, her eyes were damp.

Xena had looked over at her soulmate, hearing the tremor in her voice. She tightened her arms around her partner.

"Gabrielle, I'm just glad she had the Amazons to live with, and I give thanks that she wasn't recognized when Brutus' men came. Havin' Eve kidnapped was bad enough. I think I woulda died if they'd gotten Hope too." She closed her eyes and choked down the pain. At least one of their daughters had been spared the captivity and the madness that had been Caesar's Rome. At least one of their daughters had grown up surrounded by love, and Xena had loved Hope as if she'd been her own.

Gabrielle's daughter had enjoyed two mothers and an older sister during the first two years of her life. She'd passed her infancy in the Amazon village with Gabrielle, Xena, and Eve. Though the soulmates had made short trips away, as when they'd gone out to meet and kill Mavican in 59 BC, her life for the most part had been stable.

Then in 58 BC there'd been the endgame attack by Brutus. Acting on Caesar's orders, and dressed in the uniforms of their rival, Pompey the Magnus, Brutus had slain Queen Ephiny in combat and kidnapped 10 year old Eve. Over two hundred Amazon warriors had been killed in the battle, another three score captured.

With the queen dead and her named successor, Princess Marga, over forty leagues away, the soulmates took action, for they knew the Romans better than anyone else who'd been present. Gabrielle had made an impassioned plea to the warriors, but only twelve score and ten of the most traditional had joined her to free the prisoners and recover Ephiny's body. She would have led half the army, but Xena had spoken against her and most of the Amazons had forsaken her quest. Even so, Gabrielle had tracked the fleeing Brutus west, across nine leagues of countryside, finally catching him on wooded land with only two cohorts of legionnaires. Until the battle started, they'd thought that they'd been tracking Pompey.

In the forest the legionnaires hadn't been able to form up in ranks and files. The 250 Amazons had been in a blood frenzy and they'd opened their assault firing arrows.* At close range the heavy poisoned bronzeheads had punched through shields and armor with a resounding crack. The Roman pilum and gladius were of no use against an enemy that refused to close ranks with their lines. The Amazon warriors slew three times their number, losing only two score themselves. Most importantly, they'd liberated the prisoners and reclaimed Queen Ephiny's body, which the Romans had hoped to display in the Eternal City, among the Empire's vanquished. But the Amazons had failed in the other two objectives of their mission. They hadn't rescued Eve, and they hadn't avenged Ephiny's death by killing Brutus. For Gabrielle, returning and meeting her soulmate's eyes while empty handed had been harder than anything she'd ever done.

(*The Amazon arrows were usually dipped in one of two major kinds of chemical "enhancers". The first type used a concentrate derived primarily from mushrooms of the genera Inocybe and Clitocybe, in which the active toxin, muscarine, brought on cramps, dizziness, coma, seizure, and often death. The second type relied on the concentration of histamine and neurotoxins produced by dinoflagellates in rotting fish or shellfish. At times other toxins, among them snake venom, were employed, but these could only be obtained in small quantities. The warriors would have loved curare, but that was a South American toxin, a form of strychnine extracted from the Strychnos toxifera vine, whose native habitat, ironically is the Amazon Basin). ~Editor

"I couldn't find her, Xena," Gabrielle sobbed into the warrior's neck, "somehow he'd snuck her away with another cohort of his men, and there weren't enough of us to follow their trail too. We killed and killed until the Romans fled from us. I think they were only buying time to get Eve away. Our warriors were soaked with their blood, covered head to toe in gore, and they stank of the grave. Despite all the confusion I found him…I even fought him, Xena. I wounded him twice, but I couldn't get that one decisive strike in. Then his men surrounded him and finally drove us back before they fled. I had one last chance to kill the bastard. I picked up a gladius and threw it like a dagger, but I only hit one of his tribunes…split his spine…and Brutus got away."

Xena could only hold her soulmate and offer what comfort she could with her embrace. The Warrior Princess was numb; the only way she could survive reliving the heartbreak and horror of that day. She had been many leagues away when her soulmate had fought Brutus. Hatred had fanned the old embers of bloodlust into a conflagration in her heart. For the first time in years she had unleashed the Destroyer of Nations in response. Xena had led and fought magnificently, butchering all who stood against her, and she had come back literally bathed in the blood of her enemies. The warrior personally slew over a hundred that day, and she had been thoroughly used. She had failed to protect her daughter, failed to avenge her friend the queen, and she had performed a service for her greatest enemy. She had killed Pompey the Magnus, mortal rival of Julius Caesar. She had provided him with an unobstructed path to the throne of the Roman Empire.

On the heels of the accounts of the battle with Brutus, Amazon border patrols had reported Pompey's army to the north of the Amazon lands. Xena had been almost insane with fury, but she had still been the Favorite of the God of War. She had projected her charisma and played on the emotions of the grieving sisterhood. Over the years, Xena had been gifted by a god and trained to command by the force of her will. Her partner's reasoning hadn't stood a chance. For the first time in anyone's memory, a non-Amazon had commanded the nation's army in time of war. Ignoring Gabrielle's pleas, the main force of the Amazon Nation, almost twenty-one hundred warriors, had followed Xena into battle against the Magnus. They had slaughtered, crying out over the whizzing of arrows to Artemis the Huntress and Ares, Patron of Warriors, wielding labrys, bow, javelin, and sword. Defying an opposition that had outnumbered them by over six to one, they had nearly exterminated the two legions that Pompey had brought to fight Brutus. Scarcely a cohort had survived the slaughter unscathed.

Xena had faced Pompey, and his claims that he'd had nothing to do with either her daughter's kidnapping or the queen's death had fallen on deaf ears. His enemy was Brutus, not the Amazon Nation, though they would cross anyone's land to find him. By then she hadn't really been listening to anything except the surge of blood in her own veins. The Destroyer of Nations had never shown mercy. Xena had slain him like a dog, hamstringing him first, taunting him as he crawled, and finally beheading him like a common criminal. With the first Amazons to join her, she had hacked his body beyond recognition.

Tears of pain and guilt trickled down her cheeks and onto the clean case of her pillow. A convulsive sob escaped her lips and only Gabrielle's arms grounded her against the horror she so vividly remembered.

"I…we…oh gods, the blood…" she couldn't even form a sentence.

In the aftermath Ares had appeared on the battlefield to salute his Chosen, and while the victorious Amazons had cheered, Xena had felt like crawling down a hole into Tartarus. She had completely lost it. Her conduct had been every bit as bloodthirsty and merciless as it had ever been as a warlord. What little she could remember of some parts of the battle had seen her screaming, "Kill 'Em All", at the top of her lungs, while the Amazons unquestioningly followed her and swung at anything that moved. She had reveled in the feeling of hot slick blood coating her body from head to foot, loved the stickiness of it on the grip of her sword, and even found herself excited by the pulling sensations as it contracted while drying all over her skin. Her hair had been clotted to her scalp with sweat and gore. Ares had come to her and traced a finger thorough the spatter on her cheek, and then he'd quickly kissed her lips, licking his own to taste the blood offering before he'd vanished with a whispered, "magnificent". She'd been his again that day; his unstoppable Favorite. She had wanted to throw up, but she'd kept up appearances for the sake of the other warriors and brought back Pompey's head as a trophy for Queen Marga's coronation. It had decorated a spike in the village execution grounds…among the Nation's vanquished.

The horror of her memories abated just enough for her to feel Gabrielle's arms tighten around her. They had been the worst days of her life, and the mistakes she'd made had haunted her until her death on the Ides of March. If only she'd followed her soulmate, tracking Brutus instead of raging after the legions reported by the scouts. Maybe they could have tracked down the cohort that had taken Eve. Yet she'd been so sure that the two armies had actually been one and that they would rejoin each other for a combined secondary assault on the Amazon homelands.

"I argued against you before your own people and then went after Pompey," Xena choked out, "had to do it my way…and I couldn't resist the slaughter. We both won in battle but I lost the war. I lost my daughter and I lost the integrity of my soul to Ares' blood-mania, the katalepsis, that day. I could have lost you too. I lost the things that were really important."

"Yes, we both lost and won," Gabrielle softly agreed, "and maybe if we'd split the army by hekatontarchiae, by companies of 100, instead of by passions, maybe I could have recovered Eve…could have killed Brutus too. But Pompey's army had to be defeated, and if Brutus hadn't lived, then Caesar would have survived the Ides of March. Bad as it was, everything that happened could have been much worse, and we can change none of it now. So shed the fear and the loathing and the hate, my warrior."

Caesar had brilliantly out thought her that day. Athena would have been proud of him. He had used his enemy Pompey and he had used her by knowing her rage. It had been a bitter payback for the defeat he'd suffered at her hands outside of Amphipolis, on the summer solstice in 63 BC. The resulting feelings of inadequacy and failure threatened to crush her spirit, just as they had on that long ago day. A groan of anguish escaped from the depths of her soul. She had forgotten nothing.

"It's okay to cry, my love," her bard's soothing voice rumbled against her neck, "it's okay to give your heart's voice to the loss and the pain. But we got her back in the end. You were her mother and all of Rome couldn't give her the love you did. That's what brought her back. An entire empire couldn't replace your heart. We won that war." And the greatest warrior of her time cried for her stolen daughter and all the lost years.

After that day a kind of numbness had set in and Xena had gone to war as she never had before. The Warrior Princess had sworn a Sacramentum bellicus, an oath of war, against the greatest empire in the western world. She would take back her daughter and she would make them pay. The Greater Good had taken a backseat, for this was personal. Xena had already lost her son and she couldn't lose another child. For twelve long years she had fought them. The rift that had opened between the soulmates when they'd split the Amazon army had counted for nothing in the end; it had never diminished their love. Gabrielle had left her own daughter behind in the Amazon village for increasingly longer stretches of time and had joined Xena on the trail. She had traded in her sais for a matched pair of skeletonized short swords, custom forged for her by the Amazon blade smiths. Eve had been a daughter to her too.

From 58 to 47 BC the soulmates had tried to retake Eve from Caesar. Those were the Bloody Years. They had spied, and plotted, and fought. When they couldn't act to achieve their primary goal, they had acted to destabilize the empire, striking every blow as if it would be felt by Caesar himself. They had sabotaged naval vessels and ports, aided all of the empire's enemies, freed captives, assassinated Roman leaders, poisoned army encampments, and engaged in the wholesale slaughter of legionnaires as a matter of policy. They had caused avalanches, broken bridges, set fires, created floods, and spread plagues. Before they were through, they had destroyed the equivalent of ten legions; including auxiliaries and mercenaries, over 86,000 men. Xena had been named Primus Inimicus, 1st Enemy of the Imperium, Gabrielle along with her. The combined bounty on their heads stood at 9 million denarii, or 36 sestertium in silver. Even converted into gold, the weight would have broken a horse's back.

Perhaps a quarter-hour passed before Gabrielle spoke again. By then, her soulmate had settled from the emotional torment of her memories. The bard softly kissed her cheek.

"We finally won our war against Caesar, Xena. We took her back, body and soul."

"Body and soul…I read Janice's research," Xena whispered, her voice still shaky, "I read about her and Hope's lives after we died. They did good, both our girls did good."

"Yes they did…they made Janice and Melinda…and they made us."

Following the trail of the Xena Scrolls, the two archeologists had scoured the lands of Greece for clues about the two daughters mentioned in the texts. Their search had been a strange one, for they had known the beginning and the end of the story, yet they had been able to discover almost nothing of the chapters in between. They had always hoped to find proof to fill in the lineages of the Warrior Princess and the Amazon Bard. Between those heroines and themselves lay many generations of descendants. They had uncovered some information; tantalizing references to the soulmates' daughters, but nothing more. Eve and Hope; they had remained a mystery, shrouded by the passing of so many years.

"Your daughter became a hero, and she managed to avenge herself after 20 years."

"She did good alright," the cloned warrior repeated.

"Melinda transcribed the two stories they'd found that mentioned her, and one of them linked her to the death of Brutus. The original Roman historian's work was lost…known only from a later copy. She proved that the 7th century scribe had used the wrong ending on Eve's name; a masculine -us, Livius, instead of a feminine -a, Livia. She killed Brutus in 39 BC."

"Idiot scribe probably couldn't believe he'd been killed duelin' with a woman." A small smile of pride crossed Xena's lips; her first smile in almost a half-hour.

"And the other scroll recorded her pardon in 27 BC, by the new Emperor Augustus, so we know she lived at least that long," Gabrielle added happily.

"She woulda been 41, a mother by then" Xena mused thoughtfully. After a pause, she added, "What they found out about Hope was amazing." Here, she turned to smile at her partner and saw the quick flash of pride lighting the cloned bard's face.

"She lived all her known life with the Amazons, but we taught her every fighting trick we knew. She learned the pinch when she was fourteen…."

"She learned so much so fast, sweetheart, she literally drank in everything we showed her. And not just about fightin' either. Strategy, healin', huntin', history, leadership…."

"Hope was fifteen the last time we saw her, and she was already both a blooded warrior and an apprentice healer. She became a Master Warrior at eighteen."

"And the nation's War Queen at twenty, the youngest since Antiope almost 1,500 years before. Your daughter challenged and defeated Queen Varia in 40 BC."

"Actually, if you remember, I gave birth to Hope almost a moon past the autumnal equinox. If she really fought her challenge at the solstice festival she'd still have been nineteen. Either way, at least Hope stopped the nation's vendetta against Eve. As War Queen, she countermanded Varia's 'Oath of Blood' against Livia. I wonder how long she reigned?"

"I don't guess anyone knows now, but I'm sure she did a great job…just like you did on the TV show." Here Xena gave her soulmate a nudge and a teasing grin.

"Hahaha, Queen Gabrielle," the bard joked, "can you imagine? Especially considering the amount of traveling we did. Impossible. Still, it does have kind of a ring to it, don't you agree, Warrior Princess?"

"Of course, your Queenieness."

A low chuckle and a higher pitched giggle followed the Warrior Princess' comment, and finally, last thing before spooning together and falling asleep, they confirmed the decision they'd been deferring.

"So tomorrow we start teaching them the serious stuff, huh?"

"Yes, my Queen. We'll teach 'em to kill."

Alexander Williams had driven past the Pappas house on his way in to work, as he'd done every workday for the last three weeks. For the first time in three weeks there had been a light on in the kitchen, but their car still wasn't there. He hadn't stopped, but when his morning patrol took him past the school, he'd half-expected to see his teachers inside. Pressing his face against the window glass had become such of a habit that he knew the best point of view from which to search the interior. It was still deserted. He'd turned away from the windows, once again disappointed. When his afternoon patrol again took him past the school, he noticed a woman with short black hair just leaving. He hastened to catch up with her as she swiftly strode away down the sidewalk.

Danielle Lefferts sensed someone approaching her quickly from behind. The stride wasn't that of a jogger and the person was making way too much noise for stealth. She didn't sense danger and wouldn't react unless they closed to within two yards and made her feel threatened. A quick glance in the shop windows she was passing revealed the reflection of a policeman, hands on his duty belt, hustling towards her. She relaxed a bit; he was probably just answering a call from someplace up ahead in the same direction she was walking. That thought made her stop. She didn't have any desire to walk into a "situation" that required the police. She half turned, so she was standing sideways on the sidewalk with her back to the store windows. She waited for the policeman to approach, force of habit making her quickly catalog his description.

A Columbia foot-patrol officer, maybe 5'10" to 6'0", about 170 to 180 lbs., solid, no fat, African-American, medium complexion, clean-shaven, probably early 40s, got to be in decent shape because he's not puffing in spite of hustling along with all that equipment and those shoes. He's not breaking a sweat either and it's pretty warm this afternoon for October. He's looking at me with more than passing interest; I wonder what he wants.

The Chief Warrant Officer knew he'd stop in front of her before he actually came to a halt a respectful distance away. She noticed that he slowed and stood comfortably in front of her without needing to catch his breath. He was committing her appearance to memory with a rapid, observant glance. Black hair cropped short, pale complexion, blue-gray eyes, facial structure reminiscent of Enya, probably about 5'6-7" and 120 lbs., maybe 35, blue Levi's, US Navy sweatshirt, turquoise running shoes. Within 10 seconds, he'd absorbed enough to let an artist render a recognizable portrait, or give a dispatcher a clear description for circulation to other patrol officers. It was a practiced habit.

"Excuse me, ma'am, but I'd noticed you leaving the Columbia School of Martial Science," Officer Williams began, "and I was wondering if you're familiar with the place or the owners?" He was hoping he wasn't just chasing a curious passerby who'd tried the door and left after receiving no response.

"Officer…Williams," Danielle Lefferts responded after reading his name tag, "in fact, I met one of the teachers. Met her at a martial arts tournament in San Francisco last month. I'm house sitting for the owners. I was leaving the school after airing out the space." She was surprised by the wide smile that had spread across the policeman's face.

"So, do you know if Serena and Gabriella are coming back?" Alex Williams asked hopefully. The tournament she'd mentioned must have been the one in the Martial Times article. He briefly wondered if Gabriella had defeated this woman in competition.

"They should be home Sunday night," the CWO answered, realizing that the patrolman probably passed the school every day and knew Gabriella and her partner. She chanced a question. "Do you know them?"

"Yes, I'm one of their students," Alex told her, "I've been worried about them…none of us knew that they'd left or when they'd be back. They disappeared without leaving word. Do you know if they're okay?"

"I spoke with Gabriella last night after I got off my plane. She said they're fine," she assured him, then added, "I guess we'll be studying together, Officer Williams."

"Alex," he said, offering his hand with a smile.

"Danielle Lefferts, pleased to meet you, Alex." Her grip on his hand was firm.

He checked his watch quickly, knowing she'd notice the wedding band on his finger.

"Would you have the time to join me for a quick cup of coffee," he asked, indicating a diner just a couple doors down the street, "I've really been worried about those two and I'm curious about their absence."

Danielle had arrived the night before and knew no one in town. She had no appointments and no plans, and fate had delivered a fellow student to her, a student who was also a married police officer. She felt no cause to be nervous with him. Danielle had never met or spoken with Serena Pappas. Her contacts with Gabriella Covington amounted to their initial meeting at the tournament and a total of about 45 minutes on the phone. She had some questions of her own, and this opportunity was too good to pass up. Offering a smile, she said, "Yes, I've got time for a cup of coffee if the streets of Columbia can spare you. The truth is, I'm curious about them too."

Alex Williams gave the street a quick once-over glance, nodded, and gestured for Danielle to accompany him. "Streets will be here when I get back….they always are."

Five minutes later they were sitting in a booth in the "Congressional Diner", mantling steaming cups of coffee. The diner was a comfortable neighborhood establishment, in a style reflecting its origins in the 50s. Externally, it could have been the big brother of an Airstream trailer; the brushed stainless steel skin and rounded lines hinting at a temporal kinship with a DC-3. Inside, chrome trim edging white tiles surrounded booths and stools upholstered in fire engine red Naugahyde. The diner catered mostly to locals and students. There was nothing trendy about it beyond its antiquity. That antiquity played a part in the diner's present. Recently it had come under new management, but only the personnel had changed. The Mom and Pop owners had retired and the establishment had gone on without them, seemingly on inertia, having long ago acquired a life of its own. The menu probably hadn't changed since before the Beatles. Just what congress the diner's name had ever referred to was as unclear now as it had been in Eisenhower's time.

The waitress, a perky Britney Spears looking girl, had greeted "Officer Alex" with a genuine smile, then giggled, snatched his cap off the table and plunked it on her head, while memorizing their orders. She'd quickly filled two mugs from what Danielle thought was a 55-gallon coffee urn, added cream and sugar as requested, and returned, collecting another table's dessert choices without breaking her stride. So far, waitressing was about the only thing she'd discovered she had a talent for.

"Since you mentioned the tournament in San Francisco, I'm guessing the teacher you've met is Gabriella Covington," Alex Williams began. "Did you compete against her?"

"In fact, yes," Danielle answered with a wry grin, "competed and lost…as gracefully as I could while falling on my butt with a numbed leg. I don't know where she learned to fight. She was unbeatable out there though. Really impressive."

"Did she use a nerve pinch?" Alex was instantly reminded of Serena's demonstration on his late partner, Marcus Lewis.

"Yes, and I'd never seen anything like it before. It's part of the reason I wrangled a transfer so I could study with her. She paralyzed my leg. Later she unparalyzed it just as easily. So, how long have you studied with her?"

"Well, I was one of the school's first students, but that was only back in June."

"This year? The school only opened in June? But that's only 4 ½ months ago."

"And they've been gone since mid-September, so it's really only been 3 ½ months of classes. Still, I've seen things there…I studied Hung Gar and Shotokan mostly, for 27 years. I've dabbled in a half-dozen other styles, and I've never met teachers who are as proficient or as unique, and yes, I guess, as deadly."

Danielle Lefferts digested his words, sipping coffee to cover her silence. "…as deadly." Staff Sergeant Hudson Lykos had died after a match with Gabriella, and the doctors had agreed that it was probable that her injury had resulted from the accident; just bad luck. The team had learned that critical nerves had been irreparably damaged when two vertebrae had been crushed. However, the vertebrae weren't adjacent to each other, and they had been crushed laterally, from the sides. The direction of the force was not obviously consistent with a blow from behind. Yet everyone had seen SSgt. Lykos fall onto Gabriella's knee, and it had happened so fast. There hadn't been enough doubts to justify an investigation. SSgt, Lykos had been buried with military honors after no relatives had claimed her body. That had struck the CWO as very sad. Danielle shook her head to free herself from the memories.

"Speaking of deadly," Alex prompted, "I understand another of Gabriella's opponents died in an accident during a match. Did you see the incident?" This was the first point of curiosity he had. It was as if he'd read her mind.

"Yes, I did. SSgt. Hudson Lykos was a teammate of mine," she answered, then saw the shock in his eyes and reassured him, "she and I weren't close. I'm on the US Armed Forces Tae Kwon Do Team. It's large and we have regular turnover. Plus, we come from all the different branches of the service. Also, elements of the team may be competing in different tournaments at any given time." Alex Williams had let out a low whistle when she'd mentioned the armed forces team. He filed the rest of her words away, noting her preference for short sentences.

"The match was in its second round. SSgt. Lykos seemed to have been taunting Gabriella. It's regarded as poor sportsmanship. Still, it's not uncommon to try to psych out an opponent. Anyway, Gabriella flipped completely over Hudson. Then she swept her legs and Hudson fell onto Gabriella's knee. Broke her neck in two places. To her credit, I think Gabriella sensed something was wrong. She didn't strike anymore blows. She waited for the ref to call 'break' and then she backed off. It all happened so fast."

He'd seen her speed and he'd seen Serena's. It didn't sound like anything sinister had happened, but then again, like any good cop, Alexander Williams regarded eyewitness testimony with a grain of salt. People missed things and often saw what they wanted to.

"So when did you go up against her?"

"The very next match. SSgt. Lykos' match was semifinals. I met her in the finals."

"So you were runner-up in the women's division?"

"Yes. Like I told her afterwards. I'd never felt as good after losing a match. I didn't get a scratch or a bruise in that fight. She paralyzed my leg early in the second round."

The coffee was growing cold, but neither of them wanted to end the conversation.

"I've never met Gabriella's partner, Serena. What's she like?"

"Serena Pappas," Alex mused. How to describe the tall woman? "Probably 5'10" or 5'11", about 135 lbs., straight black hair falling past her shoulders, ice blue eyes, maybe 24 to 27. Carries herself with a tangible aura of confidence and at the same time seems out of place…they both do sometimes, like they'd be more at home on some ancient battlefield. I've seen them sparring with swords…real swords, at combat speed, with no protection, and their eyes alone would terrify you. They seem to be an even match, skill-wise, but somehow I sense Serena's the more dangerous of the two. That's not to say Gabriella wouldn't be deadly either. Does that make any sense?"

The description gave Danielle a thrill of excitement. Gabriella had been more than impressive. She used techniques the CWO had never encountered. She had been peerless at the tournament, and she was perhaps 5'4" and maybe 110 lbs. Her partner sounded like an Amazon and Alex claimed she was her equal in skill. Danielle knew that she was capable of killing, and Alexander Williams probably was too. They'd both studied long enough and hard enough to be deadly fighters, and yet neither had the coldness of a killer. Now the school's most senior student had described weapons sparring that sounded more like actual combat, and he'd said that their eyes alone were terrifying. He didn't seem like the kind of guy who would be easily scared. Danielle knew what he referred to. She'd seen it in a few soldiers. She couldn't wait to meet Serena Pappas.

"Yes, I think it makes perfect sense," CWO Lefferts replied slowly, uncharacteristically eloquent, "I've seen the difference between troops going to war with fear in their eyes, and those few who've thrived and found something on the battlefield that completes them. It's neither the coldness and brutality of a sociopath, nor the haunted relief of a survivor. It's more like they've found and accepted their craft…become comfortable with it because it's the only place where they can truly be their best. Somehow it elevates them, makes them stand apart, and sometimes it even makes them heroes."

"Exactly," Officer Williams agreed softly. He was thinking of Marcus Lewis, eldest of six children, and an honors student from a neighborhood where being smart meant not getting caught. He could have been the first in his family with a college education; the University of South Carolina had offered a scholarship. Instead he'd taken a lawman's job and worked the street because it challenged him. He'd studied martial arts for the same reasons; physically challenging himself to excel. It was what had prompted Alex's late partner to compete whenever he could. Competition had driven him to train and extend himself; it had inspired him to be his best. And somewhere in the skies over Pittsburgh, with a handful of other civilians, it had driven him to become a hero. Alex Williams needed to change the subject. "So do you know where Serena and Gabriella have been all this time?"

"Gabriella said they were in Virginia. Teaching at a big Marine base," Danielle reported. "It was just a temporary job…four weeks. Somehow I can't imagine them teaching recruits. I guess it would be like pearls before swine. Besides, the Marines have their own instructors. I'm surprised they didn't tell anyone where they were going or when they'd be back."

Alex Williams managed not to give away his shock at this bit of news. The big Marine base in Virginia was almost certainly Quantico, very near where Serena had been involved in the hostage situation only days before the women's disappearance. Had she attracted the attention of the Corps and wound up with an invitation to teach? Somehow it didn't ring true for him. The incident at the bank had ended with the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team storming the building, yet none of the terrorists had died of gunshot wounds. He knew that the FBI had an academy in Quantico, on the grounds of the Marine base. He had to wonder.

"Danielle, I don't suppose you've heard about this, but on the same day you met Gabriella in San Francisco, her partner was taken hostage by terrorists at a bank in Quantico, Virginia, practically on the Marine base…."

"That's horrible," the CWO cut in with a gasp, "she barely mentioned it."

"She and the others were freed by the Hostage Rescue Team," Alex continued, "an elite FBI assault unit. No civilians were injured. What's strange to me is that none of the three terrorists died of gunshot wounds. One of them died of brain damage and suffocation…at least that's what the papers said."

"Sounds like he was strangled or beaten to death. Oh my god! You think she…."

"I don't know," he said quickly, "the newspaper reports were oddly sketchy; not nearly the amount of detail I'd have expected, you know, considering…terrorists, a biological weapon, the proximity of a military target, and only two days after the Pentagon and the World Trade Center."

"You're right, it should have been national news. I've heard nothing about it in the media. Gabriella only referred to it as a 'bank job'. I'd thought, botched robbery attempt. Come to think of it, she didn't really say who her students were or how they ended up teaching them. I just assumed, Marine base, so…Marines."

"That's what I would have thought too. But now," he paused a moment thinking, then continued, "now I'm thinking that they somehow wound up teaching the FBI team."

"Teaching the Hostage Rescue Team? Okay. You said they're an elite assault unit. I ran across a team of SEALs before a mission several years ago. I'm a warrant officer, an encryption technician," Danielle explained. "I'd been doing upgrades on their COM link. The SEALs are the Navy's elite unit, exceptional covert assaulters. It's not only how to kill. It's how to kill quickly and silently and then move on to the next. It takes a special mindset; a warrior's mindset. I wouldn't call their unarmed fighting methods martial arts like we know it. I know Gabriella is an outstanding fighter, but if the Hostage Rescue Team is like the SEALS, they wouldn't spend their time learning a traditional art."

Alexander Williams would have agreed, but he'd seen the soulmates' faces as they'd fought. He had no doubts that they could match the killing efficiency or cold necessity of an elite unit. Given his suspicions, they'd been doing just that for a very long time. He wasn't ready to share those thoughts with anyone yet. Instead he simply said, "They're warriors with the mindset and abilities to match. If they're teaching the HRT, then I have no doubts that those FBI guys will learn a thing or two."

Danielle looked into her empty coffee mug while digesting his words. She recalled that he'd claimed they were deadly, both armed and unarmed, and that their eyes were terrifying. With a sigh, she realized that she had a lot to think about, and a lot to learn. It was becoming way more interesting than she'd anticipated when she'd decided to leave San Diego to learn some new fighting techniques. A glance at the diner's wall clock showed her that a half-hour had passed. Alex seemed to sense a breaking point in their conversation as well. He dug a couple bills out of his pocket and laid them on the table.

"Angie, time to give me back my hat unless you want me to arrest you for theft," he jokingly called out to the waitress. The girl popped out of the kitchen, knocking over a stack of canned soups. She giggled and bounced across the floor to him, where she carefully set his hat on his head, smoothed the front of his uniform shirt, and pecked a kiss on his cheek.

"So yeah," she said, "come on back soon, 'kay, Officer Alex? Say hi to Karen for me, and please be safe, oooo-kay?"

"Will do, sweetheart," Alex told her with a smile as he got up. Danielle followed him out of the booth, smiling at the friendly waitress as she passed her. "Say hi to Lynn for me, and let me know when she and Allan are playing again," he added, as he and Danielle pushed their way out of the door and back onto the sidewalk.

"Well, I guess I'll be seeing you in class, Alex," Danielle said when they were alone. "I'm sure Gabriella or Serena will call the students when they're ready to resume teaching."

"I'll be looking forward to that and I'm sure that you'll find it very interesting…very inspiring," he replied. "It's been a real treat meeting you and being able to chat like this. I think this conversation's given us both some things to think about." He drew a business card and a pen from a shirt pocket, scribbled an extra number under the station number, and handed it to her. "I know you're new here, so if you need anything, don't hesitate to call the police," he grinned. "The second number is our home number. My wife's name is Karen…she studies at the school too. I'll let her know we've got a new fellow student who might call."

Danielle accepted the card gladly, happy to have gotten such a warm welcome from a fellow student and local police officer. Being career military, she'd moved around a lot and always had to develop new friendships and contacts. She felt that she was off to a good start in Columbia.

"Thanks, Alex. I'll be looking forward to seeing you again and meeting your wife," she said, before echoing the waitress' sentiments, "you be careful out here, okay?"

"Always," he told her. They shook hands and then went their separate ways, the CWO heading back to the Pappas house, Officer Williams to continue his foot patrol.

When Danielle Lefferts returned to the Pappas house she went straight to the kitchen. There she poured herself a tall glass of lemonade from the antique glass pitcher that had once graced a room in Manhattan's Pennsylvania Hotel. The incorrigible Janice had taken a liking to it and had jammed it into her battered suitcase when Melinda had turned her back for a moment to fold a skirt into her wardrobe. Dr. Covington had wanted a souvenir of their visit to New York City; of the ground shaking paper they'd presented at the American Museum of Natural History, and a night of dancing, the music provided by Benny Goodman's Big Band. The pitcher had taken up permanent residence in a succession of refrigerators and Dora had kept it filled right up to the end. Gabrielle had been the one she'd recounted the story to, and the cloned Amazon Bard had continued the tradition. She even used Dora's recipe.

With her glass of lemonade sweating in her hand, the CWO made her way to the study. The room held the computers where she could check her email. It was definitely an odd room. She'd stood stock still the first time she'd seen it, visually exploring the space before setting foot inside. It looked to her like the inside of a campaign tent from some long bygone era, maybe Greek or Roman. In light of Alex Williams' comment about the teachers reminding him of ancient warriors, she decided that it seemed to be in character.

Now she looked at it again. The drapery of parachute cloth hiding the walls, the bookcases filled with a bizarre mismatch of scholarly tomes, detective novels, and romance pulp. Two desks sat side by side, one a disaster, the other military regulation neat. She'd looked at the artifacts in the display case on her first visit to the room, and then examined the scrolls in their glass-fronted cases. Ancient and probably authentic. No doubt about it. A few of the characters reminded her of the Greek used in math, (pi, alpha, delta, and theta), though she didn't know even the modern version of the language.

And then there were the weapons all over the walls. It was a collection that she'd have expected to find in the bedroom of an adolescent heavy metal fan, or maybe a white supremacist with fantasies of a Viking ancestry. She had looked at the blades carefully. There were no modern stainless steel copies or any of the cheap stuff from mail order catalogs. Like the scrolls, she didn't doubt their authenticity. These weapons showed their age, many bearing dings, pitting, and oxidation. Some of the grips were ragged or missing. None had felt the caress of a sharpening stone in a long, long time.

Walking around the desks to take a seat at the neater of the two, Danielle glanced at the three hard-shell cases sitting against the wall. She'd seen them the first time she'd sat down here, but hadn't touched them out of respect for her hostess' privacy. They looked like the type of cases a serious musician stored a treasured instrument in; heavy hardware, piano hinges running the full length of the seams, sturdy clasps and handles, no locks, though. The longest was perhaps just shy of four feet long, but only about eight inches wide and five inches thick. The smallest was about sixteen inches square and maybe three inches thick. The last was about two and a half feet long by fourteen inches wide and the same five inches thick as the largest one. They teased her curiosity. She looked them over again and shook her head, then sat down and turned on the computer.

It was a modern Dell, a Pentium 4 machine that appeared to be loaded. The shared peripherals were shelved on a side table behind the desks and had been cabled to both processors the women used. It was an integrated system and had probably cost a bundle. Danielle Lefferts booted up the machine she'd chosen and waited to access the ISP.

After Windows XP had loaded, a background screen appeared. The image was of Julius Caesar with a target superimposed over his face. Several bullet holes appeared marking various facial features. Accompanying the graphic was a sound file of a female voice.

"Shouldn't you be looking for a shallow grave somewhere?" It asked derisively.

That had startled her the first time she'd used the computer. Somehow it had also seemed a bit immature. What could they possibly have against Caesar? The guy had been dead for a couple millennia. Nowadays, his name had been appropriated for a pizza chain and a salad. Anyway, it was pretty loud this time, and the CWO reached to turn down the volume on the speakers.

Finally Danielle logged onto the armed services network, chose her branch of service, and typed in her Naval Service ID number and password. She saw that she had three new emails. The first was from her coach, just asking if she'd arrived safely and met her new teachers. She typed a quick response to let her know she'd reached Columbia without incident but hadn't met Gabriella or Serena yet.

The second email was from her teammate, Lt. Janine Bradshaw. The woman had been knocked out by Gabriella in the quarterfinals and still held a grudge a month later. Her email was little more than a blatant attempt to undermine the CWO's opinion of the small blonde and dig for juicy gossip about the school. She deleted it with a groan after reading it. Bradshaw was a windbag in her opinion, and they'd never really seen eye to eye. Besides that, she was Corps, and there was a "subtle" rivalry between the Navy and the Marines. It would only have been worse if Janine had been Army.

The last email was from her father. She'd recognized the header and saved it for last. Navy Captain Arnold Lefferts had passed his 30 in 1991, during the Desert Shield operations. At 61, he held a rank equivalent to an Army Colonel, and the position of Deputy Director, ONI-2, (the Directorate of Intelligence), within the Office of Naval Intelligence. From his office in Suitland, Maryland, he supervised the analysis of information supplied by the collection activities of ONI-6.

Capt. Lefferts' career in Naval Intelligence had begun at the age of 21, after Annapolis and before the Viet Nam conflict had really heated up, back in the days of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He'd survived the seemingly endless restructurings of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and had dealt with the confusing redundancy and duplication of responsibilities that had proceeded the current organization. Trust the impetus of budget cuts to have streamlined the service in ways that operational necessities never could, he'd confided to her. After a forty-year career he had no plans to retire. He enjoyed his work and had developed a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the intelligence community.

He'd married at 22, raised a family of two sons with a daughter in between, and now lived comfortably with his wife of 39 years, in Montgomery County, Maryland. He kept in touch with his offspring by computer, for advances in technology had always been a central point of interest to him, as well as a tool of his trade. Somehow in his busy day, he managed to write the most entertaining letters.

Danielle had been looking forward to them since she'd enlisted, directly following her graduation from high school. Joining the Navy had never been a question for her; at 36, somewhere deep inside her lived the little girl who still wanted to be just like her dad; just like her first hero. Now, as a Chief Warrant Officer 3, she worked with the esoteric equipment that encrypted naval communications, rendering the words of SEAL teams and warships unintelligible to hostile listeners. That same equipment allowed sensitive information to safely reach her father's analysts, from a network of human and electronic sources all over the world. Though more mundane in nature, less severe measures had allowed his words to reach her wherever she'd gone in the service of her country. She clicked the icon to open his email.

The captain offered his congratulations on her new posting and praised her willingness to learn from the woman she'd lost the tournament to. If you decide to hold a grudge, never let it show until the moment you act to redress its cause, he offered, by way of tactical advice. The continuation was astonishingly timely. Sounds like this Gabriella Covington is worth learning from, based on what you've told me. In fact, a blurb bearing her name crossed my desk recently. Do you remember Col. Ames, the Commander of Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, (MCIA)? Well, as you may know, his group functions to interface the data base here with the needs at Quantico. To make a long story short, your teachers have been ensconced in the FBI compound there for the last month, training the HRT. Apparently, they came to the Feebs' attention when Serena Pappas foiled a terrorist situation prior to an HRT assault. Came out of nowhere and really kicked their butts, (though the details are classified). Reminds me of that incident in the Keys a few years back. Hope you enjoy your experiences with these new teachers of yours…they sound…interesting. Just thought you'd like to know Dad's keeping an eye open for his best girl (wink).

A blurb had crossed his desk? Yeah, I'll bet, the CWO thought with a grin, after being requested and researched and a few favors called in. Dad's probably had his ears open ever since I mentioned losing that match and wanting to study with the winner. There's not much that happens in the military that he can't find out about nowadays, and it doesn't hurt to have him looking over my shoulder. Well, it seems like Alex Williams' hunches were right on target…smart guy. Yes, this will certainly be interesting.

She typed a thank you note to her father, and included a quick retelling of her meeting with Alex that afternoon. She included the policeman's speculations that he'd confirmed. On rereading the text before sending it, she noticed that her anticipation and excitement were pretty obvious. She'd used a few comparatives, a superlative, and longer sentences than usual. She clicked "Send" without revising. Her dad would know anyway.

Having finished with the emails, Danielle shut down the computer. This time she was prepared for the sound file of the same woman's voice.

"I said I am sick of you…now get lost!"

The screen went blank. The drives clicked and whirred and then fell silent. The CWO took a long drink from her lemonade. She thought about another of her father's comments.

The incident in the Florida Keys had been a media circus. A terrorist plot had resulted in the detonation of Soviet MIRV warhead on a deserted island, with the threat of a second blast in Miami. The plot had been dramatically foiled by a small team of covert government operatives. Like Serena Pappas, they had come out of nowhere. To this day, their identities, and the identity of their agency, had never been revealed. Even her father had been unable to find out.

When she turned around in the swivel chair, the first things her eyes fell upon were the three hard shell cases.

Her dad's report had pretty much confirmed the suspicions that her teachers were some kind of warriors. Maybe they kept firearms in their home, as well as a collection of ancient blades. While on active duty, she'd gotten at least a passing introduction to most of the modern weapons carried by the troops. She found herself curious about what kind of arms her teachers would favor. Her best guess was a Colt M-4 carbine, a Heckler & Koch MP5, and a pair of sidearms, probably Glock or Baretta. That could account for the lengths of the three cases. With a guilty chuckle, she knelt and laid the largest case flat on the floor. She flipped up the three clasps that secured the lid and lifted it open.

What she found inside was a broadsword, polished and oiled and honed. It was a cut and thrust type, with a double-edged leaf shaped blade about two and a half feet long. The overall length was close to three feet. The crossguard and large mushroom shaped butt cap were made of brass, while the grip was wrapped in leather thong. Lifting it from the velvet lined interior, she was initially surprised at the weight. She'd expected something over 4 lbs., but with its distal taper and central spine, the weapon weighed closer to 2¼ lbs. Accompanying it was a set of daggers, and behind a hinged divider were the matching sheaths. The CWO set it back in its case and closed the lid.

She went to the next smaller case, doubting now that it held a submachine gun. Sure enough, inside were a pair of short swords of a design similar to one of the ancient swords she'd seen on the wall. The wide blades were twenty inches, or about three hands long, oxided black, double-edged with straight sides, and they came to wicked points. The guards were angled forward and formed of steel. Like the larger broadsword, the grips were wrapped in leather thongs. Each butt cap was conical and also came to a point. But the most unusual feature was certainly the blades. Distally tapered, each had a series of three narrow windows cut out of the central spine. The two largest windows, closest to the handgrip on each sword, were truncated triangles, their apexes cut short, while the one furthest from the grip was a complete triangle. About ? inch of steel had been left to bear the sharpened edges. Danielle lifted one and again she was amazed by the lightness. Probably about a pound and a half, she guessed. She carefully replaced the sword and closed the case.

Now she set out the third case, the square one that she'd originally thought would hold handguns. Without any preconceived expectations, she opened it. Inside she found a ring-shaped weapon that was wholly unfamiliar. About a foot in diameter, with a continuous sharpened edge at the rim, the weapon's central grip crossed the open space within the blade in a sinuous S-curve. The blade area was certainly steel, but the mirror polished metal displayed an odd bluish cast. Inside the sharpened ring was a backing ring that appeared to be forged from the same lightly textured bronze as the S-shaped handle. This was interesting. She got to her feet and laid the weapon on the desk so that she could look at it more closely under a lamp.

What she thought she saw was impossible, metallurgically speaking. The interface between the bronze and the steel wasn't sharply defined. In fact, it appeared to contain an area where the two metals met and blended. Though she wasn't 100% sure, Danielle believed that this was impossible. While bronze could be used to join ferrous metals, as when pieces of steel were brazed together, such a joint was always an overlay of bronze atop the steel. She knew of no alloy of iron, copper, and tin. Holding the ring by its central handle felt awkward too. She couldn't imagine how such a weapon was used. Another mystery. She returned it to its case and set it back on the floor.

Danielle drained her glass of lemonade and stood up to walk back out to the parlor. She thought she'd catch the evening news on the large screen TV set while waiting for her dinner to heat up. (Most likely several Spleen Cuisine entrees reluctantly dragged from the freezer). On her way to the door of the study, her eye fell on the ancient sword that resembled the pair in the case. An examination showed that it was definitely similar, though the workmanship was cruder and the blade wasn't ventilated. A small identification tag was affixed to the wall under the sword, stating the object's provenance, as it would have been done in a museum exhibit.

Somehow, in a room made up to look like a campaign tent from the Roman Empire, seeing a sign attributing a relic sword to the mythical Amazon Nation didn't surprise her in the least. The updated versions she'd seen in the hard shall case, and the warrior attitudes of her new teachers all began to make a sad kind of sense to Danielle Lefferts. Maybe it was a complex shared delusion that the two women engaged in. Maybe it had to do with being the descendants of two famous antiquities professors; a kind of obsessive compensatory gesture to offset some perceived intellectual inadequacy or something of that ilk. What a creative solution to the stress of an identity crises, she mused. Danielle wished that she'd studied psychology. It would be…interesting.

Later that evening, after consuming the two uninspired Salisbury Steaks, with slushed potatoes, brownish gray-vee, and carrot offal, CWO Lefferts relaxed on the parlor sofa. It was Friday night. She pointed the remote control at the large screen TV and surfed channels simply because she could. (The cable box provided 348 channels, half of them unwatchable infomercials or laughably amateur porn). She finally clicked onto the Oxygen Channel and almost dropped her glass from the shock of what she saw.

It was Gabriella, in a revealing quasi barbarian babe outfit, fighting off leather clad soldiers inside a decrepit building. They were swinging at her with swords and she was defending with a pair of sai. Then there was the tall brunette in the rust colored sack dress. Danielle reviewed Alex Williams' description of Serena Pappas. Yup. It was her alright, and she expected that meeting her tomorrow would only confirm it. Serena was holding up a pair of ring bladed weapons, and then the special effects started. After a moment there was a flash and she was holding the very weapon Danielle had discovered in the square case. A ridiculous fight scene ensued. The CWO watched with rapt attention. Finally, the credits rolled. Xena Warrior Princess…"get your free Xena and Hercules 64-page collector's catalog…". She shut off the TV. It was 10 pm. She wondered about her chances of getting a late flight back to San Diego and pretending this had never happened. Her teachers were crazy, living out roles from a TV show.

"Home at last," the cloned warrior happily sighed as she guided their black 1969 Z-28 Camaro* into the driveway. With a grin, she chirped the wide rear tires crossing the sidewalk to announce their arrival. After parking under the honeysuckle-covered trellis along the side of the house, she shut off the throaty rumble of the 302 engine.

(*Though some aficionados favor the 1970½ model Z-28, which featured the debut of the 350 cid V-8, purists swear that the 67-69 Z-28s were finer cars. During those years, the vehicle featured a 302 cid engine, which could be ordered with dual 4-barrel Holley racing carburetors, 11 to 1 compression pistons, a Super Stock camshaft, and factory headers. The 302 was rated at a conservative 290 hp, but on a dynamometer, it would record closer to 390 hp. There was simply something magical about the internal geometry, the combination of bore and stroke, that made for an awesome combination. What the later 350 engine had in its favor was a stronger set of main caps to hold the crankshaft. The car Xena had acquired was a black 1969 Z-28, which had been modified with a roll cage, aluminum Edelbrock tunnel-ram manifold, Mallory magneto, ATI torque converter with Turbohydramatic transmission, and Crower Pro-Stock roller cam, among other things. In a legal drag race, the car could reach 145 mph in something just below 10 seconds, and do it from a standing start, within a quarter mile. It got 4 mpg around town, but the cloned warrior didn't really drive it very much or very far.) ~Editor

"Looks like your friend has settled in," she told the cloned bard, her powers of observation having revealed the open windows while staring around the hood scoop as they'd driven up. Xena scanned the empty house next door and gave their own house a more thorough examination from the driveway. "Hope she got to air out the school too."

"Danielle mentioned having done that yesterday, Xena," Gabrielle answered as she popped open her door, "and she ran into Alex on the street. Seems he was worried about us." She reached into the back seat for her bags.

"I guess I should have told them somethin'," Xena muttered guiltily, "I'm just not used to bein' responsible to people like that. We always used to travel and the folks who knew us didn't worry if we went off for a few weeks."

"Well, we just disappeared for a month, so I guess we're staying in character," the blonde joked, shouldering her bags.

She watched Xena smile in agreement before hauling out her duffel bag and the bucket of Kentucky fried chicken they'd picked up. The warrior set the bag with the side orders on top of the bucket and walked towards the kitchen door doing a balancing act with their dinner. "Can ya get the door?"

Before Gabrielle could retrieve her key, the door swung open and Danielle Lefferts stepped out. She tried to keep her eyes from bugging out. Having seen that TV show a couple nights before, now all she could think of when she saw her two hostesses were those characters. Gabriella was a dead ringer for the Gabrielle on TV. Serena looked like a clone of Xena in modern dress. It hadn't been an illusion. She gulped…they were crazy and living out their uber roles. She covered her shock by displaying a wide smile.

"Hiya, Danielle," Gabrielle greeted. "This is Serena Pappas," she continued, indicating her partner with a gesture of her eyebrows. She completed the informal introduction, saying, "Serena, meet Danielle Lefferts."

"Glad to finally meet you, Serena," the CWO said, "and it's good to see you again, Gabriella." She took in the situation and picked the bag of fries and rolls off the top of the bucket Xena was carrying, sneaking a peek inside.

Xena gave the stranger a quick appraisal; she seemed nervous but was hiding it respectably. Trying not to look unfriendly, she said, "pleased to meet ya, Danielle, hope ya like fried chicken."

"Extra crispy?" The shorthaired brunette asked hopefully. "I've gotten sick to death of those Mean Cuisine entrees."

"You've been eatin' those?" Both soulmates simultaneously asked in horror.

"Well yeah," Danielle responded, looking nervously back and forth between the two women, "they looked okay to me, at least as okay as they can get. I'll be glad to replace them if you want, once I find out where to shop around here."

The soulmates looked at each other and burst out laughing.

"What?" The CWO asked, unnerved by their behavior. After all, they were insane.

"Those Scream Cuisine things have been in there since before Janice passed away. Dora used to eat them when she thought no one was looking, hoping to regain her girlish figure, I guess. They've been around well over a year now, though it probably hasn't hurt them much," Gabrielle confessed with a look of distaste.

"Nothing short of naphtha incendiaries could hurt them," Xena quipped.

It was twilight, and from the street came the sound of a car horn honking, drawing their attention. The three women looked down the driveway. A light blue 4-door sedan had stopped in the pool of warm light from a street lamp, the beam's glow revealing the city dust hazing the finish. The driver's side window rolled down, and from inside a dark hand in a long sleeved shirt reached out to wave a greeting. The driver leaned his head out the window, smiling with relief.

"Good to see you back home safely, ladies," Alexander Williams called, "I've been worried about you."

"Alex," Gabrielle answered, waving back, "sorry to leave like that. We'll explain later." She grimaced at the words, knowing how much she'd hated hearing them herself. "Are you ready to resume classes on Tuesday night?"

"More than ready, Gabriella. We're all looking forward to it. I ran into Danielle while I was on patrol Friday and she let me know you were coming back. I mentioned it to the other students and they can't wait. We'll see you Tuesday…give my regards to the Colonel."

They exchanged another round of waves and then he drove off down the street. The women went into the kitchen to have their fried chicken dinner with Colonel Sanders.

"I hope you don't mind my mentioning to him that you were coming back today," Danielle said while gnawing on a chicken tibia, "he seemed so relieved to hear about you. Didn't know he be stalking you though; he seemed like a nice enough guy."

"He is, Danielle," Gabrielle said seriously, "but he lost his patrol partner, on September 11, and I guess he was really unsettled about having us disappear like that. We really should have said something to all of the students."

To Danielle's quizzical glance, Xena added, "Officer Marcus Lewis was his partner and another of our students. He was on the plane that went down outside Pittsburgh. In fact, he was on his way to the same tournament where you met Gabriella."

"I only went there to compete in his memory," Gabrielle said softly, "took the trophy to his mother the day after I got back and we had a good cry over it all. I wanted her to have it. I told her that he'd made outstanding progress and I thought he'd had a good chance of winning it himself if fate hadn't struck him down. Such a sweet lady…."

"So, what can you tell me, Special Agent Phillips?"

"Well, sir, according to the OTU, the training program was extraordinary. The HRT operators are very excited by what they saw and learned. They've been spending hours in voluntary practice, trying to master the techniques those two demonstrated."

"What about additional background?"

"As reported before, we have personal histories back to late June of 2000, but no details prior to that. At that time, they appeared in Columbia, SC. Their contact was a Dr. Janice Covington, now deceased. We've found that the doctor and her associate, a Dr. Melinda Pappas, did classified work for the United States during the Second World War. We also know that Dr. Covington had contacts in organized crime. When we investigated Serena Pappas, following the "incident" in Quantico, we assumed that she was a deep-cover operative affiliated with an unidentified federal agency. At present, it's still our best guess, but we do have an alternate scenario. That she and her partner, Gabriella Covington, are living under assumed identities provided by criminal elements."

"Do you have any solid projections of the relative likelihood of those scenarios, Special Agent DeMarco?"

"Not at present, sir, no."

"I see. Well, I can't authorize a high priority for this matter, since all of these subjects' known actions have been of benefit to this country and fall within the law. Further, if your initial scenario is confirmed, then our attention could jeopardize their operations. Our official policy is to avoid interdepartmental conflict if possible. Keep me informed if anything turns up. I think that's all then, gentlemen."

"Yes, sir."

"Yes, Deputy Director."

When the agents had left, the Deputy Director called in an older agent for his opinion. The man moved well though his brown hair was shot with gray and his face bore over six decades of wrinkles. The slight limp from an old bullet wound was barely noticeable unless he was tired. He wore an impeccable dark business suit like the hundreds of other government agents within the building. A visitor's badge identified him as a Justice Department employee.

"Well, Albert, you heard it. What do you think?"

"Aside from Phillips and DeMarco being mediocre and uninspired? Those women are definitely living under assumed identities. A call late last June to a Mr. Benito Fiori was traced back to Dr. Janice Covington. Fiori, remember him? The one that got away? He's retired now, living in Miami. Back in the 40s, 50s, and early 60s, "Benny Flowers" ran the Guissipi-Tito Family in New York and Catania. His son, Giovanni, runs things out of Atlanta now. Well, just five minutes after getting the call from Covington, Benny called his son. One of the family's rackets is forged documents; IDs, passports, social security cards, even phony stock and bond certificates, or so Treasury claims. First rate work too, according to the Secret Service. I think Covington got her old pal to legitimize her associates' documentation. Full package. Still doesn't tell us who they really are or what they're doing. After that report from the OTU, I think it's worth finding out."

"Any suspicions, Agent Gibson?"

"Deputy Director, do you remember the incident in the Florida Keys three years ago?"

"Of course. That incident has eaten at me ever since. I went to the Director…the Director of the FBI, damn it, and I asked him who had been assigned. Do you know what he told me? He said, 'I don't know, I don't want to know, and neither do you. I asked, and I was told to put it out of my mind or else.' The Old Man was actually scared."

"Exactly. This is a group that no one, not even the President, is willing to acknowledge. Their operatives are the best and they enjoy unlimited resources. They have complete deniability. They are invisible. I think their work's been attributed to every agency in existence. Now, just maybe, this incident at the Quantico bank has revealed a pair of their operatives. We should find out what we can. I don't think the window of opportunity will stay open for long."

"I can't leave this to any of my agents, Al. Will you look into it?"

"Deputy Director, I thought you'd never ask."

On his way out of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, Albert Gibson detached the Justice Dept. ID badge from his suit jacket and stashed it in a pocket. It was one of many he'd carried over the course of his career. He walked the two blocks to 10th St., between E St. and F, without a trace of a limp, and entered the Lincoln House Restaurant. The unpretentious sit-down was across the street from Ford's Theater, and just a few doors south of the house where the beloved President had died. Al didn't stop at the cashier's counter but moved quickly to the stairway leading to the downstairs dining area. After a quick search he found the booth near the back that held his two teammates. He slipped off his jacket and took a seat.

"Did you order me the roast chicken?" He asked the slender middle-eastern man seated next to him.

"I was going to, but Harry ordered you a salad instead," Faisil told him, suppressing a smile.

"You're an asshole," Albert half-heartedly accused the solidly built agent across the booth, "you know how much I love the chicken here, and Spencer's picking up the tab."

"A guy your age shouldn't be eating such greasy stuff, Gib" Harry Tasker told him with his Euro accent and a straight face. "The salad's good. I told them to hold the dressing."

"My age, shit," Al spat in indignation. "I'm going to the can."

He got back to his feet, thoroughly pissed off with his teammates, and headed for the men's restroom. On the way, he passed a waitress with three plates of roast chicken on her tray. Lucky bastards, he thought, wishing the office workers receiving the food a case of salmonella with their lunch.

In the men's room, Albert Gibson took a paper toilet seat protector from a dispenser in a stall and placed it over his head, settling it around his neck to protect his shirt. He then washed the makeup off his face, peeled away the thin layer of latex that had created the wrinkles, and wet combed the dry pigment out of his hair. The hot air hand dryer dried his scalp afterwards. In less than five minutes he shed over two decades.

"Salad, no dressing," he muttered in disgust as he shoved his way through the door and back into the dining area. He walked with purpose towards the booth. The same waitress he'd passed on his way to the men's room was just leaving with an empty tray. She gave him a smile that he returned out of habit. In the booth, Faisil and Harry were eating with gusto. A plate of roast chicken was waiting for him. "Assholes," he muttered as he sat down.

Later, after finishing the food, the three agents discussed Albert's morning meeting.

"Well, we got the approval," Al told them, laying the Justice Dept. ID badge on the table, "and the DepD still thinks I'm working for him. Having his blessing will keep the FBI off our backs. I left him with the same suspicions he's always had, so nothing's really changed."

"Very good," Harry told him, "we've met with the FBI, Justice, the DEA, the Secret Service, CIA, ONI, and the BATF. They each think they've got someone on the case while their rivals don't, so they won't be talking to each other either." He couldn't suppress a smile and his teammates shared it. Divide and conquer, he thought, as he added the other ID badges to the pile on the table. For a moment he looked worried as he eyed them. "How are we going to keep these IDs straight?"

"Simple is best," Al told him happily, "I've been working alphabetically. I met with the BATF using the CIA ID. When I went to the CIA, I used the DEA ID. So on and so on."

"Good thinking," Harry praised, rolling his eyes.

"So what do you think about our targets?" Faisil asked. He looked back and forth between the two more senior agents.

"Your show, Harry," Al deferred grumpily, sweeping the pile of badges into an attaché case, "I just run the van."

"We're the only ones who know for sure who they don't work for. The rest think they're someone else's agents and an outside presence could blow their cover, so they'll stay away. The few who don't believe that think we're looking into them on their behalf. I'd say that gives up free rein to follow our own program."

"So we're going to Columbia?"

"Helen and I are taking Dana and 'moving' into their neighborhood. You and Faisil are in the van doing surveillance and support." Harry Tasker stood up and slipped on his jacket, giving his teammates a smile. "Don't forget the receipt or Spencer won't approve the expense."

"Shit," Al griped, as Faisil sighed in resignation, "eighteen years and I'm still in the van."

"Sorry," Harry apologized softly as he left.

Being an early riser, Xena was already awake when the moving van had arrived at 7:30 am. She was seated in the kitchen, soaking up the last of an egg yolk with her buttered toast and listening to the weather report on the radio. Blatant hubris, she thought derisively, wondering what would possess people to believe the predictions, arrogantly presented as certainties, for four or five days ahead. It would serve them right to be struck down by a thunderbolt. She had noticed that her students seemed to regard the predictions with a cynical attitude, especially when they proved false. She herself had seldom tried to guess the weather more than a day or two ahead, and only then in the most general terms, based on past experience of the locality and the current signs…stuff that any farmer or sailor would have known. Xena had always secretly seen the whims of the weather as the most direct proof for the meddling of gods that she hadn't met. In the modern world, weather forecasting was obviously a profitable con game combined with soothsaying…in other words, science.

When the big truck pulled up, rattling the windows and sending the birds into flight, Danielle had been in the bathtub and Gabrielle had still been fast asleep. The cloned warrior had taken her glass of Coke and stepped out of the kitchen door to assess the situation. She also spared a quick glance around the yard for trespassers. She still didn't really know her neighbors.

The moving van had stopped in front of the empty house next door, and a crew of men in coveralls was climbing out. Slaves most likely, the warrior guessed. As she watched, they dragged a ramp out from under the back doors of the trailer and opened another pair of doors on the side. The interior of the truck was stacked to the roof with boxes and furniture. Xena eyed it with interest. Obviously someone's had a good run of plundering, she thought as she registered movement above her, what a lot of loot.

Cloned Xena turned to look back at her house and saw Danielle Lefferts leaning out of the bathroom window wearing a bathrobe, her hair still wet and spiky. She was staring at the moving van with rapidly diminishing interest. She looked down, saw Xena, and waved.

"Looks like you're finally getting next door neighbors," she called out, announcing the obvious.

"That or well-organized squatters," Xena yelled back, remembering her conversation with Janice's lawyer. Danielle seemed to think the comment funny, for she chortled as she withdrew back inside through the window.

A discordant series of crashes brought Xena's attention back to the truck. She narrowed her eyes in a critical glare. The slave gang was tossing several wheeled dollies and a steel hand truck onto the pavement, as if avenging their own early start by trying to wake the rest of the neighborhood. Their purposeful lack of consideration and their sullen bearing confirmed what she'd suspected earlier. They were definitely slaves; probably foreigners captured in the last war, since she'd learned that slavery among Americans had been abolished over a hundred years ago. Sure enough, she overheard them conversing, speaking in Russian. Xena slugged down the rest of her Coke and headed back inside, shaking her head. If she'd owned them in her old warlord days, their behavior would have earned them a few lashes.

Gabrielle had slept through the arrival of the moving van. She'd always had difficulty waking up*, and the soulmates had jokingly commented on that characteristic and her appetite as being the only truthful elements of the TV show. Both traits had become more pronounced in the 21st century, the results of soft mattresses and abundant victuals.

(*Gabrielle had in fact been a narcoleptic child. She'd actually fallen asleep while swimming, chopping vegetables, and even once while riding her pony, only awakening hours later, and only then because of a downpour. She'd been soaked to the skin, alone, lost, hungry, and certain that she'd be captured by slavers. The pony had taken the liberty of walking in circles after spending a couple candlemarks foraging on the outskirts of Potidaea. During all that time they had strayed scarcely a league. When the rain had begun, the pony had turned around and started slowly making its way home. All during her childhood, only the presence of a meal in front of her could reliably stave off her "symptoms". The narcolepsy had abated sometime in her early teens, probably due to hormonal changes in her system, though her parents had insisted that it was the work of the gods. As if in proof of this, Hypnos and Morpheus had continued to bless her with vivid dreams and an affinity for sleep. Initially, Xena had found it irritating. She'd always been fine on five to six hours of sleep, while Gabrielle had required nearly eight to function.) ~Editor

At about 9:30, Gabrielle had stretched, yawned, and slipped out of bed to begin her morning ablutions. It wasn't long before she became aware of the moving van, having spotted it from the bathroom window. In fact, she was the first to see the new neighbors. The Tasker family had pulled up in front of the truck in their vehicles at around 10:15 am; Dana in her mother's aging red Honda, Helen in a newer white Chrysler, and Harry on a large motorcycle. Sitting at the kitchen table, halfway through her breakfast, Gabrielle had looked up at the sound of the bike and spewed a mouthful of French Toast across her plate. Her eyes were as large as drachmas.

"S'reeeeeena!" Followed by a crash.

The cloned warrior had charged into the kitchen pell mell, with Danielle Lefferts on her heels. The cloned bard was petrified in shock, her overturned chair lying on the floor behind her. She was standing with an arm extended, pointing out the window as if she'd seen a harpy. Xena followed her outstretched finger. There at the curb was the large two-wheeled screamer the soulmates had encountered in the drainage canal in City of Industry, California, so shortly after escaping from the junkyard. They'd been forced to dive out of its way. Just dismounting from it was the same muscular leather clad man that they'd momentarily mistaken for Ares. He pulled the helmet off his head and set it on the handlebars.

Xena was out the kitchen door in a flash. She cleared the parked Camaro, vaulted the hedge at the property line, and charged towards him across the lawn.

Harry noticed rapid movement from the neighboring house and watched her come. She moves pretty fast, he thought, good conditioning. Helen and Dana noticed the direction of his gaze and turned to watch her too. Are they having an emergency next door, or is this the first of some obsessed welcoming committee, Helen wondered, perhaps southern hospitality run amok? She's looks pissed off…probably doesn't like Dad's bike, Dana thought, well, tough shit.

"I've seen you before," Xena accused, as she skidded to a halt in front of the family, "and ya nearly ran me and my partner down on that thing." She jabbed a finger towards the Harley. "Where in Tartarus did ya learn to drive anyway, and when did ya move here from California?"

"Good morning. No you haven't, no I didn't, in Austria, and I've never lived there," Harry said with distaste. He didn't care for California. "Anything else?"

That brought her tirade to a stop. He'd answered her the way she usually answered multiple queries and she had to think of her next question. To cover the lapse, she said, "Good morning. Your slaves have been kinda noisy."

"Sorry," Harry muttered, while Helen rolled her eyes and Dana giggled. Slaves? They're actually Russian immigrants. He asked, "Someone who looked like me tried to run you down in California?"

Xena gritted her teeth before responding. He was humoring her. She'd lost the initiative and now she was the one answering questions. She said, "Yeah, outside City of Industry last year. Ya sure ya weren't there? Looked just like you, chasing a kid and a truck down a drainage canal."

"Really? Never been there. Anyone get hurt?" She sounded like a nut job, but he'd been in similar situations himself so he suspended his reflexive disbelief. Besides, City of Industry was basically part of crazy Los Angeles…too much sun, drugs, glamour, and money. Even so, a chase down a drainage canal sounded like something out of a movie, or a covert op. Helen and Dana exchanged grins. Xena raked them with her eyes.

"Someone must have. There was an explosion…and I am not crazy!"

"I know how things get," Harry sympathized. "Explosions happen. It's part of the job." The last comment was an unsubtle bit of probing on his part.

"Ya got that right. So that really wasn't you, huh? Ya gotta twin brother or somethin'?"

"I'm an only child," he told her, then introduced himself, "I'm Harry Tasker."

"Dad just got the bike about a month ago," Dana interjected seriously, before adding, "and everyone looks like him."

Cloned Xena stared at her in disbelief.

"With the leathers and the helmet," the teen said, almost adding, duh.

"This is my daughter, Dana," Harry said, "and my wife, Helen."

"Uh, I'm Serena," she responded automatically, "pleased to meet you."

"Maybe we can chat more later after we get settled in," Helen offered, "and Harry'll talk to the slaves about the noise." To her credit, she said it with a straight face. Dana had to look away though.

"Okay, thanks," Xena said as the couple began looking towards the activity in front of their house where voices were rising. The warrior followed their gaze. The slaves were struggling to shove a refrigerator through the front door. The dolly slipped and the load shifted unexpectedly, banging against the doorframe. One of the men howled and cursed, and then went jumping around the lawn holding a hand against his chest.

Harry watched the incident and shook his head. He muttered, "Bye for now," and walked briskly over towards the injured mover.

"Sorry about your slave," Xena said sympathetically to a concerned looking Helen, as she turned back towards her house.

Back inside the kitchen, she met Gabrielle. The blonde was still standing and staring out the window at the slaves and the truck. The family had gone inside.

"Wasn't him," she told her soulmate. "Seems he just got the bike last month and he's never been to California. His daughter claims everyone looks like him when they dress up to ride." The cloned warrior chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment, thinking. The man who'd nearly run them down in California hadn't been wearing a helmet, and Harry's bike did look newer. "Somethin's funny about them though," she finally said slowly, "and he claimed that explosions are just part of his job."

The clones had resumed their life in Columbia. They'd seen their neighbors from time to time, and they appeared normal to the naked eye. Harry went off to work in the mornings, selling business computer systems, he'd said. Helen went off to work around noon, a part-time legal secretary, she'd claimed. Dana hung out with an increasing circle of neighborhood friends in the afternoon, a high school senior aka political prisoner, she'd complained. Beyond a few words and quick greetings, the family and the clones hadn't really interacted. The insulation of suburban living ensured their separation.

For the time being, Danielle Lefferts was still living in a guestroom at the Pappas house. She had adapted to the clones' routine, sometimes joining Gabrielle on her shopping trips, sometimes accompanying Xena to watch the airplanes at the nearby Columbia Owens Municipal Airport. In both instances she noticed the strange mixture of worldliness and naivete that Alex had mentioned. The two did seem out of place somehow. It showed up mostly in little details, like Gabrielle muttering about how she missed the fun of haggling over prices with the "cutpurse peddlers" to save a "drachma or an obol". Once, while in a testy mood, she'd confronted a checkout girl and offered her a lump sum for the contents of her cart. The girl had looked at her strangely. The blonde had finally shrugged and started placing items on the counter for scanning, shaking her head and muttering about how "all the fun was gone these days and shopping had become a chore." When the total was rung up it was a few dollars more than Gabrielle's offer. Exactly 10% more. Danielle realized that the small blonde had been keeping a running tally of her purchases.

The same displacement had showed up in Xena's comparisons of the planes' takeoff speed with that of a "warhorse at a full gallop flanking the lines". The tall woman's blue eyes would darken and grow misty, as if she were reliving memories of times and places long ago; of things seen and done that brought both wistful recollections and regrets. The moments didn't last for long, and at those times, Danielle held her silence, filing away her glimpsed impressions of the ghosts of her teacher's past. Xena would often look at her after such lapses, sometimes wearing an almost guilty grin, while at other times offering comments. "A warhorse might travel 25 mph with rider and gear over a short stretch. I remember a racehorse though, an Arabian, that could pass 7 lengths a heartbeat, almost 40 mph. Those planes are hittin' half again to twice that before takeoff."

At the school, two weeks of classes had passed, and the students had been overjoyed when their teachers reappeared. Danielle Lefferts had proven to be a quick learner and was very receptive to what the clones presented. Her expertise in Tae Kwon Do and her serious demeanor won her the respect of the other students. She'd often been paired off with Owen Chambers, the Columbia firefighter, during the two-person exercises. The hulking fireman towered over the CWO, but she held her own in sparring because of her precise applications of technique. The soulmates used their students' physical disparity to force the two to compensate and adapt to dissimilar opponents, and to illustrate a central truth about combat. Never judge an enemy solely by their appearance. Danielle was used to this and accepted the challenge without compliant. She also spent time socializing with Owen, and Alex and Karen Williams, after classes.

At first, Danielle had been relatively quiet around the house. The soulmates had begun to perceive her as being a bit of a stick in the mud. She read a lot, watched TV, spent hours practicing in the backyard, and studied Navy manuals to keep up with her field of encryption. It came as something of a surprise when she insisted on decorating the house and hosting a Halloween party for the other students. She bought and carved pumpkins, (from which Xena toasted seeds and Gabrielle eventually made pies), hung strings of Jack-O-Lantern lights, put up paper cut outs of black cats, witches, and ghosts, and draped fake spider webs over the hedges bordering the yard. The CWO was obviously enjoying herself.

The year before their tour guide to the 21st century, Dr. Janice Covington, had passed away before really explaining all about Halloween. Now neither Xena nor Gabrielle had more than a passing acquaintance with the holiday*, so this year because of Danielle, they got caught up in the novelty of it all.

(*On their first Halloween the year before, Xena had drenched trick-or-treaters with buckets of water when they'd come to the door. She hadn't really understood why so many oddly dressed children and appeared on her doorstep, begging. It reminded her uncomfortably of the aftermath of a battle, when the pitiful young survivors of some warlord's raid would cry to any passing stranger for food. At first she'd been annoyed, but soon she'd felt guilty. That was when she'd started waiting for them in the hallway window above the front door. The cloned warrior hated feeling guilty about her past life in this life. She'd drafted a reluctant Gabrielle to refill the buckets for her. Gabrielle had read a bit about Halloween the next day and had asked Xena if they wouldn't have been better off dispensing candy as was the custom. Xena had adamantly refused, certain that it would only encourage the beggars to stop by every night.) ~Editor

Entertaining as the celebration was, the background of All Hallow's Eve, or Samhain, was rather disturbing. This year Gabrielle's more comprehensive research had revealed that it was a night when ghosts freely walked the mortal world. Conceptually, the idea of the spirits of the dead populating the earth was somewhat upsetting. Both soulmates had dealt with shades, and like most people of the classical era, took them seriously. The clones had made a lot of enemies in their original lives and they were all dead now. There were a lot of potential grudges and debts. That was the bad news. The good news was that they were all dead now and therefore insubstantial. Troublesome as a haunting might become, ghosts were preferable to living enemies out for blood. Conversely, neither Hades, Persephone, nor any other god of the underworld they'd ever heard of would have considered allowing the dead a wholesale vacation from their realms. If anything, it reeked of the necromancy of Alti.

Danielle had reassured the clones that no one she'd ever known had actually seen a ghost. The CWO explained that celebrating Halloween was a family tradition that she and her brothers had inherited from their parents. The Halloween parties of their childhood had been a reliable way to promote friendships while the family had been traveling from one of her father's postings to another. The children in particular had constantly felt uprooted and helping them make new friends was a parental strategy. Their parents, of course, met the parents of the neighborhood kids that attended the parties. Captain Lefferts and his wife still got Christmas cards from friends they'd first met at their Halloween parties over three decades before. It gave Xena an idea, and so she'd gone along with the CWO's plan.

It was Monday, two days before Halloween. Xena and Gabrielle had been sparring in the back yard with their swords, while nearby Danielle Lefferts practiced the moves she'd learned in the last class. About 3:30 in the afternoon, out of the corner of her eye, the cloned warrior saw the red Honda pull up next door. With a subtle shift of her head, she signaled to Gabrielle, and the two moved their combat into the side yard, closer to the hedge. Their battle cries and the ringing of blades clashing drew attention as they "hammed it up" for their audience. It wasn't long before Dana and her three friends were watching them from across the Tasker's front yard.

Eventually the two young couples approached the fighters, watching them closely from across the hedge. They were talking among themselves.

"So yeah, they're my neighbors."

"Damn, Dana, I thought my parents got violent. Wow. Look at them go."

"Dude, they're the stars of that Xena Warrior Princess show. I recognize them."

"KeWl! U NeVeR sEd U hAd TV sTaRs LiViNg nExT dOoR, DaNa."

"Not like I know what they do for a living. Anyway, they were living here before us. So how come none of you knew about them?"

"Hey, I always thought it was some old lady who lived here. I remember seeing her when I was a kid."

"And so, what? You never noticed she wasn't here anymore?"

"I don't walk by here now that I have a car. I've driven past here a few times but I've never seen those two."

"Actually, I've never seen them doing anything like this before. They're really fast."

"ThIs rOx! CoUlD U lIkE, cAlL uS nExT tImE tHeY'rE oUt HeRe, DaNa? U nO, sO wE cAn HaNg oUt aNd wAtCh tHeM?"

"Yeah, I'd be over here in a second to see this. They're really good. I guess they don't actually hack each other up and stuff, huh?"

"Well like, duh! They've both got all their hands and feet." Dana rolled her eyes.

After overhearing their comments for a while, Xena and Gabrielle started talking to them while continuing their sparring, edging over until they were only a few feet away.

"Hey. Are ya enjoyin' the show?"

"Hi…and yeah, this is great. We've never seen anything like it."

Thank the gods that you haven't, the warrior thought grimly. At your age in my time, half of you would've already been enslaved or dead, and the other half woulda been fighters. After a moment, she decided that statement was a little extreme…someone had to do the farming and herding and practice trades. Instead she said, "Thanks. It's how us old folks get our exercise."

"You're not like, old…not like our parents anyway," Dana corrected herself. "Where'd you learn to fight with swords like that?"

"Uh, from video games mostly?" Gabrielle lied uncertainly. Xena gave her a sharp look. The bard added, "We picked up a few tips in Gallia and Germania too," then winced.

"ThIs iS sO kEwL. So LiKe, wErE U 2 iN tHaT TV sHoW aBoUt XeNa?"

Xena and Gabrielle slowed down to a stop and joined the group of teens, standing close by on their own side of the hedge. Xena answered with a denial.

"Nope, that wasn't us. I've seen it…I thought the fight scenes were kinda lame."

"Actually it's just that it's a TV show. What we do is real fighting, as it was done a couple thousand years ago. It's all historically accurate," the blonde elaborated.

"Wow. You two look just like the actresses. Didn't anyone ever tell you that before?"

The cloned warrior and the cloned bard exchanged looks. Both shook their heads.

"Nawww," Xena deadpanned, "she doesn't look a bit like that Warrior Princess on TV."

The clones talked with the teens for a while and finally told them that they were having a Halloween party and they were invited to come over if they had time…maybe after they got done begging. Dana gave them a funny look.

"Ya know, after ya get done dressin' up an' shakin' down the neighbors for candy an stuff," Xena clarified.

"Oh," Dana said dismissively, "that's for kids. Actually we mostly just hang out, but a party sounds cool for a change." She looked at her friends and they nodded in agreement. "What time's good?"

"After dark, I guess," Gabrielle told them, "actually Danielle's arranging everything."

They looked into the backyard where the CWO was still practicing. She'd suggested to the soulmates that they should handle the teens, since she might have turned them off by being "old". She was doing the move that let her kick the enemy she was facing twice, once with each foot as she did a back flip. It was a move that Callisto had used. From a distance Danielle didn't seem old at all.

None of them had noticed the white van parked on the street just down the block.

The boppy theme from the old TV show, "The Munsters", pounded from the four Klipschhorn speakers in the crowded parlor of the Pappas house. It was 9:00 pm and the Halloween party was in full swing. Dana and her friends had arrived shortly after dark. After a quick tour of the house with Gabrielle, Xena had drafted them for an hour of "sentry duty". She'd given them Super-Soaker water guns and stationed them in the upstairs hallway window. Since then, they'd gleefully drenched any costumed kids who approached the house, reveling in the mayhem and highly impressed with their hostesses' irreverent attitude.

"Your neighbors are awesome, Dana."

"Yeah, my parents would kill me if I did this at home."

"I can't wait to have my own place. I'd do this everyday. Did you see that last bunch?"

"I know, this is hysterical!"

"OMG, lookit, Dana…it's your folks! And they're in costume!"

"Damn, you're right! Okay guys, soak 'em on the count of three. One, two, three, GO!"

Downstairs, Gabrielle, (dressed in her ninja costume), heard a commotion outside and answered the door. She was confronted by her hulking next-door neighbor, dressed in his leather motorcycle jacket, but he had some serious battle wounds and a mechanical eye that glowed red. Both he and Helen, (who had worn a Flamenco dancer's outfit, complete with a red rose in her gritted teeth), were partially soaked. They didn't look too pleased with the welcome. Uh oh, the bard thought. The kids upstairs really outdid themselves this time.

"Hi folks, welcome to the party," she said, "what are you supposed to be, Harry?"

"I'm a Terminator," he recited, exaggerating his accent. "Cyberdyne Systems model-101."

"I see," Gabrielle said uncertainly. The movies had been before her time. "Why don't you two come with me and have a glass of cider? I'll introduce you to everyone and show you around." She noticed that Harry was clutching a lever-action sawed off shotgun. She failed to notice the tiny transceiver in his ear.

Gabrielle made the introductions in the parlor. Harry and Helen Tasker, holding glasses of mulled cider, were greeted by the students of the Columbia School of Martial Science and several significant others de jour. Owen Chambers, (costumed as a musketeer), Ronnie Chu, (dressed as Albert Einstein), and Debbie Ryan, (in a ballerina's costume), had brought dates. The two men's companions were already tipsy and chattering together, uncertain about what to think of their hostesses, while the beau accompanying Debbie, simply hung on her every word like a puppy. Alexander and Karen Williams, (dressed in the costumes of a Viking warrior and his maiden), were dancing in a flamboyant 70s disco style, but took a short break to meet their teachers' neighbors. Upstairs Dana and her friends could occasionally be faintly heard over the music, laughing and cheering each other on every time they soaked another group of trick-or-treaters. Xena had disappeared, leaving Gabrielle annoyed while she helped Danielle play hostess.

The house tour continued. Gabriella led the Taskers through the door and into the study, knowing from recent experience that this was the room that had most impressed their other guests. Helen and Harry's eyes flitted from detail to detail, taking in the stuffed bookshelves, the paired desks to their right, the display cabinet filled with artifacts, and the edged weapons and scrolls on the walls.

"Commander's tent, late Roman Republic or early Empire…maybe 50 BC," Harry muttered softly, "but the weapons span a couple hundred years on either side of the birth of Christ."

"Actually it's similar to the campaign tents of many armies in the area at that time," Gabrielle told him, surprised by his concise and accurate recognition of what he was looking at, "but you're right in general. Caesar and Pompey, among others, had used tents like this, and they set up their desks in this position, rather than directly opposite the entrance.* Most of the weapons are from the last two centuries BC, but there's a Maintz pattern gladius and a pilum from the Judean occupation under King Herod."

(*The tent was arranged like those that the soulmates had used for decades; the Roman commanders had adopted the desk placement after narrowly being missed by bolts fired through the doors by assassins. A commander was no more likely to sit facing a door than a warrior was to sit with their back to one. Caesar had probably recalled the arrangement from his time as Xena's captive.) ~Editor

Harry went to examine several of the weapons hanging on the walls, nodding appreciatively at the documentation. Finally though, he came to the same Amazon archer's short sword that Danielle Lefferts had noticed. His eyes lingered on the blade and the plaque below it, but he eventually moved away without comment. It was at about this point that a loud chorus of laughter and whoops sounded through the ceiling from the upstairs hallway. Both Helen and Harry's heads jerked up at the sounds.

"Dana!" Harry exclaimed, a bit loudly, "is that Dana?"

Helen was shaking her head in disapproval. Gabrielle winced. Harry was already moving towards the doorway, and the cloned bard was pretty sure that he remembered having passed the stairs on their way to the study.

"Oops," she muttered, eyeing Helen, who was rolling her eyes.

"He never likes being ambushed," Mrs. Tasker informed her hostess, "and they soaked him pretty good when we came to the door. He didn't have a clue."

They began moving towards the hallway and Gabrielle could already hear Harry's heavy boots taking the stairs two at a time. Wonder where Xena is, she thought to herself, she'd better have a good excuse for bailing out on this party. Upstairs, she heard Harry's voice raised in an angry, "Dana!", and a sudden rush of footsteps.

"Perhaps I could get you some more cider?" She innocently asked Helen.

A few minutes later, Harry marched his daughter and her friends past the parlor and the other guests, where Gabrielle had directed Helen. The teens looked chagrined and the Terminator looked mildly irritated. Gabrielle only caught part of their exchange on their way out the door.

"Are you crazy? You could have put someone's eye out!"

It seemed a bit incongruous, considering that his eye was already mechanical and glowing red, and the make up had depicted worse wounds than anything a Super-Soaker could deliver.

"But Daaaad…" The door clicked closed on the adolescent's protests.

A dark shadow silently observed their progress down the front walkway, where Harry separated Dana from her friends for a quick father-daughter conference. It seemed strange to the observer that their demeanor changed completely as soon as they were alone. The two whispered together rapidly and Dana passed something to her father, then went off to rejoin her friends. Harry put a finger to his ear and whispered something to himself, then walked quickly down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. Following his progress from the shadows, the watcher noted that he made a brief stop at a white van parked a couple houses down the block, then just as quickly returned to the party. The van had immediately started up and driven off.

There was definitely a mystery brewing with her neighbor, Xena thought, as she silently scaled the trellis outside the kitchen and slipped in through the bathroom window. She'd had the strangest impression of the man from that first day when his slaves had been so sullen and noisy while emptying the loot from their truck. The Warrior Princess still half suspected that he really had been in California and nearly run her and Gabrielle down on his motorcycle. She filed her thoughts away for later review and went to make an appearance at the party. Gabrielle isn't going to be happy about me deserting her, she thought. Well, I'll just have to suck it up and play social. A grin curled the corners of her lips as she settled the gun belt of her Lara Croft costume on her hips and adjusted the thigh straps.

As always, cloned Xena was up at dawn. She carefully rolled out of bed and padded silently to the bathroom. After removing the Super-Soakers from the tub and steaming the room up during a long shower, she searched for her hairbrush.

"Bacchae's breath," she cursed, "where's the miserable thing gone now?"

It was nowhere to be found. Deciding to borrow Gabrielle's, she quickly hunted for her partner's and found that one missing too. (Danielle wore her hair so short she just used a comb).

"By the gods, am I supposed to go around with Gorgon's hair all day?" Her expression darkened. "What is this, a trick left over from Halloween?" She thought about it for a few moments before a suspicion presented itself. "Gabrielle musta' really been pissed off at me for bailin' out on the party for the first hour, and now she's playin' trick or treat pranks…well, two can play this game."

She opened an access panel and turned off the hot water valve leading to the shower, then removed the valve knob with the tail end of a pair of tweezers.

"All's fair in love and war…" she muttered as she stashed the knob in her bathrobe pocket and wandered down to the kitchen to grab some fruit for breakfast before getting dressed.

An hour later, she heard a screech from the bathroom. It was Danielle.

"Oops," Xena muttered, and went back to her morning stretching routine.

The CWO came downstairs ten minutes later, still shivering, and poured herself a large mug of coffee. She looked out the window briefly at Xena, exercising out in the backyard, and gave her a baleful stare, then went back to preparing grapefruit, eggs, and toast.

Two hours later, a disheveled Gabrielle came downstairs and found Xena in the study, looking up websites showing other martial arts schools. She stood in her bathrobe with her hands on her hips until her partner looked up at her from the monitor.

"Good morning," the cloned bard began, "I want you to go upstairs right now and put the knob back on the hot water thing…and give me back my hairbrush. Halloween was yesterday and this isn't funny at all. I'm not going back to finger combing or bathing in lakes and streams in this lifetime, okay?" She didn't wait for an answer, but stomped into the kitchen to pour orange juice and coffee, and make eggs, pancakes, bacon, hash browns, and toast.

"Damn," the warrior hissed. Behind her a blue light flared up, delivering the God of War into the study. Xena looked over at him, curious as to what he could possibly want. He took in his surroundings, giving the weapons on the walls a cursory once over.

"Well, this is quite a change from the warlord business, but hey, it's not the same for me either these days," he offered conspiratorially, casting a meaningful glance towards the kitchen where the clatter of pans could be heard.

"You're right about that, Ares," the cloned warrior agreed before giving him a more pointedly questioning look.

"I thought I'd drop in to let you know that your precious hair brushes were stolen last night, but don't worry about that. You're going to have visitors tomorrow night."

The Warrior Princess cocked an eyebrow at him, digesting the news.

"You were right, Xena…all's fair in love and war," he continued, "and in battle there is no substitute for being prepared."

He gave her a grin before flashing out of the room, just as Danielle Lefferts wandered in. The CWO blinked and did a kind of double take, quickly looking to her right and left.

"Did you call a plumber?" The CWO asked. "You know, the hot water wasn't working this morning." She looked around the room again but saw no one there except Xena, still sitting at her desk. "I thought just I heard a man's voice." The cloned warrior had glanced up at her from her computer monitor and shook her head "no". With a shrug, Danielle walked back out.

The laboratory technician had never liked coming here to give his reports. In fact, after seven years of employment, he'd only been called here in person twice before. There was a vigilant atmosphere to the stark white corridors that led past a receptionist, (who kept one hand under her desk on an autopistol), to the large chamber filled with high tech communications and control equipment. Someone always accompanied him, though he'd never traded a single word with any of his escorts. They performed like robots. Along the way, he'd been ID'd by a retinal scan, a full palm print, and voice analysis. It made him feel more paranoid than when he reported his findings in Langley, at CIA headquarters. Today, four men and one woman were seated at the conference table.

"So what have you got for us?" The intense white haired man asked. He wore a black patch over his left eye and sat at the head of the table. As a field agent thirty-odd years before, Spencer Trilby had worked with the likes of Jim Philips, Napoleon Solo, and James Bond. Though he sounded pleasant enough, the focused stare from his remaining eye always made the lab technician squirm.

"Analysis of the recent hair samples from the brushes reveals DNA matching the samples from the FBI Compound in Quantico…it exhibits the same anomalies."

"The anomalies are present in both samplings from both individuals?"

"That is correct, sir. They're a match. No question about it."

"Please explain your findings then."

"Yes sir, Mr. Trilby. Uh…the examination of the control region of the mitochondrial DNA revealed a definite familial relationship between the samples. Furthermore, analysis has discerned a heritable gene specific spot mutation in the mtDNA's coding region…"

"In English please…" Trilby interrupted.

"Sir, the coding region governs the production of chemicals used in converting food into energy within the mitochondria of a cell. The control region regulates the mtDNA. Both areas are highly variable. Currently, we analyze a sequence of 610 base pairs for forensic identification purposes…"

"Young man, you're still speaking Greek to me. What does this actually mean?"

"Oh. What it means, sir, is that at some point in the family history of these two individuals, their lines shared parenting…my best guess would be about 5 to 8 generations ago, after which time the family lines separated again. The spot mutation is much more ancient…probably closer to 2,000 years old. It affects the creation of the molecules used in energy production in all the cells of these individuals' bodies. My colleagues and I have hazarded some guesses…that these individuals are able to metabolize at about 14% greater efficiency than an Olympic athlete, and perhaps 42% or more efficiently than an average person. They would be stronger, quicker, and heal faster."

"I see." Spencer Trilby looked away and sighed, as if he were actually tired. In fact the report energized him as nothing else had in weeks. After a moment he looked back and dismissed the technician. "Thank you, that will be all."

The younger man didn't move at first. What he'd seen in the lab had been more than earthshaking to him. He had one more fact to share.

"Sir, there's one other thing, something I've never seen before in a human sample and had to verify by retesting."

"Yes? Go ahead."

"In both samples, the gene carrying the spot mutation was marked. There was ladder banding every 1000 base pairs."

"Meaning what, exactly…and for the last time, in English, please?"

"Sorry, sir. I think they're clones."

None of the people at the table reacted. In fact, none of them had reacted to a thing he'd said the whole time. It was as if they hadn't heard a word of his report, but he knew better. They had certainly heard and recorded every sound he'd made. Hell, they were probably analyzing his heart rate and voice stress patterns. The technician realized that he had absolutely no idea what they thought about his information, or what they intended to do with it. They obviously didn't seem as impressed as he was with what he'd discovered. Maybe they didn't realize the importance of his data.

Yet it was important. The donors of the specimens he'd analyzed should be studied further, a paper written, and, like the genes that conferred immunity to HIV, Ebola, or cancer, perhaps tapped for cloneable research samples. The possibilities were incredible. Thoroughly captivated by the probability that existing beings had been engineered to be superhuman, he'd never comprehended that for a brief time he'd held in his hand the physical evidence of a divine inheritance.

"Sir, I'd really like to study these individuals further. I think they could offer great potential benefits to mankind. This is an opportunity…"

"Young man, the security of this nation rests on your ability to forget what you have seen," Spencer Trilby told him in a firm but reasonable tone. "The samples and all the data have already been collected, and you'll certainly disappear off the face of the earth if I can't be assured of your discretion."

The technician gulped.

Trilby offered him a friendly smile, almost as an afterthought, and then cued his personal assistant. "Francis, if you'd show this gentleman out, please?"

The African-American woman stood and gestured the technician into motion. She directed him out of the room at a brisk, businesslike pace. Not once did she speak to him. In fact, no one other than Spencer Trilby had said a word. As in the past, he found that he was very glad to be leaving.

After he'd been ushered out, the four remaining men sat around the table in silence for several moments. Finally it was Harry who broke the ice.

"We're getting closer, aren't we?"

"I believe we are," Trilby answered thoughtfully, "and now you have to be very careful. Find me their enemies, Harry. You have the files."



Continued in Part 2c