X-Men; X-Men 2

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “I feel something,” she said. And then brightened with a smile. “I think it’s—Scott!”

  Her call was answered with fire, a beam of glittering scarlet that erupted out of the darkness ahead to shatter a chunk of wall between Jean and the others with force enough to scatter shards of stone like shrapnel. As she dived clear of the beam’s path, Jean threw a telekinetic cloak over her companions, to deflect the brunt of the debris clear of them, trusting the body armor components of her own uniform to protect her.

  “My dear,” she heard Magneto call from behind, “this is the kind of lovers’ quarrel we cannot afford right now.”

  “Go!” she snapped over her shoulder. “I’ll take care of him.”

  She had sight of him now. His face showed no expression, no reaction whatsoever to the sound of her voice calling his name. She tried reaching him with her thoughts but encountered a void whose only awareness was of an icy oblivion that radiated outward from a point at the base of his skull. She didn’t need to see the circular scar on his neck to know that what had been done to Nightcrawler and to Magneto had now been done to Scott. Until the drug wore off, or she somehow broke its hold on him, he would keep fighting, without remorse or mercy.

  Magneto and Mystique started to back away, and their movement caused Cyclops to fire again. This time Jean was ready, deflecting the optic blast to one side so that it gouged a shallow trench along the far wall. At the same time, she gestured with her own hand, radiating her telekinesis outward to slap him invisibly in the chest, hard enough to throw him off his feet.

  She started running toward him, pushing him up and back through the air, increasing his speed as she did her own, gritting her teeth with the effort as he struggled—harder and with a lot more purpose than the soldiers earlier—to break her hold on him. Whatever control Stryker established allowed him to access all his victims’ skills and training. Scott and she had often practiced how best to use her powers in combat, in part by figuring out how to compensate for them. Now he was turning that knowledge against her.

  The corridor ended in a wall. She slammed him into it as hard as she could. Trouble was, he was wearing his uniform, and it protected him from the impact same as it had her from the shrapnel.

  He fired again, forcing her to duck, and he hit a Humvee parked in an alcove, flipping the four-ton vehicle over onto the one parked next to it. As she scrambled up, she lost her hold on him, and Scott flipped himself over the balcony railing.

  She rushed after him and found herself overlooking darkness, a room whose dimensions were totally hidden in shadow. Muttering a string of passionate curses that would have impressed Logan, she started to contact the others, to warn Magneto that she’d lost Cyclops. Only then did she realize that in the chaos of the moment, she’d lost her com set.

  She stepped back from the railing and hunkered down to reduce her target profile while she considered her next move. She still had a sense of Scott’s thoughts, enough to know he was unhurt and mobile, but she couldn’t pinpoint his position. Worse, she still couldn’t reach him, and the sound of gears and motors grinding from below would make the hunt downstairs even more difficult.

  “Oh, Scott,” she sighed. He was the strategist, the natural combat leader. It was more than training; it was something he excelled at, that he was born to do. She was the doctor, her role had never been more than backup. Every time they’d ever sparred, loser buys the beer, she was the one who ended up buying.

  Slowly she got to her feet. It wasn’t as if she had any real choice.

  The kids were scared. The kids were bored. The kids were angry—at being left behind, at hearing no word, at not knowing when (not if, but when) some mook of Stryker’s was going to find them. The grown-ups had promised to keep them in the loop, but all they heard from the radio was static.

  John decided he’d had enough.

  “That’s it,” he announced, and pressed the switch that extended the main ramp.

  “Where d’you think you’re going, John?” Bobby challenged.

  “Where d’you think, moron? I’m tired of this kid’s table shit.”

  Bobby started to his feet: “You’ll freeze,” he said, “before you make it to the spillway.”

  “I don’t think so,” John retorted.

  “John, they told us to stay here,” Rogue protested.

  For a moment the two boys glared, ready to take out their tensions and frustrations on each other. Rogue wondered if Bobby really would use his ice power to stop John, and how hard John would use his flames to fight back.

  “John!” she called, pleading, deliberately stepping between them.

  That broke the moment. The look John gave Bobby was ugly and filled with warning, but what he offered Rogue was a grin, just like the Johnny of old, complete with a wink.

  Then he was gone, at a trot across the hard-packed snow, defying the arctic temperatures. Rogue stepped past Bobby to the controls, but she made no move to raise the ramp. She knew how John felt, and a large part of her wanted to follow.

  Jean descended the staircase at a run, hitting the floor in a roll that took her to cover amid the ranks of hulking, spinning generators, each the size of a modest one-story house.

  She knew he’d be waiting and had an idea where he’d be. Most of all, she was fairly certain what he’d do.

  He didn’t disappoint.

  There were two ways down to his level: either pitch herself over the balcony, as he’d done, or use the stairs. He’d want a position that gave him a ready line of sight of both options. Taking her on the fly was risky. Better to wait until she landed and was trying to get her bearings.

  As she came up into a crouch, he fired, from off to her right. For anyone else, the time you saw his beam—moving at the speed of light—was the time it hit you. In Jean’s case, her parry occurred at the speed of thought. Concept and execution happened instantaneously, so that Cyclops’ optic blast crashed against the invisible barrier of her telekinesis.

  The problem was, since his beam was trying its best to make like an irresistible force, she needed a way to brace the wall that protected her, to make herself the next best thing to an immovable object.

  Didn’t work. The telekinesis held, her feet didn’t, and she felt herself slide backward along the floor.

  Cyclops advanced on her, implacable as an automaton, adjusting his visor to hone his beam to maximum intensity.

  The point of intersection where his energies met hers began to glow, like steel in a furnace, generating a radiance so bright Jean had to cover her eyes.

  She was screaming, not in fear but in defiance, calling his name over and over again, trying every way she could imagine, with voice and thought, to reach him.

  “Scott,” she bellowed, as into the teeth of a hurricane, “please! Remember who you are! Who I am! Don’t do this!”

  She could feel his optic blast gnawing away at her shield, shattering the bonds of energy that kept her safe. There was a way to beat him, by splitting her teke and hurling it into him like worms, to burrow into the vulnerable places of his body. She was a doctor, she knew precisely where and how to do the most damage—to incapacitate or worse. She could block his airway or one of the valves of his heart or possibly interdict the smooth flow of neural transmissions along his central nervous system. But the initial attack had been too quick and too wild for her to make the attempt. She had had a chance when he came at her here on the floor, but she held back a fatal moment, afraid of her control—or lack of it. One thing to try this maneuver in the controlled conditions of the danger room, with sensors monitoring every conceivable aspect of the subjects’ physiological condition and a full-spectrum medical facility only steps down the hall. Another to do it in the field, in a fight, where a single mistake could prove fatal.

  She knew now how right that last was, only she was the proof, not Scott.

  He’d upped the power ante faster and farther than she’d expected. She couldn’t spare even one iota of teke to strike b
ack at him, he’d break through her shields for sure. Yet doing nothing would have the same result.

  She couldn’t kill him.

  She refused to be beaten.

  And something awakened within her. A chord of celestial music that she’d always been aware of on the outermost edges of her being, from the moment she first used her powers, only now it wasn’t a faint trill of notes but a full-throated symphony, a crescendo that rolled through her like a tsunami. She thought at first it would overwhelm her, but instead, with a joy so pure it could never be described or even remembered in full measure, she found herself riding the crest of this impossible wave, surfing creation the way she always yearned to do on water.

  The air rippled around her as though it were a pool she’d just fallen into, and it began to glow, a roseate corona that flowed swiftly to her outstretched hand and beyond, to crash against the pinpoint needle of energy that was Cyclops’ optic blast.

  Jean bared her teeth and pushed herself to her knees, bracing one foot under her as she struggled upright, the raw emotion on her face in stark contrast to the total absence of any on Scott’s.

  The nimbus around her changed aspect as she fought, creating a suggestion more of fire than light and the sense of wings flaring outward from her back—not so much like an angel, although that would be an easy and understandable mistake. This was more akin to some predatory bird, a raptor, rising to the attack.

  Between them though, the very fabric of reality twisted under their combined onslaught. Cyclops’ power was considerable, but ultimately it was tangible. He actually had limits. So did Jean, but where his were physical, hers were solely of her imagination and of her will.

  She took a halting step forward, pushing with her thoughts as well as her body, and cheered to herself as she moved Scott’s optic blasts back toward him.

  Her triumph was short-lived. These two combatants weren’t the only elements in this battle with limits. The same applied to the physical world that lay between them. They were battling each other on levels from the paranuclear to the subatomic, and as Jean’s resistance surged to new and unexpected levels, as the energies employed increased exponentially, the heat and pressures they unleashed triggered an equal and opposite reaction.

  In effect, they created a molecular protostar, a localized version of the Big Bang.

  For a fraction of a nanosecond, a time so small it was virtually immeasurable, they had a taste of creation. Luckily for them and for their world, the fabric of reality—already weakened by their struggle—tore wide open under this incredible onslaught, allowing the bulk of the energies to vent into some other, wholly unfortunate plane of existence. All the two combatants were aware of was an impossible radiance that reduced the brightness of the noonday sun to the level of a very dim bulb, and an explosion more impressive in every respect than one of Storm’s pet thunderclaps.

  The concussion sent both of them flying. Scott, dazed and shaken, went skidding and tumbling along the floor for pretty much the length of the room. Jean wasn’t so fortunate. Her flight was shorter, her landing harder, and she cried out as her leg caught on a corner of pipe and snapped like a dry branch.

  The effects of the explosion radiated outward from the source, making themselves felt in every corner of the complex. The generator room itself shook like it was in the middle of an earthquake, the big machines rattling and groaning as they tried to cope with stresses that pushed the limits of their design specs. Dust and more fell from the ceiling, and off in the distance there was a resounding clang as a stretch of iron railing gave way.

  High up in the shadows, unnoticed, a seam opened in the wall . . .

  . . . and water began to leak through.

  The shock knocked Stryker off his feet and would have left him bloody had Yuriko not been there to catch him. He muttered darkly as he brushed the dust from his clothes, then stopped cold as a drop of water splashed onto one lens of his glasses. He looked up to behold a spidery network of cracks in the ceiling, from which water was now falling in a steady drip. He actually shuddered at the sight.

  A quick walk brought him and Yuriko to the one of the dam’s monitor stations. A glance at the rusted, decaying, but still functional dials on the wall told him all he needed to know.

  Early in his career, before Jason, before marriage, he’d been a field agent. Black ops. He’d attended a course in sabotage, a seminar on how to blow a dam. There were basically two ways to do it. You either dropped a really big bomb, or succession of bombs, in just the right place—as the British did to the Germans in World War II—or you set off a much smaller bomb, also in just the right place, and let the dam itself do the rest. The key to a dam is its structural integrity, because the pressure of the water it’s restraining is relentless. That’s why public safety mandates that all such structures be scrupulously maintained. The slightest flaw, if unchecked, could lead to disastrous consequences.

  This dam had essentially been left to rot. No one was interested in dismantling it, so the secondary spillway had been left open to drain the lake. Over the subsequent years, in part to hide what had happened here, the dam had been filed and forgotten. No one came to check on its condition, no one realized—until Stryker arrived to reopen the facility—that the open spillway had become hopelessly clogged and Alkali Lake itself had gradually filled almost to overflowing.

  Now this explosion, whatever its cause, had provided the final, fatal catalyst. Because of the weight of water pressing on the dam, these cracks that now appeared miniscule would quickly grow and spread until the entire structure collapsed.

  The complex was doomed. The only question was how long they had. He did some fast calculations, couldn’t quite make them fit. Too many unknowns. So he decided then, as an act of will, that it would last until his work was done. He’d come too far, worked too hard, to accept even the possibility of failure. Or of defeat. His cause was just, therefore he would prevail.

  “Time to go,” Stryker told Yuriko, and they did, quickly.

  * * *

  Jean heard him coming, boot heels striking the floor in a steady, robotic cadence that was totally unlike him, and she wailed silently to herself. He wasn’t unconscious and he wasn’t free and he was on his way to finish her off.

  She tried to shift position, but her broken leg was agony. She couldn’t muster concentration enough to neutralize the pain or to stop her lover.

  Screw that, she thought, and tried again, marshaling her strength of body and will, first dampening the pain in her leg to a dull but manageable ache and then calling out to Scott, not with her voice, but with her mind.

  She said his name, but what reached out to him was so much more. It was the sense of her, the emotions he stirred in her heart and those she sensed in turn from him. She took the world as it was when they were apart and then what it felt like when they were together, and it was the difference between a wasteland and a paradise. There was passion and comfort and need and joy, there was a strength that knew no boundaries, a sense of kindred souls made one, and that whole being far, far greater than the sum of its parts.

  She opened her soul to him, holding back only that part of her that even now thought only of Logan, and realized as she did so that this was the part she would call upon if worst came to worst and she found herself with no other option but to kill.

  Through the impenetrable fog of his mind she sensed him reaching for his visor and remembered absurdly the night they’d spent watching one of Scott’s favorite movies, Robert Wise’s classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. She remembered the climactic moment when Patricia Neal had been cornered by the robot Gort and how his visor glowed like Scott’s as it opened to reveal the deadly beams within.

  Scott, she called with her thoughts, please—

  Scott!

  His hand trembled, his mouth working as he struggled to speak. His breathing quickened, his hands clenched to fists, and there were flashes of light within his mind as he fought his way through the fog, calling out hims
elf in answer to her cries.

  Then, suddenly, he was crying aloud, desperate incoherent sounds like a man might utter clawing his way up from some abyss of the spirit, culminating in a great and awful scream that made her own pain insignificant by comparison.

  He collapsed to his knees and sobbed, taking in breaths of air in huge, noisy gulps, a drowning man who’d finally reached the surface long after he thought all was lost.

  He flinched when she touched him, curling in on himself, startled and terrified, too much like a dog who expected nothing but beatings. That made her angry, because this was her man and he was none of those things.

  She touched him lightly once more on the face, but with her thoughts she enfolded him in warmth, in strength, in passion. She let him see reflected in her vision of him the man she knew he was, who made her complete.

  It’s okay, Scott, she told him telepathically and said the same aloud: “It’s okay, it’s me. It’s me!”

  And as he looked up in relief, she took him in her arms, burying her face in the hollow between neck and shoulder so he couldn’t see her. That made her smile inside, although there was no humor in it. It was easy to be strong for others but when it came to herself—well, that was a different chapter entirely. But she didn’t want him to know what had happened, not yet. Let him heal just a little more, let him come a bit more wholly back to himself, then he could handle it.

  “You’re hurt,” he said.

  “You’re right,” she grimaced. “Help me up, please.”

  “I’ll carry you.”

  “Like hell. I’m a telekinetic, remember? I can make myself a splint and crutches all in one.”

  “Really?”

  “If I’m wrong, sweetie, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Jean,” he said, and then, haltingly, “I—I’m sorry.”