X-Men; X-Men 2

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  She kissed him on the edge of his mouth, glad that the difference in height between them allowed her to keep her face shadowed.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay. I . . . I was so afraid I’d lost you.”

  “Thanks” was all he said, but she could see the emotions that went into that single word, and she hugged him for it.

  A moment later, her expression changed and she looked around the room in alarm.

  “Scott,” she said urgently, frustrated that she couldn’t tell him why, “something’s wrong!”

  Mystique had printed out a map, showing the route to where the children were imprisoned. Storm and Nightcrawler covered the distance in record time. Nightcrawler was right at home, racing as easily along the walls and ceiling as the floor, as limber crouched on all fours as standing erect on both legs. Storm wasn’t anywhere near as confident, physically or emotionally. She didn’t like being underground or in confined spaces. She thought she’d put those childhood fears behind her long ago and didn’t appreciate discovering she might have been wrong.

  At last they came to a room that was essentially the lip of a broad and deep pit. Surveillance cameras were mounted at intervals around the circular ceiling, allowing an unrestricted view of the hole. She’d seen on the control room monitors that deep parallel slashes had been gouged in the walls, at a height that suggested a man Logan’s size. Such a person couldn’t climb out, he couldn’t jump out, there were no doors to be seen; the only possible mean of ingress or egress to the pit was a hoist on a sliding boom set in the ceiling. The room itself had a single doorway, and it was ringed by the ruins of a rubber gasket, which meant that in better days the entrance could have been sealed airtight. Alternating with the camera mounts around the ceiling were ventilation grilles. It didn’t take much imagination to realize that gas could be introduced to the room instead of air, to deal with any prisoners who decided to get rowdy.

  If this was a holding pen, it was designed by people who took no chances.

  Damn them, she thought with unusual vehemence. What did they want from him? What did they do to him?

  And then, more ominously, What does Stryker intend with us?

  “Who’s down there?” she called.

  “Jubilation Lee,” came the immediate reply. “Is that you, Ororo? Can you help us?”

  “Hey, would I have come all this way if I couldn’t?” She looked sideways at Nightcrawler. “Kurt, could you—” She didn’t have to finish, he was already gone.

  The kids, of course, had no idea who he was. Two girls took one look at him and shrieked in terror, backing all the way across the pit while Jubilee and Artie, one of the boys, took station between them. The boy was ready to fight—he even stuck out his forked tongue to try to scare Nightcrawler, which he actually found quite amusing—but Jubilee looked more curious than defiant. She assumed that if Storm was up top, then this had to be one of the good guys. If it wasn’t, since Stryker had given them some kind of drug to inhibit their powers temporarily, they were all pretty much screwed anyway.

  Nightcrawler gently motioned her aside and spoke to the frightened pair of girls.

  “My name’s Kurt Wagner,” he told them. “Although in the circus ring I’m better known as Nightcrawler. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

  Blank looks all around.

  “Ah, well. Some other time, perhaps. Come to me, please,” and he waved his fingers to urge them closer. “It’s all right. You’ve nothing to fear from me, I’m just going to take you for a little jaunt.”

  “Can’t Storm do this?” one of the boys asked.

  “Don’t be an ass,” Jubilee told him. “There isn’t enough volume of air in here for her to generate sufficient wind. What’re you going to do,” she asked Nightcrawler, “climb the walls?”

  “Not exactly,” he replied. He wrapped arms and tails around one of the frightened girls, who’d responded to his call and stepped up close to him. “Now,” he told her, “close your eyes.”

  Bamf.

  He was gone.

  And a moment later, with the girl’s excited cries echoing down from the floor above, he was back.

  Logan didn’t need a map, he just followed his nose. He had Stryker’s scent, and since she was the only woman in the place, aside from Mystique and his fellow X-Men, he had no problem isolating Yuriko’s scent as well. He could follow and find them anywhere now, no matter how cold the trail.

  Suddenly he stopped. Another scent, one he never thought anything about, because it was a part of him.

  He turned and thought about his first visit and the wolf he’d followed downstairs. This was a whole different section of the base, and a lot deeper. Nothing about the surroundings was familiar, and yet . . .

  Snikt!

  There were three slash marks in the wall, at the top of a flight of stairs. They reminded him of a book he’d read wintering up North of Sixty, waiting out a storm in a trapper’s cabin. Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. The explorers there had followed a trail left by their predecessor, a man named Arne Saknussemm, who’d blazed the way by leaving three parallel slashes in the rock.

  He held up his claws. They fit as perfectly here as they had in the marks he’d found up top. He heard screams, but only in memory, and smelled blood that strangely seemed as fresh as if it had just been spilled. He’d fought his way out of here, of that he was certain.

  Why hadn’t they ever tried to find him? Why had he been brought here in the first place?

  He clenched his fist, keyed the trigger in his nervous system, and put the claws away.

  Snakt!

  Only one man with the answers.

  Moving fast, Logan descended the stairs.

  Artie was the last. He looked a little wobbly as Nightcrawler let him go, but then so did the indigo-skinned mutant himself, and Storm caught him by the arm as he swayed on his feet.

  “It’s harder with a passenger,” he confessed. “And when I transport six—”

  “I’m proud of you,” she said. “Consider this a good deed to counterbalance all those sins.”

  He smiled in gratitude, but only for a moment as Artie protested, “I think I have to throw up.”

  “It’s hard for my passengers, too, I’m afraid,” he confessed further. “But the nausea will quickly pass.”

  Not soon enough for Artie, who bent double and promptly expelled all the food he’d ever gworfed in his life. Storm held his head until he was done, then manifested a tiny cloud of rain to wash his face clean. That’s when the room shook around them, and when she decided the quicker they were quits of this awful place, the better for all concerned.

  The stairs led Logan to a lab that, like the rest of the base, had seen better days. It was circular, with massive cylindrical columns supporting a large ring in the center. Unlike most of the other sections of the base, however, this one hadn’t been stripped to the walls. It looked almost . . . operational.

  In his mind’s eye, the room wasn’t empty. He counted at least a dozen ghouls on hand for every session, wearing a freakish kind of armored surgical moon suit that was designed to protect the wearer not only from biological contamination but from physical attack as well. By sight, he couldn’t tell men from women, young from old. They all had the same face, and that was the visor of their helmets. Scents were how he told them apart, except for Stryker. He remembered now that Stryker was the only one unafraid to show his face. It was important to him to be seen, and Logan wondered now if that was why Stryker had seemed so disappointed when Logan didn’t recognize him at the mansion.

  This was a surgical suite, and as he circled the room, unconsciously keeping well clear at first of the tank in its center, he noted the carts on which the nurses had piled the necessary medical instruments. The usual collection of scalpels and hemostats, scissors and retractors and clamps, but that wasn’t all, it wasn’t even close. There were tools he couldn’t name, whose purpose he didn’t know, but the mere thought of them sent an unaccustomed thri
ll of horror up his spine.

  Along the wall there was a bank of light boxes, where they would clip the X rays before going to work on him. They always let him see what was there, they always told him what they planned to do, they wanted him to know . . . they wanted him to know . . . they wanted him to know . . .

  All that care and effort and . . . consideration—for nothing.

  One of the X rays had been him. Some of them looked like monsters, all of them were of mutants. Maybe all of them were him? Maybe he was the monster? He didn’t know.

  He remembered what Xavier had told him—maybe he didn’t want to know? Right now, that didn’t seem like so bad an idea.

  Finally he forced himself to the tank. He’d thought it was empty, hoped it would be empty, but he was wrong. It was filled with an oily amber liquid and above it, suspended from the ring, a battery of instruments more appropriate to a slaughterhouse than a hospital. On pedestals beside the tank were what appeared to be molds: one with a set of three channels, needing no explanation, another with five, longer and slimmer and altogether quite elegant.

  Next to the tank, at its head, was a large cylinder whose shape reminded him of a home hot-water heater, only this was made of a thick, transparent polymer that had the same transparent qualities as glass, but clearly much stronger. It had to be, since it was designed to hold molten adamantium, which came into the vat as hot as the core of the Earth. Attached to the cylinder were a number of long, snakelike tubes that ended in wicked-looking syringes built to punch through bone. The tank was half full of a silvery liquid.

  He looked at that tank, at the cylinder, at the tubes, at the instruments—and knew at last where his nightmares came from.

  “You know,” Stryker said from across the room, though his presence came as no surprise to Logan. He’d scented the man’s approach minutes ago. “The tricky thing about adamantium is that if you ever manage to process its raw, liquid form, you have to keep it that way. Keep it hot, keep it molten. Because, you see, once it cools, it’s indestructible.”

  He paused a moment to let the implications of his words sink in, but Logan wasn’t bothered. He’d already figured out that part. That had to be why they needed someone with a healing factor.

  “But,” Stryker continued, “I can see you already know that.”

  He was being very careful, keeping the full width of the lab, and as much equipment as possible, between himself and Logan.

  “I used to think you were one of a kind, Wolverine. I truly did.” He shook his head. “I was wrong.”

  Logan charged him and ran straight into Yuriko, who caught him by the arm and—using his own momentum as impetus—slammed him as hard as she could into one of the support columns. Stone cracked and powdered with the impact, but Logan wasn’t even staggered.

  Stryker caught Yuriko’s eye, looked deliberately from her to Logan, and when she nodded, he took his leave, out a different doorway from the one he’d entered, taking time to lock it behind him.

  Logan rose to his feet and extended both sets of claws. He had no interest in her, only her boss, but if she wanted trouble, he’d make it short and final.

  In return, her own face looking bored, as though this sort of confrontation happened every day, she spread her fingers wide.

  Logan was used to the reaction he got from other people when they saw his claws for the first time. Now, surprisingly, he learned how that felt as Yuriko’s fingers elongated into eight-inch spikes. He didn’t need to be told what they were made of, and he wondered how they’d managed the implantation. If she had a healing factor as well, this could be trouble.

  “Holy shit,” he said in amazement. She smiled, but it wasn’t a human expression. In fact, nothing about her seemed human or connected; it was like she was some different species entirely, forever gazing at the world from the outside. She was predator, all others were prey. That was the natural order of things.

  Her hand flicked out, faster than he could follow, and he felt a hiss of pain along his jaw, felt blood where she’d cut a shallow gash across his cheek.

  He retaliated with a roundhouse swing that missed her by a mile as she ducked beneath it and came up like a jack-in-the-box, unleashing a powerful side kick to the belly that pitched him backward through trays of equipment, upending them on top of him as he tumbled to the floor.

  With a banshee screech, she leaped after him, slashing at him with both hands, only to find her attack blocked by his own claws. Adamantium struck adamantium, creating its own unique brand of sparks as each of them fought to break through the other’s guard and instead only managed to wreck the lab.

  Stryker heard the sounds of battle and permitted himself a smile as he quickened his pace. Time, now more than ever, was of the essence.

  Yuriko swung hard, but Logan slapped her aside. Before he could take advantage, she hurled herself clear of him, running straight at the wall and using it as a springboard to flip herself up and over. However, she made a slight miscalculation in her maneuver: As she twisted in midair, her finger claws ripped through a cluster of power cables fastened to the ceiling. They exploded with sparks, they were live and carrying a significant amount of juice, and they dangled and twisted in the air like manic snakes. That contact threw her fractionally off balance; she didn’t quite land where she wanted to, or as smoothly.

  It was the opening Logan had been waiting for.

  Logan tackled her, and together they crashed through a glass wall into some kind of lounge. X-ray light boxes, equipment, computers galore crashed and shattered around them as they struggled. Logan had strength and a fair share of agility, but Yuriko possessed speed he couldn’t hope to match. For every blow he landed, he took a dozen, and his uniform proved as effective at stopping her claws as a suit of air. Worse, her own healing factor seemed every bit as effective as his, only he was giving it a lot less work to do.

  As they’d tangled on the floor, he’d caught a glimpse of the back of her neck, saw there the scar that marked both Nightcrawler and Magneto, and realized in that instant there could be no reasoning with her. In her own way, she was as berserk as he, and he knew she wouldn’t stop until she killed him.

  She hit him again, and again, using feet this time more than claws, choosing her blows with care so that she connected with soft tissue instead of bone. She wanted to wear him down, to strip him of the ability to defend himself, to remove all hope before she came in for the kill. That was what Stryker had asked of her, and she could deny him nothing.

  She sent Logan crashing backward into the tank, and he tumbled into it, rearing up immediately only to collapse against the opposite end, eyes wide as his nightmares rioted up around him. He was clumsy and dazed, he had to be at the end of his rope.

  With a ballerina’s grace, Yuriko sprang onto the lip of the tank, striking a Kali-like pose, the fingers of both hands spread out before her like a pair of bloody fans.

  Logan showed fear in his eyes, which was exactly what she wanted to see.

  She struck, and as she made her move . . .

  . . . so did he.

  She slashed empty air, registering surprise and disbelief as Logan leaped straight up from the tank. Using all his formidable strength to defy gravity, he grabbed for the rack suspended above the tank and slashed through the wire tether that anchored it to the ceiling.

  It dropped like a guillotine. He rode it down to crash on top of Yuriko and pin her to the bottom of the tank. She struggled and screeched, using her claws on the steel and concrete members that imprisoned her. It would only be moments before she was free.

  They were moments Logan wouldn’t let her have. On impact, he pitched himself clear of the rack and grabbed the syringes attached to the cylinder of adamantium, using the same movement to open the access valves. He spared her a quick and final thought—I’m sorry—and plunged the barbed needles between her unbreakable ribs and into her heart.

  She screamed as the molten metal flowed into her body. She raged and struggled in a last
desperate bid to escape, but she was doomed the moment Logan stabbed her. Adamantium oozed out her eyes and out her mouth, it burned through the very pores of her skin until she was coated from head to toe. Unable to maintain even a semblance of balance, she fell backward into the tank, creating a splash that emptied the vessel of half its volume of amber liquid. Her fingers twitched spasmodically as she sank to the bottom.

  And then she was still.

  Logan watched her, half expecting her to crack the shell and emerge more powerful and deadly than before. By rights she should be dead, from internal burns if nothing else, as the raw, fiery metal cascaded straight into her heart. God knows what kind of damage had been done to allow the adamantium to emerge from her eyes and mouth. Covered as she was, she couldn’t breathe. Perhaps that would do the trick?

  He hoped so, prayed so. She was as much a victim as he, and more. At least—and here he touched his fingers to the back of his neck to make sure—he wore no scar to brand him as Stryker’s slave.

  If he hadn’t escaped, would that be him lying there? Or taking Yuriko’s place by Stryker’s side, as his pet assassin?

  One thing more that Stryker owed him.

  Time to collect.

  He turned his back on this unholy place, and all it represented for his life, and started after Stryker’s trail.

  Nothing would stop him now.

  Chapter

  Fifteen

  “You think they’ll come?” one of the troopers, Grierson, asked Lyman.

  Lyman nodded, automatically checking the other man’s disposition. Grierson was hunkered down behind a concrete abutment, spare magazines at hand, spare weapons as well. He was on the young side for one of Stryker’s men, but he had a superb personnel jacket, topped by a year spent as a platoon sergeant in the 82nd Airborne, humping the boonies in Afghanistan.

  “They’ll come,” Lyman said.

  “Can we stop ’em?”

  “Those are the orders.”