X-Men; X-Men 2

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Professor, do you hear me?” she called, more loudly than before. “Listen to me, Charles! Whatever you’re seeing, whatever you’re experiencing, it’s an illusion! You’re in an illusion!” She heard no reply, and when she spoke again, there was a faint roll of thunder to her voice. “You have to stop this—you have to shut down Cerebro—now!”

  The girl actually laughed.

  “Who are you talking to?” she asked, in all innocence and rich amusement.

  Xavier shook his head, as the word “now” echoed and reechoed through the spherical vault of the Cerebro chamber. For a moment he was sure Storm was right in front of him, close enough to touch—but all he could see was empty air. Save for the little girl, he was alone. His X-Men were lost, they were in deadly peril, he had to find them, save them.

  And yet . . .

  Always, his thoughts circled like vultures back to this same persistent, nagging question.

  And yet . . .

  Suppose he was the one who was lost?

  “I hear them,” he repeated, before voicing his own frustration. “But—I can’t find them.”

  “Then concentrate harder,” the little girl replied in a firm and commanding voice, in that special way that girls have that makes them sound as if they’re merely stating an irrevocable natural law.

  How could he be lost? He was in the heart of his mansion, of his school. He knew what had to be done.

  Storm thought for a moment that she’d gotten through to him, but then the breath gusted out of her in a huff as she met the girl’s gaze.

  She wondered for a moment why the girl wasn’t doing something more serious to stop them and answered her own question just as quickly. She probably needed most of her energies to maintain her hold on Xavier. As far as the girl was concerned, they posed no significant threat. All she needed to do to win was delay them long enough for Xavier to finish his work. After that, it wouldn’t matter.

  Nightcrawler started forward, intending to confront the girl physically—perhaps considering teleporting her out of the chamber—but Storm stopped him.

  “Kurt, don’t move,” she told him. There were better ways to tempt the Gorgon.

  “She’s just a little girl,” he said.

  “No,” she said flatly, “she’s not.” Because any entity capable of suborning Charles Xavier had to be considered as supremely dangerous as Magneto.

  “Oh.”

  “Good advice,” said the girl.

  She breathed a small prayer of thanks that her own elemental powers—mainly her ability to wield lightning—created a level of background “static” in her own head that made it virtually impossible for a telepath to pick her thoughts. The first times that Xavier tried he came away with a devil of a headache.

  With any luck, her adversary would have no idea of what was happening until it was too late. But this would be an all-or-nothing play. Once she acted, and revealed herself as a legitimate threat, the girl would have to strike back just as ruthlessly.

  The girl smiled. “I’ve got my eyes on you!”

  Stryker had his hand on the door handle when Logan’s fist caught him upside his face. It was worse than being hit by an iron bat. Stryker dropped, stunned, his thoughts reeling before a fresh avalanche of incredible shock and pain, blood thick in his mouth from a broken lip, and he thanked whatever fates there were that Logan’s punch hadn’t shattered teeth and jaw as well.

  He didn’t wonder why the mutant hadn’t used his claws. That reason was made plain when Logan rolled him over on his back and dropped beside him in a duck squat, almost daring Stryker to make a move to defend himself.

  “Now,” Logan said, with an edge of threat to his voice, “you were about to tell me something about my past?”

  Looking up at him, William Stryker began to laugh.

  “Why did you come back?” he asked, spitting blood.

  “You cut me open! You took my life!”

  “Please,” Stryker said, and for the first time he looked actually disappointed. “You make it sound as though I stole something from you.” He smiled suddenly, acknowledging a sudden surprise memory, or perhaps inspiration. “As I recall, it was you who volunteered for the procedure.”

  “Who am I?”

  “Just an experiment,” Stryker told him, playing every card in his hand, “that failed. If you really knew about your past, what kind of person you were, the work we did together—” He took a breath, wondering if he’d pushed Logan too far, if this would be his last. “People don’t change, Wolverine. You were an animal then, and you’re an animal now. I just gave you claws.”

  Throughout the control room, there wasn’t a green light to be seen. The telltales on every console were flashing red, with alarm chirps and honks and sirens to add to the din. A set of displays showed the inside of the vast generator room, and a secondary phalanx of monitors presented data to show how dire the situation was.

  The initial cracks had grown exponentially, in perfect concert with the original computer stress model. The jammed spillway had caused Alkali Lake to fill to the danger level, placing the dam under tremendous stress to begin with. Given the circumstances, it was already only a matter of time before it failed. The blast in the generator room had served to accelerate the process. Now, thanks to the relentless and incredible pressure of all that water, the worst-case scenario was about to reach fulfillment.

  The complex shuddered—not very much, hardly enough to notice, just enough to stir some dust into the air—as blocks of stone the size of sofas crumbled from the ceiling. Then, as water jetted across the room with the force of a high-pressure fire hose, masonry fell in chunks the size of cars. Pipes, wrenched from their mountings, ruptured. Gas lines failed, filling the air with a heady mix of steam and other elements. Severed electrical conduits showered the room with sparks. Hydrogen ignited, setting off thunderclap blasts that only added to the chaos and destruction.

  A torrent of water and stone and reinforced rebar cascaded onto one of the generators, jamming the turbine blades, which not only shattered but tore the whole assembly loose from its axis. Those blades flew every which way like scythes, and in their wake came a chain reaction of explosions that nobody in the complex failed to notice.

  There it was again.

  “Professor!”

  Storm.

  He still couldn’t find her. Hardly surprising, considering the din. Voices in his head, the hum of Cerebro deafening in his ears, this was proving far more challenging and arduous than he’d ever imagined.

  “Professor!”

  Strange that the voices he was hearing seemed to be in pain. That couldn’t be right. Cerebro was never intended to cause anyone harm. That was where he and Eric Lehnsherr had had their final falling out: What Charles Xavier saw as a tool, a means of bringing the human family together, Magneto wanted to use as a weapon, to cleanse the planetary genome once and for all. Having lived through one Shoah, he had vowed never to allow another, by whatever means were necessary. He understood the irony full well, this child of the Holocaust using the same methods as his own oppressors, the murderers of his family.

  But somewhere along the way, he’d decided not to care.

  He wasn’t right, then.

  This . . . wasn’t right now.

  Could anything be done about it?

  “Professor!”

  The chamber that housed Dark Cerebro shuddered from the tremendous shock wave. Overhead, the smooth curve of the dome came to an abrupt end as the vicious torque sheared through a line of retaining bolts and rivets. With a shriek of tortured metal, whole sections of ceiling plating collapsed, some falling straight past the gallery platform to and on the floor below with a resounding crash, while others tumbled lazily through the air as potentially deadly chunks of flying debris, especially dangerous for those like Nightcrawler and Storm who were essentially oblivious to them.

  For that fateful moment, though, all of 143’s illusions slipped—the setting reverted to its normal dimensi
ons while the integrity of the holographic globe spasmed with static. Xavier coughed and started to raise his hands to remove his helmet.

  But the moment was all the time he had, and it wasn’t enough. The creature in the other wheelchair once more became the girl. The globe once more grew to the size of the planet itself. The room remained whole and intact, with none of those present allowed to have the slightest inkling of their danger while Charles Xavier unwittingly continued to bring about the annihilation of the human race.

  The lights on the globe burned far brighter than before; Cerebro’s hum was louder and more pervasive. Mutant 143 had accelerated the process.

  Logan felt the explosion before he heard it, as a seismic transmission through the earth and a pressure wave a fraction of an instant ahead of the sound.

  “What the hell was that?”

  Stryker didn’t answer at once, mainly out of defiance.

  “Damn you, Stryker,” Logan roared, grabbing the man up by the shirtfront, “what’s happening? What is it?”

  “The foundation of the dam has been compromised,” he told Logan. “Some kind of rupture. Started in the turbines, and now it’s spreading to the intake towers. The dam is releasing water into the spillway, trying to relieve the pressure . . . tying to stop the process . . . but it’s too late! In a matter of minutes, we’ll all be under water.”

  Logan looked back at the escape tunnel.

  Stryker grabbed him, a drowning man to a life preserver: “Still want answers, Wolverine? Like how old you really are? If Logan is even your real name? If you have a family?” He knew the words were having an effect, and he glared at the mutant, willing him to listen, and to obey.

  “Or,” he said forcefully, putting all his strength into this final ploy, “is she still alive?” That one, that implication, hit the mark, dead center. “Then why don’t we just get in the helicopter and fly away. I give you my word, Wolverine, come with me and I’ll tell you everything. You owe these people nothing. You’re a survivor, you always have been!”

  Stryker gasped in pain as Logan delivered a wicked punch to the kidneys, one that was meant to hurt. He yanked Stryker close and tucked a fist under his chin, making his threat plain.

  “I thought I was just an animal, Billy,” he said.

  Stryker flinched at the snikt of the claws extending from their housings and thought right then that he was dead. When he realized a second later that he wasn’t, he had to face the shame of tears staining his cheeks, and far worse staining his trousers back and front. The outside claws bracketed his cheeks, close enough to dent the skin but not yet break it. The middle claw remained retracted.

  Logan was smiling.

  “With claws.”

  In the hallway outside Stryker’s Cerebro chamber, with the kids stirring nervously as the floors and walls trembled enough to send a scattering of dust and some random splashes of water falling from the ceiling, Jean found her right hand closing into a fist. She felt a tension up her forearm, like a spring-loaded mechanism about to release, and her teeth bared fractionally in delight.

  “Logan,” she said, almost exclusively to herself, but mentally it was a full-throated shout.

  He heard her, as if she were standing right beside him.

  “Jean,” he said, speaking as quietly as she and just as sure of being heard.

  “Just tell me what you need, Wolverine. Tell me what you need. Tell me what you want!”

  It was a simple choice: his past, or—and here Logan looked up toward the dam, which still showed no outward effects of the series of explosions deep underground; to the naked, untutored eye, it looked like it would stand forever—his future. To Stryker, the two had to be mutually exclusive. Maybe that was true?

  Logan raised his fist, forcing the other man to rise to his feet, to tiptoes, both of them knowing that what he wanted more than anything was to pop that third claw and use Stryker’s severed head as a soccer ball.

  Stryker winced again at the distinctive sound of metal on metal, but this time the claws weren’t extending. They had been retracted.

  “I have what I need,” Logan told him.

  Before he could fall, Logan pitched him up against a nearby anchor post, where chains were used to hold the helicopters secure against the worst of the local winter storms. In a matter of seconds he had Stryker wrapped tight.

  “If we die, you die.”

  As Logan raced back to the tunnel, Stryker pulled angrily on the chains and shouted after him: “There are no answers that way, Wolverine!”

  A sudden rattle of metal caught his attention, and his eyes dropped to the chains. He thought at first it was some ground tembler related to the explosions that were shaking the dam, but he was wrong. His hands were trembling.

  No big deal, he told himself, residual effect of his confrontation with Wolverine. He was scared, now he could afford to show it.

  He sneezed, and the surprise outburst sent starbursts of pain through his skull that were worse than when Wolverine had punched him. He saw blood on the chains and snow in front of him. He wiped his face on a sleeve and left a scarlet trail that looked as though he’d used a decent and well-saturated paintbrush. But when he stuck out his tongue, he tasted a steady flow of it from his nose.

  His face went pale as the snow, and a chill colder than the absolute of space closed around his heart.

  “Impossible,” he breathed, and found himself wishing the mutant had used his claws.

  That end at least would have been quick.

  Alicia Vargas sat trembling on the floor of the Oval Office, her back against one of the two sofas that bracketed the presidential seal that was worked into the carpet. Ten minutes ago she’d been fine, and then it was as if she’d been knifed and gutted like a fish. She’d never felt such pain and thought, in that first rush of agony and terror, that all the nuns’ stories of Hell had reared up to claim her. She was dimly aware of the President calling for help, of other agents and staffers laying her on the couch, making way for the medics and doctors . . .

  . . . and then, as suddenly as it had struck, the pain went away. She felt fine. She was making apologies all around, her boss insisting on a full debriefing, someone mentioning what they all feared, that this was some new kind of mutant attack . . .

  . . . and then, everyone around her dropped, pretty much the same way she had. She felt fine, but they were dying, and that staffer’s offhand remark about mutants took on a whole new coloration that made her want to flee the building, that made her wish she had died moments ago. She was dying, they were fine. Now they were dying and she felt great. Did that mean, God forbid, she was a mutant?

  She decided then and there it didn’t matter. She was an agent of the United States Secret Service, assigned to the protective detail of the President. That made him her sole concern.

  She drew her weapon from its holster and levered herself across the floor, collecting a couple more guns along the way. She couldn’t quite muster enough strength yet to stand. The President had collapsed behind his desk and lay partially covered by his chair. With a convulsive heave, Alicia shoved it clear and, bracing her back against the wall, moved it to where she had a clean line of sight of both entrances. As gently as she could, she gathered the President’s head into her lap, keeping her own Glock in hand while laying the other ones aside—but keeping them in quick and easy reach—to use a handkerchief to wipe his face of the blood that was now leaking from nose and eyes.

  “Alicia,” he choked. “My God, what’s happening?”

  “Sir, I don’t know,” she told him. “But I’m here, I’m okay, I’ll keep you safe.”

  George McKenna didn’t care about himself in that instant, because he knew Alicia’s words were a lie. He didn’t matter anymore, not as President, not even as a man; the only roles that had any substance were husband and father, and the bitterness he felt at this terrible moment was at being so far from those he loved. And even though he had no real hope of a miracle, he prayed for his wife, h
e prayed with all his heart and those coherent thoughts that remained to him for his children, that they be spared this awful end. He asked for mercy. . . .

  Below the pontiff’s balcony, three Vatican and CitiRoma ambulances stood on the periphery of St. Peter’s Square. Some among the crowd gathered below had apparently been taken ill just before the pope’s appearance. He’d signaled a secretary to make the proper inquiries, then proceeded with the day’s events.

  Now that handful of people were the only ones left standing, on the plaza and inside the Vatican itself. Elisabeth Braddock, who was taking a free day before driving to Milan to showcase Giorgio Armani’s couture line for the fall show, picked herself up off the gurney and carefully stepped off the back of the ambulance. There was blood on her face and on her new dress—linen, expensive, designed exclusively for her by Kay Cera and now utterly ruined—and her shapely lips curled as she saw more pouring from the noses and eyes and ears of everyone in sight.

  Bracing herself for what she knew was out there, Betsy opened the gates to her own mind and cast a telepathic net out across the plaza, hoping to find some clue to the cause of this mass affliction. She staggered as if she’d been physically struck and grabbed desperately for the handrail on the back of the ambulance to keep from falling. It was worse, so much worse, than she had imagined.

  This wasn’t just happening here in Vatican City. People were dropping throughout Rome itself.

  She thanked her stars her mutant power had limits, sensing that no matter how far she cast her perceptions she’d just find more of the same.

  Only the people in the ambulances appeared unaffected. Yet initially, they’d been the ones who were struck down by what was essentially the same effect. She knew one of the others was a mutant. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to put the rest of the pieces together. Someone had tried to take out mutants, possibly the world over. And now those tables had been turned.

  “No,” she breathed. “No, please no! Don’t let this be happening. For God’s sake, for mercy’s sake—stop!”