Phoenix was still five blocks away when Nightcrawler’s message came in. The other X-Men had heard it too, thanks to the telepathic link that Jean had set up between them. She broke into a run, as did Cyclops, Wolverine and Iceman beside her.
I’ve got them, Rogue’s voice sounded in their minds. They’re all identical, and they have black-tinted windows. I can’t see if Hank’s inside any of them. Jean ... ?
Still no sign of him, Phoenix sent back. As soon as she had been told of the Beast’s disappearance, she had performed a telepathic sweep of the area, searching for her old friend. Somehow, his thought patterns had been masked from her. However, there had been one obvious place to search.
Nightcrawler had teleported directly to the Hellfire Club building. Phoenix could sense him now, his adhesive feet clinging through his soft boots to the side of an overlooking skyscraper. Rogue and Storm had followed, flying under their own power.
I’m almost in sight of the building, Storm reported. Yes, I can see them.
They’re all out now, sent Nightcrawler. A dozen cars, in all. They’re splitting up, each heading in a different direction.
This is a deliberate attempt to confuse us, Storm considered.
Get on them, people, ordered Cyclops. Hank might be in one of those vehicles. We can’t let any of them escape.
The four ground-based X-Men had been halted by a particularly busy road junction. Before Phoenix could suggest levitating the quartet over the traffic—an act that would have meant blowing their cover, as they were still wearing their street clothes—Wolverine had
stuck out his hand and flagged down a cab. It threaded its way across two lanes and stopped beside them, at which point Logan wrenched open the door and removed the driver by force. Cyclops protested, but his Canadian teammate was already in the driving seat. “Anyone joining me?” he asked gruffly. The driver was on his back on the sidewalk, giving vent to a stream of expletives. Scott gave him an embarrassed smile, dropped some money into his hands and muttered an apology, as he followed Phoenix and Iceman into the back seat.
“We don’t have time to be polite,” said Wolverine. He reinforced his point by stepping on the gas, causing several vehicles to brake as he ran a red light. The cab skidded around a corner, pursued by a cacophony of angry horns.
Phoenix closed her eyes, and saw what Nightcrawler was seeing. He had waited for one of the black limousines to stop at a crossroads, and had teleported onto the top of it. Whoever was inside had evidently heard his arrival, as a volley of machine-gun fire chattered through the roof at his feet. He leapt forwards, spread-eagled himself upside-down across the windscreen, grinned and shouted “Boo!” at the unseen driver. Then he flipped backwards, landing on his feet even as the car swerved off the road and collided with a brick wall. Steam rose from beneath its bonnet, and the doors were thrown open. As four uniformed Hellfire Club agents emerged, Nightcrawler dropped into a crouch. He squinted to see past them, to ensure that there was nobody else inside their vehicle. “Sorry,” he said cheerfully, “wrong car!” And he teleported away.
Rogue, meanwhile, had employed similar but more direct tactics. By simply landing in front of another limousine, she had forced it to stop. This car too contained only costumed mercenaries, so she returned to the air, shrugging off their bullets as she chose another target.
Phoenix switched her focus to Storm. The wind-rider was still soaring above the streets, keeping track of all the fleeing cars at once. Phoenix saw them through her eyes. The time of day was working to the X-Men’s advantage: Hong Kong’s morning rush hour was just starting, and the Hellfire Club’s drivers were battling against growing traffic.
Phoenix drew Wolverine’s attention to a cluster of three black cars, which hadn’t yet been able to get away from each other. “Already on it, darlin’!” he responded. He took another corner, wide, and then threw the steering wheel hard right. With a squeal of tires and an odor of burnt rubber, the cab stopped almost within its own length, and turned sideways, effectively blocking the road. Almost immediately, a black limousine rammed into its back end, in an attempt to knock it out of its way. The cab conceded a quarter-turn, but it wasn’t enough to clear a space for the larger vehicle. The limousine backed up, stopped, surged forwards again and mounted the sidewalk, scattering a knot of pedestrians.
By this time, the four X-Men had spilled out of the battered taxicab, and Cyclops lifted his glasses and took out the rogue vehicle’s nearside tires with two well-placed optic blasts. Phoenix knew he was sparing a thought for the onlookers, who were beginning to panic. He wished this situation could have been handled more discreetly.
Further up the road, two more black limousines were trapped by the gridlock they had created. Iceman and Wolverine made towards them, the former ‘icing up’ and creating a slide for himself, the latter bounding, animal-like, across the roofs of the intervening cars. As he did so, he pulled off his shirt and flung it to one side, revealing the top half of his costume underneath.
Phoenix checked in with Storm again. She had swooped down to deal with a limousine that had almost escaped onto an open road. A precisely controlled bolt of lightning burnt out its engine, with a pyrotechnic display that was impressive but safe. Nightcrawler, meanwhile, had emptied another car in his own inimitable way. Phoenix searched Storm’s memories for her most recent sighting of the next nearest vehicle, and directed Kurt towards it.
A particularly reckless driver had failed to brake at the sight of Rogue in his path. Phoenix felt her bracing herself for the impact, and watched from afar as the front half of the limousine hit her and came off worse. Metal crumpled, glass shattered, and now Rogue could see into the car. The Beast wasn’t present. Nor, the X-Men now knew, was he in any of the three cars stopped by Phoenix’s party.
Four Hellfire Club agents had attacked Cyclops, but they hadn’t been a threat to him. He had taken out three of them, and Jean seized the fourth telekinetically, making him drop his gun and freezing him to the spot. She was about to enter his mind, to see what he knew about the whereabouts of her teammate, when Wolverine’s voice popped into her head: No need for that, Red. I already handled it; used the traditional method. She turned, to see that Wolverine had pinned an agent to the side of his car, and was holding a claw to his throat. McCoy was at the club all right. Took off with Tessa and Fitzroy, but none of these mooks know where they were headed. Got some useful information, though-and a hunch to try out. Rogue?
I’m here, sugar, came the response through the psi-link.
Give me a lift, would you darling?
On my way!
A thought flashed through Cyclops’s mind, so briefly that nobody but Phoenix could have known about it. He was suppressing a mild irritation at Wolverine, for going his own way rather than following orders. But he also knew that Wolverine’s ‘own way’ was often very effective. Jean distracted him by relaying the news, from Storm, that there were only four cars left to search. Ororo was taking one, Nightcrawler another. Phoenix sent Iceman towards the third: with his ice slides, he could make good time. She levitated herself and Cyclops, and they passed over the heads of the confused and frightened crowd below, in the hope of intercepting the fourth. From this vantage point, she could see that several police cars were trying to fight their way through the snarled traffic towards them.
Rogue landed beside Wolverine, and he jumped onto her back, wrapping his arms and legs around her. She took to the air again, her Canadian teammate guiding her path. Phoenix listened in on his thoughts again, just long enough to know that he was directing her towards a small private airfield, a short way to the north.
Stepping through one of Trevor Fitzroy’s portals was like being immersed in a split-second nightmare. The Beast felt cold and prickly, and he had an overwhelming sense of foreboding-and then it was gone, like a dream exposed to the daylight, and he wasn’t sure he could even remember or describe the sensation any more. He wondered what manner of terrible realms the young mutant had to pass through, in order
to bend real space as he did.
Hank ran across tarmac, with Tessa in front of him and Fitzroy behind, watching his every move. They reached a black helicopter and climbed into the front seat, Fitzroy taking the controls and Hank sandwiched between the two members of the Hellfire Club. Within seconds, the blades were rotating and the chopper was rising into the air. Less than two minutes later, they had swung out over the North Pacific Ocean. Hank looked down at the vast field of shimmering blue beneath him, and realized that there was no going back now.
“Worried yet?” asked Fitzroy, with a sly grin. “It’s gonna be harder than you thought for your pals in the X-Men to follow you, isn’t it?”
Hank didn’t answer, but Tessa spoke up in a quiet voice, which betrayed no trace of alarm. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Mr. Fitzroy. I’m reading the mental signatures of two people, about a mile behind us and closing. They’re flying.”
Fitzroy’s expression was a mixture of surprise and anger; Hank would have found it quite comical, had it not been for the butterflies in his stomach. A part of him felt that he ought to have been relieved, but his overall reaction was one of disappointment and disbelief. They couldn’t have found him. Not yet. Not until he had a few more answers. He wasn’t ready.
“I knew it,” snapped Fitzroy. “I told you this was a trap.”
“This has nothing to do with me, I can assure you,” Hank rumbled. “I can only assume that my colleagues discovered our method of decampment on their own initiative.”
“One of the mercenaries must have talked,” said Tessa.
“They’re trained to keep silent,” argued Fitzroy, “and they know nothing about the island.”
“But they do know the location of the airfield,” said Tessa, reasonably.
“And some of my friends can be remarkably persuasive,” Hank muttered.
Tessa was punching instructions into a black, futuristic console, which was plugged into the helicopter’s instrument panel. A tiny LCD screen lit up, but at first it showed nothing more than a flat expanse of light blue. As Tessa continued to tap away, Hank realized that he was looking at the output of a rear-mounted video camera, which soon found its targets. Two figures jerked into view on the screen, in low resolution: Rogue was flying through the clear sky, her face set into a determined expression, Wolverine on her back.
“Pursuit confirmed,” said Tessa. “Mr. Fitzroy, I think we need your particular skills.”
“You mean—?”
“They can’t follow us through one of your portals.”
Fitzroy hesitated for less than a second. Then he grinned, took his hands off the controls, and furrowed his brow in concentration. The air in front of them split open, forming another circular gateway, much bigger than the one that had taken them to the airfield. Hank steeled himself as the helicopter plunged into it. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again he could almost have believed that nothing had happened. The sky was still in front of him, the ocean still beneath. The view seemed completely unchanged.
Then Fitzroy brought the helicopter around, and Hank saw two familiar figures: Rogue and Wolverine, just as the miniature view-screen had shown them, but seen from behind now and much, much closer.
“Fitzroy, what do you think you’re doing?” Tessa didn’t raise her voice, but she couldn’t conceal her alarm. “You were supposed to take us straight to the facility.”
“I had a better idea. This way, we get two X-Men out of our hair for good.”
The Beast realized what he had in mind. “No!” he cried, lunging towards him, trying to knock his hands from the controls, but he was too late. The helicopter bucked, as two sleek missiles shot out from somewhere beneath the cockpit. They streaked into Hank’s vision, trailing white smoke. Rogue was still reacting to the helicopter’s unexpected appearance; by the time she started to take evasive action, the missiles were almost upon her.
“This wasn’t part of the deal, Fitzroy!” Hank shouted. “If either of them are hurt—”
“You’ll do what?” mocked Fitzroy. “You’ve already reneged on the deal, McCoy. But guess what? You still get to see the Black King, and to help him with the project. I think you’ll find that we can be just as ‘persuasive’ as your friends.”
Hank clenched his fists impotently, and held his breath. His heart sank as Rogue threw herself out of the missiles’ path, only for them to turn and find her again. They were heat-seekers. She managed to lose one of them, by taking a turn so tight that it couldn’t follow. But she had no chance against the other.
It was all over in seconds. Hank didn’t see the impact, because the white smoke had billowed up around the helicopter, but he saw the flash and heard the bang of a tremendous explosion, and he felt the cockpit rocking so fiercely that Fitzroy had to fight just to keep them in the air.
As they finally emerged into clear skies again, Hank looked around desperately for a trace of his two teammates. There was nothing.
Wolverine twisted his body in midair, and hit the Pacific Ocean headfirst, breath held, his arms outstretched ahead of him like a champion diver. Even so, the impact from such a height was like smacking into concrete. Had it not been for his adamantium-laced skeleton, he would have been smashed unconscious. As it was, the shock to his system was enough to daze him, and to force air out of his mouth in a frenzy of bubbles.
The metal in his bones dragged him towards the seabed, but, in a way, this was a blessing, because otherwise he would have had no idea which way was up. The water was icily cold, and, despite the insulation provided by his costume-and the jeans that he still wore over it—his healing factor had its work cut out for it just staving off hypothermia and preventing his body from shutting itself down.
He struck out with strong, tireless arms, but his lungs had begun to ache and it seemed like an eternity before he finally broke the surface. He took two great, rasping breaths, pedaled frantically to keep himself afloat, and picked up the sound of the Hellfire Club’s departing helicopter with his ultra-sensitive ears. The vehicle was a diminishing speck on the horizon. He would worry about it later. Right now, satisfied that he wasn’t about to die yet, he turned his thoughts to the plight of his teammate.
As the missiles had streaked towards them, as Rogue had realized she couldn’t avoid them both, she had hurled her passenger away from her, as far and as fast as she could. Wolverine had had no choice in the matter. Hurtling towards the ocean, he had been forced to concentrate on his own survival. He had winced inwardly at the almost deafening sound of an explosion above and behind him. A blast of hot air had buffeted him, throwing him yet further away from Rogue. She had saved his life, but at what cost to herself?
Wolverine had an excellent sense of space. Even in free-fall, he had thought to check the position of the sun, and to run some quick calculations in his head. He knew roughly how far he had been thrown, and in which direction. Without pausing for rest, he launched himself into a powerful front crawl, until he was directly below the spot where he and Rogue had parted company. He took a few more strokes, to account for the fact that she would have been flying away from him for a second before the impact, then he brought up his legs, lowered his head and dropped beneath the waves again.
But he could see nothing-and, as he dropped still further, and the water around him became darker and dirtier, and his lungs began to hurt again, he realized that he was probably wasting his time. He had glanced back, trying to see Rogue in the air, to fix her position, an instant after the big bang-but he had been dazzled by the flare, and then it had been too late. He knew where to begin his search, but he could only guess where the Southern X-Man might have been flung by the missile’s detonation.
She was tough, he reminded himself. She had the nearinvulnerability of his old friend Carol Danvers, from back when she was Ms. Marvel. And Carol’s powers had come from the Kree, and were nothing to sneeze at. But even if she had survived the missile attack, she would be in no state to fend for herself in these f
rigid waters.
Again and again, Wolverine returned to the surface for fresh oxygen. Each time, he hoped against hope to see the shape of his friend against the waves. He wanted to know that she had made it up here by herself, that she wasn’t unconscious and sinking slowly into the depths. Each time, he was bitterly disappointed.
He continued searching for minutes after common-sense told him that, if Rogue was still down there somewhere, then she couldn’t be alive. He returned to the surface again, exhausted, and in no condition to consider undertaking the long swim back to the shore.
He trod water, waited for the rest of the X-Men to rescue him and swore that, if Rogue really was dead, then he would make the Hellfire Club pay.
“Nightcrawler? Nightcrawler! Kurt, are you all right?”
Nightcrawler took a deep breath, and something caught in his throat. He doubled up, his stomach aching, and coughed water out of his lungs. Wheezing, he opened his eyes, and blinked away dark blotches to find himself looking up at the roof of the Blackbird’s main cabin. He was sprawled across the floor, and Rogue was bending over him, concern in her eyes. Iceman was behind her, and Phoenix and Cyclops were up in the cockpit. Nightcrawler could hear the engines, and feel that the plane was in flight.
“I’m fine,” he panted. “Just need to catch my breath, that’s all.” He hauled himself into a sitting position, leaning back against the base of a seat, and Rogue reached out a gloved hand to help him. His costume, he realized, was wet. Soaked through. Somebody had wrapped a thick towel around his shoulders. He could taste salt on his tongue.
“Easy there,” said Rogue, and a guilty expression crossed her face. “You’ve taken enough knocks already on my account.” She didn’t look too healthy herself. Her face was pale, her hair was plastered down on her head and her voice was more subdued than normal.
“Not at all, Fraulein,” Kurt assured her, chivalrously. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, composing himself as the pain in his guts receded. “All for one, and all that.”
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 14
