“It won’t make a difference,” she insisted, out loud. “You think that, with me out of the way, you can just waltz in and replace me again? It won’t happen, lady. Not this time.”
Madelyne was nose to nose with Jean now, and the X-Man braced herself for an attack, trying to clear her mind. “I’m putting things right,” snarled the Black Rook, “putting things back the way they should be. Me up there, and you down here.”
And suddenly, the world itself twisted around Jean, and the rock wall behind her reached out to push her onto a walkway, which bucked and rotated beneath her. She tried to steady herself, but a gargoyle flew at her, its grotesque face leering at her and its stone wings beating in front of her eyes, and she couldn’t hold on.
It all happened in an instant. She had no time to react, to fight back. Jean Grey couldn’t even draw breath to scream, as she was plunged into the fire.
“Mr. Shaw? Sebastian?”
Tessa leaned forward in her seat and waved a hand in front of her employer’s eyes. He was sitting behind his desk, elbows resting upon its metallic top, fingers pressed together in front of his mouth, and his thoughts had evidently drifted far from this basic underground office. Tessa was used to seeing him in a contemplative mood, but rarely this distracted.
He focussed back upon her, shifted his position and smiled slightly, as if trying to show her that everything was all right, that he was still in control.
“There isn’t a problem is there, sir?” she asked. “Nothing I should know about? I thought everything was going according to plan now.” “Inasmuch as it can,” he sighed, “with the X-Men here. They may be helpless for now, but they do have a rather irritating penchant for throwing spanners into my works. Perhaps Fitzroy was right. Perhaps it would be safer to kill them.”
“You still need Doctor McCoy’s cooperation,” she reminded him. “Do I? Perhaps it’s time to accept that the risks of having the Beast around outweigh the benefits. Doctor Campbell and the others may be able to complete his work now.”
“But what if they cannot?”
“You’re right,” conceded Shaw. “I can’t take that chance. 1 want this cure, Tessa, and I won’t allow my enemies to keep it from me. Not even for a day.” He looked at her sharply. “If we could tell McCoy that his teammates were here ...”
She shook her head. “No. Not until he’s ready. We discussed this before, sir. The Beast isn’t sure enough of his own motives. If he talks to his friends now, they will almost certainly dissuade him from helping us.”
Sebastian seemed to accept this point, but Tessa could sense his impatience seething just below the surface. “We can do nothing, then, but wait,” he concluded, “and hope that time proves to be on our side. Madelyne has assured me that she can keep our guests in line for as long as may be necessary.”
A look of distaste crossed Tessa’s face, before she could stop it. Sebastian saw it, and regarded her through hooded eyes. “You don’t care much for our Black Rook, do you?”
The comment surprised her. He knew full well her feelings about both Pryor and Fitzroy—and Selene, for that matter—but he had never brought up the subject openly before. This project meant a lot to him, she realized, and his anxiety was prompting this unusually reflective mood of his. She decided to take full advantage of the opportunity. “No,” she said. “She’ll betray you, Sebastian. She’ll turn on you, like they all do.”
“Perhaps.”
“She’s using you. She’s only interested in becoming the Black Queen in Selene’s absence. Once she has that, she’ll have no further use for you.”
Sebastian didn’t argue. He seemed to consider her words for a moment, then the metaphorical shutters came back down over his eyes, and Tessa knew he would pay no further heed to her advice. Perhaps, at least, he would think about what she had said. She got to her feet. “If there’s nothing else, sir, I thought I might take a walk downstairs myself, make sure everything is as it should be.”
Sebastian nodded. “Yes. A good idea, Tessa. Leave me to my thoughts.”
She did so, wondering as she walked briskly through the Kree installation whether she had told him anything he hadn’t already known. Sebastian might have let Madelyne Pryor into his bed, but his heart was far more carefully guarded.
The exasperating thing was that it didn’t seem to bother him. It was as if he was happier knowing that Madelyne probably was plotting behind his back, because at least he could understand that. He could relate to her, deal with her, predict her actions, more easily than he could with an altruist like Moira MacTaggert. They were kindred spirits.
On the base’s lowest level, Tessa passed two Hellfire Club guards and opened three doors one by one, checking inside three small, cubic rooms. Each one was devoid of furniture. In the first, Wolverine, Rogue and Storm were sprawled across the floor, all still unconscious. Wolverine’s muscles were twitching, and he was muttering curses under his breath. Rogue was rolled into a ball, sobbing. The second room was occupied by Cyclops, Nightcrawler and Iceman. Their positions hadn’t changed at all since she had last looked in on them.
In the third and final room, Phoenix lay on her side, also out cold. Beside her, sitting cross-legged on the hard, metal floor, was Madelyne Piyor.
The Black Rook’s eyes were closed too, but she was smiling.
The flames licked around Jean, but didn’t burn her skin.
She rose on a column of hot air, to face her tormentor. Behind her, one of the stone walkways exploded; her doing, more for effect than for any practical reason.
“The Phoenix rises from the flames,” noted Madelyne. “How apposite!” And indeed, Jean was now wearing her Phoenix costume again.
“Did you think you could fool me?” she cried. “Did you think I wouldn’t realize where we were, what this place is? The astral plane was my domain long before you came along!” She was angry, mostly with herself. She really hadn’t put two and two together before now, which was almost unforgivable for someone of her experience. Her only excuse was that her head was still pounding, and she wasn’t thinking straight. She had to pull herself together.
“Your domain no longer,” hissed Madelyne. “You’ve been unconscious for a long while, Jeannie.” She said the name with a snarl. “While your mind was hiding itself in its protective shell, I was making preparations. You aren’t fighting on home turf any more.” She gestured with one hand, and another walkway uprooted itself and crumbled into fragments, which flew toward her enemy’s head. Phoenix concentrated, stealing their momentum until they hovered in midair. Then she reversed their direction, and sent the makeshift missiles toward their creator, but Madelyne disintegrated them without apparent effort.
Phoenix feared that her doppelganger had a point. Here, in the virtual realm, the power of the mind was all that counted-and she was still groggy, dazed from her battle with the Kree Sentry, whereas Madelyne was fresh and hungry and ready for this. Jean could already feel stone fists closing around her ankles, pulling her down, and she had to fight to remain aloft. If she fell into the fire again, if Madelyne gained the upper hand, then the flames might scorch her this time. They might even kill her.
“You’re all alone, Jeannie,” taunted Madelyne. “No Nathan Grey or Scott Summers to help you this time. No one to save you.”
“My teammates. What have you done to them?”
“Imprisoned them,” she said, with a boastful laugh. “I’ve trapped them in self-defeating mental prisons of their own creation. Their cells are the products of their own imaginations, their own fears. They don’t believe they can ever break free, and so they won’t. It would never have worked on you, though. You required my personal attention.” Phoenix had been pulled down almost into the flames again—but by giving her foe an opportunity to gloat about her own cleverness, she had gained time to compose herself. The certainty that she would never have fallen for such an obvious ploy herself, that she wasn’t vain enough, also comforted her and gave her strength. Madelyne Pryor wasn’t
like her at all.
“You may have wormed your way into my mind,” she swore, “but you’ll never defeat me here!” She was taking control now. She could feel everything around her, every molecule in the cave walls, every flicker from the fires below. She could feel them, and manipulate them according to her own desires. She was all-powerful, invincible. It was a heady, exultant sensation, and she almost lost herself in it as she freed herself and reshaped Madelyne’s own flames, directing them to raze her world of thoughts to the ground.
And then, the Black Rook hit her with a mental image: herself, as Madelyne Pryor was seeing her now. A fierce creature in human form, its face dark but its eyes alight with lust, as it hovered in the center of a shape sculpted from the flames themselves: a fiery phoenix, like the one upon her chest. The symbol of the force that had once consumed her. No, she told herself, almost desperately, not me! And this image isn’t real. This is Madelyne’s doing.
An image from your thoughts, an image from mine. Does it make any difference?
“Yes!” she screamed, and the twisted walls cracked open. Water cascaded into the cavern, putting out the flames, as Jean Grey—and her clothes were Jean Grey’s again now—leapt at Madelyne Pryor, and knocked her over with the sheer force of her will.
The walls around them had dropped, the fire had been extinguished and they were clinging to a sturdy rock for dear life, lashing out at each other as and when they could, swept along in the deluge. “You hate me so much,” snarled Madelyne. “You wish to deny me my very existence. But I’m a part of you, witch. I’m inside you. That’s why you can’t face me. And it’s why you’ll never beat me, never be rid of me!”
“You’re wrong. You’re twisted. I won’t become like you. I can’t become like you!”
“Like me? Or like the Phoenix? You’ve even taken its name for yourself. It’s inside you, Jeannie. The taint is inside you. I know it, you know it.”
They were pitched onto a muddy bank, and the river ran on by them. They grappled with each other in a primeval landscape, the earth dark and wet, jagged forks of lightning sundering the blood-red sky. And although their struggle was, in reality, mental not physical, Jean could feel her heart pounding, her muscles pumping, and adrenaline surging through her system.
“And the longer you deny it,” spluttered Madelyne, choking on mud, “the more strength it will have when you’re finally forced to set it free. Like I was. Like the Phoenix force was.”
Jean slammed her into the ground, winding her, and wrapped her fingers around her throat. She wanted to shut her up, to stop the painful words. Madelyne Pryor wasn’t her. The Phoenix force hadn’t been her. Their crimes, their failings, their hungers had been their own. But the words continued inside her head: Let it out, Jeannie. Give in to your dark side. Become me! And she was no longer sure if they came from Madelyne or from herself.
But she was sure of one thing: that there was only one way to stop them.
Her grip on Madelyne Pryor’s throat tightened.
Rory Campbell had left, to deliver a printed report of the scientists’ encouraging findings to Shaw. The rest of the team had gathered in a small annex off the laboratory where they could relax, fix themselves drinks and talk. Hank hadn’t been invited to join them, and he chose not to gatecrash their celebrations. He sat alone in the lab and listened to the distant mumbling of their voices, their tones more optimistic than he had heard them before. Travers was looking forward to seeing his grandchildren again. Scott just wanted to be reunited with his wife.
Takamoto dampened the mood by reminding them that, as Hank had already said, there was still a long way to go before they held a fully tested cure for the Legacy Virus in their hands. Scott pointed out that at least there was an end in sight now, a chance of surviving this and getting back home. But he sounded considerably less hopeful now.
Hank knew how he felt. After the excitement of a few minutes earlier, reality was beginning to sink in again. He sat on a tall, wooden stool, rubbed his tired eyes and began to really think— because he had run out of excuses not to~about what he was doing here. He remembered what he had said to Rogue, in the Blackbird, on the way back from Newhill to Muir Island: “I pride myself on being a man of words, a man of science—and yet I appear to be most at peace with myself when I can attack a problem with my fists!” His greatest fear had always been that the mutation which had turned his body into that of a beast would eventually do the same to his mind. Was that what was happening here, slowly but surely? Was that what he was doing? Giving up on the intellectual struggle, because he would rather be engaged in a physical one against Sebastian Shaw and his cohorts? What if the X-Men couldn’t do anything and Shaw ended up as the sole possessor of the Legacy cure, as Moira had suggested? The possible ramifications hardly bore thinking about. But were they any worse than the ramifications of doing nothing, of allowing this disease to run rampant?
Even now, with a cure within his reach, Hank ached inside at the knowledge that there was still so much work to do, and that more people would die before it was done.
He looked up as Campbell walked back into the room, Shaw at his side. The Black King was grinning from ear to ear, and Hank wanted to punch the smile off his face. He grimaced and forced himself to overcome the primitive, brutish instinct.
Campbell ran through the computer projections with Shaw, and Hank peered over his shoulder, watching for the fifth time as the black and white blobs fought and neutralized each other. The sight still gave him a thrill of excitement, despite himself.
“Our serum,” Campbell explained to his attentive employer, “works not by targeting the Legacy Virus itself, but rather the very gene it was designed to attack.”
“The mutant gene,” said Shaw.
“Exactly. We aim to give it the ability to fight back.”
“How so?”
“Over a period of several days, the serum-aided by a course of radiation treatments from Kree machinery—will catalyze a fresh mutation in the gene, evolving it into a kind of super-cell, which in turn will sponge up the virus and overwrite its effects on the DNA sequences, before regressing to its original state. That’s what these graphics represent.”
“A complete cure, then,” mused Shaw. “With no side-effects?” “None at all.”
“At least,” Hank interjected, “that’s the theory.”
“But the computer,” said Campbell, “predicts a 100% likelihood of success.”
“The outlook is promising, I grant you,” said Hank, “but no computer, not even an alien one, can fully predict all the effects of a serum like this one on the human body. We will have to conduct an extensive battery of tests.”
Shaw shook his head. “We don’t have time.”
“We don’t have a choice!”
Shaw turned back to Campbell with a thoughtful expression. “Are you telling me this serum of yours will only work on somebody with the mutant gene?”
“Initially, yes. Indeed, it has to be a mutant who has only recently contracted Legacy. His DNA still has to be relatively uncorrupted for the serum to stand a chance of working.”
“However,” said Hank, “once we have facilitated the development of this super-cell within our first patient, we can isolate it before it burns itself out, and reproduce it in a laboratory.”
“That way,” said Campbell, “we can short-circuit the process in future patients by injecting the super-cell directly into the bloodstream.”
Hank took up the baton again. “By which means, we ought to be able to cure those in whom the disease is more advanced-along with baseline humans, of course.”
Shaw nodded curtly. “I’ve heard enough, gentlemen. So, what we need now is a mutant test subject, correct?”
Hank narrowed his eyes. “I don’t think you were listening closely enough, Shaw. We aren’t ready to try out the serum on a living being. The possible consequences—”
“The certain consequences of delay,” Shaw interrupted, “are that people will die.
This isn’t up for discussion, Doctor McCoy. I will not wait any longer than I have to.”
“Perhaps we could find a volunteer,” said Campbell, trying to keep the peace. “I mean, it’s difficult to identify Legacy in its earliest stages, I know, but if we could find someone—”
Hank shook his head, still glaring at Shaw. “But it might be a long search. No, Doctor Campbell, I don’t think that’s what our impatient benefactor has in mind at all. I think he’d rather save time by creating a suitable guinea-pig for us. Isn’t that right, Shaw?”
“You mean ...” Campbell glanced at Shaw, nervously. “You mean by infecting a healthy mutant with Legacy?”
“What’s wrong, Doctor Campbell?” asked Hank. “He’s already infected three humans, without appearing to distress you unduly.”
“I didn’t know ...” stammered Campbell, looking between Hank and Shaw, obviously wanting to refute the allegation but not sure if he should speak out in front of his employer. “I mean, I didn’t know he was going to ... to ... I didn’t approve ..Until now, Campbell had gone about his work in a resigned, businesslike fashion. Only now did Hank realize that he must share his own deep reservations, at least to an extent.
“It’s your choice, gentlemen,” said Shaw abruptly, heading for the door. “By chance, I happen to have seven suitable subjects for experimentation housed in this very base, should you require them. Alternatively, you have four hours to explain how else you intend to deliver a working cure to me within the next fortnight.”
“Seven subjects?” Hank repeated, feeling a sudden sense of dread, which quickly turned into anger. He had been lied to again. “Shaw!”
Shaw paused in the doorway and looked directly back at Hank, a malevolent gleam in his eye. “But that’s your deadline, gentlemen. Four hours, no longer. And then, we’ll do it my way. We’ll test your serum on a member of the X-Men.”
Iceman was cramped and restless, and becoming more anxious by the minute. He paced up and down, and walked impatiently around the small circular platform-but he had precious little space, and he could only succeed in making himself dizzy.
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 21
