I know he did it for the right reasons, thought Cyclops grimly, I know he thought it was better to have a cure to the Legacy Virus exist in the hands of somebody like Shaw than to have no cure at all. But look around you, Jean. Look at what Selene did with that cure!
None of this was Hank’s fault, Phoenix protested. He couldn’t have foreseen Selene’s involvement. That cure was meant to save the world. A hint of bitterness had entered her internal voice. So many people worked so hard to achieve something good, something worthwhile, and it only took one—just one-to take that work, that hope, and to twist it into something evil. It makes me wonder if we aren’t pursuing an impossible dream after all.
Impossible, maybe, returned Cyclops, but I still think it’s a dream worth fighting for.
Two figures stood atop a Sixth Avenue skyscraper.
Up here among the rooftops of New York, the world was white, dominated by the shifting energies of the Black Queen’s mystical force field. That field, however, provided no protection from an icy Winter wind, although the two figures were hardly aware of the cold. Their gazes were fixed upon the X-Men and their allies as they wended their way through the concrete canyons below them. They were a long way down; far enough that even Wolverine could not have caught scent of their secret observers. To normal eyes, they would have resembled nothing more than a procession of unusually colorful ants. These watchers, however, could make out every detail in their expressions, see every tear in their costumes and read eveiy word on their lips.
“Seven X-Men in all,” said the female observer in a voice devoid of emotion, “accompanied by Shaw and the rebel known as Sage.” “So Fitzroy defeated none of them.” The man’s voice was deeper, tinged with menace. It also betrayed a grim satisfaction at the failure of his colleague. “Perhaps now Selene will see the folly of inviting that young upstart into our Circle.”
“Fitzroy is impatient,” said the woman. “That has ever been his downfall.”
“Whereas we, my dear,” said the man, “have finally tracked our foes to their lair.”
On the street below, Sage was ushering her comrades into an abandoned subway station. They hurried down the stone steps in single file, glancing fiirtively around them but failing to notice two dark specks four blocks to their north and eighty stories above them.
“The Black Rook falls,” said the woman, her voice remaining as cold as ever, “but the Black Bishops move in for the kill.”
THE BEAST was only dimly aware of the sounds of destruction at first. He could hear explosions, but they seemed a long way dis-
_tant. But the sounds became louder and closer until he couldn’t
ignore them any more. He surfaced from sleep, already throwing the covers from his bed as he swung his oversized feet to the floor. He was acting without conscious thought, his years of training kicking in and taking over his body, reacting to the first sign of danger. He had already yanked open the door of the dormitory when his brain caught up with his actions, his memories falling into place in a way that was becoming depressingly familiar.
The Hellfire Club. The Kree island. The Legacy Virus. The radiation treatments.
And now, his teammate Iceman stumbled backwards into him, hands raised as he struggled to fight off a seeming horde of demons with his ice-generating powers.
“Oh, my stars and garters!” exclaimed the Beast. Instinctively he leapt away, rolling into an alert squatting position in one corner of the room, ready to defend himself as he took stock of the situation. The demons were wearing Hellfire Club uniforms, which presumably made them agents of Selene. They crowded into the doorway after Iceman, fighting each other to be the first through but flinching from a bombardment of dart-shaped hailstones.
And that was when the side-effects of Hank’s treatment crashed back in upon him. His display of athleticism had been a mistake. His stomach cramped and he was almost overcome by a dizzying rush to his head. He had been balancing on the balls of his toes, but he rocked back onto his heels and almost fell over. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, and heard Iceman’s frantic voice: “Hank, you’ve got to get out of here!”
“Gladly,” he responded tartly, knowing that the room had only one door. “And what manner of egress did you have in mind, pray?”
“The demons have bombs, but they aren’t using them around here.” Iceman tried to seal the doorway, but his attackers smashed through his ice barrier before it could harden. “They’ve been doing their best to get into this room. They want you, Hank.” Three demons closed in upon him, their claws raised, forcing him to fall back again. He made a circular ice shield for himself and used it to fend off their blows.
A fourth demon set its eyes upon the Beast, and an expression of malicious glee lit its crack-skinned features. With an unearthly howl, it pounced upon him. He couldn’t get out of its way—he didn’t trust his weakened body not to betray him—so he blocked its lunge with the room’s only chair, which splintered into pieces.
It took him a moment to deduce what Selene might want from him. His illness, he chided himself, must have slowed down his brain as well as his body. She wanted the blood that flowed through his veins: the blood that might yet prove to contain the precious cure to the Legacy Virus. But if he was taken from the Kree base now, if he was denied further radiation treatments, then the prognosis for his recovery was not at all hopeful.
Another explosion, much closer than the others, shook the room around him. His skin flushed cold as he realized that it had come from the direction of the laboratory.
Iceman had fallen. Without his conscious mind to regulate its temperature, his body armor was beginning to seep into the floor. The demons-about a dozen of them in all—crowded into the small room, and the Beast found himself backed up against the far wall, wielding a broken chair leg like a sword. To his surprise, the oncoming creatures hesitated as if waiting to see what he would do.
He summoned up all his remaining strength, threw the stick as a diversion and took a prodigious standing leap. He bounced off two heads, leapt over another six, handed off two more, performed a double somersault and landed behind the demons, the unguarded door in his sights. For an instant, hope soared in his heart-but then, as he had feared, he was engulfed by another wave of nausea. Stars exploded in front of his eyes and his legs almost buckled. He reeled, and suddenly the demons were upon him, clawing and biting as they bore him down to the floor.
A fresh emotion surged through him. He had been so close to curing the Legacy Virus at last, to saving countless lives, and now these monsters-and the bigger monster who had sent them-were taking that from him, from the world. The Beast was angry, and that anger lent him strength. Temporarily powered by adrenaline, he let out a primal scream, lashed out with his fists and feet and scored a series of palpable hits. For a minute or more, the demons couldn’t lay a hand upon him. They were in disarray, struggling to restrain their foe but falling over each other, being tossed about like leaves in a hurricane.
It couldn’t last. The Beast was overwhelmed by a combination of force of numbers and exhaustion. His arms became heavier until they felt impossible to lift, and his eyes lost focus until he couldn’t see where he was aiming his blows anyway. His anger drained away until it was only a small voice inside him railing against the injustice of Fate.
And the world turned black around him, and stayed that way for a long time.
Moira MacTaggert heard the explosion as she was straining to push a lab bench—a huge block of solid metal—across the laboratory. She dropped behind it for protection as the large double doors strained inward-but thankfully, the heavy bolts held. To the naked eye, the doors appeared to be constructed from the same dull gray metal as the rest of the alien base, but it made sense that they would have been reinforced somehow.
The blast had deadened her ears, and she didn’t hear Rory Campbell hobbling up behind her. She started as he spoke to her. “I’ve got the cover off the ventilation duct!” he shouted, obviously suffering f
rom temporary deafness himself. He jerked his head toward the small annex in which he had been working. “I suggest we get out of here!”
Moira shook her head. “Not yet. Not while we can still slow yon beasties down at least!” She glanced across the room to where a ribbon of paper was being churned out of a narrow horizontal slit in the wall. At the first sign of the demon attack, she had instructed the Kree computer to print out the contents of its genetics database. But there was too much information and not nearly enough time. “Come on,” she said, leaping back to her feet, “help me get this bench up against those doors.”
“This is madness!” protested Campbell, but he did as he was told. He had lived and worked with Moira once, before his defection to the Hellfire Club, and he knew that it was rarely worth the effort of arguing with her. “You see what their bombs did downstairs. How long will this delay them-a few seconds?”
“Right now,” said Moira grimly, “I’ll take all the seconds we can get. We’ve worked too long and hard on this cure, made too many sacrifices, to let it be destroyed now.”
The lab bench scraped and squealed reluctantly across the metal floor. Moira’s leg muscles ached with the effort of pushing it, and her shoulder felt numb. She gasped with relief as it slid into place at last, but there was no time to relax. She had hoped that the demons would have withdrawn after placing their explosives-or that they might have collapsed the corridor outside, blocking their route to the laboratory altogether-but they were already skittering and scratching about on the other side of the doors again.
The two geneticists had barely had time to push a second bench up against the first when they heard the sound of footsteps pattering away. They were prepared, then-crouched behind the benches, fingers in their ears—when the next explosion came. This time, both doors were blown off their hinges; they buckled, but the benches held them in place. The eager demons returned within seconds, and twisted claws pried their way between doors and frame. Moira and Campbell pushed against the benches with all their might, but they were fighting a losing battle. Slowly but inexorably, they were forced to give way.
Abandoning the unequal struggle, Moira shed her white lab coat to reveal a yellow and black bodysuit. The contrast summed up the dichotomy of her life: as a physician she was trained to heal, but her public association with mutants meant that she often had to fight instead. Resigned to this fact, she had trained with the X-Men to ensure that she could at least hold her own in combat.
She looked for a weapon, and found a curved metal bar on the floor. She didn’t know where it had come from—it was just part of the general clutter; for all she knew, it could have been a delicate component of an advanced Kree machine—but it would suit her purpose.
“Get out of here, Roiy!” she yelled as the first demon squeezed itself through the widened gap between the doorway and the erstwhile barrier. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that Campbell was hesitating. Turning on him, she physically propelled him into the annex. “I’m not being noble, you idiot, I’ll be right behind you. But you’re the slowest, so you get to go first. Go! I’ll hold them off as long as I can.”
Easier said than done, she thought wiyly as Campbell accepted her point and left as quickly as his artificial leg would allow. Demons were pouring into the room now; she was only still alive because they were keener to destroy her work than they were to kill her. They were plucking explosive devices from the belts of their Hellfire Club uniforms, scattering them to every comer. Remembering her incomplete printout, Moira ran to it and snatched it from its slot-but even as she tried to fold it into a manageable bundle, a demon leapt at her. She dropped the paper and wielded her bar, delivering a good crack to the fiend’s head. But its companions were beginning to turn their attentions to her.
Stubborn as she was, Moira MacTaggert had the sense to know when discretion was the better part of valor. She backed into the annex, swinging her weapon in front of her to discourage pursuit. Campbell had already got clear, and a ventilator duct lay open at ground level. She threw the metal bar at the nearest demon and hurled herself into the aperture.
She found herself in a cramped, square metal pipe; she could feel claws scrabbling at her feet, trying to hold her back, and she kicked out at them in desperation. Something whimpered, and suddenly she was free. She crawled as fast as she could, bumping her knees and elbows but not daring to slow down because she couldn’t tell if she was being followed. Even as she reached an intersection, she had no choice but to trust to blind luck, to choose a direction at random and pray that it would lead her out of the base.
The pipe trembled and a frerce wave of heat rolled over Moira as the bombs in the laboratory behind her were detonated.
Storm’s eyes were closed, as much to keep herself from seeing the horrors around her as to protect them from the dust that pried its way into her nose and mouth. Still, she couldn’t help but picture the tons of debris that must have fallen upon her. She couldn’t help but think about her childhood home in Cairo, of how quickly it had become a tomb, and of the hours she had spent buried therein, unseen by the over-stretched rescue teams.
As she fought to calm herself, a hopeful voice inside her pointed out that she hadn’t actually felt anything hit her. She was held down nonetheless by something heavy pressed against her body. She was trapped. But the weight, she was surprised to realize, was not cold like stone or metal, it was warm and soft. It shifted in time to the sound of deep breaths that she had thought her own, and to the exhalations of hot air upon her cheek.
Her eyes snapped open, and she gasped to see Sebastian Shaw’s face an inch above hers. His palms lay flat to each side of her head,
his body braced by rigid forearms. His smoking jacket and his hair were almost white, and his features had lost their habitual smugness. “I’m glad to see you’re still with us,” he said with a grim smile. “You protected me?” croaked Storm hopefully, remembering his powers.
“From the force of the fall-in, yes,” said Shaw, “but I am bearing a considerable weight upon my back, and my borrowed energy is draining fast.” His smile had become pained and, squinting through the darkness, Storm saw beads of sweat upon his forehead.
“How long can you keep going?” she asked, dreading the answer. “Twenty minutes, perhaps.”
She slapped him across the face, but it was a feeble blow. Lying on her back like this, with debris piled up around her, she couldn’t manage any better. “I’m afraid,” said Shaw, “it will take a great deal more kinetic force than that to keep my cells charged.”
“Every little,” said Storm hoarsely, “may prolong our lives by precious seconds.” She hit him again-and then a third time, using both hands but grunting with the effort.
“My dear Miss Munroe,” smiled Shaw, “if I didn’t know any better, I would swear you are enjoying this opportunity to assault me.” “What do you expect?” she retorted. “You have been playing games with me ever since I arrived on this island.” As she spoke, Storm reached out with her inner self, finding pockets of air and drawing them towards her, teasing them through hairline cracks in the rubble. A shortage of oxygen could only make Shaw’s task more difficult. She focused upon him, turning her fear into anger, giving herself no time to think about anything else. She set about his arms and shoulders with short, petulant child punches. “If you had not lured me down to the lowest level of your stolen base, we would never have found ourselves in this situation.”
She had managed to whip up a slight breeze, and Shaw’s expression softened appreciatively as it caressed his brow. “We have both survived far direr perils than this,” he reminded her.
“You sound very confident.”
“We have resourceful associates.”
“Most of the X-Men are a long way away.”
“I am assured that a rescue team is on its way.”
“By Tessa?” deduced Storm. Only Shaw’s telepathic personal assistant could have contacted him without her knowing it. “You trust her, don’t
you?”
“Implicitly—and that makes her uniquely special to me.”
Ororo frowned. Her questing senses had found the base’s stairwell, which, to judge by its air currents, was still largely open. She tried to summon some of that relatively fresh air to her, but it felt damp and heavy. A terrible fear struck her—and a moment later, her ears confirmed it as the truth. “Goddess!” she whispered.
“I wondered when you would hear it,” said Shaw. The lines around his eyes had deepened and, with his dust-white hair, he suddenly looked like a much older man.
“The base is flooding!” Storm’s voice was little more than a squeak. She was beginning to hyperventilate. Don’t think about it! She gritted her teeth and pummeled Shaw with renewed zeal, as if hoping to make him strong enough to smash a tunnel out of here with his bare fists.
“You must try to relax,” he said in a calm but forceful tone. “We can do nothing about the rising waters, but we don’t need to exhaust our air supply faster than you can replenish it.”
“A week ago,” said Storm, still breathing heavily, “you had your Black Rook, Madelyne Piyor, delve into my thoughts and use my claustrophobia against me. Now you presume to advise me on how I should cope with my weakness? I don’t know how to react to you, Shaw—and that is becoming a familiar dilemma.”
“Believe me, Ororo,” he insisted, “we are not going to die here.” His dark eyes glistened as he added: “And once we are freed, I will expect an answer to my proposal.”
Bobby Drake slept soundly, his subconscious mind swathing him in protective dreams of his boyhood home back on Long Island with his parents. A small part of him was aware of a woman’s voice telling him to wake up, but he refused to acknowledge it.
The voice became more insistent, almost painful, and Bobby realized that he couldn’t shut it out because it was already inside his head. Jean Grey wandered into his dream in her Phoenix guise with her radiant smile, but hers was not the telepathic presence he had sensed.
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 33
