“Sounds perfect,” said Rogue.
“So long as you don’t go ’porting into a tree,” cautioned Wolverine.
Nightcrawler nodded grimly. For him, this was the most dangerous part of Rogue’s plan. Such a long-distance teleport would be a strain, but it was perfectly feasible; what worried him was that, without a precise idea of the layout of his destination, he could easily materialize inside something else. In that case, he would suffer a quick but agonizing death.
He frxed his sights upon a particular spot at the top of the distant cliff edge. He tried to visualize it from all angles, to reconstruct the site inside his head. It would have been better to appear further into the trees, but it would also have been much riskier. This way, he would be visible to any onlookers for a second before he could take cover. Reaching through his illusory light-colored suit and into a pouch in his red fighting tunic, Nightcrawler thumbed off the image inducer and revealed his true form. Another side-effect of his mutant gene was that he became almost invisible when cast into shadow; it was just the advantage he needed.
“Good luck,” said Iceman, crossing the fingers of both hands.
Nightcrawler took a deep breath, concentrated on the place in his mind and envisaged himself there. His ears were momentarily deadened by a pop of imploding air, and his nostrils assailed by the stench of brimstone that always accompanied his teleports: another cruel irony. He sprinted through a cloud of dark smoke and into the trees; he didn’t even give himself time to feel relieved that he had reached Genosha in one piece.
Picking out a tree with particularly dense foliage, Nightcrawler took a prodigious leap onto its trunk and scuttled into its uppermost branches, narrowing his headlamp eyes lest they betray his presence. He prayed that such precautions would prove unnecessary-but to his dismay, he soon heard footsteps approaching.
A mutate passed beneath him, the top of his head just a few feet below Nightcrawler’s perch. He looked scrawny and malnourished, his green uniform hanging off him like rags from a scarecrow: he was probably ill with Legacy. His lips were pinched and his expression haunted. He moved slowly, uncertainly. Perhaps he only suspected that he had heard or seen something. . . .
But as he passed Nightcrawler’s hiding place, the mutate faltered and sniffed the air. He cocked his head to one side suspiciously, and Kurt realized that, like Wolverine, he had the ability to detect another person’s scent.
Inwardly cursing his luck, he sprang from his hiding place and somersaulted to land feet-first on his would-be hunter’s neck. Fortunately, as his appearance had suggested, the mutate had not been blessed with great physical defenses. He emitted a tiny, high-pitched groan and collapsed into the undergrowth. Nightcrawler stooped beside him and checked his pulse. He was alive, but he would be out for a while at least.
Time was of the essence now. The mutate had a belt-mounted radio handset, and it couldn’t be too long before he was expected to report in. Nightcrawler listened for a moment, but heard nothing to suggest that there were more sentries about. Moving quickly but lightly on his feet, darting from tree to tree, he made his way back to the cliff edge.
With the moon behind him and the lights of Hammer Bay some way down the coast to his left, he couldn’t see the X-Men’s boat on the sea—but he knew it was out there. He teleported again, more confidently this time, aiming for a point some four feet above the one from which he had started out. As he had expected, he materialized above cold, dark water: the boat had been anchored, but it had still drifted a short way on its chain since he had left it. Before gravity could take hold of him, he got a fix on its new position and vanished again to reappear neatly beside his teammates.
“One guard,” he reported. “I was forced to deal with him.”
“Did he get a look at you?” asked Wolverine. Nightcrawler shook his head.
“Either way,” said Rogue, “the sooner we get back over there, the better.” She removed a long black glove, and gave Nightcrawler an apologetic look. “You ready for this, sugar?”
“When you are,” he replied, trying to sound cheerful.
As bad as this would be for him, he knew it would be far, far worse for her.
Rogue reached out and brushed her fingers across Nightcrawler’s cheek; just a brief, gentle caress, but the result of it hit her like a sledgehammer between the eyes. Everything that Kurt Wagner was, everything he thought and felt, was rushing into her, trying to displace her own identity. She gritted her teeth and concentrated on her sense of self. She tried not to focus upon the stray thoughts, the odd recollections, that were sluicing through her brain to light up the insides of her eyelids. She remembered how unsettling it had been to let the Professor into her mind, and she wondered if Kurt was feeling the same about her now.
The onslaught subsided, and she was aware of her own lungs heaving. She looked down at her uncovered hand and saw that the skin was dark blue.
Nightcrawler was holding his head in his hands-but after a moment, he looked up and grinned at her bravely. He was resilient. He had been through this-and, like all of them, much worse—before. He would recover, faster than most of Rogue’s victims did.
There was an image in her mind: a small patch of land surrounded by trees, in which a uniformed mutate lay face down. Instinctively, she knew how to get to that place. She replaced her glove, put her arm around Wolverine’s shoulders and drew him to her side.
Alone, Nightcrawler wouldn’t have been able to take all three of his colleagues to Genosha. He found it a strain to teleport with even one passenger, especially over such a distance. To do so three times in succession would have killed him. This way, Rogue could take some of that burden from him. She could teleport herself and Wolverine to the island now, before her stolen powers began to fade. In a few minutes’ time, Nightcrawler would be healthy again, and he could follow with Iceman.
But Kurt had warned her, in no uncertain terms, that it would hurt.
Rogue closed her eyes and teleported. The world exploded around her, and she was enveloped in dark smoke, feeling as if a giant hand had seized her internal organs and twisted them forty-five degrees clockwise. She let out a scream, feeling shamed by Wolverine’s stoic refusal to do likewise: he must have been feeling almost as bad as she did.
Thankfully, it was over in a second. The sweet smell of pollen hit Rogue’s nostrils, overwhelmed an instant later by that of brimstone, and she saw the felled mutate at her feet. She hadn’t even had time, she realized giddily, to wonder what might have happened if he had woken up and begun to wander about. She was only vaguely aware of Wolverine beside her; she didn’t know what condition he was in.
Her legs felt like jelly, and she collapsed against a tree, breathing heavily, her stomach heaving.
“Remind me,” she panted, “to never, ever do that again.”
Iceman felt sick.
He sat hunched up with his back against a tree-trunk and his arms around his knees, putting all his efforts into regulating his own body temperature and waiting for the nausea to pass.
It was all right for the others, he thought: Nightcrawler was used to this, Wolverine had his healing factor and Rogue was dam near invulnerable. They had all coped better than he had with the stresses that the teleport had placed on their bodies. They were standing around the unconscious mutate now, discussing what was to be done with him.
“Whatever you say, Logan,” insisted Nightcrawler, “I will not agree that it’s acceptable to take a human life.”
“This guy knew what he was getting into when he took the job!” growled Wolverine.
“And who’s to say he had a choice in the matter, mein freund?”
“We have to do something,” said Rogue. “We can’t afford to have our presence here discovered.” Her skin hadn’t quite returned to its normal color yet; it still had a blue tint.
“Nothing else we can do,” said Wolverine. “As soon as our mutate friend wakes up, he’ll put a call in to his boss. Best we toss him into the sea now and
nip the problem in the bud.”
Nightcrawler shook his head vehemently. “All he can report is that somebody attacked him from behind. He didn’t see me.”
“But,” said Rogue, mbbing at her chin thoughtfully, “when Magneto hears the report of that other sentry, he might just put two and two together and make X.”
“Who’s to say he won’t do that anyway, if one of his guards goes missing?”
“At least we’ll have bought ourselves some time,” said Wolverine.
“You know what Cyclops would say if he was here,” said Rogue.
“But he ain’t here, is he!”
It was a familiar argument, and one that Wolverine must have known he would lose. But he had his say nonetheless. He believed that, as the X-Men’s foes grew deadlier and more mthless, so too did they have to change their methods. He believed that a war could not be won without sacrifices. Iceman tended to steer clear of such disputes; in theory, he agreed with Nightcrawler’s principled stance, but he could see Wolverine’s point as well. Leaving the mutate alive was asking for trouble. It meant that, somewhere down the line, the X-Men’s lives could be endangered, their vital mission jeopardized. Disposing of their foe-a man who would surely have done the same to them without hesitation-was the easier option. And life was difficult enough as it was for a mutant; for an X-Man, even more so.
Iceman would have shed few tears if Wolverine had killed the mutate. But he could never have delivered the fatal blow himself.
“It’s your call, darling!” said Wolverine, looking at Rogue.
“We’ll tie him up,” she said decisively, “and hide him somewhere.”
Wolverine shook his head. “No point. If we’re not gonna do the job properly, best leave him as he is. We don’t to make this look too professional.” The mutate groaned as he began to stir, and Wolverine dropped to his haunches beside him. He slipped his hands around the man’s throat and applied pressure to his sensitive nerve clusters until he passed out again. “There-should keep him under for another couple of hours. Pile a few leaves on top of him. With luck, we’ll be long gone before the alarm’s raised.”
Rogue nodded her approval to this course of action, and turned to Iceman. He sighed and climbed to his feet, nodding to signal that he was well enough to proceed. In fact, he was still feeling queasy, but he would just have to put up with that.
“So, which way to Hammer Bay?” he asked.
The question had been directed at Nightcrawler, but it was Wolverine who answered by setting off sure-footedly through the trees. The others followed him without question: they knew that his sense of direction was unparalleled.
Emerging from the copse, they hurried down a gentle slope into a moonlit field. As Wolverine led the way across it quickly, eager to reach the cover of more trees on the far side, Iceman looked at the dead earth beneath his feet. He could sense that it had not felt water in a long time; whatever seeds had been planted in it had been neglected, left to wither in the hot, dry climate. Genosha had once advertised itself as “a green and pleasant land,” and the claim had not been an exaggeration. The field, he supposed, was symbolic of the state to which the human-mutate war had reduced a once proud country.
He couldn’t help but wonder if America might one day suffer a similar fate. His instinct was to deny that such a horror was even possible-but what if an all-out war began there too? Who could predict how that might end?
The others had almost crossed the field, and Iceman made to catch up with them-but he frowned as he caught sight of something. Something odd about one of the trees in front of them—but what was it? Had it moved? If he concentrated and looked at a certain spot in a certain way, then part of the landscape seemed off-kilter somehow, distorted. He ought to have warned the others, but none of them appeared to have noticed anything amiss, and that made Bobby doubt the evidence of his own eyes.
The air rippled like a heat haze, just a few feet in front of Nightcrawler and to his left, and suddenly he was sure. “Guys,” he said, “I think there’s something up there!”
A shape formed out of nowhere. It was a woman, her hands clasped to her cheeks, her eyes and mouth stretched into wide saucer shapes. She was insubstantial like a ghost, and Iceman could see the trees through her. She must have blended herself into her background, masking her presence somehow even from Wolverine’s senses.
She was screaming, and her voice was a shrill alarm signal. Wolverine leapt at her, his claws springing from their housings, but she dissipated on the air and left him to slice through green mist. The scream sounded as if it were coming from all around the X-Men now, boring into their skulls and filling their brains with its intensity. Iceman put his hands over his ears, but it didn’t keep the scream out. Rogue threw an experimental punch, looking aggrieved but not at all surprised when she connected with nothing. She tried again anyway, and Iceman saw a faint green shimmer as something recoiled from her fist.
Quickly, he brought up his hands and condensed the moisture in the air around it. A large, jagged lump of ice thudded into the ground between the four X-Men, and Iceman was gratified to see that he had trapped a green blur in its depths. The screaming had stopped.
“Good work, Bobby,” said Rogue. Iceman’s ears were still numb, and the words sounded distant to him. “Now let’s get out of here before someone comes to investigate that racket!”
“Too late,” said Wolverine grimly.
Wolverine’s keen ears had detected a familiar whining sound. Air-cars, four or more of them, running on their quiet antigravity-powered engines. They had once been used by Genosha’s so-called peace-keepers, its human magistrates, but he had no doubt that they would have fallen into the hands of Magneto's followers.
The others could hear them too now, and they followed him into the woods at a run. Bright searchlights stabbed through the trees and lit up the undergrowth, and Wolverine caught flashes of rounded silver panels through the leaves above him. A finger of light caught Rogue momentarily, followed by a barrage of blaster fire that ripped up the ground beneath the X-Men’s feet. Nightcrawler was buffeted by an explosion, but he teleported instinctively before he could take shrapnel damage.
“So much for sneaking into the country undetected,” he said ruefully.
“Looks like it’s Plan B, people,” said Rogue.
They all knew what she meant. They had discussed this on the boat ride from Madagascar. Now that their presence in Genosha had been discovered, they would be hunted down-and Magneto’s forces outnumbered them by hundreds to one. If they stayed together, they could only fall together. Individually, however, each of them stood a chance of being able to keep out of sight-and they only needed one of them to complete the mission, to find evidence of their enemy’s plans and to get that information out to the rest of their team.
The X-Men scattered, and even Wolverine had soon lost sight of his three teammates through the foliage. He could hear a commotion above him, though: Rogue had flown straight up into the sky and made herself a target for the aircars, distracting their pilots. Plucky lady.
And there was something else: a whooshing of air behind him. A flying mutate, and a fast one. He varied his path, putting cover between himself and his pursuer, but it was no use. The mutate kept gaining on him until Wolverine knew that he had to stand and fight.
A muscular figure flew at him like a cannonball. Wolverine stood his ground until the last possible moment, then leapt beneath his incoming attacker. But the mutate’s speed was incredible, and he was still able to clip the X-Man’s chin with a fist that felt like an anvil. It was only a glancing blow, but it was enough to rattle even Wolverine’s reinforced bones.
He was still reeling when the mutate came in for a second pass. This time, he threw himself backwards and brought up his hands and feet, taking hold of the mutate’s shoulders and simultaneously delivering a punishing double-kick to his stomach. His foe spun around in midair and hit the ground hard. He was already back on his feet by the time the X-Man co
uld press his advantage-but Logan was fast too. The pair closed in hand-to-hand combat, and the mutate, for all his speed and strength, couldn’t land a solid blow on his twisting, slippery opponent. Wolverine, on the other hand, made himself an opening and raked his claws across the mutate’s arm. He felt them tearing through skin, felt a warm trickle against his knuckles, and grinned to himself through clenched teeth. “First blood,” he snarled in triumph.
And then he caught another two scents. Three. Four. More mutates, alerted by the sounds of combat or perhaps by an inaudible distress signal. They were approaching from all sides, homing unerringly upon the X-Man’s position. Fuelled now by urgency, he laid into his opponent, giving no quarter, and felled him with two swift adamantium-laced punches to the jaw. But his senses told him that it was already too late.
He was surrounded.
Nightcrawler was making slow but sure progress, leaping from tree-top to treetop, a shifting shadow, melting into the darkness whenever he thought there might be eyes upon him. He was leaving the sounds of the aircars behind him, their engines protesting as they tried to keep up with their target. He feared for Rogue’s life-but at least, he thought, while the aircars were still spitting fire, it meant that she was giving them something to aim at.
And then, he heard a new sound: the sound of a pitched battle from somewhere ahead of him and over to the right. The clanging of metal against metal, the shrieking of unfamiliar energy discharges. It had to mean that Wolverine or Iceman was in trouble.
Kurt hesitated. He longed to help with every fiber of his being, but the X-Men’s plan forbade it. He was supposed to keep away from the others. It sounded very much like his teammate was outnumbered: if he went blundering in, then he was likely to get himself captured or killed too. But how could he abandon a friend in need?
Even before he had formed an answer to that question, he found himself heading toward the source of the disturbance. What harm could it do to take a quick look at least, to see precisely what the situation was? He could always teleport away if he had to.
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 53
