Bobby started, dropped his crowbar and whirled around to find Debs standing behind him, wearing a magistrate’s padded uniform and aiming a magistrate’s rifle at his chest. He cursed his own stupidity: he had become too absorbed in his task, in thoughts of freedom, to hear her sneaking up on him.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” he said lamely.
“Oh? Then I didn’t just see you create that thing out of thin air?” Debs drew closer to him, the rifle shaking a little in her hands. “The only thing around here that ‘isn’t what it looks like’ is you, Drake. You lied to me. You’re a stinking gene freak!”
“I’m a mutant!” snapped Bobby.
“Same difference. I suppose you were going back to your friends, were you? Now that you’ve found us, you were going to lead them all back here to kill us!”
“No!”
“I trusted you, Bobby. I thought you were different. You said you didn’t want to fight.”
“I don’t!” he insisted. He was waiting for his moment, ready to ice up. The rifle’s armor-piercing bullets could almost certainly penetrate his frozen shell, but he could take Debs by surprise, hit her with the world’s biggest snowball and disarm her before she had time to react. But he hesitated, seeing something in her expression: something to suggest that the situation wasn’t hopeless, that she wanted to believe him. He held out his hands in appeal, and said: “Look, I may have been bom a mutant, but I’m not a Genoshan. I’m an X-Man, if that means anything to you. When you found me last night, I wasn’t trying to get out of the country, I was trying to get in.”
Debs peered at him through narrowed eyes. “Go on,” she said.
“OK, so maybe yesterday I might have sided with the mutates if it had come to it,” admitted Bobby, feeling that total honesty was now the best policy. “I know what they’ve been through, and I was ready to blame all the Genoshan humans for that But you reminded me that everybody’s different, that I can’t blame an entire race for the actions of a few people. I hope you can see that too.”
“What are the X-Men doing here?” asked Debs, still suspicious. “We think Magneto might be about to threaten the world again. We’re here to find out what he’s planning, and to stop him if we have to.”
“Will you get rid of him for us?”
Bobby shook his head sadly. “If we could. Look, Debs, this mission is important-and I’m grateful to you and your friends for saving me from the border patrol, but I have to get out of here! Will you let me go? I promise you, I don’t have any contact with the mutates.” “And if you do? If you run into them outside?”
“I wouldn’t tell them about this place. I don’t want to be the cause of any more deaths.”
“And the attack tonight?”
“I...” Bobby almost resorted to a lie, but he was sure Debs would see through it. “I don’t know. If it came to it... I think I might warn
them____Hendrickson’s planning a massacre!”
Debs kept the gun trained on him for a moment longer, then she lowered it and nodded. “OK. I’m going to let you go, Bobby. My instincts tell me you’re a good person, and you’re right-I shouldn’t change that opinion just because of the makeup of your genes.” Bobby smiled wanly. “If only there were a few more people like you ... ”
“But you can’t go out this way. The skylight’s wired up to a silent alarm. Hendrickson would have troops out front before you could hit the ground.”
Bobby grimaced. He had been so close.
“Come with me,” said Debs, sounding sure of herself again. She flicked on the rifle’s safety catch, tucked the weapon under one arm and dropped lithely through the open hatchway into the storeroom below. Bobby followed her, dismissing the paranoid suspicion that she might be leading him into a trap.
They hurried down several flights of stairs and emerged into the main atrium, where they were greeted by an impatient Hendrickson. “Where have you been?” he asked Debs. “The rest of the party is all ready to go; they’re only waiting for you.”
Bobby found himself holding his breath as he waited for Debs to answer.
“I’ve been showing Bobby the ropes,” she said. “I thought he might come out with us.”
“Are you crazy?” retorted Hendrickson. “Do you want him dead?”
“It’s a simple reconnaissance mission,” said Debs. She half-turned to Bobby, and explained: “We’re checking out the village building by building. Sometimes, we find food. Sometimes, we find equipment.” “And sometimes,” said Hendrickson, “you find genejokes. Or they find you.”
“There’ll be half a dozen of us-and we know where their main base is now; we can steer clear of it. Anyway, the mutates hardly ever attack in broad daylight!”
“Drake isn’t ready. You saw what happened last night-he almost got himself killed!”
“I can look after myself,” protested Bobby.
“Not without the right equipment you can’t,” shot back Hendrickson. He shook his head decisively. “No, you’re staying put for this one-but I’ll take you down to the armory and get you kitted out.” He clamped a strong hand on Bobby’s shoulder and guided him away. The X-Man cast a forlorn look back at Debs, who threw a tiny, helpless shrug in his direction before m oving to join her colleagues at the door.
“It’s just that I get claustrophobic,” babbled Bobby as he was led from the atrium. “I’m starting to feel hemmed in. I think I need some fresh air.”
“We’ll try you out on the hardware,” said Hendrickson gruffly. “If you’re good enough, you can come out with us tonight. Did Debs tell you? We’ve got a mutate nest to burn out!”
Bobby swrallowed hard, fell into step beside the heavyset man and said no more.
The laboratory was unguarded, but it was sealed by a reinforced door with a locking pad. Rogue scowled at the numbered keys, searching the fading memories of Aidan and June but finding that neither of them knew the combination.
She hadn’t seen anybody on this underground level. Had she had more time, she could have waited in hiding until somebody came this way and opened the door for her. As it was, she was beginning to think that brute force was her only option. She would lose the element of surprise, though—and if Magneto was around, perhaps her life to boot.
Then, a third option occurred to her. She still possessed Aidan Morgan’s telepathic powers, and his knowledge of how to use them. She let her mind drift from her body, shuddering at the weird, giddy sensation of disconnection. She felt like a ghost, tentatively feeling her way around a psychic landscape that corresponded to the shape of the building above her. She skirted around Magneto’s throne room, knowing that his psychic defenses were prodigious. If her mind brushed against his, he would surely know about it.
A parcel of thoughts called to her with its familiarity, and she steered herself toward it. She recognized Jennifer Ransome: a mutate whom the X-Men had once liberated, now Magneto’s chancellor. Rogue found herself looking through Jenny’s eyes, thinking her thoughts-and somewhere, her own body drew a sharp intake of breath at the sudden change of perspective.
Rogue/Jenny was standing in a corridor, talking to a young man with short, brown hair and rugged, unshaven features. “I can’t believe you’re being so cynical about this,” she said. “If you’d seen those two people ... the Legacy cure saved their lives!”
“I don’t doubt it,” said the man, “but if Magneto plans to do nothing more than end the epidemic, then why does he need this ‘Hellfire Club? And why all the secrecy?”
Rogue/Jenny pouted. “Perhaps he doesn’t want to raise our hopes until he’s sure.”
“He’s keeping things from his own government!”
“Then perhaps he doesn’t trust some of us. He has good reason!” “And don’t you think it’s some coincidence that he’s doing all this while his son is out of the country? Pietro wouldn’t have let him lie to us.”
“What’s wrong with you, Phillip?” snapped Rogue/Jenny. “Do you want the mutates to keep suffering? Per
haps you want to follow in your father’s footsteps after all!”
Phillip Moreau blanched, and Rogue felt Jenny Ransome’s immediate contrition, and her love for this man. Phillip’s father had been the infamous genegineer, whose surgical procedures had facilitated the oppression of a race—but Phillip himself had been instrumental in changing all that. When he had seen the magistrates taking Jenny away, when he had learned his family’s evil secret, he had stood up and spoken out against the old regime.
“I’m just worried that Magnus is becoming too powerful,” he said quietly. “When he came here, he promised to end the fighting in Genosha. If that’s still his goal, then I’m behind him all the way. But I’ve heard how he talks about human beings, even those of us who work with him. I don’t know what he’ll do when he doesn’t need us any more.”
“I know,” sighed Jenny with an apologetic half-smile. “I’ve wondered about that too.”
Rogue had been riffling through the young mutate’s memories, and now she found what she was looking for. She withdrew her psychic presence even as Jenny and Phillip fell into an affectionate hug. She had invaded their privacy enough, she felt.
“I just don’t want us to go back to how it was before,” said Phillip, “with one race victimizing another.”
And then, Rogue was alone again, back in the basement and back in her own body. She hurried over to the lab door and used the last vestiges of her dissipating telepathy to scan beyond it, to see if she could expect a reception committee. To her disappointment, the lab must have been psi-proofed, because she couldn’t sense anything at all within its walls.
“All right, girl,” she muttered to herself, “here goes nothing!”
She tapped the four-digit combination into the keypad and stepped back, ready for anything as a mechanism whirred and the door finally slid open.
She swore under her breath as a figure stood revealed.
At seven feet tall with shoulders almost half as broad, he more than filled the doorway. His colossal bulk could be attributed to his containment suit: Rogue knew that inside the gold-plated armor existed a creature of pure energy, massed around a human skeleton. Behind a perspex chest plate, his ribs could sometimes be glimpsed through an atomic furnace. The plate connected to an equally transparent domed helmet, from beneath which a skull leered at her. Much to her regret, she had encountered this hulking engine of destruction before.
His name was Holocaust.
Bobby squinted along the sights of a rifle, his gaze tracking across a field of two-dimensional buildings. A figure appeared on a rooftop: a cardboard cutout of a mutate in a skinsuit, an orange flash of energy in his eyes. Gritting his teeth, he squeezed the trigger, and the gun whined as it fired a thin beam of light. The beam hit a sensor in the figure’s head, and it fell backward. Bobby heard another cardboard target popping up to his right, and he shifted his aim and fired again. A third mutate appeared in a window, and then the figure on the roof was back. Next, a door flew open to reveal a woman in a magistrates’ uniform; Bobby jerked his rifle around to cover her but, tempting though it was, he managed not to fire.
He had scored nine hits with nine shots, when suddenly his tenth target sprang out from behind a trashcan, much closer than he had expected. He leapt back, startled, as it hurtled toward him, carried by a concealed rail in the ground. The cutout was brought up short with a heavy clang, just a foot or two in front of his face, and he stared at it speechlessly as the main lights came back on and dispelled the red-tinted gloom of the practice range.
Hendrickson applauded as he stepped out of the shadows behind Bobby. “You did well,” he said. “Very well indeed.”
“I’ve always had a good eye,” mumbled Bobby, still staring at the final target. In fact, he had spent many long hours in the Danger Room, the X-Men’s hi-tech training facility, honing his reflexes and sharpening his aim. Of course, he was more accustomed to bombarding his targets with snowballs and ice darts than with bullets, but the principle was the same.
The only thing that had slowed him down was the bulky body armor beneath his dark green combat suit. He was used to having more freedom of movement.
“And don’t worry about that last one. It takes most people by surprise. Just think of it as a warning: out there in the field, some of the mutates will be coming right at you.”
“Thanks,” said Bobby, grateful that Hendrickson hadn’t guessed the true reason for his miss. He had been surprised, but not only by the target’s sudden appearance: the Danger Room sprung tricks like that on him all the time. The reason he had hesitated, the reason he had been unable to fire, was that this target was more detailed than the others. And more familiar. Painted onto the cardboard was a rather good likeness of his teammate, Wolverine.
Tearing his eyes away from the worrying effigy, he asked: “So, do I get to go out with you tonight or what?”
Hendrickson smiled. “You’re keen. I like that.”
“And?” prompted Bobby.
“You’re in. Frankly, you’re too good to leave behind. Briefing at 1800 hours.”
“And we leave at half past, right?”
“1830 prompt.”
“I’ll be ready.”
Bobby tried to sound enthusiastic, but his insides were in turmoil. He had come to the conclusion that the fastest way out of this place was to go along with Hendrickson: the raid on the mutate “nest” was to take place earlier than he had expected. “Those freaks have the advantage at night,” its orchestrator had explained. “Half of them can see in the dark, can’t they? Anyway, according to our intelligence, they have some kind of evening get-together. We can hit them when they least expect it, trap them in their own lair like rats!”
His plan was to abscond from the raiding party as soon as he could; with luck, he could still reach Hammer Bay by sunset. But where would that leave the people of this village; the mutates who were about to be slaughtered, and the humans who would die fighting them? He had been able to avoid thinking about it before. He had told himself he had more important things to worry about, that this was none of his business. But now, he felt involved. He felt as if he ought to do something-if only he knew what.
Hendrickson took the practice rifle from him and dropped it into a rack. “Now, let’s see about getting you something a bit more useful, shall we?”
He led the way down another corridor, stopped at a heavy, triplelocked iron door and produced a bundle of keys from his belt. Most of the shelves in the armory were bare, but Hendrickson found an old rifle and dropped it into Bobby’s hands. The X-Man stood quietly, feeling numb, as an ammunition belt was slung over each of his shoulders and a small silver grenade pushed into one of his belt pouches. “For emergencies only. We don’t have too many of these left. They’re like smaller versions of the sonic sphere: they let out a high-pitched shriek, which makes it impossible to concentrate. It’ll stop the genejokes from using their powers for a minute or so—just long enough for you to make a run for it.”
Further down the corridor, Hendrickson bobbed into a small storeroom and emerged with a magistrates’ mask and cap, which he tossed to his new recruit. “Good fit?” he asked as Bobby donned them reluctantly.
“Not bad,” said Bobby, his voice distorted by the mask’s speaking grille. The skin of his face was prickling beneath the cold, hard metal.
“As soon as we get outside, you put that mask down, right? Those monsters will throw everything they can at you: fire, acid, all kinds of weird energy. You need to protect your skin-and there’s a ventilator in there to deal with gas attacks. One of the local mutates can turn herself into a vapor and suffocate you-so you need the protection, believe me.”
As they moved on, they passed a window in an office door. Bobby caught sight of his own reflection in the glass, and hardly recognized himself. He remembered what Wolverine had said before, about a mutate in magistrates’ clothing. He had allowed himself to be turned into a symbol of oppression. Disgusted, he tore the mask from his face and l
et it hang from its strap around his neck. But what else could he do?
As they approached the main atrium again, Bobby heard voices raised in alarm, talking over each other. Hendrickson frowned and quickened his pace.
Debs’s reconnaissance party had returned—at least, four of its six members had. Bobby almost bumped into one in the doorway as he was carried through by two other men, his arms draped over their shoulders. His combat suit had been shredded, he had lost his mask, his face was pale and dirty, and his eyes were closed. The other three were slumped against the consoles in the atrium, exhausted and probably hurt, surrounded by concerned colleagues.
Hendrickson’s voice cut clearly across the babble. “What happened here?”
The answer came from several people at once. “Mutates!” “Gene freaks!” “They were ambushed!”
One member of the ill-fated expedition levered herself to her feet, although she was clearly in pain. “We lost Mark. They killed him. And ... and David ... he’s hurt bad. ...”
“And Debs?” Bobby stepped forward. He couldn’t help himself. “Where’s Debs?” ' ‘ ‘ ’
The woman met his yearning gaze for a second. Then, she lowered her eyes and shook her head despondently.
“What’s happened to her?” The question emerged as an imploring cry.
“She went down,” said a middle-aged man with dark hair and a moustache, who was sitting on the floor, his back propped up against a console, his rifle lying carelessly beside him. “Hit by an energy beam. She was alive, but we couldn’t reach her. The genejokes must have her!”
“And you just left her?” Bobby made for the airlock door. “We’ve got to get back out there!”
Hendrickson placed a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Not yet, son. We’ve got a plan, remember? We attack at 1830. If we go off half-cocked before that, we’ll just lose more good people-and we’ll throw away eveiything we’ve worked toward.”
“But Debs!” he protested hopelessly. “They’ve got Debs. What if they hurt her?”
Hendrickson shook his head sadly. “There’s nothing we can do for young Debra just now, son. If the mutates have her, then she’s almost certainly dead already. We have to accept it!”
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 63
