The Beast swallowed, and his voice was barely a whisper now. “Then I’m sorry, Magnus. I’m sorry for us all.”
And he tightened his fist around the precious vial, and crushed it. The ensuing silence seemed so loud to Hank that it roared in his ears. He fully expected Magneto to exact bloody revenge for his action, but it hardly mattered now. He looked down at his right hand, opening his fingers and staring numbly at the fragments of glass and the blood that he had spilt. Blood on his hands. It seemed an apt metaphor.
And suddenly, he realized that the blood was no longer dripping, or soaking into his blue fur, but rising. In defiance of gravity, it gathered into a red mass before his startled eyes, and floated away from him. It took him a confused half-second to appreciate that Magneto was drawing the blood to him by controlling its iron content. The master of magnetism wore a harsh smile of triumph.
With an anguished ciy, the Beast threw himself at his foe, feet-first—a desperate, futile attack. He rebounded from a magnetic force field, and was borne to the ground by a heavy, invisible weight upon his shoulders. He struggled to rise, but found himself on his knees at Magneto’s feet. “I warned you, Henry. I am too close to my goal to suffer any obstacles in my path. The cure is mine, and nobody will take it from me.”
“I think you know,” said a stern voice, “that that isn’t true.”
Hank gasped with relief, and not only because he felt the magnetic pressure upon him lessening. The voice had belonged to Cyclops-and he was accompanied by Phoenix, Storm, Nightcrawler, Iceman and Wolverine. The footsteps of the six X-Men crunched against the debris left by Rogue’s destructive battle with Holocaust as they entered the laboratory and lined up before their oldest enemy. They appeared battered and tired, but defiant.
“As I keep telling you,” said Cyclops, “the X-Men will always stand against you.”
“You’re too late,” snarled Magneto. “I have the cure!”
“But you can’t protect it and fight us at the same time,” said Phoenix. She glanced meaningfully at the blood sample, which hung suspended at Magneto’s shoulder, maintaining the shape it had had in the vial even though there was no vial any more. “You’re holding it together by force of mind alone. The slightest lapse in concentration, and you’ll lose it.”
“Then you should know one thing before you seek to engineer such an outcome,” he said coolly. “By my reckoning, it is eight o’clock. In Hong Kong and Perth, therefore, it is midnight. I am aware that you deactivated the trident firework in Sydney-but by now, the second and third devices have been launched. Their infection has been spread. And as you rightly say, my dear, any offensive against me will result in the destruction of the one thing that can counter it. So, my friends, are you still as eager to begin a fight that will doom the majority of the world’s population? Or are you prepared to accept my terms at long last?”
To Hank’s surprise, Cyclops laughed in Magneto’s face. “Another thing you need to learn, Lensherr: there’s always a third option.” Sebastian Shaw was standing, a shadowy figure, in the doorway. A young couple stood behind him, and Hank thought he recognized them from pictures in the X-Men’s files: members of Genosha’s cabinet, although he couldn’t call their names to mind. Shaw cleared his throat, and said: “The launches in Hong Kong and Perth have been aborted. And my assistant, Tessa, is contacting our other branches worldwide as we speak. Regrettably, the Hellfire Club’s solstice celebrations will pass not with a bang but with a whimper.”
“Shaw!” A dangerous undercurrent rumbled in Magneto’s voice. “I expected this betrayal, of course-but I didn’t think even you would be so blatant.”
“I have not betrayed you,” said Shaw. His tone was even, his expression grim. “But the situation has changed. While you were busy fighting these children, your aides couldn’t reach you with vital new information.”
Magneto raised an eyebrow, and the Beast found that he was holding his breath, waiting to hear what the Black King had to say.
Sebastian Shaw took a pause, as if entirely for dramatic effect, before ending the suspense. “The cure doesn’t work,” he said.
And, for several seconds afterward, nobody spoke.
“What treachery is this?” Magneto spat the words, but his erstwhile ally was nonplussed in the face of his anger.
The Beast had some idea what he was feeling. His own head was awhirl with thoughts. He couldn’t accept that, after all he had been through, all he had put the X-Men through, it could end like this. A part of him knew, of course, that it was for the best, that Magneto couldn’t proceed with his plan now. But Shaw’s cold, hard assertion had robbed him of hope.
Even when he had been prepared to sacrifice the Legacy cure, he had had the comfort of believing such a cure possible, knowing that he had found it once and might do so again. Now, there was nothing. No. He wouldn’t accept it.
Three weeks ago, the Beast’s teammates had visited a possible future in which Selene had had the Legacy cure. His cure. And it had worked for her-hadn’t it?
Shaw had seen that future too. Hank wanted to remind him of it, to contest his awful claim. But it was likely that Magneto knew nothing of the averted timeline in which the Black Queen had ruled New York-and if this was an elaborate bluff, a way of wresting the cure from him, then he couldn’t risk blowing it. Biting his tongue, he waited and listened.
“If you won’t believe Shaw,” urged Cyclops, “at least listen to your own people. Jennifer? Phillip?” Shaw stepped aside, and the two cabinet members came forward.
“It’s true, Magnus,” said the man. “Raul Jarrett is dead.”
“The virus returned,” expanded the woman, “stronger than I’ve ever seen it. It ate through his system in a matter of minutes. There was nothing we could do.”
“I have just contacted Tessa in Sydney,” said Shaw. “She is having your other young guinea-pig examined-but it appears that she too is showing symptoms of a relapse.”
Hank swallowed. Ruthless as the Black King might be, the X-Men would never have gone along with a plan that involved murder. And if Raul Jarrett wasn’t really dead, then Magneto would find out the truth soon enough. Worse still, the story made sense—as Phoenix now pointed out. “How do you think we escaped from the Hellfire Club in Sydney, when Miranda was holding us powerless? My abilities returned to me, Magnus. We didn’t realize it, but the Legacy Virus must have been affecting her mutant gene even then.”
“We knew there was a remote possibility of this,” sighed Shaw. “The super-cell must have become unstable when it was taken out of Doctor McCoy’s bloodstream. It worked for him, but it won’t work for anybody else.”
“It is feasible, Your Eminence.” Hank had almost forgotten about the blonde scientist, but she emerged timidly from her hiding place now. “And if it’s true, it would mean that each Legacy sufferer would have to evolve his or her own unique super-cell.”
“In short,” said Shaw, “he would have to go through the same tortuous process as McCoy did-which is, of course, impossible since Selene destroyed the Kree equipment and records at our Pacific research facility. The work we did there cannot be duplicated.”
It was a good story-perhaps too good-and Hank almost allowed himself to be convinced by it. He probably would have been, had it not been for Selene.
But then, Magneto let out a roar of pain and frustration, and swung an arm with savage force as if knocking aside some invisible opponent. The blood sample that had hung in the air beside him exploded, showering the occupants of the lab with sticky red droplets. And Hank realized that, even if Shaw and the others had been lying, even if the cure had worked after all, then it had just been lost forever. He leapt forward with an anguished cry, but stumbled to a halt in the stomach-wrenching knowledge that there was nothing he could do.
His dream had died.
“You idiot!” he raged instead. “We could have studied that cell. We could have tried to understand it, found a way to transplant it successfully or recreate the c
ircumstances of its creation.” His voice tailed off, sounding smaller and smaller in his own ears.
“It’s over!” snapped Magneto. He directed a glare at Shaw. “Our business partnership is terminated.” The Black King acknowledged him with a curt nod as Magneto stalked toward the door, his cloak billowing behind him.
Wolverine barred his path. “Forgetting something, aren’t you? You’ve put the X-Men to a whole heap of trouble, bub-and we ain’t paid you back the half of it yet!”
Magneto rounded on him with naked contempt. Then, the Beast followed his probing gaze to the rest of his mutant foes in turn. They would fight him if they had to, but Hank saw—as Magneto must have seen-that they were weary, their resolve sapped by the fact that there was nothing left to fight for. Only a pound of flesh that would have done them no good at all. Nightcrawler was helping a dazed Rogue to stand, and Iceman was surreptitiously leaning against a charred bench for support. Even Cyclops looked unsteady on his feet.
Hank felt the same as he imagined they did. He wanted to go home.
“I have no interest in another futile confrontation,” said Magneto, and he sounded tired too. Tired and old-but still forbidding, still rigid. “You are intruders in my country, all of you. Leave within the hour, and I will take no further action. Fail to do so, and you will be dealt with as enemies of the state. Farewell.”
He turned away again and strode out of the room, and this time Wolverine let him go, albeit with his fists clenched and his lips curled into a hateful sneer.
“So, this whole mission was a flaming waste of time!”
The X-Men’s Blackbird aircraft had just taken off from Sydney, giving its eight occupants their first real chance to converse since their reunion in Genosha. Nevertheless, Rogue had settled back into her comfortable seat in the back of the plane, hoping to get some sleep. She was exhausted-and, even with the Blackbird’s souped-up engines, New York and Salem Center still lay several hours away. Wolverine’s gruff voice had shaken her out of the beginnings of a doze, and she sighed ruefully and pried her eyes open.
“I wouldn’t say that,” objected Cyclops. “If we hadn’t become involved—”
“Then Shaw would have called the whole thing off anyway,” said Wolverine, “as soon as that Miranda woman fell ill again.”
Iceman pouted. “Trust Emma Frost to send us on a wild goose chase!”
Cyclops shook his head firmly. “It would have been too late by then. The Legacy bomb in Sydney would have been detonated; perhaps the ones in Hong Kong and Perth too.”
“It might not seem like we accomplished much,” said Phoenix, “but by delaying Magneto’s plan for as long as we did, we probably saved the whole world.”
Nightcrawler grinned. “Again? This is almost becoming embarrassing!”
“Don’t get too excited, elf,” said Wolverine sourly. “The world won’t appreciate it.”
“Makes me feel a little better, anyhow,” mumbled Rogue. She cast her mind back to the long, heavy silence that had fallen in the wake of Magneto’s departure from his laboratory. The silence that had said that nobody had won today, because the prize itself had been lost.
Shaw had been the first to speak, assuring the X-Men as he had taken his leave of them that it hadn 't been a pleasure. Storm had pointed out that he was leaving the wounded Holocaust behind, to which Shaw had replied that his pawn, having failed the Hellfire Club again, was of no fiirther use to him. “Will you never learn?” Ororo had sighed, exasperated.
“Incidentally,” he had said as a parting shot, “I trust you can
make your own travel arrangements from now on? You aren’t welcome to share mine.”
Cyclops had used a low-intensity, high-duration optic beam to fuse the cracked part of Holocaust’s armor, preventing him from hemorrhaging any more life-sustaining energy. His act of mercy had sparked a predictable but mercifully short dispute with Wolverine.
And, finally, Jennifer Ransome had offered to send the heroes on their way. One of her cabinet colleagues, an unsavory type by the name of Cormack Grimshaw, had the ability to convert people into binary electronic impulses. He had transmitted the X-Men to the Blackbird's comm-set via a modem: all in all, not an unpleasant way to travel, so long as you didn’t think too hard about it-and Rogue had certainly appreciated the fact that it was almost instantaneous. Remembering the hired motorboat, and thinking that the Xavier Institute could do without yet another bill for damaged or lost goods, she had asked Jenny if she could also retrieve the vessel and return it to its owner in Madagascar.
“We are rather assuming,” said the Beast, “that the cure was ineffective from the outset. There is an alternative possibility: one to which I have been giving much consideration.”
Phoenix nodded. “I thought about that too. The cure worked for Selene, didn’t it?”
“Could she have found a way to stabilize it?” mused Nightcrawler. “Something she didn’t tell us about? We’ve never really understood how her abilities work.”
“It is possible, yes,” said the Beast.
“But it’s also possible,” conjectured Cyclops, “that the cure did work—and that somebody tampered with it before it could be used.” “All of which,” said the Beast, “leaves a palpable question mark hanging over the identity of this hypothetical noble soul.”
“Could it have been Tessa?” asked Storm.
Cyclops frowned. “I doubt it. She’s always been fiercely loyal to Shaw.” Ororo’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, but she didn’t argue. Rogue wondered what she was thinking.
“You don’t suppose... ?” she began. She tailed off in midsentence. It was a ludicrous idea. Wasn’t it?
But Phoenix continued her train of thought. “Somebody who had the means, and was close enough to Magneto to have the opportunity. ...”
“But just unhappy enough with his plans. . ..” said Nightcrawler. “And treacherous enough,” interjected Storm.
“. . . to have the motive. ...”
“Best hope you’re wrong,” growled Wolverine, resting his heels on the seatback in front of him. “’Cos if you’re right, it means we’ve all been played for suckers. We’ve just been the pawns in another Hellfire Club game!”
“As far as I’m concerned,” said Cyclops firmly, “only one thing matters. In the hands of somebody like Magneto or Selene, that cure was a threat—which we’ve ended. We might not have the cure ourselves, but even so ... I think we won this one.”
The Black King of Hong Kong stood in his rooftop garden and surveyed his domain.
He never felt more powerful than this: than when he stood at the heart of his self-built empire and looked out over the city that he had come to think of as his own. He had influence here. Between his immediate employees and his wider network of contacts, he could issue almost any decree and expect it to be carried out. And if there were still larger empires to be won, other Kings and Queens to be toppled, then that was good too. It gave him something to work toward: a goal that, on bright mornings like this, he was confident of achieving.
Shaw’s current objective was comparatively modest, but he approached it with no less determination and flair than he applied to all his ventures. The Hellfire Club’s solstice celebrations had fizzled out, but he would compensate for that with the grandest, most hedonistic New Year party that the organization had seen in generations.
He didn’t need to turn and face his assistant. He outlined his instructions and knew that, without having to take notes, Tessa would absorb and act upon them. It was only after he had dismissed her that she gave voice to a question. “Sir?” she said. And Shaw halfpivoted toward her, arching an eyebrow. “Did I do the right thing?” He didn’t have to ask what she meant. He took a deep breath, pursed his lips in thought, and finally admitted: “The X-Men provided a useful distraction. 1 am satisfied with the outcome.”
“I’m glad,” smiled Tessa. She hesitated for a moment as if hoping to learn more. When Shaw remained silent, however, she didn’t prompt h
im. She gave a brisk nod, turned and left.
For a minute or more after her departure, he stared at the door to the stairs that had closed behind her. And then, without having consciously willed it, without even having been aware of the shadow rising within him, he clenched a fist and drove it into one of the pagoda’s struts. He was shaking in frustration, and he had to close his eyes and breathe through it.
She was just another pawn, he told himself. A commodity to be used and discarded. He had allowed himself to become uncommonly close to this one, almost reliant upon her-but that had been a mistake. And he had learned his lesson now. An ambitious man could not afford to be weakened by sentiment. He didn’t yet know for sure that Tessa would betray him-he only suspected that she was like all the others after all—but the seed of doubt had been planted in his mind, and it was enough. When the moment came, he would be ready for her.
By now, she would know what he had done. Most of it, anyway. He had given her enough information for her computer-like mind to work out the rest.
Tessa had always known that her employer was working with Magneto under sufferance, that he intended to keep the hard-earned Legacy cure from him. Unfortunately, Selene’s highly visible intervention had made that impossible. Lacking the physical power to defy his partner, Shaw had been forced to bite his lip and hand the stolen blood of the Beast over to him. But he had had no intention of living in a world ruled by that zealot; a world in which all the real power lay in the hands of one man, and that man was not Sebastian Hiram Shaw.
Fortunately, his influence extended far beyond Hong Kong; even further than Magneto had realized. Until recently, the prosperous Genoshan capital, Hammer Bay, had seemed an ideal site for a new Hellfire Club chapter. Therefore, Shaw had been pulling the strings of its captains of industry for some time; he had even imported many of them. And, at his strongly worded request, more than one such person had resisted his instincts to abandon the suddenly war-torn city for more stable markets elsewhere.
Magneto had had six scientists working in shifts to duplicate the Legacy cure. It had been a simple matter for Shaw’s agents to track them down and identify the weakest of them. The master of magnetism controlled his servants through fear, but Shaw had always believed that money—in enough quantity—was a more powerful incentive. In this case, he had been proved right. The transaction had taken place under Magneto’s nose.
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 73
