“Now,” Hank said, “I concede that the prospects are unsavory, to say nothing of aesthetically disharmonious, but I am quick to point out that there are, scattered around the globe in varying states of disrepair, any number of decommissioned and partially demolished Sentinels. If we were somehow able to get them up and running in short order, I believe we’d increase our chances of defeating that fleet exponentially.”
“Even if such a thing were possible,” Peter Rasputin said, rubbing the back of his neck, “how would we activate so many Sentinels?”
“And how are we meant to control them if we do?” Kurt put in, balanced on the back of a wooden chair.
“Yeah,” Kitty said, setting her glass down on the table, “when they’re up and running, aren’t they usually pretty busy with that whole kill-all-mutants thing?”
“Ordinarily, I’d agree with all three of you, heartily,” Hank said. “But as some of you may be aware, I sometimes do freelance consulting for SHIELD and other government agencies. They often call on me to provide a new perspective on nettlesome questions, or to draw upon my rather, shall we say, unique experience. Just last week, I was asked to give an opinion on some satellite surveillance photos. SHIELD was monitoring counterinsurgency forces in the South American republic of Santo Marco when their satellites picked up something strange a short distance away in Ecuador. It had been there for years, evidently, but until now no one had bothered to look in that direction.”
“What was it?” Doug asked.
For a brief moment, the humor left Hank’s voice, and his smile faded. “An abandoned Master Mold facility”
Across the table, Kitty blanched, and Logan’s claws popped from between his knuckles.
“Excuse me, a what?” Betsy said, raising her hand like a schoolchild asking a question.
“The birthplace of the Sentinels,” Scott answered, setting his silverware down on the table with a clatter.
“Precisely.” Hank gave a curt nod. “Or one of them, at any rate.” Hank turned to Betsy and continued. “The X-Men have been responsible—or at least involved—in
the destruction of a number of such facilities in the past. Simply put, a Master Mold is an autonomous, semi-sentient factory for robots.”
“Mutant-killing robots,” Kitty corrected.
“Giant mutant-killing robots,” Doug added.
‘Yes,” Hank said reluctantly. “Giant, mutant-killing, robots. Any one of which, if left to its own devices, could claim the lives of countless innocents. But one doesn’t question the morality of a bullet. One simply pulls the trigger.”
“What are you saying, McCoy?” Logan sneered, barring his teeth. “Guns don’t kill people, you do?”
Hank bristled but kept his temper. “No, Logan. I’m saying that we can use the Master Mold to activate the decommissioned Sentinels, repair those that are broken, and control all of them once reactivated. And then we save the Earth.”
“Okay,” Scott said, raising his voice over the din. A wide-ranging debate had broken out around the table when Hank finished outlining his plan, and tempers were beginning to flare. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“I just don’t much like the idea of activating a whole army of mutant-killers,” Kitty shot back, nostrils flaring. “Would you let Nazis out of jail to help you fight a war?”
“Who has Nazis in jail?” Kurt scratched his head. “And how many Nazis are left around, anyway? Baron Strucker is still at large, I suppose, but.. .”
“You know what I mean,” Kitty snapped. “If it was after the war, and you had put Nazis in jail, and you were fighting another war ...”
“With someone else ... ?” Doug put in, trying to be helpful.
“Look, it’s a hypothetical, okay! Like one of those killing-Hitler-as-a-baby questions. The point is, there are some lines you don’t cross, and some stinks you can’t wash out.”
“I don’t know, sugah,” Rogue said thoughtfully. “If lettin’ a bunch of blamed Nazis out on the battlefield meant that me and mine would survive, I guess I’d be okay with that.”
“Yes, but...” Kitty opened and shut her mouth. She looked around the table for support, found none. “But . . .” She crossed her arms across her chest, and dropped her chin, sulking. “Okay, then. But I still don’t like it.”
“Look” Scott said, playing the peacemaker, as he’d done since he was a kid at the orphanage. “We’re all tired. But lots of lives are depending on us, so I expect we’ll be a great deal more tired before we’re through. Now, as I see it, we have three main objectives. First, we have to gain access to the alien city in Bermuda, to free Lee Forrester and her crew...”
“And the other prisoners,” Betsy put in. “I saw it in the Exemplar’s thoughts. They’re rounding up X-gene-positives from around the world and transferring them there for ‘examination.’”
“Delightful,” Scott said dryly. “Okay, so we’ve got even more prisoners to rescue than I thought. In any event, we’ll need to send in a strike team—assuming, of course, that we work out a way to penetrate the island’s shielding.”
“I may have some thoughts in that direction,” Hank said.
“Good.” Scott nodded. “We could use them. Now, I propose a three-man team—me, Kurt, and Peter. Assuming that Hank works out a way through the shield, we storm the city and free the prisoners.”
"Da, ” Peter said simply.
“Sounds like fun,” Kurt said, though his tone suggested otherwise.
“Second, we need to get a team to Ecuador, to get the Sentinels up and running.”
“I should be on that assignment.” Hank raised his hand. “I’ve had experience in a Master Mold, as Scott will well recall, and I believe I know enough about the general layout to navigate inside. My only concern is that I’m not as familiar with the Sentinels’ programming code as I could be, and may run into snags in that arena.”
“So why not take someone who can talk to the computer in its own language?” Kitty asked.
“Did you have someone in mind?” Scott replied. ‘Well, duh.” Kitty pointed across the table at Doug. “It may have escaped your notice, Scott, but Doug’s mutant ability is language. He can get that Master Mold to sit up and beg, if anyone can.”
Scott glanced at Doug, and inclined his head slightly. A blush rose in Doug’s cheek, and he looked away.
“Fair enough.” Scott turned back to Hank. “Well, Hank, who else do you want on your team?”
Hank reached over and laid an enormous hand on Doug’s thin shoulder. Smiling, he said, “I think the two of us should have the computational aspects of the mission well in hand.” He paused, and then added, “But the need for pure strength may still arise.”
“I ain’t got nothin’ planned,” Rogue said sleepily. “I’ll ride shotgun and take care a’ any heavy lifting.”
“Okay, then we’ve got only one objective left.” Scott glanced around the table, his jaw set. “And it’s a doozy.”
“Let me guess,” Kitty said, making a grand gesture with her arms. “Insurmountable odds, life-threatening menace, and a goal almost impossible to achieve that will, if left undone, doom the rest of the plan?”
Scott allowed the slightest hint of a smile to tug at the corners of his mouth. “Something like that.” “Figures,” Kitty said, and slumped in her chair. “Count me in, I guess.”
“I already had,” Scott answered, his tone making clear that Kitty’s abilities had never been in question. “You, Logan, and Betsy will need to go to the Kh’thonic Fathership, to disable the fleet’s defenses.”
“What?!” Betsy’s mouth dropped open, her eyes wide. “We need you.” Scott’s tone was gentle, but firm. “There simply isn’t any other way. I’m guessing that locked in our Exemplar prisoner’s head is the key for gaining entry to the Fathership. If you go along, you should be able to control her telepathically like a puppet, and get yourself and the others aboard.”
“And me?” Logan asked.
‘You?” S
cott said, sparing him the briefest glance. ‘You just need to do what you do best.”
Logan pursed his lips, and nodded appreciatively. “Good plan, Cyke. But there’s one problem. I don’t remember seeing a rocket ship parked in the hanger, last time I looked. How you plannin’ to get us up into the black?”
Scott’s mouth drew into a tight line, and he glanced from Logan to Hank and back.
“I’ve got an idea, but I don’t think you’re going to like this one, either.”
27
“Okay, I gotta give this one to Cyke,” Logan snarled. “I don’t like it.”
“Chin up, chappie,” replied Colonel Alysande Stuart, glancing over her shoulder. “It’s no days of wine and roses for me, either, I can assure you.”
The diminutive Canadian sat behind Alysande in the high-g acceleration chairs, Betsy on one side and Kitty on the other, all three of them crammed into pressure suits and strapped securely in place.
Alysande, at the controls of the experimental space plane, lifted the clear, nearly indestructible helmet over her head and secured it to the neck seals of her pressure suit. She toggled her suit’s radio to network with the craft’s internal communications system, and spoke into the helmet mic. “How’s our other guest doing back there?”
“Settling in nicely, I think Colonel,” came the voice of the RCX operative known only as Raphael. Alysande reached a gloved finger over to work the suit controls set on her left forearm, and reduced the volume of the helmet speakers. “If Ms. Braddock can assure us that she’ll be able to keep the ... specimen ... in an unconscious state until needed, I should think we’re in good shape.”
“Don’t worry on my account,” Betsy said, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. “The Exemplar won’t regain consciousness until I give her the trigger word, and then she’ll see and hear only what I choose.”
“Charming,” Alysande said softly, temporarily muting her helmet mic. Considering how a considerable percentage of the world’s population regarded mutants, this Braddock woman was incredibly forthcoming with details about how she could so easily enslave the mind of another. Wasn’t that precisely what crackpots like Bolivar Trask and Robert Kelly were always nattering on about? That with their unimaginable powers, mutants posed a threat that normal humans could scarcely comprehend?
Now, while a group of extraterrestrials that were, for all intents and purposes, mutants themselves threatened to conquer the world, and do God-knew-what with the subjected peoples of Earth, here a terrestrial mutant admitted quite casually that she could use her powers of the mind to subdue and confuse another sentient being to her heart’s content. How easily could Braddock or another like her do the very same to her fellow Earthlings? Or, heaven forfend, her fellow subjects of the British Crown?!
‘"You say something, Sandy?” the man called Logan said, hefting his helmet in his hands like a rugby ball.
Alysande’s expression soured, and not just because of Logan’s unwelcome use of the overly familiar nickname. Even with her helmet mic muted, he’d been able to hear her muttered whisper. She’d read up on the mutant abilities of Logan and his friends in the classified files of Her Majesty’s government, and then Raphael had provided a tidbit or two that were too top-secret even to be recorded there—Alysande shuddered to think how he might have come by them. Alysande would have to be careful. With his enhanced senses, Logan would be able to detect things normally safely hidden. It was even conjectured that his enhanced auditory and olfactory capabilities would make it possible for him to act as a walking polygraph of sorts, able to hear when one’s pulse quickened, or the surface temperature of their skin changed. Which was, of course, to say nothing of his berserker rages and unbreakable skeleton and claws.
Delightful. Just the sort of man to have on a maiden voyage.
When the notion of a collaboration between the international rogues—the X-Men—and Her Majesty’s government had first been mooted, only hours before, Alysande had been against it from the start. From the expression of Logan and his companion Kitty Pryde, the young American, it was clear that they were no happier having to ask for Alysande’s help than she was happy to be obliged to give it. But, as she’d explained when they’d reached the launch platform off the coast of Tortola, her job was to safeguard the United Kingdom at any cost, and she didn’t care whom she had to get into bed with to get the job done. Had there been any alternative, Alysande would have taken it, and gladly; but so far, the plan proposed by the X-Men was the only feasible strategy so far advanced, however outlandish or difficult a prospect it might be.
Key to the X-Men’s plan was the need to deliver a small number of them to the flagship of the invading armada, the immense vessel they called the Kh’thonic Flagship. Fortunate for them, then, that the British had a bleeding-edge space plane already fueled and ready on the waters of the Sargasso Sea. The arrival of the Kh’thon had thrown a wrench into the plans of the British Rocket Group, so there was some justice, if not even some irony, in the idea of its virgin launch being the linchpin in a plan that might spell the end of the Kh’thonic threat.
Raphael maneuvered around the rear acceleration chairs, smiling unctuously at their passengers, Ms. Braddock in particular, and then settled himself into the copilot’s seat. The RCX operative’s presence was the only variable in the plan for which Alysande could not account. When she’d relayed the X-Men’s request to her superiors, she’d volunteered her name as a potential pilot for the mission. There was every chance that they would not be returning alive, and that they might face violent resistance when they reached the Fathership; it was clear, then, that none of the space plane’s planned crew could be sent along. They were scientists, to a man, none of them with any combat experience. Alysande, who’d overseen security for the space plane project since its early days, knew more about the craft and its controls than virtually anyone but the men and women who built it, and certainly knew how to handle herself in a flrefight.
When the word had come down that the space plane would be put at the X-Men’s disposal, then, Alysande was hardly surprised to hear her own name mentioned as captaining the vessel. However, when Raphael was listed as her second-in-command, she’d been taken somewhat aback.
It shouldn’t have puzzled her at all, really. She realized that only in retrospect, while watching the secret agent oversee the installation of the unconscious Exemplar prisoner in the rear of the craft’s passenger section. Seeing the care with which Raphael maneuvered the sleeping body into place, the almost naked hunger writ on his face, Alysande had first taken his interest in the woman to be one of a prurient nature. It quickly occurred to her, however, that the virtually sexless Raphael was not likely interested in the strange, unearthly woman’s body. No, Raphael was interested in her mind.
Specifically, the ability of her mind to move objects. She could lift a car, bus, or boat, or so Alysande had been told, but it occurred to her that the telekine might also be able to manipulate objects on a smaller scale— say, something the size of a capillary in the brain? It didn’t take much imagination to see what a backroom, black-ops type like Raphael wouldn’t do with the ability to literally squeeze the life from a target, but from across the room. And when Alysande saw the way he hungrily looked at Ms. Braddock as he passed by suggested that he would not refuse the ability to pluck secrets from the minds of his enemies from great distances, either.
Despite Raphael’s protestations to the contrary, Alysande knew that the RCX viewed this mission, in large part, as a shopping trip. In addition to helping to safeguard the safety of humanity and of the Earth itself, Alysande was sure that Raphael was under orders to secure and bring back any bits of technology, weaponry, or otherwise that he might come across and determine what might be of use to the British crown.
Which, Alysande realized with only a slight measure of distaste, was perfectly fine with her.
As Raphael strapped into the copilot’s seat, Alysande patched her helmet mic into the ship’s inboard commu
nications.
“Everybody buckled in? Best you do, as I expect this might be something of a bUmpy ride.”
Out on the launch pad, the countdown had begun.
28
“So you used to be an Avenger, right, Mr. McCoy?” “Still a reserve member in good standing, Doug. But remember, call me Hank. Why, you think they loan a Quinjet to just anybody that asks?”
“No ... Hank. I was just wondering. What’s Captain America really like?”
Hank sighed, and turned his attention back to the quinjet’s controls.
The five-person, supersonic VTOL was now racing over the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, cruising at just over Mach 2. At this speed, they would reach Ecuador in just over an hour. Hank McCoy and Doug Ramsey were strapped into the two flight crew seats, while Rogue was sacked out in the back stretched across three jump seats. She snored from time to time and the sound was so high and whistling that Hank couldn’t help finding it irresistibly charming.
Yes, Hank chided himself If not for the fact that the barest touch of her skin knocks people unconscious, but only after depriving them of their powers and memories, then maybe you’d make a play for her, no? If, that is, she were able to get over the fact that you look like a shaved ape crammed unconvincingly into a human suit.
For all that he approached the world, and its perils, with a light heart and a smile on his face, still there were times when darker moods struck Hank. Now, evidently, was one of those times.
He scowled.
“Mr. McCoy?” said the boy at his side, tentatively. “Erm, Hank? Is everything alright?”
“Hmm? Oh, yes, Doug. I’m sorry. Was a million miles away for a moment, there. You were asking about Captain America, were you?”
Doug nodded, wide-eyed and eager.
“Well, keep yourself in the game, young man, and you just might meet him yourself.”
Provided, that is, Hank thought, that any of us lives that long.
The Return Page 13
