It was a rat’s nest, a meat grinder that would chew up any force fool enough to take it on.
So of course, the X-Men had been tasked to do just that.
In the distance, the sky lit up with a line of tracers, curving gracefully through the night as the gunner tracked an airborne target, and a few seconds later the sound of firing followed, bup-bup-bup-bup. Both sight and sound were then overwhelmed by an ugly fireball as the falling bombs hit their target.
Logan’s eyes narrowed to slits as he watched from the minimal shelter afforded by the intersection of a house’s two stone walls. His senses were more acute than any hunting predator’s, but in a scrap like this the advantage became a liability. He could see clearly in almost total darkness, yet a surprise burst of tracer rounds could strip him of that night vision in a flash. The healing factor that was his main mutant power would deal with the loss in a couple of heartbeats, but in a firefight those seconds usually made the difference between survival and disaster. Logan’s sense of smell allowed him to follow trails that bloodhounds couldn’t trace, but there were so many scents to choose from here that it took conscious effort to process them. Suddenly, he had to use conscious thought to direct processes that were normally backbrain second nature. Didn’t matter that he still did it with a speed and accuracy that left everyone around him in the dust, whether mutant or sapien. It blunted his edge—and that was unacceptable.
He sniffed the air, to catalogue who—or what—was in his immediate vicinity, and smiled at one smell he recognized.
Somebody had been kind enough to lose their cigar.
Cuban. Vintage. Hand-rolled. He caught just the smallest residual flavor of the woman who’d made it enough to recognize her if they met, smiled as he considered the possibilities.
He cupped his lighter to shield the flame from view, aware as he did that this habit from previous battlefields wouldn’t help in the least against a heat-sensitive thermal imager; on the other hand, such a device would have nailed him right from the start. No response suggested no such device, which gave him leave to indulge. He didn’t get the opportunity very often these days. Too many flamin’ rules, too many flamin’ busybodies hell-bent on enforcing them, too much flamin’ aggravation.
Harsh snaps through the air off to the right caught his attention and he sank a little deeper into the building’s shadows, instinctively hiding the glowing end of the cigar with the hollow of his hand as multiple pulses of laser fire burned their way overhead, clipping a nearby building and creating a shower of heat-fused masonry. Like hail, only harder. Had it hit something more significant with a more powerful pop, he would have had a spray of shrapnel to contend with.
Had nothing to do with him, though; someone else was the target.
Logan didn’t move; there was no point. Given the lay of the ground, the intensity of the strafing fire, they had nowhere else to go but right past him.
Bingo.
Two figures, male and female, in the black leather uniforms of the X-Men. The man was in the lead, big sucker, but moving with surprising grace despite his evident bulk, bare arms standing out from the rest of him in the glow of various explosions. The skin of those arms and of his head reflected the light in a way that told Logan he was metal—even his hair gleamed as though cast from chrome. This was one of the newbies, Piotr Nikolievitch Rasputin. Colossus.
Logan spared him only the merest glance; his focus was mainly on Rogue.
She used to flinch at loud noises; now she kept pace with her companion, bobbing and weaving with practiced grace, presenting a random and unpredictable target for the opposition—showing excellent instincts for dealing with any trouble that came her way.
“How long do we have?” the man called to her.
“Two minutes, tops,” she replied, as she dove with him to cover.
Smart girl. The obvious place to hide was the shadowed corner where Logan himself stood, yet she realized that any infantryman worth the name would recognize that as well, and probably drop a brace of rounds on the location just to make sure. She’d chosen a nearby shell hole instead, part of a string of depressions that afforded a messy but relatively secure means of slipping across this open patch of ground.
The moment Rogue hit, she turned her back to the way they’d come, every one of her senses on high alert. Rasputin was a step behind, his attention still on whatever might be chasing them; he hadn’t yet twigged to the possibility of a threat from anywhere else. His wasn’t as artful a landing, either. Downside to all that bulk was, despite his relative ease of movement, Colossus still landed like a falling bank safe. Slid all the way to the bottom and made a deeper hole of his own.
Logan couldn’t help a grin. The girl was pretty damn good. All it had taken was a whiff of his lit cigar.
Better yet, he realized she was looking right at him.
But that was when she made her mistake, standing straight up to greet him, all thoughts of the mission banished behind her smile of welcome and pure delight.
“Logan,” Rogue cried.
“I’m away for a while, the whole world goes to hell.”
He should have known better. They had both breached battlefield discipline, had forgotten for a fateful split second what was happening all around them. And nearly paid dearly for the lapse.
He heard footsteps, the kling of a grenade pin flipping free, but never saw the bomb until it blew on the far side of Rogue. No time to pull her clear, no chance to cover her body with his own. She was too far out of reach.
But Colossus wasn’t. His view wasn’t masked by Rogue, as Logan’s was—he saw the grenade—and in the instant it took to fall, the fraction of a heartbeat before it exploded, he grabbed Rogue’s bare hand in one of his.
Back in the day, when Logan first knew her, the assimilation process was gradual. It took a definable length of time, enough for Rogue to have second thoughts, for the subject to pull away, as he felt his life literally pouring out of him. This was virtually instantaneous.
From the point of contact, Rogue’s skin flashed chrome as armor rolled up her arm across her body—while Peter’s reverted the other way, from organic steel back to normal flesh—so that when the spray of antipersonnel shrapnel reached her, it deflected off…
…to clip Logan instead.
It hurt like hell, both from slashing open a stretch of his side—which bled freely—and because the metal was red-hot, burning him as well. That’s why he favored T-shirts and clothes older than most of the junior X-Men; the way he generally got himself torn up, they were the most easily replaceable. Made him smile inside and shake his head, to wonder at the replacement cost of the custom-constructed X-Men uniforms.
Logan pressed his hand against the wound, but no more blood was flowing; there’d been just enough for that first, glorious, indelible stain before the skin regrew. It was still tender, but in a matter of minutes there’d be only a scar, and by tomorrow nothing at all. No sign whatsoever that he’d been wounded.
If only he could dump the sense memories of those hurts as easily. One thing to be a man who’s almost impossible to kill; totally another to remember pretty near every one of those quasi-death experiences.
He took another puff of his cigar. They’d been here long enough.
“You gonna stand here and get blown up, or what?”
“I didn’t see you at briefing, bub,” Rogue sassed him back, giving as good as she got, which cheered him. “D’you have the slightest idea where we’re goin’?”
She had the knowledge from the briefing, but he had the experience. As a brace of searchlights speared down from some hovering platform to illuminate the scene for the enemy gunners, he gestured towards a squat and ugly structure some distance away, across what had been the town’s central square.
“I’m thinkin’ that bunker.”
The look she gave him told Logan he’d scored, and also that if she had just absorbed Cyclops’s optic blasts instead of Colossus’s steel, the frustration in her eyes might
have propelled him all the way over there in a single shot!
He felt a tremor through the ground, saw ripples in a pool of water pulse inward to the center.
Another pulse, establishing a steady cadence whose spacing suggested the march of something massive.
“Time to go, children,” he told the others, noting that both were reverting to their original states: Rogue human, Colossus in armor. She’d way improved since he saw her last.
“We get to that door,” Rogue announced, stress making her Mississippi accent a bit more pronounced, breathless from the double-sided transformation, “we’re clear.”
The two younger X-Men began moving from cover to cover, just as they’d been trained.
Logan started walking, right out in the open, as though he were out for an evening stroll—making himself a stalking horse for anyone dumb enough to take a shot. Watching him, Rogue didn’t know whether to admire his courage or shake him silly for being such a damn fool! Logan, she hissed to herself, don’t you realize, dummy, that the price of havin’ friends, people who truly care ’bout you, is that when you’re hurt, we feel it, too! Only we maybe don’t get over it quite so quick.
Rogue wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines. On the far side of a nearby hill, Storm also watched him take his walk and confined her spoken comments to a single word: “Logan!”
Thinking to herself, she used terms that would have given even him pause and made any telepath with access to those thoughts sever the connection instantly. He wasn’t supposed to be here, and while his presence was always welcome in a firefight, she really didn’t like surprises when lives were on the line.
Storm looked again through her binoculars, this time checking the integral display. Logan was fifty meters ahead, the bunker some two hundred plus beyond.
Twisting around, she used hand signals to alert the rest of her team, under cover of their own a few dozen meters back and to the side. Kitty Pryde was already on the move, body low to the ground as she sprinted in a zigzag towards Bobby Drake. The maneuvering wasn’t really necessary; of all the team, she was the closest to Wolverine in her practical invulnerability to harm. Not so much like Colossus, whose organic steel armor could actually be breached with the right weapons, but because neither bullets nor energy beams can have much effect on a girl who was essentially a ghost.
Storm could feel the tremors in the earth as well, could sense the displacement in the air that told her something massive was moving through the night, closing on them with every giant step. Time had just joined the opposition.
“You okay?” Kitty called to Bobby as she slid down to join him, misjudging her angle just enough that she arrived half sunk into the ground. He didn’t say anything, but his look was eloquent: she knew the casual way she walked through walls really creeped him out.
“Yeah,” he replied. “You?”
“A little dusty.”
He reached out and brushed her shoulder clean. She’d invited the contact, and he’d responded, both operating on instinct. That was as far as either was prepared to take things. Now.
Still, he couldn’t help giving her a smile. It was clear he liked her. Problem was, while Kitty was a free spirit, Bobby already had a girl—Rogue.
“Storm’s signaling; she wants us to catch up. Your lead?”
She grinned and took off, and Bobby had to scramble to keep up. She was as dangerously arrogant as Wolverine when it came to getting hurt. She didn’t believe it was possible. Kitty didn’t even have to worry much about being taken by surprise, because for the most part her power was always “on.” Her natural state, according to Professor Xavier, was to be phased; she stayed coherent by an act of will.
Laser pulses sought them out, and Bobby blocked them with a wall of ice that was porous enough to allow them through but filled with enough impurities—namely dirt—to diffuse the beam to the point of harmlessness.
But those beams weren’t the only threat. A brace of rockets shot in from another direction. Bobby was only aware of them after Kitty suddenly grabbed him, crushing her body against his in a hard embrace that allowed her to phase them both so the missiles passed through them as if they were air. His insides tingled as they did, reminding him of a joy buzzer–pen his brother had once blown his allowance for on Halloween.
Across the field, Rogue had also seen the approaching missiles—they’d passed her on the way—and in the moment before impact, when she saw Bobby so vulnerable and unaware, her heart stopped and leapt up to her throat. She was happy to see him survive unscathed, but a lot less so when she noted that it took way too many extra moments for him and Kitty to break apart.
“Keep movin’, kid,” Logan told her. He’d seen what she’d seen, damn him; he didn’t miss anything. “And keep your eyes dead ahead.”
Storm missed it all. She was focused on their objective, and the handheld display which presented her with a map of the battlefield, complete with the disposition of her team and a counter that was just passing ninety seconds.
“Time, people,” she told Kitty and Bobby as they arrived, using the comset clipped to her ear to alert the others. “No more margin for error. Iceman, Shadowcat—get in position.” This was to Bobby and Kitty directly, using their code names. “On my mark.”
They moved forward at a jog trot, quick but careful, in a V-formation led by Storm, with her younger teammates trailing by a couple of steps, covering her flanks while she concentrated on the way ahead.
The last bit of cover was a pile of junked cars; beyond was nothing but open ground, an ideal killing field. Somebody with a mortar got their range and began bracketing them with rounds as they approached the checkpoint, inching closer with every shot, the last forcing them to pitch forward in an undignified scramble that brought them with a crash down beside the other assault team, who’d gotten there first.
Logan was leaning against one of the cars, apparently without a care in the world.
“What are you doing here?” Storm flared at him, letting a bit more of her feelings show than she’d actually intended. High above, a complement to those emotions, came a blinding flash, gone almost before it had time to register, accompanied by a basso drum roll that was instantly recognized. A bolt of lightning, a trill of thunder; the elements were echoing Storm’s emotions.
That wasn’t good. The fact that she had to take a moment to master herself didn’t help her mood. Chances were, when this op was concluded, someone, somewhere might have to deal with some very nasty weather.
“Enjoying the scenery,” he suggested, choosing the completely wrong moment for levity and then making it significantly worse by using a piece of flaming debris to relight his cigar.
For a moment, Storm seriously considered going “Zeus” on his insubordinate ass and using her next bolt of lightning to knock him flat. Perhaps a very near miss would knock some sense into his thick Canadian skull. Or at least inspire a modicum of respect.
She dismissed the inspiration even before it was fully formed, because she knew it would do no good.
And suddenly, there was no time for conscious thought at all as she sensed movement in the air—that same massive shape she’d noticed before, only much, much closer. How had it crept up on them so unawares? Realization and action came as one as she grabbed for her friend and teammate and yanked him bodily clear of the car, just as a massive armored foot the size of a semitrailer squashed it flat.
They ended up face-to-face, tight against each other, and for that briefest of moments that was all that mattered.
“I got this,” said Storm, as the foot moved on. Through the smoke and the shadows, the literal fog of battle, none of them was in a position to see what it was attached to. The younger X-Men weren’t sure they wanted to.
“Watch my back, okay?” she told him.
“Not a problem,” he replied.
It was a spectacular back, Logan thought, even masked as it was by the cloak of her uniform. To call Ororo Munroe beautiful was merely to stat
e the obvious. There was no one—among the X-Men, in the world—who even came close. Except, the thought came to him, a memory of a wound still fresh enough to hurt: Jean Grey.
“Hey, bub,” Rogue chided gently, “eyes front, right?”
He slid a look her way, which made her grin. Logan subvocalized a warning growl that set hackles rising on the backs of the necks of both the boys and Kitty, but seemed to make Rogue’s grin grow even wider.
Storm, all business, brought them back to the task at hand.
“Stay in formation,” she instructed. “Wait to make your move.”
They knew whatever cues she was talking about, but Storm knew Logan didn’t. She grabbed him as he stood to make a move of his own.
“Logan,” she snapped, “we work as a team!”
He smiled tolerantly and she thought more seriously this time about that lightning bolt. “You let me know how that works out for you, darlin’,” he replied, and resumed his evening stroll, complete with cigar.
So obvious a target couldn’t be ignored. Their adversaries opened up with everything they had.
So foolhardy a friend couldn’t be abandoned. Bobby and Peter exchanged quick glances. Then Peter rose to follow.
“Peter!” Storm snapped, genuinely furious now. “Get back here!”
The raw edge of command in her voice actually got through to him, and to Bobby as well, who’d been caught halfway to his feet. Peter stopped, torn between wanting to follow the Wolverine and his responsibility to Storm as mission commander.
X-Men(tm) The Last Stand Page 3
