“Lucier wasn't too pleased with us after that," Bobby noted.
“You can say that again," Jean responded. "He was like a pit bull on a bad hair day."
"Nor was his pique difficult to understand," Hank put in. “Based on what Lucifer spat at us before he slunk off, it seemed he had been planning Earth's downfall for years ... and we had managed to ruin his scheme in a few scant minutes."
Bobby frowned thoughtfully. "I still don't understand why the professor let him escape that way-without a fight, I mean. It was pretty clear we hadn't seen the last of him."
"Because it didn't matter," Scott remarked, rejoining the conversation at last. "Lucifer was just an advance scout for the Quistalians. if we kept him from leaving, some other scout would’ve taken his place ... someone we might not have matched up with so well."
"The devil you know?" Warren suggested.
"That’s what I'm thinking," said Scott.
"But knowing Lucifer didn't make our second encounter any easier," Hank observed dryly. "In fact, familiarity worked more in our adversary's favor than in our own."
Bobby nodded. "He was ready for us, all right."
“You're referring,” said Jean, "to the transparent cage in which Lucifer imprisoned us?"
Warren grunted. "Considering how well he knew us, he wasn't able to keep us there very long."
Hank winked at Jean. "That's because our resident teleki-netic was able to flip a lever without anyone realizing it."
Jean rolled her eyes. "Your resident telekinetic wishes she had thought of that lever on her own. But if memory serves, it took a certain Beast to make the suggestion."
"And to identify the right lever,” Warren added.
"It's a gift," Hank told the others, batting his long, blue eyelashes with false modesty.
“Of course," Bobby noted, "we weren't out of the woods yet. We still had all those big green robots to take on."
"Yes," said Jean. She glanced at Warren, her brow creasing over the bridge of her delicate nose. "And a little confusion to overcome."
“Confusion?" Bobby asked.
Warren knew exactly what Jean was talking about. “Over whether to try to knock out Dominus," he elaborated.
Bobby's eyes narrowed with obvious discomfort as it came back to him. "Oh yeah," he said. "That."
Warren hadn't forgotten a single detail. As he and his teammates made their way through endless corridors of sin-ister-looking alien machinery, they finally came across Lucifer's main chamber-a space defined and surrounded by a single, sprawling Quistalian machine.
Suddenly, they heard Xavier's voice in their heads, warning them not to damage the machine—which he called Dominus. However, Warren wasn't so sure it was the professor who had sent the message. After all, Lucifer had demonstrated telepathic abilities as well. What if the Quistalian had impersonated Xavier to deceive them and save Dominus?
With that in mind, Warren had gone after the machine. But before he could do any damage, he felt something slam him in the back with stunning force. It had taken him a moment to shake off the effects—and to realize that Scott had walloped him with an optical beam.
He still remembered how it feit—the psychological pain as well as the physical. It seemed to Warren that he had been betrayed. Stabbed in the back, if only with an energy blast.
By that time, Bobby was making an attempt to destroy Dominus with a well-placed projectile made out of ice. However, Jean stopped it in mid-air with her power of telekinesis.
It was the first time one member of the team had found himself pitted against another-not just in one of the professor's danger room sequences, but for real, in the outside world.
Then they saw why Xavier might tell them not to attack Dominus. One of Lucifer's robots, trying to tear into a bouncing Hank, shot past him and struck Lucifer's machine instead. Instantly, the robot was torn apart-though Dominus remained unscathed.
Had it been Warren who plowed into the machine, there would have been nothing left of him but gristle and gore Clearly, Scott had done him a favor by pounding him witl his optical beam.
Still, it had taken Warren some time to forgive his team mate—to get past the bitter feeling of being double-crosse by someone who was supposed to be his friend.
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"Fortunately," said Jean, “Warren's gotten over that shot he took from Scott" She eyed him. “Hasn't he?"
Warren wasn't sure if she had been inside his head the whole time, following his thoughts, or had just arrived at the same endpoint "Yes," he assured her. “I have."
Jean looked satisfied. "That's what I thought."
Warren sighed. If he was going to hold something against Scott, it wouldn't have been that optical blast. It would have been the fact that his teammate stole the heart of the first woman Warren had ever loved.
The woman he was looking at right now.
"Of course," Warren went on, glancing at Scott and smiling a conspiratorial smile, "that doesn't mean I don't get the urge every now and then to give him a shot in return."
Jean grinned. “Who doesn't?"
“Thanks a lot," said Scott.
And again, they all laughed.
It had been a long time since the being called Lucifer had something to laugh about.
But as he floated in the Nameless Dimension and listened to the X-Men gloating over past victories, he couldn't help delighting in the irony. Time and again, the mutants had neutralized and defused his Quistalian initiatives. Time and again, they had stood in his way as he attempted to lay claim to their world.
But this time would be different. This time, Lucifer wasn't counting on his people's advanced technology to help him obtain his objective. This time, he was relying on the talents of the X-Men themselves.
Every moment they unknowingly did his bidding appealed to his bottomless hunger for retribution. Every sec-
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ond they inadvertently served his cause was a source of deep, heartfelt satisfaction.
On Quistalium, the dark, regimented world-complex of his birth, there was a name for such an exalted feeling. It was called "the secret victory"-and it was prized above all other kinds.
Why? Because other kinds of victory didn't require the same sort of subtlety on the part of the victor. They didn't demand the same level of complexity and imagination. And as a rule, they were a good deal easier to secure.
It was the kind of thinking that prevailed among Lucifer's people, a dour, relentlessly aggressive race dubbed the Arcane by one of the first sentient species to feel the Quistalians' boots on their necks. It was an example of the philosophy that had made them conquerors.
For an agent of the Arcane, victory might arrive in a heartbeat or it might take a century of planning. But in the end, it always came.
Lucifer himself had overseen many a successful campaign. He had identified dozens of unsuspecting species and methodically plotted their downfalls, pursuing each of his schemes with painstaking care and diligence until the time came when he could activate the machine called Dominus and deaden the wills of the populace.
Back on Quistalium, his efforts brought him glory and prestige. They earned him a large, well-appointed estate by the dazzling Falls of Fire, medals enough to fill a sleeping chamber and long parades before cheering throngs in the immense synthetic canyons of the capital.
They also propelled Lucifer to the top of Quistalium's military hierarchy, garnered him the admiration of lesser agents and gave him access to his government's secret inner
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councils. They made him a bright, blazing symbol of all that his people aspired to.
It was a far cry from his beginnings in the lowest stratum of Quistalian society, a caste that occupied the several barren asteroids in orbit around the homeworld. Lucifer's parents, whom he hardly remembered, had been part of the faceless multitude that worked the asteroids' radioactive mines, serving their civilization in the most mundane and mechanical way po
ssible.
Lucifer would certainly have shared their fate had his brain enzymes not revealed an enormous potential for strategic intelligence—the kind theretofore undocumented in the spartan domiciles of the asteroid belt. From that point on, he was trained with the sons and daughters of aristocrats ... whom he outshone on a regular basis.
And every time he did so, he was forced to endure physical punishment at their hands. Clearly, they resented his demonstrations of superiority. But he didn’t stop demonstrating it and he didn't balk at the beatings-far from it. To Lucifer, the physical torment was merely another rite of training, an exercise that would make his will stronger with each passing day.
In the end, his approach served him well. His meteoric ■ rise to prominence as an advance agent was proof of that.
But power and renown were never ends in themselves to Lucifer. The mantle of commendation always seemed to sit a bit heavily on his shoulders, as if it were a burden rather than an honor.
In truth, the only reward he ever coveted was conquest itself. His only desires, his only goals, were to serve to the Supreme One and to expand the Quistalian empire.
The images imprinted on his eyes when he slept weren't those of riches or splendor. They were the eyes of his myriad
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victims—always wide with expanding fear, or fixed listlessly on an eternity of unrelenting oppression.
And well they should have been. Once a species was taken in thrall by the Arcane, there was no possibility of its rescue or redemption. There wasn't even the slightest ray of hope.
Year after year, Lucifer had pursued the same ambitious course, like a comet streaking through the heavens. He had established base after secret base, network after hidden network, yoking world after unsuspecting world to the cause of Quistalian domination. And he had never failed in his mission.
Until he came to Earth.
The alien's teeth ground together as he remembered the first time he had seen the blue-green sphere. It had seemed so innocent, so vulnerable, so eminently available for the taking.
Prior to his departure, he was called to the mighty chamber of the Supreme One and warned that Earth might prove a nettlesome acquisition. After all, its population was large and scattered across its globe, and it seemed to exhibit a high level of intelligence.
Lucifer saw now why he had been granted not one chance to conquer mankind, but three-the first time such a thing had happened since his people took their boundless aggression into space.
But even three opportunities had not been enough. The acquisition turned out to be even more difficult than the Supreme One predicted. Lucifer had failed and failed miserably.
And after he squandered his last chance, he was exiled to the place known as the Nameless Dimension. It was necessary, expected—a grim warning to the Arcane’s other advance agents never to underestimate any species they sought to enslave.
At first, it had galled Lucifer to think that someone else might reap the harvest he had sown on Earth, learning from his mistakes and using that knowledge to complete Lucifer's conquest. The very notion had gnawed at him like a worm in his brain.
But to his surprise, the Supreme One hadn't sent a replacement to Earth. He had allowed mankind to remain free and unscathed, despite its having been identified as a prime target population.
Lucifer had puzzled over that decision for a long time, turning it over and over in his mind-and at last come to a startling conclusion. It seemed he wasn't the only one who had miscalculated the difficulty of enslaving Earth. The Supreme One had miscalculated as well.
He had sent an agent of the Arcane on a mission for which he was unprepared. And as a result, he had been forced to sacrifice that agent, costing Quistalium a piece of valuable property in the process.
Did that mean the Supreme One deserved to be punished too?
Lucifer cackled uncontrollably at the thought, his gloved fists pressed hard against his mouth. The all-powerful Supreme One, cast aside as Lucifer had been cast aside, forced to live out his solitary existence in a drab, featureless limbo ... it was too amusing for words.
He wished he had conjured such an image when he was first dispatched to the Nameless Dimension. He could have used a reason to laugh then. He could have used a great many of them.
The present moment was a different matter entirely. Lucifer didn't need to find reasons to be amused. He had all the entertainment he needed, all the diversion anyone could ever hope for.
Xavier's mutants were seeing to that
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he hot Columbian sun beat down on Scott Summers with oven-like intensity as he manipulated the visor that kept his optical beams in check.
The visor opened only the slightest bit, little more than a hairsbreadth really. However, it was enough to release one of the most potent biologically generated energies known to man.
The thick, exotic foliage in front of him ripped away before his optical onslaught, revealing an eight-foot high slab of dark, oily-looking metal built into the side of the mountain. His job done, Scott closed his visor.
Hank approached the slab and touched it with a blue forefinger as the smell of chlorophyll permeated the air. "Quistalian manufacture if I've ever seen it," he observed.
"Looks like we came to the right place," Jean remarked.
"Any sign of life in there?" Scott asked her.
His wife closed her eyes and concentrated. After a second or two, she shook her head. "Nothing even approaching sentience."
"So we could still find some daytime talk show hosts," Hank quipped, readjusting his bulging yellow backpack.
Scott shot him a disparaging look.
"Sorry," said his furry friend, shrugging his massive blue shoulders. "I couldn't resist."
Warren pointed to a tiny hole in the center of the door. "Looks like this is the lock. Where's that key?"
Scott opened one of the utility pouches on his shoulder strap and removed a device the size of a ballpoint pen. Professor X had given it to him before the team left Salem Center.
Inserting the device into the hole, he pressed a stud on the side of it. There was a green glow from inside the hole. Then the slab began to slide down, barely giving Scott time to remove his key.
The dimly lit corridor that stretched out past the threshold was rife with the somber, oily-looking metals and strangely serpentine circuitry they had seen in other Quistalian bases. Replacing the key in his pouch, Scott turned to the others and beckoned.
"Come on," he said.
"Right behind you," Bobby told him.
Scott entered the tunnel, his eyes adjusting gradually to the lower light levels. Its cool embrace felt refreshing after the moist, steamy heat of the Columbian highlands.
Warren flapped his wings and soared ahead of his teammates in accordance with their plan.
As Bobby followed Scott into the corridor, he transformed into his icy form. "You know what's interesting?" he asked.
"What?" Scott responded, his eyes focused on the stretch of passageway directly ahead of them.
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"That the professor was working on all this stuff,” said Bobby, "and he never toid anyone.”
Scott spared him a glance. “By stuff, you mean this thing?” he asked, patting the pouch that held the Quistalian key.
“That's part of it," Bobby replied. "There's also the machine Hank's lugging around that's going to broadcast the status quo signal to the other bases... and whatever it is the professor's going to cobble together once we bring him his components."
Scott pondered his teammate's comment as he led the way deeper into the tunnel. "What are you saying? That Professor Xavier has gotten a bit more mysterious lately?”
"When it comes to the Quistaiians," said Bobby, "yes."
Scott frowned as he saw where his friend's remarks were going.
“It must have been pretty traumatic," he said, "when Lucifer dropped a slab of stone on the profes
sor's legs. I can see why he'd devote some extra effort to defending Earth against that kind of power."
Of course, he hated the idea that Xavier was as vulnerable as the rest of them were. But there was no avoiding it. The professor wasn't a god, after all. He was just a man.
They continued to make their way along the corridor, following its twists and turns. Scott and Bobby remained in the lead, poised for trouble. Trailing them, Jean "listened" for any as-yet undetected signs of life. And Hank brought up the rear, carrying the professor's counterfeit broadcast component in his backpack.
Then Scott heard something that sounded like the beating of wings. He exchanged glances with his wife, an unspoken question on his lips.
She answered it just as silently. It's Warren, all right. And he doesn't seem to be in any danger.
A moment later, their fellow X-Man was on top of them, his wings spread from one wall to the other in a braking action. "I found the part we're looking for," he said.
Scott nodded. "Good. How far?"
"Another hundred meters," the winged man estimated. 'This passage snakes so much, it's hard to tell."
"I can live with a hundred meters," said Bobby.
“Same here," Scott told him. "But let's pick up the pace a little. The sooner we're out of this place, the better I'll like it."
Again, Warren went on ahead. But this time he stayed in sight, hovering at each bend in the corridor until the rest of the team caught up.
Finally, they reached their destination-the entrance to an immense, cylindrical chamber, the upper reaches of which were lost in darkness. The lower portions of its towering walls were lit by long, opalescent strips, revealing serpentine circuitry that was even thicker and more twisted than what they had already seen.
The place brought back memories of the Quistalian facilities Scott had explored early in his career as an X-Man. None of those memories were especially pleasant ones.
At the opposite side of the chamber, a series of smaller cylinders comprised what the professor had described as the base's communications system. The majority of the cylinders were solid gray in color. Only one was a dusky gold with a series of scarlet striations running through it. Scott recognized it as the component they had come for.
Shadow of the Past Page 9
