“So it’s an accusation, then, is it?” she asked rhetorically. “Let me tell you something, you sanctimonious bigot, unlike you, I follow orders. The Secretary instructed me to call Charles Xavier. I have done that. No more, no less. Simply because you cannot even conceive of following instructions is no reason to believe those around you share your faults.”
Gyrich’s eyes narrowed and his lip curled back. A pulsing on the side of his cheek revealed that he was grinding his teeth, and Val was absurdly pleased. It was to her great displeasure that Val Cooper had known far too much hate in her life. Most people, she imagined, knew too little love. That was par for the course.
Hate was completely different. It was a disease, and an infectious one at that. Still, she lived in Washington, so the choice was between hatred and self-loathing. Val Cooper thought she was pretty decent, overall, so she chose hatred.
Even in the spawning ground for heartlessness and cruelty, Gyrich was something special. Val was fond of saying that when he died, Hell wouldn’t take him for fear he’d take over the joint. It always amazed her how few people laughed at that line. But they were right. The truth was never funny.
Gyrich exhaled and sat forward slightly in his seat, attempting and failing to produce a benevolent smile, which instead became the foolish grin often reserved for infants, senile relatives, and the mentally ill. In itself, it was an insult.
“Let me be specific, and official,” Gyrich said slowly. “Did you inform the X-Men of the situation in Colorado?”
“No.”
“Then we can only assume, as I have long believed, that Professor Xavier is directly tied to the X-Men,” he said, leaning back with a nauseatingly self-satisfied air.
“Speak for yourself,” Val said, just as calmly. “That’s not what my report will reflect.”
Gyrich raised an eyebrow. “Explain,” he commanded, though she ignored his tone for the moment.
Val was thinking fast, but the basic gist of this story had already been concocted with Charles Xavier hours earlier. The last thing Xavier needed was to have Gyrich on his tail at all times. It would seriously impair the X-Men’s ability to function as a team. Still, though prepared, she spoke slowly and thoughtfully to make it appear as though her reasoning was being developed on the spot.
“We know Xavier is friendly with Dr. Henry McCoy, aka the Beast,” she said. “We also know that, at times, McCoy has been seen with the X-Men. Therefore, it is more likely that Xavier told McCoy, and McCoy passed it on. Even that is unlikely, however. Xavier has too much to lose in the fight for mutant rights if he were to lose the favorable opinion of the current administration. He wouldn’t jeopardize that by revealing the content of what was obviously a high-level-clearance conversation.”
She could see from the moment she began that Gyrich wasn’t buying word one of the story. In the end, that hardly mattered. It was less important that Gyrich be dissuaded from connecting Xavier to the X-Men than it was that he be dissuaded from connecting Val herself to the X-Men. Not only would she lose her position and everything associated with it, but if he could show that she knowingly invited outside agencies in to deal with restricted federal operations, she could, and certainly would, be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” she said finally.
That woke Gyrich up from his predatory daydreams.
“You’re right,” he said smugly. “It doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. But hey, Val, if that’s your professional opinion on the subject, then I’m willing to take your word on it, of course. Only thing is, that leaves me with a bit of a conundrum.”
“How’s that?” she asked.
“Well, it’s really quite simple,” Gyrich said, nearly licking his lips with anticipation. “You claim you didn’t contact the X-Men directly, though of course we both know you have the capacity to do so, since several members of X-Factor actually used to be X-Men. You also insist that Xavier isn’t directly tied to those mutie terrorists, and wouldn’t contact them even if he were. You see where this leaves us?”
“I’m not following you,” Val said, but she was lying. She was following Gyrich’s logic very closely, and it disturbed her deeply.
“Well, if you didn’t call them, and Xavier didn’t call them, then it must be the X-Men themselves who have taken over this facility,” Gyrich said, almost leering now with the pleasure of the spot he’d put her in.
“That’s ridiculous!” she said. “You have no reason to think …”
“I have every reason to think that is the case, and unless you care to tell a different story, we both know how the Secretary will feel,” Gyrich said smugly. “You can file your little reports to your heart’s content, but it won’t change the outcome. The X-Men have been confronted by the U.S. Army on federal land. Though they have, as yet, made no hostile move, we must assume they are the culprits, and that they intend to rendezvous with teammates inside the facility.”
The red-haired man leaned forward and plucked her desk phone from its cradle. He punched in a numerical sequence that gave him access to the safe line she had used to call Xavier. It swept itself for bugs or other surveillance every thirty seconds, and automatically disconnected if the receiving line began a trace.
Gyrich then dialed a brief code number.
“What are you doing?” Val asked, though suddenly she thought she knew. She felt as though she’d been punched in the stomach, and bile rose in her throat.
“This is Gyrich,” he said. “Get me Colonel Tomko.”
Leaning over to speak into the phone, Gyrich looked around the room. Eventually, his eyes found Val’s, and he smiled at her with genuine warmth, a first for the man. But she knew the smile was not for her benefit, it was his uncontrollable reaction to a moment of personal triumph.
“I’ll ask you again, Gyrich,” she said angrily. “What the hell are you doing?”
She reached for the cutoff button, to disconnect his call, but Gyrich stood and slapped her hand away.
“Move an inch toward that phone and you’re done in D.C., Cooper,” he snarled. Then his demeanor changed completely and his smile returned. He leaned back on her desk and spoke grimly into the phone. “Hello, Colonel Tomko,” he said. “Under my authority, you are hereby ordered to place the X-Men in custody. Should they resist, you will instruct your men to shoot to kill.”
“No!” Val shouted. “Gyrich, are you out of your mind? They may be the only people capable of preventing disaster out there! You’re blowing your ace in the hole, you blind lunatic!”
Gyrich was ignoring her. Instead, he seemed to be having trouble with Colonel Tomko on the line. Gyrich’s face had reddened, and his nostrils flared as he spoke louder and more slowly.
“I’ll say this only once more, Colonel,” he declared. “You answer to me and only to me. I have given you your orders, and you will carry them out. I expect that when you next contact me, the X-Men will be your prisoners or dead, and the facility will be back under our control.”
Without another word, he hung up. Val knew the horror she felt must be etched on her face, but could do nothing about it. Gyrich seemed not to notice, however. He was too happy with himself.
“Now, maybe we can finally deal with these mutie freaks once and for all,” he said. “And if Tomko fails, it will only prove that Wideawake is a necessity that must be put into active use. One way or the other, it’s a win-win for me, Val. Which means you lose.”
When Gyrich slammed her office door, Val could only shake her head. Sometimes she thought he was merely a miserable, evil man, and other times she had to believe he might be slightly insane. For the first time, she began to actually hope that the latter was true. If it weren’t, she just didn’t know if she would be able to stay in Washington anymore.
Nerves frayed, Val locked her office door and retreated to her desk. She used her safe line to place yet another call to Charles Xavier, and silently asked herself if she would ever be in a position where she might be the bearer o
f good news. It would be a pleasant change.
SEVEN
AS their ship emerged from the stargate, Ch’od was, for the second time, awed and unnerved by the fleet of warships in orbit around Hala. He had witnessed military gatherings of such magnitude before, several even larger, but more often than not the Starjammer was escaping capture or destruction, and it was not easy to get a decent, panoramic view of vessels in pursuit of your own.
Over the years he had learned to be thorough, so he checked and double-checked that the Starjammer was cloaked from Shi’ar and Kree sensors.
“Raza, make sure the X-Men are prepared to ’port planetside in two,” Ch’od said absently, wishing that he could join the extraction team that would save Corsair and Hepzibah from execution, or die trying.
Of course, the latter part of it held no allure for him. Ch’od did not relish the idea of dying. But since there was no way he was going to allow himself to lose, he didn’t have to worry about dying. Of course, the whole question was moot. Someone needed to stay behind in order to teleport the extraction team back to the Starjammer, and get them into the stargate before the fleet could begin their pursuit or blow them out of orbit.
It was going to be a long day.
Raza lifted the safety bars that held him in the copilot’s seat. He stood and headed for the main cabin, and then all hell broke loose.
“Ky’thri!” Raza cried, as an intense blast at the defense shields rocked the Starjammer, and alarm bells clanged to life around them. Raza fell to the ground and held on to the base of his chair as a second blast caused the ship to veer sharply off course. Ch’od reached one large hand down and wordlessly lifted his comrade from the deck. Behind them, in the tiny closet that served as his “quarters,” the furry being called Cr+eeee chittered in fear.
“Shields are burning out!” Raza shouted over the alarms and the rising hum of the failing defense shields. “I hadst thought we were cloaked!”
“We were!” Ch’od responded, his gentle shell giving way to bare fury as he looked over the ship’s control panels. “We still are!”
The two beings, longtime friends and allies, one half of the Starjammers, froze simultaneously. Slowly, with looks of frustration and disbelief, they turned to face one another.
“Thou hast got to be kidding me,” Raza said, an expression he’d picked up from Corsair long ago. The Starjammer shook violently as it was struck yet again.
“It’s the only answer,” Ch’od replied, then leaned over the control panel and brought a massive fist down on top of a bank of lights, one of which glowed green to signify that the ship was, indeed, cloaked.
It winked out.
Ch’od roared with a myriad of emotions, from anger to amusement, just as a final blast crashed into the ship and the high pitched buzzing whine of the defense shields simply stopped.
“’Twould seem we have a problem,” Raza said drily, and Ch’od could only laugh. They were probably going to die, and the absurdity of it all had come to him suddenly. The cloaking systems had been offline all along, but a shorted signal had told them the opposite. They weren’t cloaked, and now they weren’t shielded either. “Get the X-Men and go!” Ch’od shouted, the moment of laughter over.
“But thou canst not …” Razz began, then stopped when he saw that Ch’od was ignoring him.
Ch’od wrapped his scaly fists around the stick and banked into a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree rolling turn. A massive Shi’ar battle cruiser appeared on the vid screen and Ch’od nodded. He preferred to face his enemies head on. The cruiser fired a pair of plasma missiles, but with them dead in his sights, Ch’od’s finely honed skills as a pilot took over. He dove under the missiles, pulled up immediately and began strafing the underside of the battle cruiser.
The missiles followed, but he had gained on them. Ch’od decided to test an age-old wisdom, which said that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. He jerked the stick backwards and passed within meters of the battle cruiser’s engines. The Starjammer’s bottom hull was bathed in the furnace of flames that were belched from the other ship’s core.
The missiles would most certainly have performed the same move. There was no way he could outmaneuver them. But if he was correct, he wouldn’t have to. Ch’od bore down on the stick, snapping back into place along the same trajectory he’d followed before dodging around the battle cruiser. His position above the ship matched perfectly the missiles’ position below.
When the battle cruiser exploded, the Starjammer received a huge speed boost, and shot toward Hala’s atmosphere without any additional effort. The shortest distance between two points. He guessed it was true after all. Unless you counted the stargate.
The battle cruiser’s destruction had already brought attention, as the Starjammer’s sensors indicated that several of the fleet’s smaller vessels were hurrying to investigate. He hoped that the cruiser hadn’t had time, or didn’t think they were enough of a threat, to report the Starjammer’s emergence from the stargate. The way their luck had been running, he’d have had to assume that the odds were stacked against them.
He kicked in the hyperburners for a count of ten, changed course and skimmed along the outer edges of Hala’s atmosphere. It was going to be close.
“Raza, what’s taking so long?” He yelled, and in the moment of silence that followed, he noticed Cr+eeee’s chittering for the first time and began to make a low clucking noise that he knew would calm his old friend’s nerves.
Finally, Cyclops stepped into the cockpit.
“Ch’od, we don’t have time to go through it, and Raza only laughs when I ask him what’s happening, but I have one request for you,” Cyclops said quickly.
“I only hope I can fulfill it,” Ch’od answered respectfully.
“When the time comes for us to radio for dustoff, please be alive and have this ship in good enough shape to get us out of this place,” the leader of the X-Men said, and Ch’od merely nodded.
Cyclops hit a comm-badge that was clipped to his breast, and asked, “Is this thing working?” His voice came through on the Starjammer’s comm-link, so Ch’od gave him the Terran thumbs up sign that Corsair had taught them all. When Cyclops had retreated to the main cabin, his voice came back through the link.
“Six to beam down, Ch’od,” Cyclops pronounced over the link.
“Beam down?” Ch’od asked, befuddled.
“Teleport us down, Ch’od,” a new voice said. Ch’od thought it was that of the Archangel. “That’s what it means. Teleport us …”
Ch’od was no longer listening. He was about to come under fire again, and had only seconds to ’port the extraction team to the surface of Hala. In a heartbeat, it was done, but too late.
Without any defensive shields, the Starjammer took a massive hit. A different set of alarms went off, but Ch’od did not need them to see the problem.
There was fire in the cockpit.
* * *
AT its best, teleportation is a physically disconcerting experience. When the ship doing the teleporting is under fire and preparing to leave orbit, and the job is done hurriedly, the experience can be far worse. There was no elegance to the X-Men’s arrival on Hala. They did not shimmer into existence in the midst of a sprawling community as if glorious gods were arriving from another dimension. Rather, they were dumped unceremoniously into the war-ravaged remnants of a once-proud suburb of Kree-Lar.
Cyclops felt nauseous as he rose to his feet, then reached down to help Archangel do the same. A merciless sun burned high above the planet, and its intense light made the destruction around them all the more vivid. They stood in what had once been a town center, perhaps a marketplace. Water bubbled under a mound of shattered crystal, and Cyclops assumed it had been a beautiful fountain once upon a time, before the war with the Shi’ar.
Still, despite the destruction, the place was hardly abandoned. Several women were attempting to get water from the crystal-showered spring without doing themselves irrev
ersible injury. Dozens more were in the process of rebuilding, while five ragged-looking Kree elders cooked some kind of meat on a fire pit built into the bare earth.
“I t’ink we in the wrong part o’ town, Cyclops,” Gambit said uneasily.
“It isn’t what it seems, I’m afraid,” Cyclops answered, even as Jean and Rogue moved closer to hear their exchange.
“Where are we, Scott?” Rogue asked.
Cyclops was about to ask Jean that question, to see if she could pinpoint the distance from their location to Kree-Lar, when Raza interrupted.
“This be Ryn-Dak,” Raza said, unholstering his plasma weapon as he scanned the area. “Once it didst symbolized the quality of life that the Kree young aspired to. Then came the war.”
“Kree middle class, eh?” Archangel asked, intrigued. “What was here that the Shi’ar wanted to destroy so badly? Some kind of base or factory?”
“Do not play the fool, X-Man,” Raza said bluntly. “The Shi’ar didst choose to destroy Ryn-Dak, but ’twas not for its military significance. They destroyed it for the peace and ideals it didst represent.”
“Just like on Earth,” Jean interjected. “These are the victims of war: children and the aged, civilians with no interest in battle.”
It was true, Cyclops saw. Other than two burly Kree men, one with blue skin and one with pink—for Kree came in both colors—all those left in Ryn-Dak were quite young or very old. The blue-skinned Kree male, who was working metal over a fire, obviously a smith of some kind, looked in their direction for the first time. Cyclops noticed a long scar on his right cheek, but he also saw the immediate hostility on the Kree’s face.
“So that’s what has you all heated up,” Rogue pointed out, motioning toward Raza’s drawn weapon. “We’ve just been dumped into a place where, more’n likely, since you’re Shi’ar, everybody wants you dead.”
“There’s more to it than that, Rogue,” Jean said quietly. “Historically, the Kree haven’t exactly loved humans very much either.”
“I hate to break this up, folks,” Cyclops interrupted, “but we’re beginning to draw a crowd. I think we’d best move on.”
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