Marvel Classic Novels--X-Men

by Christopher Golden

  “If we lose, and it don’t look like we got much chance of winnin’, there’s two ways this thing can go. First, New York City ends up gettin’ nuked, ’cause you know the army can’t beat Magneto. Maybe you don’t care about all the people in the city dyin’ like that, but I’ve got a feelin’ you ain’t as unfeelin’ as you make out.

  “Second—and you’ll like this—Magneto wins, and the Mutant Empire expands faster and faster until the entire Earth has been remade. You’ll be bowin’ and scrapin’ before Emperor Magnus in no time, bein’ as how you were so insistent upon provin’ that you weren’t one of us.”

  Cain Marko looked from one face to the next. From Rogue, to Jean, to Scott. Rogue wasn’t sure what he was searching for, maybe some confirmation that they all believed what she had said.

  “I’ve got friends here, in the city,” he said, almost absently.

  “Not for long,” Rogue answered.

  The Juggernaut took several steps forward, until he was standing, towering, over Cyclops. Marko looked down at the leader of the X-Men, eyes hard inside his mask.

  “What about it, Summers?” he asked. “This all for real? Your team gonna get trounced here today?”

  “It’s a distinct possibility,” Cyclops reluctantly agreed.

  “I don’t like you, Summers,” the Juggernaut said.

  “The feeling’s entirely mutual, Marko.”

  Juggernaut looked around again, at Rogue, then Jean, then back at Cyclops. He put out his hand.

  “Just as long as we understand each other.”

  FOUR

  IT was wrong. All wrong. Once upon a time, the Worthington family had been Manhattan royalty. Richer than God, they’d been. Yet as a boy Warren had been blissfully unaware of the harsh realities life held for others. Little things like being forced to go to bed without supper—for so minute a transgression as drawing on his father’s favorite tie with magic markers—those had been the sum total of his childhood hardships.

  Then came the wings. Warren had blossomed early, hitting puberty at the tender age of eleven. At first, his parents had terrified him with their own fears, that the growths on his back might be some form of cancer. Soon enough, it became plain to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention exactly what those growths were.

  Mother had always called him her little angel. She’d no way of knowing that term of endearment would one day prove prophetic.

  He had to admire his parents’ fortitude, though. With an inside track on all the latest research—because after all, knowledge was power and Warren K. Worthington Jr. had enough money to buy whatever power he ever needed—his father had determined that little Warren III was a mutant. He paid all the doctors a fortune in hush money, including the man who’d devised the truss that held Warren’s wings flat against his back.

  His father, Warren had long since determined, had just wanted it all to go away. If the wings weren’t seen, they weren’t really there. The Worthington family could go on with their business dynasty as if they were unaware of their son’s genetic status. Warren grew up to be a playboy, just as his father had expected. But in the privacy of his own home, in his own room, away from the stigma society placed on mutants, the stigma his own parents, by their silence, had placed on him, he unfurled his beautiful wings and dreamed of flying.

  He dreamed of it until one day he couldn’t stop himself. And Warren Worthington III, his mother’s little angel, flew.

  Not long thereafter he was packed off to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. The next time he told his parents he loved them was the day he wept over their graves.

  But while his father had been alive, he had shown his mutant son all the wonders of Manhattan, the curious behavior of the city’s idle rich. New York City belonged to the captains of industry, he would always say. The wealthy families that were the power behind every company and politician in the region. Like the Worthingtons.

  Warren had never understood the attitude of ownership, but he did value Manhattan for everything it had. When others complained of the homelessness, the crime, the corruption, Warren used his family’s money to do what he could in those areas. But in doing so, he constantly reminded anyone who would listen that New York was the greatest city in the world.

  But now it was all wrong. He glided between old four- and five-story buildings, biometallic razor wings slicing the air, wounding the sky. Once, he’d been an angel, ivory feathers floating, muscles powering him aloft. His new wings matched his altered nature, violent and incisive. He had begun to gain control over the violence that raged within him, but he could never bring back the natural wings that had been mutilated, then amputated.

  Something about Archangel would never be right again. Now his city was twisted as well. It looked the same on the outside, but its soul was being drained away, with every person fleeing in terror.

  A rare trace of birdsong lilted through the air above. A nice breeze spared him a moment of the stagnant, superheated air that hung in the city’s concrete canyons. The sun shone down, glinting off display windows and forcing him to squint. It should have been a perfect New York City day.

  But New York City had all but disappeared. The rude, stressed-out tribe that called Manhattan home had been thinned nearly to nothing to make room for a new tribe, a dangerous tribe. That was the way of the wild, but it didn’t sit right with him. This wasn’t the wild, after all. More than anywhere else, for better or for worse, Manhattan island was civilization.

  Or had been. Now it was wild again. The structure of civilization still stood, but rather than brimming with life, it was filled with the terrified and the terrifying, lurking in doorways and subway stations and narrow alleys.

  It was wrong. All wrong.

  They had already checked out two Sentinels, the robots that stood guard over the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, respectively, on the western shore of the island. Cooper had said before that there was no visible marking to identify the Sentinels, but had not mentioned that there were markings. She had brought infrared goggles in her gear from Washington for that specific purpose.

  It would have been a stroke of true luck if one of those Sentinels had turned out to be the Alpha unit. But they just weren’t that lucky. Now, Archangel winged his way above, acting as point man and scout, while Gambit and Cooper navigated abandoned cars, cabs, buses, and trucks on the streets below on a motorcycle they’d come upon just beyond the Manhattan-side mouth of the Holland Tunnel.

  Gambit had it hot-wired in seconds, literally. Watching him, Warren had realized for the first time that all the talk of Remy LeBeau having been an international master thief before joining the X-Men had been one hundred percent truth. It made him wonder, not for the first time, how much of Gambit’s past was still a total mystery to the X-Men.

  On the other hand, nobody fought harder than Remy LeBeau. For all his sarcasm, Warren figured Gambit was a good man to have at his back.

  Greenwich Village was beneath him now, and the buildings had gotten even shorter. No skyscrapers down here. Offices, warehouses, retail space, that was the old city. The face of this part of the city changed from day to day, new restaurants and boutiques opening as last month’s hot spots closed.

  Almost directly south, he could see the twin towers of the World Trade Center jutting up next to Battery Park City. Beyond them, over blocks of buildings of every shape and size, Archangel could see the head of the next Sentinel. Canal Street heading southeast and West Street running south were packed with vehicles, so Gambit guided the Harley down Greenwich Street.

  They’d already passed several small groups of humans, even a couple of people who appeared, courageously, to be out on their own. Warren figured they were trying to discover how much the city had actually changed. They barely blinked when Gambit and Cooper drove by, but the few who spotted Archangel in the air definitely reacted. Some ran for cover, others threw whatever was at hand, still others merely pointed in fear or astonishment.

  It didn’t matter tha
t they had decided to stay in the city despite Magneto’s rule, these people were not prepared for it. Many of them would die if Magneto were left in charge. The X-Men were not about to allow that to happen.

  “Swing over to Broadway when you have a chance,” he said into the comm-link on his left wrist. “From there it’s a straight shot down to Battery Park. Looks like that’s where Robby the Robot is hanging out.”

  “Check,” Cooper responded.

  “Val, there are twenty of these bad boys, and we’ve only checked out two,” Warren said, concerned. “It’s going to take a while. Isn’t there any other way to do this?”

  “Not unless you can carry me on a flying circuit of the whole island, Warren,” Cooper responded. “No way would we get an airship or a chopper in here, buzz around Manhattan, without Magneto and his goons taking notice, and action.”

  Archangel sighed. Cooper was right.

  “All right,” he answered. “Tell me again where they’re all located. We may have to split up if we don’t get lucky in the next hour or so.”

  “We did the Holland Tunnel and the Lincoln Tunnel,” she answered. “We thought the next one was the downtown heliport, but you said Battery Park, so that’s two. Brooklyn Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge, Midtown Tunnel, UN Building, Queensboro Bridge, Metro Hospital Center, Triborough Bridge.”

  She stopped, presumably to take a breath and rack her brain.

  “There’s one in Harlem in the one-forties, one at the Cross Bronx, one at the Henry Hudson, the GW Bridge, then four more along Riverside Park facing Jersey.”

  She paused.

  “Warren?”

  “Pray for luck, Val,” he said. “We’re gonna need it.”

  On the street, the Harley swung east. They were past the Village now, rapidly approaching the financial district. With one thrust of his wings, Warren also turned east, speeding up to get ahead of them, to do his duty as the point man. But he hadn’t been paying enough attention.

  “Heads up, Remy,” he said. “Activity ahead, by City Hall.”

  They were coming up on City Hall fast, and the street was filled with people. More people than Warren had seen in one spot since entering Manhattan, maybe more people than he’d imagined had stayed behind. But these folks weren’t kowtowing to Magneto. They were fighting for their city.

  There were hundreds of them, the true melting pot of New York, crossing every imaginary boundary people put between them, race, gender, religion, age, income. They were New Yorkers first and there to fight. Problem was, they were losing.

  On the steps of City Hall, police officers and mutants stood side by side, keeping the citizens out. Warren recognized several of the mutants, including Senyaka, an Acolyte in the colorful uniform all of Magneto’s inner circle wore. Even as he looked on, Senyaka lashed out with his psionic whip and began to choke one of the men closing in on the cops. The others began to back off.

  “My God,” Archangel said, then spoke into the comm again. “Magneto’s co-opted City Hall, Val. We’ve got cops and Acolytes working together. These people don’t have a chance.”

  “Back off, Warren!” Val’s panicked voice erupted from the comm-link. “Get out of sight immediately. Don’t let them see you!”

  “What?” Archangel asked. “What are you—”

  “La petite fine is right, mon ami,” Gambit interrupted, the roar of the Harley coming through the link with his heavily accented voice. “Gambit don’ like it any better den you, but we can’t afford to have Magneto and de Acolytes down on us now. We got a job to do.”

  Warren ground his teeth together, took one last look at the chaos at City Hall, and turned away, heading for cover at top speed. In an instant he was gone, and he didn’t think anyone had seen him.

  “Let’s get this done,” he said into the comm.

  Yet he knew that no matter how lucky they were, no matter how quickly they might get the job done, the city would be deeply scarred. The psychological scars on the population were a part of it, but there was no way this thing was going to end without some serious collateral damage.

  Gambit had turned the Harley down Church Street, only a block away from the City Hall madness. Archangel swiftly followed, catching up as they passed the spires of Trinity Church. Several blocks farther south, Gambit swung left for a block, then turned south onto Broadway. The green lawn of Battery Park was just ahead.

  Archangel held back, not wanting to gain more attention from the Sentinel than was absolutely necessary. Now that he saw it, standing its silent, deadly vigil at the southern tip of the island, he realized how vital that particular spot was.

  From Battery Park, ferries ran to and from Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Close by was the terminal for the Staten Island Ferry. Far more important, however, were the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the downtown heliport, and Fort Jay, the U.S. Coast Guard station on Governors Island, just a short way across the Upper New York Bay.

  It occurred to him then that Magneto was very serious about his plans for Haven. His behavior had been eminently reasonable, and insane at the same time. He truly believed that Haven would be able to function with the rest of the world. If he’d thought the island would have to be completely self-sufficient, he’d have ordered the Sentinels to simply destroy the bridges and tunnels and be done with it.

  Somehow, the idea that Magneto believed the world might come to accept his Mutant Empire was more chilling than the inevitable catastrophe that was guaranteed when he realized he was wrong.

  “How about it, Val?” Archangel asked over the comm. “What’s the infrared say? This our boy?”

  “Negative, Warren,” she said. “Let’s move on.”

  As they headed for the Brooklyn Bridge, Warren started praying for luck once more. It was all they had.

  * * *

  THE human resistance was growing. The relatively small group of somewhere between one and two hundred that Bobby Drake had gotten involved with had already hooked up with several others. It was a network of people who refused to kneel before Magneto. Some were bigots. Some had not been bigots before Magneto took over, but were gradually devolving into bigotry. But the majority were just people who didn’t want to give up without a fight.

  Bobby had tagged along, helping out where he could, for most of the morning. In fact, it had been Gabi, one of the resistance fighters, who had confirmed for him that the X-Men were indeed being held inside the Empire State Building. He’d thought about it for quite some time before he realized that he had only one option.

  Iceman was going to have to go in after them.

  Of course, some of his new friends had offered to help. Gabi and her brother Michael had nearly forced themselves on him, and it had taken some effort to talk them out of it. After all, if the X-Men were the city’s best hope, it was in all their interests to break the rest of the team out. Still, they were new to this kind of thing. He’d been risking his neck for years, gone up against Magneto what seemed like dozens of times, and he was still around to talk about it.

  Truth be told, once he’d thought about it, he stopped viewing himself as the X-Men’s resident clown. He was, in the end, the last X-Man. That was some incredible billing, and fulfilling the role would be a daunting task. Iceman didn’t know if he was capable of it, but he was certain of one thing: If he couldn’t rescue the X-Men, it would only be because he himself had either become a captive, or had died in the effort. A sobering thought. But Bobby had been having quite a few of those today.

  Like most buildings of its size, the Empire State Building had several entrances to the lobby. Magneto’s own little Gestapo guarded the lobby as if it were Fort Knox, but Bobby knew that the majority of his experienced Acolytes would be off handling more important and immediate tasks throughout the city. In fact, in making a wide circuit of the building, he did not see a single mutant that he recognized. Iceman had assumed that Voght, or Unuscione, or even the Blob, would have been left in charge of the new recruits. But if there was a seasoned warrior
among them, it wasn’t anyone he’d ever run across.

  The lobby was a death trap. But as far as he could tell, little or no attention was being paid to an additional entrance, a service door that did not go into the lobby itself. He had to assume that it would be guarded on the inside, but there was no sentry posted outside the door. That would be his entry point.

  Carefully avoiding the conspicuous sight lines of those mutants guarding the lobby, he made his way to the side of the building as quickly as possible. He hoped that anyone seeing him might mistake him for a New Yorker either brave or stupid enough to have come this close to ground zero.

  Once at the door, however, he had to work fast. It was a heavy metal thing, probably foam core, and there were two deadbolts above the lock that was in the knob itself. No time for niceties, though. Icing up his right hand, he concentrated on freezing one side of the door frame and the locks. He didn’t ice the knob, however. He needed something to hold on to.

  Fully human again, for his ice form did not give him any additional strength, Bobby wrapped a hand around the doorknob and yanked with all his might. With a crack, the brittle frozen metal of the deadbolts snapped and the door swung open in his hand.

  There was only one guard. The mutant turned toward him in speechless surprise, jaw slack and eyes wide. Bobby didn’t know what his power was, but he knew the guy might call out an alarm any second. Like a batter going for a home run, Iceman swung his hands through the air. Mid-swing, the ice bat formed in his hands, and a second later, it connected with the guard’s skull.

  The guy went down hard in a shower of ice shards, totally out. Iceman looked down at him, and couldn’t help but feel a little guilty.

  “Sorry about that, rookie,” he said quietly. “But you bet on the wrong horse.”

  A moment passed and Bobby heard nothing, no shouts or running footfalls. He was in, that was a start. Now he had to do his best to see that nobody knew he was in. There was nothing he could do about the ice on the floor. He would have to hope that it melted before anyone came by to check on or relieve the guard. There were larger problems.