Marvel Classic Novels--X-Men

by Christopher Golden

  “Traitors!” he cried again, this time making the word a pained curse.

  A swarm of other mutants moved in. They’d been backed up to the massive glass display window of a designer clothing store. Thirty of Magneto’s followers, and only two of them. Wolverine knew that he couldn’t beat them all without killing some of them, or at least he feared that was the case.

  “Freeze ’em,” Wolverine growled.

  Iceman didn’t miss a beat. He might have been an X-Man a lot longer than Wolverine, but he never failed to defer to Logan in the field. Wolverine chalked that up to good teamwork. Drake had proven over and over in the past few days something that Wolverine had always known but never voiced. Iceman was a lot better at being an X-Man than anyone ever gave him credit for.

  With a muttered, regretful curse that Wolverine’s enhanced hearing could not have failed to pick up, Bobby Drake lifted both his hands, and poured on the ice.

  “Traitors?” he screamed in fury. “We’re traitors? To what? Insanity? All we want is an end to this kind of garbage. All we want is peace! There are humans who hate all mutants because of your actions, your beliefs. You’re no better than they are!”

  Thirty mutants were frozen in the street. Iceman controlled his powers to an extent Wolverine had never witnessed, leaving, in every case, only the individual’s head exposed. Just enough to breathe. As he produced the ice, Bobby slid along, propelling himself with his power, as he would on an ice slide. Wolverine scrambled after him, looking for trouble, watching for an aerial attack.

  Bobby continued out into the middle of the street, freezing at least a dozen more mutants. Rogue had to fly the Beast out of the way so Iceman could continue. Half a dozen more of the enemy force were frozen solid. Rogue landed with the Beast just behind Wolverine, and they marched on with him, over the newly made tundra.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said in awe.

  “Nor I, dear Rogue,” Hank said. “And I’ve known the boy for many years.”

  “I just wish he’d thought o’ this a while ago,” Wolverine grumbled.

  Ahead of them, Iceman stumbled.

  And fell.

  “Bobby!” Rogue called, and went toward him.

  “I was afraid of this,” the Beast said, mainly to himself, and followed. “He’s completely drained himself.”

  Wolverine was going to follow, but he heard the sounds of battle moving toward him from behind. He turned, and across the ice came the war, Scott and Jean and Bishop trying their best to hold back hordes of mutants, more than Wolverine had even imagined they were facing.

  “Wolverine, we’ve got to regroup, watch each other’s backs!” Cyclops shouted over the din. “Otherwise, we’re dead!”

  Logan snapped his head around to pass the command on to Rogue and the others, but she and Hank were in a battle to keep Iceman’s unconscious form from being dragged away.

  It looked awfully grim. Wolverine held his claws up in front of him in battle stance, and hung his head a moment. With a deep breath, he prepared to experience the worst life had to offer, and not for the first time. He had seen friends die before, faced death himself many times. He had killed. Whatever it took, that’s what Wolverine would do.

  Whatever it took.

  Then, beyond the mob attacking Rogue and Hank and Bobby, came a familiar, thundering noise that shook the half-block-long field of ice Logan stood upon.

  “One side, goons!” a deep voice rumbled. “The cavalry’s comin’, and you’re all in for a world of hurt!”

  It was a sight Wolverine never would have imagined he would see, could barely believe even though it was right before his eyes. With nearly twenty other mutants behind him, Cain Marko was tearing a wide swath through the enemy lines.

  Incredibly, the Juggernaut had come to the rescue.

  FOURTEEN

  “HOW the hell did the thing know where we were?” Val shouted. “There are no sensors in here!”

  Massive fingers began to grope around the opening in the back of the Sentinel’s head. It had figured out their location, and now it was determined to pull them out of its skull and vaporize them, or stomp them underfoot, or something equally nasty.

  Val was not happy.

  “How …?” she began to ask again.

  “No sensors?” Archangel asked.

  “Are you sure ’bout dat?” Gambit added.

  “Absolutely!”

  “You t’inkin’ what Gambit is t’inkin’, mon ami?” the Cajun asked his teammate.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Enough of this cryptic stuff,” Val shouted at them. “What? What?”

  “Well, if there are no sensors, then somebody told it we were in here,” Archangel explained. “Who has contact with the Alpha unit? Who can give it orders?”

  “Oh, my God,” Val said. “Not now! We haven’t done the override yet!”

  There was a shrieking of metal and the Sentinel began to widen the hole in the back of its skull, tearing at it as if it were peeling a piece of fruit.

  “We in trouble,” Gambit said softly. “But Magneto can’t be here yet, or he’d come in after us, right? Depechez-vous, Valerie. Hurry up!”

  “Cooper, are you there?” Gyrich’s voice came over the comm.

  Val, Gambit, and Archangel all looked at one another in horror, as they realized that the success of their mission, and their lives, might depend upon a man who hated them all.

  “Gyrich, listen,” Val said hurriedly. “The thing knows we’re in here, Magneto’s on the way. I need a back door. A bypass, before I can even enter the override codes to restart the original program.”

  Silence. Then Gyrich said, “Let me think.”

  “Not what we want to hear, Gyrich!” Archangel shouted. “We don’t have time for games.”

  “Nobody’s playing,” Gyrich said. “I’m trying to remember the code phrase.”

  “A phrase,” Val asked, panicking. “A quote of some kind, a rhyme, what is it?”

  “Just give me a second,” Gyrich roared in frustration.

  He was serious, not toying with them. All the barriers had fallen, all the political differences, philosophical arguments, were cast aside. Everything that meant anything was in jeopardy. Gyrich was a mean-spirited, ignorant fool, but not fool enough that he didn’t understand the stakes. Val would like to have been relieved, but they didn’t have time for sentiment.

  Screeching metal. Val whipped around even as Gambit said, “He comin’ in, Valerie,” so calmly that she wanted to slap him.

  “Oh, God,” she said, looking around the command center frantically for some way to stop it.

  “Gyrich!” she snapped.

  “I’m thinking!” he yelled back.

  “No, wait, first tell me, can we disable this thing from in here, shut down its motor controls without cutting off our ability to shut down all the others from in here?” she asked.

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “Gambit, ’Angel, those panels!” Val barked, and pointed.

  Remy and Warren fired everything they had at the motor controls of the Sentinel, leaving its brain and memory intact but stopping it cold. It froze in the street, completely paralyzed. The hand stopped clawing at them, but it blocked their exit. Val figured they could worry about that when the job was done.

  “Cooper!” Gyrich shouted, trying to get her attention. “What?” she asked.

  “What I was saying was, you can disable the Sentinel, but you’ll be a sitting duck for the army in there. No defenses. Which Sentinel is it?”

  “The one by the UN. Tell them to cease fire on us,” she said. “And give me the back door code.”

  “It’s Shakespeare,” Gyrich said. “I’m trying to remember what the quote is.”

  “Well, hurry,” she said.

  They were quiet then, all staring at the monitor, which showed some of her failed attempts at hacking Magneto’s program. She would have been able to break it, eventually, she knew. But they didn’t have t
ime for eventually.

  A clanging broke the silence. A repetitive noise, like the sounding of a large bell.

  “What in the name of God is—” she began. “Somebody’s knocking,” Archangel said.

  “I guess we know who it is too,” Gambit added.

  There was a terrible shrieking sound as the metal hand of the Sentinel was torn away and flung down onto the street below. Outside the hole in the robot’s skull, Magneto hovered in the air, encapsulated in magnetic power.

  “You three are trying my patience,” he said.

  * * *

  IT was all Bishop could do to keep from screaming. All the horrors that he had witnessed in the not-so-distant future where he had been born and raised, every act of violence or oppression, every broken spirit or cowering soul, were there all around him. But it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not so soon. The Sentinels, and the chaos and the destruction, it was decades early.

  He wanted to close his eyes, wanted to pretend it was just another session in the Danger Room. But he knew it was true, all of it. And the only way he could prevent that hellish future from coming to pass that very night, was by fighting as he had never fought before.

  So he clenched his teeth to bite off a scream unvoiced, and he pumped round after round of plasma fire into the attacking mutant hordes. It was everything he’d been trained to do in the XSE, the mutant police force of that future time, but even the XSE’s worst-case-scenario battle plans never accounted for something like this.

  It was getting dark now but the sky was still lit with the memory of sunshine. A bright day had ended in low clouds, which reflected the sickly glow of fires and the streaking, whistling, pastel contrails of overland missiles and other large-weapons fire.

  For Bishop, it was as if every nightmare he had ever had, those fever dreams of terror yet to come, had not ended in his waking warm and safe in his bed at the Xavier Institute. A nightmare that might never end.

  “No,” he said simply, softly, to himself.

  Bishop used his elbows, his forehead, his knees, the butt of his plasma rifle, and the hard set of his face to splinter passage through a tight knot of mutants ahead. He left the other X-Men behind, though Cyclops had called for them to regroup. The man was a more-than-capable field leader, but Bishop thought that Cyclops didn’t want to understand what was really happening here. Bishop knew war. He knew you never put all your soldiers in one spot, or the war could be over very, very quickly.

  A low growl that erupted into a full-throated battle cry came unbidden from his lips as he slammed into, then trampled over, a man whose empty eye sockets swirled with orange mist. He leaped to the trunk, and then the roof, of an Oldsmobile. The thin roof buckled slightly under his weight.

  Trembling with the fury and the fear that raged within him, Bishop turned his plasma rifle on the crowd of mutants trying to take advantage of his sudden separation from his comrades.

  “Fools!” he shouted. “You’re just giving them what they want! All the people who want to see us caged, or dead. You’re handing them the very tools they can use to destroy us!”

  A narrow-focus beam of electric flame sliced across his face. If anyone else had been the target, it would have sliced their head in half. Bishop absorbed the energy of the attack, held the plasma rifle in one hand, and prepared to cut down the crowd with that devastating blade of fire.

  In his own time, he wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But this was a different time. It wasn’t the XSE. He had learned much since he came to live and fight beside the very legends he had venerated as a boy. Killing was the final option, invoked rarely enough that the gravity of it had finally reached him. Though Wolverine would likely not have hesitated, Bishop had changed. The X-Men had changed him.

  He discharged the killing blast into the pavement in front of the Olds.

  Then the barrage came, energy blasts of every type arcing toward him. No projectile weapons. They were mutants, after all. How foolish they were. Apparently, none of them were paying attention.

  Channeling the attackers’ energy into his plasma rifle, Bishop cut a wide swath through Magneto’s followers. Nearly two dozen mutants fell under his furious assault, as he stood upon the car and swung the weapon back and forth like a fire hose. Two dozen. And he was fairly certain that all of them would live. Fairly certain.

  “Bishop!”

  He turned to see Cyclops coming toward him, taking advantage of their enemies’ momentary confusion and fear to run a clean path and leap up onto the car.

  “I give orders for a reason, friend,” Cyclops said sternly. “Get back to your teammates so we can give each other cover.”

  He wanted to snap at Cyclops. Wanted to say something about “getting results” in a flip way that would let the man know he didn’t like to be ordered around. But, though he didn’t like it, he was used to it. Hierarchy was valuable, leadership important. Summers wasn’t perfect, but he was a good leader. And Bishop? Bishop was a good soldier.

  “Bishop?” Cyclops asked, a note of concern in his voice. “I’m okay,” Bishop said, “it’s all just a bit too close to my reality.”

  “Down!” Cyclops shouted, and Bishop responded instantly, no thought given to the rapid change in tone on the battlefield.

  A burst of energy shot from Cyclops’s visor, and tore up the street and the advancing enemy behind them. Bishop fired his plasma rifle in the opposite direction, defeating the quickly hatched two-pronged attack.

  Two-pronged. But they were dealing with mutants, so …

  Bishop let himself fall backward off the roof of the car, firing straight into the air even before he slammed into the hood of the Olds. A woman, whose body was so distended she resembled nothing so much as a manta ray, had been floating down on top of them, her open mouth lined with rows of razor teeth and her talons reaching for the next kill.

  Bishop shot her out of the sky, and rolled off the car to hit pavement. Cyclops took out two more attackers on the ground with his optic blasts, then jumped down to join Bishop in the street.

  “Let’s move,” Cyclops said.

  Bishop led the way, breaking bones and banging heads as he went. When they reached the X-Men, Bishop at first thought the team was about to be ambushed. He trained his plasma rifle on three mutants who stood by Jean Grey, ready to shoot them down.

  A huge hand landed on the rifle, and pushed its barrel up. “They’re with me,” the Juggernaut said. “The odds are bad enough without you firin’ on your allies.”

  Bishop nodded. It disturbed him to have the Juggernaut fighting at his side. There was no question that the man was fighting in earnest, that he was fully aligned with the X-Men for the duration of the battle. But who knew what might happen after? That was what disturbed Bishop. Enemies never made comfortable allies.

  But with the team so horribly outmatched, with so little on which to pin their hopes, any help was appreciated, no matter its origins.

  Rogue and Wolverine seemed to be handling an enemy attack without help off to one side. The woman Arclight, who’d been among the Marauders they had defeated in the small hours of the morning, was attacking once more. Apparently she was too stubborn or too stupid to quit while she could still walk upright.

  Bishop trained his weapon on her.

  “Who’s that?” Jean Grey asked, and he was startled that she’d come up so close by without his noticing her approach.

  He glanced at her in confusion, and she pointed toward a commotion taking place a block or so to the south. Mutants were turning to face some new threat, but the weakest ones had hung back, not wanting to risk battle with the X-Men. A line of humans—humans!—marched down the center of the street. Many of them were police officers, armed with guns and tear gas. Both were fired into the tightly knit group of mutant aggressors, which was broken up quickly enough.

  Some wore gas masks, but most did not. It didn’t matter, though. The man in front, who Bishop thought looked familiar, lifted his hands, made a small movement
with them, and the gas seemed to be lifted from the street, pushed into the sky. Hacking, coughing mutants tried to stumble away, but the same man motioned again and they went down as if rammed by a fast-moving car.

  That’s when Bishop knew him. Skolnick was his name, a military man who’d defected to become one of Magneto’s lapdogs. Bishop had seen him on the dais with Magneto that very morning. Magneto had crowed about his defection, about what it meant for mutantkind. Obviously, Skolnick had seen the error of his ways. He was fighting the good fight again, and this time, he wasn’t alone. Bishop didn’t have time to count the cops and human civilians backing Skolnick up, but there were well over one hundred.

  He worried for them, that they would be cattle to the slaughter in a battle of mutants. But the X-Men could use all the help they could find.

  The odds looked a little brighter. Now if the others could only take care of the Sentinels, he thought …

  * * *

  “GYRICH!” Val Cooper screamed. “We don’t have time to waste! Let’s have that code!”

  “God, I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” he answered over the comm.

  “We’re dead,” Archangel said, mostly to himself, as he and Gambit raced to the hole torn out of the Sentinel’s skull.

  Magneto floated in a ball of electromagnetic power, just beyond the hole, and a sixty-foot drop waited below. Archangel knew that he alone was no match for Magneto. In the end, none of them were. But up there he wasn’t even sure what kind of help Gambit would be, given that he could not fly.

  He moved to the attack, but it was a futile gesture. He knew it in his heart, and he saw it in Magneto’s eyes, in the face of the greatest enemy Archangel, and the X-Men’s mentor, Professor Xavier, had ever had. Magneto could destroy him utterly, with little effort, if murder was his goal. And there was so very little that Warren could do, given that sphere of energy that protected Magneto from attack.

  Together, Archangel knew that he and Gambit could buy Valerie mere moments. No more. But it might be …