by Greg Cox
Her euphoria lasted less than a second, about the time it took for her to become fully aware of their new surroundings.
Rising in the sky above them, shifting clouds veiling portions of mighty continents and oceans, the great blue globe of the Earth shined down on them, casting its reflected sunlight on a barren lunar landscape marked by still and silent craters. Peering down past her feet, the Scarlet Witch saw the perforated roof of a domed moonbase, constructed within the circumference of one of the larger craters. The atmosphere gushing from the breach in the dome blew a column of swirling debris after the rising heroes, whose lungs suddenly cried out for air.
Good lord, Wanda thought, gasping for oxygen that was nowhere to be found. Blackness rushed over her, along with a fearsome cold—or was that heat? Rogue didn’t need to fly us to the moon.
We’re already there!
Chapter Seven
The full moon shone into the cockpit of the Avengers’ quinjet, waking Storm from uneasy slumber. Blinking her large blue eyes, she found herself strapped into a passenger seat to the right of Iron Man, who was busy piloting the supersonic aircraft. “Excuse me,” she apologized, “I appear to have dozed off.”
“No problem,” he replied. “In this business, you’ve got to grab a nap when you can. You never know when you might get another chance.” A yawn escaped his gilded faceplate. “We’ve been on the run ever since Wanda disappeared yesterday. I imagine it must be the same for you X-Men.”
“Indeed,” Storm agreed. Through the tinted windshield of the quinjet she saw the rippling surface of the Atlantic Ocean stretching beneath them and she wondered how long she had slept.
Are we almost to Scotland? She hoped, rubbing her eyes. She peered back over her shoulder and saw the rest of the rescue team, Bruce Banner and Wolverine, seated behind her. The cursed scientist, now clad in fresh clothes provided by the Avengers’ butler, looked to be resting as well, while Logan stared balefully out a side window, maintaining a grim silence as he methodically polished his claws on an adamantium whetstone. No doubt he was anticipating the dire battle ahead. As are we all, Storm thought, fearing that the Gamma Sentinels would prove formidable adversaries. But defeat them we must, for the sake of Kurt cmd the others, Bright Lady, she prayed, ensure that we arrive in time to protect those in jeopardy.
“Not that I wouldn’t mind a little conversation, now that you’re awake,” Iron Man commented. “Especially with such an attractive lady as yourself.”
Storm raised an eyebrow. “Are you flirting with me, Iron Man?” she asked, amusement in her tone. Funny to realize that, only hours ago, she and this same Avenger had dueled in the skies above Niagara Falls, hurling thunderbolts and repulsor rays at each other, but such was the peculiar world in which she lived.
“Force of habit,” he explained, not sounding terribly chastened. “I’ve always had a weakness for a pretty face.” His electronically-distorted voice took on a more serious edge. “Hope you don’t find that too frivolous, while your friends and teammates are in danger.”
Ororo smiled and shook her head. “Not at all,” she said generously. “As you suggested before, in this precarious life that we lead, we most hold onto our humanity and good humor, even in the face of overwhelming peril.” She gave the armored Avenger a closer inspection and noted, with a touch of surprise, that his metal gauntlets were not upon the navigational controls but instead inserted into matching, glove-shaped depressions in the control panel. “You can link your armor directly to the ship itself?” she asked, more for the sake of small talk than out of any urgent scientific curiosity.
“Exactly,” Iron Man confirmed. “I prefer a direct cybernetic interface whenever I have occasion to fly the quin-jet. It eliminates one degree of instrumentality, increasing its responsiveness by a factor of .833, which never hurts in a tight spot.” Clearly proud of his advanced technology, he increased the quinjet’s acceleration without moving a finger. “Besides, I’m just used to flying under my own power, as you must be, too.”
The increase in speed briefly pressed Storm against the back of her seat. “In truth, I also prefer flying on my own to riding in an aircraft, yet I have always relied more on the elemental power of Nature than the wonders of science. No offense intended,” she added quickly.
“None taken.” He sounded like he was enjoying the discussion. “Myself, though, I’ve always considered the human talent for technology and invention to be part of nature. Fish swim, birds fly ... we’re built to build things.” “An interesting point of view,” Storm admitted, “one I had not fully contemplated before.” She began to wonder what Iron Man looked liked beneath his robotic helmet. Curiously, her imagination pictured him as resembling Forge, the brilliant mutant inventor and engineer. Forge spoke just as passionately about machines and their intricacies; she suspected he and Iron Man shared a kinship of sorts, that of like souls. A stab of melancholy snuck into her heart; she and Forge had been more than friends, yet the call of their individual destinies had kept them apart more often than not. “And still, for all of humankind’s unquestioned ingenuity, can any mechanical marvel truly compare in splendor to even the commonest sunset?” “You ever seen some of da Vinci’s original blueprints and sketches?” Iron Man challenged her good-naturedly. “We’re talking pure elegance in design and execution.” The quinjet banked to starboard, smoothly responding to the Avenger’s control. “You may have a point, though.” So we agree to disagree, Storm reflected. If nothing else, perhaps this shared mission of mercy would help bridge the rift that circumstances and conflicting priorities had wrought between the Avengers and the X-Men.
She wondered if the second team, comprised of Cyclops, Captain America, and the Vision, had arrived yet in Alberta, site of the Leader’s former headquarters. The Beast had volunteered to remain behind at Avengers Mansion to coordinate the two teams’ efforts; he would undoubtedly contact them as soon as there was news from Cyclops and the Avengers accompanying them.
May the Goddess grant that they find our missing comrades, or at least some hint as to their whereabouts, she thought. Every hour that passed heightened her sense that their friends faced terrible danger.
“Maybe you can clear something up for me,” Iron Man said, changing the subject. “Who exactly is in charge of your team, you or Cyclops?”
“We share co-leader status,” Storm explained. The group dynamics of super-powered crusaders, it occurred to her, was another subject on which they shared expertise. “We have found it the most effective arrangement.” “Really?” Iron Man sounded skeptical. “The Avengers have always worked best with a designated chairman in charge, like Captain America is now. Otherwise you end up with too many ringmasters trying to run the show.” A pensive tone crept into his voice. ‘ ‘Ran into some problems along those lines not too long ago, when I convinced Stark to subsidize a whole new team called Force Works. Sort of an alternative to the Avengers, set up to my own specifications. The problem was, I appointed the Scarlet Witch to be team leader, but kept taking charge anyway, undercutting her authority.” His helmet shook slowly atop the articulated cables of his armor’s neck attachment. “By the time Force Works eventually dissolved, absorbed back into the Avengers, it’s a miracle Wanda was still speaking to me.”
Storm could tell the memory troubled him, no less now 1 75
that the Scarlet Witch was missing and presumed the captive of a ruthless foe. “I cannot deny that Cyclops and I have had our occasional clashes,” she confided in him, “but those days are largely past. In the long run, neither of us would wish the X-Men to be deprived of the leadership abilities each of us brings to the team.”
“Hard to imagine a corporation working that way,” Iron Man commented, and Storm recalled the Golden Avenger was also a paid employee of billionaire Tony Stark, “but I guess there’s always room for another paradigm.” Storm glimpsed determined blue eyes through the slits in Iron Man’s mask. “Heaven help whoever snatched Wanda if I get my hands on him, though. I owe
Wanda that much, after all the aggravation I put her through.”
“We shall find her, my friend,” Storm said, laying her hand atop of the Avenger’s recessed right gauntlet. “And Rogue as well.” No matter how diabolically brilliant the Leader was, she thought, surely he could not long elude the combined efforts of the X-Men and the Avengers?
A surly voice broke into the conversation. “If you two are done yappin’ up there,” Wolverine said, speaking up from his seat in the rear of the cockpit, “looks like we’re heading up on ground zero.”
Wolverine’s keen eyes had not deceived him. On the horizon, a rugged green island rose from the ocean, within sight of the distant shore of Scotland. Rocky cliffs towered above stone-strewn beaches while rural villages with names like Kilmory and Blackwaterfoot nestled in the shadow of the rolling hills carpeted in purple heather. As the quinjet zoomed nearer to Muir Island, Storm spied a futuristic complex, composed of sleek structures of steel and glass that seemed distinctly out of place among the bucolic atmosphere of the rest of the isle, poised atop a high cliff overlooking a well-maintained pier. “The Genetic Research
Centre, I take it?” Iron Man said, gliding the quinjet in toward an amphibious landing in the harbor below.
“Yes,” Storm stated. She stared anxiously at the familiar buildings, looking in vain for conclusive evidence of what might have transpired since Nightcrawler’s desperate SOS hours ago. Although it was well past midnight, local time, she spotted lights on in the primary science building, a six-story edifice at the very brink of the cliff. Forbidding steel shutters covered most of the windows in the science building, except for one of the upper floors, where the shutters appeared to have been tom asunder by some manner of explosion or energy blast. Through the ruptured shutters, bright green flashes occasionally showed, competing with the glow of ordinary fluorescent lights. “There,” she pointed to the others, “something’s happening in one of the labs.”
Brace Banner, roused from sleep by the activity in the cockpit, stuck his head between Storm and Iron Man, gazing out at the Centre. “I read Dr. MacTaggert’s papers on genetic mutation while trying to find a cure that would rid me of the Hulk. I can see where her work might have value to unscrupulous men wanting to create artificial mutants for their own purposes. Men like the Leader.” Storm gathered from his tone that, for whatever reason, he had come to abandon his quest for normalcy.
“Better settle back into your seat, Bruce,’’ Iron Man warned the Hulk’s alter ego. “We’re touching down.” His gaze fixed straight ahead, the Golden Avenger piloted the quinjet to a surprisingly gentle landing on the waves. Pontoons inflated from the aircraft’s landing gear and the ship bounced only twice upon the waves before cruising to a halt next to a long, wooden dock. With a mechanical click, Iron Man detached his gauntlets from the quinjet’s control panel. “You think the Leader might have raided the Centre just to steal her data?” he asked Banner.
The scientist’s lean face, haggard and haunted at the best of times, assumed an even more somber mien. ‘ ‘The Leader once nuked a city of five thousand, just to create a handful of gamma-irradiated henchmen. He wouldn’t pause for a nanosecond before ransacking some laboratory in Scotland, not if he thought your friend had something he could use.”
A grim assessment, Storm thought, but not one she had any reason to doubt. Past experience with the likes of Apocalypse and Mister Sinister had left her with few illusions regarding the depths to which brilliant, twisted minds could sink.
“Enough flamin’ talk,” Wolverine snarled. His claws sliced through the seatbelt holding him in place. “Let’s get on with it.”
Another phosphorescent green flash came from the building above them, boding no good fortune, she suspected, for Nightcrawler, Iceman, Moira, and any others who chanced to be residing at the Centre when the Gamma Sentinels struck. Unclasping her own seatbelt, she was no less eager than Wolverine to engage the enemy. “Very well,” she stated. “Follow me.”
Inside the battle-scarred ruins of the once pristine laboratory, the copious sheets of ice left behind by the defeated Iceman had begun to melt, flooding the cold steel floor upon which Moira MacTaggert futilely struggled to escape her bonds. Elastic steel cables, thin as copper wire but too bloody strong, at least as far as Moira was concerned, were wrapped around her from her neck down to her ankles, pinning her arms to her sides and digging into her flesh despite the welcome padding of her labcoat and ordinary civilian wear. Shivering upon the increasingly slushy floor,
Moira could see Bobby Drake lying equally helpless less than a meter away. No longer protected by so much as a sliver of frozen armor, the defrosted Iceman had yet to recover from the brutal electrical shock administered by the restraining wires enveloping him.
I should count m’self lucky, I suppose, that these accursed contraptions didn ’t judge me in need of the same sort of shock treatment they inflicted on poor Bobby, she thought.
But it was hard to feel too blessed whilst a pair of cunningly-camouflaged Sentinels helped themselves to years of her work, to say nothing of plenty of expensive equipment....
Moira had deduced the true nature of the invaders hours ago, when “Doc Samson” first approached a bank of deep-frozen computers. She had watched in amazement and horror as the emerald-tressed muscleman melted away Iceman’s handiwork with a set of ocular heatbeams that Moira had never known Leonard Samson to possess, but her mounting suspicions were not fully validated until Doc Samson detached the end of his left index finger, revealing a miniature electronic probe, then inserted the probe into a matching data port in Moira’s main Cray supercomputer. “Recording: all files and systems,” he announced mechanically at the same time that Moira had realized that Doc Samson, and presumably the “Harpy” as well, were actually machines, manufactured, for reasons she couldn’t guess, in the image of well-known specimens of gamma mutation. From there, it had taken but the slightest of deductive leaps to come to the conclusion that these rampaging intruders had to be the latest and most duplicitous generation yet of the mutant-hunting mechanical monsters known as Sentinels.
Will we never learn? she had thought bitterly, appalled to see the same hateful idea come round again. If half the money and technical know-how that have gone into building Sentinels had been spent on something worthwhile instead, say, biomedical research, we could have surely cured the Legacy Virus by now, and Lord knows what else besides.
Since that revelatory moment, hours past, the Doc Samson-Sentinel had not budged a centimeter. A steady hum came from his brawny chest as he took advantage of her linked computer network to prowl through years of accumulated data and theories. Many of her most important files were doubly encrypted, of course—ever since that stink with the Xavier Protocols a while back, Moira had taken care to make sure her work was unintelligible to prying hackers and other snoopers—but she had the sinking feeling that the Sentinel’s electronic brain was a match for her own encryption software and computerized security checks.
The most I can hope for, she thought, is that it slows him down long enough for help to get here.
One thing Moira knew for certain, she sure as blazes wasn’t going to provide the Doc Samson-Sentinel with any of her passwords, not that he had even bothered to ask. That can’t be a good sign, she admitted gloomily.
While the Doc Samson-Sentinel robbed her via cyberspace, the Harpy-Sentinel took a more tangible approach. The counterfeit bird-woman flapped about the trashed laboratory, selectively placing flashing electronic tags on various items—on the hard copies of her notes and on assorted items of equipment. The tags evidently provided a signal to some variety of transporter device, since the objects selected subsequently disappeared in a flash of eerie green light. Granted, it was also possible that the items in question were merely disintegrated, but Moira considered that unlikely; the Harpy’s actions were too deliberate and specific to be simple acts of destruction. If the avian Sentinel had merely wanted to destroy the objects of her search, t
here were doubtless easier ways to do so. Her hellbolts, for instance.
Were additional Sentinels pillaging the rest of the Centre? Moira had no idea what had become of Nightcrawler; she had not seen Kurt since he had teleported away to investigate what was happening downstairs. Since he had not attempted to rescue them, Moira had to assume that he had run afoul of a Sentinel or two. She just hoped that he’d managed to call for help before another relentless robot captured him.
Moira gave thanks, for perhaps the thousandth time, that Rahne was away from home. Had she been here to witness this assault, that dear lycanthropic lass would have felt obliged to defend Moira with tooth and claw—and would have almost certainly fallen victim to the Sentinels as well. Be well, my sweet bairn, she silently wished her foster daughter, in the event she never saw her again.
“Recording: complete,” the Doc Samson-Sentinel announced. “All pertinent files have been assimilated.” He disengaged his finger-probe from the supercomputer, then drew back a mighty fist. “Proceeding to demolition of premises,” he reported, then slammed, his right hand into the heart of the CPU. Metal and molded plastic tore noisily and sparks flew as his impressively-thewed arm sank into the machine up to his elbow. His fraudulent features maintaining the poker face to end all poker faces, he withdrew his arm from the violated computer, leaving a gaping crater in the side of the Cray. “Have no fear, Doc Samson is here,” he intoned with nary a speck of human feeling.
Oh, give it a bloody rest! Moira thought indignantly. At this point, the Sentinel’s rote attempts to maintain the imposture had become little more than an insult to her intelligence, She winced as the Doc Samson-Sentinel crushed a delicate electron microscope with his bare hands. It wasn’t enough that they had stolen her data, she lamented, they had to go and wreck her equipment too?
A loud, flapping noise distracted Moira from Doc Samson’s wanton vandalism. The wind from the Harpy’s wings blew flecks of ice and snow against Moira’s face as the flying Sentinel landed on the floor between Moira and Bobby. Bird-like talons sank into the melting slush as the human half of the Harpy leaned toward the ensnared scientist, another badge-sized electronic tag clutched between emerald fingernails. “Oh no!” Moira gasped, realizing that the Sentinel meant to tag Moira herself for transport.