“Stay here,” Logan snapped, and then he charged.
Bobby couldn’t resist a peek, and yielding to that temptation made him more scared than ever.
Two troopers were carrying Jones down the stairway. Another few waited below in the hallway.
Logan turned the scene into a demolition derby. A fist backed by adamantium bones smashed one man’s face and hurled the man aside, blinded and broken and bloody. Momentum carried him into the main body of the group, and a piercing shriek of surprise and pain told Bobby that Logan was using his claws.
There was nothing he could do to help Logan, not here, not in this kind of scrap, short of maybe freezing everybody in place. But then what would he do if more bad guys showed up, with Logan occupied?
At the same time, he wasn’t prepared to hide anymore, the way he had before in the kitchen. One of the school’s rules—written and unwritten—was that the older kids looked out for the youngsters.
He didn’t think about what he was going to do; that would have iced him in place more effectively than his power. He lunged across the hallway, straight for the servants’ elevator, expecting with every one of the three steps it took him to feel the shock of a bullet to the back. He was so totally out of breath when he made it, and squeezed so deeply into the recessed alcove, that when the door slid open behind him he tumbled flat on the floor and almost couldn’t get up.
At the other end of the hall, Logan was peppered with anesthetic darts. They didn’t even slow him down. From above on the stairs, one of the men carrying Jones opened up with his sidearm, a 10mm automatic, but only managed to fire a couple of rounds before Logan took off the barrel and his forearm with a single sweep of his claws.
Logan never stopped moving, shifting from one adversary to the next with quick and deadly efficiency. He was a born scrapper, and in a crowd like this the advantage was all his. Everyone he faced was an enemy, whereas the soldiers had to be careful lest they cut down some of their own. The smart play for them would have been to withdraw and try to cut him down with automatic weapons or explosives, but they were boxed in by the tight confines of the hallway and there was no time for them to do more than react purely on reflex and training.
His reflexes were better by far, and their training didn’t begin to prepare them for what they faced tonight.
He didn’t care if they cut him, if they shot him; he’d bleed a while and then get better. By contrast, the blades that were part of his hands cut body armor and flesh and bone with equal facility, and if he chose not to use the blades, his unbreakable bones would do almost as much damage.
The fight didn’t last a minute longer. When it was done, Logan was the only one left standing, one of a precious few left breathing.
He saw a dart sticking from his arm and pulled it out, flexing his fist and clenching it to make sure there were no ill effects. He found another in Jones and plucked it free as well. He pressed his fingertips to the boy’s neck to confirm what his other enhanced senses had already told him. The pulse was slow, but strong and regular. The boy was asleep, otherwise unharmed.
He didn’t bother looking back to where he’d left Bobby; he knew the older boy was gone. Hearing told him the elevator was engaged, scent told him which floor he’d gone to.
Logan hauled Jones off the stairs by an arm and pitched him across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Before the boy was settled in place, Logan was moving up the stairs, two and three at a time. His senses had also given him a pretty decent picture of the opposition’s numbers and general location. There was no time to waste, no margin for mistakes.
On the third floor, Bobby stepped out into chaos. The youngest kids, and some of the older ones, were panicking as wind pounded the roof and windows around them. Someone was screaming that the glass was going to shatter; another collapsed to his knees on the floor, face upraised and howling, certain a plane was going to crash right through the wall and bring the building down on their heads. The helicopters were perched outside the windows, using their million-plus candlepower spot lamps to light up the interior of the house in absolutes of black and white. The glare was so intensely bright that everyone was forced to close their eyes, just to keep from being permanently blinded.
Bobby grabbed for the first figure within reach. It turned out to be John Allardyce.
“What the hell’s happening?” John demanded between racking coughs that doubled him over. Somewhere he’d swallowed a lot of smoke, and he didn’t much like it. Smoke was useless to John without a flame.
“Guys with guns,” Bobby said, because that was all he knew for sure and trusted himself to say.
“No shit, Sherlock. We got a war here, we’re being invaded!”
“We’re a school!” Bobby protested.
“Try telling them!”
“We’ve got to help the kids!”
“Peter’s up ahead. They’re gathering around him.”
“John, where’s Rogue? Have you seen her?”
“I don’t know. Man, I didn’t see you till you grabbed me!”
“I’m going to find her.”
John opened his mouth to protest, but Bobby was already two rooms down the hall. He didn’t want to follow. He saw no percentage in being a stupid hero, especially under these circumstances, but he liked even less the idea that Bobby might think him a coward. The fact that Bobby would never conceive of such a thing didn’t enter John’s head.
Muttering and grumbling, he set out after his roommate, bulling his way against the tide of frightened schoolchildren.
The floor was trembling under the approach outside of a Sikorsky Blackhawk. It took station a dozen feet above the roof, and another assault team rappelled to the target. They weren’t playing nice anymore. They used shotguns and shaped-charge grenades to blast skylight windows from their frames, and shock-wave charges to stun everyone in the rooms below.
The troopers burst into the hall like sharks attacking a school of baitfish. One triggered a taser at the closest student, a young Asian girl, and sent a burst of electricity down the double wires into her back. To his surprise, Jubilation Lee didn’t fall. She pivoted on one foot, dropping into a shooting crouch of her own with her right arm outstretched, and shot that jolt of electricity through the air right back at him. The blast hit the trooper like the impact of a semi, throwing him back against the wall so hard he left an indent of his body deep enough to hold him upright. Out of the darkness nearby came the sound of a dart gun as another trooper returned fire from cover, and Jubilee dropped, unconscious.
In the neighboring wing, Peter Rasputin opened a hidden panel in the hallway wainscoting, revealing a passage and stairwell lit at intervals by emergency glow globes. Handing off Siryn to one of the older students, he began ushering his charges inside. Speed was the essence here. He had to clear the corridor before they were discovered by any of the intruders.
“Hey, shorty!” he heard from behind him. He thought at first it was one of the enemy and turned, ready to fight, only to find himself facing a figure barely half his size. Without another word, Logan handed over Jones.
“I can help you,” Colossus called after him.
“Help them!” came the reply. “You got your responsibilities, bub.”
Logan paused at a junction of the hallway. The beams of two flashlights and a set of green targeting lasers splayed across the wall. He waited a moment, then stepped out of sight around the corner. The lasers went out, and Peter heard a couple of grunts, plus the sound of falling bodies. One flashlight beam vanished as well, and the other skewed wildly sideways before rolling into view along the floor.
“I have mine,” Logan finished quietly, stepping briefly into view. “Get going.”
Peter didn’t need to be told twice. There were no other students in sight. He’d been running a head count of the kids he was shepherding into the escape passage, and he knew he was well short of the total. Who was just missing, who’d been captured, he had no idea. He also knew, although this lef
t him sick and angry at heart, that he couldn’t go looking for them. As Logan said, he had his responsibilities, and he would not abandon them.
He stepped through the doorway and locked it closed behind him.
Kitty Pryde didn’t bother with doors. She didn’t need them. Intangible as a ghost, she raced through the mansion, down to the main floor, where she found soldiers . . .
. . . through one of the classrooms, more soldiers . . .
. . . through the arboretum, more soldiers . . .
. . . through the billiard room where Cyclops would shoot nine ball using his optic blasts instead of a pool cue, more soldiers . . .
. . . through the hallway beyond, and right through the body of one of the invaders before either of them knew quite what was happening.
Kitty’s power allowed her to slip the molecules of her own body through the valences of other physical objects. The process was so quick that it had virtually no effect on the molecular cohesion of those nonorganic solids, any more than the passage of baseline human bodies would affect the air through which they travel. Or, more accurately in her case, the vast emptiness of open space.
That wasn’t the case with electrical fields. Any transit by Kitty created a momentary skitz in a power circuit, causing a blink when it came to household wiring, leading to the occasional disaster when she interfaced with higher-order electronics. She was death to hard drives.
There was one other by-product, which her studies with Xavier had only recently begun to explore, and that related to the fact that the human body’s central nervous system is one huge electrical network, linked to a supremely powerful biological computer. Whenever she ghosted through a person, she caused much the same shock with them that she did to a power circuit. The consequences depended on how quickly she was moving and where the contact took place.
For the trooper, it was like being momentarily jammed into a light socket. His world went white, just the way he’d read about folks who’d survived lightning strikes, and for an instant after it was over he thought that was what had happened. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t altogether sure what had just happened. He had a vague sense of a girl popping out of a wall, then diving right through him.
His own reaction was automatic. Even as shock threw him into a vertiginous spin toward the floor, he managed to snap off a taser round after the girl. It was a spectacular shot, especially considering the circumstances. He caught her dead center between the shoulder blades—only the prongs at the end of the taser wires didn’t strike living flesh at all. Instead they buried themselves in the wall of the house, at the very instant the girl herself vanished inside.
Upstairs, Rogue had found another girl to add to her collection. Terrified, of course, huddled in a heap, face gleaming with silent tears in the random splashes of brilliance thrown by the circling helicopters and their damn spot lamps. Marie found herself wishing, fervently, for some powers more appropriate to the name she’d chosen for herself, Rogue—something akin to Cyclops’ eye beams, or Jean’s telekinesis, or Storm’s command of the weather. She wasn’t feeling picky; she just wanted something to even the odds and maybe tear those gunships from the sky.
“Come on, honey,” she said instead, in her best baby-sitter voice, projecting a strength and calm she didn’t have as she gathered the girl to her breast, taking care to always keep a layer of clothes between her own skin and the girl’s.
She was glad now that one of the first things she had done on arrival at Xavier’s School was memorize the network of hidden passages that honeycombed both the mansion itself and the grounds. At the time she was just staying in character; after all, a girl has to know how to slip away unnoticed for a night of private fun, even if she never found the opportunity to try. Now that work was paying off with interest, the passages enabling her to elude pursuit and scoot her share of students to safety.
“In you go, girls,” she told them, “just like Storm taught us, ’kay?”
The girl in her arms was clinging like a limpet, whimpering now along with her tears. Rogue was her lifeline, and she couldn’t bear to be parted. Rogue didn’t have time for this. They were too close to one of the upper floor’s big bay windows. The longer they stayed, the greater the chance of being spotted when one of the helicopters did a flyby and trained its million-candlepower lamp into the house.
“Aren’t you coming?” the other girl asked. She was a Scots redhead of barely thirteen named Rahne Sinclair.
“I have to find someone first,” Rogue told her. With a winning Highlander grin, Rahne pried the other girl’s hands loose from Rogue’s neck, offering reassurances of her own as she led the way into the passage.
“When you come out of the tunnels,” Rogue told them both, “run straight to the first house you find. Tell them there was a fire. Tell them to contact your folks. Whatever you do, though, you don’t tell anyone you’re a mutant. Okay?”
The girl nodded uncomprehendingly, but Rahne knew the score. She’d take care of her classmate just fine. Rogue leaned forward to brush a wisp of hair from the younger girl’s face. In return, she got a brave attempt at a smile.
“Okay,” the girl said.
“You’ll be fine,” Rogue told her, and closed the secret panel behind them.
Quickly she scooted the length of the hallway. The walls and floor, the very air, were trembling again as the helicopters made another run on the mansion. She had to find cover before she was nailed herself.
Through the infernal din, suddenly, unexpectedly, she heard a familiar voice, someone she thought would be long gone from the mansion by now.
“Rogue,” called John Allardyce.
“Rogue!” bellowed Bobby Drake, determined to make himself heard.
“Bobby,” she cried, startled to realize how out-and-out delighted she sounded to see him safe and free. John had to make do with just a nod of greeting.
“There anyone else?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” Bobby replied.
“Petey Pureheart was looking after a crowd of kids,” John said. “Outside of them, nada. Bad guys galore.”
“Where’s Logan?” Rogue demanded. “He was s’posed to be looking after us!”
Bobby’s face twisted. She knew the look. It echoed her own reaction to some of the things she’d seen Logan do in a fight.
“What’s happened?” she said, grabbing Bobby by the shirtfront. To save her life, Logan had let her imprint him and his healing factor. Most of the memories that came with his powers had thankfully faded over time, but under stress she still manifested occasional residual flashes of his personality. “Where is he?”
Bobby didn’t need to be asked twice. “He was downstairs,” he told her.
“This way,” she told them, intending to lead them back toward the secret passage.
Before she could move, an exterior lamp turned the hall brighter than noonday. They saw two shapes vaguely outlined in the glare, hanging outside the window. Immediately Rogue grabbed John, Bobby grabbed Rogue, and they all tumbled around the corner in a heap as an explosion shattered the leaded glass to bits, spraying the corridor with splinters and debris. Right behind the blast came the soldiers, targeting lasers tracing lines through the smoke, fingers ready on the triggers. Each door they passed got the same treatment: shotgun blasts to the hinges followed by a shot from a battering ram to punch it open, a couple of stun grenades to incapacitate anyone inside, sustained bursts from submachine guns to finish the job. Each room took only seconds to clear, and they did the job with murderous, methodical precision.
Without a word, the three young mutants decided that they didn’t want to find out what would happen if they were found. When the soldiers reached the corner, the kids were long gone.
Up aboard the Hercules, the technicians staffing the sensor consoles were not happy. At the start of the incursion, they’d had a clear picture of the mansion’s interior. They knew precisely where the kids were.
Now, after a span of too few minutes
, nothing was certain anymore.
They had troopers down all across the board, with varying degrees of injury, and more than a few deaths. Worse for them, they had gradually lost contact with a significant number of potential targets. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to determine the reason: the mansion must possess a number of sections that were comprehensively shielded against remote sensing and imagery. The only way to be sure of cleaning out the place would mean finding the access points and sending teams into the tunnels. Trouble was, given mission parameters, that wasn’t an option.
The only alternative would be to widen the search parameters and try to pick the mutants up when they emerged onto the surface. But that would mean significantly degrading the resources available to monitor the prime target, Xavier’s mansion. Again, given mission parameters, not an option.
Barring a miracle, any kids who’d escaped into the tunnels were pretty much free and clear.
Unaware of this, Peter Rasputin led his party into one of the long tunnels burrowed deep beneath the estate. Its terminus was a thick stand of woods outside Xavier’s holdings, a nature preserve. He had no idea what would happen after that, or what would become of a score of terrified, bedraggled children in their nightclothes, with no money between them and no one close at hand they could trust.
Right now, though, for Peter, that didn’t seem so important. He just wanted to get them, and himself, out of danger, to a place where no one would chase them or threaten them with guns. He wanted a breather, time enough to gather his wits and take stock of both the situation and his resources. Of the ultimate outcome, though, he had no doubt.
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