“This should not have happened,” he told Jason. “I don’t know what can be done, my boy, but you have my word, I’ll find some way to help you.”
His mind was on other things, flush with the excitement of his reawakened telepathy. He didn’t see the flash in the boy’s eyes that belied the quietude of his behavior.
Xavier wheeled himself toward the locked door, making sure to roll across the inhibitor, taking a rude pleasure in the sound of its delicate workings crushing under his wheels.
“Mr. Smith,” he called, aloud and with his thoughts, “are you there?”
Of course he was; his mind was as plain to Xavier as the sunrise on a clear day. In short order, the door was unlocked, and Xavier’s arms were released from their restraints. His companion guard simply stood where he was, as Xavier told him to, watching disinterestedly.
“I arrived here with a friend,” Xavier ordered. “Take me to him.”
Scott Summers had a cell all to himself, his optic blasts restrained by a high-tech inhibitor of their own. He was also shackled to the bed, to keep him from getting ideas about unleashing his beams himself.
“Remove his restraints,” Xavier told the guards.
While Smith did as he was told, his partner hurried forward with Cyclops’ visor. Taking great care to keep his eyes tightly closed and his face turned away from any living targets, Scott donned the visor.
“Thank you,” Xavier said to the soldiers, and then to Corporal Smith: “What is the quickest way out of here?”
“The helicopter, sir” was Smith’s reply, at attention, as if to a general.
“Take us there, now.”
Two-thirds of the way eastward across the continent, in the passenger cabin of the Blackbird, on its way to the mansion, Bobby Drake wasn’t happy with his roommate. John Allardyce, cheerfully flicking his lighter cap open and shut, open and shut, couldn’t care less.
“You think it’s funny,” Bobby fumed, refusing to let up even though he’d been speaking to deaf ears since they went airborne. “Let’s go set fire to your house next time!”
“Too late,” John said cheerily.
“You almost killed those cops, John,” Rogue told him.
“So?” John turned toward her. He spoke with exaggerated patience, as though explaining the most obvious facts of life to the terminally dim-witted. “Logan would have”—he gave a pointed look at the man across the aisle—“if he hadn’t gotten shot in the head.”
Logan ignored the boy. He wanted no part of this argument, because in this one instance, both sides were right. John was right. Given the circumstances, he would have charged those cops and likely used lethal force. But he also sided foursquare with Rogue. Just because he was prepared to shoulder that karmic burden didn’t mean it was right for these kids to do the same. Hell, it probably meant precisely the opposite.
Mercifully, Jean gave him a high sign from the flight deck, and he clambered up the aisle to join her and Storm.
“They’ll be all right,” she assured him. Unconvinced, he growled, crouching down behind the cockpit seats and occupying himself with an examination of the dials and display screens. Jean was staring at him, first at his reflection in the windscreen, then straight on as she swung around in her chair to look him full in the face. He thought he’d welcome such attention, but her direct gaze made him distinctly uncomfortable.
She must have picked up the cue, from body language or his thoughts, because she reached out and used her thumb to wipe a smudge of blood off his forehead, from where the bullet had struck back in Boston. She didn’t move her hand away, though, but stroked him again with her thumb, a quick caress right over the now-healed wound.
More than anything right then, he wanted to take that hand. He wanted to kiss those lips, he wanted to lose himself in the scent of her hair. He wanted—
Too many things.
“So,” he said, taking refuge in the proprieties, “any word from the professor?” Seeing a faint quirk at the edge of her mouth when she shook her head, he remembered to add, “Or Scott?”
“Nothing,” she told him.
“How far are we?” he asked.
“We’re coming up on the mansion now. Once Storm whistles up some cover—”
“I’ve got two signals,” Storm interrupted, “coming in fast.”
Accompanying her announcement, a proximity alarm sounded. Warning lights flashed on the main console, and the main display shifted channels to a radar field. Two blips, rising and approaching from behind, identified by the plane’s onboard computer as F-16s. They were armed and trying to paint the Blackbird with their target acquisition systems.
The Blackbird shuddered in wake turbulence as the Falcons shot past to announce their presence, then throttled back to pace the bigger aircraft, taking up flanking positions on either side. Each of the pilots was making a downward gesture, telling them to land at once.
They made the same point over the radio: “Unidentified aircraft, this is Air Force two-one-zero on guard. You are ordered to descend to twenty thousand feet and return with our escort to Hanscom Air Force Base. Failure to comply at once will result in the use of extreme force. Do you acknowledge?”
When there was no reply, the fighter pilot repeated his instructions.
“Somebody’s angry,” Storm commented.
“I wonder why” was Logan’s pointed response, with a glare over his shoulder at John Allardyce.
Logan hung back in the shadows so that the fighter jocks could only see the two women at the controls. Nightcrawler had started mumbling prayers again, and the kids aft were demanding to know what was happening; they weren’t shy about sounding scared, either.
Jean looked at Storm, then at Nightcrawler. She’d already come to her decision.
Logan was about to ask, “What now?” when the lead fighter told them.
“We’re marked!” Storm cried as the Blackbird’s systems confirmed the worst. “They’re going to fire! Seat belts!”
She slapped the throttles to their firewalls and pointed the big black aircraft toward the stars. The Blackbird surged forward as though it had been launched from a catapult, and Logan had his hands full grabbing hold of the back of Jean’s chair with one hand and catching Nightcrawler with the other. Strangest damn feeling for Logan, and then some, to find some guy better than a head taller wrapping himself like a monkey around his arm and using it to climb up to his torso.
They felt another minor shudder as the Blackbird broke the sound barrier. In their wake, the F-16s went immediately to afterburner and rocketed after them. Alarms and displays on the main panel revealed two minor blips separating themselves from the pursuing fighters and beginning to close the gap at a significantly greater speed.
“Who are these guys?” Bobby yelled from the back. “What the hell is happening? Why won’t they leave us alone?”
Nobody up front paid him any attention. They had enough to worry about.
“What’s the threat?” Logan demanded.
Jean pointed at the display: “Sidewinders. They’re heat seekers. We give them minimal profile with our exhaust, we can lose ’em.”
“Everybody hang on!” Storm yelled, and she and Jean together swung the wheel hard over.
The Blackbird peeled off to the left, pitching up and over into a barrel roll that allowed them to reverse direction without needing a wide turn. The missiles, closing on where the plane had been, triggered their own proximity sensors and detonated, creating a minor fireball too far behind the Blackbird to do any damage. In response, both pursuing fighters split in opposite directions to come in on them from either side.
Storm jinked them the other direction, turning headlong in the direction of one of the fighters and forcing both of them to maneuver to prevent a collision. Nightcrawler wedged himself into a corner, holding on with hands and feet and tail while praying for all he was worth. Aft, John Allardyce had no smart comments, just a lot of sweat as he grabbed for a barf bag.
�
��They’re not backing off,” Storm said. “And they’re not giving me a decent opening to outrun them.”
“Don’t we have any damn weapons in this heap?” Logan demanded as the fighters struggled for position. The women were good, but these guys were trained professionals at the top of their game. No way would they lose a dogfight.
Jean shot a glance at Storm, who released hold of her controls. Jean had the aircraft now.
Storm’s eyes burned white, occluding iris and pupil. The air around her became supercharged with electricity, and Jean flicked a line of switches to disengage the systems on her side of the panel. Even so, performance on the main displays began degrading markedly, the screens becoming more and more crowded with static.
Through the canopy, Logan saw clouds darkening the sky ahead as puffy cumulus crashed together and built themselves before his eyes into a towering series of thunderheads. Lightning announced the storm, and he knew down on the ground people would be picking up the pace, cursing the weatherman for getting the forecast wrong yet again, as they hurried toward shelter.
On the radar, despite the electronic interference Storm was creating, he could see the shape of the storm up ahead. To his uneducated eye, it looked nasty. Without hesitation, Jean sent the Blackbird rocketing into its heart.
The Falcon drivers couldn’t know what to make of the freak weather. They didn’t care. They followed.
On radar and to the naked eye, wisps of cloud began to swirl, faster and faster as Storm manipulated pressure gradients and temperature to create air effects within these clouds more common to the great plains than the northeast. Great rams of high-pressure cold bludgeoned hot low-pressure air, generating maelstroms of tremendous force that found expression as airborne tornados.
Aboard the Blackbird, despite the best efforts of both Jean and Storm, it was a rough and rocky ride, akin to thundering over potholes the size of New Jersey. Wind smashed at the hull; one minute they were in clear air, the next the canopy was covered with sheets of rain, the next, completely occluded by ice. The only constant was that visibility sucked and maneuverability was worse.
Hard as it was for them, though, Logan didn’t want to imagine what it was like for their pursuers. He counted over a dozen whirlwinds, writhing impossibly across the sky both vertically and horizontally, creating an atmospheric gauntlet no aircraft could possibly survive.
Still, they tried, using every ounce of courage and skill to close to the point where they could establish a solid lock.
“We’re marked,” Jean cried out . . .
. . . and Storm responded by sandwiching the nearer fighter between a pair of tornados.
They literally tore the plane to bits, scattering wreckage across the sky in pieces no larger than a Zip disk. In the blink of an eye, the pilot found himself cast out of his vehicle and into the teeth of weather more ferocious than he could imagine, much less recall. He’d never had a plane disintegrate around him before, prayed never to endure the experience again. But most amazing of all to him was what happened afterward.
He thought for those first awful moments only of his wife and kids, but then it was as if the hand of God had reached out to enfold him. Yes, he was falling from miles in the air, but from the moment he separated from his aircraft, it was as if the storm had lost all interest in him. He might as well have been falling through a clear summer sky on some training exercise. Not a breath of wind touched him, nor rain, either, even though he fell for miles through the darkest and most terrifying pile of cumulo-nimbus thunderheads he’d ever seen. His parachute opened without a hitch, and he descended to a smooth landing somewhere close to Syracuse.
His wingman knew none of this. He only saw his fellow plane disintegrate, heard a final, frantic squawk of shock and terror over the radio before contact was lost. He made the logical assumption, and just like that the fight became personal.
The tornados came looking for him, and he skated around them with a daring and skill that pushed his interceptor well beyond the envelope of its flight and combat dynamics in his determination to nail them. He wouldn’t give up, he wouldn’t back off, and as the increasingly desperate maneuvers progressed, he gained height on them.
All Jean wanted was to break off the engagement, to use the Blackbird’s far superior power plant to put so much distance between them that he couldn’t follow. But if she ducked to the side, if she turned tail, the Falcon would have a shot. If she bulled down his throat, he had a shot.
Storm let her temper get the better of her. Logan jumped as small flickers of lightning crackled from her eyes and the interior of the flight deck resounded to the kettledrum riff of thunder. Outside, all the subordinate funnels coalesced into one, that megatornado expanding until its cone engulfed first the Blackbird, and then the Falcon on its tail.
Quick as she was, the pilot got tone before she could grab him. This time, before his plane went the way of his wingman, he popped a pair of slammers: AIM-120 AMRAAM “fire-and-forget” air-to-air missiles. Even as he bailed, even as the storm around him abated to give him an equally smooth and safe descent to the ground, he knew he had the target nailed.
Explosions high in the atmosphere confirmed it. When he was picked up, over the Canadian border in the woods above Lake Huron, that’s what he reported.
Jean kicked the Blackbird through the whole regime of missile avoidance maneuvers. She pulled a vertical rolling scissors, snapping back and forth across her base course violently enough and often enough to break the radar lock the slammers had on them. She tried a high-speed, high-G barrel roll to flip up and over the missiles and come in behind them. For all the good she did, the damn missiles might as well have been tied to the Blackbird with wire.
Without a word, using a slap to the arm to get the other woman’s attention, she handed the controls back to Storm. They were leaving her storm well behind, although the air, and the ride, remained bumpy. The missiles were too small, too close, too fast for Storm’s power to do any good. Their survival was Jean’s to decide.
One small blessing: As Storm scaled back her power, the radar cleared up. Jean had a clear electronic view of their tormentors. All she had to do now was slide her consciousness down that invisible line connecting the Blackbird to the missiles . . .
Storm cleaned up the Blackbird’s flight profile, exchanging maneuverability for raw speed as the variable-geometry wings folded close to the hull, creating an airfoil ideal for high-mach hypersonic flight. Given a small fraction of a minute, they could outrun the damn missiles, stretching out the pursuit until the missiles ran out of fuel. But the missiles were already going hell for leather, far faster than the planes that launched them, and the time the Blackbird needed to accelerate was time they didn’t have.
As the missiles struck the unseen barrier that she threw up in their flight path, Jean’s body reacted to an invisible impact and she gritted her teeth, hurling another telekinetic boulder at them. Again and again they plowed through her obstacles, the impacts psychically translating themselves into physical terms so that each one felt like a heavyweight punch. But this succession of hammer blows only made Jean that much more determined to prevail. She wasn’t trying to finesse the intercept by manipulating the missiles’ flight-control surfaces or even just grabbing hold of them and throwing them away; there was too much risk of losing her telekinetic grip, and no time to recover if she did.
She vaguely registered a cry of elation from the seat beside her and felt a sudden, pronounced wobble on the trajectory of the nearest missile. She hit it again, and again, and again, cursing it in terms that would impress Logan, furious with herself for not having the raw power necessary to do the job in a single shot.
She felt her body flush with a heat unlike any she’d ever known, not a physical sensation at all so much as a . . . spiritual one. She heard something faint in the distance, like a carillon fanfare, a call to glory that made her ache to answer, a sense of a window opening onto possibilities beyond number. It registered to her
as music, but she knew it was so much more. It spoke to her as fulfillment, but of what she did not know.
“Jean,” she heard Storm call, from as great a distance one way as the fanfare was the other, and for that moment was torn between which one to answer. “How are you—”
The last shot did the trick, sending the missile straight up so that its proximity fuse, mistaking its fellow missile for the target, detonated. She was aiming for a twofer, a double kill.
Aft, at the rear of the passenger cabin, John Allardyce had long since run out of barf bags, long since ruined his borrowed clothes. Bobby Drake didn’t feel much better, although—since his uncle was a Gloucester man who made his living fishing the Grand Banks and enjoyed taking his favorite nephew for the occasional jaunt—he’d acquired a cast-iron stomach long ago.
Rogue, unfortunately, was in real trouble. The Blackbird didn’t use standard seat belts; all the seats were fitted with four-point military-style restraints. Procedure mandated that passengers lock themselves in at takeoff, but she’d been talking with Bobby, who was really rocked by how wrong things had gone back at his house. He wasn’t even sure anymore whether or not he could even go home again. In addition, she’d been so upset—still and probably for a while to come—with John for the stunts he’d pulled during the fight that she never got around to buckling herself in. Once the dogfight started, she found to her increasing dismay that she couldn’t.
All the Blackbird’s wild and unpredictable moves forced her to spend most of the time just hanging on, to keep from making like a hockey puck against the walls and ceiling. Every time she got hold of a damn buckle, it wouldn’t lock into the mechanism. She’d think one was anchored, but then when she tried to close another, the first would pop out. It happened so often—making her so frustrated she was ready to cry—that she believed the plane was doing this to her on purpose.
She knew she was getting upset, so she followed Jean’s training. She forced herself to take big, slow, calming breaths. She was still scared but tried not to let that matter so much as, one by one, she gathered the buckles and slugged them into place.
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