X-Men; X-Men 2

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  This was going to work. She was going to be okay.

  Up front, three pairs of eyes—green, brown, and blue—stared transfixed at the radar screen and the big blotch way less than a mile behind the Blackbird that represented the exploding missile. Things were looking good. They were going to be okay.

  The panel beeped an alarm, and the second missile raced free of the debris field, locked and closing.

  They had seconds to save themselves.

  Jean threw everything she had into its path, focusing her concentration so tightly that the shape and fabric of the world around her began to fade. She didn’t perceive herself anymore as being surrounded by the solid structure of the Blackbird; instead, she beheld the glittering atomic and molecular matrices that composed it. The world for her became a panoply of brilliant pinpoint lights and colors, shot through with vistas of unfathomable emptiness, almost as though reality was no more than an illusion, with all the tangible substance of a dream.

  She closed her eyes, tasting the harsh gunmetal of blood from her nose.

  The proximity beeps of the radar were coming closer together as the missile closed the range. She took a final roundhouse swing—and missed.

  The missile’s course never wavered.

  “Oh, God,” she breathed.

  Inside the hull, it felt as though the Blackbird had just had its back broken by a baseball bat. The big plane bucked downward under the impact of the pressure wave. Shrieking metal matched shrieking voices as shrapnel punched a score of holes in the roof.

  Decompression did the rest, blowing out a major section, the plane’s own velocity wrenching the piece away. Instantly the cabin was swept by winds far greater than any hurricane. Rogue’s harness held for all of a heartbeat, and then, to her absolute horror and disbelief, her buckles disengaged and she was swept screaming up and out the hole, into the sky.

  Everyone saw what happened, only one was able to act on it.

  Nightcrawler vanished in his distinctive bamf of imploding air and the faint stench of sulfur.

  Rogue didn’t know what to do or think. She’d never fallen out of a plane before; this was the kind of thing that only happened in movies. She remembered what she’d seen about skydiving and spread her arms and legs to try to stabilize herself. At the same time, she was laughing hysterically inside, demanding to know what the hell good that would do because she didn’t have a parachute and sooner rather than later gravity was going to reintroduce her to the ground, the hard way. She doubted after that happy moment if even Logan’s healing power would make much difference.

  It was really cold, too. She’d hardly begun falling and already she couldn’t breathe and she’d likely pass out and freeze to death before anything serious happened. It was so unfair.

  That’s when the demon caught her, indigo skin making him hard to see against the darkening sky that was left over from the storm. He rocketed out of nowhere with a grace and skill that told her he knew all about skydiving and wrapped himself around her, arms, legs, and tail. And teleported.

  She didn’t know where they went for the split instant they were in transit, and for as long as she planned to live she never wanted to find out. There was a cold that chilled her to the marrow, more completely than Bobby could. There was a silence that had nothing to do with the absence of sound. There was a raging disorientation that made her wonder if her insides and outsides had been transposed. There was an awful sense of nothing.

  And then she was whole once more. And the pair of them were dropping the last couple of feet to the wind-ripped deck of the Blackbird’s main cabin. Which, in Rogue’s estimation, was not an improvement, because the plane was falling just as out of control as she had been.

  Storm yelled their altitude, diminishing rapidly, as she and Jean fought to pull the plane out of a flat spin. The explosion had crippled the flight controls, they had minimal hydraulics, which made the act of turning the wheel or pulling on the yoke or pressing the rudder pedals akin to bench-pressing a fully loaded semitrailer. They had a flameout on one engine, possible shrapnel damage and a fire-warning light from the other, which they ignored as they rammed its throttle past the firewall in an attempt to stabilize their descent.

  Logan braced himself in position and laid his hand beside Jean’s on her yoke, using his strength to buttress hers. They were into the breathable atmosphere, that was good. But they were fast running out of sky, that was way bad.

  Storm’s eyes went white again as she fought to bring a wind into their path, to use it to check their headlong fall. But for all the passion of her indomitable will, she was still constrained by natural forces. She could generate a wind to cushion their landing, but not in the space they had left.

  “You can fly,” Jean told her. “Grab the kids, get them clear!”

  As she spoke, Jean once more turned to her own teke, but that well was too dry to be of use. She had will to spare, but no strength to match the terrible momentum of their descent.

  Without thinking, responding solely to a surge of emotion that caught them both by surprise, she placed a hand over Logan’s. The look he saw when he met her eyes was a revelation that he knew would break both their hearts. And yet, it was a moment and a memory he’d carry with him to the grave.

  Storm cleared her harness and shoved herself past Logan, calling to the kids.

  Strangely, it was Nightcrawler, holding tight to Rogue, who responded.

  “Uh . . . Storm?” He was pointing to the roof.

  She followed his upraised finger and didn’t bother hiding her astonishment as the fabric of the hull came alive before her eyes. Dark threads of metal alloy polymer laced their way across the hull spars as though they were being spun from a loom. The spars themselves that had been twisted and broken politely straightened themselves. The roar of wind through the hull gradually lessened to a whisper, then to silence.

  Around them, the hull righted itself, returning to level flight.

  Logan looked questioningly at Jean, wondering if this was her doing. As mystified as he, she shook her head, but she also didn’t move her hand. Indeed, she tightened her grip, interlacing her fingers with his.

  They were a couple of hundred feet in the air, but their velocity had dropped to less than a hundred knots. With each ten feet or so they lost another ten knots until, ten feet off the ground, they stopped.

  They sat there, floating just above the ground, for maybe a minute before anyone had the presence of mind to mention the landing gear. That provoked more than a fair share of nervous chuckles as Jean broke contact with Logan to slap the big landing lever from the top to the bottom of its cradle. A quiet whine and a dull thunk told them what the status lights confirmed: gear down and locked.

  The next sensation was an equally understated thump that told them they were once more on the ground.

  The kids in the back, being kids, let out a cheer.

  On the flight deck, the first flush of relief had been cast aside by the sight of what was waiting for them. They had descended into a forest clearing not much bigger than the Blackbird itself. On the edge of the clearing, parked under the sheltering evergreens, was a black limousine, not the sort of wheels normally used for a camping trip. But then, the couple using it wasn’t the sort you’d expect to find out here roughing it, either.

  Mystique gave Jean and Logan a wave from where they stood midway between the nose of the Blackbird and their car. Magneto, once again properly clothed in his signature black and gray, held out his hand in welcome. Mystique stood at his side.

  “If I set you down gently,” he offered in a pleasantly companionable voice, the kind you’d want in a favorite old-country uncle, “will you hear me out?”

  Chapter

  Twelve

  It was a good place to hide, even without the stealth netting that Storm and Logan quickly spread across the hull. Jean wanted to help, but her psychic exertions in the air had taken a physical toll—which she’d discovered when she tried to climb out of her pil
ot’s chair. The spirit was willing, the flesh had other ideas. She didn’t have strength to move, and Logan had to carry her out.

  Magneto had set the Blackbird down hard against a nice-sized escarpment, part of a line of large hills—baby mountains, really—that formed a valley with a mainly north-south orientation. It had been carved out of the landscape by the great ice ages, when the advancing glaciers had plowed troughs in the earth like a plow. This was still technically wilderness, with no roads to speak of for fifty miles in any direction, pretty rough going on foot through the forest. Magneto had brought his limo in the same way he saved the Blackbird, with his power.

  For Storm and Jean, that had proved a daunting revelation. The plane had been designed with Magneto’s abilities in mind, to make it as impervious to him as possible, and yet he’d grabbed hold of it and repaired it with frightening ease.

  The cliff formed a wall at their back. Every other direction, they saw only trees. Old-growth forest, timber that had never been cut, thick stands of fir that towered thirty meters and more in height. This was rugged country that made no concession to modern man or the amenities of modern society, as the kids learned when they decided to go exploring and almost immediately got themselves lost. Logan found them without any trouble but wasn’t happy about it, and he made it clear to them that next time they were on their own.

  “Think they listened?” Jean asked him.

  He snorted derisively. “That’ll be the damn day. Especially John. He’ll do it again just to spit in my eye.” His expression sobered. “How you doin’?” he asked her.

  “Pretty much fine, thank you,” she replied, interlacing her fingers and stretching her arms till the joints cracked. “Just being lazy.”

  “You’re entitled.”

  “Absent the circumstances, and the company,” she added, with a pointed flick of the eyes toward the limo, “I’d agree with you. I’ve been monitoring GUARD.” She meant the military command frequencies. “Both pilots are okay.” Logan made a face. He understood her impulse to save the two men, but frankly he couldn’t have cared less. Guy tries to kill him, the guy takes his chances. No bitching, no tears.

  “The second pilot’s reporting us as a probable kill,” Jean finished.

  “They buying it, the brass?”

  “Well, Ororo didn’t entirely disperse her storm. It’s raining pretty hard over the probable crash site, zero-zero visibility, no hope of flight operations until it clears, which she assures me”—ghost of a grin—“won’t be for a while. System seems to have stalled. Meteorologists are baffled.”

  “I’d keep looking if it was me, till I knew for sure.”

  “Hence our precautions,” and she indicated the netting, shrouding the plane and the car. “Even enhanced imagery won’t spot the plane, and our heat and electronic emissions are close to zero. By the time we finish setting up, we’ll look like a camping party, nothing more. There should be nothing here to merit a second glance.”

  “Except for him,” Logan noted, jutting his jaw in the general direction of Nightcrawler, who was carrying a tent pack over to where Mystique had begun to lay out their campsite.

  “Whatever happens, Logan, we’ll deal.”

  “So tell me, Jean, just how many people are there in the world with that color skin and those color eyes?”

  She shrugged. “How many are blond and blue, or redheaded with green eyes?”

  “I don’t believe in coincidence.”

  Her tone sharpened. “And I don’t believe in judging someone without giving them a fair chance. You of all people might appreciate that.”

  With a grunt of effort, deliberately ignoring, then waving away, his offer of help, Jean pushed herself to her feet and strode toward the open hatch of the Blackbird. Logan fumed as he watched her go, but he was mostly angry at himself. He had nothing against the German, couldn’t help liking him in some ways. But the attack on the mansion, and now finding himself in close proximity with a man he’d cheerfully slaughter, had put all his combat instincts on high alert. Jean was too much like Xavier, always determined to see the brighter angles of human nature. Logan had walked too long, too far, with killers. Trust came hard for him because he knew, deep down to his soul, the cost of betrayal.

  He felt as if he’d already failed once, by being caught by surprise at the mansion. He wasn’t going to let that happen again.

  Mystique was supervising the layout of the camp, and Logan had to admit the woman knew her stuff. She knew he was watching and if that bothered her, she didn’t let it show. Quite the opposite, in fact; she seemed amused by his attention.

  Logan smelled a faint acrid wisp on the wind, the detritus of a striker generating a spark, over and over, in an unsuccessful attempt to ignite a flame.

  That made him grin. The kids were going all Boy Scout. How cute.

  Bobby Drake didn’t share that amusement as repeated attempts to use John’s lighter to torch some kindling led to a huge amount of frustration. He tried paper, he tried twigs, he tried dry leaves, but nothing would catch. All the time he was conscious of John, sitting behind him with his back to a tree trunk, silently laughing at his failure.

  “You could help, you know,” Rogue snapped to John. There was no expression on the boy’s face as he looked up at her. His eyes were cold and unreadable.

  Forcing himself to ignore everything but the need to generate some fire, Bobby followed a couple of sparks as they landed on a leaf, pursing his lips and giving them a gentle puff of air to excite them into a true flame as they burned through the leaf and left a glowing boundary that quickly expanded outward in their wake. The more Bobby breathed, the brighter the embers glowed, until he saw the ghost of a flame. Stifling a cheer, he grabbed for some more tinder to feed the baby fire.

  Then, with a speed that surprised and saved him, Rogue’s hand caught him by the scruff of the neck and yanked him clear, his own muscles engaging that very same moment in kinetic response to a threat his conscious mind wasn’t yet even aware of. In that selfsame instant, the tiny flicker of flame exploded into a pillar of raw fire, hot as a blast furnace, that reared up better than ten meters before fading to a happy little campfire.

  Bobby scrambled around to confront the boy behind him, but he lost his balance as he did so and sprawled awkwardly on the grass, which kept John from being on the receiving end of a roundhouse punch to the face. He glared at John, so did Rogue, but all they got in return was the most innocent of smiles.

  John held out his hand, gesturing for the borrowed lighter. Bobby wanted to throw it away or, better yet, encase it in a block of ice that would last as long as a glacier. Instead, remembering all he’d been taught at home and at Xavier’s, he mastered his rage and dropped the lighter into John’s open palm. Then he and Rogue turned their backs on him and walked away. Once they were back at the school, assuming there was a school to go back to, Bobby determined to insist on a new roommate. John had crossed too many lines. Bobby wanted no more to do with him.

  After the fire came dinner. Nothing fancy, nothing that needed cooking. The campfire was mainly for psychological comfort, to give the scene an air of companionability that was lacking on the faces of most everyone present.

  It was an adversarial setting, Magneto and Mystique on one side of the fire, Jean, Storm, and Logan on the other. Everyone but Logan was seated. He stood behind the women and a little to their side, with a clear shot at Magneto. His stance appeared casual, but nobody was fooled. The question that lingered unspoken between them all was whether or not he could reach the older man and deal with him before Magneto could bring his own powers to bear.

  Magneto sat in a camp chair, with a presence that made it seem more like a throne. Mystique hunkered down beside him in a crouch, her movements so fluid it was hard to believe she had a skeleton beneath her indigo skin. There was a snap to the air, a harbinger of the fast-approaching winter, that made the heat of the fire welcome. Magneto had hated the cold since Auschwitz and had bundled himself insi
de an open greatcoat to keep it at bay. Mystique, by contrast, didn’t seem to mind a bit. She walked naked, using a decorative scattering of bony ridges across the chest and hips as a minimal acknowledgment of propriety, and dared the world to make a comment.

  Jean sat on knees and heels, a very Japanese stance that amply demonstrated her natural grace. She, too, was playing a role, presenting herself in an apparently submissive posture that was in fact anything but. Like a samurai, she could stay this way for hours, yet remain constantly ready to spring to her feet faster than anyone might have guessed. She rarely looked at Magneto, yet Logan knew her focus on the man was as intent as his own.

  Of them all, Storm looked the most natural as she tended the fire, feeding it the occasional length of wood while using her control of the winds to channel a constant breeze through the base of the blaze, keeping it hot. She sat cross-legged, in a position she’d learned as a child out on the Great Rift Valley, wandering with the Masai.

  The kids, showing more sense than Logan expected, were keeping their distance, as was Nightcrawler.

  Logan told the story of what had happened at the mansion. Magneto told them of Xavier’s and Scott’s capture.

  “Our adversary,” Magneto said at the end, “his name is William Stryker. He is very highly placed in the national intelligence community. Specializing in clandestine operations. Ostensibly accountable to the President, but it’s clear now he has an agenda all his own.”

  “What does he want?” Jean asked.

  The look Magneto gave her made his feeling plain: Shouldn’t that be obvious, child? But Logan spoke before he could repeat those sentiments aloud.

  “That’s the question we should be asking Magneto,” Logan challenged.

  Magneto inclined his head, very much the monarch holding court, the civilized man confronting a band of barbarians. Or worse, children.