“No offense, but from what I saw on the video—”
“Those are the orders.”
Grierson shrugged. “First time for everything, I guess.” He hefted his long gun, a Barrett .50-cal sniper rifle, whose depleted uranium shells could punch through tank armor a mile away. “I get a decent shot with this!”
Lyman nodded again, aching for a cigarette. He never smoked at home, only in the field and only before a fight. Had to be nerves. Thirty years in the service, combat tours all over the world, and he still got nervous. He figured that was the difference between him and Stryker; the commander had no nerves, or at least none that he ever showed his men.
One more time, for reassurance, and to give himself something to do, he made the rounds of his fire team, checked their sight lines and kill zones, made sure everyone had an abundance of weapons and ammo. In a fair fight, against an adversary like themselves, no matter how well trained and disciplined, he would have called the outcome no contest. His guys had ideal ground, anyone advancing up this corridor wouldn’t even come close.
As it was . . .
He’d broken the cardinal rule of clandestine ops: He’d brought along some personal items. Only pictures—the wife, the kids, the grandchild-to-be. His dogs. He’d raised them from pups, a pair of mixed-breed shepherds that kept his wife good company when he was away. With the kids building households of their own, his own home was too empty too often. He knew she was lonely; he hoped the dogs made it easier to bear.
He wondered what they’d say, his kids, seeing him here? He thought of the children they’d taken from the mansion and how cavalierly Stryker had condemned them. Funny, even though he understood the broad outlines of Stryker’s ambition, he always assumed—no, he always chose to assume—that the targets would be adults. Full-grown mutants.
He did a dangerous thing for a soldier. He put himself for a moment in the other man’s boots and considered how he might react if they were his children who’d been stolen.
He took a breath and then another, even deeper, because the first was way too shuddery and he needed his men to see him completely in control. He had to take a third, because this time the fear wouldn’t be banished so readily; it had its hooks deep in him, and he had to pry them loose one at a time. Lyman wasn’t a brilliant man; he wasn’t into concepts. His skill was execution. Give him a mission, and you were guaranteed to see it accomplished.
“I gotta go, sweetheart,” he whispered to the pictures in his hand, and he kissed each one in turn. One daughter, and her baby he knew he’d never see, three sons, his two dogs, and the woman who was the center of his life. He clasped his hands in prayer, bracing his wife’s picture between thumbs and fingers, staring at it with such intensity that by force of will alone he could almost make it real.
That’s when they heard the hum from inside the Cerebro chamber, a deep pulsing groan as if the world itself were stretching sore joints. It wasn’t so much heard as felt, a frequency so low it made your insides quiver. At the same time, the floor beneath them, the rock around them, trembled, and every man in the fire team looked around nervously, half expecting some monster to come burning through the walls or the walls themselves to come tumbling down.
“Remember the briefing,” Lyman told them. “This is part of the process. You guys may think this feels bad, but I guarantee you it’ll be worse for the muties. Stay chill, people, stay alert.”
“Five bucks says the gizmo nails ’em before we fire a shot!”
“Save your money, Manfredi,” Lyman shot back. “I’d rather take it from you over poker.”
He didn’t get much of a laugh from his men, but it was enough. Lyman tucked away his photos and checked his own weapons. If the muties had half a brain between them, that first pulse should bring them on the run. They’d know the stakes now.
It wouldn’t be long.
“I have a valid target,” Grierson announced, leveling his sniper rifle.
Lyman whipped his binoculars to his eyes and brought the approaching figures into focus. Magneto and Mystique, at a range of one hundred meters. The old man was a half step in the lead, marching up the hallway like he was leading a whole army into battle. He didn’t seem to mind Grierson’s laser sight resting right over his heart.
“You’re cleared to fire,” Lyman said, and immediately a resounding boom filled the hallway around him, so loud he couldn’t help flinching.
The shell didn’t hit its target; it never came close. Without lifting a finger, without a gesture of any kind, Magneto simply stopped it in midair.
The rest of the team opened up, and the air around Lyman filled with the stink of cordite and the sound of spent casings rattling off the walls and floor. Every man here was a crack marksman, and this was point-blank range. The only pause in the murderous volleys was when someone had to replace an empty magazine. In the space of a few frantic minutes, they expended better than half their munitions . . .
. . . and found themselves with absolutely nothing to show for it.
Not one of the bullets came closer to their targets than an arm’s length. It didn’t matter that they were forged of nonferrous materials, that some were super-dense plastic. If Magneto couldn’t manipulate the shells directly, he warped the magnetic fields around them, and him, using force and pressure to accomplish his goal.
Too astonished to be scared, the troopers gradually stopped firing. A couple looked to Lyman, hoping for a Plan B.
He couldn’t think of one; he was transfixed by the scene down the hall. They’d thrown literally thousands of rounds at the two mutants, and now Magneto was reshaping them to his own requirements, pressing them so tightly together they formed a wall that completely obscured him and Mystique from view.
Why would they need a shield, Lyman thought. He knows there’s nothing we can do to him—
He heard a faint click, followed the noise, and had his answer.
The bastard had just pulled the pin on his grenade.
Lyman grabbed for the bomb and pitched it clear, thankful for the seven-second delay on the fuse, but even as he did he knew it was a useless gesture—because those same fateful clicks could be heard all around him. They had a whole case of grenades, each man carried his standard allotment, and every one of them had just been triggered.
He saw his wife in his mind’s eye and reached for her . . .
. . . and he was done.
Of course the explosion of the grenades ignited what remained of the rifle ammunition, which created quite a fireworks display outside the chamber. Mystique tucked her body close around itself at Magneto’s feet, placing her back right against his metal shield as strays ricocheted all around them.
When the pings and whistles and pops and crackles and booms had all faded, leaving Mystique coughing from the smoke and the stench of ruined flesh, her ears ringing from the shock waves, Magneto set aside his shield, and they proceeded on their way.
There wasn’t anything left of the defenders worth looking at. Magneto paused a moment at the entrance, standing by a bloody mess that was unrecognizable as a man. Oddly, a photo had survived the slaughter, a little singed at the edges, a handsome woman of middle age and two bright-eyed dogs. Mystique kneeled for a closer look, but Magneto shook his head. He opened his hand, which was filled with the pins he’d pulled from the grenades, and let them fall, burying the photograph in steel.
Then his head jerked up and he staggered as if he’d just been physically struck, Mystique hissing in agony as a phantom ice pick went straight through her brain, as the hum radiating from inside the room got louder, grew deeper and more intense.
In front of Charles Xavier, a light appeared. In terms of the holographic globe being displayed by Cerebro, it was located at the core of the world. From that point, radiant spears stabbed outward to connect with each and every one of the scarlet dots that represented an active or potential mutant.
“Oh,” Jean cried suddenly, and then she cried out in real pain as her concentration
slipped and the teke splints vanished from around her broken leg. Psychically damping the pain didn’t make it go away, it just made things feel worse every time she had to notice. But her injury was the least of her concern as her hand tightened on Scott’s shoulder so tightly he winced, half wondering if she was going to crush his bones.
“Jean,” he demanded, placing an arm around her waist, pulling one of her arms across his shoulder so he could better handle her weight, “what’s wrong?”
“Voices,” she gasped, “so many voices, can’t you hear them, of course you can’t what am I saying oh Charles oh Charles what have you done?”
“Jean!”
“Scott, it’s Cerebro,” she cried, and for the first time since he’d known her, Scott heard genuine terror in her voice. “We’re too late!”
She screamed. He’d only heard its like once before, when he was young and hunting. It was one of the few memories that he knew dated from before the orphanage where he’d grown up. He was in mountains, so many they filled the horizon on every side, and though his dad carried a gun for protection, they were there to shoot pictures. Some poor fool in another hunting party had stumbled into a bear trap, and the metal jaws had nearly taken off his leg.
Jean collapsed to the floor, clutching at her head and howling. Scott knelt beside her, struck through the heart to see her in such pain, yet utterly helpless to alleviate it.
He heard a deep, basso profundo thrum that sounded to him like tectonic plates grinding, and then, just like that, he lost all ability for rational thought as his own head was overwhelmed by a sleet storm of pain. His eyes were burning and his brain with it, the fire coursing down his spine and along every path and linkage of his nervous system.
His last, desperate, marginally conscious act was to throw himself clear of Jean, to wrap his arms around his head and tuck his body in as tight upon itself as he could manage. His beams couldn’t punch through his own flesh; this way, he hoped, he prayed, he wouldn’t unleash them on anyone else. He wouldn’t hurt Jean—any more than he already had.
Storm and the children were making good time through the bowels of the complex. For once, even Artie was behaving. No smart remarks, no haring off on his own, he held her hand tight and kept pace, even though her legs were twice the length of his and she was walking fast. Nightcrawler was on point and so far, thankfully, the way ahead was clear.
She sensed the psi wave before actually hearing it, in the same way she sensed changes in the weather. The shape of the air, the energies coursing through it, bulged and rippled as though they were being shunted aside by the approach of a power far more massive than themselves.
Nightcrawler felt it, too. He dropped from the ceiling, bracing a hand against the wall to steady himself. He looked dizzy and felt far worse. In his whole life he’d never suffered from vertigo and now, suddenly, he was glad for what he’d been spared all these years. He tried to focus his eyesight, and when that failed, he realized it was getting harder to form coherent thoughts as well. It was as though every cell in his body had acquired the ability to teleport independently of one another, and they’d all decided to go their separate ways.
He started to turn, to warn Storm, to cry out to her for help, but that simple action proved beyond his capability as he stumbled over his own feet and flailed desperately for a handhold to stop himself from falling.
“Storm!” he cried with the frantic desperation of a drowning man, but she was in no position to help.
She was already on her knees, hands clutched to her head, caught in her own whirlwind and shot through with lightning that exploded from her eyes and circled right around to strike her back. Always before she’d been immune to the elements she wielded, but that was no longer the case as wicked arcs of electricity exploded over and through her. She writhed with every impact, and while the winds attacking her swept away the smoke raised by these repeated attacks, they couldn’t dispel the quickly rising stench of burned uniform. Or the certain knowledge that in very little time, her flesh would be burning, too.
The children were screaming now, howling like souls being tormented by demons, Nightcrawler’s eyes going wide with horror, his mouth forming the words—part demand, part prayer—“Stop it! Please, stop it! For the love of God—stop!” But no sound emerged. He was beyond the ability to speak.
He knew, as Storm did, that this was just the leading edge of the nightmare coming for them, the merest prelude to what lay ahead. He prayed for mercy, not only for himself and his companions, but for the souls of those responsible.
He forced one hand in front of the other, climbing along the floor as he would up a vertical rock face, determined to reach Storm, to give her what shelter and comfort he could so that together they could try to protect the children. There’d been no one to protect him growing up. He’d learned early how to fight and, far more importantly, how to defuse a fight, and he’d sworn afterward he would never allow anyone to be without a protector.
He stretched his right arm forward, a distance that seemed to his disoriented eyes to be miles. It was so hard to move, to think, there was a tremendous numbing pressure right behind his eyes that threatened to pop them from their sockets and he was sure his brain was swelling from the onslaught of the energy pulse.
Then the hum enveloped them, and all that came before faded to insignificance.
Nightcrawler’s last conscious thought was of wonderment. He’d always believed you had to be dead before you went to Hell.
Logan tried to snarl, but it came out more like a scream. Claws emerged from both his hands, but they extended no more than an inch before retracting. This time, though, Logan’s healing factor didn’t close the wounds behind them, and blood sprayed from the open cuts. Indeed, it appeared that all the wounds he’d ever endured were coming back to haunt him as a score of gashes opened across his flesh, splashing the floor around him scarlet. Some were random and messy, the legacy of knives or bullets or the cruel vagaries of nature, but many were neat and purposeful, the incisions of careful men who’d abandoned all allegiance to the Hippocratic oath they’d taken as medical students to do no harm. They’d laid Logan open to the bone and now, in the place Stryker implied he had been born, it was happening all over again.
* * *
Magneto staggered under the onslaught of the psychic pressure wave, standing against it as he would against the full force of a hurricane’s winds. Step by determined step, he advanced on the doorway to Stryker’s version of the Cerebro chamber.
“Eric,” he heard from behind and to the side, Mystique’s voice, shattering between one syllable of his name and the next, between that word and the one which followed. “Hurry!” Feminine for one, masculine for another, plunging from soprano to bass and back again.
He didn’t look back, he couldn’t spare the effort—and besides, he could imagine what was happening. Somehow Cerebro was attacking them through their very powers, turning what made them unique against them and consuming them with it. Mystique was a metamorph, a shape-shifter, able to mimic any conceivable human form perfectly. Size, age, gender, none of these were obstacles.
Now, as with Logan, her past came back to torment her. Cerebro made her flesh pliable, like soft wax, and then like mercury, as she underwent change after involuntary change, revisiting every face and form she’d ever copied. Even though she made it seem easy, it really wasn’t. Her apparent speed came with years of training, of practice, of preparation. Each transformation was an effort, and the more she executed, the faster she did them, the greater the toll. If she needed to grow taller, she had to bulk up to provide the raw material. Shorter required burning off mass. Flesh was comparatively easy to sculpt, bones less so, and internal organs the most demanding of all. That’s why most gender shifts were cosmetic.
None of that applied now. The shifts came so fast that she presented herself as multiples. Her own coloring, Jean Grey’s face, Robert Kelly’s torso, Rogue’s legs, Xavier’s face, Rogue’s hair, Jean’s torso, Wol
verine’s hands, claws sprouting from fingers, from between her toes, Magneto’s face rising from her belly, someone else’s from each breast, arms becoming legs and feet growing fingers, all these mad alterations accompanied by a rising chorus of howls from mouths that popped into view all over her body, each capable of independent speech and all of them shrieking in agony under the relentless and crushing pressure of the wave.
Soon, terribly soon, the transformations would come so quickly, the pain would grow so great, that Mystique’s consciousness—her sense of fundamental self—would shatter. In effect, on both a cerebral and a cellular level, she would forget who and what she was. Most likely, she would genetically discorporate into a muddle of mindless cells, and that would be the end of her.
Magneto knew all that, knew she was but one victim of far too many, knew something similar lay in store for him—unless he stopped it.
He lifted a hand and a new sound rose to challenge the hum of the Cerebro wave: the basso groan of metal finding itself subjected to stresses well beyond design tolerances. He couldn’t do this at Mount Haven; the part of the complex where he’d been incarcerated had been constructed of nonferrous materials and revolutionary plastics. But Alkali was much older, built in a day when the likes of him hadn’t been a factor. There was a lot of metal for him to play with, and even though the Cerebro wave presented a significant—for some, insurmountable—obstacle, he was determined to prevail.
He had survived Auschwitz. He had lived to see his captors in their graves, had helped deliver more than a few of them to that end by himself. This would be the same.
He flashed teeth with the effort, almost a snarl, and metal started to warp and tear around him. The timbre of the hum emanating from inside faded ever so slightly, and the pulse of the Cerebro wave . . . slowed.
Charles Xavier was aware of none of this. He stared up at the globe circling around him, transfixed by the firefly display of scarlet dots, paying not the slightest attention to the trickles of blood from nostrils and ears and the corners of his eyes as stress ruptured the pinpoint capillaries that fed his brain. These were the most minor manifestations of being at the wave’s source, of being the focal point of the power being unleashed, and at this moment they represented no lasting physical trauma.
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