THE LEGACY QUEST TRILOGY
X-MEN® THE LEGACY QUEST TRILOGY: BOOK 1 X-MEN® THE LEGACY QUEST TRILOGY: BOOK 2 X-MEN® THE LEGACY QUEST TRILOGY: BOOK 3
Steve Lyons
ibooks
new york www.ibooks. net
X-MEN® THE LEGACY QUEST TRILOGY: BOOK 1 X-MEN® THE LEGACY QUEST TRILOGY: BOOK 2 X-MEN® THE LEGACY QUEST TRILOGY: BOOK 3
X-MEr
THE LEGACY WEST TRILOGY: BOOK1
IT WAS the right kind of weather for a funeral.
The sun had not been seen all day. It had taken cover beneath a wispy blanket of clouds, as if sensing that it would not be welcome here on this gloomy November morning. The sky was gray, and its grayness seemed to leech all other colors from the cut flowers and the clapboard houses of this small, remote corner of New England. The air was cold enough to bite, and a weak but piercing wind howled as if in anguish through the trees.
The stranger took a deep breath, gathered his resolve and walked towards the wrought-iron gates of the town’s small cemetery. He was a tall man, with a thin face, short red hair and freckled cheeks. At least, that was how he looked at the moment. As his feet crunched against the dead leaves on the ground, he felt an irrational fear that his disguise would not be good enough; that everybody would see through it, and see who-and what-he was. He buttoned up his black greatcoat, for the sake of appearances, as if trying to protect himself from a cold he didn’t feel.
People had gathered at the gates. White vans sat among the black limousines, and the stranger recognized the logos of three different television networks on their sides. TV crews and newspaper journalists mingled with the crowd. Their presence seemed like an intrusion. Bathed in artificial light, a young man made a live report to the nation. His words were emotive, his expression carefully earnest, as he spoke into his handheld microphone. The stranger felt a rush of anger towards him, but fought it. He had a job to do, after all.
The funeral party had arrived a few minutes earlier. The stranger could see them through the railings: a cluster of dark figures, almost swallowed up by a gray sea of headstones. He had watched, his heart going out to them, as they had struggled to clear a way through the gates, with the coffin of a lost friend or family member borne aloft on six shoulders.
Two grim-faced men had stationed themselves at either side of the entrance. They controlled the flow of people into the cemetery, and kept the paparazzi and the more obvious rubber-neckers out. They questioned anyone they didn’t know, and searched them to ensure they had no cameras before allowing them to pass. The ceremony, they were determined, would be the one part of this tragic business that would not be broadcast to the world.
The stranger had to be there, but he hadn’t reckoned on the guards. He quickened his pace slightly, turning his face from them even though they couldn’t possibly have recognized him. He could probably have bluffed his way past them, but he couldn’t have risked being searched. They would have found that his physical shape did not match his appearance.
And what would he have said to them anyway?
The stranger had traveled a long way to be here, and he wasn’t sure why. He had never met the deceased. He had never even heard the name William Montgomeiy until a few days ago. And yet, the young man’s death—and the media frenzy that had accompanied it— had had a more profound effect upon him than he could possibly have anticipated.
The stranger knew Montgomeiy’s killer. He knew it very well indeed.
He rounded the corner of the cemeteiy, and kept on walking until the pack at the gates could no longer see him through the railings. He looked up at the metal spikes a foot above his head, and nodded confidently to himself. He cast one final, furtive glance up and down the street, to be sure that nobody was around to see what he did next. Then he crouched down, tensed his muscles and sprang forward, taking three bounding steps along the sidewalk before he launched himself into the air and twisted sideways. He somersaulted over the tops of the railings with an inch to spare, and made a perfect, almost soundless, landing on both feet on the far side.
For a long moment, then, the stranger squatted silently, almost expecting to hear shouts of outrage and fear. When he was sure his acrobatic feat had gone unnoticed, he pulled himself back up to his full height, adjusted his illusory tie and brushed dust from his coat.
Then, using the trees as cover, he picked his way stealthily towards the other mourners.
A weak, early afternoon sun was trying in vain to warm the frigid waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, where it met the North Sea off the coast of Scotland. Dark waves lapped against a lonely pillar of granite, which jutted obdurately out of the depths. Atop this pillar, light glinted off the towers and pylons of the Muir Island Genetic Research Center.
And, inside that center, one of the world’s foremost geneticists was slumped over her lab bench, beginning to stir from a fitful sleep.
Doctor Moira MacTaggert didn't want to wake up, but an insistent pain in her neck and the stark electric light of her windowless laboratory dragged her from the comforting darkness. Perspiration had glued her face to the sleeve of her white coat. She tore it free, and sat up in her chair with a regretful sigh. Her throat was sore, but that was normal these days. She didn’t know how long she had slept-this isolated, timeless environment gave her no clues-but she was still tired. Not just in body, but in mind and spirit too. The details of her dreams had already fled from her memory, but she knew they had been of a better world; a world that she was sorry to have left behind so soon.
The half-cup of coffee by her side was stone cold. A diy, brown ring stained the topmost paper in a haphazard pile of scribbled notes to herself. Notes that were all but useless now-but she still faced the dispiriting task of writing them up and filing them. There was always the smallest chance that some scrap of information might help in the future.
“I see no reason to continue,” her lab partner had said yesterday morning. “Our initial hypothesis was hopelessly inaccurate. This entire endeavor has been an unmitigated disaster.” Moira knew Doctor Henry McCoy well enough to know that the long words were an attempt to hide his feelings. But his strained tone had still betrayed his weariness and disappointment.
She had gritted her teeth and tried to ignore him, to focus on her work. On the slide beneath her microscope, a numbingly familiar chemical reaction had been playing itself out. “You can give up if you want, Hank,” she had responded, “but I’m seeing this through to the end.”
Was that optimism, she wondered now, or just blind stubbornness?
She dragged herself to her feet and stretched her arms and legs, pushing out the kinks in her muscles. She massaged her neck, and stifled a yawn as she opened the heavy doors that separated her from the rest of the world. She stepped out into the bare, clinical corridors of her research facility, and flinched from the cold sunlight that streamed through the small, high windows and made dust motes dance before her eyes.
Sleep must have overcome her, at last, just as everybody else was rising. She had been unconscious for over six hours, but it felt like six minutes.
She was not as strong as she used to be. A year ago, she had pulled regular all-nighters without a problem. Now, she was tired all the time, and she felt as if she had a permanent cold. She smiled to herself ironically. If only her ailment were something that simple.
At times like this, Moira could almost feel the virus eating away at her from the inside, sinking its tendrils into her DNA strands, rewriting her very genetic makeup. She wondered how much more time she had.
Yesterday’s conversation flashed through her mind again. She remembered Hank’s voice: “The virus has corrupted the DNA sequence in the cell samples. Even in the improbable even
t that our anti-vaccine could begin to slow the reaction now, it would be too late.”
“It would be something!” she had insisted.
“A false hope, nothing more. We can’t reverse that sort of damage, Moira. We’d have to learn to map the entire human genome just to begin to try.”
Didn’t he think she knew that?
It was unlike Hank to be so terse, so irritable, so insensitive to her feelings. But the strain of the past few months had begun to take their toll on him. She had watched it happening. She had watched him crumbling, piece by piece, with each new setback, each dashed hope. She knew what he was going through, but not how to help him. He would have to come to terms with it in his own way, his own time.
Yesterday morning, Hank McCoy had walked out of the laboratory, head bowed, fists clenched in frustration. Twenty minutes later, the security systems had informed Moira that he had left the center, left the island altogether. Good. He had needed to get away for a few hours, to find time to think. And equally, Moira had needed to be left alone, to buiy herself in work, to pursue this latest futile experiment to its conclusion. That was how she coped.
“We’ve already reached the end, Moira.” Hank’s last bitter words to her, as he left. “You can hold out for a miracle if you wish, but you’re only denying what we both already know. We’ve turned into another cul-de-sac. This line of research has reached a dead end.”
He had been right, of course.
She wondered where he was now.
The center was silent, almost eerily so. This building housed some of the most advanced technology known to Mankind, but Moira strained her ears to hear even a distant hum, to hear anything above the regular sound of her own shallow breathing. An involuntary shiver caught her by surprise. She ought to have been used to this, after all these years living out here. She had always valued her privacy, and enjoyed the peace that came with solitude. But it seemed a long time now since she had truly been alone.
What if she died here? What if her time ran out today? When would they find her?
She walked to the kitchen alcove, her footsteps filling the emptiness with hollow echoes. She made herself a fresh cup of coffee using powdered creamer. She didn’t like it, but she had become used to the taste. When you cut yourself off from civilization as she had, fresh milk was one of the many things that became a luxury. She leaned back against a worktop, removed her glasses so she could rub her weary eyes, and sipped at the hot liquid gratefully.
Hank had been gone for over twenty-four hours. Moira told herself not to worry. He had probably checked into a guesthouse on the Scottish mainland, or just roamed the Highlands overnight with no regard for the passage of time. But she couldn’t rid herself of the nagging doubts. She had learned through experience that, where Hank McCoy and people like him were concerned, anything—almost literally, anything—could happen.
She wondered if she should call in the X-Men.
“So, what is the mood like in Newhill, Massachusetts today, Jon?” “Very subdued, Peter. As you know, this is a small town, a very close-knit community, and the death of Mr. Montgomery from the Legacy Virus has affected everybody. The funeral is taking place behind me as we speak-just through these railings here-and many shops and businesses are closed in Newhill this morning, as a mark of respect.”
“Have you spoken to Mr. Montgomery’s family?”
“Not yet, Peter. They’ve asked that the funeral should be a private affair, that they be left alone to grieve. I’m hoping to get a few words with them as they come out. But I have spoken to some of the other local residents, and they all say the same thing. They just can’t believe this has happened here, especially not to somebody so young. I think you said earlier that William Montgomery was only twenty-nine years of age.”
“A community in shock, then.”
“Absolutely. A state of shock. A feeling of ‘how could this happen here?’ I spoke to one woman earlier, and she told me there’s never even been a mutant sighting in Newhill.”
“But the Legacy Virus doesn’t only target mutants any more, does it?”
“I’m afraid not, Peter. Mr. Montgomery’s parents insist their son was not a mutant, and the results of the post-mortem seem to confirm their claim. I think, for many of the people here, that this is the most frightening aspect of this tragedy: that apparently, no one is safe from what, until recently, was seen as an exclusively mutant disease. On top of all this, of course, is the worry that we don't yet know how it might be transmitted: whether it’s airborne, or if you can catch it from contaminated food and water. We just don’t know.” “I’m sure a lot of our viewers, watching this, will be quite worried about this virus. What symptoms should we be looking out for, Jon?” “Well, in the early stages, the symptoms are a sore throat and a runny nose-a mild cold, basically. But after that, it becomes more difficult to predict. The Legacy Virus attacks its victims’ DNA, and there is still an awful lot we don’t know about that. Very often, it causes outbreaks of boils and lesions on the skin. We also know that some of the earliest victims, some mutants-and of course their DNA is veiy different to our own-lost control of their actual mutant powers. What you have to remember, Peter, is that this is still a very new disease, and research into it is only just beginning.”
“A lot of work still to be done, then.”
“A lot of work-and a long way to go before we can hope for a cure. But I should remind our viewers at home that cases of the Legacy Virus are still quite rare. There have only been a few confirmed cases in human beings so far. It appears to be spreading quite slowly.”
“But it is spreading, Jon.”
“Yes, Peter. It is spreading.”
Five time zones to the east of Newhill and its problems, a thin, almost gaunt, pale-skinned man sat in a small fishing boat with its engine turned off, and squinted at Muir Island through a pair of binoculars. Beside him, his partner—a stocky man with a full red beard, approaching middle age—struggled with the paddles to keep the boat as steady as he could.
The thin man’s gaze lingered longest on the island’s smallest building: a nineteenth-century crofter’s cottage, incongruous against the bulk of the hi-tech facility that dwarfed it. When he had seen enough, he lowered the binoculars from his eyes, turned to the bearded man and gave him a curt nod of confirmation. No words were exchanged. No sounds were to be made at all, except when absolutely necessary. They pointed the boat towards a shaded nook at the foot of a low cliff. The bearded man set it on its way with an assured thrust of the paddles, then left it to drift towards its destination, with its two passengers, in silence.
The bearded man opened a black briefcase, rummaged through its contents and produced two black ski masks. He handed one to his partner, and pulled the other one down over his own head. Both men wore nondescript sweaters, faded blue jeans, gloves and boots that they would dump overboard once their mission was over. Reaching into the case again, the bearded man took out a rope and a grappling hook. He began to pay out a length of the rope, running his hands over it to check for knots, his eyes flicking towards the cliff top as he mentally gauged its height. The thin man occupied himself by taking another look at the schematics. He spread them out on his lap, nodding to himself as he matched the outlines of the buildings to the fresh evidence of his own eyes and ran through the details of the plan in his mind. Muir Island was protected by a sophisticated security system, and it worried the man a little that his blueprints were slightly out of date. But no system was impenetrable. Not if you had the right skills and tools for the job. And that cottage was the weak point.
He rolled up the schematics and slipped them back into their cardboard tube, which he tucked beneath his bench, out of the way. He reached for his laptop computer and booted it up, checking that all the programs he needed were still safe on its drive: programs that could root out and analyze data with phenomenal speed, cracking random combinations and even confounding enemy systems with false data. The men’s instructions were that this mi
ssion had to be executed in total secrecy. If they set off an alarm, any alarm, then the deal was off.
As the fishing boat nudged against the rocks at last, the thin man took one final look at the target. Her image stared back at him defiantly from the small screen, her eyes alive with Celtic fire. Brown hair tumbled around a face that was still relatively young but careworn. In the picture, she was wearing a yellow and black bodysuit, as if she fancied herself some kind of super-hero. Her lab coat provided a bizarre contrast to the costume. But the thin man and his partner knew all about this woman. The bodysuit, they knew, was to give her freedom of movement, and an element of protection, in combat situations. She may have been an important scientist, but the nature of her work—and of the people with whom she mixed—had earned her some powerful enemies. She had to be prepared.
The thin man smiled a thin-lipped smile of satisfaction, as his bearded partner hurled the grappling hook towards the cliff top and it caught first time. All the preparation in the world wouldn’t save Doctor Moira MacTaggert from them.
“No, we haven’t heard from Hank in days. Is something wrong?” The speaker, whose image filled the screen of Moira MacTaggert’s sophisticated communications console, was called Jean Grey. She was one of Moira’s oldest, dearest friends.
“No more than usual,” said Moira, with a sigh. “We’ve hit another brick wall, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Moira.”
“Och, never mind that now,” she said dismissively, trying not to show how much she was hurting. “We’ll pick ourselves up and start again, like always. But Hank took it pretty hard this time. When he walked out of here, he was more down than I’ve ever seen him.” “How long has he been gone now?”
“The best part of thirty hours. I’m worried, Jean.”
“I’m not surprised. This doesn’t sound like the Henry McCoy I know.” Jean pursed her lips and frowned thoughtfully.
She had long, curly, red hair and was quite strikingly beautiful-and Moira knew that she possessed the brains and the personality to complement her looks. But Jean Grey was also a mutant, born with a genetic abnormality that marked her as something different-and, in some people’s minds, someone to be feared.
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 1