To judge by his fighting style, however, Wolverine’s temperament couldn’t have been more different from Cyclops’s. The man who was known to his friends only as Logan preferred to cut loose, relying upon his instincts. In battle, he almost resembled the wild animal from which he had taken his own code name. His mutant gene had endowed him with enhanced senses, a remarkable healing factor and three extensible bone claws in the back of each hand. Scientists in his homeland of Canada had added their own double-edged gift: they had grafted adamantium, the hardest known metal, onto his skeleton. And decades of experience-Logan looked forty, but his healing factor had retarded the aging process so that nobody could tell how old he really was-had made him, as he often boasted, the best there was at what he did.
He leapt into action now. He launched himself into the air, a yellow-and-blue-clad ball of hissing fury, and lashed out with his adamantium-laced claws. He had started the exercise with twenty drones, as had Cyclops. Wolverine's drones were golden in color, and programmed to target only him. They were also proofed against his claws, being reinforced with adamantium themselves. Still, a palpable hit would knock them, bleeping, to the ground. He had already downed eleven, without-as far as Cyclops had seen-being tagged in return. By the time he hit the floor again, three more drones had been deactivated. He landed nimbly on his feet, and rolled out of the way of the inevitable counterattacks.
His approach was effective, Cyclops couldn’t deny that. It had also been the cause of bitter clashes between the two men in the past, when Logan’s feral nature had-in his leader’s opinion-gotten the better of him. He was unpredictable, and Cyclops didn't like that.
Scott was responsible for the X-Men’s welfare-and, when Professor Xavier was away as he was now, that responsibility weighed particularly heavily upon him. He had been placed in charge of his mentor’s dream—and he had no intention of letting the Professor down.
The drones were coming at him again, all at once, in a circle around him, maintaining their distance from each other. He gritted his teeth and set his jaw determinedly. He struck out four times with pinpoint accuracy, not one iota of energy wasted. At the last possible second, he ducked again and rolled, gratified to see that some of the drones had fired upon the spot where he had just been, and that two had hit and incapacitated their fellows.
He brought himself up into a crouch, and found himself back to back with his teammate. “Come on, One-Eye,” taunted Wolverine, “why not admit that you only scheduled this workout ’cos of what we saw on the TV news?”
“I told you
“Yeah, yeah-and each time you blast one of these critters, you ain’t seeing the face of one of them Newhill jerks. Right! What I want to know is, what did McCoy think he was doing, stirring up the ant’s nest like that?”
“It wasn’t his fault. It looked to me like he only stepped in to help.” That wasn’t what the news reports had said. They had played to their viewers’ paranoid obsessions: mutants hiding among them, waiting to strike. Only the Beast had been featured-the camera crews hadn’t been quick enough to catch him after he had fled the cemetery and joined his teammates—but rumors of an army of super-powered reinforcements had been presented as fact.
“Two gangs of mutie-haters tearing lumps out of each other? Fd have gotten myself a com dog, sat back and watched them go at it!” “No you wouldn’t, Logan.” Cyclops snapped his head around and blasted another drone, which had ventured too close to him.
“Doesn’t help none though, does it, getting into a scrap on live TV? As if people need any more convincing that mutants are the cause of all the world’s problems.”
“They’re scared, that’s all.”
“Scared of what they don’t understand.”
“Perhaps, in Newhill, they have cause to be.”
“I don’t see how you can be so damn reasonable!” Wolverine had been making himself a target, drawing his drones towards him. Now, with a scowl and a flash of metal, he closed the trap, and took out another two. “What, they think the Legacy Virus is a picnic for us? It’s designed to kill mutants, for Christ’s sake. So, how come it’s our fault if a few poor homo sapiens get caught in the crossfire?”
Cyclops didn’t answer. Wolverine wasn’t saying anything that he didn’t already know. He had spent most of his life fighting against anti-mutant prejudice, but the situation never seemed to improve— and Legacy had only made things worse. Scott had been present when Stryfe, himself a mutant from the far future, had unleashed his engineered virus upon the past in retaliation for a lifetime of mistreatment. He had been unable to stop him.
Stiyfe’s intention had been that his mutant kin should be feared and shunned even more than they already were; that they should be treated like lepers. He had been more successful than he could ever have imagined. Even Stryfe hadn’t anticipated that the virus itself would mutate, and begin to attack baseline human beings: those who weren’t mutants.
Stryfe was dead now, but his legacy lived on in places like Newhill, Massachusetts. It threatened to destroy Professor Xavier’s dream. But, most of all, it had exacted a very personal cost from the X-Men themselves. It had struck closest to home when it had taken the life of Illyana Rasputin, the younger sister of their currently-absent teammate Colossus. Now, Moira MacTaggert was also threatened.
Cyclops shared Wolverine’s frustration-and, if the truth were known, he did find some release in loosing his powers and knocking drones out of the sky.
The impromptu training session, however, was interrupted by an insistent electronic chirping. The communications console at the Danger Room’s door. Cyclops felt a stab of dismay at being recalled to the real world and its problems so soon, but he controlled it. The silver drones were mounting another attack, but he focussed past them and fired a thin optic beam, which hit the emergency cutoff switch on the wall. Wolverine found himself swinging at empty air as his remaining drones clattered to the floor around him.
Cyclops hurried to the console and took the call, a knot of woriy forming in his stomach at the knowledge that it would almost certainly be bad news. Still, a smile played on his lips as the monitor revealed a head-and-shoulders shot of Jean Grey Summers, Scott’s wife and the love of his life. He could see from her expression that something was wrong, so he skipped the small talk and got straight to business. “What is it, Jean? Is Hank OK?”
“He’s fine,” said Phoenix. “We took him back to Muir Island in the Blackbird. It’s Moira. There’s no sign of her, Scott. She seems to have disappeared into thin air.”
Cyclops’s mind was already working, racing through a checklist of the X-Men’s many enemies who might have a grudge against Moira or who might use her to get at them, and who could pull off a stunt like this.
“You’d better tell me everything,” he said.
Phoenix had just recapped the situation for Cyclops, and broken the connection to New York, when she heard the door of Moira’s cottage opening. She sensed the Beast’s thought patterns before he had joined his three teammates in the living room, and she knew he had nothing good to report.
“I’ve been over every inch of the research center with a fine-tooth comb,” he said. “I can fmd nothing damaged or missing, nothing out of place at all. No indication that anybody other than Moira and myself has entered the building in weeks.”
Phoenix nodded. His detailed inspection had only confirmed what an earlier quick search had suggested. She had performed a telepathic sweep of Muir Island herself, and knew that its sole inhabitant was not present. At least she could stop fearing the worst now. She knew that Moira had contracted the Legacy Virus, that it was eating away at her on a cellular level—and a dead woman would have no thoughts for her to read. She hadn’t voiced her worries, but she knew that Nightcrawler, Rogue and the Beast had shared them.
Moira’s boat was still tied to its moorings. Her helicopter still rested on its pad. She hadn’t left the island in either—which meant that somebody must have collected her. And the fact that
her sophisticated security system had been deactivated suggested that she had left in a hurry. Or, as was beginning to seem likely, been taken against her will.
“It’s the same here,” said Nightcrawler. “It’s like the Marie Celeste. I can find nothing to suggest that Moira hasn’t just stepped out of the house for a few minutes.” Kurt knew the cottage well, having lived here for a time as a member of Excalibur: Britain’s own team of mutant heroes, now disbanded. “Except that, if she did, then where is she now?”
“I wonder,” said the Beast thoughtfully. He padded across the room to a wooden cabinet, pulled open a drawer and began to rummage through its tidy contents.
“I checked the security logs,” said Phoenix, “There were no incidents recorded in the hours before the system was shut down—but there are some blind spots in the data. I’m running a program to correlate them, but my guess is that somebody fooled the sensors and gained access to this cottage. They must have surprised Moira here.” “The disks!” Hank turned back to the others, and Jean could have sworn that his face had turned a paler shade of blue. “Moira and I always backed up our work onto rewritable DVDs, in case something happened at the research center. She kept them in this drawer.”
“And they aren’t there now?” asked Phoenix.
“But why would somebody want to take them?” asked Rogue.
“To sabotage your work?” suggested Nightcrawler.
The Beast shook his head and began to pace the room, pinching his lower lip. “No, no, I don’t think so. I checked the files at the center. They were all present and correct. If this was sabotage, then our unknown foe would have destroyed them too, if not the center itself.” “It could be a coincidence,” said Rogue. “What if Moira just happened to have the disks with her when she left?”
“It’s possible,” the Beast conceded, nodding thoughtfully to himself. “I suppose we can’t form any solid conclusions at this juncture. If only I had been here ...”
“It’s my guess,” said Nightcrawler, “that our perpetrators waited until you weren’t.”
“Exactly,” said Phoenix. “And, instead of trying to deduce why Moira was kidnapped—if indeed she was—then I think we should ask ourselves how. She was taken by surprise in her own home. There are no signs of a struggle, and she didn’t have time to alert us, even though she has a communications console in this room with a direct line to the X-Men.”
“So either she knew her assailants and welcomed them into her home...” said Nightcrawler.
“Or they landed on Muir Island silently,” concluded Phoenix. “Which rules out an aircraft,” said the Beast, “unless Moira was so engrossed in her work that she didn’t hear its approach-and a would-be intruder would be unwise to gamble upon such a possibility.” “Could she have been taken in by a shape-shifter like Mystique?” asked Rogue.
“Maybe,” said Phoenix, “although Moira has had enough experience with our mutant enemies to be cautious.”
“I would suggest a teleporter,” said Nightcrawler, “but the security sensors were calibrated to detect any sudden displacement of mass.”
“Which they didn’t,” said Phoenix.
“Nevertheless,” said the Beast, “it behooves us to investigate the possibility. With the equipment at the research center, I can conduct a thorough scan for residual energies.”
Phoenix nodded. “OK, Hank, you do that. Kurt, you stay here and help him. Rogue and I will go for a quick flight, and see if we can locate any witnesses.”
“You think somebody might have seen something?” asked Rogue. “Yes,” said Phoenix, “I do. Something like an unfamiliar boat on the sea this afternoon.”
The TV news was still covering the morning’s events in Newhill. Bobby Drake stared morosely into his glass at the warped reflection of his own young, open face and his mousy brown hair, and he tried to tune out the presenter’s voice. He had come into Salem Center to avoid thinking about what had happened. He had spent hours wandering aimlessly around the town’s shops, but had ended up in this bar because he was sick of seeing sensationalistic headlines on the afternoon and early evening editions of newspapers. He had already declined Wolverine’s offer to vent his feelings by joining him and Cyclops in a Danger Room training session. This was one of those days on which he needed to forget that he was a mutant, and specifically the X-Man known to the world as Iceman.
But the television, mounted on a wall bracket above Bobby’s head, wouldn’t let him forget.
The blue-furred interloper at William Montgomery’s funeral had been identified as Doctor Henry McCoy. This news program was more responsible than some: the presenter suggested that Hank had been trying to end the trouble, not cause it. He even reminded his audience of the Beast’s one-time role as a member of the Avengers: a UNsanctioned super hero team who enjoyed a degree of regard and even adulation that was denied to their mutant counterparts.
It was too late. Bobby knew that too many minds had been made up already.
To his left, further along the bar, a swarthy man in a lumberjack’s shirt and jeans made a less than polite comment about how ‘muties’ were appearing everywhere.
“Too right,” agreed the bartender, operating the pumps. “It’s frightening, that’s what it is. If a freak like that Beast guy can pass himself off as human, then how’re you supposed to tell? There could be half a dozen of them in this bar right now.”
To Bobby’s surprise, one of the bartender’s colleagues—a young woman-came to mutantkind’s defense. “Oh, Chuck,” she said, rolling her eyes, “if you can’t tell the difference, then what’s the problem? They’ve got to drink somewhere!”
“Problem is,” said the male bartender, “they’re worming their way into decent society, that’s what the problem is.”
“We already know how they’re planning to replace us,” said the swarthy customer. “They should be rounded up and put into camps, where we can keep an eye on them.”
“Or at least sent back to their own country. That... that Genosha, whatever it’s called.”
Bobby scowled, and told himself not to get involved. He gritted his teeth and tightened his grip on his glass, accidentally lowering the temperature of his beer by a couple of degrees.
It was like this all over the country, the television assured him. Longstanding fears had been inflamed. People were looking at their neighbors, talking behind their backs, wondering if they might conceal a dangerous secret. Wondering if they might be hiding and watching, and biding their time. There had already been four reported attacks against suspected mutants. One was dead, another injured. As yet, there was no evidence that any of the four possessed the mutant X-factor, although one had been found to be infected with the Legacy Virus.
The newsreader moved on to another story, and Bobby listened to it, because the conversation to his left hadn’t finished and he didn’t want to hear any more ignorant comments. The gist of the item was that a Mrs. Scott from upstate was making a fresh appeal to the public for sightings of her husband, a prominent biochemist who had been missing for three weeks. He had been carrying out research into the genetic modification of crops, and it was speculated that his disappearance might have something to do with anti-GM protestors.
“If they’ve got nothing to hide,” asserted the swarthy customer, his voice rising as he swilled down his beer, “then why’d they kick up such a fuss about the Mutant Registration Act? Why object to letting our democratically elected government know who they are and what they can do?”
Bobby left his glass half-full, and walked out of the bar before he lost his temper and said something unwise. The evening was beginning to draw in, and he hadn’t brought a coat, but the cold didn’t affect him. He stuck his hands into his pockets and trudged back towards the school, his shoulders stooped.
He couldn’t help wondering how the people of Salem Center would react if they knew that some of their suspicions were well-founded: that mutants really did live among them, and that they really did disguise their
true natures in public and hold clandestine meetings at their top secret base, in which they formulated battle plans.
Sometimes, Bobby Drake just wanted to be normal.
Sure, his powers could come in handy. Iceman could do some pretty cool stuff: form ice and snow out of the very air, even skate from A to B on a self-created ice slide. And he was lucky: in battle, he surrounded himself with a tough shell of ice, but, when he was in civvies, there were no visible signs of his mutant powers. Unlike poor Hank or Kurt, he didn’t need an image inducer to be able to hide in a crowd. His earliest days with the original X-Men-he had been their youngest member-had been some of the happiest in his life. But things hadn’t seemed so bad in those days. The world hadn’t seemed so hostile.
Being a mutant had never been easy-but there had been a time when Bobby had been able to get away from it all, at least for short spells. He had taken several leaves of absence from the X-Men, spent time with his family, dated girls and gone to college. He had even enjoyed a degree of public acclaim as a member of a Los Angeles-based super-group called the Champions. Perhaps he had just been na'ive, he thought now. Perhaps he had been blind to the tensions that had been building up around him even then.
It was harder, nowadays, to forget that he was different. Harder to escape the reminders. Harder to ignore the fact that mutants had many enemies, some of whom had ways of finding them and attacking without warning.
Bobby had recently learned that, as Iceman, he had the potential to become one of the most powerful mutants yet born. He had been accused of squandering that potential. But he had no wish to devote his entire life to being the best mutant he could be. He wasn’t Wolverine. He wasn’t even Cyclops. He still wanted a normal life, outside of all this.
He wondered how long it would be before the choice was taken from him altogether.
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 4