“Next time, Fitzroy,” Wolverine muttered under his breath. “Next time!”
Now that the battle was over, a sudden silence descended upon the room. The sounds of laughter drifted up from the street below, and Wolverine’s keen hearing picked out the muted strains of orchestral music from inside the Hellfire Club’s ballroom. He could make out something else too: police sirens, approaching.
He hurried to Rogue’s side. She was hunched into a ball, cradling her knees in her arms. He knew what had happened to her, just as he knew that there was nothing he could do to help. “You all right, darling?” he asked.
She looked up at him, and nodded bravely. “Too many stray thoughts whizzing about this old head of mine, that’s all.”
“And Mountjoy?” asked Storm.
“Gave up the ghost, so to speak. Soon as he got out of my body, I used Nightcrawler’s power to ’port out of there. How is the elf? I’m afraid I hit him pretty hard.”
“Concussed,” said Storm. “He needs rest, but I don’t think there’s any serious damage. And he got what we came for.” Wolverine could see that, even in his sleep, Nightcrawler was holding fiercely on to a compact disk.
“Time to beat a retreat then,” he said. The sirens were louder now,
and he could see from Storm’s reaction that she could hear them too. “I think those cop cars are coming our way. We’ve attracted attention.” “And, since our raid on the Hellfire Club building wasn’t exactly legal...”
“Took the words right out of my mouth, ’Ro. Let’s get our butts out of here!”
THE X-MEN’S Blackbird had always been fast-but, since it had been modified with alien technology, its speed was almost unbe-
_lievable. For Hank McCoy, however, the journey to China was
still too slow. It gave him too much time to think.
“You, most of all, are looking for answers,” Selene had said to him, “but you’d prefer not to find them here.” His fellow X-Men had been discreet enough not to question him about what she had meant, later. But, much as he was loath to admit it to himself, she had been right.
Selene had been toying with them all, of course. She had promised to tell them what she knew of Moira’s whereabouts. Then, with a cruel smile, she had announced: “Nothing. I know nothing.” And she had broken into peals of laughter, which had soon subsided beneath Cyclops’s glare. She had become thoughtful, then. “However, I am somewhat intrigued. Could it be that an old and trusted friend is keeping secrets from me?”
Hank’s heart had leapt at that. He knew how deceitful the Black Queen could be—but, even so, he had believed her without question. And more: he had felt a tingle of excitement-of hope?-at the suggestion that this ‘old and trusted friend’ (and how many people could that be? Even the hint of sarcasm with which Selene had spoken the words pointed towards one associate in particular) could be the true culprit in all this.
Storm had contacted them, back at the X-Mansion, and her report had all but confirmed it. She had described how her team had battled the Hellfire Club in Hong Kong, and how Nightcrawler had escaped with half the contents of Sebastian Shaw’s hard disk. Analysis of the data had revealed something interesting: that only a few days earlier, Shaw had deleted the schematics of Muir Island’s security systems from his computer. It was enough to tie him in with Moira’s abduction.
And so the X-Men had agreed to reunite in Hong Kong, to ponder their next move. In other circumstances, Hank might almost have welcomed the prospect of a forthcoming battle. It might have taken his mind off his problems. But why did Moira have to be involved?
It was sometimes easy to forget that Moira MacTaggert had the Legacy Virus herself. She faced her illness with a brave face and a determination to fight that was typical of her. Still, however bad Hank felt about his failure to find a cure, it had to be ten times worse for her. And he knew that, for each minute she was missing, each minute he spent searching for her, another minute passed during which no progress was made towards their goal. He felt sick to think of all that wasted time, of Moira’s life-and how many others?—ticking away. And that made him feel guilty, because he knew he could have entrusted this rescue mission to the others. He could have returned to his work on Muir Island.
But there was a small part of Hank McCoy-a part he tried not to acknowledge, because it offered a hope that might be too cruelly dashed, and because he felt guilty about this too—which spoke to him of greater possibilities.
He had known for a long time that Shaw, like him, was trying to cure the Legacy Virus. If he had taken to acquiring geneticists, then there had to be a connection. But then, why attract the X-Men’s attention by going after one of their associates? And why now?
“Your hopes are high,” Selene had said, “but your fears are still greater.”
What if the Hellfire Club had made a breakthrough?
Phoenix had taken the controls from Storm, to give her a rest. The African X-Man had already flown eight thousand miles to collect her teammates. She lay back in her reclined seat, her eyes closed-although she couldn’t have been asleep, as the instruments showed that the Blackbird was still benefiting from an artificial tailwind.
Cyclops and the Beast were lost in their own maudlin thoughts, Cyclops staring out of the window in a futile attempt to prevent his wife from seeing how worried he was. Jean had to admit that she had spent most of the journey in subdued silence herself. The despondent air in the cabin had even rubbed off on Iceman: he sat and fidgeted restlessly, sensing the mood of the others and not wishing to disturb their reveries.
Jean didn’t have to read Hank’s mind to know that the Legacy Virus was at its forefront. As for Scott... well, his thoughts were an open book to her at the best of times. Right now, she could be sure beyond a doubt that they were thinking about the same thing.
Or rather, about the same person.
Once, back in the days when Jean Grey had been known as Marvel Girl, she had made a deal with a powerful cosmic entity. In return for her own survival when she ought to have died, she had allowed it to replace her temporarily on Earth. The Phoenix force had wanted to learn humanity, but instead-and with Sebastian Shaw’s help-it had become a monster. It had saved the entire universe—but then it had destroyed a sun, and killed billions. It had learned something from its human host, though. In the end, it had taken its own life, to spare others. And, for a time, Jean Grey had been believed dead and buried.
That was when Scott Summers, still in mourning, had met Made-lyne Pryor.
In some ways, it was flattering that, with Jean gone, Scott had fallen for a woman who looked almost exactly like her. But it was also somehow creepy, and neither Jean nor Scott liked to think about that chapter of his life. Madelyne was a pilot who had crashed her plane on the very day-at the exact moment-that the Phoenix, in Jean Grey’s form, had died on the moon. She had walked out of the flames unharmed, with no memory of her life before the accident. To Scott, she must have seemed like his lost love reincarnated. In a way, she had been. He hadn’t known it at the time, but she was a clone of Jean, created by the X-Men’s old foe Mr. Sinister, as part of one of his typically Machiavellian plots.
After a whirlwind romance, Scott had married Madelyne. They had had a son, but he had been taken from them. They had been through a lot together.
And then Jean had returned.
Perhaps Madelyne had good reason to feel bitter towards the couple. Jean knew that Scott wasn’t proud of the way he had treated his first wife during that difficult time. He had just found out that the only woman he had ever truly loved had apparently risen from the grave. He had seen at last that Madelyne Pryor had been nothing but a confused attempt on his part to replace her, to hold on to a part of Jean Grey forever.
But Madelyne wasn’t Jean, and her hurt had festered and turned into hatred, and her hatred into madness. Jean and Scott still felt guilty about what they had put her through. But their guilt had been, in some small measure, assuaged by Madelyne’s transfor
mation into the Goblin Queen, which had proved her to be an imperfect reflec-tion-a distortion rather than a copy, with a dark side that could never have been born of Jean herself.
Just like the Phoenix.
Madelyne was a member of the Hellfire Club now, a part of the Hong Kong Inner Circle-and, if the rumors were true, Sebastian Shaw’s partner in more than one sense of the word. Storm’s team hadn’t reported meeting her in Hong Kong, but she would certainly be with the Black King somewhere, plotting and waiting for a chance to exact revenge upon the people who had wronged her. Her very presence would stir up feelings that both Jean and Scott had hoped to forget, and force them to confront a past they had thought long buried.
To a casual observer, it might have seemed like a ghost was operating the laptop computer.
The Hong Kong hotel room was in semi-darkness. A night breeze drifted through the open window, and made the blinds tap against the sill as if sending out a message in Morse code. The main source of light was the small screen, over which Nightcrawler hunched, parts of his body washed in color while other parts faded into the shadows.
Wolverine lay on his back, still wearing the lower half of his costume, on one of the two beds. From the regular rhythm of his breathing, Nightcrawler had assumed he was sleeping. He was surprised, then, to hear his voice.
“Shouldn’t you be getting some rest?” asked Logan, disapprovingly.
“I had a few hours’ sleep before we flew out here. I’m OK.”
“Rogue hit you pretty hard-and it’s likely we’ll be facing off against the Hellfire Club again tomorrow. Think how she’ll feel if you keel over as soon as the fists start flying.”
“I told you, I’m OK. Anyway, Rogue did the right thing.”
“Try telling her that.”
“I already have. Mountjoy wasn’t about to let either of us go. If she hadn’t punched me, I don’t know what would have happened. I could have ended up like ...” Kurt didn’t want to complete the sentence. Lamely, he finished: “You know.”
“Like Carol Danvers,” said Wolverine, never one to shy away from words.
Nightcrawler sighed, and turned away from the screen, his eyes adjusting quickly to the darkness of the rest of the room. His teammate, he saw, hadn’t changed his position, hadn’t even opened his eyes. “You’re probably right, mein Freund,” he conceded. A set of squared-off numbers shone from a digital clock radio between the beds. It was later than he had thought. “I thought I’d found something else in the data we salvaged from Shaw’s computer.”
“Like what?”
“Like a heavily encrypted communications link. I can’t trace it, though. I can’t even reconstruct any of the incoming messages. They’ve been very efficiently purged.”
“Don’t sweat it. A man like Shaw knows plenty of people. Doesn’t mean to say they’re all involved in whatever he’s got his fingers into right now.”
“I suppose not,” said Nightcrawler. “At least we know now that he was interested in Moira. Chances are, he has her and the rest of the missing scientists. If only we knew where ...”
“Get some rest,” said Wolverine. “The rest of the team’ll be here in a few hours, and then we can talk about rounding up Fitzroy and his pals and beating the information out of them.”
“Come back to bed, Sebastian.”
Shaw hadn’t realized that Madelyne was awake. He had been pacing fretfully in his dressing gown, feeling confined in the small, basic quarters that were so much less than he was used to. There were no windows in this underground room, only a subdued artificial light. Not that the discomfort bothered him too much. He had bigger problems.
He looked at Madelyne, thin sheets clinging to the curves of her body, long red hair flattened by the pillow so that it seemed to form a halo around her beautiful face. She was a most enchanting diversion. But even she couldn’t divert him from his worries tonight. “You’re brooding about Doctor MacTaggert, aren’t you?”
He climbed back onto the bed beside her, and raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “The perils of living with a telepath, I suppose.”
“Of living with a woman, Sebastian. I don’t need to read your mind when I can simply read your face.”
He smiled demurely, and wondered if she was lying to him. He had put the question to her deliberately, as a test. Fond as he had become of his Black Rook, he knew he couldn’t trust her. He had learned through bitter experience never to trust anyone.
“I misjudged her,” he confessed. “I knew she was stubborn, but...” He sighed. “Perhaps I should have heeded the advice I was given. Perhaps I should have been patient. I have some of the best people in the world working for me-but somebody like MacTaggert, somebody with her insights and skills, could have guaranteed our success.”
“I can change her mind,” said Madelyne.
“I doubt that very much,” said Shaw. “She’s already dying from the Legacy Virus. What more could any of us do to her?”
“Make sure it hurts!”
“She would still resist, spitfire. 1 was sure I could reach her. Our facility here offers the good doctor her best chance of survival. I believed that when she realized this, she would join us.” Shaw clenched his fists in frustration. He had offered the Scots woman everything she could have desired: achievement, recognition, life itself. He couldn’t understand the mentality of somebody who would turn down all that on a point of principle.
But then, he had always found it difficult to understand others. Because of this, and because of the circles within which he moved, he had found himself betrayed on many occasions. He surrounded himself with people who could further his cause, regardless of the fact that such people were likely to have their own agendas. Keep your friends close, said the old adage by which Shaw lived, and your enemies closer. That was why he didn’t-couldn’t-trust Madelyne. That was why he suspected Selene’s motives for striking out on her own, without his sanction, and taking over the New York branch. She hadn’t opened hostilities against him yet, but he would have been a fool if he hadn’t prepared himself for that possibility. And were the Black King and the Black Queen to go to war again, then not all of the other pieces would choose his side. Trevor Fitzroy, in particular, was surely only biding his time until his mistress summoned him.
The game was falling apart around him.
“Everybody can be bought,” said Madelyne, leaving Shaw to wonder again if she had been eavesdropping on his thoughts. “I can look into her mind if you wrant, see what she truly desires. If she has a price, I can find it.”
“Maybe,” he said, thoughtfully.
“Where is she now?”
“In a bunkroom. I want her treated well, for now. I will talk to her again tomorrow. Perhaps she can still be persuaded.” He didn’t really believe it, though. He rolled onto his back and rested his head on the soft pillow. His dressing gown fell open, and Madelyne drew closer to him, and ran a hand over his exposed chest. Shaw didn’t respond to her touch. “We’re running out of time, Madelyne,” he said quietly.
“By moving against Doctor MacTaggert, we’ve attracted the attention of the X-Men.” "
“Fitzroy’s letter?”
He nodded. He had prohibited all radio contact between this facility and his headquarters on the mainland. But, just a few hours ago, a tiny wormhole had popped into existence in his office here, above his desk, and a note from his White Rook had been pushed through. The X-Men had been sniffing around in Hong Kong. Fitzroy was sure they had learned nothing, but Shaw knew his old enemies better. They would be arriving on his doorstep before long.
“We can defeat the X-Men,” said Madelyne, seeming to relish the prospect of a fight.
“And keep the project safe in the process?”
“It means a lot to you, doesn’t it?”
“Far more than anything else.”
He didn’t want to talk about it any more, so he turned his back towards her. A second later, however, he felt Madelyne’s breath upon his neck, and her hands mass
aging the tension-knotted muscles of his shoulders. He was irritated, at first, by her insistence upon invading his personal space. But the sensation was a pleasant one, and he found himself smiling as a weight lifted from him. She was a very enchanting diversion after all.
It took him a minute to realize that she had invaded his head too. She was massaging his mind as she massaged his body, relaxing him and pushing his worries away. But, by this time, he didn’t care much any more.
He drifted towards sleep, idly wondering if Madelyne knew that he didn’t love her.
“I don’t think we have much choice,” said Cyclops. “The Hellfire Club know we’re in Hong Kong, and we can be fairly sure they have Moira, but we don’t know where.”
“So, we make them tell us,” said Wolverine.
Cyclops nodded. “I think we have to take the offensive, yes.” Seven X-Men, dressed in civilian clothing, were eating breakfast in a quiet corner of a small cafeteria, a block away from the hotel in which three of their number had spent the night. Only the Beast was not present. Upon arrival in Hong Kong, he had professed himself to be dog-tired. The strains of the past week or so were beginning to tell, from working through nights on his ultimately abortive cure for the Legacy Virus, to lying awake and worrying about Moira. He had decided to skip the planning session, crashing down in Wolverine and Nightcrawler’s room for a few hours, and asking Cyclops to fill him in later on what had been decided.
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 12