by Alex Irvine
Then the fight would take care of itself.
“Kate,” Rachel said. “I don’t have to be a telepath to know that your mind is going in every direction at once. You need to be calm and focused if this is going to work.”
“Easy for you to say,” Kate said. But she lay back on the table and closed her eyes, slowing her breathing and letting the chaotic swirl of her thoughts drain away until only one remained. She remembered being thirteen, the newest member of the X-Men. They had called her Sprite back then, and she hadn’t had the confidence to tell Storm and the rest that she didn’t like that code name very much. But she couldn’t remember when she had changed it.
“Time to do this, if we’re going to do it,” Franklin said. He stood with one hand hovering over the Jammer’s switch. “Rachel, are you ready?”
“I’m ready,” she said. “But don’t freak out if it doesn’t happen right away. It’ll probably take me a few minutes to gather Kate’s consciousness and make sure I’m keeping it intact for the projection.”
“We’ll stay out of your way,” Ororo said.
“Silence would be good,” Rachel said. “Franklin, turn it on.”
There was a sharp click as Franklin activated the Jammer. None of them spoke after that.
THREE
WOLVERINE banked the Blackbird around and dropped the plane into a steep approach to the landing strip at the perimeter of the federal Max-X penitentiary, a holding facility designed for superhumans who couldn’t be kept in normal prisons. The X-Men had caught an alert ninety minutes ago that some kind of explosion or possible seismic event had collapsed part of the facility. Among several possible escapees was Fred J. Dukes—better known as the Blob, one of the original members of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.
With the so-called “mutant hearings” on tap in the Senate the next day, Storm had immediately decided that the X-Men needed to have a strong and visible presence at the site. She, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Kitty Pryde were the response team.
From the air, the prison looked at first as though a sizable bomb had destroyed one entire wing. But on closer inspection, it appeared quite different. There was no debris field scattered outward from the center of the collapse.
“Blob,” Peter said. “He has grown more powerful.”
Blob could increase his mass and density to the point where it was impossible to move him. He was also practically impossible to harm physically. Now it seemed he had amplified his powers, becoming dense enough that his mass could bring down any structure designed to contain him.
“He imploded the whole building?” Kurt Wagner—Nightcrawler—wondered. “Ich staune. Where has he gone, then?”
“Better put him underground next time,” Wolverine said.
“You are a little too eager to kill, Wolverine,” Peter said.
Wolverine chuckled, the sound more like a growl than a laugh. “All I meant was if he was underground, he could drop a building on his own head and not be able to walk out. You gotta stop taking everything so seriously, Petey.”
“And you should perhaps consider how your past actions make my response understandable…Logan.”
Wolverine shrugged. “Fair enough. You do things your way, I do ’em mine.”
“Where are all the guards?” Nightcrawler asked. Max-X was supposed to be under the control of the best soldiers a joint Special Forces-S.H.I.E.L.D. training program could produce—but the prison grounds were empty and the front gate was open. The Blackbird’s radio emitted only static, even on the dedicated Max-X frequency. Something was jamming it.
The Blackbird braked to a halt on the parking lot outside the prison fence. Peter opened the fuselage door and led the way down the ramp that extended automatically below it. Storm and Nightcrawler followed, and Kitty was about to go with them when Logan cut in front of her.
“Stay on the plane, Kitten,” Wolverine said. “We haven’t taken the training wheels off you just yet.”
“That’s not fair,” she protested. “I’m an X-Man. You even gave me a nickname.”
“Yup, we did. So I guess I’ll use it. Stay on the plane, Sprite. I’d never hear the end of it from Chuckie X if I let you out into a gunfight and something happened. Watch and learn.” Wolverine held her gaze. “Got me?”
“Fine,” she said, and spun away from him to go sulk in the copilot’s chair.
The four X-Men crossed the parking lot, seeing right away that more was wrong than just a collapsed wing of the prison complex. Bullet holes pockmarked some of the buildings nearest the gate, which wasn’t just open. It had been blown off its hinges.
“I smell blood,” Logan said, just as the ambush was sprung.
The exterior doors of the prison complex burst open. Heavily armed mercenaries bearing the blank-faced masks of the Hellfire Club poured out, guns blazing. More mercenaries appeared in the prison’s sentry towers with heavier single-fire sniper rifles.
One of their shots punched through Peter’s shoulder, spinning him around. He transformed into his organic-steel form, and two more bullets ricocheted off him. Nightcrawler disappeared in a puff of smoke and reappeared, saber gleaming, in the midst of one of the enemy fire teams. He took three of them down and bamfed away again before they could react.
Wolverine’s approach was more straightforward: He lowered his head and charged into the midst of the closest group, claws out and slashing. Storm raised her arms and drew a fog into existence, obscuring herself as clouds appeared and darkened the sky. Rain began to fall, and a rumble of thunder echoed across the high plain.
Inside the Blackbird, Kitty Pryde watched the battle in a state of pure anguish. She had to do something. The X-Men had welcomed her, saved her life—and now, when they were facing overwhelming odds, she was not out there to help. She couldn’t stand it. She was ready to fight. She knew it.
There were Hellfire Club mercenaries everywhere, outnumbering the X-Men by at least ten to one. But the prison guards, previously overwhelmed by the Hellfire assault, seemed emboldened by the X-Men’s arrival. Gunfire sounded from within the buildings as they fought their way out and rallied to defensive positions at the edges of the prison grounds.
Colossus’s organic-steel body glinted in the sunlight, sparking with the impact of dozens of bullets. They staggered him, but could not hurt him. He lowered a shoulder and barreled into the wall under one of the sentry towers, toppling it into the guardhouse close to the gate.
“Fastball Special, Petey!” Wolverine yelled, sprinting across the prison courtyard. Colossus braced his feet and caught Wolverine in mid-leap, hurling him up to somersault into the sentry tower on the other side of the gate. The Hellfire sniper got off one last shot before Wolverine struck him fists first, smashing him to the floor. A concentrated volley of machine-gun fire tore into the tower just as Logan hit the floor.
“Logan!” Kitty cried. He wasn’t invincible. None of them were. She had to help. What kind of X-Man would she be if she just stood by and watched?
Kitty took a deep breath and phased, letting herself fall through the bottom of the Blackbird’s fuselage and becoming solid again when her feet touched the ground. A detachment of Hellfire Club mercenaries was making a sweep around the perimeter fence, heading for the Blackbird. One of them spotted her, and she barely phased in time for their fusillade of bullets to pass through her. She resolidified and ducked behind the Blackbird’s landing gear, so terrified that she couldn’t even cry out. Some kind of energy blast hit the landing gear and knocked her spinning, but she kept to her feet and ran away from the Hellfire mercenaries into the pouring rain, reflexively heading for the monumental form of Colossus. He would protect her, he would—
Something hit her hard between the shoulder blades and she sprawled forward, face-down. Gasping for breath, she rolled over, waiting to see blood. Instead she saw Logan. He’d leapt from the guard tower and flattened her, absorbing the brunt of the Hellfire Club’s next volley himself.
A normal man would ha
ve been shredded, but Wolverine was just mad. He tore into the Hellfire mercenaries and put the six of them down before Kitty managed to get back to her feet.
Covered in blood and still snarling, he turned to her. “I told you, Kit, stay on the blasted plane. You’re not ready for this yet.” He was pointing at her; when he saw her staring at the blood on his claws, he drew them in. “Kit, you gotta listen—hey!”
Something else hit Kitty then, an upheaval in her mind that tore her loose from her senses and dropped her into darkness.
* * *
LOGAN saw Kitty go down. He spun around in a full circle. There were no other Hellfire mercenaries nearby. He hadn’t heard a shot except those coming from inside the complex, where the S.H.I.E.L.D. guards were regaining the upper hand.
Nightcrawler bamfed into existence next to him. “Was ist los?”
“She just dropped,” Logan said, kneeling over Kitty. She was breathing, and he couldn’t see any wounds.
“I will tell Ororo,” Nightcrawler said, disappearing in a puff of brimstone.
Well, damn, Logan thought. Now I’m babysitting?
Not for long, as it turned out. Logan and Colossus had already reduced the number of Hellfire Club mercenaries by more than half. Now, not ten seconds after Nightcrawler had vanished, a bolt of lightning blasted out of the sky, forking to strike the four remaining sentry towers and the perimeter fence to take out most of the Hellfire mercenaries who had the misfortune to be outside. In the ozone-smelling aftermath, the remaining mercenaries surrendered en masse.
For another few moments, gunshots sounded from inside the complex. Then the S.H.I.E.L.D. guards who had survived the initial attack emerged from their defensive position to gather the prisoners, freeing Colossus to turn his attention to Kitty and Logan.
“She’s out cold, but she doesn’t look hurt,” Logan said. “I don’t know what the hell happened.”
“I will stay with her,” Colossus said.
Logan took off, finishing the sweep of the Max-X grounds to see whether any of the other superhuman inmates had escaped. Along the way, he released some guards he found trapped in a partially collapsed wing of the main complex.
“You men better make sure the rest of your guests are still here,” he said.
Then he hurried to catch up with Ororo and Kurt. They were out near the prison’s main gate, consulting with the warden, a career S.H.I.E.L.D. officer named Yargeau with a gash splitting his crew cut and a nose clearly just broken during the fight. “Blob had his lawyer in yesterday,” Yargeau was saying. “First we knew he had a lawyer—but hey, it’s America. They talked for about an hour, and then she left. Nothing unusual.”
“That’s something unusual,” Logan said, and pointed.
They all looked—and then they all froze.
The Sentinel descended, slowly and precisely, from the skies over the southern Rockies. Keeping itself oriented toward the Blackbird, it touched down on the bare ground between the runway and the collapsed portion of the Max-X complex. Then it stood watchful and still. It was one of the older models, perhaps rolled out by the Master Mold itself. Every mutant watching it got an uneasy sensation, all the way down in the base of the brain, the place where the fight-or-flight response lived. That was what Sentinels meant to them.
Logan started walking toward it. “Sentinel on the grounds. There’s more goin’ on here than just a jailbreak.”
“Colonel?” Storm prompted. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”
“Never seen it here before,” Yargeau said. “Or any Sentinel. S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t use them. You guys know that.”
“Drawn by us using our powers, no doubt,” she said. “Let’s see what it has to say for itself.”
She called Logan back. Of all the team, he was the most likely to lose his temper.
It had been some time since the X-Men had seen an active Sentinel. As Storm rose to its eye level, the Sentinel made no move to attack. An arc of static electricity snapped between them as she hovered perhaps ten feet from it. “Sentinel. Why are you here?”
“To observe mutants.”
“Plenty of us to observe,” Wolverine said.
“To observe only?” Storm prompted.
“The nature of my orders is not to be disseminated to unauthorized parties,” the Sentinel said.
“And who are the authorized parties?”
“The roster of authorized parties is not to be disseminated to unauthorized parties.”
“We should take it out, ’Ro,” Wolverine said.
“Expression of hostile intent detected,” the Sentinel said. “Threat assessment under way.”
“There is no threat,” Storm said. “We are only here to pursue the escaped prisoner Fred Dukes.”
“Observations will continue,” the Sentinel said. “Detection of hostile intent mandates ongoing threat assessment until confirmation of secure environment.”
Yargeau stepped forward. “Robot, I hear you talking about authorization, but I didn’t authorize you being here. Nobody at S.H.I.E.L.D. did. Get off this property before we do our own threat assessment.”
“Expression of hostile intent detected,” the Sentinel said, this time looking down at Yargeau. “Source nonmutant. Threat dismissed.”
“Is that right,” Yargeau said.
Storm landed next to the S.H.I.E.L.D. officer. “Your support is noted and appreciated, Colonel Yargeau,” she said. “But let’s not escalate this confrontation.”
“If that’s how you want to play it, Miss Munroe,” Yargeau said with a last sharp gaze at the Sentinel. “But my superiors are going to hear about this. I will not have this at my facility.”
Two of his subordinates approached him with preliminary damage and casualty reports. “Blob’s the only escapee,” one of them said. “This whole thing was targeted to him, looks like.”
“Let’s make sure,” Yargeau said. “Count again. And the minute we get power restored, everything’s on lockdown until further notice. Your lightning did a number on our electrical grid.”
“Next time we’ll save your wiring and let the Hellfire Club ruin the place, maybe,” Wolverine said.
“Enough, Logan,” Storm said. “Colonel Yargeau, I’m sure you can appreciate that this kind of battle sometimes requires the use of blunt instruments. We’ll be on our way soon. Blob will not have gotten far on his own. If he is in the vicinity, we will find him; if not, we will know there was some kind of coordinated effort to extract him.”
“By whom, is the question,” Nightcrawler said. “Has the Brotherhood re-formed?”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Storm said. “Right now we’ve got a more pressing issue. Peter, what’s Kitty’s status?”
“She’s starting to come around,” Peter answered.
He helped Kitty to a sitting position. She opened her eyes and started to focus on her surroundings. Joy chased shock across her face as she saw the X-Men.
“Kurt! You’re alive!” she cried out.
It flooded over her, everything at once. The shock of clean air and bright sun, after long years in the polluted ruins of New York. The sensory feedback of her body, thirteen years old, before the decades of fighting and deprivation that had left their traces even on her resilient mutant physiology. She felt so light, so full of energy. Even colors seemed more vibrant, from the lustrous green of the shrubs lining the runway to the rich dark blue of Nightcrawler’s skin…
In a sharp dissonant moment she remembered him dead, lying in the mud at the edge of the camp’s barracks, rain falling on his face. But here he was, now, a wry puzzled smile on his face as he reacted to her words.
“So it would appear, my kitten,” he replied. “Was there ever any doubt?”
She scrambled to her feet—how light she was, how nimble!—and looked around. “Where are we? This isn’t New York.”
“Closest town is Demming, New Mexico,” Wolverine said.
“Oh, I thought—” Kate looked down at herself, confirmin
g with her eyes what her nervous sy-stem had already told her. “I’m thirteen,” she said wonderingly. “It worked!” Then she spun around to fling herself into Colossus’ arms. “Peter…”
“Yes, Kitty.” Peter looked uncomfortable at the intensity of her reaction.
Storm stepped closer and put a hand on Kate’s shoulder. “Kitty, are you all right? Did you hit your head? Did something happen?”
Did it ever, Kate thought. It was time to get a grip on herself and get on with the mission. There was no time to waste, either here or back in her future. “You’re never going to believe this,” she said, reluctantly separating herself from Peter, “but I’m not Kitty. I’m Kate.”
“She did hit her head. Must’ve,” Wolverine said.
They had all warned her to keep her cool when the X-Men in the past didn’t believe her, but Kate could already feel the first hints of frustration. She tried to stay focused. “No, Logan, it’s…I can’t believe it worked. This is going to sound crazy, but I’m not Kitty. At least I haven’t gone by that name in a long time…since just a few years from now.”
“We must get her to a medical facility,” Peter said.
“No, Peter, I’m fine, listen. I’m…I mean, this is my thirteen-year-old body, but I’m Kate. I’m thirty-five, and my mind has been sent back through time to warn you. There’s a terrible future…” She looked again at Nightcrawler. Almost more than the proprioceptive shock of being in her adolescent body again, the sight of him was hard to wrap her head around. “Kurt, I saw you die. It was…”
Storm was looking more and more concerned. “Your first combat experience can be a shock,” she said gently. “That’s why we wanted you to stay on the Blackbird. We thought it best for you to just observe until you had progressed a little further in your Danger Room training.”
“The Danger Room,” Kate repeated. She hadn’t thought of it in…well, years. “So Professor Xavier… he’s still alive?”