by Alex Irvine
* * *
PETER walked across Madison to the corner across from the entrance lobby, waiting for the signal that Storm and Logan were in place. Other Sentinels were visible patrolling near Grand Central and farther away to both north and south. Their escape had provoked a full-scale search operation, but the Sentinels would not anticipate a strike at the Baxter Building any more than an elephant anticipates a mouse going for its jugular. Peter had once read that elephants were frightened of mice because of the possibility that a mouse could run into the elephant’s trunk. That would be a nuisance. But if a mouse got stuck in the elephant’s trunk—that could be a real problem.
The X-Men hoped to stick a mouse up the elephant’s trunk. At the Sentinel nerve center, they planned to clog up the communications and surveillance equipment that allowed the Sentinel-elephant to breathe. If it worked, the great beast would come crashing to earth. If not, mutantkind would be crushed under its invincible mass—and all of North America along with them.
Peter steeled himself, but only mentally. He reserved his physical transformation for later—for the inevitability of killing. He hated nothing more, but his principles were irrelevant given the stakes. If he had to kill, he would.
Across the street, FCA soldiers were leaning against the 42nd Street side of the Baxter Building’s ground floor, telling jokes and pretending to be ordinary loiterers. They, too, were awaiting the signal from Logan and Storm. Then all proverbial hell would break loose.
Perhaps some of them would survive it.
More important, perhaps a future would survive them.
At three o’clock exactly, Peter looked up into the sky. He saw a bolt of lightning lance down, forking above the Baxter Building. One branch struck the cluster of antennae and satellite dishes on the building’s roof. The other flashed down to ground level, striking the Sentinel at the lobby door and arcing out from it to every conductive structure nearby.
Sparks blasted out from the metal door frames. Diminishing fingers of electricity played around the street signs and other metal objects along the curb. When they dissipated, the Sentinel sat slumped against the wall, head down, smoke drifting from its eyes and other seams in its armor.
This time, Storm had had time to prepare.
Transforming into his organic-steel form, Peter ran north, catching up with Rick and his FCA comrades. “They’ll know we’re here now,” he said as they got to the lobby doors. He shattered the heavy glass and led the FCA group through the lobby to a private elevator in the building’s interior. Once, it had been reserved for the Fantastic Four; in the years since their deaths, it had sat unused.
“This one’s yours,” Peter said to Rick.
Rick stepped forward with a small object that looked like a flashlight. He activated it and shone its beam directly on a scanner next to the elevator door. Logan and the FCA had researched the building exhaustively and learned that the elevator was keyed to respond to a certain emergency code available to the Fantastic Four’s close allies. They had then tracked down the code in a destroyed S.H.I.E.L.D. laboratory on Long Island and programmed it into this device. Now they held their collective breath, waiting to see whether the elevator was still functional. If not, it would be a long climb up the stairs, and the Sentinels would have plenty of time to prepare for their arrival.
The elevator doors opened, and Peter breathed a sigh of relief. So much had gone wrong already, it was a welcome change of pace to have a gamble pay off. He and the six FCA soldiers got on the elevator, and Peter hit the button for the top floor. The doors slid shut. For thirty-five floors, all they could do was wait.
* * *
“PRETTY good show, ’Ro,” Logan commented.
They stood watching the aftereffects of the lightning strike on the roof. Electrical components in the satellite dishes smoked and spat. Some of the antennae had toppled over the edge of the roof. A control station and transformer had exploded when the lightning hit, and it burned brightly.
Every Sentinel within twenty miles would know the Baxter Building was under attack. That was fine with Logan. By the time reinforcements arrived, he and Storm would either have finished the job, or they’d be finished themselves.
“Only the beginning, Logan,” Ororo said. “Let’s get moving. We don’t want to leave Peter on his own.”
She closed her eyes briefly and generated a field of static electricity, jamming any electronic detection and surveillance systems that had survived her first attack. The Sentinels already knew the X-Men were here, but the static field might keep them from zeroing in on the mutants’ specific locations. Emphasis on might, she thought—and decided to create more fields, in different parts of the building. She drew the current along the length of the building’s primary lightning rod, and from there into the outermost girders that ran straight down into its basement levels. Any observer sensitive to electromagnetism would register its presence. With luck, the Sentinels would respond to it, dividing their attention and leaving an opening for the X-Men to infiltrate the control room.
Logan watched her until she nodded at him, indicating that the field was up. His claws flashed in the firelight as he cut through the chain on the roof-access door. It squealed on rusty hinges, but it opened, and he led Ororo to the fire stairs several floors down. They passed through an emergency door that led to a hall running along the edge of the building, connecting the freight-elevator shaft to Reed Richards’ former lab space. Logan remembered coming here, a long time ago. He could almost hear Reed bossing everyone around, irritating Logan by being the smartest person in the room.
This was the simple part of the plan. The Sentinels knew they were coming, so there was no point in being coy. On the other hand, the Sentinels didn’t know exactly where they were, because Storm had fried the Baxter Building’s main electrical system. Any security cameras would be out of commission—but the main communications-control systems would have their own power source, insulated from electrical shocks to the building. So the next step was to hit that control room, hard and fast.
“Okay,” Logan said. “If we got this figured right, the control room’s on the other side of this door. They’re gonna know we’re around here somewhere, but one good thing about not being twenty feet tall is we can go lots of places in the building they can’t. That’s our only advantage. Soon as we’re in the control room, it’s gone.”
“Then let’s do some damage out here, eh?” Rick suggested.
The private elevator at the far end of the hall pinged. Its doors slid open to reveal Peter and the rest of the FCA.
“Boys and girls,” Logan said. “New wrinkle in the plan. The three of us will hit the control room and take out as many of the Sentinels in there as we can, along with whatever’s controlling their comm network. Meanwhile, the Free Canadian Army goes on a little search-and-destroy through the rest of the building. Any electrical stuff, you blow it up. Anything more technologically advanced than a pencil, you shoot it. Stay out of areas where the Sentinels can get around easily.”
“Yippee-kay-ay,” Rick said. “Let’s do it. We got at least a dozen shaped charges left. C4 solves lots of problems.”
“Take it floor by floor, but keep moving downward,” Logan said. “For all we know, the building’s gonna come down at some point. You’re gonna want to get out as soon as you can, but do some damage along the way.”
“That’s our specialty,” said the medic who had treated Rachel.
“There’s a fire staircase, back through the emergency door,” Logan said.
“FCA, we are leaving,” Rick said. He extended a hand. “Get out alive, Logan. We need you around.”
“You too, bub,” Logan said, shaking Rick’s hand.
The three X-Men waited until the FCA soldiers were all gone down the fire stairs. “If we wait until they detonate their first charge, we might catch the Sentinels in a moment of distraction,” Ororo said.
“Could be,” Logan said. “I still feel like a mouse planning to take o
ut the local cat.”
“Funny you should say that. I was just thinking about mice, as well,” Peter said. “But the context was elephants.”
“We can go with that,” Logan said. “Let’s go scare us some elephants.”
They followed the hall through a couple of turns. Then Logan said, “This is the door. I can hear them in there.”
They waited.
* * *
OUTSIDE in the street, Kitty couldn’t contain her impatience. “Nothing’s happening,” she said.
Rachel then did something that shocked her. She reached out to take Kitty’s hand and squeeze it. Her grip was feeble, but the gesture sent a wave of emotion through Kitty she couldn’t quite identify. “Give it a minute,” Rachel said. “Won’t be long.”
A minute, thought Kitty. Strange to think a minute could be so important: the difference between waiting and doing, between living and dying. She had traveled twenty-two years into the future, and she might never get that time back. Every minute was important. How many old sayings were there about living every minute like it was your last? She’d dismissed them as the kind of thing older people said because they were jealous of the young, but she’d been wrong to do that. The Hellfire Club mercenaries could have ended her life in New Mexico. A Sentinel could have done the same here in New York. At any moment, all those infinite minutes and possibilities could be reduced to the cold certainty of death.
As they were about to be for Rachel. Kitty looked at her, watched her life force slowly ebbing away. Rachel did not cry out, did not visibly fight. But Kitty could see the intensity of her struggle in the tautness of her facial muscles, in the slow care she took with every word she spoke, every motion of her body. To Rachel, every minute was now precious, because she had so few left.
God, to know you were going to die…
But didn’t Kitty know that, too? Her chances of getting back to her own time were—well, maybe not zero, but not good, either. It was much more likely that a Sentinel would vaporize or crush her here in the future. And more likely still that Rachel’s resolute struggle to hold her body together would fail before she could swap Kitty and her older self back to their proper places again.
Kitty understood they needed to wait as long as possible, giving her older self maximum time to avert the assassination of Senator Kelly—assuming time passed at the same relative rate in both her past and this present/future. The truth was, she might return in the blink of an eye, considered from her past self’s point of view—and that would create another future. Or she might return after exactly as much time as she had experienced here, in which case it was possible that the line from that past to this future would be unbroken. Kitty’s head spun a little thinking about it. She was smart, and knew it, but anyone who thought hard about relativity without a little bit of dizzy wonder wasn’t doing it right.
Either way, to be safe, she needed to wait as long as possible here—which meant, basically, as long as Rachel had the strength to return her. Unless there was another way back, and Kitty doubted that very much.
Boiling the situation down to its essence, Kitty Pryde knew she was probably going to die very soon, and she was terrified.
But all she could do was wait a minute, as Rachel had said. Wait, and hope, and then take action when the time came.
* * *
FIVE minutes later, a thump and rumble shook the floor. “That’s it,” Logan said.
He tested the door latch. It was locked. With one claw, he cut through the bolt holding it shut and eased the door open enough for the three of them to get a look inside.
They were on the floor of the control room, which appeared to occupy the entirety of the building’s footprint except for the narrow hallway and elevator shafts. The ceiling was maybe fifty feet above them, and a catwalk ran around three sides of the room about halfway up the walls.
In the center of the space stood a shining metal column, laced with fiber-optic cable and shimmering behind a force field of some kind. Whether it was a protective measure or a containment protocol, they didn’t know. And it didn’t much matter. The column had to come down if they were going to do more than scrap a few Sentinels.
“That’ll be it,” Logan whispered.
There were whole banks of terminal screens and workstations, scaled to the Sentinels’ size. At one of them stood a Sentinel, tracing lines on a touch screen. “Omega-class,” Storm whispered. They stood out from the ordinary Sentinels by virtue of the identification numbers stamped into their armor. The lower the number and fewer the digits, the higher the Sentinels’ rank and ability. Normal Sentinels were fierce enemies; Omega-class Sentinels were more than strong enough to kill all three X-Men if they didn’t do something to tilt the odds in their favor.
“You got another Fastball Special in you, Petey?” Wolverine asked. “I’ll open this bastard up before he knows we’re here. Might not kill him, but it’ll sure slow him down. Then you and ’Roro finish him off.”
“There will be others,” Storm said. “In fact, I can see one up on the catwalk. It is facing away from us.”
“One thing at a time,” Logan said.
Peter crouched and Logan stepped into his hand, bracing himself against Peter’s shoulder. Peter heaved Wolverine through the air toward the Sentinel, the snikt of Logan’s claws sounding sharply against the hum of the force field and the ambient whir of cooling fans.
Logan was moving at something close to a hundred miles per hour, and he had perhaps twenty-five yards to cover before hitting the Sentinel. That left the Sentinel approximately a half-second to respond. But in addition to superior armaments, the Omega-class Sentinels had enhanced sensory mechanisms and reflex arrays. Almost faster than the human eye could follow, the Sentinel spun, raised a hand, and blasted Logan out of the air with an energy beam emanating from its palm.
An afterimage of that moment would remain burned into Peter’s mind as long as he lived: Logan’s body arching in the Sentinel’s beam. The gruesome contrast between the parts of Logan’s body outside the beam’s cone, charring and melting, and the almost X-ray clarity of his Adamantium skeleton in the brilliant light. The sound of Logan’s feral dying shriek cutting off as his lungs and vocal cords vaporized.
Of all of them, Peter realized, he had never really imagined Logan could die.
The stink of burned flesh and hair flooded the room as Logan’s body crashed into the catwalk over the control-room door. He tumbled down to land in a smoking, charred heap in front of Peter and Ororo.
“Pathetic organic being,” the Sentinel said. “Did you imagine you could approach—much less penetrate—this facility without being detected?”
Apparently, the other thing that set the Omega-class Sentinels apart from their subordinates was that they had been programmed to be arrogant.
“Mutants 049 and 116, you are still of some use to us. Yield immediately and survive.”
Storm’s answer was a blast of lightning.
The intensity of the electrical fields present in the control room gave her a huge reservoir of energy to tap. She linked it to her weather powers, amplifying them beyond anything she had ever before attempted. Earlier that night, caught by surprise, she had been unable to bring down Sentinels. Now, with this virtually limitless ambient energy field at her command, she hit the Omega-class Sentinel with a jagged blast that slagged its internal circuitry and left a smoking, fused hole just above and to the left of its torso repulsor lens.
Feelers of lightning licked out from the Sentinel. Some were absorbed into the force field; others flashed across the surfaces of the control panels lining the walls. They flickered and sparked, but the system as a whole was undamaged.
Logan lay silent, much of his flesh burned away from the Adamantium rods and casings that reinforced his skeleton. His upper body had taken the brunt of the blast. His ribcage and collarbones were exposed, along with the entirety of one arm’s bones. His other arm, the right, was bare Adamantium down to the elbow; the hand below
it twitched, its claws flicking irregularly out and back in. From the waist down, the damage was more superficial: third-degree burns that had charred him down to the muscle tissue. His face, too, was partially burned away, exposing his Adamantium jaw and the lower half of the skull. One of his eyes was gone. The other stared sightlessly off to one side, where the Sentinel toppled to the floor with a thud that echoed throughout the room.
The Sentinel on the catwalk said, “Mutant infiltration of control room. Request reinforcements.”
It rose up, away from the catwalk, and faced Storm across the smoky width of the room. “One mutant terminated,” it said. “Two hostile. Location of others unknown.”
Another distant boom shook the building. The Free Canadian Army was doing its job, Storm thought. Time to keep on doing hers.
Peter charged out from under the catwalk overhang, leaping over the body of his friend to grab onto one of the hovering Sentinels’ feet. The exhaust from its boot rocket seared him, but he did not feel it. The Sentinel, its balance upset by the sudden addition of five hundred pounds to one leg, swung and dipped in the air. Peter held on to it with one arm wrapped around its ankle and kicked his legs out, hooking his own ankles around the catwalk railing. The railing was constructed of heavy steel vertical beams connected by braided steel cables the thickness of a normal human arm.
With his legs scissored around one of those beams, Peter jackknifed his body—driving the Sentinel down and playing a devastating game of crack-the-whip with its head, which struck the control-room floor hard enough to shake the walls and bounce Logan’s remains into the air. Bits of the Sentinel’s cranial armor flew off to bang and clatter across the floor as Logan’s body hit the ground again.
Across the room, a door slid open. Through it Peter saw two more Sentinels, both Omega-class. Electronic gibberish was pouring from the prone Sentinel’s damaged head. It tried to get up, but its hard landing had apparently damaged its inertial-control and balance systems.