by Alex Irvine
The wall exploded outward from the overpressure, as if a huge bomb had gone off with all of its force concentrated in only one direction. Storm allowed herself to be drawn along with the blast of wind. Around her tumbled Logan, Avalanche and Pyro. They hurtled in a loose group out across the grand steps at the front of the building and onto the manicured green of the Mall.
She saw all of them except the Blob and Colossus. Storm had been afraid of that. She had hoped to catch Blob by surprise, before he could root himself to the earth, but his response had been quicker than she’d anticipated. Even as she rode the whirlwind outside and tried to set her friends down more gently than her foes, Storm wondered what they could do if the Blob simply refused to be extracted from the building. He would tear it down out of spite, even if Senator Kelly escaped.
And speaking of Senator Kelly, where was he? Ororo had a feeling that if the Brotherhood had succeeded in killing him, they would be shouting that from the rooftops. So he was most likely alive, but she disliked not knowing where he might be—almost as much as she disliked not knowing where Kate had gotten to.
Were the two disappearances linked? Had Kate gone looking for Senator Kelly? Ororo could not break away from this fight to find out. Too many lives were at stake here.
Fire swirled along the wind currents, flaring out into the open air. “You see, Storm, your winds only feed my flames!” Pyro said.
Colossus was also still inside. He and Blob were no doubt locked together, and Storm feared that even Peter’s prodigious strength might meet its match in the Blob.
But they had another, and perhaps more immediate, problem. As the dust and debris blew away, Storm saw that a military rapid-response team, complete with light armor, had already cordoned off the entire area around the Senate building. Their officers were pointing out the locations of all known mutants, apparently without regard to which side each mutant was fighting on. If the X-Men weren’t careful, Ororo knew, they would find themselves under assault from the military even as they fought to save lives from the Brotherhood.
The only benefit of this military intervention was that it kept civilians away. They had all been evacuated to gawk from a safe distance. Ambulance lights strobed behind the military position as emergency workers treated the injured from the Brotherhood’s initial attack. Washington, D.C., was as prepared as any city in the world to deal with an event of this nature.
Storm heard amplified voices shouting more orders, but could not make out what they were saying. Where were Moira, Professor Xavier, and Kate? Had they found Senator Kelly? She had not felt Xavier’s touch on her mind since just after the battle had been joined.
Fight the battle you can fight, she told herself. It was her responsibility to lead the X-Men against the Brotherhood here, before more lives were lost.
* * *
BACK inside the destroyed hearing chamber, Blob held Colossus by the arm. Colossus unloaded a punch to his face, but the Blob just laughed.
“She couldn’t make me go,” he said. “Nobody makes Fred J. Dukes do something he don’t want to do. And as long as I got hold of you, you don’t go anywhere until I say so.”
He paused, and a cruel leer exposed oddly perfect teeth in his homely face. “But maybe it’s time for you to take a little ride.”
FOURTEEN
PETER was not going to get there in time. Half the expanse of the Baxter Building control room stretched between him and the Sentinel poised to burn Ororo to ashes. The glow of its palm beams brightened. It would fire at any moment. Desperately he ran, knowing he wouldn’t make it. He might as well have been outside the building, or back on the farm in Siberia.
Logan was gone, soon Ororo would be, and how much longer after that could Peter survive? What would Kate find when she returned from the past—if she ever did? And if she did not, how long would poor Kitty survive in her adult body with Rachel dying at her side?
Things could hardly be worse, Peter thought. And then, at least for one fleeting moment, they got better.
Ororo had fallen near the original, human-sized door the three of them had used to enter the control room. The Sentinel stepped over the body of the one she’d destroyed, leaning close to her. “You are no longer useful,” it said. “The time of mutants is over. Sentinel directives mandate elimination.”
With its next step, it planted an immense booted foot next to the smoking, mangled remains of Wolverine—who lifted his head.
“Logan,” Ororo said in amazement.
He reached up with one arm that was half flesh and half exposed Adamantium, and his claws punched into the back of the Sentinel’s left heel. Logan jerked the claws sideways, severing the hydraulic assembly that maintained tension in the Sentinel’s lower leg and therefore controlled its balance.
It swayed to its left, arms splaying out as its palm beams discharged. One of them blew a hole in the ceiling. The other scorched through the wall just in front of Peter as, with that same hand, the Sentinel grasped the catwalk for support.
That gave Colossus the extra moment he needed to reach the Sentinel. He dashed along the length of its arm and flipped a heavy cable around its neck. Then he pulled, slowly garrotting the Sentinel. He couldn’t strangle it, obviously. But Peter knew if he pulled long enough and hard enough, eventually its head would come off. And in any case, he would keep it occupied so it couldn’t target Storm.
At least until one of the two other, damaged Sentinels in the room recovered enough to kill them.
The Sentinel reeled back from Ororo, with Peter still hauling at the cable around its neck. She scrambled across the floor to Logan, then stopped as the staggering Sentinel stepped back and crushed Logan under its damaged heel. As quickly as the foot came down, it rose again. The Sentinel began thrashing its way across the room, but Ororo could see the damage it had done to Logan.
His Adamantium skeleton was undamaged, of course, but his body was completely devastated. Only the invulnerability of his skull kept his face intact enough for him to speak. “’Ro?” he said. “Can’t see.”
Both of his eyes were gone.
“Tried to slow it down,” he said.
“You did,” she said. “You saved me one more time.”
“Okay. Good. That’s all I got,” he said, and died. She saw the last life leave him. His hands relaxed; the points of his claws made small clinks as they settled onto the concrete floor, not even hard enough to leave a scratch.
Peter pulled on the cable with all the strength his anger could give him, bracing his feet against the metal flange that ringed the Sentinels’ upper torso. He felt something give, and pulled harder. The Sentinel started to scream, an alarm sound that felt to Peter like a cry of pain and fear. Did the Sentinels feel fear? He did not know. What he knew was that people had felt fear, and the Sentinels were responsible. He flicked both wrists, wrapping the cable once more around them, and pulled again.
The Sentinel’s head tore off in a shower of sparks and a gout of dark lubricant and hydraulic fluids. Peter fell, landing flat on his back; the Sentinel’s head crashed down face-first beside him a moment later, splattering him with slick oils.
He looked over and saw Logan. Ororo stood over his body in a tearful rage. Peter could feel the energy radiating from her. She walked across the room—past the twitching Sentinel with its broken head; past the decapitated body of the Sentinel that had killed Logan; past the body of the first Sentinel, the hole punched through its torso still smoldering.
As she approached the frozen Sentinel, its armor crackled anew. Ororo drew the heat from it and from the air around it. Icy fog formed in the room, and nearby glass monitors shattered.
“Monsters,” she said. “Not even monsters. Idiot machines, thinking you have reason. Murderous wind-up toys. You have almost killed us. Almost. But we will die no more.”
Long cracks appeared in the Sentinel’s armor, and pieces of it began to shear away. Ororo hovered five or six feet in the air, lifted up from the floor by the intensity o
f the energies she channeled.
“Now, Peter!” Ororo cried out. Peter leaped forward, clenching both fists together.
The blow shook the floor as the Omega-class Sentinel seemed to detonate under him. Supercooled bits of it peppered the room, shattering what windows still remained and punching shrapnel holes in the banks of terminals and monitoring equipment that lined the walls. The force of the Sentinel’s disintegration pitched Peter’s quarter-ton mass most of the way back to Logan’s body. He landed flat on his back and lay stunned for a moment, blinking.
The control room filled with mist as the
pieces of the destroyed Sentinel’s body rewarmed, and the ambient temperature climbed back toward freezing. Smoke hung in a layer high in the room. The hole in the ceiling acted as a chimney, drawing the warmer air up and out into the chilly night. Sparks fell in cascades from damaged machinery. It looked as though fires were burning outside.
Let the whole building burn, Peter thought. Except it wouldn’t. The Sentinels would fight the fire and bring it under control.
Peter and Ororo had a moment, no more. Their primary objective still stood before them, that column of cables and steel protected behind the coruscating barrier of its force field. The core powering the Sentinels’ North American surveillance matrix was still intact.
But not for long. With the Sentinel guards dispatched, the X-Men had bought a moment to determine how that force field worked. Surely there was a way to overload or bypass it, if they could find it in time. All they needed was to discover the weak point in the system.
Could it be that they were about to win? Actually win, not just fight a holding action that would delay their extinction for a few hours or a day? Peter had not imagined that possible during the process of the plan’s hatching, debate, and execution. Nevertheless, he had supported the plan. Against his better judgment, he had allowed his wife’s mind to be separated from her body and projected more than two decades back in time—with no idea whether he would ever see her again. Then the unexpected twist: young Kitty Pryde, the Sprite he remembered as a skittish girl, speaking to him out of Kate Rasputin’s physical form. If he had known that would happen, would he have consented? It seemed one strangeness too far, a little too much to expect of any man.
But if all could be put right—if Rachel could keep herself alive long enough to restore past and present Kate/Kitty to their times—then it would all have been worth it.
If Kate had been able to divert the Brotherhood’s attack on Senator Kelly. What was happening at this moment back in the past? Did that question even have any meaning? It had been four hours or so since the telepathic projection. During that time, had the X-Men come to believe Kate’s story? Had they gotten to Washington, D.C.? Had they contacted Professor Xavier? What was happening, or had happened? Nothing here looked any different, of course, and probably never would. In all likelihood, they were fighting for a different future—one that none of them would ever experience.
Or would they? How much could they assume they knew about the workings of time? It was a heady question. Peter wondered, in the aftermath of smoke and freezing fog that was also preamble to the final act, whether they would ever know what Kate’s actions in the past had accomplished. They had talked it over endlessly, speculating and arguing whether this future would be changed, or unmade, or left completely intact by the creation of a parallel new timeline. Would any of them ever know?
They had sacrificed Franklin and Logan, and soon Rachel, for the possibility that others might live. Nothing could be certain, maybe not even the past—and definitely not the future. If Kate was coming back, Peter wanted to be able to tell her they had succeeded. And above all, Kitty needed to return to the past, so she could fall in love with the younger version of him. They would make something beautiful together. If Kate’s mission succeeded, even their children might survive.
He cut off that train of thought. He would need focus to survive the next few hours. All they had done was fire the first shot of the last battle, and they had lost half their number in doing so. There was no room to make any more mistakes.
All those thoughts and speculations flashed through Peter’s mind in the time it took him to stand up and walk over to the core. He gazed at it, wondering how it worked. Advanced technology was not his specialty. He reached out and placed a hand on the force field.
An explosion reverberated through the building. Was the FCA still bombing their merry way down to the ground floor, or had the havoc in this room started some kind of chain reaction?
“Ororo,” he said. “Should we try to overload this force field, or will it be faster to bypass it and try to destroy the control array’s power source? There will be more Sentinels here soon.”
* * *
RACHEL said something, just a little too quietly for Kitty to understand.
Kitty looked from the Baxter Building to her and then back up at the building. Smoke poured from its roof, and at least three fires glowed from different floors. “What, Rachel?” she asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Rachel said.
The last of the FCA guerrillas burst out of the front entrance, followed seconds later by an explosion that blew out all the windows facing Madison Avenue and 42nd Street. The defeated Sentinel sitting against the wall fell over on to its side as the FCA followed Rick over to Kitty and Rachel.
“What’s the word?” Rick asked.
“We don’t know anything,” Kitty said. “At least I don’t. What did you see in there?”
“We stayed in the old parts of the building. Sentinels didn’t redo all of it. We peeked out of the fire staircase, blew all the electrical stuff we could find, and kept moving,” Rick said. “That’s what Logan said he wanted.”
“You saw all of them inside?”
“Logan, Peter, Ororo. Were there more?” Rick asked. “That’s all we saw. You guys were talking about someone else. Is he—?”
“That’s all of them. All of us,” Kitty said.
Rick looked up to the top of the building. “Something’s going on,” he said. “Hard to tell what, other than it’s not friendly.”
“How will we know if it worked?”
“If you see the Sentinels start milling around like they don’t know what to do, that’ll be a sign,” Rick said. “If the transmitter up there is destroyed, they won’t be able to hear each other.”
Reinforcements for the Sentinels inside the Baxter Building were already arriving. From the north, three landed on the roof and disappeared. Three others marched into view on Madison Avenue, taking up a guard position at 43rd Street.
Six Sentinels coming from the west landed on 42nd Street, between Madison and Fifth. Three of them split off and marched toward the intersection of Madison. Too close for comfort, Kitty thought—but as long as the mutants’ powers weren’t interacting with the environment, the Sentinels didn’t seem to notice them. Either that, or the Sentinels were entirely focused on the armed attack on the Baxter Building.
Maybe it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Rachel was keeping herself alive, and the Sentinels were leaving them alone. For the moment, at least.
Apparently, Rick felt the same way. “Weapons down, FCA. Slow and discreet. Somewhere out of sight. We are out of here,” he said. “No way we can take on the Sentinels. You coming?”
“No,” Kitty said. “I’m not leaving my friends.”
“You sure? I don’t think things are going too well.”
“All the more reason to stay,” Kitty said.
“Well, good luck to you, then,” Rick said. “FCA, disappear. Rendezvous at location Chuck.”
The rest of the FCA soldiers melted away to the east, away from the visible Sentinels. They’d left their guns behind the canopy over the stairs down to the subway. Kitty felt a moment of alarm. What if the Sentinels noticed the guns? Under the circumstances, she guessed that would be enough for her and Rachel to be vaporized, no questions asked. They couldn’t stay here, but she wasn’t su
re Rachel could be moved.
Rick lingered a moment longer. “Last chance. I’ll take you both with me if you want to go.” He looked at the Sentinels and back to Kitty. “If you’re coming, now’s the time.”
“Not while they’re still inside,” Kitty said.
“All right, then,” Rick said, and then he was gone.
The Sentinels stood their ground. One of them looked at Kitty and Rachel, then back at the Baxter Building. Their orders apparently did not include clearing the area of human flotsam lying against the railing at the head of the subway stairs.
It made sense. If the Sentinels could contain Logan, Storm, and Peter inside the building, what happened outside wouldn’t matter. Kitty couldn’t make a difference. Neither could Rachel. Magneto could cause some damage, but he was probably dead by now. Even if he wasn’t, he might not be able to get himself out of the camp.
“Oh, no,” Rachel said. Her eyes were closed, and her breathing was getting slower and shallower.
Kitty didn’t dare ask.
* * *
PETER heard a sound like the release of an air brake—a quick, percussive blast of air. He pictured a hose bursting. Probably something had been weakened by the various acts of destruction performed in this room, and now it had let loose.
Ororo hadn’t answered his question. “Ororo, we—”
Peter turned to her and stopped. Storm was falling, pierced through the body by a six-foot steel spear. Behind her stood the Sentinel with the shattered face, arm extended, the firing tube visible at the base of its palm. Past that were more Sentinels, crowding into the control room.
The Sentinel tried to say something, but its vocal apparatus was too severely damaged. All that came out was another series of buzzing squawks and squeals—yet somehow to Peter they seemed arrogant and smug, as the first Omega-class Sentinel had been before Storm silenced it.
She fell to her hands and knees as Peter cried out, “Ororo!”
The Sentinel fired another spear, locking in on Peter’s voice. It hit him square in the belly, but did no more than rock him back onto his heels. He counted three, four, five more over its shoulder forcing their way into the room.