X-Men 2

by Chris Claremont

  In the neighboring wing, Peter Rasputin opened a hidden panel in the hallway wainscoting, revealing a passage and stairwell lit at intervals by emergency glow globes. Handing off Siryn to one of the older students, he began ushering his charges inside. Speed was the essence here. He had to clear the corridor before they were discovered by any of the intruders.

  “Hey, shorty!” he heard from behind him. He thought at first it was one of the enemy and turned, ready to fight, only to find himself facing a figure barely half his size. Without another word, Logan handed over Jones.

  “I can help you,” Colossus called after him.

  “Help them!” came the reply. “You got your responsibilities, bub.”

  Logan paused at a junction of the hallway. The beams of two flashlights and a set of green targeting lasers splayed across the wall. He waited a moment, then stepped out of sight around the corner. The lasers went out, and Peter heard a couple of grunts, plus the sound of falling bodies. One flashlight beam vanished as well, and the other skewed wildly sideways before rolling into view along the floor.

  “I have mine,” Logan finished quietly, stepping briefly into view. “Get going.”

  Peter didn’t need to be told twice. There were no other students in sight. He’d been running a head count of the kids he was shepherding into the escape passage, and he knew he was well short of the total. Who was just missing, who’d been captured, he had no idea. He also knew, although this left him sick and angry at heart, that he couldn’t go looking for them. As Logan said, he had his responsibilities, and he would not abandon them.

  He stepped through the doorway and locked it closed behind him.

  Kitty Pryde didn’t bother with doors. She didn’t need them. Intangible as a ghost, she raced through the mansion, down to the main floor, where she found soldiers . . .

  . . . through one of the classrooms, more soldiers . . .

  . . . through the arboretum, more soldiers . . .

  . . . through the billiard room where Cyclops would shoot nine ball using his optic blasts instead of a pool cue, more soldiers . . .

  . . . through the hallway beyond, and right through the body of one of the invaders before either of them knew quite what was happening.

  Kitty’s power allowed her to slip the molecules of her own body through the valences of other physical objects. The process was so quick that it had virtually no effect on the molecular cohesion of those nonorganic solids, any more than the passage of baseline human bodies would affect the air through which they travel. Or, more accurately in her case, the vast emptiness of open space.

  That wasn’t the case with electrical fields. Any transit by Kitty created a momentary skitz in a power circuit, causing a blink when it came to household wiring, leading to the occasional disaster when she interfaced with higher-order electronics. She was death to hard drives.

  There was one other by-product, which her studies with Xavier had only recently begun to explore, and that related to the fact that the human body’s central nervous system is one huge electrical network, linked to a supremely powerful biological computer. Whenever she ghosted through a person, she caused much the same shock with them that she did to a power circuit. The consequences depended on how quickly she was moving and where the contact took place.

  For the trooper, it was like being momentarily jammed into a light socket. His world went white, just the way he’d read about folks who’d survived lightning strikes, and for an instant after it was over he thought that was what had happened. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t altogether sure what had just happened. He had a vague sense of a girl popping out of a wall, then diving right through him.

  His own reaction was automatic. Even as shock threw him into a vertiginous spin toward the floor, he managed to snap off a taser round after the girl. It was a spectacular shot, especially considering the circumstances. He caught her dead center between the shoulder blades—only the prongs at the end of the taser wires didn’t strike living flesh at all. Instead they buried themselves in the wall of the house, at the very instant the girl herself vanished inside.

  Upstairs, Rogue had found another girl to add to her collection. Terrified, of course, huddled in a heap, face gleaming with silent tears in the random splashes of brilliance thrown by the circling helicopters and their damn spot lamps. Marie found herself wishing, fervently, for some powers more appropriate to the name she’d chosen for herself, Rogue—something akin to Cyclops’ eye beams, or Jean’s telekinesis, or Storm’s command of the weather. She wasn’t feeling picky; she just wanted something to even the odds and maybe tear those gunships from the sky.

  “Come on, honey,” she said instead, in her best baby-sitter voice, projecting a strength and calm she didn’t have as she gathered the girl to her breast, taking care to always keep a layer of clothes between her own skin and the girl’s.

  She was glad now that one of the first things she had done on arrival at Xavier’s School was memorize the network of hidden passages that honeycombed both the mansion itself and the grounds. At the time she was just staying in character; after all, a girl has to know how to slip away unnoticed for a night of private fun, even if she never found the opportunity to try. Now that work was paying off with interest, the passages enabling her to elude pursuit and scoot her share of students to safety.

  “In you go, girls,” she told them, “just like Storm taught us, ’kay?”

  The girl in her arms was clinging like a limpet, whimpering now along with her tears. Rogue was her lifeline, and she couldn’t bear to be parted. Rogue didn’t have time for this. They were too close to one of the upper floor’s big bay windows. The longer they stayed, the greater the chance of being spotted when one of the helicopters did a flyby and trained its million-candlepower lamp into the house.

  “Aren’t you coming?” the other girl asked. She was a Scots redhead of barely thirteen named Rahne Sinclair.

  “I have to find someone first,” Rogue told her. With a winning Highlander grin, Rahne pried the other girl’s hands loose from Rogue’s neck, offering reassurances of her own as she led the way into the passage.

  “When you come out of the tunnels,” Rogue told them both, “run straight to the first house you find. Tell them there was a fire. Tell them to contact your folks. Whatever you do, though, you don’t tell anyone you’re a mutant. Okay?”

  The girl nodded uncomprehendingly, but Rahne knew the score. She’d take care of her classmate just fine. Rogue leaned forward to brush a wisp of hair from the younger girl’s face. In return, she got a brave attempt at a smile.

  “Okay,” the girl said.

  “You’ll be fine,” Rogue told her, and closed the secret panel behind them.

  Quickly she scooted the length of the hallway. The walls and floor, the very air, were trembling again as the helicopters made another run on the mansion. She had to find cover before she was nailed herself.

  Through the infernal din, suddenly, unexpectedly, she heard a familiar voice, someone she thought would be long gone from the mansion by now.

  “Rogue,” called John Allardyce.

  “Rogue!” bellowed Bobby Drake, determined to make himself heard.

  “Bobby,” she cried, startled to realize how out-and-out delighted she sounded to see him safe and free. John had to make do with just a nod of greeting.

  “There anyone else?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Bobby replied.

  “Petey Pureheart was looking after a crowd of kids,” John said. “Outside of them, nada. Bad guys galore.”

  “Where’s Logan?” Rogue demanded. “He was s’posed to be looking after us!”

  Bobby’s face twisted. She knew the look. It echoed her own reaction to some of the things she’d seen Logan do in a fight.

  “What’s happened?” she said, grabbing Bobby by the shirtfront. To save her life, Logan had let her imprint him and his healing factor. Most of the memories that came with his powers had thankfully faded over time, but un
der stress she still manifested occasional residual flashes of his personality. “Where is he?”

  Bobby didn’t need to be asked twice. “He was downstairs,” he told her.

  “This way,” she told them, intending to lead them back toward the secret passage.

  Before she could move, an exterior lamp turned the hall brighter than noonday. They saw two shapes vaguely outlined in the glare, hanging outside the window. Immediately Rogue grabbed John, Bobby grabbed Rogue, and they all tumbled around the corner in a heap as an explosion shattered the leaded glass to bits, spraying the corridor with splinters and debris. Right behind the blast came the soldiers, targeting lasers tracing lines through the smoke, fingers ready on the triggers. Each door they passed got the same treatment: shotgun blasts to the hinges followed by a shot from a battering ram to punch it open, a couple of stun grenades to incapacitate anyone inside, sustained bursts from submachine guns to finish the job. Each room took only seconds to clear, and they did the job with murderous, methodical precision.

  Without a word, the three young mutants decided that they didn’t want to find out what would happen if they were found. When the soldiers reached the corner, the kids were long gone.

  Up aboard the Hercules, the technicians staffing the sensor consoles were not happy. At the start of the incursion, they’d had a clear picture of the mansion’s interior. They knew precisely where the kids were.

  Now, after a span of too few minutes, nothing was certain anymore.

  They had troopers down all across the board, with varying degrees of injury, and more than a few deaths. Worse for them, they had gradually lost contact with a significant number of potential targets. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to determine the reason: the mansion must possess a number of sections that were comprehensively shielded against remote sensing and imagery. The only way to be sure of cleaning out the place would mean finding the access points and sending teams into the tunnels. Trouble was, given mission parameters, that wasn’t an option.

  The only alternative would be to widen the search parameters and try to pick the mutants up when they emerged onto the surface. But that would mean significantly degrading the resources available to monitor the prime target, Xavier’s mansion. Again, given mission parameters, not an option.

  Barring a miracle, any kids who’d escaped into the tunnels were pretty much free and clear.

  Unaware of this, Peter Rasputin led his party into one of the long tunnels burrowed deep beneath the estate. Its terminus was a thick stand of woods outside Xavier’s holdings, a nature preserve. He had no idea what would happen after that, or what would become of a score of terrified, bedraggled children in their nightclothes, with no money between them and no one close at hand they could trust.

  Right now, though, for Peter, that didn’t seem so important. He just wanted to get them, and himself, out of danger, to a place where no one would chase them or threaten them with guns. He wanted a breather, time enough to gather his wits and take stock of both the situation and his resources. Of the ultimate outcome, though, he had no doubt.

  Awful as things seemed now, in the end he was sure they’d work out all right.

  In that regard, Bobby and John would give him the argument of a lifetime. For them, as they hurried with Rogue down the nearest flight of stairs, the order of the evening was that things that were bad were constantly getting worse.

  The mansion was crawling with troops, and from the sounds they heard all around, they quickly realized that nobody was using tranquilizer guns anymore. The bad guys were shooting bullets now, and they weren’t being stingy with their ammunition.

  Abruptly, Rogue stopped in her tracks, so suddenly the others slammed into her from behind. Harsh words were formed, but none were spoken. The sight before them wouldn’t allow it.

  Rogue was standing amid a pile of bodies, all soldiers.

  “Logan was here,” John commented unnecessarily, but even he felt small and vulnerable in the face of this carnage.

  “This is old news,” Bobby said, reaching for Rogue’s gloved hand. “We can’t stay here, Rogue, we’re sitting ducks. We keep running after him like this, we’ll just get ourselves in trouble.”

  She didn’t reply, she didn’t move a muscle, so Bobby edged forward to look her in the face.

  She was staring down at her chest. It was covered in green dots. He looked up, following the beams of light to their source, and found a team of soldiers in the far doorway, weapons leveled.

  They never got a chance to fire. Logan saw to that.

  He was on the gallery above them, and with a primal scream that was so much more animal than human, he dropped on them like the wrath of God unleashed, arms held wide, claws extended.

  The soldiers didn’t stand a chance. Bobby couldn’t watch this time any more than the last. Rogue wouldn’t turn away. Logan was a part of her now, and would be forever, the same as with everyone else she imprinted. She felt her own fists flex just a little and felt an echo of the wild and untamable creature she saw before her.

  Something tweaked her attention. Her eyes flicked to the side, and she caught a glimpse of a smile on John’s face and a look to his eye that made her sad and scared all at the same time. John was enjoying this. He wanted a piece of it for himself. It would be fun.

  A brace of lights hit the entrance from outside and above, pinning Logan in their beams as the helicopters responded to frantic calls for help down below. They didn’t wait for orders, they wouldn’t have cared anyway; the moment their guns came to bear, they opened fire, pockmarking the lawn with craters and shattering the stone entrance to the mansion to powder. But their target wasn’t there anymore.

  “Go,” Logan told the kids, pushing them deep into the house. “Go, go, go!”

  John found the nearest escape passage, opened the door, then he and Bobby went leaping through at once. Rogue held back. Imprinting Logan had left her own senses with a faint residue of what Logan himself possessed, and she could hear soldiers closing on their position from every side.

  She called his name.

  “Keep going,” he told her, and shunted her none too gently over the threshold.

  “Logan,” she pleaded.

  He shut the door in her face. And she was glad.

  He figured at least twenty close at hand as he put his back to the wall, but only a dozen of them lit him up with their lasers. They didn’t fire right away, he didn’t care.

  He popped both sets of claws, but their fire discipline held. Nobody pulled a trigger.

  “You want a piece of me,” Logan raged, his face twisted with a wild, untamable grin. “C’mon, boys, take your best shot. You know you want to. Shoot me! And see who gets to walk out of here alive!”

  “No,” said someone new, with quiet authority.

  “Not yet,” the figure finished, approaching through the darkness. The voice was familiar, Logan recognized that at the start, but he couldn’t find a name or face to match it.

  “Wolverine? Is that you?” the man said, closer still, the soldiers reluctantly moving apart to allow him past. He was important to them, but also, and just as obviously, the man in charge. They couldn’t refuse. Kill him, Logan sensed instinctively, and this fight could well be won. “How long has it been?”

  The man paused, as if expecting an answer to his greeting, his voice showing some good humor as he continued: “Fifteen years? And you haven’t changed a bit. Me, on the other hand . . .”

  With that, William Stryker stepped into view. He wore combat gear, just like his men, and in that attire his true calling was more than plain.

  “Nature.” He made a deprecating gesture. “It takes its toll.”

  The scent rang bells, far more so than the face, yet try as he might Logan couldn’t find the labels that would give these random flashes of remembrance proper meaning.

  The claws withdrew into their housings.

  “What do you want?” Logan asked of him.

  Stryker replied with a s
mile that would have done the Cheshire cat proud.

  On the other side of the wall, Rogue stood unmoving in the entrance to the secret passage, bitterly ashamed of the surge of emotion that had swept through her as Logan closed the door. He’d been a stand-up guy for her from the start, and this was how she repaid him, by being happy that he stayed behind—because she felt an echo in her own soul of the berserker rage and madness that possessed his. It made her want to run away from him, more powerfully than any impulse she’d ever felt. But being his friend, being true to her name, she defied those expectations. She spit in their eye. Logan would have done the same, but this response was purely hers, and that, too, was why she chose to stay. They were alike, but they weren’t the same.

  Hands grabbed her arms. She shook them off.

  “Wait,” she told the boys, who couldn’t believe their ears. “You’ve got to do something.”

  “Damn straight,” John said hurriedly. “Run like hell while we’ve got the chance!”

  “They’re going to kill him!”

  That argument fell on totally deaf ears. Both boys had seen Logan in action. Neither believed such an outcome remotely possible.

  “Yeah, right.” John scoffed for emphasis. “He can handle himself, Rogue. Let’s book!”

  “Bobby,” she pleaded, “please!” She was desperate now, determined, because when she said, “They’re going to kill him,” the part of her that resonated with him suggested that was something he desired.

  All Bobby knew was that Logan was the scariest creature he’d ever encountered. He was every nightmare that had ever had come to life, and if he never met Logan again, he’d be haunted by these memories for as long as he drew breath. In a way, he blamed Logan for all that was happening tonight. The first time he came to the mansion was when they were attacked by Magneto; now, the night of his return, the Army. He was a walking invitation to disaster, and nothing good would come of hanging with him. He also saw the way Rogue looked at him, spoke of him, cared for him, and he hated him for holding the place in her heart he wanted for himself.