X-Men 2

by Chris Claremont

  The next sensation was an equally understated thump that told them they were once more on the ground.

  The kids in the back, being kids, let out a cheer.

  On the flight deck, the first flush of relief had been cast aside by the sight of what was waiting for them. They had descended into a forest clearing not much bigger than the Blackbird itself. On the edge of the clearing, parked under the sheltering evergreens, was a black limousine, not the sort of wheels normally used for a camping trip. But then, the couple using it wasn’t the sort you’d expect to find out here roughing it, either.

  Mystique gave Jean and Logan a wave from where they stood midway between the nose of the Blackbird and their car. Magneto, once again properly clothed in his signature black and gray, held out his hand in welcome. Mystique stood at his side.

  “If I set you down gently,” he offered in a pleasantly companionable voice, the kind you’d want in a favorite old-country uncle, “will you hear me out?”

  Chapter

  Twelve

  It was a good place to hide, even without the stealth netting that Storm and Logan quickly spread across the hull. Jean wanted to help, but her psychic exertions in the air had taken a physical toll—which she’d discovered when she tried to climb out of her pilot’s chair. The spirit was willing, the flesh had other ideas. She didn’t have strength to move, and Logan had to carry her out.

  Magneto had set the Blackbird down hard against a nice-sized escarpment, part of a line of large hills—baby mountains, really—that formed a valley with a mainly north-south orientation. It had been carved out of the landscape by the great ice ages, when the advancing glaciers had plowed troughs in the earth like a plow. This was still technically wilderness, with no roads to speak of for fifty miles in any direction, pretty rough going on foot through the forest. Magneto had brought his limo in the same way he saved the Blackbird, with his power.

  For Storm and Jean, that had proved a daunting revelation. The plane had been designed with Magneto’s abilities in mind, to make it as impervious to him as possible, and yet he’d grabbed hold of it and repaired it with frightening ease.

  The cliff formed a wall at their back. Every other direction, they saw only trees. Old-growth forest, timber that had never been cut, thick stands of fir that towered thirty meters and more in height. This was rugged country that made no concession to modern man or the amenities of modern society, as the kids learned when they decided to go exploring and almost immediately got themselves lost. Logan found them without any trouble but wasn’t happy about it, and he made it clear to them that next time they were on their own.

  “Think they listened?” Jean asked him.

  He snorted derisively. “That’ll be the damn day. Especially John. He’ll do it again just to spit in my eye.” His expression sobered. “How you doin’?” he asked her.

  “Pretty much fine, thank you,” she replied, interlacing her fingers and stretching her arms till the joints cracked. “Just being lazy.”

  “You’re entitled.”

  “Absent the circumstances, and the company,” she added, with a pointed flick of the eyes toward the limo, “I’d agree with you. I’ve been monitoring GUARD.” She meant the military command frequencies. “Both pilots are okay.” Logan made a face. He understood her impulse to save the two men, but frankly he couldn’t have cared less. Guy tries to kill him, the guy takes his chances. No bitching, no tears.

  “The second pilot’s reporting us as a probable kill,” Jean finished.

  “They buying it, the brass?”

  “Well, Ororo didn’t entirely disperse her storm. It’s raining pretty hard over the probable crash site, zero-zero visibility, no hope of flight operations until it clears, which she assures me”—ghost of a grin—“won’t be for a while. System seems to have stalled. Meteorologists are baffled.”

  “I’d keep looking if it was me, till I knew for sure.”

  “Hence our precautions,” and she indicated the netting, shrouding the plane and the car. “Even enhanced imagery won’t spot the plane, and our heat and electronic emissions are close to zero. By the time we finish setting up, we’ll look like a camping party, nothing more. There should be nothing here to merit a second glance.”

  “Except for him,” Logan noted, jutting his jaw in the general direction of Nightcrawler, who was carrying a tent pack over to where Mystique had begun to lay out their campsite.

  “Whatever happens, Logan, we’ll deal.”

  “So tell me, Jean, just how many people are there in the world with that color skin and those color eyes?”

  She shrugged. “How many are blond and blue, or redheaded with green eyes?”

  “I don’t believe in coincidence.”

  Her tone sharpened. “And I don’t believe in judging someone without giving them a fair chance. You of all people might appreciate that.”

  With a grunt of effort, deliberately ignoring, then waving away, his offer of help, Jean pushed herself to her feet and strode toward the open hatch of the Blackbird. Logan fumed as he watched her go, but he was mostly angry at himself. He had nothing against the German, couldn’t help liking him in some ways. But the attack on the mansion, and now finding himself in close proximity with a man he’d cheerfully slaughter, had put all his combat instincts on high alert. Jean was too much like Xavier, always determined to see the brighter angles of human nature. Logan had walked too long, too far, with killers. Trust came hard for him because he knew, deep down to his soul, the cost of betrayal.

  He felt as if he’d already failed once, by being caught by surprise at the mansion. He wasn’t going to let that happen again.

  Mystique was supervising the layout of the camp, and Logan had to admit the woman knew her stuff. She knew he was watching and if that bothered her, she didn’t let it show. Quite the opposite, in fact; she seemed amused by his attention.

  Logan smelled a faint acrid wisp on the wind, the detritus of a striker generating a spark, over and over, in an unsuccessful attempt to ignite a flame.

  That made him grin. The kids were going all Boy Scout. How cute.

  Bobby Drake didn’t share that amusement as repeated attempts to use John’s lighter to torch some kindling led to a huge amount of frustration. He tried paper, he tried twigs, he tried dry leaves, but nothing would catch. All the time he was conscious of John, sitting behind him with his back to a tree trunk, silently laughing at his failure.

  “You could help, you know,” Rogue snapped to John. There was no expression on the boy’s face as he looked up at her. His eyes were cold and unreadable.

  Forcing himself to ignore everything but the need to generate some fire, Bobby followed a couple of sparks as they landed on a leaf, pursing his lips and giving them a gentle puff of air to excite them into a true flame as they burned through the leaf and left a glowing boundary that quickly expanded outward in their wake. The more Bobby breathed, the brighter the embers glowed, until he saw the ghost of a flame. Stifling a cheer, he grabbed for some more tinder to feed the baby fire.

  Then, with a speed that surprised and saved him, Rogue’s hand caught him by the scruff of the neck and yanked him clear, his own muscles engaging that very same moment in kinetic response to a threat his conscious mind wasn’t yet even aware of. In that selfsame instant, the tiny flicker of flame exploded into a pillar of raw fire, hot as a blast furnace, that reared up better than ten meters before fading to a happy little campfire.

  Bobby scrambled around to confront the boy behind him, but he lost his balance as he did so and sprawled awkwardly on the grass, which kept John from being on the receiving end of a roundhouse punch to the face. He glared at John, so did Rogue, but all they got in return was the most innocent of smiles.

  John held out his hand, gesturing for the borrowed lighter. Bobby wanted to throw it away or, better yet, encase it in a block of ice that would last as long as a glacier. Instead, remembering all he’d been taught at home and at Xavier’s, he mastered his rage and d
ropped the lighter into John’s open palm. Then he and Rogue turned their backs on him and walked away. Once they were back at the school, assuming there was a school to go back to, Bobby determined to insist on a new roommate. John had crossed too many lines. Bobby wanted no more to do with him.

  After the fire came dinner. Nothing fancy, nothing that needed cooking. The campfire was mainly for psychological comfort, to give the scene an air of companionability that was lacking on the faces of most everyone present.

  It was an adversarial setting, Magneto and Mystique on one side of the fire, Jean, Storm, and Logan on the other. Everyone but Logan was seated. He stood behind the women and a little to their side, with a clear shot at Magneto. His stance appeared casual, but nobody was fooled. The question that lingered unspoken between them all was whether or not he could reach the older man and deal with him before Magneto could bring his own powers to bear.

  Magneto sat in a camp chair, with a presence that made it seem more like a throne. Mystique hunkered down beside him in a crouch, her movements so fluid it was hard to believe she had a skeleton beneath her indigo skin. There was a snap to the air, a harbinger of the fast-approaching winter, that made the heat of the fire welcome. Magneto had hated the cold since Auschwitz and had bundled himself inside an open greatcoat to keep it at bay. Mystique, by contrast, didn’t seem to mind a bit. She walked naked, using a decorative scattering of bony ridges across the chest and hips as a minimal acknowledgment of propriety, and dared the world to make a comment.

  Jean sat on knees and heels, a very Japanese stance that amply demonstrated her natural grace. She, too, was playing a role, presenting herself in an apparently submissive posture that was in fact anything but. Like a samurai, she could stay this way for hours, yet remain constantly ready to spring to her feet faster than anyone might have guessed. She rarely looked at Magneto, yet Logan knew her focus on the man was as intent as his own.

  Of them all, Storm looked the most natural as she tended the fire, feeding it the occasional length of wood while using her control of the winds to channel a constant breeze through the base of the blaze, keeping it hot. She sat cross-legged, in a position she’d learned as a child out on the Great Rift Valley, wandering with the Masai.

  The kids, showing more sense than Logan expected, were keeping their distance, as was Nightcrawler.

  Logan told the story of what had happened at the mansion. Magneto told them of Xavier’s and Scott’s capture.

  “Our adversary,” Magneto said at the end, “his name is William Stryker. He is very highly placed in the national intelligence community. Specializing in clandestine operations. Ostensibly accountable to the President, but it’s clear now he has an agenda all his own.”

  “What does he want?” Jean asked.

  The look Magneto gave her made his feeling plain: Shouldn’t that be obvious, child? But Logan spoke before he could repeat those sentiments aloud.

  “That’s the question we should be asking Magneto,” Logan challenged.

  Magneto inclined his head, very much the monarch holding court, the civilized man confronting a band of barbarians. Or worse, children.

  Storm had as little tolerance for being patronized as Logan did. “So,” she demanded curtly of the older man. “What is it, Eric? What do you want?”

  Magneto’s expression tightened so fractionally only Logan caught the change. He wasn’t used to being spoken to like this, and he didn’t like it. He knew his priorities, though. He’d leave any response for later.

  “When Stryker invaded your mansion, he stole an essential piece of its hardware.”

  “Cerebro?” Jean asked, shaking her head in denial. She didn’t want to believe that that was what had happened. “Stryker would need the professor to operate the system,” she said.

  “Precisely,” Magneto agreed. “Which is the only reason I believe Charles is still alive.”

  “What’s the deal?” Logan asked sharply. “Why are you all so scared?”

  Magneto answered him. “While Cerebro is working, Charles’ mind—amplified by its power—has the potential to connect with every living person on the planet. If he were to concentrate hard enough on a particular group of people—let’s say mutants, for example—he could kill us all.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding,” Logan said.

  “Charles and I built Cerebro as a tool,” Magneto continued, “one I believed, we both believed, would unite the world.”

  Flatly, a statement of fact, like announcing there are stars in the sky, Storm said, “Liar!”

  Magneto met her gaze and saw in her eyes the character of a woman who had faced down lions bare-handed.

  “You wanted to use Cerebro as a weapon against nonmutants,” she continued in that same calm, devastating reportorial tone. “Only the professor wouldn’t let you.”

  He didn’t try to defend himself. “Now, I fear, he has no more choice in the matter.”

  “Can you hear anything?” Bobby asked Rogue from the opposite end of the campsite.

  “Excuse me?” she asked him back, with a look that said she thought he was nuts.

  “I dunno, I thought, y’know, since you imprinted Wolverine—”

  “His name’s Logan,” she retorted in a fierce whisper. Even though she couldn’t hear what the adults were saying, she knew Logan could hear the kids just fine if he wanted, and suspected Jean could pick up their thoughts just as easily. “And I can’t, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said hurriedly in a placating tone. “Sorry I asked.”

  John, busy staring at their campfire, snorted.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Nightcrawler, his yellow eyes the only part of him that could readily be seen against the background shadows, “but I can get a closer look.”

  Bobby and Rogue nodded in tandem, and the yellow eyes vanished, leaving behind a faint bamf of imploding air and his distinctive scent of smoke and brimstone.

  “Nice,” Bobby said in admiration.

  John waved his hand in front of his face. “Oh, yeah. Mutant teleport farts. Real nice.”

  Nightcrawler didn’t catch the last remark, but if he had, he wouldn’t have thought anything of it. There wasn’t a joke or comment that could be made about the by-products of his power that he hadn’t heard already. Some of them actually made him laugh. Regardless, he always made it a point to smile. Grace in adversity was an article of faith with him.

  His destination was a fir tree just beyond the adults’ campfire. The challenge was getting close enough to reach a branch—without materializing impaled on one—and to avoid making so much noise when he grabbed hold that it would draw the attention of anyone down below.

  Using hands and feet and tail, he clambered silently down the trunk until he found a vantage point that kept him hidden but afforded a decent view of the others. Then he simply wrapped his tail around a branch, hung upside down, and listened.

  Storm was speaking to Magneto with an almost prosecutorial manner: “How would Stryker know what Cerebro is—or where to find it?”

  Magneto didn’t answer right away. He laid his right hand for a moment on the inside of his left forearm, where he’d received his identification tattoo from the SS guards at Auschwitz, rubbing his thumb absently back and forth across his sleeve as though he could feel the marks left in his skin through the thick, heavy cloth. Then, his expression strangely unreadable, he lifted his hand to the back of his neck, to the scar left by Stryker’s injections. He’d now been branded twice in his life. As a boy, there had been no way he could fight back. As a man, he’d thought there was no way he would allow such a thing to happen again.

  Vanity, he thought, remembering the ancient Roman injunction to their Caesars: All is Vanity.

  “I told him,” he said at last, an admission dragged from the depths of his soul.

  He looked from Storm to Jean, both women in the eyes, not bothering to hide the rage and shame that roiled within him like magma beneath the caldera of a dormant volcano, and was impre
ssed that neither flinched. “I helped design the system, remember? I helped Charles build it.

  “Stryker has undeniable methods of . . . persuasion. Effective against me. Effective even against a mutant as strong as Charles. Believe this, if Stryker has Charles, he will find a way to break him. And suborn him to his purposes. If he weren’t absolutely certain of that fact, he wouldn’t have acted.”

  “Who the hell is this Stryker?” Jean asked.

  “He’s a military scientist with considerable ties to the clandestine intelligence community. He has spent his professional life looking for a solution to what he considers the mutant problem. But if you require a more . . . intimate perspective, why don’t you ask the Wolverine?”

  “His name is Logan,” Jean said, coming too quickly, too sharply to Logan’s defense, in a way that made Magneto smile very thoughtfully as he turned his attention back and forth between them.

  “Of course it is,” he said. “But what’s in a name?

  “William Stryker,” he continued, “is the only other man I know who can manipulate adamantium. The metal laced through the Wolverine’s bones, it bears his signature.

  “Are you sure you don’t remember—Logan?” In return, he got a blank look. “What a pity.”

  “The professor—”

  “The professor trusted you were smart enough to discover this on your own. He gives you more credit than I do.” Logan’s eyes flashed, but beyond a subvocalized growl, he offered no other reaction to Magneto’s insult.

  “So Charley knew,” he said.

  “ ‘Charley’ has always known.”

  Jean looked sharply at Logan, but his face was as still as his thoughts.

  Logan didn’t react.

  “Charles has always known.”

  “Please understand,” Storm spoke calmly from the fireside, “if we don’t take this all purely on good faith. You went to some trouble to save us—for which we’re all quite appropriately grateful. The question is, why? What do you want, Magneto? Why do you need us?”