“Yeah, but to do that, you have to be conscious,” Cain replied.
“There are always risks,” Rogue said.
“That’s a hell of a risk,” he said. “Why take the chance? If we’re all captured, there isn’t anyone left to come to the rescue.”
“You have a better idea,” Cyclops said, somewhat sarcastically.
Cain’s eyes narrowed inside his helmet. The amiable spirit with which he’d been dealing with the X-Men dissipated. Scott Summers was a good tactician, an excellent field commander, and courageous as they came. Just because the X-Men had always been his enemies did not mean he could not appreciate, or even respect, their strengths. But he was something of an academic snob as well. Summers must have figured just because Cain didn’t finish high school that he was stupid. Well, he was wrong.
“In fact,” he said coldly. “I think I do.”
“Well, I for one would like to hear it,” Rogue said. “If we can avoid a head-on confrontation until after the X-Men are free, I’d be happy.”
“You guys think too heroically,” Cain said, and smiled in amusement at his own words. “This martyr-complex thing has got to stop if you want to see breakfast tomorrow. You’ve got to start to think like a thief, like a criminal. The rule there is, whatever you steal is only valuable if you’re still around to benefit from its theft.
“That’s why we need a diversion,” he said, looking to Jean because he was slightly irked at Cyclops just then. “If me, Summers, and Rogue start raising hell not far from Magneto’s headquarters, the attention will be diverted from the building. You probably wouldn’t be able to get in and find the X-Men without being discovered, but I’m sure you can convince a guard or three here and there that they didn’t see or hear you at all. Right?”
“It’s a fine line, Cain,” Jean responded, “but I try not to use wholesale telepathic manipulation on people when it can be helped.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t understand that...” Cyclops began, but let it go when he received an annoyed glance from Grey,
n
his longtime lady. Juggernaut would have been amused, but they didn’t have much time.
“Look,” he said, “I understand perfectly that you guys try to tread some fine line. To be honest, I think it’s pretty cowardly—when you go into a fight, it should be to win, no matter what—but somehow you seem to win anyway, so who’s to argue with success, right? Point is, we’ve got no time for things like good manners here. You said yourselves that this was it, the big one, that the future of the world rests on whether we can beat Magneto or not. Let’s worry about crossing boundaries later, okay?
“Besides, once I’ve started a fight, there’s only one way it ends,” Cain vowed. “The other guy goes down, or I do. I’m not playing dead for anybody. I just can’t do it.”
He watched them, what was left of the X-Men, as each weighed what he had said. Except for Wolverine, he’d always considered them a bunch of liberal wimps with their heads in the clouds. Now, though, with the fire in Rogue’s eyes, the resolve on Jean Grey’s face, and the tightening of Scott Summers’s fists, Cain wasn’t so sure.
One thing he was certain of, though, was that their plan sucked. Getting captured, on purpose or otherwise, just didn’t sit right with him. If they weren’t prepared to go along with his alternate suggestion, well, the Juggernaut would have to come up with a third plan for himself. Cain wondered if Summers would be so used to running the show that he’d ignore his suggestion out of spite. After a moment’s consideration, he pushed the thought away. Summers was smarter than that.
It wasn’t at all that the Juggernaut was extremely intelligent, or a good strategist, or anything of the sort. It was only as he’d said: in his line of work, you got in, grabbed your objective, and got out, one way or another.
Yeah, they’d have to go with his—
“Company,” Jean said quietly, taking several steps toward an eccentric clothing store on the right, hugging close to the building.
The others quickly followed, and so did Juggernaut, though he didn’t see anyone. He quickly discovered that he wasn’t
built for stealth, however. He was just too damn big to be inconspicuous, no matter where he was.
“What am I missing?” Cain asked.
Jean held up a finger to shush him. Rogue went to the shop’s door, and with a quick twist of the knob that shattered the locks, they were inside. The Juggernaut was about to follow when Cyclops held up a hand, urging him to stay out on the sidewalk.
“We’re not close enough,” Summers said. “Let’s try to do this fast.”
“Do what?” Cain replied, beginning to get frustrated.
Then he heard the voices.
Twenty-five yards ahead was an intersection. Traffic lights continued their mute exercise of authority with no regard to the lack of vehicles they might command. The voices were loud, one particularly deep and booming, magnified all the more by the haunting absence of noise in a city normally so saturated with it.
“This is the life, buddy!” the loudest voice thundered. “Always knew being a cop was easy. Free donuts, your own little kingdom like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. It’s a pretty good deal.”
“Frankly, Fred, I was hoping for a position with a bit more long-term potential, more responsibility,” said another male voice, this one with a strong Australian accent.
Juggernaut recognized them both. Grey must have been psi-scanning their immediate area almost constantly, watching for an attack or even a chance meeting, as this apparently was going to be.
Pyro and the Blob came around the corner as close to side by side as they could get, considering the Blob’s extraordinary girth. They weren’t alone. At least a dozen other mutants trailed behind them, some familiar to him, most not. Blob and Pyro, though, were easy to recognize. They’d been part of Freedom Force for a while, celebrities, but even before that, they’d made the news. Major troublemakers, hellraisers of the first order.
“Well, well, well,” Juggernaut said, “what’ve we got here?”
As a fighting force, these later-generation Acolytes were untrained. Several seemed to freeze, uncertain how to react. Fully half a dozen spread out in attack formation, those who were armed bringing weapons to bear. Mutant mercenaries. Not criminals, not terrorists, just creeps with powers hiring out to the highest bidder without a moment’s consideration of who they were working for, what they were destroying. Juggernaut had no illusions: he was no hero, he was one of the bad guys. But even the guys in the black hats in the cowboy flicks had dignity, honor.
Mercenaries were scum.
There were a pair of mutants in the back—a big bruiser and a stout guy with spiky hair all over his body—who looked like tag-team wrestlers and clearly worked as a team. They looked familiar, but Juggernaut couldn’t place them. Those two bothered him. They seemed dangerous, far more so than the mercenaries, because these other two were obviously a little nuts.
Pyro and the Blob both merely smiled and kept walking.
“Do my eyes deceive me, Fred, or is that the Juggernaut?” Pyro asked, even as he waved at the mercenaries to be sure they wouldn’t attack ... yet. “Why, I’d heard as how he’d turned tail and abandoned the cause. Was kind of surprised, actually. Not a good idea to piss Lord Magneto off these days.”
Lord Magneto, Juggernaut thought with venomous sarcasm. What a load of crap.
“How about it, buddy?” the Blob said, ignoring his partner’s amused babble. “You come back to tell us you’ve changed your mind?”
“As a matter of fact, I have,” Cain replied.
He could feel the sigh of relief that went through the group. The Juggernaut’s reputation had preceded him after all. Who in their right mind would want a battle, no matter what the odds? As Pyro and the Blob stopped a few feet away from him, Cain studied the rest of them, trying to figure out what their powers were. Far as he could tell, the tag-team boys didn’t have any kind of weapon, mechanical or natural, other than
strength and, he guessed, agility.
Of the four mutants who were obviously inexperienced, two looked as if they might pose a threat—not to him, of course. One had bony spines lining his body, and the way he stood it seemed likely the teenager could fire the spines from his body or from some natural-flesh projectile housing on the back of his hands. The other was leaking phosphorescent radiation or something from his mouth. The rest of the rookies looked harmless, but you could never judge a mutant just on appearance.
The mercenaries were another story. Three were armed with high-powered automatic rifles, so their mutant gifts were probably more cerebral. Another was nearly feral, with a collar and heavy chain leash held by a seven-foot hulk of a man whose flesh seemed made of granite. Then there was the woman, exquisitely beautiful with her tumble of chestnut-brown hair and a gown of some gossamer material so thin it was nearly impossible for Cain to take his eyes off her, even though he could see nothing of her revealed beneath the dress.
They were dangerous, though obviously those armed with conventional weapons were low-level mutants at best.
“Changed your mind, eh?” Pyro sneered. “S’funny. Harlan Kleinstock told me you insisted you weren’t a mutant at all. You had a few choice words for him, is what he said, and none of them were real nice.”
“That’s true,” Juggernaut agreed. “But like I said, I changed my mind.”
“So now you want to join up—maybe you realized Magneto’s gonna be the only game in town pretty soon,” the Blob reasoned aloud.
“You got it,” Cain admitted. “Magneto’s getting ready to change the world. But you’re wrong about one thing: I didn’t come back to join up.”
The Blob narrowed his eyes in confusion. “But I thought you said you changed your mind?” he asked.
“I did, but not how you’re thinking,” the Juggernaut said, a thin smile splitting his face. “See, I wasn’t lying when I said I wasn’t a mutant. Now, I figure, I’ve got a lot to lose if Magneto makes every human being a second-class citizen— assuming he’ll even be that kind about it.”
Pyro held up a hand and the mercenaries started to close in, spreading out a bit to be sure that the Juggernaut couldn’t escape. With the rookies along for the ride, they started to circle around behind him. What fools, he thought. They actually imagined he was planning to make a break for it, even after he’d been standing there nearly two minutes already.
“Y’know, you actually are as stupid as you are big,” the Blob said, smiling a schoolyard bully smile that was as obvious a threat as if he’d been slamming a fist into his palm.
Juggernaut snorted laughter.
“Oh, that’s rich,” he said. “I’ve been called big and stupid by a guy named ‘The Blob’! That’s one to tell the grandchildren!”
The Blob began to go for him, but stopped when Pyro held up a hand and mumbled a warning.
“We’re gonna do this the right way, the way Magneto wants it done,” Pyro said. “You have been summoned before the Emperor Magneto, Juggernaut. This is a direct order from an Imperial officer. Will you comply?”
“Yeah, right,” Juggernaut said derisively.
“In that case, in the name of Emperor Magneto, you are hereby under arrest,” Pyro said, one comer of his mouth rising in a bratty smirk. “Okay, people. He’s all yours.”
The Blob took a step forward, precisely what the Juggernaut had been waiting for. As Fred Dukes was in midstep, Cain hauled back and hit him with all the strength he could muster, right in the face. There was a crack, like bone breaking, and the Blob cried out in pain and fell onto his butt on the pavement, accompanied by a minor earth tremor.
The rest of them would probably be a cinch. Even if he’d been alone. Which he wasn’t.
“The X-Men!” Pyro cried as he saw Cyclops, Rogue, and Jean Grey burst from the clothing store.
It got ugly after that.
Pyro tried to flash-fry the Juggernaut where he stood. Cain reached for him, completely unscathed by the flames, and the little man tried to leap away. But the Juggernaut was faster than most of his enemies imagined, and snagged Pyro by the ankle. He tore the gas tanks from the mutant’s back, and tossed them away. Then he held Pyro up in front of him and slapped him once across the face. Pyro hung limp, out cold, and the Juggernaut threw him away as carelessly as he had the gas tanks, not even bothering to watch where the Australian landed.
“Next!” he shouted, thrilled by the fight. It was a real kick to see the X-Men fighting beside him, knowing they weren’t going to try to stop him because, for once, he was on the side of the angels.
Bullets sprayed the X-Men, bouncing off Rogue and the psi-shield Jean had thrown up around herself and Cyclops. In seconds, all the rookies were down except the one with the phosphorescence around his lips. He opened his mouth as if to speak, and green chemical fire raged forth, and this time, Juggernaut could feel the heat. This was no ordinary flame, but some mutant combination of normal fire, chemical heat, and intense hatred, a psionic blaze with a formidable mind behind it.
Cain snarled at the rookie, snapping one of tire armed mutants up in his hands and using the man for a shield. The guy was lucky, his mutant power was a personal force shield. However, it wasn’t a very powerful shield. It was going to keep him alive, but not from getting burned.
The Juggernaut heard a howl and before he could turn, the feral mercenary was on his back tearing at his helmet, trying to get it off. He didn’t think the thing knew that his helmet protected him from psychic probes and attacks. No, the savage mutant just wanted to tear at his face and eyes, since the flesh of his anus resisted its claws.
Cyclops quickly took out the two other armed mutants, then fired a shot at the ghostly woman who now floated toward him. As Cain looked on, the woman seemed to become a kind of copper mist, sparkling in the sun and yet unmoved by the slight breeze that stirred the day’s heat. It enveloped Cyclops, but the Juggernaut couldn’t see anymore because the feral mercenary was still on his back. He swatted at it, reaching back to try and get hold of it, but the thing, or man if it still was a man, was too quick.
Cain saw Rogue, about to be pummeled by the huge mutant who appeared made of stone. He spun around, reaching for the wild thing on his shoulders, and saw Jean Grey, using a telekinetic shield to hold off an attack by the green fire breather. Spun again, and there was Cyclops, on the ground, clutching at his throat as if he could find no air to breathe. The copper mist that had been a beautiful mutant woman hung around him in a cloud. He blasted an optic charge into the metallic ether, but with no result.
Part of the Juggernaut wanted to watch, to savor the end of an enemy’s life. But that was the part of him, the cruel, sadistic part, that he had been working at eliminating for years. It wasn’t professional, and it didn’t feel very good either. Besides, for now, Cyclops was on his side.
The Juggernaut stopped spinning and bent over fast. The feral mutant was momentarily thrown into the air, though it kept its clawed hold on his armored neck. Still, it flew up high enough so that Cain could grab it by its odd coat, his invulnerable skin splintering a number of spines that might have been tipped with poison.
He tossed the thing into the poison mist next to the writhing form of Cyclops. Immediately, the woman solidified. Though he ought to have been near death after having been so long without air, his lungs filled with some awful poison until she had drawn herself out of him to reform, Scott Summers was on his knees in a heartbeat. The feral thing reached for him, and Juggernaut worried that he’d made a mistake, that he’d saved Cyclops from one form of poisoning only to confront him with another by way of the savage mutant’s porcupinelike spines.
Cyclops toasted it with a full-force optic blast from about three feet away. The savage creature was thrown across the
street and through a department store’s plate-glass window. It stirred, alive still, but did not rise.
“Scott, get ready!” Jean shouted.
Juggernaut looked over to where J
ean still protected herself against the rookie mutant spitting toxic flame. Suddenly, he realized what she intended. She was going to telepathically force the ghostly poison woman to become solid so that Cyclops could take her down—leaving herself deliberately open to attack.
He moved.
“Now!” Jean said, dropping her telekinetic shield and forcing the ghost woman to solidify.
Cyclops decked the woman with a fist as Juggernaut hurled himself in front of the flames that were about to engulf Jean Grey. He howled in agony, and the thing turned on him, advancing, trying to finish the job.
“Thanks, Cain, I just needed a momentary distraction,” Jean said, and suddenly, no more fire came out of the mutant’s mouth. Even the phosphorescence that had been omnipresent had now disappeared.
The rookie’s eyes went wide.
“What did you do?” he said in horror, then, realizing he had no weapon, turned and ran away.
“What did you do?” Cain asked.
“Unlike most mutants who have energy powers, like Scott or Gambit, that guy’s fire was not merely psionically controlled but psionically generated. I turned it off. He can’t remember how to generate it anymore,” Jean said, her voice harsh, and yet somehow sad.
“Pretty nasty for the X-Men,” Cain remarked. “I wonder if Charley would approve.”
“Probably not,” Jean admitted. “But we don’t have time for manners, or so I’m told.”
“Touche,” Cain said.
“Juggernaut!” the Blob boomed, just to the left. “You hurt me!”
“Good!” Cain replied, smiling broadly.
“What’s wrong with you, siding with them?” the Blob
asked, advancing dangerously, clutching his broken face. “You’re a criminal, you’re one of us.”
“One of you?” the Juggernaut asked. “Don’t insult me, man. You haven’t got any class at all. You’ll hire yourself out to anyone with a plan and some cash, or just tear up a town for the hell of it, because you can. I don’t have the time for those tantrums anymore, and I’m not about to become a mercenary. I’m a career criminal, Blob, in it for the gain, not the pain. If Magneto takes over, my career’s over.”
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