Rather than waste time attempting to figure out how the power-dampening shackles worked, Iceman simply froze the mechanisms, rendering them brittle and useless. All four were then able to free themselves with simple flicks of the wrists and ankles.
As they walked out, Wolverine glared at Cargil, began to walk toward her, but Storm held him back with a hand.
“Not a word,” Bishop snarled at her as they left.
Wisely, she remained silent.
Trish whimpered as she stepped past the bodies of her friends.
“God, I’m so sorry,” she said quietly, but she wasn’t sure if she was apologizing for not having prevented their deaths, or for having remained alive.
A strong hand landed on her shoulder, and then the Beast pulled her close to him. They walked side by side, his blue-furred arm hugging her tightly to him, warm and safe.
“You did what you could,” Hank McCoy said. “You did everything you could, Trish.”
“I couldn’t save them,” she said softly.
“No,” Wolverine said, the ferocity in his voice startling. “But we can go out and make sure that it ends here, that nobody else dies on some maniac’s whim.”
“I’ve got your back, Logan,” Bishop said gravely.
“No quarter, X-Men,” Storm commanded. “Eliminate any resistance hard and fast, and don’t forget our main objective. Magneto must be defeated.”
* * *
The summer day had moved on, the shadows lengthening into that long stretch of waning sunlight called late afternoon. The canyons of the city were already plunged into shadow where the buildings were the tallest. It being summer, night was still a long way off, but those shadows were a warning that it was on the way.
With a nervous glance from side to side, Gabriela Frigerio hurried across the street with her brother Michael and the group she’d come to think of as the inner circle of the resistance: La-marre, Steve, Joyce, and their de facto leader, Miguelito.
“I don’t know about this,” Joyce said, her usually radiant face eclipsed with concern. “I mean, how do we know we can trust these people? Isn’t it better to stay in the underground, get more organized, before making a move?”
“Yeah,” Steve agreed. He was her husband, however, so his support wasn’t particularly persuasive,
“That sounds good, lady,” Lamarre said, “but it won’t work. You don’t get it. We’ve got to make the stand now, before Magneto gets any stronger than he is.”
“Lamarre is right,” Miguelito said.
He was short enough that they all had to look down to pay attention.
“Magneto is at war now,” Miguelito continued. “If the government wins, great, we’re all set. But if they lose, it will be over for us, no matter how hard we fight. No, the best time to take a stand is now, when Magneto won’t have much time or firepower to dedicate to us.
“We’ve got hundreds of people waiting for the word, and there are probably thousands of others who will respond if we just set an example for them,” Miguelito said.
“Thousands?” Gabi asked
Miguelito smiled, shrugged. “One can hope,” he said.
“Hope isn’t going to keep us alive,” Michael mumbled.
They all looked at him, Gabriela in particular. Just as they
had to look down to meet Miguelito’s eyes, they had to look up to see Michael’s. He was six foot six, at the least, and rarely said a single word.
“Actually, Michael, I disagree,” Gabriela said. “I think hope will keep us alive. I think it already has. It’s all we’re running on, right now. We may not be capable of taking this city back from Magneto on our own, but we can certainly make things more difficult for him. We can make absolutely certain that the human population of this city does not cooperate with him.”
“We don’t even have to do it for long,” Lamarre added. “Much as I hate to rely on any mutie for help, we know the X-Men are going to be moving in on Magneto at any time. As long as we—”
“My God!” Joyce shouted. “Don’t any of you hear the bombs falling? Don't you hear the war? We shouldn’t be out here at all, we’re not ready for this.”
For a moment, nobody responded. Steve tried to pull Joyce into a comforting embrace, but she brushed him away. Lamarre started to say something, but Miguelito hushed him.
‘ ‘Do we hear the war?’ ’ he asked rhetorically. ‘ ‘Of course we do. But I’m not willing to let somebody else fight it for me, to let someone destroy my city in order to save it. You want to go back into the subways and take charge of feeding people and giving medical attention, get all that organized, that’s okay with me. Nobody is going to think any less of you.”
Her eyes widened, and Joyce looked around the group. Finally, she nodded.
“Let’s go,” she said, pulling Steve after her.
He offered an apologetic glance, but Gabriela thought he seemed more than a little relieved. The man had probably been as frightened as his wife, but she had voiced her fear, risked condemnation and accusations of cowardice. Gabi wondered if that made Joyce any more courageous than her husband. She kind of thought that it did.
With Lamarre and her brother trailing behind, Gabi continued up the sidewalk next to Miguelito. Their weapons were held at the ready, in case they should be set upon by Magneto’s forces, or human beings who had used Magneto’s conquest as an excuse for vandalism, theft, and chaos.
They walked in silence for several blocks. Halfway down a side street, Miguelito stopped and pointed.
“That’s it,” he said.
“Who are we meeting here, man?” Lamarre asked.
“What’s that, Lamarre, the fortieth time you’ve asked me that question?” Miguelito responded. “Well, you’re about to find out.”
It was a bar, a slightly seedy-looking place that was far from being one of the trendy pickup bars that Gabi had frequented before the madness came to New York. This was a place for drinking, not a place for meeting people or socializing.
A glowing window sign advertised Guinness stout, and above the door, a neon tube spelled out the words tom’s taproom.
“Here?” she couldn’t stop herself from asking. “Our big powwow is in here?”
“Where did you want to do it, Times Square?” Miguelito cracked, then pulled open the door to Tom’s Taproom and entered.
They descended half a dozen steps and Gabi blinked several times, eyes struggling to adjust to the darkness of the bar. Dark wood, dim lighting, the eternal odors of old beer and cigarette smoke. The man behind the bar, a stout guy with gray hair but a young face, had one hand on the grip of a shotgun that lay on the oak bar.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re not open for business.”
“Hey, it’s us who should be sorry,” Miguelito said. “Though you are obviously back there ready to serve drinks to somebody, we’re not here to drink. We’re here to help.”
The stout man’s eyes narrowed.
“Miguel?” he asked.
“Yeah, Tom, it’s me,” Miguelito answered.
Tom smiled and came around the bar. Miguelito went over, allowed the Taproom’s owner to look him up and down, and then the two men did the last thing Gabi might have expected.
They hugged.
“God, it’s good to see you, kid,” Tom said. “Jesus, you grew up fast.”
“Nah,” Miguelito said. “You just got old, Tommy.”
Tom turned toward the murky-looking back room of the bar. Fluorescent light burned, and she was fairly certain there were a couple of pool tables back there.
“Wilson, get on out here,” Tom shouted. “You’ve got visitors.”
A man appeared from around a partition that screened much of the back room off from the rest of the bar. He was stock ' and dangerous looking, Latino, and Gabi was certain she had seen him somewhere before.
He wasn’t alone. One after another, men and women filed out after him. Gabi counted twelve of them in total, and several wore blue uniforms.
/> “The cops?” Lamarre snarled. “What are you, nuts? You know Magneto’s got the cops workin’ for him.”
“Not all the cops,” the man Tom had called Wilson said defensively.
That’s when Gabi recognized him. Wilson Ramos, the police commissioner of New York City. She understood Lamarre’s anger and confusion. What were they doing there, with the police, with the commissioner, for God’s sake? They had been told that City Hall, that the entire city government, was now working with Magneto. That meant that...
“You set us up?” Michael said softly, startling her.
“No, man, it’s not like that at all,” Miguelito explained. “Then what is it like?” Gabi snapped.
Lamarre was already backing toward the door. “This was supposed to be another resistance group, man, not Magneto’s pet human soldiers.”
“If my little brother hadn’t warned me you’d be armed, I’d shoot you just for saying that,” Wilson Ramos said. “Now can we get down to business, or what? City Hall is under siege, but the resistance fighters there are unorganized and their numbers are dwindling. They need our help.”
“Your little brother?” Gabi asked, astonished.
Miguelito smiled.
“I never used to tell people mi hermano was the Apple’s top cop,” he said. “Not that I was ashamed, but nobody would believe me. Now our differences don’t seem like such a big deal anymore.”
He turned to Wilson.
“Do they, Willie?”
“Not at all, ’Ito,” Ramos said. “But don’t call me that, or I’ll have to shoot you.”
“Seems to me you’re just itching to shoot someone,” Lamarre said, and Gabi could tell from his tone that he was still greatly suspicious.
“Oh, yeah,” Wilson responded. “Problem is, the guy I want to shoot can’t be killed with bullets. So, if I can’t take Magneto out, I can sure as hell take City Hall and sweep out the collaborator trash like Maxine Perkins and Steve Tyree. I’ll shoot them if I have to.”
Lamarre smiled.
“When do we leave?” he asked.
* * *
Magneto hovered more than one thousand feet above ground, breathing air that was both thinner and more polluted than below. He could see the Empire State Building to the north and the World Trade Center to the south, with the Statue of Liberty beyond it in New York Harbor.
As best he could, he surveyed the war around him, and realized that the military was not closing in at all, not as he had first believed. Indeed, while they were striking out at the Sentinels in a colossal waste of ammunition and losing soldiers to the massive robots’ return fire, they were not pressing the battle at all.
Apparently, they were awaiting final orders from the American President. But what Magneto could not determine was exactly what they expected those orders to be.
It was entirely possible that the President was simply being indecisive. But there were two other potential reasons for the military’s inaction, both of which concerned Magneto a great deal.
w
The first, and most bothersome, was that Xavier might be telling the truth. The President might actually be considering thermonuclear attack. They could raze New York City to the ground, and then claim that Magneto himself had set off the nukes to keep the city from returning to American control.
It seemed all too plausible. Even so, and despite the atrocities he had witnessed in his life, Magneto could not bring himself to believe that the leader of the most powerful nation in the world would knowingly murder hundreds of thousands of American citizens merely to save one city from conquest.
The other option was that the President was waiting for something. Perhaps he and Xavier had cooked up a plan. But without the X-Men, what could they hope to accomplish? Even if all of the X-Men were free and in top form, there would be nothing they could do against hundreds of other mutants and a fleet of Sentinels.
With an electric crackle, the gauzy image of the Acolyte Scanner shimmered into existence beside him. It was an odd thing to see, a ghostly female form standing in the middle of the sky without any apparent means of support. But then. Scanner wasn’t actually there at all.
“You signaled for me, my Emperor?” Scanner inquired.
“Order all units to await my word before becoming involved in this skirmish,” he said. “The war has not actually begun. It is still possible, I believe, to end this conflict without destroying the city. That would be my preference, since we all intend to live here.”
Scanner offered a low bow, and flashed out of existence.
Magneto wanted to think that the President was merely having a difficult time committing to a plan. The other two options were far less appealing.
In any case, he had determined to refrain from attacking the military himself unless they directly assaulted him first, or until the President ordered an invasion or a nuclear attack.
If he wanted Haven to still be standing when the conflict was over, Magneto knew he had to make his moves wisely.
Chapter 10 j
On the steps of City Hall, a swarm of humans wore away at the nerves and resolve of the combined mutant and human force responsible for the building’s defense. Police officers loyal to the city government, to the recently promoted mayor, Maxine Perkins, and those simply loyal to the job of keeping the peace, tried to put down the revolt with a minimum of violence. But the patience of policemen, particularly in urban areas, was notoriously thin. And they were well armed.
Side by side with the cops were Acolytes, mutant followers of Magneto, charged with forcing the remaining human populace to afford mutants the respect that was now required.
Heads were cracked open like rotten tomatoes, citizens shot with rubber bullets—and some with the real thing as well. Ivan Skolnick tried desperately not to use his mutant powers, which he still despised. Yet others around him were not so prudish. Senyaka, one of Magneto’s Acolytes, lashed his agonizingly painful psionic whip at any human in range. It was a vicious scene.
For a while, it seemed as though the human hordes were like the legendary Hydra: cut off one head and two more would take its place. But after a time, the flow appeared to dwindle.
That was about the time the war started in earnest. Perhaps, Skolnick thought, the attackers realized all was lost, that their efforts meant nothing. Or perhaps they felt there were more important battles to be fought that day. In any case, Skolnick’s troops, who were responsible for policing mutant-human relations, were thinning the crowd quite a bit.
“We seem to be winning this part of the war, Major,” the usually taciturn Senyaka said at his side. “Since it appears the Emperor may have need of me elsewhere, I assume I can be confident in leaving you to your appointed duties?”
“Absolutely,” Skolnick replied.
Senyaka made short contact with someone via comm-link. and was immediately teleported from the defense of City Hall. Skolnick was very happy to see him go. The burning eyes behind that cowl had disturbed him, most especially with the way they flared whenever Senyaka’s psionic whip would wrap around a human limb or throat. As if he was leeching some kind of energy from them.
Skolnick didn’t want to have to think about it. Nor did he want to think about Maxine Perkins, and the new police commissioner, the self-righteous Steven Tyree. He tried to turn it off, tried not to see the faces of men, women, and teenagers. The way he viewed it, they were all fighting for that magical place in every heart where a person’s hometown will always stay, perfectly preserved from childhood. Despite all its faults, New York inspired as much passion as any small town.
He could not stand those faces, etched with fear and desperation. These people were merely defending their homes, defending the rights that the greatest nation on Earth had given them. Rights that Magneto had taken away. Skolnick was beginning to seriously wonder if he had made a grave error. All his life, Skolnick had wanted to be a soldier. He had become an extraordinary soldier, a credit to his family, a servant of the American ideal.
Now he had betrayed all that. Yes, he was a mutant. Yes, there were hardships to be dealt with because of it. But hardships had been faced by those crusading for gender and race equality, and other “misfits” for centuries.
Had Magneto gone too far?
Bullets chipped brick behind Ivan Skolnick’s head, and he ducked, preparing to blast the shooter as quickly as possible. No time for self-recriminations, he thought. This was a war, and he a soldier.
Question was, whose side was he really on? Even he wasn’t sure.
* * *
“So much for the element of surprise, eh, Summers?” Cain Marko sneered.
Cyclops knew the Juggernaut’s amusement was not feigned. Marko was happy the time for battle had arrived. It was the only thing the man had ever done well.
In a way, though he was loath to admit it even to himself, Scott could relate.
“Rogue,” he barked, “take down the giant. Marko, you’ve got Slab. I’m on Hairbag. Jean, reign the others in until we’re clear!”
So I’m on crowd control now? Jean’s mental voice entered his head, even as Cyclops unleashed an optic blast that knocked Hairbag end over end into the woman with the octopus face.
Scott didn’t respond. No need. He knew Jean was just picking on him. And she knew that she had not been relegated to mere crowd control, but given the most work to do. She had to keep a dozen-odd mutants busy all by herself, while the others took down the major players and then came to her assistance. He hated laying all that on her, but they didn’t seem to have much other choice.
Not that things ever worked out the way he planned. His skill as a field leader was not even necessarily based on perfect execution of a plan, but on instinctive reaction to complications that might arise.
Like now, for instance.
Hairbag had untangled himself from the tentacles that extended from the forehead and cheeks of the tall woman he had landed on. Cursing her in a voice loud enough to be heard over shouts and cries of pain and anger, Hairbag leaped to his feet much faster than Cyclops might have expected. Rather than rush at him in attack, however, the spiky-haired mutant turned his back on X-Men and Acolyte alike. He bent over slightly, and as if some switch had been thrown, the hair on his back stood up straight and sharp.
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