“I’m trying,” Val answered. “I’m having a problem getting through Magneto’s program, though. The override codes are useless if I can’t get into the system in the first place.” “Why don’ you try another way in?” Gambit asked. “Dere must be a back door or somet’ing, non?"
Cooper paused before looking down at the keyboard, then at the monitor in front of her. Finally, she looked back at them.
“I’m sure there is. Magneto had to have a back door built in to reprogram them in the first place,” Cooper explained. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this. We know he was involved with the Hellfire Club for a while. Well, before anyone knew he was a mutant, Sebastian Shaw was building Sentinels for the government. He could have put something in, told Magneto. That’s all I can think of.”
“But we aren’t going to get that information, are we?” Archangel reasoned.
‘ ‘Well, that back door was probably set up for a single use anyway,” she replied.
“So what are our other options?” Gambit asked.
“Only one,” Cooper answered. “Gyrich.”
“You expect him to help you?” Archangel asked.
“Hey,” Gambit broke in, “if he don’ help us, his derriere is on de fire right along wit’ de rest of us.”
“That doesn’t mean he’ll help, though,” Val said. “Still,
it may be our best hope. Let me try to get him on the comm-link.”
She reached for the comm-unit on her wrist. Before she could speak, something slammed into the Alpha Sentinel, rocking it hard. Val fell to the floor from her seat. Gambit and Archangel stumbled, nearly falling themselves. Another blast struck the Sentinel, and plasma burst through the hole Gambit had blown in the metal hunter’s head.
“Cover!” Cooper yelled, and all three of them flattened out on the floor.
Sparks flew in the command center, but Gambit did not think there had been any real damage. Still, it had been a close call.
“Enough of that!” Val said, and slid into her seat once more. “Let me just adjust the frequency of this thing and . ..
“Gyrich!” she barked into the comm-unit. “Come in, Gyrich!”
“Who the hell is this?” an unfamiliar but authoritative voice demanded on the link.
“This is Valerie Cooper,” Val snapped. “You know the name?’ ’
“Well, yes, Ms. Cooper, I—”
“Get me Gyrich on the comm,” she said.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, I—” the military man began.
“Now!” she ordered.
“Yes, ma’am,” the soldier complied.
They waited.
“Warning!” the Alpha Sentinel said, its voice loud enough to hurt their ears. “Intruders detected. Commencing termination.”
• • *
“I can’t believe Marko turned coward and ran,” Wolverine snarled, and popped a single claw through the lower abdomen of a mutant whose main power seemed to be particularly repulsive body odor, backed up by a small dose of telekinesis.
“Find a doctor,” he said gruffly to the mutant, and then turned away.
The man would live, but he was most definitely out of the fight.
“You’re showing amazing restraint,” Iceman said, watching the mutant clutch his belly and stumble into the midst of the mosh pit that passed for a battleground.
Wolverine grunted something in return. Drake was right. While the others were going a bit farther than usual—not killing, but not holding back nearly as much as they normally would—he was drawing the line. Most of their enemies were relatively decent folks duped into a war they had never asked for by Magneto himself. ’Course, if he ended up ripping open Senyaka’s rib cage, or Voght’s, well, that was another story. He had plans for that punk Pyro too. If he ever got his hands on the guy.
“You’re right about Marko, though,” Iceman said. “I mean, I was stunned as anyone to see him fighting with us instead of against us. But then to turn tail and run—it just doesn’t make sense.”
They spun and danced and cut and bludgeoned their way through half a dozen of Magneto’s faithful. Wolverine’s healing factor made up quite handily for his lack of sleep. He had no idea how the others were even standing up.
“Getting dark,” Drake observed at his side.
“Yeah,” Wolverine agreed, “good for us. Bad for them.” “Look around, Logan,” Iceman said. “You actually think we’ve got a shot at winning this thing?”
“More than a shot,” Wolverine answered. “We’re gonna win because that’s the only acceptable outcome. No matter what it takes, we have to win. It wouldn’t hurt if we had more help, I’ll tell ya, but we’ll make do.”
But even as he said it, Wolverine recognized that his words were empty. There was the distinct possibility, given the numbers involved, that they would fail. Off to the left, he could see Rogue and the Beast driving through a parade of attackers. Scott and Jean were somewhere up the street, and Storm was above them, dropping miniature tornadoes and hailstorms on the enemy. She might be their greatest asset in a battle this size, he thought. He didn’t know where the hell Bishop had gotten to. The last time Wolverine had seen him, the future X-Man had been falling out of the sky, and Rogue had barely saved him from becoming so much Manhattan road pizza.
“Time to die, traitors!” cried a thin man with skin like polished ebony and features so angular, they might be diamond sharp.
He slashed long fingers toward Wolverine, who put his fists up, claws in the air, and blocked the attack. The crystalline man grunted his displeasure, but before he could withdraw his deadly hands, Wolverine whipped his claws to either side, neatly slicing off the end of each digit. The man screamed in pain.
“Traitors!” he cried again, this time making the word a pained curse.
A swarm of other mutants moved in. They’d been backed up to the massive glass display window of a designer clothing store. Thirty of Magneto’s followers, and only two of them. Wolverine knew that he couldn’t beat them all without killing some of them, or at least he feared that was the case.
“Freeze ’em,” Wolverine growled.
Iceman didn’t miss a beat. He might have been an X-Man a lot longer than Wolverine, but he never failed to defer to Logan in the field. Wolverine chalked that up to good teamwork. Drake had proven over and over in the past few days something that Wolverine had always known but never voiced. Iceman was a lot better at being an X-Man than anyone ever gave him credit for.
With a muttered, regretful curse that Wolverine’s enhanced hearing could not have failed to pick up, Bobby Drake lifted both his hands, and poured on the ice.
“Traitors?” he screamed in fury. “We’re traitors? To what? Insanity? All we want is an end to this kind of garbage. All we want is peace! There are humans who hate all mutants because of your actions, your beliefs. You’re no better than they are!”
Thirty mutants were frozen in the street. Iceman controlled his powers to an extent Wolverine had never witnessed, leaving, in every case, only the individual’s head exposed. Just enough to breathe. As he produced the ice, Bobby slid along, propelling himself with his power, as he would on an ice slide. Wolverine scrambled after him, looking for trouble, watching for an aerial attack.
Bobby continued out into the middle of the street, freezing at least a dozen more mutants. Rogue had to fly the Beast out of the way so Iceman could continue. Half a dozen more of the enemy force were frozen solid. Rogue landed with the Beast just behind Wolverine, and they marched on with him, over the newly made tundra.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said in awe.
“Nor I, dear Rogue,” Hank said. “And I’ve known the boy for many years.”
“I just wish he’d thought o’ this a while ago,” Wolverine grumbled.
Ahead of them, Iceman stumbled.
And fell.
“Bobby!” Rogue called, and went toward him.
“I was afraid of this,” the Beast said, mainly to him
self, and followed. “He’s completely drained himself.”
Wolverine was going to follow, but he heard the sounds of battle moving toward him from behind. He turned, and across the ice came the war, Scott and Jean and Bishop trying their best to hold back hordes of mutants, more than Wolverine had even imagined they were facing.
“Wolverine, we’ve got to regroup, watch each other’s backs!” Cyclops shouted over the din. “Otherwise, we’re dead!”
Logan snapped his head around to pass the command on to Rogue and the others, but she and Hank were in a battle to keep Iceman’s unconscious form from being dragged away.
It looked awfully grim. Wolverine held his claws up in front of him in battle stance, and hung his head a moment. With a deep breath, he prepared to experience the worst life had to offer, and not for the first time. He had seen friends die before, faced death himself many times. He had killed. Whatever it took, that’s what Wolverine would do.
Whatever it took.
Then, beyond the mob attacking Rogue and Hank and Bobby, came a familiar, thundering noise that shook the halfblock-long field of ice Logan stood upon.
“One side, goons!” a deep voice rumbled. “The cavalry’s cornin’, and you’re all in for a world of hurt!”
It was a sight Wolverine never would have imagined he would see, could barely believe even though it was right before his eyes. With nearly twenty other mutants behind him, Cain Marko was tearing a wide swath through the enemy lines. Incredibly, the Juggernaut had come to the rescue.
1181 ow the hell did the thing know where we were?” Val •■shouted. “There are no sensors in here!”
■ I Massive fingers began to grope around the opening in the back of the Sentinel’s head. It had figured out their location, and now it was determined to pull them out of its skull and vaporize them, or stomp them underfoot, or something equally nasty,
Val was not happy.
“How ... ?” she began to ask again.
“No sensors?” Archangel asked.
“Are you sure ’bout dat?” Gambit added.
“Absolutely!”
“You t’inkin’ what Gambit is t’inkin’, mon ami?” the Cajun asked his teammate.
“Oh, yeah.”
“Enough of this cryptic stuff,” Val shouted at them. “What? What?”
“Well, if there are no sensors, then somebody told it we were in here,” Archangel explained. “Who has contact with the Alpha unit? Who can give it orders?”
“Oh, my God,” Val said. “Not now! We haven’t done the override yet!”
There was a shrieking of metal and the Sentinel began to widen the hole in the back of its skull, tearing at it as if it were peeling a piece of fruit.
“We in trouble,” Gambit said softly. “But Magneto can’t be here yet, or he’d come in after us, right? Depechez-vous, Valerie. Hurry up!”
“Cooper, are you there?” Gyrich’s voice came over the comm.
Val, Gambit, and Archangel all looked at one another in horror, as they realized that the success of their mission, and their lives, might depend upon a man who hated them all.
“Gyrich, listen,” Val said hurriedly. “The thing knows we’re in here, Magneto’s on the way. I need a back door. A bypass, before I can even enter the override codes to restart the original program.”
Silence. Then Gyrich said, “Let me think.”
“Not what we want to hear, Gyrich!” Archangel shouted. “We don’t have time for games.”
“Nobody’s playing,” Gyrich said. “I’m trying to remember the code phrase.”
“A phrase,” Val asked, panicking. “A quote of some kind, a rhyme, what is it?”
“Just give me a second,” Gyrich roared in frustration.
He was serious, not toying with them. All the barriers had fallen, all the political differences, philosophical arguments, were cast aside. Everything that meant anything was in jeopardy. Gyrich was a mean-spirited, ignorant fool, but not fool enough that he didn’t understand the stakes. Val would like to have been relieved, but they didn’t have time for sentiment.
Screeching metal. Val whipped around even as Gambit said, “He cornin’ in, Valerie,” so calmly that she wanted to slap him.
“Oh, God,” she said, looking around the command center frantically for some way to stop it.
“Gyrich!” she snapped.
“I’m thinking!” he yelled back.
“No, wait, first tell me, can we disable this thing from in here, shut down its motor controls without cutting off our ability to shut down all the others from in here?” she asked.
“Well, yes, but—”
“Gambit, ’Angel, those panels!” Val barked, and pointed.
Remy and Warren fired everything they had at the motor controls of the Sentinel, leaving its brain and memory intact but stopping it cold. It froze in the street, completely paralyzed. The hand stopped clawing at them, but it blocked their exit. Val figured they could worry about that when the job was done.
“Cooper!” Gyrich shouted, trying to get her attention.
“What?” she asked.
“What I was saying was, you can disable the Sentinel, but you’ll be a sitting duck for the army in there. No defenses. Which Sentinel is it?”
“The one by the UN. Tell them to cease fire on us,” she said. “And give me the back door code.”
“It’s Shakespeare,” Gyrich said. “I’m trying to remember what the quote is.”
“Well, hurry,” she said.
They were quiet then, all staring at the monitor, which showed some of her failed attempts at hacking Magneto’s program. She would have been able to break it, eventually, she knew. But they didn’t have time for eventually.
A clanging broke the silence. A repetitive noise, like the sounding of a large bell.
“What in the name of God is—” she began.
“Somebody’s knocking,” Archangel said.
“I guess we know who it is too,” Gambit added.
There was a terrible shrieking sound as the metal hand of the Sentinel was tom away and flung down onto the street below. Outside the hole in the robot’s skull, Magneto hovered in the air, encapsulated in magnetic power.
“You three are trying my patience,” he said.
• • •
It was all Bishop could do to keep from screaming. All the horrors that he had witnessed in the not-so-distant future where he had been bom and raised, every act of violence or oppression, every broken spirit or cowering soul, were there all around him. But it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not so soon. The Sentinels, and the chaos and the destruction, it was decades early.
He wanted to close his eyes, wanted to pretend it was just another session in the Danger Room. But he knew it was true, all of it. And the only way he could prevent that hellish future from coming to pass that very night, was by fighting as he had never fought before.
So he clenched his teeth to bite off a scream unvoiced, and he pumped round after round of plasma fire into the attacking mutant hordes. It was everything he’d been trained to do in the XSE, the mutant police force of that future time, but even the XSE’s worst-case-scenario battle plans never accounted for something like this.
It was getting dark now but the sky was still lit with the memory of sunshine. A bright day had ended in low clouds, which reflected the sickly glow of fires and the streaking, whistling, pastel contrails of overland missiles and other large-weapons fire.
For Bishop, it was as if every nightmare he had ever had, those fever dreams of terror yet to come, had not ended in his waking warm and safe in his bed at the Xavier Institute. A nightmare that might never end.
“No,” he said simply, softly, to himself.
Bishop used his elbows, his forehead, his knees, the butt of his plasma rifle, and the hard set of his face to splinter passage through a tight knot of mutants ahead. He left the other X-Men behind, though Cyclops had called for them to regroup. The man was a more-than-capable field leader
, but Bishop thought that Cyclops didn’t want to understand what was really happening here. Bishop knew war. He knew you never put all your soldiers in one spot, or the war could be over very, very quickly.
A low growl that erupted into a full-throated battle cry came unbidden from his lips as he slammed into, then trampled over, a man whose empty eye sockets swirled with orange mist. He leaped to the trunk, and then the roof, of an Olds-mobile. The thin roof buckled slightly under his weight.
Trembling with the fury and the fear that raged within him, Bishop turned his plasma rifle on the crowd of mutants trying to take advantage of his sudden separation from his comrades.
“Fools!” he shouted. “You’re just giving them what they want! All the people who want to see us caged, or dead. You’re handing them the very tools they can use to destroy us!” '
A narrow-focus beam of electric flame sliced across his face. If anyone else had been the target, it would have sliced their head in half. Bishop absorbed the energy of the attack, held the plasma rifle in one hand, and prepared to cut down the crowd with that devastating blade of fire.
m
In his own time, he wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But this was a different time. It wasn’t the XSE. He had learned much since he came to live and fight beside the very legends he had venerated as a boy. Killing was the final option, invoked rarely enough that the gravity of it had finally reached him. Though Wolverine would likely not have hesitated, Bishop had changed. The X-Men had changed him.
He discharged the killing blast into the pavement in front of the Olds.
Then the barrage came, energy blasts of every type arcing toward him. No projectile weapons. They were mutants, after all. How foolish they were. Apparently, none of them were paying attention.
Channeling the attackers’ energy into his plasma rifle, Bishop cut a wide swath through Magneto’s followers. Nearly two dozen mutants fell under his furious assault, as he stood upon the car and swung the weapon back and forth like a fire hose. Two dozen. And he was fairly certain that all of them would live. Fairly certain.
“Bishop!”
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