With a burst of magnetic energy that threw the ocean water away from him, he rose, crackling, from the sea.
Eleven more Sentinels had arrived, and he knew that was all of them. The Alpha unit was out of commission, and he had disabled one other. Now he was out over the ocean with little at hand to be used as weapons or projectiles. And the Sentinels seemed to be made of some metal alloy mixed with a polymer that he could not easily grasp.
Which meant nothing, no hardship at all for Magneto. He merely focused his will and attention on the Sentinels, on the web of magnetic power that blanketed the earth, and how this unknown substance reacted to it. It might not, technically, be metal. But it certainly had metal in it. More than a trace.
That was enough.
The Sentinels attacked again, all eighteen of them blasting him with plasma cannons located in their palms. Some also fired solar radiation flares from their eyes. He dodged some, allowed others to be absorbed and dispersed by the much more powerful force shield he was generating.
He didn’t want to think. But he could not avoid it. Without the Sentinels, Haven’s future was in jeopardy. With the support of his Acolytes and other newly arrived followers, they might have enough power to keep the Mutant Empire intact, to repel invaders to build a new world. They might.
And they might not.
The Sentinels were useless to him now. As much as he regretted it, Magneto knew he had to destroy them.
As a new barrage of plasma beams buffeted his force shield, so intense that his entire body ached from the effort he made not to buckle under the attacks, he concentrated on the little metal that was part of the alloy used in creating the Sentinels’ shell. Focused on it, reached out with curses on his lips, and began to tear the fleet of Sentinels apart.
The debris piled up in the ocean until it looked like Pearl Harbor after the Japanese attacked, hulking metallic useless beasts with ugly faces staring up at the darkness. Dead. Defeated.
Magneto turned back toward Haven, and the war.
♦ * *
“Move it, people!” Trish Tilby shouted, in a tone she knew combined the worst traits of high school teacher and drill instructor.
But it was effective. The press corps she had gathered around her hustled like crazy.
“Set up wherever you like, get the best angles, whatever. Just stay out of the X-Men’s way. This thing is going to end fast when it ends, one way or another,” she explained.
She sounded confident. She knew that. But inside, she was wilting. The fight had gone on too long. If the X-Men were going to win, they’d have had it all wrapped up before now.
With the Sentinels keeping the military out, Magneto only had to destroy the X-Men and it was over.
And the X-Men, from what Trish could see of them a few blocks north of the conflict, were looking pretty haggard. It
was-—
“Trish!” one of the CNN crew shouted behind her.
When she turned around, she saw a tank rolling down Seventh Avenue toward them. Seconds later, she identified a sound blossoming on the air: helicopters. Trish looked up in time to see three choppers rise up over the long block between Sixth and Seventh, about ten blocks south of their own position.
“Get me set up, now!” Trish ordered.
“You’re ready to go, and mobile,” a producer named Gayle told her. “You’ve got the feed to all networks.”
Trish ran then. Forward a block and a half. Close enough to the fight to hear the grunting, the slap of flesh, the burning crackle of energy let loose on an unsuspecting enemy. That was as far as she wanted to get, and too close by far.
“Go,” she said simply.
The camera came up, and she began to speak.
‘ ‘This is Trish Tilby, reporting from the site of a new Civil War, a struggle fought not between blue and gray, but brother and brother nevertheless,” she said.
“There are humans in the fight, mainly New York City police officers, and other brave souls banded together to protect their city. But the main conflict is between mutants.
“Some of you, watching this, have begun to think this is my story. The story of what I’ve been through in the past day or so. That’s wrong. It’s the story of America. Of what we’ve come to, tearing one another apart because of our differences.
“Those of you out there in the dark, watching me now, watching the fight raging behind me and hoping the mutants doing battle destroy one another, you should be ashamed of yourselves. The X-Men, and others allied with them, are out here fighting your battles, putting their lives on the line for your well-being, for your children’s future.
“They would fight for themselves, but, you see, it is too late for them. Too late to be happy, too late to live normal lives, too late for the simple pleasures of life. You, Mr. and Ms. America, have taken that away from them. So, while Magneto punishes you for it, while Magneto tries to do to you exactly what you so desperately want to do to him—erase you from the picture—the X-Men stand and fight for a dream that is so much like the American dream. They fight for ideals that most of America seems to have forgotten. For justice. For equality. For freedom.
‘ ‘They fight for you. They may well die for you. The courage of fools, or the selflessness and benevolence of patriots?
I guess the answer to that question is fairly subjective, but how you answer it, ladies and gentlemen, how you answer it may tell you something about yourselves that you’d rather not know.
“The military can only stand by and wait. It’s the X-Men’s show, now. It all rests with them. If Magneto isn’t stopped here, he’ll be in your town next, that I guarantee. And as you watch for the next few moments in silence, as you watch what they are suffering for you, ask yourself one very disturbing question: What in the name of God would we have done, what would our fate have been, if the bigots of this nation had been successful in destroying the X-Men, as they’ve been trying to do for years? What would we have done without them?”
Trish signaled with her left hand, which was out of the camera frame, and the cameraman panned away from her and settled on the quickly dwindling war.
It stayed there a long time.
The world watched.
As staid as his well-deserved reputation painted him to be, Charles Xavier was not above childlike excitement. That was the very emotion he had felt when he realized that Valerie Cooper, Archangel, and Gambit had succeeded in their quest to take the Sentinels away from Magneto.
It was a huge victory, a priceless one. For several entire minutes, Xavier was able to put aside his anxiety over the continuing war, his political spin-doctoring of mutant-human relations, his constant monitoring of all the major parties involved.
The smile hurt his face.
When Gyrich had come over to deliver the good news, Xavier had forced himself to stifle the smile. As Gyrich walked away, he had thought it would return, but it did not. The reasons quickly became apparent.
In his youth, Charles Xavier had been a man of action; a soldier, an adventurer, so many things. After he lost the use of his legs, all of that changed. In his lowest times, he considered himself the worst kind of voyeur. Not that he eavesdropped on people’s thoughts, or peeked in on the fantasies in their minds. That never interested him.
Instead, he lived vicariously through the X-Men, in so many ways. They did what, in almost every case, he could not. They went out into the world and fought for his dream. He did all he could, politically, financially, personally. He guided their every action. But it was the X-Men in the field, without their teacher, mentor, founder.
Sometimes, Charles Xavier, among the two or three most powerful men on the planet, felt completely powerless. Useless.
He might have asked Gyrich to bring him along, but the man would never have complied. Who wants to take responsibility for a man who cannot walk in the middle of a war zone? He might have forced Gyrich to take him, but that would have led to disaster.
In any case, that was not his role. Xavier
was to direct, to command, to inspire, to plan. There were things he might have
done to end the battle more swiftly, but his moral code would not allow him actually to undertake any of them. Under normal circumstances.
These were hardly normal circumstances. It was quite possible that, before dawn broke once more, Xavier would have broken even more of his own personal commandments, ignored his entirely subjective thou-shalt-nots in favor of safety, of life, of victory.
Part of his role was to see the big picture, to sense the danger the X-Men were in and try to guide them through it.
X-Men, beware, he thought, sending the message to each member of the team simultaneously. The deciding moment of this war has come. Magneto is on his way to you now. Enraged as he is, he is more dangerous than ever. Do not let your guard down for a moment, do not allow relief to diminish your readiness for battle. For everything you have done up until this moment has been but a prelude to this, the final battle with Magneto.
If you are not careful, he could destroy you all.
Message sent, and silently acknowledged, Xavier looked up at the night sky and breathed deeply. There was no pleasure in it, no relaxation of the grim set of his features. Only preparation for whatever might come.
For Charles Xavier had finally realized that he could remain on the sidelines no longer. The final battle with Magneto was his to fight. The X-Men might triumph without his help, but he feared that not all of them would survive.
Victory was his to earn.
He did not move from the spot where he had sat for hours in his wheelchair. Even so, Charles Xavier had gone to war.
* * *
Gambit and Val Cooper tore onto Fifth Avenue on another stolen motorcycle, with Archangel flying above. Mutants and humans alike were fleeing the field of battle—at least those that could still move under their own power. They seemed to sense that the end was near, and that none of them would have any impact over the outcome of the war for Manhattan.
“It’s like Times Square just after midnight on New Year’s Eve,” Archangel said on the comm.
“Or when de sun come up de morning after Mardi Gras,” Gambit agreed. ‘ ‘Nobody even want to look at anybody else, just get de hell out of dere and home to bed.”
It had come down to the X-Men and the Juggernaut against those Acolytes who remained conscious and some of their more powerful allies. By the time Gambit steered the bike through unconscious bodies he hoped were still alive, Archangel was already in the thick of battle. It would be over soon, he knew.
Or it would have been, if they had been the last of the enemy. But there was still Magneto to deal with. Soon. Very soon. But not yet. They could still finish off the others and present a united front against Magneto when he did get there.
“Valerie, get off,” he said grimly. “De toy soldiers are over dat way.”
She started to protest, even as she got off the motorcycle, but Gambit was gone before the first words were out. She’d done her part. Now the X-Men had to finish the job.
Cyclops was blasting away at a mutant who looked as if he were made of rubber, but the surface of his flesh rippled and shone like crude oil. Whenever Cyclops took a shot at him, the mutant’s body bent or opened to let the blast through.
Then he’d hit Cyclops again, hard, leaving a dark inky stain behind. It wasn’t much more than one on one, it seemed, and Gambit moved forward to help Cyclops, figuring his presence would make the difference, change the balance of power. It was so close to being over.
There was a small sound behind him, creeping cat’s paws, and he started to turn. Too late. Senyaka’s burning psionic whip wrapped around his neck, choking off his air before he could take a breath. Gambit tried to get his hands on the whip, to use his power, to use the whip against Senyaka, something. It moved side to side, snakelike, avoiding his grasp. He kicked out, taking Senyaka in the chest. The hooded Acolyte let out a grunt, but the whip did not let go.
Gambit tried once more to get his hands on the whip, then
lunged for Senyaka himself. But the air was gone. Completely.
He went down hard. When his face hit the street, he barely felt it.
• * *
From above, Rogue saw it all.
“Remy!” she screamed, and shot toward him out of the sky.
Rogue had never worried for herself. She worried about consequences all the time, worried for her friends, worried for the world. But never for herself. She was nearly invulnerable. Anything that might hurt her very badly would likely also kill her. Nothing she could do about that.
But Gambit was not invulnerable. Not hardly. Sure, Remy LeBeau knew how to take care of himself. That had been his full-time occupation before joining the X-Men, covering his own hide. Things had changed. He knew family now. Rogue flattered herself to think he knew love as well. She most certainly loved him.
Down on the street, the man she loved, the sharp-tongued mystery man whose Cajun charm had won her over from their first meeting ... Gambit was dying.
“No!” she cried, shot like a bullet to street level, and didn’t slow down a bit before slamming into Senyaka.
Ribs cracked under her assault. She slammed through glass partitions and into a row of ATM machines. His cowled head clanged off the machines and he stumbled for a moment, unsure of where he was. A weak glow formed in the palm of his right hand, a feeble attempt to create his psionic whip. Rogue spun him around, and Senyaka’s cowl slipped down.
She recoiled.
“My God but you’re ugly enough, ain’t ya?” she observed.
Rogue hit him in the gut hard enough to carry him off his feet and back out onto the sidewalk, then he rolled into the street. Senyaka held tightly to his belly, doubled over, and vomited blood in the gutter.
She went after him. As she reached to pick him up, a powerful hand grabbed her right arm, and she spun, lashing out at this new attacker.
Hank McCoy blocked her swing with the flash of one blue-furred arm.
“Ow!” he hissed. “Now, that’s going to leave a significant contusion.”
“Let go of me, Beast,” she demanded.
“Apologies, Rogue, but no,” Hank replied. “Another blow and you would have killed him.”
She glanced back at Senyaka. The blood was coming from his nose as well, now. The Beast relaxed his grip, but she didn’t go after her target again.
“In truth, he may yet die from the injuries you’ve given him,” the Beast said sadly.
“Let him,” she said, though she did not really mean it. She was no killer. Rogue said nothing as the Beast knelt to see what medical assistance he could give to Senyaka.
Across the street, Gambit lay very still. Rogue wanted to go to him, feel his pulse. That way she could breathe again. But she couldn’t drive herself through the night. It had all become surreal to her suddenly, and touching Gambit’s neck or wrist would bring them back to reality. If he were dead, she didn’t think she ...
“Oh, thank God,” Rogue gasped.
She had seen his chest rise and fall. Even now, it continued to do so.
Rogue rushed to Gambit’s side, knelt by his unconscious form. They’d all been through a lot the previous few days, but Gambit had had it even tougher than the rest of them. She ran her gloved fingers over the stubble on his chin, pushed his hair away from his face. She longed to be able to touch him, her own skin to his flesh. But the pleasures of such simple contact were denied Rogue forever. With her personality-, memory-, and talent-absorption powers, she could permanently damage anyone she touched.
It was the worst kind of isolation. And yet, with Gambit, Rogue had begun to feel a little less alone.
2M.
“You rest now, sugar,” she said quietly. “You’ve done your part.”
She kissed the fingers of her gloved right hand, then pressed the kiss to his lips. Rogue didn’t even glance back at the injured Senyaka, at Hank McCoy, who was trying to undo at least part of what she’d done. It didn’t mat
ter. In many ways winning didn’t even matter anymore.
The only thing that did matter was an end. Now, Rogue wanted nothing more than to go home, to bring Gambit back to Salem Center to heal.
She prayed that it would be over soon.
* * *
“You tried to kill my brother!” Harlan Kleinstock shrieked, more astonished than accusatory. “Oh, you’re dead, man.”
“Please,” Iceman said, sarcasm like venom from his mouth. “If I’d wanted to kill him, I’d have flash-frozen the air in his mouth and nose, or freeze-dried his chest and just shattered it.”
Harlan fired a blast of kinetic energy from his fists, but Iceman blocked it with a concave ice shield, deflecting it back at his attacker. Kleinstock was too angry to be impressed.
“Go down and stay down, pal,” Kleinstock snarled. “I’m getting a little tired of you, of this whole thing. Give it up, will you?”
“Wait,” Iceman said, flustered and angry. “You’re tired of me? You’re tired of me? Oh, that’s rich!”
Bobby formed the moisture from the air into a battering ram of ice that tore Harlan Kleinstock off his feet, drove him back several yards, and slammed him into a brown UPS truck parked askew at the corner. Kleinstock didn’t get up.
With a long sigh, Bobby sat down on the street corner, chin in his hands, not even bothering to look and see if his teammates needed help. He didn’t think they did. It was almost over now.
“I’m going to Disneyworld,” he said softly to himself.
When Ivan Skolnick spotted Colonel Tomko standing with Henry Peter Gyrich, he froze in his tracks. His human allies continued to swarm from the battlefield toward the growing ranks of the media on the sidelines. But that was not Skolnick’s proper path and he knew it.
Approaching Tomko and Gyrich was the most courageous act he had ever performed. When he was only a short distance away, Gyrich looked up and recognized him. The man’s eyes went wide and he glanced nervously at Colonel Tomko, then at a blonde woman behind him, who Skolnick recognized as Valerie Cooper, the mutant affairs expert. Then Gyrich turned his attention back to Skolnick’s approach, and glared.
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