The look was an eloquently wordless threat. Skolnick ignored it. When he was ten feet away from Colonel Tomko, he snapped to attention.
“Major Ivan Skolnick, reporting, sir!” he barked. “Remanding myself into your custody, sir.”
Tomko looked at him quizzically, then at Gyrich and finally at Cooper.
“Custody?” he asked. “What for, Major? You aren’t in my command.”
“Yes, sir, I know, sir, but you’re the highest ranking officer present, sir,” Skolnick said quickly, every word a sharp pain in his heart. His career was over.
“Major, I think you should—” Gyrich began.
“You overstep yourself, Mr. Gyrich,” Colonel Tomko said, and Skolnick could hear the pleasure the colonel got from telling Gyrich off. He liked the sound of it himself.
“Colonel, sir, I was leader of Special Ops Unit One, orders to terminate Magneto,” he said. “But I’m a mutant, sir—”
“What?!?” Gyrich nearly shrieked. “No wonder!”
“I turned on my own unit and joined Magneto’s cause,” Skolnick said, eyes on the pavement.
Gyrich was fuming.
“But you led the human resistance in this decisive battle, didn’t you?” Colonel Tomko asked.
“Yes, sir,” Skolnick replied.
“Were any of your unit hurt?” the colonel asked.
“No, sir,” Skolnick said, “I wouldn’t have harmed a hair on their heads.”
“Colonel, this man should be court-martialed for treason,” Gyrich said emphatically.
“You’re not a military man, Gyrich,” Tomko said. “It’s none of your business. Besides, the major is hardly a traitor.”
“But he—” Gyrich spluttered.
“He is a genius!” Tomko finished. “He used the fact that he was a mutant to construct an elaborate ruse, kept his men safe from harm by causing them to be incarcerated, and infiltrated Magneto’s infrastructure in order to position himself to usurp Magneto when the time was right. If anything, he is to be commended.”
“Commended?” Gyrich squealed.
“Mr. Gyrich, if you have a problem with my version of events, perhaps you’d care to discuss exactly whose orders SOU1 were operating under, in direct conflict with the President’s very specific instructions?” Colonel Tomko said.
Gyrich grumbled something Skolnick couldn't hear. Behind him, Valerie Cooper had an enormous smile on her face.
“Good work, Major,” Colonel Tomko said, and held out his hand.
Major Skolnick couldn’t shake.
“Sir, I’m sorry, but it isn’t the way you—” he began, trying to explain.
The colonel held up a hand, gesturing for him to be quiet.
“Major,” he said patiently, “I don’t know what you’re about to say, and I don’t want to know. I know what’s going in my report, and I’m sure Gyrich’s report will reflect the same. You’d do well by yourself and all involved to just keep quiet.
“You have something you want to say to your unit, Major, you say it to them in private. You hear me?” the colonel asked.
“Yes, sir,” Major Skolnick responded, and offered a salute.
The colonel saluted in return.
All of it had gone away, like an awful nightmare. Well, not all of it.
The guilt was still there.
. * * * •
To Amelia Voght, Wolverine looked like some feral beast, a warrior out of barbarian times, a stone killer. As far as she was concerned, he was all of those things. His adamantium claws were nearly black with blood. Moonlight and neon glinted off speckles of crimson on Wolverine’s face and chest.
Voght was terrified. The worst part was, she thought Wolverine could smell her fear.
“Come on, X-Man,” she said. “Try me. If I can teleport your arms back to Avalon, those claws would make great trophies.”
To her growing horror, Wolverine smiled. Voght wasn’t sure—didn’t want to be sure—but she thought she saw blood on his teeth. But no, she told herself, he wouldn’t—She stopped herself. She didn’t know for certain what Wolverine would or would not do, when pushed. And she prayed she wouldn’t find out.
“Back off, or I’ll take you apart,” she warned, weakly.
“Threats don’t mean much to me, little girl,” he said, taking several steps toward her, stalking her. “You try to ’port my arms off, that means you gotta get real close. Before you lay a hand on me, your guts’ll be painting the street.”
Voght shivered.
“You’d best surrender, now, or we’re gonna have to throw down. It’s gonna be messy too,” he promised.
She said nothing. Biting her lip, Amelia Voght considered all that she owed Magneto, all that his dream meant to her and to so many others. It had always seemed to her that Haven would be worth dying for, but here was her death now, taking another step toward her, and, by God, she didn’t want to die.
“Let’s do it,” Wolverine said, and started for her.
Voght steeled herself. No matter how much she feared him, she wouldn’t run. He was just another mutant. She’d beaten him before. If she had to kill him now, to save her own life, then that was the way it would be.
“Give it up, Voght!” somebody shouted to her left. Wolverine slowed as Amelia turned to see who had spoken. Her breath slowly leaked out of her, and for several seconds, she forgot to take another.
It was the X-Men. All of them. Or nearly all, since Gambit was out of it. Jean Grey had spoken, and with her stood Cyclops, Rogue, the Beast, Bishop, Storm, Archangel, Iceman, and their unexpected ally, the Juggernaut.
Voght didn’t know what to do. Then she knew there was only one thing she could do.
In a crackling flash, she teleported away.
* * *
“Quick, look around!” Cyclops ordered. “See where she turns up. It could be an ambush.”
“Ain’t nobody left to ambush us, Cyke,” Wolverine snarled. “The party’s over. I don’t think Voght is coming back.”
“Jean?” Scott asked, realizing that she would be able to sense Voght if she popped up anywhere near them.
After a moment, Jean shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Great,” Iceman said. “Can we go home now? I’m going to sleep for about a year.”
“Sounds good,” Archangel chimed in. “Then we can go to Paris and sleep there for a few months.”
“What’s wrong with all of you?” Cyclops asked. “This isn’t over. Hardly over. It’s just begun. Remember what the Professor said?”
“Indeed,” the Beast said. “But, then, where is he?”
They were all silent, then, as they tried to push their exhaustion aside and focus on the war still to fight.
“Well, I don’t wanna look for him,” Iceman said finally. “Maybe he figured it was done with, and went on home?” Nobody thought that was very plausible.
Then Jean’s eyes went wide, and Scott heard her voice, both as she spoke and telepathically.
“He’s here,” she said.
They all looked up at once.
“I don’t think I’m ready for this,” Iceman said quietly.
“None of us are,” Cyclops admitted. “But we haven’t come this far to lose. This is the real thing, the core of the fight. This is the battle the X-Men were created to fight.”
“Then I humbly suggest we not screw it up,” the Beast said calmly.
Nobody laughed.
* * *
Despite his intimate knowledge of them, despite all the times that he had thought them beaten and the X-Men had risen from the ashes to triumph over him again and again, despite all of that, Magneto was stunned to see them standing, nearly unscathed, amid the wreckage of several city blocks. Unconscious or semiconscious mutants littered the streets along with debris left behind by the battle. There were the dead as well, not too many, but some. Then there were those who were still walking, crawling, or dragging themselves from the battle-scarred streets.
The X-Men had survived. More than
survived. They were triumphant. As far as Magneto could see, only Gambit had sustained any grievous injuries. The Cajun was not a factor. That left nine X-Men. And the Juggernaut.
Xavier’s students stood ready, but made no move to attack. Magneto understood their trepidation. This was the final battle between them. He knew that. They must know it as well.
“Perhaps you feel as though you’ve won, X-Men,” he called down to them. “You have not. You have merely prolonged the inevitable, merely made my life more difficult. Haven shall be. Once you are all destroyed, I will rid Haven of dissenters even if I must do it alone.
“It is almost too late for mercy, you see. Summers, Grey, McCoy, I appeal to your intelligence, and your instincts. You have thirty seconds to begin to withdraw from my empire. Then, sad as I am to say it, I will be forced to kill you all. You are just too much trouble to be allowed to live.”
“Well, guys, it’s been real, but I’m outta here,” the Juggernaut said, and Magneto allowed himself a small smile. It was as he had expected.
“What?” Cyclops cried.
“Hey, Summers, no offense man, but I helped you out as best I could. I got you this far. But I didn’t come here to die, okay? I’m gone/- Marko explained.
“Cain ... ?” Jean Grey asked.
“Sorry, Grey,” the Juggernaut said with a shrug. “I’m not one of the white hats, okay? I’m not a black hat. Maybe I’m a gray one, but I don’t think so. For me, it’s all in the green.”
There were several hushed exchanges, then the Juggernaut left and the X-Men turned their attention back to Magneto.
“Coward!” Bishop screamed as Marko walked away. None of the others would even look at him.
Cyclops gathered the X-Men closer to him and spoke softly to his team. Magneto wished that he could hear Scott Summers’s words, better yet his thoughts, but he was no telepath.
Then, as he knew they would, the X-Men tamed and attacked.
Cyclops let loose a barrage of optic blasts that did not injure Magneto but instinctively, he dodged. Faster than he would have given her credit for, Rogue was there. She could not harm him through his force shield, but the blows she rained upon it drove him lower.
Lightning tore from the sky and struck the sphere of energy that protected him, passing a terrible jolt of electricity into Magneto’s flesh. He shook with it, and his body went numb a moment. Then it was over, but he didn’t want to experience it again.
Bishop fired upon him with some kind of plasma weapon and Jean Grey tried to pry open his mind, to force him into unconsciousness. Bishop’s weapon was laughable, and Magneto had taught himself how to defend against psychic attacks decades earlier.
Ice began to form within his protective sphere, and Magneto was amused by the audacity of Bobby Drake. He’d been a boy the first time they’d clashed, and Drake still had not learned his lesson. Magneto thought it might be time to teach him one. For now, he simply modulated his sphere to drop the ice out through it.
That was when Archangel launched dozens, perhaps hundreds, of his wing-knives. Two of them had paralyzed Magneto for minutes. Nearly a hundred might kill him, if they were allowed to get that far. But he knew their biometallic compound now.
With a gesture, Magneto turned the wing-knives away from him and sent them flying, his control over the metal moving them so fast, they were little more than a blur. The wing-knives slashed through Rogue’s costume, and though she was nearly invulnerable, some passed through her skin.
Rogue fell from the sky and hit the pavement with a crack. She did not rise again.
Magneto tore Bishop’s weapon from his hands with little more than a thought, then he reached out along the magnetic lines of power and did something he had wanted to do for a long time. He picked Wolverine off the ground by the ada-mantium in the Canadian mutant’s skeleton, forced his claws out of their sheaths, and sent Logan twisting through the air following those deadly claws.
Wolverine plowed into Bishop, his claws slicing the future X-Man to bloody shreds.
“You bastard!” Logan screamed as he stood up. “You made me kill him! You’re next, Magneto! Once and for all, you’re next!”
Magneto forced Wolverine to turn his claws around, and drive them into his own chest, perforating heart and lungs. Wolverine fell.
Lightning struck his force shield once more, and Magneto jerked and writhed in pain for several moments. His guard slipped, and one of Cyclops’s optic blasts slid through the field, tearing into his right arm. Then he knew that he wasn’t the only one who knew it was the end. Either the X-Men would be destroyed, or Magneto would be dead. Even Summers knew that. He was using deadly force against Magneto.
Good, Magneto thought. If they were trying to kill him as well, it didn’t feel so much like murder.
Storm, noble as she was, had annoyed him. She had hurt him for the last time. It was all too easy. Magneto snagged up a brown delivery truck that was essentially a steel box. In the web of his power, he flung it toward her.
“No!” Storm screamed. “Not again. Please, no!”
Thunder shattered windows for seven blocks, lightning flashed and struck at the steel prison that sped toward her. But Storm could do nothing. Magneto tore the truck apart, bending and warping it with his mind and then wrapping it around Ororo Munroe. He crushed her with it, and rather than set it gently down, Magneto merely let her fall.
Optic blasts hit his force shield again. Cyclops wouldn’t give up. There were just the five of them left, the five original X-Men: Cyclops, Jean Grey, the Beast, Archangel, and Iceman.
Magneto knew he would have to kill them, or at least hurt them badly enough that they would be out of the war, permanently.
It saddened him, but it could not be avoided.
The X-Men had to die.
e’ve got to go in,” Gyrich demanded. “We’ve got yu to take Magneto down now, while he’s distracted!” Wm Colonel Tomko looked to Valerie Cooper, she assumed for some kind of rational response to Gyrich’s raving. She didn’t have one.
“Gyrich, you’re out of your mind,” she said, her tone as matter of fact as she could keep it. ' ‘The X-Men are in there, right now, trying to stop him. If we throw everything we’ve got at Magneto—and that’s what it would take, if even that would do it—the X-Men are at ground zero. We kill him, and we’d be killing them too.”
Gyrich glared at her. He didn’t respond verbally, only with that hateful, arrogant glare. But Val didn’t need words. She knew perfectly well what the glare meant, what the message was.
The first part of it was, Stay out of it, Cooper, it isn’t your affair. But it was her affair. She was in it, no question, and she had the power, no matter how limited, to get in his way.
The second part was, So the X-Men are in the way? So what? That’s another near dozen mutants we won’t have to be afraid of anymore.
Val felt sick. Gyrich wanted to blow up several city blocks with Magneto and the X-Men as targets.
“You want them dead, don’t you Gyrich?” she sneered. “And it isn’t just because you’re a bigot. It isn’t just because they scare you. It’s because your pride is hurt, because you couldn’t take Manhattan back from Magneto. You couldn’t stop the madman’s bid to be emperor of the universe or whatever. It took mutants to do it.
“You think they’re the scum of the Earth, you treat them like they’re some unmentionable thing you’ve got to wipe off the bottom of your shoe, but they took the Sentinels out. They took the Acolytes down. And if we’ve got any hope against Magneto, it’s in their hands.
“That burns you, doesn’t it Henry? You hate them even more for that.”
“Hatred has nothing to do with it,” he said smugly. “It’s
common sense is all. And if the X-Men are killed in the meantime, well, sacrifices have to be made. Victory' comes at a price, Cooper. They know that.”
Val was fuming. She wanted to beat some sense into Gyrich, or at least enjoy trying. There was no doubt in her mind that s
he could do it too. But she wouldn’t. Unlike Gyrich, she followed orders.
“Colonel?” an overweight sergeant called from the front seat of a communications vehicle that had just arrived. “I’ve got the President on the line for Mr. Gyrich and Ms. Cooper. He wants to talk to you too.”
Tomko’s eyes widened, but he said nothing. She admired him. The man could roll with the punches, that was for sure. The chain of command had not been bent, but shattered. First he’d taken orders from Gyrich, out in Colorado. Then his Pentagon superiors had reasserted themselves. Now the President himself had stepped in.
“Ms. Cooper,” the President said, when they had gathered to face his image on the vid-comm unit, “I want to thank you for your assistance in this matter. So far, the X-Men’s cooperation has kept loss of life and property damage to a minimum—though,” he added, smiling slightly, “I doubt the UN would agree with me. In any case, without them, we might truly have had to use the most drastic of measures. They disabled the Sentinels, brought the war down to Magneto against the rest of the world.”
“No argument, sir,” Gyrich put in quickly. “But they aren’t going to be able to finish him off. I recommend that we—”
“Frankly, Mr. Gyrich, I’m not prepared to hear any of your recommendations at the moment. If I’d listened to you from the beginning, we’d be in a world of hurt right now,” the President said.
“Colonel Tomko,” he continued, “you are to wait for the outcome of the X-Men’s attack on Magneto. If they fail, you have authorization to use any means at your disposal to destroy him, regardless of collateral damage. Rely on Ms. Cooper as your consultant.
“Mr. Gyrich, you are to return to Washington immediately. The Director of Wideawake will be awaiting your arrival. Apparently, you have much to discuss, including what to do now that the Sentinels have been destroyed,” he concluded.
“But, Mr. President, it isn’t over here, I can’t just—”
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