The Ultimate X-Men

by Unknown Author

  Predict the future—and control it.

  Sharpe sighed and began meditating again, trying to achieve affinity with the nine chaos talismans. Their power, though hobbled by the lack of the tenth and final artifact, was still great. And soon, very soon, he would use the combined power of the nine to locate and retrieve the tenth.

  Once the two new variables were factored out of the equation, of course . . .

  “Thank God the concept of a bath is universal,” Jubilee sighed from the hotel bathroom.

  “Glad you’re enjoying it,” Storm called back while finishing her unpacking.

  “Totally,” Jubilee replied, blowing bubbles across the bathwater’s gently undulating surface. Then, realizing she might not be the only person feeling the need for cleanliness after their midafternoon trek, she added, “Hey, you waiting for the tub?”

  “No, you relax,” Storm told Jubilee almost absentmind-edly, as she closed her bureau drawer, then looked out their tenth-floor window at the darkening Egyptian sky. Cairo, the Jewel of the Nile, was starting to glisten as, one by one, city lights were turned on. “I want to feel like a native right now,” Storm continued, as much to Jubilee as to herself.

  “Well, you’re sure gonna smell like one,” Jubes whispered, but Storm’s acute hearing picked up on it. She was too distracted to chide the youth on her manners, however; Jubilee was deep in the throes of culture shock, and Ororo knew she wras secretly loving every minute.

  Besides, Ororo’s mind was otherwise occupied. The original note from Alia was disturbing enough, and the message left at the hotel’s front desk—in which Alia had mysteriously changed tonight’s meeting time and place—only added to Storm’s uneasiness.

  But there was something else too. Something wrong out there. Waiting. Watching. And, most of all, calculating.

  Ororo knew she wouldn’t get any answers sitting around the hotel room for the next three hours, waiting for the rendezvous with Alia. And she wanted more information before she walked right into what might turn out to be some kind of trap.

  “Jubilation, I’m going to go out and get some air,” she called out. “I’ll bring something back for dinner, and then we can meet up with Alia.”

  “Fine by me,” Jubilee called back as Storm headed for the door. “Don’t drink the water.”

  Storm chuckled, then left Jubilation to relax in the tub.

  * * *

  THE ULTIMATE Ml EH

  Ororo walked out into the rapidly cooling Egyptian air, watching the sky turn a hundred shades of red, orange, blue, and purple as the sun mercifully withdrew, giving the desert city some respite from the day’s searing heat.

  She wished she could fully appreciate the sunset’s beauty, but that strange feeling of wrongness was growing more intense, almost as if it wrere watching her. There was a coldness to it, the kind of razor-sharp logic and order you feel when confronted by a dizzying mathematical equation you can’t solve.

  Mathematics—was it Alia herself who was the threat? That hadn’t even occurred to Storm until she arrived at the hotel, and felt the bizarre oppressiveness of the city. She’d never experienced anything like it before, and barely even understood why she associated these feelings with numbers.

  But Cairo had changed little since she last called it home, at least in the important ways. Ororo still knew where to go to get the word on the street, without getting her throat slit. She had been more than capable of taking care of herself as a gawky street urchin; now, returned as a virtual goddess, Storm knew the city’s secrets would soon reveal themselves to her probing eyes, one way or another.

  She ducked into a dark alley. . . .

  Towels aren’t too shabby, either, Jubilee silently admitted to herself as she pulled a comfortable oversized sweatshirt over her black tights and hung the fluffy white hotel towel up to dry. This place is starting to look up.

  She flopped onto one of the queen-sized beds, fearing the worst—and finding herself once again pleasantly surprised by the mattress’s enveloping softness. “This’ll be

  ORDER EROH CMOS

  murder on my back,” she muttered to herself, her face halfburied in a pillow. “But that’s what vacation’s all about, right?”

  It was starting to feel like a proper vacation, too, instead of the hellish obligatory field trip Jubilee had thought it was going to be. She almost wished the rest of Generation X were here so they could all do a way-cool night on the town. . . . But she knew was too tired for that, anyway.

  Noticing the old-fashioned-looking television remote control on the bed table, Jubilee rolled over lazily and grabbed it, turning on the small TV across the room. “Foreign TV—cool,” she told herself, until she realized that there were only five channels, and they were all in Arabic. “My best friend in the whole wide world, turned against me,” she sighed, turning the TV off and rolling again onto her back. “Maybe I’ll see if there’re any cute guys . . . down . . . stairs. ...” Her voice trailed off as the long day’s journey and jet lag caught up with her, and she dropped off to sleep.

  At first Jubilee thought the buzzing was her alarm clock. Through a fog of half-sleep, she reached over to the night table, and began her usual ritual of flopping her hand around until the offending noise stopped. She knocked the TV remote onto the floor, smacked the phone, and banged her hand into the bedside lamp. But the buzzing was coming from the other direction.

  Then Jubilee remembered that her alarm clock was over five thousand miles away.

  Her sticky eyelids blinked reluctantly open as she turned to see what was making the buzzing, crackling noise. It

  THE ULTIMATE X-HCH

  seemed to be coming from outside, or from near the window. But she didn’t see anything there. Jubilee wondered if maybe there were an electrical short-circuit in one of the walls, or—

  Her eyes caught movement. Sitting up, she kept her gaze focused on the window. The air was undulating, crackling, moving. Like the heat distortion she’d seen in the desert from the jet, or like the kind of fluid distortion you might observe underwater.

  It was moving toward her.

  Flowing through the cracks in the multipaned window, the boundaries of its amorphous form were now becoming clearer to Jubilee. It was like the thing from that old Blob movie, except that it was nearly invisible and hovering in the air. The crackling noise it made was definitely getting closer. Tendrils of the thing reached toward Jubilee, who scrambled to get off the bed while grabbing for the phone.

  She suddenly felt a sharp stinging sensation on her lower right leg, and yelped as she instinctively pulled away and fell onto the floor, with the phone falling on top of her. “Help!” Jubilee screamed into the phone receiver, not waiting for the front desk to pick up. She saw that the skin on her leg where the tendril had touched her had exploded outward, as if a microscopic firecracker had been implanted under her skin and detonated.

  “Firecrackers, huh?” she asked herself as she watched the thing still pulling itself through the spaces between the window panes, still reaching for her. “Two can play at that game, Sparky,” she answered herself, pointing at the bizarre phantom and letting her mutant ability handle the rest.

  Bursts of brightly colored energy shot from her out-

  stretched hand and exploded in and around the faceless thing. Jubilee was used to seeing the bright flashes of her infamous “energy plasmoids”—they’d saved her skin on more than one occasion—but right now the dazzling display was making it hard to see what (if any) effect her attack had had on the creature.

  “Hello?” the front desk clerk’s voice came through on the phone, in heavily accented English. “What is going on up there?”

  “Your freakin’ see-through curtains are tryin’ to eat me, dude!” Jubilee yelled back into the mouthpiece, ceasing fire and trying to see if the phantom was still there. “If you’ve got cops in this town, you better send for ’em, pronto!”

  The confused clerk started asking more questions, but Jubilee had stopped
listening as she let the receiver drop to the carpeted floor. The barely discernible phantom had been blown into several chunks by her onslaught of “fireworks”—and now they were all converging on her!

  To the chaos spirit, Jubilation Lee was nothing more than a stream of data that was to be moved to another section of the master equation. From the spirit’s purely mathematical point of view, she was a virus in the program of reality itself. The chaos spirit had only one goal—to rewrite the code of Jubilation Lee so that she would function, not as a living, breathing, active variable, but as a dead, cold zero.

  “Cornin’ through!” Jubilee’s voice pierced the early-evening bustle in the hotel lobby. “Heads up!”

  Heads obligingly turned as Jubilee, still clad in her oversized sweatshirt and firing barrage after barrage of fireworks

  Jilt ULTIMATE X It ED

  behind her, blew into the main lobby, still pursued by the indistinct, globulous thing. The tourists and native Egyptians, seeing explosions and fearing terrorist gunplay, screamed and scattered or dropped down behind furniture.

  Jubilee’s eyes had started to adjust to the thing’s energy signature; she could see it more easily now. She knew that it always coalesced back into its original single form no matter how many times she tried to blow it apart. And she knew that it was moving a lot faster, here in the open air, than it had been when trying to sift itself through the hotel room window.

  It was faster than Jubilee, and she knew that too.

  Her only chance was to somehow find Storm. Once Jubilee got outside, she could send up a fireworks flare as high as possible, and hope that Ororo saw it from wherever she was.

  The thing touched Jubilee again, and the back of her neck erupted in pain—she could feel blood trickling down her neck and back. She instinctively threwT herself forward onto the marble floor, rolled once, and fired back with her maximum-force fireworks. The detonation was deafening, like a small bomb. The thing was shredded-—along with most of the front lobby. Jubilee herself was blown backwards along the floor, toward the front doors. More screams from terrified tourists followed the still-echoing reverberations of the blast.

  Jubilee, holding the back of her neck and applying pressure to stop the bleeding, staggered out through one of the hotel’s revolving front doors. Once outside, she risked a glance behind her, and saw that the thing was again reform-

  ing itself. She had perhaps ten seconds before it would be back on her.

  Gathering her strength, Jubilee raised both arms skyward and fired off one huge fireball toward the sky. She mentally willed it to keep rising as high as possible before detonating in a dazzling burst of color about two hundred feet in the air.

  She looked back toward the hotel, and saw that the whatever-it-was had already reassembled itself, and was oozing through the cracks in a revolving door.

  She staggered across the Corniche, dimly aware of the cars honking and steering crazily to avoid hitting her. She ducked into an alley, hoping it wasn’t a dead end.

  The alley led onto a quiet side-street, but Jubilee knew she was running out of time. She didn’t even risk looking behind her, for fear it would slow her down. Instead, she left a trail of exploding fireworks behind her as she ran, hoping it would slow the pursuit, but knowing that the thing was recovering from the blasts at an ever-increasing rate.

  “Storm!” Jubilee called hoarsely, dodging into another alley, emerging onto another road. “Storrrrm!” she screamed, not wanting to die alone on these unfamiliar streets, so far from home. Hearing no response, she risked a quick look over her shoulder, and noted with some satisfaction that it was still a good thirty feet behind her.

  Jubilee suddenly cried out in pain as her shin smashed into a garbage can and she went sprawling onto the cobblestone sidewalk. The early evening sky whirled crazily above her as she rolled painfully onto her back. She tried to scrabble to her feet, already knowing that it was over, she was dead—

  I tit UlIMAIt im

  —and then she noticed the hooded figure in white desert robes standing right next to her. But rather than run away from her as everyone else on the street had been doing, this person stepped between Jubilee and the rapidly approaching energy, as if to intervene.

  “Wait, you don’t know what you’re doing—” Jubilee started to warn.

  “Yes, I do, child,” a woman’s voice answered sternly from under the hood, in English laced with a slight Egyptian accent. “Now, stay down!”

  Dumbfounded, Jubilee complied—not that she was in any shape to do much else—as the thing moved ever closer to them. The robed woman raised her right arm toward it, and Jubilee thought she might’ve been holding something in her hand.

  As her pursuer approached within five feet, a series of bright white lines began forming in the air, all seemingly emanating from the woman’s right palm. More and more straight lines burned themselves into the air, forming a geometrically perfect spiderweblike pattern between the women and the indistinct energy form, which stopped its forward movement and hovered in the air before the growing web of light.

  The lines continued to appear, now reaching up and around the thing to form a more three-dimensional pattern—like old-style computer graphics, Jubilee thought numbly. There were dozens of lines, then scores, then hundreds, creating a delicate-looking cage of light around the now-motionless phantom.

  A tendril of energy extended from the creature between the “bars” of its rapidly forming cage, almost experimen-

  tally—and was abrupdy recoiled. The light-cage continued to form around it. Then, finally complete in breathtakingly perfect symmetry, the cage began to shrink.

  Jubilee slowly got to her feet, awed by the clashing of forces she did not comprehend. The cage’s rate of implosion seemed to increase exponentially, until it winked out of existence in a pinpoint of light, apparently taking its prisoner with it.

  “Wicked,” Jubilee muttered, looking at the mysterious woman as she pulled back her hood to reveal a beautiful Egyptian with pitch-black eyes and matching long hair. “Thanks, I don’t know how you knew about—”

  “I’m Ororo’s friend, Alia Taymur,” the woman answered solemnly. “You must be Jubilee. I had hoped we wouldn’t meet this way.”

  “Hey, better this way than at the funeral parlor,” Jubilee answered ruefully, holding out her right hand to Alia, then pulling it back on finding that it was covered in her own blood, “(jeez.”

  Alia held out in her right palm the object with which she had subdued the energy thing. Jubilee could now see that it was a flat stone disc, an ancient artifact of some kind inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics. It had four hooklike extensions that fit between the fingers of Alia’s hand, allowing her to hold on to it even when her palm was open.

  Alia held the artifact close to Jubilee, who assumed the woman was simply showing it to her. But then Alia whispered something in a language Jubilee hadn’t heard before, not even in the cacophony of the bazaar. Jubilee pulled back slightiy as the enigmatic symbols on the disc’s face

  THE ULTIHM X HEH

  glowed with the same bright white intensity that the cage had emitted earlier—then faded back to ordinary stone.

  Jubilee looked at her right hand again. It was clean. She felt the back of her neck, and found no trace of the wound that had been stinging only moments before. Her leg, too, had been miraculously healed, and her black tights had been repaired.

  “What the—” Jubilee marveled. “How’d you do that? What’s goin’ on here?”

  “The fractal disc can be used to retroactively alter very small, simple variables in the equation of reality—especially those that were artificially manipulated in the first place,” Alia answered. “Because the chaos spirit was unable to alter any major variables, I can cancel most of the minor ones out.”

  “Right, should’ve known,” Jubilee said with mild sarcasm. “And as for w'hat’s going on . . . ?”

  “We’ll go to the rendezvous point first,” Alia answered
, taking Jubilee by the arm and leading her into a dark alley. “Once Ororo’s joined us, I’ll be able to tell you both why I need your help.”

  “Why you need our help, huh?” Jubilee asked ironically, rubbing the back of her neck again.

  Jubilee pulled her hands into the long sleeves of her sweatshirt and shivered a little, sitting cross-legged on the dock and looking out onto the Nile. She couldn’t believe how a city that was so hot by day could be so chilly by night; in this respect, Cairo was even worse than the Australian outback, where she had lived alongside the X-Men for a while. It was about ten-thirty at night, and Storm and Alia were just ending their trip down Memory Lane, and none too soon for Jubilee. She had listened at first to the street-urchin tales of wonder and woe, but talking over old times and old friends quickly loses its appeal if you weren’t actually there in the first place.

  According to Storm, she had returned to the hotel and found no evidence of the damage caused by Jubilee’s encounter with the thing that Alia called a “chaos spirit”— just a missing Jubilee. Alia had apparently used that disc of hers to undo most of the aftereffects of the chase, and had also left a phone message at the front desk letting Storm know that Jubilee was safe.

  Alia’s stern manner was replaced by childlike giddiness when Storm showed up at the preappointed meeting place on the docks of the river. Storm, too, let a good portion of her guard down upon seeing her childhood friend. They had written each other a few letters over the years, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of catching up to be done. And that’s what the two old pickpocket partners had been doing for the past half hour, talking and laughing while Jubilee pretended to listen and stared out at the dark surface of the river.

  She wished she had had such a girlfriend when she had been younger—or even now, for that matter. It seemed like such a special kind of friendship, but female bonding was something that Jubilee’s childhood as a homeless mutant orphan in Beverly Hills hadn’t lent itself to. Even now, the only person who seemed to really understand Jubilee was Logan, the berserker mutant who called himself Wolverine. And what did that say about Jubilee?