Cyclops breathed a sigh of relief as Wolverine held Cr+eeee at arm’s length, the little beast still chattering away but no longer attempting to harm them. It must finally have recognized them as well, Cyclops reasoned. Cr+eeee was from the distant planet Lupus, and had been with the Starjammers since long before their first contact with the X-Men. The creature was a constant companion to Ch’od, who claimed to understand its chittering language, and that it was as intelligent as any other sentient being they had encountered.
“Cr+eeee, what happened to the Starjammers?” Cyclops asked.
The little alien reached a furry paw up to scratch at his long, pale proboscis.
“You t’ink maybe he pilot de ship, mon ami?” Gambit purred, his sarcasm unwelcome and ill-timed.
“He understands,” Cyclops said coldly.
“Maybe so,” Wolverine added, “but will you understand him if he answers?”
Cr+eeee cocked his head to one side, listening to this exchange, then dropped to the ground from Wolverine’s shoulder and raced to the cockpit door. Bishop was already there, prepared to endure whatever defense mechanisms the space pirates had built into the passage. When he reached out a hand, Cr+eeee started to screech wildly, and Bishop paused a moment.
“I don’t think he wants us to go in there,” Bishop said, studying the alien with new appreciation.
“I don’ t’ink it matter what he want,” Gambit said, striding forward.
“Gambit, wait …” Cyclops began, but Wolverine stood in front of both of them, his claws popping out with a clang.
“Door’s mine,” Wolverine said, just as Cr+eeee leaped from the floor, sank his claws into Wolverine’s flesh and clothing, then bounded onto a nearby control panel. His claws began to tap out a numbered sequence on the keypad even as Wolverine’s adamantium claws raked a gaping hole open in the cockpit door.
A shock ran through the metal claws and up his arms. Every muscle in his body tensed with its power. Wolverine bared his teeth and a low growl emitted from deep in his throat as he shook with the energy of the door’s protective field.
Cr+eeee finished entering the code, and Wolverine seemed to deflate slightly, a hiss of air coming from his mouth. He kicked through the torn apart cockpit door, then turned to look at his teammates, motioning toward Cr+eeee as a bemused grin lifted one side of his mouth.
“Furball’s not as dumb as he looks,” Wolverine said with a chuckle, then entered the cockpit.
“Damn!” he swore softly. “Looks like we got a situation here.”
Cyclops steeled himself against what he would find, then went in, Bishop and Gambit following quickly behind. The grotesque tableau that awaited them filled his heart with a nauseating mixture of dread and relief.
Ch’od lay slumped across the ship’s instrument panel. The steering column had broken off, and its shaft impaled the Timorian’s scaly, reptilian hide. A pool of green, brackish liquid had formed under his seat, and a darker, sticky looking green lay at the center of several charred wounds on his back.
Raza, the Shi’ar cyborg, looked even worse. He lay on his back on the cold metal floor, one hand covering a gaping wound in his belly. There was a laser-clean slice in the cyborg side of his face, and his biomechanical left arm was nowhere to be seen. Only a sparking, smoking stump remained, emitting a noxious chemical smell and the sickening sound of gears that ground on despite his unconsciousness.
Cyclops was deeply concerned for them, but the dread and relief he felt came from the same bit of information. His father, Corsair, was not among them. For the moment, at least, he forced himself to take that as good news.
“If dis green stuff is blood,” Gambit said in wonder as he crouched next to Ch’od, “den de big guy seem to ’ave lost an awful lot of it.”
His words spurred Cyclops into action. Wolverine and Bishop were attempting to lift Raza in order to carry him back through the hold.
“No time for that,” he said sharply, then focused his fear and uncertainty into an optic blast that took out the entire glass observation shield at the front of the cockpit. It exploded into shards and he shouted for Iceman to get a ramp up to them immediately. Only then did he notice that the ship had sunk so far into the lake that the cockpit was mere inches from the surface of the water.
Cyclops reached for Ch’od, and Gambit began to pull on the nearly quarter-ton reptilian alien.
“No, Gambit, wait,” he said. “We pull him off of there now, and whatever blood he’s got left is likely to pump out at our feet.”
“We goin’ to leave ’im ’ere, den, Cyclops?” Gambit snapped.
“Relax, Remy. We just have to take it another way.”
Cyclops focused his optic blast into a tight beam, the thinnest of lasers, and burned through the shaft of the steering column where it met the ship’s controls. Ch’od slumped back in his seat, no longer hung on the stake that had impaled him. Then Iceman was at the blasted hole in the front of the cockpit, slippery ramp ready to get the wounded Starjammers to land. Wolverine and Bishop took Raza out, and Iceman came inside to help with Ch’od.
As they lifted him, muscles straining, Ch’od’s eyes opened. Cr+eeee, who had been watching the proceedings in silent fear, begin to chitter with pleasure that his friend was not dead. Ch’od’s gaze seemed to waver, unfocused, and then suddenly found the face of Cyclops.
“Scott …” he croaked softly. Cyclops tried to shush him, but Ch’od forced himself to go on. “… must get … Corsair before … his execution.”
Then his immense, amphibian head fell back and Ch’od slipped into unconsciousness once more.
TWO
INSIDE the government installation that was home to Operation: Wideawake, silence reigned. Magneto stood in the control center, built into the silo wall, and looked down at the fleet of Sentinels that would soon be at his disposal. He could not help but recognize the irony in his plan, to turn humanity’s terrible, ultimate weapon against mutants back upon themselves. Rather than being amused by this irony, however, Magneto was profoundly unsettled. The Sentinels were one of many signs that, just as he had always said, humans and mutants could not live in peace.
Yet in the war of philosophies that he had waged with Charles Xavier for so many years, Magneto had never wanted to be proven right.
The Acolyte called Milan, whose mind communicated directly with technology, sat in silence at the command station—the main computer terminal linked to the installation and the Sentinels. His chin lay slumped down onto his chest, the goggles that covered his eyes hardwired into the terminal through a jack at his left temple. His mind was in cyberspace, the ultimate in virtual reality, and Magneto wondered, idly, what would happen if Milan were simply unplugged.
Which would, of course, never happen. Magneto would not allow it.
“It’s chilling, don’t you think?” a voice echoed inside the control center, and it took Magneto a moment to realize it was an audio link, piped into the room from the silo below. Senyaka and Unuscione were there, on guard, in anticipation of more soldiers arriving; and they would arrive, eventually. Senyaka had asked the question.
“What is?” Unuscione answered, her tone betraying the arrogance that was her deepest flaw.
“Being here, among them,” Senyaka answered, clearly not as sure of himself now. Magneto watched the cowled man turn from Unuscione, and walk deeper into the silo, looking up at the Sentinels towering over him like an ancient forest.
“We’ve come to take these weapons for ourselves,” Senyaka said. “But they have proven deadly in the past, to mutants. Knowing that the sole purpose of their creation was the destruction of our kind … Unuscione, as strange as it sounds, though not a spark of life or intelligence exists in them at the moment, I feel as though they are watching me. Biding their time. It is chilling.”
Unuscione uttered a low, dismissive chuckle. Had it been anyone else, Magneto knew the woman would have spoken her thoughts aloud, said the word that was no doubt in her mind, the wor
d coward. But Senyaka was as dangerous, as uncontrollable in his way as she was. If they were to battle, Magneto would have to step in. He could not afford to lose them both.
The Lord of the Acolytes looked up at the motionless faces of the Sentinels, the smooth metal surfaces, the slitted sockets inside which sensor eyes lay dormant. Dormant, yes perhaps, but Magneto discovered that Senyaka was right. It felt as if the murderous robots were watching him. The effect was quite chilling indeed. The silo was a ghost town, a place of death. The effect was even eerier with Milan slumped, corpse-like, in his chair.
The feeling, Magneto finally decided, was neither completely unpleasant, nor inappropriate.
Voght appeared suddenly in the open doorway behind him, and Magneto motioned her forward, glad of her company.
“All the humans have been corralled, Magneto,” she reported. “Javitz and the Kleinstocks are watching over them, and Cargil has gone topside to keep watch.”
“Thank you, Amelia,” he answered. “You may be at your leisure until reinforcements arrive. Everything seems under control.”
Voght nodded, then walked quietly to the long window overlooking the silo. All was quiet below once more, Senyaka’s attempts at communication rebuffed by Unuscione’s harshness. Years before, Unuscione’s father, known as Unus the Untouchable, had been one of Magneto’s followers as well. The man’s mutant powers had eventually killed him, leaving the young woman terribly bitter. One day, Magneto hoped she would end her grief. For her sake, and that of the other Acolytes.
“Maybe it’s not my place,” Voght said, turning Magneto abruptly from his thoughts, “but I would imagine the programming for the Sentinels, for the entire base, would be buried in complex encryptions and decoy files. And once we’re there, you’ll have to reprogram the mecha-Godzilla rejects out there yourself. Even with Milan’s abilities, we could be here days.”
Magneto raised an eyebrow, a bemused smile lifting one side of his face. “Your point?” he asked.
“I don’t know about you, but I don’t guess there’s much by way of pizza delivery way out here,” Voght said with a shrug. “I guess I just wonder what we’re all going to eat.”
“My dear Amelia, you must have faith,” Magneto said. “I’m sure there is enough to eat in whatever sanitized galley the American government calls a kitchen to feed us for today. That will be long enough.”
He could see that Voght still did not understand, and though he was loath to explain himself to his Acolytes, he found himself making increasingly frequent exceptions for Amelia. She had become, strangely, his confidant.
“You have been involved with the politics of mutantkind longer than most of the other Acolytes, even those older than yourself,” Magneto began. “Surely, you remember a group of wealthy, power hungry mutants called the Hellfire Club?”
“Of course,” Voght said. “But what has that got to …?”
“The Hellfire Club was ruled by an inner circle,” Magneto interrupted. “Their ranks were fashioned after pieces on a chess board, and there came a time when they were lacking a White King.”
Voght’s eyes widened with surprise. “You?” she asked. “I’d no idea.”
“It was a short-lived relationship but, as you will soon realize, a fruitful one. Though the Black King, a mutant named Sebastian Shaw, always struck me as a braggart and a fool, he spent most of his time making allies. He was a politician, not a leader; there is a vast difference. He wanted me on his side, and so took me into his confidence. That Shaw was a mutant was not publicly known. In fact, his military industrial empire was inextricably tied to the federal government. Profoundly.”
“Operation: Wideawake,” Voght realized aloud, and Magneto nodded.
“The single time Shaw took me into his confidence,” he said. “He had buried a secondary program into the Sentinels, which could be accessed and activated with the use of a single password: empire. Once Milan has befriended the main computer and has found the backdoor into the Sentinel command program, that code word will give me total control of the Alpha Sentinel, and through it, the entire fleet.”
Magneto walked to where Milan still slumped at a rapidly changing computer screen, laid a hand on the unconscious mutant’s shoulder and knelt to watch the binary numbers flashing by. When he looked back at Voght, his smile was triumphant.
“If your stomach is growling, Amelia, feel free to scout us up some breakfast. But trust me, we won’t need to worry about dinner.”
Voght returned his smile, and Magneto felt just a single moment of the calm he hoped all mutants would be allowed once they were provided with a haven from humanity’s yoke.
* * *
SOLES slapping the marble floor, muscles tense, Valerie Cooper tried not to let her anxiety show as she hurried toward the Secretary’s office. Even in times of crisis, when her expertise or her team was needed, it was rare for the ‘boss’ to request a face to face. Either her team, the government sanctioned mutant strike force called X-Factor, to which she was attached as federal liaison, had completely blown their diplomatic mission in Genosha, or something worse had happened.
Though at the moment, she couldn’t think of anything worse than that. Particularly since she’d only just arrived in her office when the call from the Secretary’s aide came. She hadn’t even been able to gulp down a cup of the godawful mud that was passed off as coffee to government employees. She was, suffice to say, somewhat on edge.
Opening the heavy oak door, she crossed the carpet of the impeccably decorated outer office and was waved in by the Secretary’s secretary, the mere thought of which confounded her. Valerie Cooper had never been a morning person.
“Ah, Ms. Cooper,” the Secretary said in his perfunctory manner, motioning for her to close the door behind her. “I believe you two know each other?”
Two? Val was so relieved by the lack of hostility in the Secretary’s voice, which of course meant X-Factor hadn’t screwed up after all, that she’d barely acknowledged the presence of the third person in the room. Now, however, as the stiff-looking, auburn-haired man turned toward her, his face was marred by an incredulity and disgust that she knew was but a mirror of her own.
“Gyrich!” she said in revulsion.
“What the hell is she doing here?” the man, Henry Peter Gyrich, snapped in anger.
“You forget yourself, Mr. Gyrich,” the Secretary said, and Val wanted to warn the older man to be careful. Gyrich might answer to him for the moment, but he had many powerful, invisible friends in the intelligence community. Through all her dealings with him, Val had yet to find a single commendable thing to say about Gyrich, except perhaps that he was a snappy dresser. The man was a master manipulator who used every assignment, public or clandestine, to further his personal agenda.
“My apologies, Mr. Secretary,” Gyrich soothed. “I just didn’t expect to see Ms. Cooper here. This is omega-level clearance subject matter after all.”
“Valerie has omega-level clearance, Henry,” the Secretary said, admonition in his tone. “Please do sit down, Valerie, we have much to discuss.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said. When she took her seat to Gyrich’s left, he glared at her silently before turning his attention back to the Secretary. His frustration gave her great pleasure.
“Earlier this morning,” the Secretary began, “we failed to receive a report from one of our sensitive facilities. Communication has yet to be established. We must assume a security breach, and I look to both of you to counsel me regarding immediate action on this crisis. The facility in question is the Colorado base of Operation: Wideawake.”
“No!” Gyrich gasped in astonishment.
“It’s never over, is it?” Valerie said softly, shaking her head.
“What’s that?” the Secretary asked.
“We’re going to destroy each other, aren’t we, sir? Mutants and humans, I mean. It just doesn’t end,” Val sighed.
“It’s your job, Cooper, to see that it does end. And soon. Now, my fir
st inclination, of course, would be to send in X-Factor …”
“Oh, perfect!” Gyrich exploded. “The mutie freaks have found a way to take off-line our number one defense against their plans to dominate humanity, and you want to send them reinforcements! That’s beautiful!”
“That will be enough, Gyrich!” the Secretary shouted, his booming voice rattling picture frames on the office walls. “Another outburst like that and you will be relieved of your responsibilities pertaining to Wideawake. Are we clear?”
Gyrich’s eyes hardened. Val wanted to tell the Secretary he’d just made a dangerous enemy, but she didn’t dare.
“Yes, sir,” Gyrich said slowly. “But I would recommend that you not allow my vehemence to disguise the truth of the words.”
“Mr. Secretary,” Val said, ignoring Gyrich, “Mr. Gyrich has never been very good at covering up his bigotry, or the personal agenda he has had for becoming involved with Wideawake. His comments about X-Factor, government operatives themselves, make it clear that he is not rational on the subject of mutants.”
“Enough of this, both of you,” the Secretary snapped, losing his patience. “If I didn’t know Henry was less than clear-headed on this subject, I wouldn’t have called you in as consultant on this, Val. I am the Director of Wideawake, after all. Now, can we just get down to business, please?
“Henry, if you’d been a little patient, I’d have informed you that X-Factor is on a diplomatic mission in Genosha, and so are unavailable for at least the next four days to help with the Colorado situation. Therefore, I have already made the decision to send troops in to recapture the facility, if it has, indeed, been breached. And we have no reason to think it has not. The question is, do either of you have any idea … any reasonable idea, who might have been capable of and interested in finding and capturing this facility?”
Val could see Gyrich struggling with the question. She knew he probably had dozens of suggestions, hundreds even, but few of them with any valid reasoning. Unfortunately, she had the same problem. There were too many possibilities, though fewer than Gyrich imagined.
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