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 turned 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 adamantium 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.
SEVENTEEN
“WE’VE got to go in,” Gyrich demanded. “We’ve got to take Magneto down now, while he’s distracted!” 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 she 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—”
“Gyrich, in case you missed it, you’ve been relieved of any responsibilities in Manhattan at this time,” the President said sharply. “You have your orders.”
The screen went dark. Val tried not to smile. She needn’t have worried. Gyrich stormed away immediately, boarding a helicopter that would start him back to D.C.
“That’s one troubled soul,” Colonel Tomko said, without a trace of the venom she might have expected from the man.
“The bad news is, he isn’t the worst of them. The world is full of people much more radical in their views on mutant–human relations than Gyrich. All that hate is going to tear us apart,” she said.
* * *
“MS. Tilby, I’m—”
“Police Commissioner Wilson Ramos,” she finished. “I’m pleased to meet you, sir, and very impressed with what you’ve done here today.”
“Thank you,” he said. “But we’ve no time for mutual admiration.”
“What can I do for you?” she asked, slightly put off by his intensity.
“Gabi?” he said, deferring to an attractive girl standing just behind him.
“These men and women are mutants, Ms. Tilby,” the girl—Gabi— said. “They came here because of what Magneto promised them, but when they realized what was happening, they turned on him and did everything they could to help the X-Men.”
Trish admired the young woman, obviously one of the resistance fighters she’d heard about. She was courageous and yet obviously compassionate. But Trish thought Gabi seemed uncomfortable talking to her, and wondered if it was because she was a reporter. Reporters, she knew, had worse reputations than lawyers these days.
“What can I do for you, or for them?” Trish asked, quite sincerely.
Gabi hesitated, so Ramos stepped in.
“The military will take them into custody,” Commissioner Ramos said. “Who knows what might happen to them, then? They just want to go back to their homes, back to the world they knew, no matter how flawed. Some of them have kept their genetic differences a secret, and now they only want to slip back into their old lives.
“I think they’ve had a hard enough lesson the past couple of days, don’t you?” he asked.
Before Trish could answer, Gabi said: “Iceman told us we could trust you.”
Trish smiled. It pleased her to know that, no matter what had happened between them, the X-Men still trusted her. She thought of Caroline, and of Kevin, who had both died because they were good people, people who didn’t care about genetic differences.
“We’ve all suffered enough, I think,” she said finally.
With Ramos assisting, she gathered around all the members of the media that she knew. Together, and using the police officers who had backed Ramos up in the war, they spent the rest of the night, and well into the morning, shuttling mutants back out of New York. An underground railroad for the twilight of the twentieth century.
When Trish first thought of the analogy, it saddened her greatly to realize that it was all too accurate. Hate never went away, it only changed to take advantage of the times. Later, she would try hard to believe that wasn’t true. Sometimes, she could almost do it.
* * *
ONE by one, Amelia Voght teleported the original Acolytes back to space station Avalon in Earth orbit. Senyaka, the Kleinstocks, Frenzy, all of them were badly injured. They would heal, but not in time to make a difference in the final battle.
It was all up to Magneto now.
Years had passed since Magneto had first faced these five, the original X-Men: Iceman, the Beast, Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Archangel, who had been just Angel back then. He remembered the day well. He had been attacking the mili
tary base, Cape Citadel, when they came seemingly out of nowhere, offering a challenge he had never expected, from a man who had once been his closest friend. Surprise had been their advantage, as had his reluctance to simply kill them all, and Xavier as well, if necessary, to achieve his goals.
The stakes had risen since then, the consequences grown more deadly. The X-Men had grown in number, and become far greater warriors. But Magneto had evolved as well.
And they no longer had the advantage of surprise.
Cyclops continued to batter Magneto’s force shield with his optic blasts. Magneto admired his persistence, but thought the man foolish. It was clear his beams were no match for Magneto’s power. Although the constant attack was tiring him a bit, forcing him to constantly focus on his own defense.
The other four moved as one.
Jean Grey wrapped the Beast in her telekinetic web and lifted them both off the ground, rising toward the spot where Magneto hovered over the devastation. Iceman shot from the ground toward Magneto on a pillar of ice he was building beneath himself, then extended it into an ice slide that drove him forward. Archangel took to the air, diving and swooping back and forth, not giving Magneto an easy target.
The others were easy targets, though, and could be dealt with easily and soon enough. He turned his attentions to Archangel, who had already hurt him once. Magneto wasn’t going to allow that again. As Warren Worthington tucked back his wings and dived, Magneto held up a hand, waiting for Warren to fire his wing-knives.
In that moment, Iceman flash-froze a huge block of ice on the side of Magneto’s force shield, disrupting the field as if it were a window of ice on the side of the sphere.
Jean Grey dropped the Beast, who bounded off the ice slide Bobby Drake had left behind, and smashed through the ice-window, scattering shards of jagged ice and slamming into Magneto’s chest before flipping into a backward somersault and landing behind Drake on the ice-slide.
Archangel didn’t fire his wing-knives. If he had, he was too close now for Magneto to do anything about it. But instead, Worthington dived in at extraordinary speed, banked in at an angle, and flew past the hole in Magneto’s force shield before he had had time to repair the sphere. His right wing sliced out, through the break in the sphere, and cut Magneto’s side in several places.
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