Scott knew the attack was coming an instant before the Exemplar exploded into motion. It came of fighting for his life on an weekly basis—if not more frequently— since he was a teenager. A life of facing down genocidal maniacs, alien invaders, evil mutants, and more had given him an almost preternatural danger sense, allowing him to anticipate an opponent’s movements, and to have a counterattack ready at a moment’s notice.
In most instances, that meant that Scott was able to win a fight almost before it had begun.
In this instance^ it simply meant that he got to stay alive for another few moments.
The figure calling himself Invictus Prime, the sun glinting off his steel-like skin—so much like Colossus, Scott thought—simply motioned with his hand, and the five figures hovering in midair behind him rushed forward like a wave breaking on a rocky shore.
Scott didn’t hesitate an instant, tapping the side of his visor and widening the aperture of the ruby-quartz lens.
His eyes exposed, a wide scarlet beam of concussive force lanced from the visor, catching the nearest of the
Exemplar in her midriff She had wings sprouting from her back, gray and leathery like those of a bat, and long talons on her fingers.
Scott didn’t waste time waiting to see the effects of his blast, but swung his head around and sent another beam lancing toward the male figure wreathed in a sheath of green flame. The impact of the optic blast sent the green torch tumbling backward, but before Scott could sight on another target, he was knocked off his feet by a beam of force that caught him in the chest.
The wind knocked out of him, he struggled into a sitting position, and looked up to see the steel-skinned figure of Invictus Prime regarding him, white energy dancing at the corner of his eyes.
“\our blasts are unfocused, your aim undisciplined,” Invictus Prime said, his tone haughty. “Shall I demonstrate proper form?”
Beams of solid white light shot from the Exemplar’s eyes, and Scott managed to roll to one side just before they blasted into the ground where he’d been, kicking up a huge cloud of sand.
Scott scrambled to his feet, parrying with an optic blast of his own that missed Invictus Prime only by inches, and began looking for cover. He hoped the others were faring better than he.
“Quickly now,” Alysande shouted as the last of the marines raced toward the transport. “Pick up the pace or we’ll leave you here with that lot.”
The rotors had already been turning on the transport by the time Alysande had ordered a retreat, her marines laying down suppressing fire as they broke off in twos and threes and raced to the helicopter. Now, as the last of them climbed aboard, she motioned to the pilot, who gave a thumbs-up and prepared to take off.
“Discretion here,” Raphael said, as Alysande strapped into the jump seat beside him, “being the better part of valor?”
“We’ll be back,” Alysande said, keeping her tone level, “and with reinforcements, and we’ll see to this alien incursion, once and for all.”
“If they are aliens.” Raphael’s tone was suggestive, insinuating, but Alysande refused to rise to the bait. “And what of the X-Men?”
Alysande glanced out the helicopter’s windscreen as the transport lifted off the ground. Back on the beach, the two groups of mutants were in pitched battle, and seemed to have forgotten all about the humans formerly among them.
“The X-Men can bloody well look after themselves.”
Logan hadn’t forgotten about Alysande and her men. He had been busy keeping these Exemplar jokers busy while the marines beat a hasty retreat, and now that their transport was speeding away from the atoll, and the battle, he allowed himself a little grin, biting down hard on his cigar.
Now that the bystanders are out of the way, Logan thought, I can cut loose and have a little bit of fun.
Logan saw that Scott was busy swapping optic blasts with the big metal guy, and the flying chick and the green torch had both gone off somewhere, which left the other two for him. Both were female, at least as near as Logan could tell, and stood on the sandy beach a few short yards away from Logan’s position.
One was built like a brick house—literally. She was maybe twice Logan’s height, and looked to be made of gray stone, like living granite. She looked like the Thing’s older sister.
The other was closer to Logan’s height, but lithe, built like a dancer. She had pointed ears, yellow eyes, and blue fur, with long bony talons growing from her fingertips, and hopped from one foot to another like an acrobat.
Without preamble, the blue acrobat leaped toward Logan, talons raking the air.
Logan, with a minimum expenditure of energy and motion, sidestepped the acrobat’s attack grabbing hold of one of her forearms and using her own momentum to swing her around, hurling her through the air.
“Alley oop,” Logan said casually.
The acrobat, though, yellow eyes flashing, twisted in midair, and landed effortlessly on her feet a short distance away, arms held out slightly to her sides for balance.
“Hey, darlin’.” Logan smiled at the acrobat, and raised his hands in front of him. “You showed me yours. How ’bout I show you mine?”
From the back of his own fists popped adamantium claws, each like a tiny, unbreakable sword, capable of cutting through anything short of adamantium itself.
“Degenerate,” the blue acrobat spat, and bared pointed teeth. “I see now I shouldn’t have gone easy on you.”
“Desist, sibling,” the brick said, motioning with a hand the size of a shovel. “Allow me to deal with this mongrel.”
Before Logan could react, the brick rushed forward.
Cripes, he thought in the split second allowed him, how can something so big move so fast?!
And then the brick plowed into him with the speed and force of a freight train.
Logan skidded into the sand a few yards away. It would take a bigger blow than that to break his near invulnerable adamantium-laced bones, but a couple more hits like that and his healing factor would be working overtime.
“Okay,” he said in a low voice, rising to a crouch, claws out and ready, “so maybe this won’t be quite as easy as I thought.”
Scott was on the beach, and the winged woman, the green torch, and Invictus Prime were converging on him. His optic blasts were nearly spent, the most recent beams carrying little more impact than a rose-colored flashlight. It would be only a moment or two before his reserves of energy replenished themselves, provided he lived that long.
“To think,” Invictus Prime said, looking down his nose at Scott, “that the once proud Earth has fallen into the clutching grasp of such as this.”
“Oh, yeah?” came a voice blaring over a loudspeaker. “Well... suck it.”
The three Exemplar turned in the direction of the voice and were caught completely unawares as the nose of a Lockheed RS-150 rammed into them at speed, knocking them for a loop.
The Blackbird stopped short, hovering in midair just above Scott, the sound dampeners on the engines acting at full capacity, with only a whisper of noise escaping.
“Well?” Kitty Pryde was visible through the windscreen at the controls, her voice reverberating over the plane’s external loudspeakers.
“‘Suck it’?” Scott asked, climbing to his feet and dusting off the legs of his jeans.
“Okay, so I choked under pressure,” Kitty answered. “Now, will you guys come on, already? The meter’s running here.”
Without sparing a glance to see what had become of the Exemplar, Scott leapt up into the open hatch of the Blackbird. As he maneuvered into the copilot’s seat, Logan lurched through the hatch behind him, his face and arms crisscrossed with deep cuts and scrapes.
“I’m not usually one for runnin’ from a scrape, but I know when I’m outmatched. So what you waitin’ for, kiddo?” Logan said impatiently. “Punch it!”
The hatch swung shut automatically, and Kitty gripped the controls as the plane shot up into the afternoon sky, steadily climbing toward Mach 4.
Invictus Prime hung motionless in midair, watching the little craft zipping away toward the horizon. The rest of his Exemplar cell gathered around him, taking up their accustomed positions.
“They were more powerful than we had been led to imagine,” said the winged woman.
“And more skilled,” said the one with the skin like gray granite.
“But still not a match for us,” said the blue-furred acrobat, yellow eyes narrowed.
“Perhaps,” said the green torch. “But they were few, and we do not know in what numbers they infest this world.”
“We should have pursued them,” the blue-furred acrobat said angrily. “We could have made short work of them.”
“Enough!” The voice of Invictus Prime rang like a bell. “We have done as ordered. The time will come to attend to these degenerates. And soon.”
Once upon a time, Magneto had made this room his bedchamber. Now, it was a prison cell.
Lee liked it better the old way.
Their captors, it seemed, were none too pleased that others had taken up residence in the city before their arrival. Before Lee and her crew had been locked away in this high tower room, the strange hairless beings who’d captured them had made a show of removing every tapestry and stick of furniture that Magneto had brought to these strange, unearthly buildings. From the high, narrow window of their cell, Lee could even now see the pillar of smoke rising from the courtyard far below, where their captors had set everything of Magneto’s to the torch.
Lee had stayed in the city as well, a time or two, first with Scott, then with Magneto, and then on her own, after she’d lost touch with both of them. Lee had been fascinated with the city, and with the beings who’d originally built it, sometime in distant prehistory. Based on the statuary that covered the city, and the shape and dimensions of the doors and corridors, she’d had to conclude that whatever the original inhabitants of the city had been, they weren’t people. At least not by any definition she was accustomed to using.
But now, all this time later, she found herself back again, and the prisoner of men and women who, though hairless, silent, and strange, were nonetheless inarguably people.
There were six of them locked in the otherwise empty chamber. Lee and Paolo sat in one corner, while Richie, Jose, and Merrick clustered around Frank in another.
Lee didn’t have to possess the mutant ability to read minds to know precisely what Frank and the others were thinking.
This was all Lee’s fault.
Lee couldn’t find it within herself to disagree. It was her fault. Had she spent so much time rubbing elbows with men and women who had the ability to move mountains with a glance that she’d forgotten that she was just a regular human being? Just a person, with only the strengths—and weaknesses—that entailed.
Lee had been watching their captors carefully, though, both when they were captured in the courtyard and when they were escorted here to their makeshift cell, and Lee suspected that they, too, shared all those same strengths. And, more to the point, all the same weaknesses.
She tried to outline her plans for escape to the others, but they were having none of it.
“Look Cap’n,” Frank had said, managing to turn the syllables of the title into a curse, “we got this far fol-lowin’ your suggestions, so maybe you’ll excuse us if we don’t hurry up and listen to the next brilliant idea to fall out of your head, m’kay?”
And that was that. Frank had sulked back to his corner, his little coterie of crewmen gathered tight around him, and fell to whispering plans of their own. Paolo, for his part, had just propped his chin on his hands, looking older and more tired than Lee had ever seen him. At one point, Frank raised his voice just loud enough and long enough for Lee to hear the word rifle, and beside her Paolo blanched, averting his gaze.
She knew the old man blamed himself for letting their captors get hold of their only weapon, but what choice had he had? One of the bald UFO people had pulled some sort of crystal rod out of his pocket, pointed it at the rifle, and the next thing anyone knew the shark gun had gone white hot. Paolo’s hands were still blistered and burned from the heat of it, but Frank and his cronies hardly cared about that. Like Lee, Paolo made for a convenient scapegoat, a target toward which they could pour their anxieties and fear, redirected as aggression and blame.
Then, suddenly, they had another target, if only briefly.
The door to the chamber slid open, with a whisper of stone upon stone. The mechanism responsible completely eluded Lee, as it had in all her previous visits. One moment the door was closed, and the wall looked unbroken and smooth; the next moment part of the stone had collapsed back into itself, revealing an open doorway.
A slim, hairless figure stood in the opening, regarding them serenely. He looked to be about thirty, but there was something about his eyes that suggested a far greater age. He was dressed in a loose-fitting robe of deep purple, with scarlet bands around his wrists and ankles, his feet and hands bare. In his hand, he held a crystal rod that was all too familiar.
Wordlessly, the figure advanced into the room, seeming more to glide across the floor than walk so graceful were his motions. As he approached, another figure was revealed behind him, staying in the corridor beyond the doorway. It appeared to be a woman, but Lee couldn’t be sure; with large eyes in a round, wide face, no ears, and only two slits for a nose, the figure regarded them with an unreadable expression.
“Get ’im!” Frank yelled, without warning, and launched himself into the air and at the purple-robed figure.
“Wait!” Lee shouted.
With a somewhat disinterested air, the robed figure raised the crystal rod fractionally, pointing its end at Frank But while the movement was slight, the results were dramatic.
Blinding white light leapt from the rod’s tip, and Frank was sent tumbling head over heels, slamming into the far wall with a thud. He slid down to the ground, alive but only semiconscious, moaning softly.
“This one requires to know which of you is the leader,” the robed figure said, speaking in soft, gentle tones.
Richie, Jose, and Merrick looked at Frank, moaning insensate against the far wall, then turned to look back at Lee.
She began to rise, but Paolo spoke up first. “I am,” he said, climbing unsteadily to his feet. “What of it?”
Lee wasn’t sure whether to expect some kind of “I am Spartacus” moment, but the other crewmen averted their eyes and stayed resolutely on the ground, so it looked like the competition would be pretty light.
“No,” Lee said, climbing to her feet and laying a hand on Paolo’s shoulder. “I’m the captain.”
Lee stepped forward, planting her hands on her hips, and narrowed her eyes at the robed figure.
“You are the leader, then?” he asked serenely.
“Yes. I’m responsible for bringing these men here.” She planted her hands on her hips. “Now, just what do you want with us? Who are you people, anyway?” “Please excuse this one,” the robed figure said, bobbing his bald head slightly. “This one had only now been instilled with the ability to communicate in your tongue, and some of your conceptual structures are still problematic.” He paused, and then added, “People, did you say?”
Lee raised an eyebrow. “Right. Who are you?”
“Ah,” the robed figure said. “I am Vox Septimus, servitor unaugmented clade, of the House Nine-Mirror-Eclipse, preeminent among the Collective.” In response to Lee’s blank stare, he added, “Merely a humble servant of the masters of Earth, the Kh’thon.”
“The who, now?” Paolo asked, stepping forward to stand beside Lee.
“The Kh’thon, of course,” the man named Vox Septimus said, as though it were the simplest thing in the world. “The Kh’thon were the original sentient inhabitants of this planet, though there is some debate among their servitors whether they originated here or on some other world or plane. This city, called Dis, was once one of their strongholds.”
“So you’re one of these Kh’thon things, then?” Lee asked.
Vox Septimus’s eyes opened wide, and he let out a short, loud bark of laughter. “This one? Oh, gracious no. This one is simply one such as you, an unaugmented servitor, descendant of those first raised up from among the other animals to serve the needs of the Kh’thon.”
“Where in the what now?” Paolo said, brows knitted.
“The distant ancestors of us all were subsentient organisms native to this biosphere,” Vox Septimus continued. “As they had need for such, the Kh’thon altered the genetics of a strain of subsentients, creating the first servitors. This one, and you as well, are made in that same phenotype.”
Lee opened her mouth, then closed it again. She thought she understood what the strange man was saying, but if she did, she didn’t like it.
“The Kh’thon are, of course, near immortal,” Vox Septimus went on, “and aeons ago a contingent of them grew weary of their perhaps too comfortable existence on Earth, and decided to explore the distant reaches of the galaxy. Dozens of millennia passed, and at long last those Kh’thon explorers have decided to return home, to rejoin their earthbound brethren.
The journey has been long, but at last they have arrived. However, in the intervening millennia, it appears that the Kh’thon who remained on Earth have departed for other worlds themselves, or for other planes of existence, or perhaps migrated on to some more advanced form of being. Whatever the reason for their departure, they evidently left their servants behind, who have since multiplied uncontrollably, and now run rampant over the planet.”
No, that clinched it. Lee knew she didn’t like what the strange man was saying.
“But as though matters were not already bad enough,” Vox Septimus continued, “it now appears that some of these errant servitors have been triggered, without the control of a Kh’thon master.”
Lee regarded him through narrowed eyes. “Triggered?”
“Yes,” Vox Septimus said, growing impatient. “The randomizing element in their genome activated, secondary and tertiary mutagenic characteristics allowed to come to the fore. Some are even ... Exemplar class.” An expression of extreme distaste twisted his lip, as though he’d just smelled something horrible. “To think of augmented servitors, running rampant.” He shook all over, like someone had just walked over his grave. “It is anathema, the height of blasphemy.”
Lee shook her head slowly.
“I don’t buy any of this,” she said, keeping her tone level. “I can’t accept that humanity is little more than stray pets for inhuman aliens who moved out hundreds of thousands of years ago.”
Vox Septimus shrugged. “Your opinions on the matter are of no special importance. It is the truth.”
Lee thought for a moment. “So what do you want with us anyway?”
“Ah,” Vox Septimus said, nodding slightly. “Yes. It has been given to this one and another”—he gestured to the large-eyed, earless woman still standing in the corridor beyond the doorway—“to discover how best to communicate to the current inhabitants of Earth a simple message.”
Lee glanced at Paolo, who cast back a worried look. “What sort of message?” Lee asked.
“Only this,” Vox Septimus said. “That the Kh’thon have returned, and will now put their home in order.”
Elizabeth Braddock wasn’t at all sure what she’d gotten herself into. It had been only a few days since she’d accepted the invitation to come and live at the Xavier mansion, and while everyone had welcomed her with open arms, she couldn’t help but feel like an outsider.
She’d accepted the invitation, in large part, because she didn’t have anywhere else to turn. Betsy had possessed her psi talents for years, and even though she’d put them to use a time or two in the service of queen and country, she still felt like a novice. She had tremendous potential—or so she’d been told—but so far, Betsy herself had seen precious little evidence of it.
Betsy knew she was no hero, as much as she’d tried. Her brother, Brian? Now, he was a hero. True blue and courageous, no question about it. But for all her ability to peer into the minds of others, to peek momentarily into the future, Betsy had ended up too often a victim, someone to be rescued by others.
Most recently, she was rescued by students of the Xavier school.
It had been a year since Betsy was taken by the ex-tradimensional slavemaster known only as Mojo and forced to cavort for his pleasure. Brian had searched for her for the better part of a year, and then managed to get himself captured, in the process. In the end, Doug Ramsey and a handful of other Xavier students had managed to rescue Betsy and her brother.
What little remained of her old life back in England had crumbled to dust in the long months she’d been away, and Betsy found herself with no compelling reason to return. When she’d been invited to come and live at the Xavier mansion, to study with the X-Men and learn how better to use her powers to protect herself and help others, she’d jumped at the task She’d had visions of studies, and exercises, and careful training. Things like that Danger Room down in the sublevels, where she’d watched Kitty Pryde fight gangsters and giant holographic robots that morning.
What she hadn’t foreseen, however, was that before she’d even unpacked her bags, she’d be sitting with the world-hopping X-Men in the tastefully appointed library, hearing the details of an alien encounter.
Scott Summers, Kitty Pryde, and Logan had left the mansion in a rush only a few hours before, flying off over the waters of Breakstone Lake in their sleek jet-black spy plane. Now, they were back, more than a little worse for wear, with an unbelievable story to share.
“Unglaublich!” said the blue-skinned man named Kurt Wagner, code name Nightcrawler, who perched on the arm of the couch, his prehensile tail swaying slightly behind him like a charmed snake.
“You took the words right outta my mouth, sugah,” said the woman known only as Rogue. She ran a gloved hand through her white-streaked hair.
Kitty was curled up in a big reading chair, her legs folded under her, a steaming cup of coffee in her hands. Logan was stretched out on the couch, his feet propped up on a low coffee table—which to Betsy’s untrained eye looked to be a priceless antique, its value no doubt only slightly decreased by the scuff marks of Logan’s sand-crusted boots. Scott, for his part, paced impatiently back and forth in front of the fireplace, his hands behind his back.
“Enough of this jawin’ already,” Logan said, taking a deep sip from his bottled beer. “The only reason to turn tail and run was to come back for reinforcements, and now that everybody’s back from Scotland we oughta load up and head back there, already.”
Scott opened his mouth to say something, but quickly shut it and continued his pacing.
Betsy had no desire to read anyone’s mind without their permission, unless circumstances truly demanded, but whatever was going through Scott’s head was so intense that stray thoughts bled off him like heat off a stove. Without even trying to peer into Scott’s consciousness, Betsy knew that he was tempted to do just as Logan suggested, but that long years of training and experience demanded that he have a more complete picture of the situation before charging in half-cocked.
Even after a year as a mind-slave of an extradimen-sional impresario, Betsy felt more than a little out of her depth with all this discussion of aliens.
“Isn’t it possible,” she said, raising her hand tentatively, like the new kid in class asking the teacher a question, “that this all mightn’t be some kind of misunderstanding? Couldn’t we just reason with these aliens?” “We got a mighty good taste of the aliens’ reasoning style, darlin’,” Logan said with a sneer. “It seems to come at the end of a fist, and punctuated by death rays. So really, thanks, but no thanks.”
“Look,” Kitty said, putting her coffee cup down on a side table and swinging her feet to the floor. “I think everyone is missing the point here. These aren’t aliens. They’re Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens superior.” “What about these... Kh’thon?” Rogue asked. “Whatever the flippin’ heck they are.” Logan finished off the last of his beer, and tossed the empty bottle into the corner.
Scott stopped his pacing, and regarded the others, his expression hard. “Focus, people. We’ve got a problem, and we need a solution.”
“The problem being Captain Forrester and her crew, nicht wa.hr?” Kurt rubbed his chin with one of his oversize fingers, and Betsy tried hard not to stare. As many odd creatures and beings as she’d dealt with in recent years, she still found it difficult to get used to six fingers, six toes, a prehensile tail, and blue fur.
Which, come to that, reminded her of something. “Um, if you don’t mind?” Betsy raised her hand again, and Scott and the others turned to her. “From your description of these . .. Exemplar, it sounds as if they might be a little ... familiar?”
Beside her on the couch, Logan narrowed his eyes, but nodded slightly.
“Like familiar, how, sugah?”
“Well, Rogue,” Betsy said, and placed her hands on her knees. “It’s a little untoward and out of the ordinary, I know, but if Scott, Kitty, and Logan wouldn’t mind, I could show everyone what I mean by sharing their memories of the Exemplars telepathically.”
Kitty merely shrugged. “Sure, take whatever you need.” Betsy could tell that she had been around telepaths for a long time, and had never learned to fear them.
“Okay, Bets,” Logan said guardedly, “but don’t touch anything else in there, or else I might just forget my manners.” Logan, too, clearly had long experience with telepaths, but Betsy could see that his experiences had perhaps not all been as positive as Kitty’s.
Scott was the most reluctant to accede to her idea. A long silence ensued. “Okay,” he said at length, “but make it quick.”
Betsy nodded, a small, almost notional gesture, and closed her eyes. She reached out with her mind, looking for the minds of the others.
Kitty was easy to find. Her mind flared like a searchlight in the night, bright and optimistic. She’d seen darkness, that much was clear, but hadn’t let it overwhelm her. Betsy found the memories of the day scattered haphazardly through Kitty’s thoughts.
Betsy took only what she needed, sensory information specifically, and primarily the visual record. She brushed aside the lingering fears and anxieties about the day, Kitty’s emotional and intellectual responses to the situation, her impressions of the tall British soldier
Colonel Stuart, even residual bleed-over of Kitty’s feelings about and toward her companions, Logan and Scott. Betsy couldn’t help noticing the way that Kitty looked at both men as older brothers, or as avuncular figures, even while she was aware that they were in many respects polar opposites. Each had served as a different kind of role model for Kitty since she first came to join the X-Men. Whenever Kitty faced danger, an unconscious part of her always seemed to ask “What would Scott do?”, and then “What would Logan do?”, and then puzzled out which of the responses best suited the situation.
Drawing back gracefully from her brief communion with Kitty’s thoughts, Betsy turned her attention to Logan. While Kitty’s memories had been scattered and haphazard, though intermingled with other impressions and recollections, the far-reaching skein of associative memory, Logan’s thoughts were quite different. Here, it was like looking at an animal in a cage. But what surprised Betsy was not the animal, which one might have expected in the mind of such a fierce warrior, but the cage itself It was an incredibly complex and sophisticated bit of mental architecture, and suggested a mind of considerable dimension and discipline. At first glance, Betsy was sure that this was a structure imposed on the man by someone else, perhaps theX-Men’s founder and mentor, Charles Xavier. But on closer examination, it was apparent that, instead, this was a self-imposed structure. Through careful study, meditation, and self-examination, Logan had learned to keep his thoughts under careful control.
Which wasn’t to say that the cage door couldn’t be opened, on occasion, and the animal within allowed to run free. But when it did, it was Logan himself who opened that door, and closed it again when the need arose. Betsy shuddered to think what reserves of selfcontrol that must require.
Betsy found Logan’s memories of the day set in front of the cage door, wrapped up like a present, waiting for her. She was neither invited nor welcome to view anything else of Logan’s mind. Gratefully, she accepted the memories, and withdrew.
Scott was next. In one sense, his mind was precisely as Betsy might have expected. The mental and emotional landscape of a complex man in the prime of life, with the fears and hopes, loves and hatreds of someone who has spent a lifetime in the service of others. What was surprising, however, was the tendril that ran from Scott’s thoughts out into the ether, like a golden thread, unseen by any but a telepath allowed a brief and privileged view into his mind. Where the thread went, and to what it connected Scott, Betsy couldn’t say, but she didn’t have time to contemplate further. She found Scott’s memories of the day. After dusting off Scott’s anxieties about the safety of the captured crew, and his confusion over his unresolved feelings for Lee Forrester himself, Betsy folded the memories close to her, and withdrew.
For the briefest instant, she held the three sets of memory impressions in front of her, there on the astral plane—Kitty’s, bright and hopeful, Logan’s, strictly ordered and structured, and Scott’s, sincere and conflicted. Then she pressed the three sets together, until only one remained. With a judicious bit of editing, she was able to shear away personal associations, emotional undercurrents, subconscious references, or any other mental or emotional baggage, leaving only the visual and auditory record. Then she patched over any discontinuities, and eliminated redundancies, until she was left with what amounted to little more than a psionic video recording.
Then she opened her eyes. Only a scant few seconds had passed.
“Well?” Rogue said. “You gonna get started, or what?”
“Already did, and done.” Betsy gave a slight smile. “Now, I’ll share with the rest of you, and perhaps you will see what I mean.”
With a tiny telepathic “push,” Betsy sent the little psionic recording she’d edited together to everyone in the room.
“That’s them,” Logan said simply, as everyone got an up-close, if perhaps impersonal, look at the five Exemplar.
Across the room, Betsy saw Scott’s hands tighten into fists at his side, and could feel the waves of aggression and anxiety rolling off him.
“Now,” Betsy said, “does anything about these people seem in the slightest... familiar?”
They looked at the woman with the blue fur and yellow eyes, the optic blasts shot by the leader, and the leader’s own steel-like skin.
At just that moment, the tall Russian named Peter Rasputin ran into the room, eyes wide.
“What’s the matter, mein Freund?” Kurt Wagner said, a concerned expression on his dark-blue features.
“We’ve just received a call from Dr. Corbeau,” Peter answered grimly.
“Oh, no!” Kitty leaned forward, her hand flying to her mouth. “He’s not down there near that island, is he?”
From Kitty’s thoughts, Betsy caught the image of a stolid, resourceful man at the wheel of a yacht, deep intelligence glinting in his eyes.
“No,” Peter answered, shaking his head. “He’s still on Starcore. His people were the first to the vessel of the aliens you encountered.”
“So what’s the bad news, Petey?” Logan asked.
Peter took a deep breath before continuing, his expression hard. “The doctor reports that another dozen such ships are now approaching Earth orbit, with more following not far behind, the largest of them the size of a small moon.”
“Oh, dear,” Betsy said, gaping.
“You can say that again, sister,” Logan said. “Aliens or not, this is a flamin’ invasion.”
The first of the landers touched down within an hour. Moments later, telecommunication systems worldwide were interrupted. Bandwidth was choked by a signal transmitted from high orbit. Worldwide, the message suddenly appeared on televisions, cellular phones, and computers, overriding all firewalls and protocols, the local dominant language or dialect automatically selected from more than a thousand alternate audio tracks. But the video feed remained unchanged, and countless billions of eyes around the world, in that moment, beheld the same image.
A man with silvery skin and white glowing eyes stood in the center of a vast amphitheater, while arrayed behind him were hundreds, even thousands of figures in all shapes and sizes, some crouched on the ground and some soaring overhead.
“People of Earth, attend. I am Invictus Prime of the Exemplar, first exarch of the Shining Fist Cohort. Even now, my siblings from among the serried ranks of the Exemplar are descending upon your world. We bring with us glad tidings. Your onetime and future masters, the rightful owners of this planet, have returned. No more will you wander alone, unguided, through the wilderness. With the Kh’thonic Collective once more resident on Earth, all will be as it should always have been.
“All unaugmented individuals, those you would class as ‘baseline human,’ should submit themselves to the will of the Kh’thon immediately. Depots will be established near centers of population for you to gather, for future examination by your superior servitors. All augmented individuals, whether mutant by birth or mutant by accident or design should surrender themselves immediately to the nearest Exemplar, who will determine on the spot if their talents may be of use to the Kh’thon.
“Those who are of no use, whether augmented or unaugmented, will be disposed of in an appropriate and humane fashion. Those who refuse to submit, or who resist the will of the Collective, will be dealt with in a far harsher manner.
“Thank you for your attention, and welcome back to the loving grace of your masters, the Kh’thon.”
As the image faded from the television set in the far wall, Kurt Wagner could feel a strange pang somewhere deep within him. Was it hunger? Or something else?
Before he could puzzle it out, Logan had leapt to his feet, adamantium blades slicing out from the backs of his hands.
“What are we doin’ waitin’ around for?” In this moment, teeth bared, Wolverine seemed more like the animal whose name he shared than a human being. But then, Kurt reflected, he himself was named for a worm and looked like a demon, so labels and appearances could not always be trusted. He knew that somewhere inside his friend Logan lurked a gentle man; at the moment, though, that gentle man appeared to be hidden beside an unstoppable engine of fury. “We gonna bust your lady friend out of that alien city or not?”
Scott stiffened, and turned his attention to the television without answering.
“Oh, you guys . . .” Kitty said, her voice sounding distant and small.
Kitty was sitting on the edge of her seat, mouth open and eyes wide, using the remote to flash from one station to another. Since the Exemplar signal had ceased, the airwaves had been filled with news of the armada overhead, and of the ships now landing in cities all over the world.
“Hang on, Kitty,” Scott said, stepping over and placing a hand on her shoulder. “Go back one.”
“Aw, heck,” Rogue said, whistling low.
The image on the screen was of Manhattan, Times Square to be precise.
“By the white wolf...” Peter said softly.
One of the alien landing craft had set down in the middle of Broadway, and was only now blossoming open like an enormous, cruel metal flower, just as the others had described the craft in the Bermuda Triangle doing earlier that day. It was now approaching sunset, and as the last rays of the sun reddened the sky, the figures that emerged from the craft into the neon-lit always-daylight of Times Square seemed to glow with a strange, unearthly illumination of their own, like will-o’-the-wisp, like corpse light.
There were a half-dozen of them, or so it seemed. They climbed from their blossoming metal flower, took to the air, and hovered over the heads of the close-packed crowds of tourists and commuters.
Kurt, who had traveled to the stars and visited other dimensions, fought aliens and demons and monsters, could not help being impressed by the bravery and presence of mind of the news camera operator on the ground. He was clearly having some difficulty keeping the Exemplar in focus, but even so the camera operator had held his ground, even when the crowds began to realize that standing around and looking up with gaping wonder at the alien invaders floating just overhead was not perhaps the safest course of action.
The television picture began to shake, as the camera operator was bumped on either side by pedestrians struggling to get out and away from the Exemplar overhead, and the audio was filled with shouts of alarm and warning.
Just then, the camera swung around, finally coming to rest on one of the Exemplar, who had raised his arms, commanding attention. Well-muscled from the waist up, from the waist down he was completely encased in some sort of silver device, sleek and aerodynamic like a lift body.
“Something’s happening,” said an unseen person, and Kurt realized it was the camera operator. It was a woman, by the sounds of it, brave but frightened.
“Attend,” the seated Exemplar said in English, his voice echoing off the buildings, distorted and buzzing through the television speakers. “I am the Capo of the Judgment’s Watch Cohort, and it is given to us to secure this region of the continent. All unaugmented individuals should gather immediately in this place for processing. Interruptions and delays will not be tolerated.”
Without warning, another of the Exemplar, a young male with bright green skin, transformed into some sort of vicious flying animal, like a cross between a bat and a shark and swooped down over the crowd.
“You heard Nilus,” roared the strange flying creature with the voice of a teenage boy. “Gather!”
Kurt and the others watched in helpless horror as the strange bat-shark creature flew directly into the path of the camera operator. In the blink of an eye, the video signal was gone, replaced by static.
“Mein Gott!” Kurt swore, yellow eyes squinting briefly shut in empathy, as he tried desperately not to imagine what might just have befallen that brave woman.
“We’ve got to get down there,” Kitty said breathlessly.
“Agreed,” Scott said, and pulled his sweater over his head. Underneath he was wearing the plain blue tunic of his uniform. He reached into a pocket and took out a pair of reinforced yellow gloves, and tugged them on. “But we need to do this smart. We’ve got these landers coming down all over the planet.”
“Da,” Peter Rasputin said. “But it is not as if we did not have friends, Scott.”
Squinting his eyes shut, Scott pulled on a blue cowl, and then settled his battle visor over his eyes. “True. But we need some way to coordinate with them. We could use Cerebro, but it’d take a pretty powerful telepath to reach as far as we need to reach, and with the professor gone...”
“Excuse me,” interrupted Betsy Braddock, sitting demurely at the far end of the couch. “I believe I can be of assistance there. Though I’ll need to know who I’m to contact.”
“Leave that to me,” said a new voice from behind them, and Kurt turned to see Doug Ramsey standing in the doorway. He was one of the newer students, one Kurt had had precious little opportunity to get to know. Was he sufficient to the task?
“I don’t know.. .’’Scott said, shucking off his pants, unselfconsciously, revealing the uniform he was already wearing beneath.
“Cripes, Cyke, do you wear that thing everywhere?” Logan muttered under his breath. “What’s the matter, couldn’t find a phone booth to use?”
Scott ignored him. “Perhaps Kitty would be a better choice to assist Betsy...”
“No way,” Kitty said, slipping her mask over her eyes and jumping up from her seat. “I’m more help out in the field. But Doug can do it, Scott. He’s got more brains than the rest of us put together.”
“That’s good enough for me, Katzchen,” Kurt said, and disappeared, a puff of brimstone and a tiny bamf noise the only sign of his passing. For the briefest, imperceptible instant he was elsewhere, and then he was standing by the open doorway. “If Kitty trusts him, so do I.”
“Great,” Doug said, waving a hand in front of his face, nose wrinkled, an expression of distaste curling his lip. “I appreciate”—he sputtered, coughing slightly on the strong smell of the brimstone residue of Kurt’s tele-portation—“the vote of confidence.”
Kurt touched a small device at his belt. No larger than a pocket watch, it was an image inducer, which allowed the wearer to display any outward appearance he chose at will. An instant later, Kurt was no longer wearing a loose-fitting white shirt and black slacks, but was clad in his black, white, and red uniform. Kurt seldom wore casual clothes, preferring the unstable molecules of the uniform, which moved and glided effortlessly
with his acrobatics, preferring to use holographies when he wanted to affect a more relaxed appearance.
“Then what are we waitin’ for?” Logan said, shouldering past. “There’s people out there gettin’ their backsides handed to ’em, and we’ve got to stop it.”
As he watched Logan go, Kurt thought of what Scott and the others had said about the power levels of the invaders they’d encountered down in that alien city, and about the images he himself had just seen on the television screen. As Peter, Kitty, and Scott followed Logan out the door and down the corridor, Kurt felt again the strange pang deep inside. But he realized now that it wasn’t hunger, but a sensation he hadn’t experienced in quite some time.
It was fear.