A sliver of moon was visible through the high, narrow window of the cell. Lee Forrester sat against the wall, her knees tucked up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs.
Night had fallen only a short while before, which meant it had been something on the order of fifteen or sixteen hours since they first spotted the UFO blazing across the sky, little more than twelve hours since they’d been captured. Only half a day, and it felt like a lifetime.
But then, Lee thought ruefully, life ended at death, so unless they were very lucky, half a day might end up being a lifetime, after all. Or what was left of one, at any rate.
Frank had regained consciousness sometime after being thrown into the far wall, and now sat apart from the others, gingerly prodding his bruises from time to time. Richie, Jose, and Merrick, while still clearly blaming Lee for their troubles, had lost confidence in Frank’s ability to lead them to freedom, and so they sat dispirited in the corner, muttering occasionally to one
another. Paolo kept his place at Lee’s side, as always.
The wall had been unbroken stone, ever since the strange little man in the purple robes had left, sometime that afternoon. Now, without warning, the stone flowed once more, and in the newly open doorway again stood the purple-robed man who’d called himself Vox Septimus.
He still carried the crystal rod, and the sight of it was enough to keep the others from attempting to duplicate Frank’s earlier plan.
Lee, though, had some learning yet to do. Maybe they wouldn’t get out due to brute force, but she was convinced there was still a chance to find some angle, some advantage.
“What do you want?” Paolo said sharply, before Lee could speak.
“This one merely comes to offer humble thanks, for your leader’s contributions to the objectives of our masters, the Kh’thonic Collective.”
“Contributions?” Lee said the word like a curse, sliding her feet out in front of her and putting her hands palm-down on either side. “And just what did I contribute?”
When Vox Septimus had come to them a few hours before, asking about how best to deliver their ultimatum or whatever it was to the people of Earth, Lee had refused to answer. She’d kept her mouth shut, even after the purple-robed man asked a whole string of questions. But rather than the angry response she’d anticipated, and instead of zapping her with the rod or turning and questioning the others, Vox Septimus had merely smiled, nodded, and left the cell. He’d rejoined the strange, large-eyed, ear- and noseless woman in the corridor, and the door had flowed shut.
So what, precisely, was Lee supposed to have done that helped Vox Septimus and his masters?
“Simply put,” Vox Septimus said with a smile, “the knowledge that this one’s associate was able to glean from your surface thoughts was invaluable in preparing a broadcast signal that transmitted to his world’s population our masters’ message.”
Lee looked at the hairless figure, her eyes narrowed. “So you’re telepathic, then? Or your friend is, at least?” Vox Septimus’s eyes widened a fraction, and his mouth opened in a “o” of surprise that quickly melted into a broad smile. “This one? An augmented? Ha. Ha ha.”
It sounded as though he were mocking Lee, but when she realized the spasmodic gestures that shook his shoulders were laughter, she came to understood that the expression was sincere.
“Oh, dear, no,” Vox Septimus said, and reached up to wipe the corners of his eyes. “This one is a humble unaugmented only. But the other who was likewise sent on this errand was indeed a low-ranking augmented servitor.”
Lee nodded slowly, mulling it over. “You mean the woman with no ears or nose?” A sudden, inappropriate thought hit Lee, and she resisted the temptation to ask how a woman with no nose might smell. “So she’s a telepath.”
‘Yfes.” Vox Septimus nodded, regaining his composure. “Though her psionic talents are an extremely low order. Not so powerful to pull the information from your brains unbidden, this one is afraid, but more than sufficient to pull the errant thoughts that drift through your consciousness upon hearing a question.”
“Even those I didn’t answer.” Lee’s lips pressed together, and she felt like smacking her head into the wall. She’d been so smug, so sure that she’d given nothing up to their captors, only to discover she’d been giving them everything they were after, all along. No wonder they didn’t repeat any question twice, or torture the answers from her. There simply wasn’t any need.
“So you sent your message,” Paolo snapped. “Now what? You gonna let us go?”
“Oh, dear, no.” Vox Septimus tucked his chin in, eyebrows raised, as though the question took him completely by surprise. As though he couldn’t imagine why they would want to be released. “In fact, you’ll be happy to know that, in short order, the rest of your world’s population will be likewise detained.”
“What?” Frank said, lifting his head and glaring at the purple-robed figure.
“Here,” Vox Septimus said helpfully, and raised the crystal rod. “Allow me to show you.”
On seeing the rod once more, Frank flinched and covered his face with his hands, but rather than lashing out as it had done before, this time the crystal rod merely shone a beam of light on the blank wall opposite Lee.
“What the ... ?” Merrick said, and Lee thought he’d taken the words right out of her mouth.
In the empty air between the rod’s tip and the blank wall, there now danced a fully three-dimensional image of a city. It glimmered slightly, and when Lee squinted she could just barely make out the texture of the wall on the far side, seen dimly through the image itself It was some kind of holographic technology, Lee assumed, perhaps using the far wall to bounce light back, the interference between the first wave and its reflection creating the solid-seeming images.
As Lee and the others watched, the image shifted, and the perspective zoomed crazily, until finally it resolved itself They were looking at a city square, which from the Spanish words on the street signs and the varied skin colors of the passersby must have been somewhere in Central or South America. There was some sort of carnival or street fair in progress, and everyone looked to be having a ball.
“What are we lookin’ at, Cap’n?” Jose asked.
Lee shrugged. From what she could see, this was just an unremarkable city scene, which from the angle of the shadows and the color of the sky appeared to be just before sunset.
“Ah, this one offers apologies,” Vox Septimus said. “The relevant element of this visual record is some short remove into the future. Allow this one to address.”
Suddenly, the crowds, which moments before had been drifting leisurely across the miniature scene, shifted into high motion, blurring across the streets, and Lee realized that Vox Septimus had put the moving image into fast-forward.
“Here we are,” Vox Septimus said with satisfaction.
The image slowed to a normal rate once more, but where before the scene had been of happy people at a street festival, now things had taken a darker turn. Both literally, in that the sun had set in the sky, and figuratively, in that now the happy revelers of the earlier scene had been replaced by men and women in terror for their lives.
A handful of hairless men and women, all dressed in strange clothing, were in the air and on the ground, rounding the festivalgoers into large metal pens, like cattle being led to the slaughter. Lasers shot from eyes, bone spears flew from palms, lightning crackled from fingertips, and the helpless people were powerless before them.
Beside her, Paolo’s hands tightened into fists, and Lee saw a killing rage rising in the old man’s eyes. She reached out and laid a hand on his elbow. “Not now,” she whispered, though her instincts to injury were the same as his.
Lee turned her attention back to the purple-robed figure. Perhaps this was an opportunity after all.
“I can’t help but notice, Vox, that you don’t seem to have the same powers as so many of the rest of your kind. That you’re . . . how did you put it? Unaugmented?”
Vox Septimus turned to her, and the image projected by the crystal rod vanished.
“Of course,” he said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “And what of it?”
“You must have been pretty unlucky to be born
without any powers, I guess.” Lee spoke as casually as possible, as though discussing the possibility of rain in the distant future.
Vox Septimus straightened, his head tilted to one side, quizzically. “Unlucky? This one was born for a task, as were all augments and unaugments alike. We are bred with the characteristics that our masters require, no more and no less.”
“Ah,” Lee said, nodding slowly. “So your people have your powers from birth? They aren’t something that they get from some kind of machine?”
Lee wasn’t sure what to expect, but if her experi- -ences with powers in the past were any indication, strange abilities could sometimes be turned on and off, at will and otherwise.
“Machine?” Vox Septimus repeated, and then began to chuckle, once more with that strange, unnatural laugh. “Machine? Ha. As though the gifts of the Kh’thon were some mere mechanical contrivance? Ha ha. This one’s talents derive from the genome, foolish individual, just as do those of every servitor from the lowliest unaugmented to the loftiest Exemplar. Ha ha.” Genetic engineering? Lee tried to stifle a frown. That wasn’t exactly what she’d been fishing for. She was hoping that maybe all of this vaunted ability and power was something that came with a convenient “off” switch, preferably labeled with foot-tall letters. Something that was hidden in the genome? Perhaps a little trickier.
“So they’re ...” Lee felt her enthusiasm for this line of questioning quickly fading. “They’re just born with their powers?”
“Some,” Vox Septimus said. “But some are triggered in later life. The randomizing element in the genome allows the Kh’thon to engender whatever trait or ability they require in a servitor. The augmented, the most powerful of which are the Exemplar, serve an endless number of functions for the Kh’thon, everything from navigating through hyperspace with enhanced sensory organs to serving as the defensive capacities for Kh’thon who venture planetside. The Fathership and the other ships in the Kh’thonic flotilla are well armed and fortified, of course, but in situations where more precise means are required, the Exemplar are deployed.”
“More precise means?” Something about the way he’d said that sent chills down Lee’s spine.
“Such as removing native populations from the planets the Kh’thon wish temporarily to inhabit,” Vox Septimus said simply. Then he treated Lee to a smile, and added, “Such populations are usually exterminated, but surely the Kh’thon will find a use for some of you, at least.”
“It’s right through here, Betsy,” Doug Ramsey said. He pulled the chain on the desk lamp, and the headmaster’s study was suffused with warm light. He was hyperconscious of the presence of the woman behind him, and did his best to keep his tone level and confident-sounding. His best, though, just didn’t seem to be good enough, since every time he opened his mouth to speak he sounded just like a chipmunk. Or at least, that’s what he thought.
Doug was no hero. Sure, he had the black-and-yellow uniform of a student of the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters hanging in his closet, unstable molecules and all, but that’s where it stayed, most of the time: hanging in his closet. Sure, he put it on whenever the rest of the gang got together to train in the Danger Room, but really, what good was he in those operations? All he really managed was to add another moving target to the team, another bystander to protect.
But an innocent bystander? Doug almost blushed. If measured by his actions, particularly with the fairer sex, then yes, he was as innocent as they come, as pure as the driven snow. But if judged by his thoughts, by his ambitions? He chanced a glance at the vision behind him, and suppressed a shudder. Well, if thoughts were enough to damn him, then he was as far from innocent as they came.
Up until a few short months ago, Dougjust figured he was smart. Heck, if he was honest with himself, he thought he was a genius. No, he knew he was a genius. It was really the only answer for it. He’d always been a clever kid, getting high marks in school, and never having to work that hard on his assignments, but there’d always been one or two other kids as smart or smarter than him in class. But then a few years ago, he’d hit puberty, and all bets were off.
It was in Spanish class that he first realized he was a genius. He showed up, the first day, knowing no Spanish beyond taco and burrito, and by the end of that first class period he was correcting the teacher’s improper use of intransitive verbs. The next day, he was watching soap operas on Spanish-language television, and the day after that he was finishing up Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha in the original.
And that was the longest it had taken him to learn a language, ever since.
The computers came a short time later. He’d always played video games as a kid, but it wasn’t until he glanced through a book on computer programming that he understood that computers were simply, at their base, language. The software code which underlay everything that a computer did was nothing more than another grammar and vocabulary to learn, and it took Doug no time to pick them up.
That was when he’d first met Kitty Pryde. They’d met at Stevie Hunter’s dance class in Salem Center— which Doug’s parents had insisted he take, so that he could get offhis backside and move now and again—and had quickly hit it off He’d initially thought that Kitty was some boarding school wannabe hacker, and had gone along with all her talk of hacking into government databases and the like because he thought she was cute. Having the ability to learn any language in short order, or to make any computer do whatever he wanted, strangely hadn’t helped Doug one iota when it came to meeting girls. When Kitty wanted to talk to him, he was happy to talk about whatever she wanted.
Then, long story short, Kitty had revealed that she was a mutant. And more than that, her boarding school was a kind of training ground for mutants. And, the icing on the cake, the mutants trained at the boarding school were theX-Menl
Doug’s mind was officially blown, however, when Kitty revealed to him that he was a mutant, too. Him!
It was at this point that Doug decided that he’d somehow been given someone else’s life by mistake— someone much cooler than he was—but he wasn’t about to complain.
In no time, Doug was palling around with Kitty and her mutant friends—and his mutant friends. Then the headmaster somehow convinced Doug’s parents to let him come and be a student at the school, and then Doug was a bona fide superhero. Costume, code name, and all.
Except he wasn’t, really. Oh, he was a mutant, and a member of a team of mutants, and he had a costume and a code name, but a super-hero? Doug didn’t think so. He couldn’t shoot lasers from his eyes, or teleport, or turn into steel, or pass through solid walls. What could he do? Well, he could read.
Did no one on the team realize that his code name, Cypher, didn’t just connote the ability to transcipher or decypher, but meant, literally, nothing? Cypher meant “zero,” but worse than that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it also meant “A person who fills a place, but is of no importance or worth, a nonentity, a ‘mere nothing.’”
Gee, thanks, Professor X, Doug thought ruefully, way to address any lingering insecurities I might have had.
At the moment, while Kitty and the rest of the graduate team went off to save lives, Doug was left behind to man the home fires, and act as the yellow pages for Betsy Braddock Which meant firing up Cerebro, which meant coming into the headmaster’s office and opening the secret panel beside the bookshelf that swung open to reveal the hidden chamber behind the wall.
Sure, Doug wasn’t a hero. But he knew languages, and he knew computers. And because of that, he’d gotten to go places, and experience things, that he’d never in a million years dreamed might have been possible. He’d put his life on the line, time and again, and done it happily, because it meant that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t so much of a “mere nothing” after all.
Doug knew that, as Milton said, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Now, it was his turn to serve in his own particular fashion again, and stand beside Betsy. He hoped that she wasn’t picking up any of his thoughts, hoped against hope that she hadn’t seen any of the images that popped unbidden into his mind whenever he looked at her. But who could blame him? She used to be a fashion model, for cripes sake, and now she was living under the same roof? And maybe Doug was just kidding himself, but he couldn’t help but think there was a chance that maybe she might like him, too. And not just like him, but like him.
Doug couldn’t wait any longer. He steeled himself, taking a deep breath, and turned around.
“There it is, Betsy,” he said, trying to think pure, innocent thoughts. “That’s Cerebro.”
He needn’t have worried. Betsy had eyes only for the machine.
From Salem Center in Westchester County to Times Square in New York was a distance of just a bit more than fifty-four miles. Barring traffic, it could take just over an hour. With traffic, it could take forever.
At a top speed at sea level of Mach 2.3, the Blackbird could travel 1,770 miles per hour. Factoring in acceleration and deceleration, that meant that the X-Men’s plane could get from the Xavier mansion to downtown Manhattan in a handful of minutes.
Even so, Peter Rasputin couldn’t help but feel impatient as the lights of Times Square hove into view below them, and wished that there wasn’t some quicker way to go. He was strapped into his accustomed seat on the Blackbird, his hands folded in his lap, eager to get to work.
“Everybody ready?” called Scott Summers from the pilot’s chair.
Before Peter could answer, Rogue unbuckled her seat belts and moved over to the hatch. “I’ll see y’all down there, ’kay?” With that, she flung open the hatch and jumped out.
Peter turned and peered out the window, and watched as Rogue flew by, her white-streaked brown hair rustling in the high wind. She turned, and gave him a broad wink before diving out of sight in a blur of black and green.
“Aw, cripes,” Kitty said, looking out the window on the plane’s opposite side.
“What is it, Katya?” Peter loosened his seat belts, and leaned over to see.
“That,” Kitty said flatly, “is one big-boned gal.”
Peter looked over Kitty’s shoulder, and his mouth opened wide. Just below them was Times Square, and through the plane’s side window could be seen a woman standing on the pavement, dressed in a strangely cut suit of green and white, lifting one foot off the ground, as though preparing to squash a bug underfoot.
Except that the woman stood at least one hundred feet tall, and the “bugs” she was preparing to squash underfoot were regular men and women, scrambling to escape from Times Square.
“Isn’t this about the time you normally invoke that white wolf of yours, Pete?” Kitty glanced over at him and treated him to a tight smile.
“Perhaps later, Katya.” Peter slapped the buckles on his seat belts and climbed out of his seat. He moved toward the open hatch, marveling as always at the Shi’ar force fields that maintained the internal cabin pressure. Even with the hatch wide open, one could barely hear the whistle of wind rushing by outside.
“Preparing to touch down, folks,” Scott said at the controls.
The Blackbird stopped its forward motion and, hovering, began to descend straight down on the intersection of 42nd Street and Broadway.
“I believe this is my stop,” Peter said, and with a quick smile, lunged out of the window.
For a brief, exhilarating moment, Peter luxuriated in the sense of motion, in the high whistle of the air whipping past his ears, the fluttering of butterflies in his belly as his senses tried desperately to reorient themselves.
Then, he triggered the transformation.
The briefest smell of ozone filled his nostrils, as it always did, some faint residual energy left over from the transformation of flesh to metal. And the rest of his senses, particularly sight and hearing, shifted further down their registers, the world becoming suddenly a slightly grayer, slightly quieter place, as it always seemed to him in his armored form. Professor Xavier had tried to explain it to him once, how rods and cones of metal were less sensitive to photons than those of organic cells, how the bones of the inner ear had a lower range of motion when made of steel than of calcium. But Peter, for all his fearsome mien and imposing stature, had the heart of the poet, and all that he needed to know was that when his body was armored, so too was his soul. He sometimes felt that was the only way he was able to live with the violent, often terrifying things he experienced as an X-Man: with his senses blunted, the experiences were always kept at a slight distance, so when he was once more a regular man, living in a world of rich sounds and vibrant colors, he could look upon those memories as though they’d happened to another person entirely.
Such as now, as he whistled through the air at terminal velocity, an organic steel bullet falling directly toward the towering giant of a woman, prepared any second to end the lives of innocents with a stamping foot.
Somewhere deep inside, the poet’s heart hid inside a suit of solid armor, while the man of steel did what he had to do.
As Peter jumped from the open hatch, Kurt Wagner decided it was time for him to go as well. He glanced out the window to get his bearings.
“Auf wiedersehen,” he said, with a jaunty salute, then disappeared with a bamf and a puff of brimstone.
Kurt reappeared a hundred feet to the west of the Blackbird. Since his momentum was always retained through teleportation, at first he and the plane were moving in the same direction, and at the same speed. But where the Blackbird had its powerful Shi’ar engines to act against the force of gravity, Kurt was out in the empty air, and so after hanging briefly in midair, he began to fall, slowly accelerating at thirty-two feet per second per second.
Kurt spread his arms and legs wide, drawing on his years of experience as a trapeze artist with Der Jahrmarkt to slow his fall, and then scanned the swiftly approaching ground below.
To one side, Peter was plowing into the shoulder of the giant woman, knocking her off balance and preventing her from squashing a crowd of innocents underfoot. The woman fell against a building, sending a rain of dust and small debris on the crowd below, which meant the worst of their injuries would be minor cuts and bruises, not liquefaction.
Below, Rogue was setting to with a large figure, whose golden skin glinted brightly in the neon lights. That he was taking and giving blows with Rogue by turns suggested he was even stronger, and tougher, than he looked.
Kurt was just a few hundred feet above the ground by now and would have to choose a target quickly. Then he saw his man. With pale white skin and glowing green eyes, the hairless figure looked almost like an animated corpse, but he was all too lively, shooting beams of crackling black energy from the palms of his hands, using it to herd the panic-stricken humans into the metal pens set up by his fellows.
Kurt grinned, and did some quick calculations in his head. Fixing the image of his destination in mind, he concentrated, and disappeared once more.
Bamf.
Making a vertical jump was always harder than making a horizontal one, though it was far easier to jump down than up. And, for that matter, it was far easier to ’port north-to-south than it was east-to-west. Professor X had always suspected that it had something to do with the Earth’s magnetic field, which seemed reasonable enough to Kurt. It wasn’t as if it mattered, though. That was simply the terrain through which he moved. Just like a mountain climber rarely has to worry about the cause of gravitation, whether curved space-time or the presence of theoretical gravitons or what-have-you; all that mattered to him was that if he let go of a mountain side he would fall. So too did Kurt care little how his teleportation actually worked, so long as it did.
As before, Kurt emerged from his almost-instantaneous teleport with the same momentum with which he’d gone in. And considering that he was now only three feet off the ground, that should have meant a very short trip and a very painful end to a long and distinguished career of adventuring. However, while Kurt had retained his inertia, he had reoriented his direction, so that on completing the teleport he was now moving horizontally, parallel to the ground. And, more important, directly toward the back of the pale-skinned, greeneyed man shooting black energy from his palms.
“Heads up, Black Light,” Kurt quipped.
Straightening his legs out, his knees slightly bent, Kurt slammed feetfirst into the back of the Exemplar. Kurt’s legs collapsed like a spring, cushioning the blow for him, but still imparting the majority of his momentum to the black-energy wielder.
The black-energy wielder stumbled forward, falling face-first on the pavement, while Kurt tucked his legs, rolled in midair, and then landed gracefully on his feet, his tail outstretched for balance.
“You are quite accomplished at harassing innocents, mein FreundKurt said, his smile revealing wickedly pointed canine teeth. “Let’s see how you do against someone who fights back, shall we?”
The golden behemoth threw a punch, lightning fast, his huge fist catching Rogue in the abdomen. The momentum of the blow carried her backward, folded in half, soaring up in the air.
Oof, Rogue thought. I’m nigh invulnerable, but even so, danged if that didn’t hurt/
She straightened out in midair, hanging motionless above the gold mountain for a moment.
“Not bad, sugah,” Rogue said, rubbing her chin with a gloved hand. “Now how’s about I take the next shot?” Without hesitating, she dove, pouring on speed, both arms straight out before her, hands curled into tight fists. By the time she connected with the Exemplar, she was moving just a hair slower than the speed of sound. That, coupled with her super-strength, meant that the impact really packed a punch.
The golden behemoth, though, barely even flinched. “Automa isn’t sure, little one,” the Exemplar said, his voice rumbling like distant thunder. “Was that meant as an expression of affection, or were you intending to hurt me?”
“Trash talk?” Rogue said, curling her lip. “Nice.” She landed on the cracked pavement a dozen yards away, taking stock of the situation.
“Come, little one.” He motioned her forward with hands large as shovel blades. “Now let Automa give you a love tap in return.”
“Why don’t Automa just stick it,” Rogue replied.
In response, the Exemplar who called himself Automa rushed forward, impossibly fast, and it was all Rogue could do to dance out of the reach of his next attack.
This ain’t goin’ nowhere good, Rogue thought ruefully. Try as I like, him and me look to be too evenly classed.
There was another way, of course. A quicker path to victory. But it carried with it a kind of defeat, and Rogue wasn’t willing to surrender on that front just yet.
Automa rushed again, and Rogue instinctively countered, sweeping her foot out in a whip kick, which connected with the back of his golden legs, and then following up with a bent armed hook and a jab.
The kicks and punches raining on the Exemplar’s metal skin seemed to have a momentary effect, sending him staggering slightly back
I suppose it’s just like Mikey always used to say, Rogue thought. Precision and speed win out over brute strength every time.
She nodded, mulling over the truth of that, before realizing that the memory and the sentiment weren’t hers. -
The kick-and-punch combination, she realized, were a savate technique, French kickboxing that a woman named Carol Danvers had studied a lifetime ago. The advice, and the instruction, had come from Colonel Michael Rossi, who was with Air Force Intelligence.
But Rogue had met Mike Rossi only once, and he’d not been forthcoming with advice. It was because she’d met Carol Danvers once upon a time on a bridge in San Francisco that she now shared her memories.
Rogue’s mutant power was the ability to absorb memories and abilities through physical contact. If she came skin-to-skin with another organism, for a brief time she’d know what they knew, and be able to do
what they did. The exchange left the other person drained—literally—usually lapsed into unconsciousness for some length of time, but it wasn’t much easier on Rogue. She had trouble keeping her own memory, her own identity, distinct from the flood of new experiences.
The transfer was typically temporary, lasting only about sixty times longer than the initial contact, so that for every second she was skin-to-skin, she retained the memories and abilities for a single minute. But there was the possibility, however slight, that if she remained in direct contact for too long, the transfer might be permanent.
That’s what had happened with Carol Danvers, all those years ago. She’d been a super-heroine, once upon a time, superstrong, nigh invulnerable, and able to fly. And she’d tussled with Rogue, who at the time was a mixed-up kid who’d fallen in with a bad crowd. For all intents and purposes, that was the end of Carol Danvers. When she’d woken up, she’d become a blank slate, with no memories of her former life, and no powers.
Of course, in the days and weeks to come, when Rogue woke up in the middle of the night, she sometimes thought that she was Carol Danvers. She had the woman’s powers, and all her memories, a lifetime of experiences, just as vivid and real as anything Rogue had experienced in her young life.
Rogue had sought out help, going to the home of the X-Men, asking for the help of Professor Charles Xavier. And he and the X-Men had guided her back, step by step, from the brink
Even now, though, while she was able better to control the transfer of powers and memories from another, and to keep the contact just long enough to get what she needed, from time to time Rogue found herself thinking another woman’s thoughts, remembering another woman’s life.
Every time she touched her skin to another person, every time she initiated contact and transfer, there was a part of Rogue who worried that this might be the last time, that in the transfer what remained of the girl who called herself Rogue would be lost, swallowed forever in a flood of alien thoughts and memories. And when the other was actually alien, as this Automa seemed to be, the fear of losing herself was even greater.
That’s why she preferred to solve problems with her gloved fists these days whenever she could. Better to err on the side of caution, she figured.
So I’ll take my licks, Rogue thought, as she and Automa closed for another round. But what he don’t know is, if push comes to shove, then the gloves are off
Kitty, Scott, and Logan leapt to the ground, as the Blackbird slowly rose back into the air. Its autopilot would steer it over the city, parking it out on the waters of the Hudson until the X-Men needed it once more.
“Looks like Rogue, Petey, and the elf have already picked dance partners,” Logan said with a smile. “I’m thinking the green kid is about my speed.”
He gestured toward the green-skinned shape-shifter, who even now was transforming from a bat-shark thing to some sort of oversize, taloned ape-creature, menacing a family of tourists who stood petrified on the spot.
“Be my guest,” Kitty said, stepping aside and motioning him forward.
“Much obliged, squirt.” Logan bared his teeth, and from the backs of his hands adamantium blades popped out with an audible snikt. “Hey, green genes! Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”
A short distance off, a woman dressed in black and yellow with a purple headdress was evidently using telekinesis to harass a bus full of schoolkids, levitating it off the ground and slowly rotating it end over end.
“I guess I’ll take the telekine,” Kitty said with a shrug. “Scott, you got the half-man/half-sled over there?” She pointed at the Exemplar who’d identified himself as the Capo on the televised broadcast.
“Yes, Kitty,” Scott said, his jaw set. “I’ve got him alright.”
“Sounds good,” Kitty said, and set off on a jog toward the telekine. “Give a shout if you need a hand.”
Scott turned to watch her go and marveled. Still in her teens, she’d seen and done such things that facing an invading army wasn’t enough to knock her off balance. She might be afraid, somewhere deep down, and was wise enough to be cautious, but clearly wasn’t going to let that stand in the way of doing her job.
“Okay, jokers,” Scott said to the empty air, turning toward the Exemplar in the floating silver sled. ‘You picked the wrong planet to invade.”
Betsy held the silver headpiece in her hands. It was like a giant’s skull and seemed to reverberate with mental echoes, old dreams and hollow memories.
“It’s a psionic amplifier,” Doug Ramsey explained. “Anybody can use Cerebro to pinpoint the location of nearby mutants, but a telepath like you can use it to communicate with specific mutants anywhere on the planet.”
Cerebro itself was fairly unimposing—a bank of controls and electronics in a casing of brushed steel, with leads going from the casing to the wide helmetlike headpiece. In the empty space in front of the machinery was a simple office chair on casters. Betsy wondered why such an incongruously normal chair, and not a more permanent fixture, until she remembered that the machine’s designer had wheeled his own chair with him, wherever he went.
Betsy settled into the chair, the upholstery squeaking slightly under her legs. She swiveled around, facing the machine.
“So I just... put this on?” she asked, sounding uneasy, feeling the heft of the silver helmet in her hands.
“Erm, I haven’t actually ever used it myself,” Doug said bashfully. “But if you can figure out how to use it to place a telepathic call, I can help you out with who to call. I’ve memorized the X-Men’s Rolodex . . .” He paused, and glanced over at Betsy, as though he’d said something he shouldn’t have. “Oh. I guess that sounds insufferably geeky, doesn’t it? The kind of guy who reads dictionaries and memorizes other people’s phone books for fun?”
Betsy treated him to a slight smile, and laid a hand on his elbow.
“No,” she said gently. “I think it’s perfectly charming.”
She drew her hand back and, taking a deep breath and steeling herself, carefully set the headpiece on her head.
“Hmm,” she hummed thoughtfully. “Nothing’s happening. Oh, wait...”
And then, the world opened up before her.
Betsy Braddock had been a telepath for some years, and had been “intuitive” far longer than that. She’d read countless minds, both intentionally and by accident; learned to project her consciousness onto the astral plane for brief periods of time; and caught quick glimpses of the near future, though maddeningly without any real degree of control.
This was the first time, though, that she’d experienced anything like this.
It was as though another world were overlaid on the one she saw with her eyes. It was something like the astral plane she’d visited psionically, but denser, more vivid, more real. She was seeing the world through her mind’s eye, but her mental “vision” extended far further than she ever might have imagined possible.
It was an amazing experience, and Betsy was sorry that it took an alien invasion to make such a thing possible. If the news was to be believed, there were alien landers touching down all over the planet, and soon no corner of the world would be safe.
A thought occurred to her unbidden—7 wonder what Brian’s doing in all this?—and before she’d had time to think again, she felt the sudden sensation of motion without acceleration, and suddenly she was looking at another place entirely.
She’d wondered about her brother, Brian, and here he was. In the white, blue, and red armor of Captain Britain, he was standing in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, facing off against a quartet of Exemplar invaders, their metal-flower landing craft perched a short distance away. At Brian’s side was his fey companion, Meggan, her feet floating a few inches off the ground.
The four Exemplar they faced looked formidable. A woman and three men, they were hovering in midair, miniature stars dancing around them, lightning flashing in their eyes. But as imposing as the quartet might have been, it was clear that Brian and Meggan were holding their own.
It took the briefest moment for the reality of her situation to process through Betsy’s thoughts. Here she was, sitting in a quiet room in a mansion in New York
State, peering with ease through the astral plane to see events unfolding thousands of miles away.
Okay, then, Betsy thought. Now I’ve got work to do.
Before she withdrew, though, she reached out with her thoughts, butterfly wings that brushed the edge of Brian’s mind.
Take care of yourself, brother.
Suddenly, Brian smiled, and straightened slightly, as though drawing on some inner reserves of strength, and Betsy knew he’d heard her.
Time to go.
Then she lifted the silver helmet off her head and the world shrank to just the space in front of her and the young man standing at her side.
“Wow,” Betsy said breathlessly.
“It works, I take it?” Doug said.
“Yes, I believe you can say that.” Betsy blinked a few times and shook her head. “That was simply . . . wow.”
Doug leaned against the brushed-steel cabinet that housed the Cerebro mechanism itself, crossing his arms over his chest. “Okay, I guess it’s time to start making some telepathic calls, then. You up to it?”
Betsy thought for a moment and nodded. ‘Yes, absolutely. Where shall we begin?”
Doug rubbed his lower lip thoughtfully “Probably best to start with the other New Mutants, make sure they’re doing okay out there. We haven’t heard from them since Illyana ’ported them ail out to Colorado yesterday to visit Dani’s parents.”
Betsy nodded, lips pursed. “Very well, that seems simple enough.”
She’d met Doug’s fellow Xavier students only a few days before, but had mind-touched each of them briefly, and had solid mental images of each in mind. She had only the vaguest of notions of how far and in which direction Colorado could be found, but if her experience with Brian had been any indication, she had only to think of the person she wanted to reach, and Cerebro did the rest.
Settling the headpiece back over her head, Betsy closed her eyes.
A brief sensation of rushing forward, and she was in Denver, Colorado. A trio of Exemplar, two them as tall as buildings and the other moving so fast he was almost invisible, were harrying pedestrians and drivers alike, while water shot up from a broken main and rained down on their heads like a summer torrent.
Arrayed against them were more than half a dozen young men and women, each of them wearing the yellow-and-black uniform of a Xavier’s student.
Can you hear me? Besty mind-called. It’s me, Elizabeth Braddock.
“Betsy?” said the determined-looking Native American girl with the belt of turquoise and silver.
Yes, Danielle, it’s me. I’m using Cerebro to communicate with you all.
“How’re things back at the homestead, Ms. Braddock?” said the tall, lank young man with the short-cropped blond hair, his ears sticking out slightly on either side.
As well as can be expected under the circumstances, Sam. Doug is here with me, and the others have gone to Manhattan to repel the invaders.
“We’ve got our hands full with a few o’ the cursed spaleens ourselves, ma’am,” growled the werewolf with the voice of a young girl.
As I see. Will you be needing any assistance, then?
“It would seem not, mam’selle,” answered the young Asian woman with the shoulder-length hair.
“Have no fear on our account, dear lady,” said the angry young Brazilian. “We’ll soon bring these demons to account for their actions today.”
Fair enough. Try to contact us right away if you should need help. If I’m using Cerebro, there’s a good chance I’d hear a mind-call, but if I don’t answer, use the telephone, I suppose.
“You got it,” said the young blonde woman, the faintest hint of a Russian accent beneath her American teenage bravado. She gave a thumbs-up, then pulled a sword out of thin air, eldritch armor appearing on her torso, arms, and legs, and she threw herself at the nearest of the towering Exemplars.
Take care, friends, Betsy thought, and then removed the helmet once more.
“Okay, that’s them sorted,” Betsy said. She briefly brought Doug up to speed on the situation in Colorado, and she could tell by the expression that flitted across his face that part of him wished he was out there with them, while part was grateful to be safely here inside the mansion. Betsy could see, without having to peer inside his thoughts, how conflicted Doug was
about his powers. He often viewed his life with the Xavier students as one big adventure, but at the same time was plagued by the suspicion that he was terribly out of place, and that the team would be better served to be rid of him.
“Come on, then, Doug,” Betsy said, and reached out a hand to him. “Let’s get to work.”