“Surrender, mutant,” the Sentinel commanded. Sheets littered the floor, along with a thin foam mattress, as the swinging bedframe pursued Nightcrawler down the length of the infirmary. Hoof-like feet ground the discarded blankets beneath the Sentinel as it tramped across the floor. “Surrender, mutant,” the behemoth commanded chillingly. “You cannot escape the Abomination.”

The Abomination!

Suddenly, Nightcrawler remembered where he had seen this particular lizard-man before; in the Professor’s comprehensive database of superhuman menaces, mutant or otherwise. The real Abomination, alias Emil Blonsky, was one of the Hulk’s regular adversaries, another gamma-mutated monstrosity who was supposed to be just as strong as the Hulk and twice as ruthless. Nightcrawler had never met the Abomination personally, but the genuine article had nearly killed two of Kurt’s fellow X-Men, Archangel and Marrow, less than a year ago, shortly before Nightcrawler rejoined the team. Kurt recalled Warren’s account of that incident with a shudder; his high-flying friend had described the Abomination as a particularly vicious foe. If this robotic facsimile of the Abomination was even half as dangerous as its inspiration, then they were all in serious trouble.

The Sentinel swatted at Nightcrawler with the metal bed-66

frame, coming so close that Kurt felt the breeze generated by the makeshift weapon’s passage. He found himself being driven back into the northwest comer of the medlab: a dead end that left him little room to maneuver. The end of his tail remained wrapped around the handle of the scalpel, but the surgical tool seemed hopelessly outmatched by the much larger bedframe. Nightcrawler realized he needed a brilliant tactical ploy—schnelll

His luminous eyes flicked toward the doorway at the opposite end of the infirmary, the only source of light within sight. “Dim lights. Corridors B1 through B12,” he shouted past the ersatz Abomination. Voice-operated technology responded immediately, lowering the lights in the adjacent hallway and throwing the entire level into shadowy darkness.

Kurt could see perfectly well, of course. They don’t call me Nightcrawler for nothing, he thought. Beyond that, the drastic reduction in illumination allowed him to take advantage of another of his natural talents: the ability to turn all but invisible in deep shadow.

Cloaked in darkness, he scurried on all fours across the ceiling and away from the comer. I need to get to the Communications Suite, he realized, and summon reinforcements. Just what the world needed, a more brutal breed of Sentinel. God help us all if every one of the intruders is fashioned in the image of the Abomination, with Hulk-like strength at its disposal.

Without warning, the saurian skull swiveled atop a nearly-nonexistent neck. Red eyes, now suffused with an unnatural red radiance, fixed with impossible accuracy upon the invisible mutant. -‘Infrared tracking initiated,” the Sentinel announced. “Target located.”

The bedframe crashed to the floor as, discarding its weapon, a scaly hand reached out for Nightcrawler with unexpected speed. Before Kurt had a chance to react, a vise-like grip closed around his ankle, squeezing his leg with bone-crashing force!

Something was scratching at the shutters. Something large and very persistent.

Perversely, the same opaque metal blinds that protected Moira and Bobby from whatever was outside the Centre also prevented them from seeing what exactly was trying to get at them. Considering that this particular lab was three stories above ground level, Moira MacTaggert realized, the would-be invader could either fly or was very, very tall. How else could it reach the now-barricaded window?

“What do you think it is, doc?” Iceman asked. Even though the temperature of the laboratory was a comfortable fifteen degrees Celsius, his crystalline anatomy showed no sign of melting. She found it vaguely unnerving that she could see all the way through his translucent skull and torso, unlike the old days when he simply coated his flesh-and-blood body with frost or snow. Recently, however, the youthful X-Man had mastered the trick of transmuting the whole of his organic substance to living ice. A biological oxymoron if ever there was one, she thought, her scientific curiosity intrigued despite their present peril.

“I cannae say,” she answered him. “If only I can get these bloody monitors to work the way they’re supposed to ... !” Row upon row of empty screens, displaying nothing but static, frustrated her. Putting on her reading glasses to better see the display panels, she fiddled urgently with the controls to the security cameras, trying to compensate for the inexplicable burst of gamma radiation that had scrambled the cameras’ transmissions. If I reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, she thought, maybe I can filter out of some of this electromagnetic rubbish. Lord knows it always worked on Doctor Who. .. .

To her surprise and immense satisfaction, a few of the screens cleared at once, permitting her and Iceman a peek at what was going on beyond the besieged laboratory. The Centre’s interior cameras were still thoroughly bollixed, but at least they could now see the grounds outside the building, including the region on the other side of the large, shuttered window. Her moment of triumph evaporated, however, once she got a look at the bizarre and frightening entity struggling to gain entrance to the lab.

The creature had the graceful head, shoulders, and arms of a beautiful woman, albeit one colored in various shades of green. Lustrous emerald tresses, abundant and unrestrained, framed an attractive face whose unblemished skin was tinted chartreuse, a few shades lighter than her jade-hued lips. If only her head and shoulders were seen, Moira decided, this barbaric-looking green beauty might easily be mistaken for Jennifer Walters, the celebrated She-Hulk. Below her bare shoulders, though, her womanly appearance gave way to the shape and semblance of an enormous bird of prey. Dark green feathers, the same hue as her flowing mane, covered a stout, avian body of roc-like proportions. Colossal wings, at least three meters across, flapped vigorously as the creature clawed at the metal shutters with the scaly talons of a colossal raptor. Verdant tailfeathers spread out nearly a full meter past the bird-woman’s hindquarters. Sea-green eyes held a glassy, insane sheen. Sharpened canines jutted from beneath her chartreuse lips.

Having devoted her life to the study of human mutation, Dr. Moira MacTaggert, Ph.D., recognized the strange hybrid creature from her research. “Och,” she exclaimed,

’tis the Harpy!”

“Like on Xena‘1” Iceman asked, his gaze glued to the startling image on the security monitors.

Moira rolled her eyes. Trust an American to learn his classical mythology from a silly TV show! “Sort of, but this Harpy was bom of gamma radiation, not Olympian mischief.” The symptomatic green coloring was a dead giveaway. “Betty Ross Banner, the late wife of Bruce Banner, a.k.a. the incredible Hulk, was transformed into the Harpy several years ago, after similar exposure to concentrated gamma radiation. She was cured eventually, but the case is well-documented. I’d recognize her anywhere.” “Late wife?” Iceman asked, sounding understandably puzzled. He scratched his glacial skull, producing tiny shavings of ice that dusted his shoulders like dandruff.

Moira shrugged. “She’s supposed to be dead.”

“Yeah, aren’t they all,” Iceman remarked. Flippant as he was, the lad had a point, Moira conceded; if she had ten pence for every time a reportedly dead super-villain resurfaced, she could finance a chain of Genetic Research Centres throughout the British Isles and beyond.

None of which did anything to alleviate their current plight. Could the fearsome Harpy actually breach the lab’s defenses? Moira was distressed to see the Harpy’s talons digging deep scratches in the chrome steel shutters. How is that possible? she wondered. The shutters weren’t adaman-tium, but they were the next best thing, and the Harpy was shredding them with nothing more than a pair of gamma-spawned chicken legs!

“That’s not going to keep her out for long, doc,” Iceman stated, reaching much the same conclusion as Moira. “Okay if I fortify things a bit? It might leave a bit of a mess to clean up later.”

Moira winced at the thought of gallons of melting ice flooding her expensive laboratory equipment, then consid-

ered what the ferocious Harpy might do to that same equipment. “Go ahead,” she replied. Certainly, it wouldn’t be the first time these facilities ended up the worse for wear after some heated hostilities. “Do whatever ye have to do,”

“Thanks, doc,” Iceman said. “You won’t regret this.” He slid across the floor atop a frictionless plane of ice that formed ahead of his path. Coming to a halt directly in front of the wide picture window, he placed his palms against the huge pane of glass. And just in time; even as fresh ice began to flow from his fingertips, spreading over the window like a protective glaze, the impact of the Harpy’s assault on the metal shutters sent cracks racing through the thick glass. Iceman hurriedly shored up the splintered window by pouring on the ice. Moira felt the air within the lab grow dryer as the frozen X-Man drew the moisture from the atmosphere to construct his wintry bulwark. A thick layer of bluish ice formed over the entire window', muffling the grating sound of the Harpy’s talons scraping against the disintegrating steel shutters. “There,” Iceman said confidently, stepping back to admire his frigid handiwork. ‘ ‘That should do it.”

“G-g-good work,” Moira said, shivering. She drew her white labcoat closed and hugged herself to keep warm. The sheer accumulation of ice had turned the sealed laboratory into an oversized icebox. She envied the internal thermostat that rendered Iceman immune to the chilling effect of the environment he had created. He must be very popular on hot days, she thought, not that we ever have any of those over here.

She’d gladly suffer a little discomfort, though, if it meant keeping the Harpy safely outdoors. She looked away from the imposing wall of ice to check on the security monitors keeping watch over the fierce bird-woman’s activities. Moira was pleasantly surprised to see the Harpy drawing back from the shuttered window, flapping her mighty wings as she hovered about a meter away from the shredded metal barricade, which now glistened with condensation brought about by the icy coating on the opposite side of the window.

Could it be, the Scottish scientist hoped, that the Harpy was abandoning her efforts to gain access to the laboratory?

Not in the slightest. Before Moira’s horrified gaze, the bird-woman raised her slender arms and pointed her fingers at the fortified window. Blazing orange fire discharged from her hands, striking the Centre with the force of an exploding bomb. The blast could be heard and felt all the way through the steel, glass, and ice that stood (if not for much longer) between the flying monster and her potential victims. Great chunks of ice crashed onto the floor as fissures worked their way through Iceman’s defensive wall. Streams of melting frost ran down the newly-formed crevices, pooling onto the floor before Iceman’s feet. “Hey!” he protested loudly. “You didn’t tell me she could do that!”

I forgot, Moira thought; after all, the Harpy had not been an active threat for several years. Now that the full particulars came back to her, however, she recalled that the Harpy’s so-called “hellbolts” supposedly packed the explosive punch of several kilograms of TNT. According to the original report, the bird-woman’s energy bursts had proved sufficient to subdue the Hulk. They had also destroyed an Air Force fighter jet, resulting in the death of the pilot.

I wonder how a hellbolt stacks up against Cyclops’s eyebeams, Moira couldn’t help speculating, even as she realized that anything that could knock out the Hulk was not going to be stopped by a sheet of ice, no matter how solid or self-sustaining.

Nevertheless, Iceman worked hard to reinforce his arctic embankment, filling the cracks and crevices with fresh ice, even drawing on his own substance to hold the icewall together; the frozen spikes along his arms and spine dissolved away as Iceman sprayed the window with frigid mortar. * ‘Step back, doc,” he warned Moira. “I’m not sure how long this is going to hold.”

Nodding, Moira gingerly dashed to the questionable safety of the far end of the laboratory. She had to watch her step to avoid slipping on any patches of frost left behind by Iceman’s trek across the floor. Her gaze fell on the sample of Legacy Virus still resting inside the airtight containment cylinder.

I better put that someplace safe, she realized. The last thing she wanted was for Bobby to get infected with the lethal virus, which was typically more dangerous to mutants than to ordinary human beings. She grabbed the plexiglass cylinder, stamped with the universal symbol for biohazardous material, and ran toward a circular, cabinet-sized adamantium vault filled with several identical cylinders.

For that matter, she thought, I don’t want to infect the Harpy either. She had no idea whether a gamma-irradiated entity like the Harpy would be vulnerable to the deadly virus, but she didn’t want to find out the hard way; if this really was Betty Banner, somehow returned from the dead, then there was an innocent woman trapped inside the distorted body of a mythological monster.

Tucking the cylinder carefully beneath her arm, Moira lifted the lid of the vault, releasing a gust of frosty mist from its refrigerated interior. An empty slot awaited Sample #17/102. Too bad there’s no room for me in there, she thought. She could use a protective vault right now.

Another explosive blast rocked the laboratory, sending bits of broken glass and ice flying like shrapnel. Iceman shielded them from the rocketing fragments with a hastily-erected iceshield, but the shock of the detonation knocked Moira off-balance. She clutched onto the rim of the vault to keep from falling, the cylinder slipping from beneath her arm. Moira’s heart virtually stopped as she heard the vial crack upon the hard steel floor.

“Bobby!” she shouted frantically. “The virus!”

The urgency in her voice caught Iceman’s attention. His translucent blue eyes widened as he spotted the fallen cylinder. Turning his back on the crumbling barricade, he threw out his arm toward the cracked vial. Gelid moisture jetted from his fingertips, encasing the compromised cylinder within a solid sheath of ice. “Thank heavens,” Moira exclaimed. With any luck, Iceman had reacted swiftly enough to keep the virus from escaping into the atmosphere.

I should test Bobby anyway, just in case, she thought, assuming the Harpy leaves any of us intact.

Iceman spun back toward the rime-covered window, but the momentary distraction had critical consequences. The combined heat and force of the Harpy’s hellbolts had reduced his icewall to an avalanche of slush. With an ear-piercing screech, the crazed bird-woman crashed through shutters, window, and ice alike, invading Moira’s scientific sanctuary amidst a cacophony of shattering glass and cracking ice. Her outstretched talons struck Iceman in the chest, bowling him over before he had a chance to defend himself.

“Beware the Harpy!” she squawked. Her harsh, unpleasant voice sounded like a cross between the ravings of a madwoman and the caw of an angry crow. “Surrender or be eliminated.”

Bobby Drake slid on his back across the debris-covered floor of the lab, the smooth planes of his body sending him sledding like a toboggan out of reach of the Harpy. Splinters of steel and jagged shards of ice and glass littered the floor, but Iceman didn’t need to worry about getting sliced or stabbed as long as he maintained his ice-form. Ice doesn’t bleed; one of the distinct advantages of a frozen body over ordinary flesh and blood.

Thank you, Emma, he thought with just a trace of bitterness; he had never understood the full potential of his mutant powers until a ruthless telepath named Emma Frost took over his body—and showed him how to convert that body into ice, through and through. Since then, physical injuries had held a lot less terror for him.

A bank of computers brought his unplanned slide to a jarring halt. Iceman sprang to his feet and glanced down at his chest; the Harpy’s claws had left deep rents across the crystalline surface of his torso. Ouch, he thought, mostly from force of habit. With a thought, he repaired the wounds by constructing frosty scabs out of the ambient moisture.

Thus restored, he quickly scoped out the scene, just like Cyke had taught him. Moira had taken shelter behind the containment vault while the Harpy flapped overhead, her predatory gaze shifting from Moira to Iceman and back again. Obviously, his first priority was to distract the berserk bird-woman from the defenseless human scientist.

“Hey, Ms. Rodan,” he taunted the Harpy, “over here!” A snowball formed within his grip. Iceman gave the icy sphere a second to get good and hard, then pitched the snowball at the airborne intruder. The missile smacked against the Harpy’s chartreuse cheek, and her head swiveled toward the offending X-Man with a jerky, bird-like motion. He was disappointed to see that the rock-hard snowball had not so much as bruised the Harpy’s deceptively elegant features; she was even tougher than she looked. Oh well, he thought, at least 1 got her attention.

“Identified: mutant designate: Iceman,” she screeched. “Compensating for cryogenic interference.”

Compensating how? he wondered. He took a second to further survey the scene. The sturdy ceiling, no more than fifteen feet high, hampered the Harpy’s aerial abilities while a gaping hole in the demolished window let in a cool night breeze. Good, he thought approvingly; the great thing about the U.K. was that there was never any lack of moisture in the air, which meant he had plenty of ammo to draw upon. “Compensate for this!” he challenged the enraged bird-woman. A second snowball slammed into the Harpy’s face, and she swooped at Iceman, talons extended.

Iceman skated out of the way, sliding atop a selfgenerated sheet of ice. Better keep moving, he decided, not wanting to present the Harpy with an easy target for those nasty energy blasts of hers. He’d seen what the Harpy’s blazing bolts had done to his icewall, never mind the steel shutters, and reached the not-too-complicated conclusion that he’d just as soon not end up on the receiving end of her personal pyrotechnics. With that in mind, he picked up speed, almost but not quite outpacing the slick, blue track he projected before him. In a matter of minutes, the floor of the laboratory resembled a full-sized skating rink.

But the Harpy was surprisingly fast, too. Her claws raked his back as she dived from above, briefly intercepting Iceman’s path, before ascending for another run. This time Iceman barely ducked beneath the slashing talons.

Hmm, he noted, no more energy bolts. Maybe she’d used up all her firepower breaking into the building? If so, he might never have a better time to go on the offensive. Let’s go for it, he decided.

The tips of the Harpy’s wings brushed the ceiling as she circled several yards above the ice-coated floor, apparently out of reach ... or was she? His speed and efficiency honed by countless drills, plus plenty of genuine combat experience, Iceman instantly erected a frozen stairway that he ran up pretty much simultaneously, generating each new step only a moment before his crystalline feet came down upon it, “Surprise!” he shouted at his flying foe, who suddenly found herself eye-to-eye with the cocky, young X-Man. A second later, heavy sheets of blue-white ice formed over the Harpy’s feathered wings and, unable to stay aloft, she plummeted to the floor, landing with a crash upon the ice.

“Hah!” Iceman laughed, pleased at the effectiveness of his ploy. And why shouldn't it have worked? he asked himself triumphantly. He had once grounded Sauron, the human pterodactyl, much the same way.

A convenient ice-slide delivered him promptly to the floor, where he confronted the downed Harpy, who glared at him with wide, unblinking eyes. Not about to take any chances with the dangerous mutation, Iceman encased the bird-woman within a solid block of ice that merged inextricably with the thick layer of frost upon the floor, leaving only the Harpy’s head free of an artificial snowdrift. He didn’t want her to suffocate, especially not if Moira was right and the Harpy was just an innocent victim of some kind of radiation accident. What a shame, he thought compassionately. With the bulk of her avian body obscured beneath the ice, it was easier to think of his captive as a woman and not a monster.

“All’s clear,” he called out to Moira, letting her know the worst was over. It occurred to him that Nightcrawler had been gone for awhile now without checking back in with them. I hope he’s okay, Iceman thought. There was a person-to-person communicator built into his belt, but he’d have to unthaw to use it; at the moment, his uniform, constructed of unstable molecules designed by Reed Richards, was made of solid ice just like the rest of him. He was reluctant to de-ice, though, until he was sure the danger was completely over. Hadn’t Kurt said something about multiple intruders?

As if on cue, something pounded at the entrance to the lab. A massive, armor-plated door had slid into place when Moira first sealed off the lab, but now the door shuddered in its frame with each heavy blow delivered against it from the other side. The impressions of mighty, clenched knuckles bulged outward from the steel plating.

No way is that Nightcrawler knocking to get in, Iceman realized. Colossus was the only X-Man he knew with powerhouse fists like that, and Peter Rasputin was, in theory, miles and miles away.

“Further adaptation to cryogenic disruption required,” the Harpy squawked. “Activating thermal conduction units.” A reddish glow began to emanate from deep within the enormous ice cube that contained the trapped bird-woman. Despite the cold, her fangs were conspicuously not chattering. “Beware the Harpy! Beware!”

“Huh?” Iceman blurted, his attention tom between the pummeling at the door and the Harpy’s unquenched defiance. The latter’s oddly robotic syntax puzzled him as well; it dawned on him that he and Moira may have completely misread the true identity of their winged assailant. What if this Harpy wasn’t the late Betty Banner at all, but some kind of mechanical duplicate?

The volcanic radiance coming from the freeze-packed Harpy caught his eye, and he watched in alarm as the ice enclosing the bird-woman melted at an accelerated rate. Cold, clear water streamed from the sides of the makeshift prison, carrying with it great chunks of soggy slush. Iceman concentrated all his power on the receding snowdrift, trying his best to keep the hostile Harpy in cold storage, but his handmade ice was liquefying faster than he could refreeze it. He could feel the heat radiating from the encased bird-woman, an unnatural warmth that bore little resemblance to even the hottest of fevers. It was like there was a portable nuclear generator blazing inside her, throwing off wave after wave of incandescent heat. That wasn’t plain old body heat, he understood. This was something different, something inhuman.

Oh geez, Iceman thought as the awful suspicion sunk in. I befshe ’s a Sentinel!

The Harpy did not wait until the ice was completely dissolved to free herself. Throwing out her enormous wings with tremendous force, she sent the remains of her frozen prison flying off in every direction. “None can cage the Harpy!” she cawed triumphantly and took to the air, displaying no visible signs of hypothermia or even frostbite. The wind from her wings blew powdered ice and snow against Iceman’s face. “You cannot escape the Harpy!”

“Yeah, right,” Iceman said skeptically. He wasn’t buying that story anymore. The way he figured it, the disguised Sentinel—until he learned otherwise, he’d consider it a Sentinel—had been programmed with a limited repertoire of stock super-villain phrases, purely to mislead the opposition and whatever media might be paying attention.

Just like a talking parrot, he thought, which was kind of weirdly fitting. He wasn’t sure why exactly someone wanted to pass off a Sentinel as a deceased bird-monster, but he could work that out later. All he knew now was that there was no more point in holding back; killing a living being was one thing, trashing another stinking Sentinel was something else entirely. “All right,” Iceman said, sucking up all the free moisture at his command, “no more Mr. Nice Ice.”

The Harpy wasn’t pulling her punches either. “Targeting mutant designate: Iceman,” she announced from above, only a nanosecond before a red-hot burst of flame erupted from her seemingly human hands. Un-oh, he thought, looks like she’s recharged. Iceman dove out of the line of fire, onto a self-generated luge that carried him sliding on his stomach away from instant incineration. Even though the main thrust of the hellish bolt missed him, rendering a square foot of floorspace completely free of ice, the fearsome heat of its proximity melted away Iceman’s legs all the way up to his knees, and he had to devote precious seconds to restoring his limbs to their original proportions.

That was close, he thought, shivering (and not from the cold). Theoretically, he could regenerate his entire body as long as some fraction of his awareness remained intact, but he didn’t feel like experimenting along those lines at this particular moment. The booming pounding at the armored door still reverberated across the lab, reminding him that the Harpy-Sentinel wasn’t their only problem. Where on earth is that pointy-eared German elf? he wondered desperately, hoping to hear a well-timed bamf any second now. From the sound of it, he was only moments away from being outnumbered.

A burst of orange fire exploded in his path. The Harpy was shrewdly firing her bolts at the luge as it formed in front of him. Iceman changed course at the last minute, creating a hitherto-nonexistent detour out of the chill Scottish air, then throwing in a series of zigzagging curves to keep his course unpredictable. Making sure he had built up enough momentum to carry him through, he executed a partial loop-the-loop that left him upright once more, sliding upon the slippery soles of his feet while making random turns every other second. He knew he was only buying time, though. A more ingenious tactic was called for, hopefully before whatever was outside the battered door broke all the way through.

“Here goes nothing,” he muttered, puffs of condensed vapor fogging the air beyond his lips. Spotting the horrible Harpy out of the corner of his eye, he hurled a stream of sleet at her face. The cold, congealing liquid formed an icy mask over her face, blinding her as efficaciously as the hood over a falconer’s hunting bird. Perfect, Iceman thought. Now I just need to work quickly.. . .

Her powerful pinions flapped angrily as the Harpy tore at the frigid mask with emerald nails. She managed to quickly scrape the ice away from her eyes, but when she searched the laboratory for her frosty foe. those eyes widened in confusion.

Iceman was everywhere. Several Icemen, at least a dozen, stood in a variety of poses all over the laboratory. The stationary figures, each sculpted from identical blue-white ice, populated the scene, some staring upward at the Harpy, some looking away nonchalantly. There was even an Iceman hanging from one of Nightcrawler’s trapeze rings in the ceiling, his translucent knuckles wrapped around the metal hoop. Everywhere the Harpy-Sentinel looked, she saw another unmistakable specimen of the previously one-of-a-kind Iceman.

“Anomaly ... anomaly,” she squawked. Her face became immobile as her head jerked toward one humanoid ice sculpture after another. “Registering multiple coordinates for mutant designate: Iceman. Processing probability analysis....”

The feathered Sentinel hesitated, hovering in midair as its computerized synapses coped with this unanticipated occurrence. Then, abruptly, it unleashed a hellbolt at a motionless figure standing resolutely, arms akimbo, upon the floor. The destructive energy blast struck the figure dead-on, eliciting a horrified gasp from Moira MacTaggert as she peeked over the rim of the durable containment vault.

A crystalline body snapped and cracked loudly, and, when the blinding flare passed away, all that was left of that Iceman was a truncated pair of legs rooted to the frosted floor, standing forlornly like twin pillars left behind by some long-collapsed edifice,

“Feel the fury of the Harpy!” she announced before turning her attention to a nearly identical figure posing adjacent to the one she had devastated only seconds before. “Feel the fury of the Harpy!” she said again and launched a second blast that took the head off the next Iceman in the line. “Feel the fury of the Harpy! Feel the fury of the Harpy! Feel the fury of the Harpy . .. !”

Sounding very much like a broken record, the determined Harpy relentlessly and methodically picked off each of the apparent Icemen, one at a time. Hanging from the trapeze ring fifteen feet above the wintry carnage, the real Iceman resisted the temptation to nod in satisfaction. That’s right, he thought, his icy fingers stuck to the cold metal of the hoop, use up all your firepower on my handy-dandy, instant ice doubles. The same trick had fooled that mutant-hating creep. Bastion, a few months back, and it looked like it was working like a charm this time around. Still, as he watched the massacre from on high, being careful not to move a single crystalline muscle, he had to admit that it was more than a little unnerving to watch the Harpy blow his various self-portraits apart. He tried not to flinch as a hellbolt split one of his clones right down the middle.

Creating all those ice doubles from scratch had taken a lot of concentration and energy. The really tricky part, though, had been creating that ice-ladder to the ceiling, climbing as quietly as he could, then dissolving it completely before the Harpy got rid of her frozen blindfold. Iceman was glad to have a few moments to recuperate while the feathered Sentinel took out her cybernetic frustration on his lifeless duplicates.

And, from the look of things, the Harpy’s fiery blasts were losing their oomph. Instead of entirely decapitating the seventh frozen decoy, the sizzling hellbolt merely melted “Bobby’s” head to the size of an ordinary ice cube. Now there’s a disturbing image, he thought; he could just imagine the wisecracks the Beast might make about the double’s now-diminutive “cranium.”

He waited until the Harpy had expended her firepower on at least ten imitation Icemen. With only one decoy remaining between him and the Harpy’s lethal attentions, he let go of the trapeze ring and dropped toward the floor. Before he could hit the ground, however, a triangular sail, just an inch-and-a-half thick, grew from his shoulders, slowing his fall. He used his freshly-created parasail to glide after the Harpy. His rock-hard feet slammed into her back at the very moment that she released a final, sputtering burst of fire at the last of the sculpted ice doubles. Her outraged squawk of surprise merged with the wet, splintery sound of the clone melting to pieces.

Iceman kicked off from the base of the creature’s wings, catching an updraft to carry him up and away from his inhuman adversary. His own wingspan, he noted proudly, nearly equalled the Harpy’s. He bombarded the flying Sentinel with a barrage of icy hail that dislodged a few of the Harpy’s synthetic feathers. The emerald plumes fluttered gently to the floor even as their recent owner banked sharply upon the wind and climbed toward Iceman, slashing out once more with her long talons.

The airborne X-Man thought he was ready for the Harpy’s attack. An instant ice-shield attached itself to his upper arm and he held it up to block the raking claws. But the Sentinel had another trick beneath her verdant feathers;

an aperture opened in the Harpy’s chest, which fired like a cannon at the unsuspecting Iceman, who suddenly found himself snared in some sort of electrified net. Thin metal filaments, glowing with blistering energy, sliced off the tips of Iceman’s improvised parasail, sending him spiraling toward the ice-glazed floor below. He landed in a heap, hard enough to knock the wind out of him, hopelessly tangled in the electrically charged netting, which began melting into the very substance of his crystalline body. Despairing, Iceman realized he had to shed his ice-form before he melted away entirely, even if that meant leaving himself vulnerable to physical attacks on his restored flesh and blood. Talk about your lose-lose situations!

The corrosive heat of the net made it hard to concentrate, but Iceman closed his eyes and forced himself to visualize his humanoid alter ego: brown hair, pink skin, meat and bone and gristle. Blood rushing through pulsing veins and arteries. A human heart beating in his chest. Through some bizarre alchemical process known only to his own mutant metabolism, solid ice transmuted into organic tissue, turning Iceman back into Bobby Drake, a slender young man in a light blue uniform, lying in a puddle upon the floor. His hair clung damply to his skull. Ice-cold water glistened upon his back.

Despite this miraculous transformation. Bobby’s circumstances hardly improved. The wires no longer threatened to reduce his limbs to liquid, but his mortal flesh felt the stinging sensation of who knew how many volts running through his body; it was like getting the shock treatment from Storm during a Danger Room skirmish. I’m sorry, doc, he thought as he felt his consciousness slipping away. I didn ’t want to let you down.

The last thing he heard before passing out was the sound of a heavy iron door crashing to the floor.

Peering over the edge of the containment vault, Moira MacTaggert inspected the frozen wasteland the laboratory had become; it looked like a new Ice Age had hit Scotland, and never mind global warming. But what else could you expect when someone called Iceman came to your defense? Shattered replicas of the frigid X-Man were scattered about the lab, whilst Iceman and the Harpy took their battle to the limited airspace of the lab. Moira just hoped she’d be around to mop the bloody place up once the fighting was over.

So far, at least, Bobby seemed to be holding his own against the Harpy, leaving Moira to wonder what had become of Nightcrawler. Watch out, Kurt, she thought. If we have a gamma-mutated bird/woman hybrid up here, Lord only knows what’s poking around downstairs.

Pounding blows smashed against the sealed entrance, distracting her from the aerial battle being fought above her. “Now what?” she muttered, sounding more exasperated than alarmed. The emergency bulkhead was made of reinforced steel, yet the thick plates were already buckling beneath the relentless impact of whoever was trying to smash his or her way into the lab. Moira glanced hopefully at the security monitors, but the internal cameras were still on the fritz, providing her with no clue as to the identity of the apparently super-strong housebreaker. Judging from the sheer power of the blows, she thought, I think we can safely rule out Jubilee.

A high-tech bio-medical laboratory was no place to store weapons, but Moira found herself wishing she’d stashed an Uzi somewhere among the microscopes and petrie dishes. The middle-aged scientist was no shrinking violet, and considered that she could make a fair accounting for herself in any ordinary donnybrook. It didn’t take a Ph.D. to comprehend, however, that she wouldn’t last long in unarmed combat against any being capable of making it through that door. Blast it, she thought. I’m a scientist, not a bloody super-heroine.

With one final, tremendous heave, the armor-plated door gave way, falling forward onto the floor of the lab with a deafening clang that echoed through the entire icebound laboratory. Moira braced herself for whatever ghastly monstrosity might makes its way through the now-open entrance. Imagine her relief when she spied a respected colleague instead.

Dr. Leonard Samson, possibly the world’s leading authority on the psychology of superhumans, and the Hulk’s personal therapist, strode into the ice-bedecked chamber. Along with his impressive academic credentials, he had a muscular build worthy of Hercules or the mighty Thor. His long green hair, flowing freely over his shoulders, testified to the effects of gamma radiation on his own DNA, although he had obviously been spared a transformation as grotesque as either the Harpy’s or the Hulk’s; the unpredictable vagaries of gamma mutation had dealt with him much more generously, merely enhancing his physical strength to Hulk-like proportions whilst adding a greenish tint to his distinctive mane.

“Have no fear, Doc Samson is here,” he declared, utilizing the colorful nickname the media had inevitably dubbed him with. He had clearly come dressed for action, clad in a red leather outfit consisting of a sleeveless vest, trousers, and boots. Fingerless red gloves protected his clenched fists. A handsome, intelligent face swept the lab with his gaze, looking surprisingly unsurprised by its arctic appearance.

“Leonard!” Moira called out, rising from behind the vault. She did not know Samson well, but they had met at the odd scientific conference over the years. She remembered being particularly impressed by his paper on The Behavioral Dynamics of Human/Super-Human Relations. No doubt he hoped to treat the unfortunate Ms. Banner once he apprehended the crazed creature she had become; Moira hoped he could cope with an energy-blasting Harpy as well as he’d handled that symposium in Anchorage a few years back.

Samson turned piercing green eyes toward her. “Identified: Dr. Moira MacTaggert. Human, female. Director and proprietor of targeted facility. Prepare for relocation to Gamma Base.”

The voice, deep and authoritative, was as Moira remembered, but the words and their delivery did not sound like anything she ever expected Leonard Samson to say. If she heard him correctly, he was after her, not the Harpy! “What are ye talking about, Leonard?” she demanded. “What’s this all about?”

Before he could answer, the brittle sound of Iceman crashing to earth attracted Moira’s gaze and filled her heart with anxiety. Enmeshed in a crackling electronic net, Iceman lay sprawled upon the fractured ice whilst the Harpy cawed triumphantly above him. Moira watched in horror as the frozen X-Man reverted to plain old Bobby Drake. She felt both victory and safety slipping away, an impression confirmed when a powerful hand grabbed onto her throat and lifted her off the floor. “Apprehended: human designate: Moira MacTaggert,” Doc Samson proclaimed, not a trace of human emotion in his voice. ^f ‘No further resistance is anticipated.”

Where are ye, Kurt? Moira wondered desperately. Samson’s strength matched that of his Biblical namesake. No matter how she struggled, she could not escape from his steely grip. Unable to turn her head, she barely managed to glimpse Bobby collapsing unconscious onto the floor a few meters away. With Iceman down, and Samson and the Harpy running roughshod over the lab and its inhabitants, everything now depended on Nightcrawler.

If only she knew where he was ... !

“Unglaublich!”

Nightcrawler cried out in both agony and amazement. Delicate bones in his ankle cracked as the pseudoAbomination tightened his grip on the ceiling-crawling X-Man. Nightcrawler tried to yank his leg free, but the Sentinel held on to him as securely as a ball and chain. In desperation, Kurt used his tail to fling the borrowed scalpel at his foe. The blade struck the monster in the throat, where it bounced harmlessly off the Sentinel’s synthetic scales. “Apprehended: mutant designate: Nightcrawler,” the robot reported to itself. “Elimination of mutant imminent.” The Sentinel pulled Nightcrawler down from the ceiling and, as his fingers and toes were forcibly tom from their gravity-defying holds on the ceiling, the tortured X-Man escaped the only way left to him.

BAMF!

With a flourish of smoke and brimstone, he teleported away from the mock Abomination’s excruciating grasp. A split-second later, he arrived in the darkened hallway, gasping for breath. All this teleporting, on top of the shock induced by his broken ankle, left him weak and exhausted. Ordinarily, I’d report to the medlab, he thought, biting down on his lip to keep from yelping in pain, but that’s probably not the best idea at the moment, considering that I just left an annoyed and artificial Abomination there.

Grimacing, he limped down the corridor toward the elevator. The Comm Suite, from which he could theoretically send for help, was two floors away and he was in no shape to bamf that far. Fractured ankle bones ground against each other, producing sharp, shooting pains that brought him close to fainting. His vision blurred and grew dark around the edges, while the floor seemed to sway dizzyingly beneath his feet. He couldn’t pause for a moment’s rest, though; he knew he had to keep going—for Iceman and Moira’s sake. To take the pressure off his injured leg, he kicked off from the floor with his good leg, lifting his body above his head, and started walking on his hands. “Jah, he murmured weakly, “that’s better. I think.”

Even for a mutant as acrobatically gifted as Nightcrawler, hand-walking at an urgent clip was tiring work, almost as hard as teleporting from one end of the Research Centre to another. A cold sweat broke out beneath his red-and-blue uniform, leaving him feeling damp and clammy. Although suspended in the air, his broken ankle throbbed mercilessly, and he wished for some serious painkillers, plus maybe an attractive nurse or two. The elevator, less than twenty meters away, seemed light-years distant.

How are Moira and Bobby faring? he wondered, concerned for his friends despite his own grievous situation. Could Iceman withstand a full-fledged Sentinel assault on his own? In truth, Nightcrawler had seldom fought beside the frozen hero, simply because their terms as X-Men had so seldom overlapped, so he had only a limited sense of Bobby Drake’s capabilities. Cyclops and the others spoke well of Iceman, though, which reassured Kurt somewhat. The refrigerated X-Man could have never survived against the likes of Magneto or Sauron, if he hadn’t learned something from his sessions in the Danger Room. Bobby can hold his own, Nightcrawler decided. I just need to have faith.

A deafening crash interrupted his worried musings. Still standing on his head, Nightcrawler looked back the way he came—and saw the phony Abomination emerge from the medlab in an explosion of flying timbers and plaster. Eschewing the convenient exit, the Sentinel simply bulldozed through the wall and into the hall, less than fifteen meters behind the shocked X-Man. “Tracking mutant designate: Nightcrawler,” it said. Infrared scanners glowed balefully from sockets beneath the robot’s troglodyte brow. “Target sighted.”

Instinctively, Nightcrawler cartwheeled forward onto his feet, then gasped out loud as his weight came down on his bad leg. Tears leaked from his eyes and he almost lost his balance. Half limping, half dragging his foot behind him, he lurched toward the elevator, all the time hearing the lumbering footsteps of the disguised Sentinel closing on him. As soon as the lift controls came within reach, he jabbed the UP button with his middle finger and waited for the metal door to slide open, which didn’t happen nearly fast enough.

“Come on,” he whispered impatiently. According to the display above the entrance, the lift was still among the Centre’s sub-basements, working its way up, floor by floor. ‘ ‘Schnell, schnell! ’ ’

“Beware the Abomination,” the Sentinel said mechanically, apparently programmed to perpetuate its fraudulent imposture for the benefit of whoever might be listening. “The Abomination cannot be thwarted.”

Nightcrawler could not be fooled. He knew a Sentinel when he heard one. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw that the relentless robot was only a few meters away. To his vast relief, the elevator chimed, announcing the lift’s arrival. And none too soon, he thought, squeezing past the metal door as soon as it began to slide open. The point of his tail stabbed repeatedly at the close door button inside the lift even as he blurted out his destination to the voice-activated elevator system. “The Comm Suite,” he panted, breathing hard. “Now.”

To his frustration, the elevator door took its own sweet time in closing, pausing patiently for any further passengers. Unfortunately for the debilitated X-Man, one such passenger was even now bearing down on the elevator, its greedy claws reaching out for Nightcrawler once more. The light from the open lift poured out into the corridor, exposing the pseudo-Abomination in all its reptilian hideousness. Kurt flattened himself against the back of the elevator, then glanced at the emergency hatch in the ceiling of the lift. A possible escape route?

At last, the door leisurely began to slide shut, but it was too late. Scaly fingers caught hold of the door’s edge, halting its progress an instant before the entrance completely closed. With a harsh wrenching noise, the Abomination-Sentinel ripped the steel door from its tracks, then charged into the cramped confines of the lift, only to find its quarry missing. The escape hatch slammed shut above the robot’s head, granting the Sentinel only a fleeting glimpse of a pronged tail chasing its owner out of the lift compartment.

Nightcrawler heard the faux Abomination claw through the roof of the elevator beneath him, metallic green talons rending the flimsy steel barrier between the Sentinel and its prey. Favoring his injured ankle, Nightcrawler climbed even faster up the greasy elevator cable, confident that the massive robot could not easily duplicate his own agile ascent, yet eager to increase his lead on his indomitable pursuer. He swiftly counted off the floors as he climbed.

One. As he passed the closed elevator doorway that led to the laboratory where he had left Iceman and Moira, he thought he heard the muffled pounding of hammers upon steel, along with the cawing of... an enormous bird? He was sorely tempted to make his way back into the lab, to add what was ieft of his strength to his friends’, but, no, he realized, summoning reinforcements had to be his top priority. “Hang on, mein freunds,” he whispered. “Help will be on its way soon.”

Two. Moira’s security lockdown had also sealed the entrance to the Comm Suite, but, thankfully, Nightcrawler still remembered the appropriate security codes. Using all three of the fingers of his right hand, he rapidly keyed the correct numeric sequence into an access panel mounted to the wall of the elevator shaft. With a hydraulic whoosh, redundant layers of steel shielding slide aside to permit him entry to the chamber beyond. He hopped awkwardly from the cable to the floor of the Comm Suite, sending an agonizing pang through his injured leg despite his best efforts to shield the tender limb from the impact. “Mein gott, that hurts!” he muttered, wiping his greasy hands on his trousers. If he’d been a telekinetic and not a teleporter, his angry thoughts at that moment might have been enough to reduce the ersatz Abomination to so many nuts and bolts....

Faxes, modems, scanners, and other equipment filled the suite, all tied in to the high-powered satellite dish erected on the roof of the Centre. He limped over to the main communications console and gratefully dropped into a movable seat. His fingers danced over the control panel as he fired up the communications array and sent out a general SOS to the X-Men, X-Force, and even—why not?—-Generation X’s private academy in Massachusetts. “Attention, priority Alpha!” he stated crisply into the mike. “This is Nightcrawler calling from the Genetic Research Centre on Muir Island. We are under attack by Sentinels. Repeat: Sentinels. Assistance is required as quickly as possible. Please respond immediately.”

Too bad they’re all an ocean away, he thought, but the

X-Men could travel with amazing speed when they had to. He placed a pair of headphones over his pointed ears, and waited anxiously to hear if anyone had received his message. Just our luck if nobody’s home to take the call.

“C’mon, Ororo, Logan, Rogue, somebody. Let me know you’re there.”

The headphones muffled but hardly blocked out the startling sound of something crashing through the ceiling behind him. “Vas?” he asked out loud, rotating his seat to locate the source of the disturbance. Surely the “Abomination” had not climbed up the cables already, let alone taken a detour by way of the roof? That was impossible! Nonetheless, a gigantic green figure now stood between Nightcrawler and the open elevator shaft, casting an ominously large shadow over the surprised and crippled X-Man. Kurt Wagner gulped as he recognized the savage creature grabbing onto his chair and effortlessly throwing Nightcrawler across the room with just one hand.

It was not the Abomination.

It was the Hulk.

-Chapter Three

This is more like it, Captain America decided. Now that the Beast had successfully called a truce between the various warring parties, the X-Men, the Avengers, and even the Hulk could work together to achieve a common goal. Hank McCoy definitely deserved a round of applause; as far as Cap was concerned, teamwork was always preferable to knocking heads together.

The assembled heroes had gathered upon the Rainbow Bridge spanning the Niagara River downstream of the Falls. Colonel Lopez and his Canadian counterpart guarded both ends of the bridge, blocking traffic and providing the heroes with a degree of privacy from curious sightseers and aggressive reporters. TV news copters, driven away by the Hulk earlier, had returned in force, however, circling low above the two-lane suspension bridge with their cameras aimed at what was undeniably an impressive collection of colorful individuals.

We ’re all of us looking a bit worse for wear, Cap reflected. With the notable exception of the Hulk, they were all soaked and more than a little banged up. One wing was missing from his own cowl and his sore jaw kept reminding him of its unfortunate collision with the Hulk’s fist. I’m lucky / still have all my teeth, he thought; the Hulk must have been holding back some.

The X-Men had not fared much better. Cyclops’s yellow bandolier was tom and his lower lip looked swollen, while Storm’s exposed arms and legs were marred by numerous nicks and scratches. The Beast’s dense fur largely concealed his injuries, but Cap noticed that the agile former Avenger was moving a bit more stiffly than he usually did, a pained wince occasionally dimming his characteristic smile. Poor Hank, Cap thought. He didn’t envy anyone who’d been on the receiving end of Cyclops’s eyebeams.

Only the Hulk, standing at least a head taller than anyone else on the bridge, appeared unscathed by the recent violence. True, his faded purple jeans hung in ribbons below his knees, but that was pretty much standard attire for the Hulk. “So what are we waiting for?” he rumbled ominously. A sullen expression seemed to have taken up permanent residence upon his neanderthal features. “I said I’d answer your stupid questions if everyone left me alone, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got all day. Let’s get on with it.”

Storm gave the Hulk a disapproving look. His bad attitude was getting on everyone’s nerves, but, thankfully, no one felt inclined to start another fight. “Hold tight a few more minutes,” Captain America instructed the Hulk in his most authoritative voice. Hopefully, his relative seniority would carry some weight with the impatient Hulk while they tended to a more urgent matter.

Cap leaned out over the pedestrian guardrail, searching the churning basin beneath the Horseshoe Falls. A foggy white mist concealed the surface of the pool, frustrating the Star-Spangled Avenger’s efforts to see any sign of activity below the turbulent white water. A rainbow arced through the mist. The weather, he noted, had improved dramatically since Storm joined the cease-fire, gray and angry clouds giving way to open blue sky. He just hoped the rainbow would prove a positive omen.

“C’mon, Shellhead,” he whispered to himself. “What’s keeping you?”

Another long minute passed before he thought he saw something break the surface of the misty pool. “Look!” Cyclops called out, pointing toward the water below. Cap followed his gaze and was relieved to see a gleaming metal figure emerge from the river. Iron Man shone in the sunlight, as he rose into the sky, cradling the broken body of the Vision. He flew slowly toward the bridge, the seemingly inert synthezoid weighing him down like ballast, until Iron Man’s boots touched down on the pavement near Cap and the others. Staggering beneath the obvious weight of his burden, he carefully lowered the Vision to the surface of the bridge. The android Avenger appeared lifeless except for a faint, intermittent flickering in the amber gem embedded in the Vision’s forehead. Even though he had been warned in advance, Cap was still shocked to see the Vision’s right arm lying separate from his body.

“Sorry for the delay,” Iron Man apologized. He sounded slightly out of breath. “It’s pretty murky down there. It took me awhile to find his arm. My spotlight was broken, so I had to rely on the sonar.” Cap noticed that Iron Man’s armor was dented in places and the beam projector in his chestplate cracked. Did the Hulk do that or Storm? he wondered.

The blacktop beneath the Vision cracked loudly, narrow fissures extending like spiderwebs through the pavement around the fallen synthezoid. “He’s heavier than he looks,” Iron Man explained, stretching his arms as much as his armor would allow. “He must have increased his density to its upper limit before he took the plunge from the Falls.” Storm felt compelled to apologize as well. “I’m so sorry, Iron Man. I had no idea what had happened to your teammate. No wonder you attacked the Hulk.” She shook her head, no doubt recalling how she had rashly come to the Hulk’s defense. “I was tired and wet and recovering from a severe psychic shock, but I should have realized you had been provoked.”

All eyes gradually turned toward the Hulk. It was he, Iron Man had explained to the X-Men, who had tom the Vision asunder, then tossed both pieces over the Falls. Unrepentant, the green goliath glared back at them, his arms folded across his chest, the massive biceps bulging like overstaffed sandbags. “Hey, I warned him to leave me alone,” he gmmbled. “Can I help it if he can’t take a hint?”

Cap clenched his teeth, biting back an angry retort. He couldn’t expect the Hulk to show any remorse. Helping the Vision was what mattered now. “How is he?” he asked Iron Man. The Vision’s plasticine body looked disturbingly still. Only the flashing gem in his forehead hinted at any degree of animation. Was he alive or dead? Cap wondered. Or did those words mean anything at all where, an artificial lifeform is involved? The Vision’s predecessor, the original android Human Torch, had “died” several times, but was currently up and running again. With any luck, the Vision was just as durable.

“I’ve seen him worse,” Iron Man said bluntly. He had a point; Cap recalled at least two occasions on which the Vision had practically needed to be rebuilt from scratch. “His primary operating system has gone into emergency shutdown mode to conserve energy, but I should be able to reattach his arm back at the mansion, then reboot him with only minimal memory loss. If he’s lucky, he won’t even remember the accident.”

Iron Man’s hopeful diagnosis elicited a skeptical expression from Storm and Cyclops. Cap didn’t blame them; the dismembered Vision sure looked like a seriously-wounded casualty of war. “Trust me,” Iron Man informed them, “this isn’t nearly as bad as the time the Feds completely disassembled him, or the time Morgan Le Fey blew him apart with a mystical blast. Now that required some major reconstruction work.”

“That’s our Vizh,” the Beast remarked. He crouched ape-like, his knuckles grazing the pavement, and inspected the synthezoid’s amputated arm. Unlike the rest of the Vision’s body, the disconnected limb appeared lightweight and gelatinous in texture. “He takes a licking, and keeps on ticking.”    .

“Fine,” the Hulk snapped testily. “If Robby the Robot is going to be okay then, can we maybe get on with business? At this rate, my snazzy green hair’s gonna go gray again before I get away from this overrated tourist trap.” Iron Man had heard enough. “Listen, Hulk,” he barked. “I just spent fifteen minutes fishing your crummy handiwork off the floor of the river and the last thing I need is your lip.” He took an angry step toward the Hulk, the servomotors in his armor whirring audibly, but Captain America laid a restraining hand upon the Golden Avenger’s shoulder.

“Easy, old friend,” Cap said. His crimson glove was almost the same color as Iron Man’s shoulderplate. ‘'That’s not going to help the Vision—or Wanda.”

“Aw, let him go,” the Hulk urged, sounding disappointed by the Cap’s diplomatic efforts. He flashed a wide, malicious grin. “I’ll crack open that metal shell like a boiled lobster. It won’t take long, I promise.”

“No,” Cyclops said firmly, stepping bravely between Iron Man and the Hulk. ^;‘We’ve wasted too much time already.” He turned his visor toward the two surviving Avengers. “You mentioned the Scarlet Witch a moment ago. What sort of danger is she in?”

There upon the bridge, flanked by watchful armies on both sides, the two teams compared notes, sharing with each other the bizarre and unsettling chain of events that had brought both mutants and human heroes to Niagara Falls in search of the Hulk. Captain America was not too surprised to discover that the X-Men’s quest was very much like their own. The pieces are coming together, he thought, even if we can’t quite make out the big picture yet.

“Sounds to me,” Cyclops said, “like the Scarlet Witch was abducted not long before Rogue disappeared, and under similar circumstances.”

‘ ‘Living marionettes, animated tee-shirts ... this just keeps getting stranger,” Iron Man complained. He had earlier confided to Cap his concern that this case might end up involving sorcery, not exactly scientist Tony Stark’s cup of tea. “The common link here, besides the suggestively analogous m.o.’s, is the presence of gamma radiation at both sites.”

The mention of gamma rays caught the Hulk’s attention. For the first time, he seemed more than grudgingly interested in what the costumed heroes had to say. “Gamma radiation, mysterious disappearances,” he muttered, more to himself than to either the Avengers or the X-Men. His surly expression darkened further as he mulled over what he had just heard. “It can’t be. Not him again.”

“Do these clues mean something to you, Hulk?” Storm asked. Her striking blue eyes held a trace of hope. Perhaps their costly pursuit of the Hulk would prove worth the hardships they’d endured.

I hope so, too, Cap thought.

For once, the Hulk answered without argument and only a token amount of attitude. “Not all that weirdness about puppets and flying shirts,” he said, “but the rest of it? Yeah, that rings some bells. The way I see it, your buddies got beamed out of there after the puppets and all put the kibosh on them. Problem is, there’s only one slimeball I know who uses trans-mat technology powered by gamma energy: my old sparring partner, Samuel Stems. Or, as he likes to call himself these days, the Leader.”

The Leader! Cap didn’t know whether to be relieved or appalled now that the Hulk had finally provided them with a suspect. The Avengers hadn’t crossed swords with the Leader for years, not since that time the Leader tried to change history by travelling back to the dawn of human evolution, but Cap well remembered just how fiendishly brilliant that megalomaniacal mastermind could be. If the Leader is responsible for kidnapping Wanda and Rogue, getting them back is not going to be easy.

“I thought he was dead,” Iron Man protested.

“Me too,” the Hulk confirmed. “I messed him up pretty bad in Alberta awhile back, in this underground city of his. It looked like he’d finally kicked the bucket once and for all.” He scowled and shrugged his ample shoulders. “You know super-villains, though. They keep coming back, like the flu.”

Cap knew what he meant. He’d lost count of the number of times that the Red Skull or Baron Zemo had returned from the grave. But why would the Leader come after Wanda or Rogue? The Hulk was the usual target of his insane schemes of revenge.

“Forgive me,” Storm interrupted, “but who is the Leader? I’m afraid I’m not familiar with this individual.” “Another singular product of gamma radiation,” the Beast offered helpfully, “only this time the metamorphic effect went straight to his head, increasing the size and capacity of his cerebellum. Essentially, he ended up as awesomely intelligent as the Hulk is—”

“Watch it,” the Hulk growled. His voluminous shadow

fell over the hairy mutant, who flinched instinctively.

‘ ‘—stronger than most,’ ’ the Beast concluded tactfully. “Like so many other misguided prodigies of our acquaintance, he promptly set about to conquer the world. Absolute intelligence, alas, apparently corrupts just as absolutely as raw power.” He glanced nervously at the Hulk. “Present company excluded, of course.”

Cap decided to intervene before the Beast’s loquacious ways got him deeper into trouble. “Thank you, Hulk. You’ve been very helpful.” He held out his hand to shake the Hulk’s immense green mitt. “You’re free to go, provided you don’t intend to create any further disturbances here. Our quinjet is parked not far from here. Perhaps we can drop you off someplace private and secluded?”

The North Pole, for instance? he thought. After all, if it was good enough for the Frankenstein monster in the novel. .. .

“Forget it, yankee doodle.” The Hulk ignored Cap’s proffered hand. ‘ ‘If the Leader is involved in this shindig, then I’m coming with you. That big-brained fuhrer has been a pain in my posterior long before he messed with you and your missing gals. If he’s going down, I’m going to be there, whether you want me or not.” He looked the assembled heroes over dubiously. “Besides, I’m not sure any of you are up to it.”

“What?” Iron Man answered indignantly. The motile metal of his gilded faceplate allowed some of his ire to show through. “Who invited you along?” Judging from the offended and/or dismayed expressions on the three mutants’ faces, Iron Man wasn’t the only one taken aback by the Hulk’s brashness. “I can’t speak for the X-Men, but I can tell here and now that the Avengers have been doing fine without you. Hulk, and against adversaries as dangerous as the Leader, if not more so.”

“I’m coming with you,” the Hulk insisted, hands on his .hips. He towered over the armored Avenger. “You got a problem with that, tin man?”

“Maybe,” Iron Man said, undeterred by the Hulk’s looming presence. Even dented and dripping from his dive beneath the Fall, Iron Man’s armor made him an imposing figure. Metal gauntlets were clenched; clearly what the Hulk had done to the Vision hadn’t been set aside.

Captain America shared his sentiments, especially where their injured comrade was concerned, but felt obliged to play peacemaker once more. The lives of at least two women were at stake. “Stand down,” he ordered Iron Man, and the Golden Avenger reluctantly complied, stepping back from the Hulk to join Captain America a few feet away. His armored fists remained tightly clenched.

Cap considered the Hulk carefully. The hot-tempered behemoth had served with the Avengers before, however briefly, and certainly there was no love lost between the Hulk and the Leader. The only thing that worried the veteran hero was whether or not the Hulk would place his anger against his old enemy over the safety of the hostages. What if his barbaric desire for revenge endangered Wanda or Rogue?

Somewhere inside that furious monstrosity is Bruce Banner, he reminded himself, and Banner is a decent, honorable man. He had to hope that, ultimately, some tiny portion of Banner would be enough to curb the Hulk’s most crazed, counterproductive impulses. Heaven help us if I’m wrong.

“All right. Hulk,” Cap said. “If the X-Men have no objections, you can join us on this mission. I’d rather have you fighting with us than against us.” He looked at Storm and Cyclops, unsure which of them served as leader of their team. “Is that acceptable to you?”

“Give us a moment, Captain,” Storm requested. She and Cyclops conferred quietly, casting a few doubtful looks at the Hulk, then leaned over to whisper to the Beast. Interesting, Cap thought. From the looks of things, it appeared that the X-Men proceeded more through consensus than through an established chain of command. Whatever works for them, he decided.

Their huddle lasted for only a minute or two. Cyclops nodded at Cap and answered for his teammates. “We have no objections to working with the Hulk. The important thing is finding our people.”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Cap agreed. He glanced about the bridge. Overhead, the buzzing news copters were getting alarmingly closer. For all we know, the Leader could be watching us on CNN right now, he thought.

“I suggest we reconvene at Avengers Mansion, where we can take better advantage of our resources. I assume you X-Men have transportation of your own?” he asked.

“Our able and adaptable aircraft awaits on yonder isle,” the Beast assured him, giving the Hulk a wide berth as he bounded toward the American end of the bridge. “Given the Hulk’s esteemed status as a charter member of the Avengers, however, perhaps he would be most comfortable travelling with you?” He did little to conceal his eagerness to foist the irascible man-brute off on the Avengers.

Technically, Cap remembered, they had revoked the Hulk’s membership years ago, but now was no time to mention that, “Good idea,” he said firmly. “Hulk, you’re with us.”

“Terrific,” Iron Man muttered sarcastically, low enough so that only Cap could hear. “This should be a fun flight.”

At least we’ll be able to keep an eye on the Hulk, Cap thought, despite sincerely mixed emotions over acquiring such an explosive loose cannon for their team. To his surprise, the Hulk voluntarily lifted the super-dense remains of the Vision, leaving Iron Man only the amputated arm to carry. Following after the Beast, Captain America led the others back toward American soil, only to be confronted by an armed battalion commanded by Colonel Arturo Lopez.

“I believe we’ve finished with our business here,” Cap reported to the officer. “The Hulk is leaving with us, so there should be no further need for you and your troops.” “Not so fast,” Lopez said sternly. His lean face was grim, like he had to do something he wasn’t too happy about. “I appreciate your efforts here, Captain, but, with all due respect, I have standing orders to apprehend both the Hulk and the X-Men.” He fixed a stony gaze on Cyclops and his team. “The X-Men, in particular, are wanted regarding an attack on a government installation less than twenty-four hours ago.”

“What?” Cyclops objected, sounding genuinely surprised. The Beast and Storm looked equally perplexed. “What is he talking about?”

Cap held up his hand to still further argument. “Let me ask you something point blank,” he said to Cyclops. “Did you or any of your team attack the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier yesterday?”

Cyclops shook his head. “No, this is the first I’ve heard of any attack. We’ve been searching for Rogue nonstop since she disappeared yesterday afternoon.”

“And that search didn’t include a raid on S.H.I.E.L.D.?” Iron Man pressed them.

“No, of course not,” Storm insisted. “We have no grievances against that organization. To the contrary, Nicholas Fury is one of the few top-ranking officials in your government who has not supported any anti-mutant campaign.”

That’s overstating things a bit, Cap thought. While he could not deny that the United States had sometimes sacrificed individual liberties on the altar of national security, he remained convinced that such excesses and extremism did not represent America as a whole. The mutant-haters and genetic segregationists were only one small part of the American reality. Still, Storm sounded sincere when she said the X-Men had no reason to suspect Nick Fury of foul play against them.

“What about the rest of your team?” Cap asked, recalling the classified security footage he had seen depicting various X-Men running amuck on the Helicarrier. He mentally compiled a list of the costumed mutants caught by the security cameras as they deployed their unearthly powers against Fury and his agents. “I don’t see, for instance, Banshee, Sunfire, Iceman, or Marvel Girl.”

“My wife goes by the codename ‘Phoenix’ now,” Cyclops corrected him. “She’s with the Professor and the rest of the team in Antarctica now. As for the others you mentioned, Banshee is semi-retired these days, teaching in Massachusetts, while Iceman is assisting a colleague of ours in Scotland. Sunfire hasn’t fought beside the X-Men in years, but this doesn’t sound like his style. Last I heard, he was still Japan’s number one super hero.”

“Not counting Astro Boy,” the Beast quipped.

Who? Probably a contemporary pop culture reference, Cap guessed, although he didn’t get it. His own tastes had been shaped in the Thirties and Forties, during the era of Bogart, Bing, and Abbott and Costello. For a second, he wondered idly if the Beast had even heard of Betty Grable. I need to get out more, he decided.

What Cyclops had told him more or less gibed, however, with his own knowledge of the individuals involved, although he’d been unaware until now that Cyclops and

Phoenix had gotten married. Good for them, he thought. He found himself leaning toward the idea that the oddball assortment of past and present X-Men who had attacked the Helicarrier were impostors of some sort. Lord knew it wouldn’t be the first time unscrupulous pretenders trashed the reputations of otherwise upstanding heroes; Cap himself had been temporarily replaced by a disguised Skrull less than a year ago.

“That’s what I figured,” he told Cyclops, then turned to face Lopez. “Colonel, I have reason to believe that the X-Men are innocent of the charges against them. I’ll vouch for them until we find evidence to the contrary.” He nodded at the officer’s two-way radio. “You can check with your superiors if you like, but I think you’ll find my priority clearances in place.”

Lopez scratched his chin, thinking it over. Cap could tell he wasn’t looking forward to pitting his soldiers against a well-trained team of super-powered mutants. “No,” the colonel decided, “your word’s good enough for me. I’m satisfied to remand the X-Men into your custody.” He squinted past the three mutants to the mountain of green muscle towering above them. “Um, what about the Hulk?” “You can arrest me,” the jade colossus said, not intimidated in the slightest by the poised guns of nearby troops, “if you think you can.”

Cap didn’t expect he’d have much trouble convincing the colonel to let him escort the Hulk away as well. He suspected that authorities on both sides of the border would be glad to see all of them go.

Too bad they couldn’t expect the Leader to be so cooperative, if and when they finally tracked him down.

The most annoying thing about being smarter, by several orders of magnitude, than anybody else was that the only person who could truly appreciate your genius was you.

The Leader sighed. Such was the cross he bore, by virtue of his magnificent, gamma-endowed brain. Even his partner in this latest enterprise, despite coming from an infinitely more advanced civilization than the one currently making a mess of the planet Earth, lacked any full understanding of the intricate nuances and subtleties that distinguished the Leader’s every waking thought.

I am a prophet unrecognized in my own land, he thought, savoring a draught of delectable self-pity, although he intended to remedy that situation, once he had a world of his own to rule. Then the hapless subjects of his new dominion would have no choice but to acknowledge his transcendent superiority—or face immediate execution. After all, there would be no place in that brave new world for minds too feeble to grasp the utter primacy of the Leader’s awesome intellect; it would be only common sense to cull the herd of those mental defectives oblivious to his grandeur.

Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 in E minor. Op. 98, played softly in the background as the Leader sat at the nerve center of his spanking new base of operations, constructed

in part with the resources and technology provided by his partner. His pale green fingers rested upon an ergonomic control panel of his own design, while his voluminous skull, housing a brain larger than any other, rested against the high, padded back of a futuristic stainless steel throne. The twin hemispheres of his fantastic cranium swelled like balloons above his contemplative brow, their complex convolutions barely covered by his hairless epidermis. His flesh, the faded green of some stubborn subterranean fungus, was largely covered by a simple orange jumpsuit, but the resplendent dome of his skull proclaimed the sublime nature of his historic transfiguration to any who might look upon him.

For now, though, Leader was alone, left to the profound privacy of his own meditations while his partner pursued their joint agenda elsewhere. He raised a Baccarat glass of wine—Chateau du Lac, 1934—to his thin lips as he effortlessly absorbed information from over three dozen video screens simultaneously. The screens were stacked, row upon row, directly in front of his throne so that he could inspect them all without having to move more than his eyeballs. Most of the high-definition color monitors were tuned to a variety of global news sources: CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, Video Free Latveria, and the strictly subscription-only Super-Villain Channel, among others. A select few, however, broadcast their images exclusively to the Leader, such as the video and audio feed coming straight from the sensory receptors of his newly-acquired Gamma Sentinels.

“Excellent,” he murmured to himself as he in effect stared through the eyes of his pet Sentinels as they ransacked the offices and laboratories of the famed Genetic Research Centre on Muir Island. So far, the intimidating automatons had easily overcome whatever meager opposition the mutant defenders of the Centre had presented;

while the presence of Iceman and Nightcrawler at the Centre had not been anticipated, the Gamma Sentinels had made short work of the two callow X-Men. Now operative GS-3, cunningly crafted in the image of the hate-maddened Harpy, kept watch over the bound figure of Dr. Moira MacTaggert, the only inhabitant of the island who held any genuine interest to him. MacTaggert’s work on the genetic transmission of specific mutant traits had been intriguing, even impressive for an unevolved human female; he looked forward to interrogating her at his leisure once she was safely transported to the base.

The Harpy herself could be seen via the eyes of GS-1, a better-than-passable simulacrum of that Freudian fool, Leonard Samson. The Leader had to applaud whatever faceless bureaucrat had come up with the deliciously droll idea of disguising their new robotic centurions as the Hulk and his bestial brethren; he supposed he should be offended that the techno-wizards at S.H.I.E.L.D. had not included an artificial “Leader” among their mechanical menagerie, but their short-sighted omission was merely more proof, as if any more were needed, of the way an unthinking world valued brute physical power over intelligence.

To be fair, the Leader granted, it would hardly be possible to build a Sentinel that came close to duplicating my own brilliance; even Omnivac, his most accomplished creation in the field of artificial intelligence, had been a mere shadow of its maker’s unparalleled cognitive powers.

His mood darkened as he recalled how the barbaric Hulk, in company with the self-righteous Avengers, had destroyed Omnivac on the Leader’s orbiting space station a few years ago, right before he himself had almost perished in a prehistoric volcano, thanks to Captain America, Iron Man, and, most especially, the Hulk. Putting down his wine, which had acquired an unwanted bitter aftertaste, he focused the majority of his consciousness on CNN, which was still broadcasting prerecorded news footage of the senseless tripartite battle between the X-Men, the Avengers, and the Hulk. He watched again as Iron Man and the Hulk, one-time allies against his own manifest destiny, expended their strength and energy in costly combat atop scenic Niagara Falls.

“Encore! Encore!” he urged sardonically. It soothed his soul to see his former enemies battling amongst themselves, thanks to his own machiavellian manipulations. That the strife had ultimately ended in an ignominious and personally inconvenient truce was of little import; his projections had predicted an 83 percent probability that the self-styled heroes would eventually join forces, even if he had held onto a wistful hope that the unreasoning fury of the Hulk might up the casualty rate a tad.

Call me an unrealistic, wild-eyed dreamer, he thought, sighing indulgently once more, but, deep down inside, I really thought that the Hulk might kill a couple of X-Men or Avengers.

But, alas, as so many times before, Banner and his wretched alter ego had foiled his fondest expectations. One day I will make him pay for that, he vowed, and sooner than he thinks.

By his advance calculations, the motley assortment of costumed crusaders must have converged by now for their most dire consultations, most likely at the Avenger’s ostentatious townhouse in Manhattan. Unless the Hulk had grown significantly dimmer since their last encounter, always a possibility where Banner’s endlessly mutable metamorphoses were concerned, he had to assume that his brutish nemesis had already detected the Leader’s hand at work in the oh-so-distressing disappearances of the Scarlet Witch and Rogue, and shared that inevitable insight with both the X-Men and the Avengers. It was considerably less likely that the puzzled heroes had yet realized that Wolverine had been abducted as well, given that the feral X-Man had been snatched in the middle of his beloved wilderness, far from public view. That missing piece of data would cost all concerned dearly, particularly as his master plan continued to play out.

The Leader had no fear of immediate discovery. Correctly attributing their present difficulties to the Leader was one thing; finding him would pose a more challenging puzzle. To his certain knowledge, the only semi-sentient souls who knew of the location and existence of his current domicile were his militaristic partner and his loyal lieutenants. And even should the united acumen of “Earth’s mightiest heroes ” bring them close to uncovering my new address, the Leader recalled with smug satisfaction, my partner will be waiting to strike at their ranks from within.

A chime sounded from his control panel, reminding him that it was time to check on his involuntary guests. How time flies, he reflected, when you’re plotting the downfall of all you despise. He pressed a lighted pad on the arm of his throne, and the entire seat rotated 180 degrees, bringing him around to face another set of controls, as well as a transparent pane of reinforced glass.

Through this picture window—in reality, the obliging side of a one-way mirror—he spied his unwilling test subjects: Wolverine, Rogue, and the Scarlet Witch. Shorn of the garish costumes they usually affected, the three captives wore matching orange jumpsuits, which looked rather more flattering on Rogue and the Witch than it did on their hirsute throwback of a companion. Each mutant specimen was confined to his or her own high-tech sarcophagus, lidless to permit easy inspection by the Leader from the adjacent control chamber. Wires and electrodes were connected to key junctures on their body, while I.V. lines provided them sufficient water and nutrition, along with medication as needed. The Leader was proud of the design of the containment sarcophagi, which had completely eliminated the risk of transporting the specimens from cells to lab and back again. Automated equipment provided him with the means to perform any experiment without ever leaving his chair, let alone having to deal with the predictably irate subjects in the flesh. He had heard enough defiant superhero rhetoric over the course of his career, and felt no need to subject himself to any more.

Per his meticulous estimations, his mutant guinea pigs had been allowed sufficient time to recuperate from the last round of admittedly demanding tests. Before commencing a new slate of experiments, the Leader decided to take a few moments to review the results of his findings to date.

It is always important to keep one’s ultimate goals in view, he philosophized, lest one lose sight of the vision amidst the vivisections.

For many years now, his paramount objective—his utopian dream—had been to create a new race of gamma-mutated beings to populate a world of his own design, with himself reigning like a god over a more evolved species of human being. In the past, this had led to such ambitious endeavors as infecting New York City with a contagious gamma gene, detonating a stolen gamma bomb in a major population center, and even attempting to gamma-irradiate the primordial soup from which all terrestrial life would eventually evolve. As laudable as such enterprises had been, they had all suffered from the inherent randomness of genetic mutation. For all his unquestioned sagacity and expertise, he had thus far remained unable to predict whether any given specimen, exposed to sufficient quantities of gamma rays, would evolve into a being of superior intelligence and sensibilities—or a Hulk. The best he could do was irradiate a multitude of individuals and hope for one or two specimens whose mutant traits proved worth preserving. A rather time-consuming and inefficient procedure, to say the least.

These new test subjects, gathered by his partner’s highly versatile lieutenants, potentially held the key to a better, more elegant way of achieving his aims. If his current experimental campaign bore fruit, he would soon acquire a power he had long desired: to induce specific genetic mutations at will. These captive mutants—in particular, the two female specimens—possessed a singularly tantalizing combination of innate talents, talents he hoped to combine and duplicate to great effect. Imagine! No more animalistic hulks, abominations, and harpies; instead he would engender a new breed of proud, green supermen and superwomen created in his own omnipotent image.

Consider: the ill-bred, backwater swamp trash known only as Rogue. Her unique mutant ability consisted of the power to absorb and assimilate the equally unique attributes of other mutants and mutated beings. In essence, she could somehow isolate the genetic template of any super-being and transfer the essential elements of that template to another specimen, namely herself. It required only the slightest of conceptual leaps to imagine refining this process in order to imprint a chosen mutant trait onto as many subjects as desired. True, at present, the “Rogue effect” tended to be temporary, except in rare instances, and had unfortunate negative effects on the original mutant donor. It also appeared that the process resulted in serious psychological trauma to the recipient of the trait selected. Still, the Leader was convinced that he could eliminate such unwanted limitations and side effects in time.

Who knows? he thought. It was even possible that the data his Gamma Sentinels were now extracting from the Genetic Research Centre might hold the secret to bringing Rogue’s “wild talent” under more precise and scientific control. A man could dream, couldn’t he?

Consider also: Wanda Maximoff, popularly known as the Scarlet Witch. On a fundamental level, genetic mutation was a matter of probabilities, the random rearrangement of agitated chromosomes into new and potentially superior configurations, and probabilities were what the Scarlet Witch’s notoriously ill-defined powers were said to control. Contrary to Einstein’s famous aphorism, ultimately invalidated by the findings of modem quantum physics, God did indeed play dice with the universe, but the Scarlet Witch possessed a knack for weighting the dice. Her power alone, tamed and made to produce specific and reproducible results, could finally allow him to induce precisely the mutant characteristics he sought to instill in his followers, without relying on the fickle dispensations of chance.

A thrilling prospect, even if one as yet still beyond his reach. The Leader frowned, contemplatively stroking his bushy black mustache, the only trace of body hair remaining on his immaculate body. So far, if he was to be brutally honest with himself (and to whom else could he so candidly confide?), his tests upon the Scarlet Witch and her trademark “hexes” had produced conspicuously mixed results.

Hexes. The very word provoked a contemptuous scowl from the Leader. How could one expect to identify the scientific basis of the subject’s enigmatic abilities when the entire world had conspired to swaddle the Scarlet Witch’s genetic gifts within veils of superstitious hogwash? That there were mystical forces at work in the universe he could not deny, not in a space-time continuum that included such entities as Dr. Strange and the Asgardian gods, but there was mutation, and there was magic, and, in his experience, the one very seldom had much to do with the other. He had no doubt that there was an underlying scientific theory behind Wanda Maximoff’s demonstrated capacity to manipulate the laws of probability, even if the subject herself seemed to take all this fuzzy-minded “witchcraft” business a little too seriously. But what could you expect from an ignorant gypsy raised in the backwards recesses of the Balkans?

With a tap of his finger, he called up a statistical breakdown of his experiments with the Scarlet Witch to date. The data was projected between him and the observation window by his own specially-designed holographic emitters. He shook his capacious head as he reviewed the statistics, which were just as he remembered: The Witch could affect probabilities, of that there was no doubt, but the effectiveness and reliability of her hexes varied significantly depending on her emotional and physical state. Even more discouraging, the results were even more erratic when her hex powers were transferred to Rogue via direct physical contact. Rogue was able to mimic Maximoff’s tricks, but with less control and precision. It was as though some crucial component of the Scarlet Witch’s powers remained ephemeral and impossible to quantify.

Magic? He resisted the notion with every fiber of his logic-loving being, but he was starting to wonder.

Still, such minor impediments and irritants were a small price to pay to acquire the god-like puissance he sought. Only by combining the harnessed powers of Rogue and the Scarlet Witch could he: a) produce the mutations he deemed worthwhile, and b) transfer those mutations from one subject to another.

That consummate facility would more than justify his time and trouble. Why, the creative potential was practically unlimited, nor need he limit himself to the nearinfinite possibilities of the human genome. Soon, very soon, he aspired to mix and match the genetic characteristics of both human and alien donors. His gaze lingered on the Southern-born woman in the central sarcophagus, the one with a striking white streak running through the center of her copious brunette locks. How would Rogue’s mutant physiology react to the absorption of extraterrestrial traits and abilities? He looked forward to conducting that very experiment in the near future, perhaps when the Leader’s partner returned from his undercover assignment. That, he thought, quoting the estimable Bard, is a consummation devoutly to he wished.

But what of his third lab rat, the atavistic man-animal who went by the highly appropriate name of Wolverine? In truth, the pugnacious X-Man was less essential to the Leader’s grand design than his female associates. His mutant healing factor, however, had intrigued the Leader for a number of reasons, chief among them its provocative similarity to the Hulk’s own dismayingly remarkable regenerative powers. Too many times the Leader had personally witnessed the accursed jade goliath’s near-instantaneous recovery from what should have been mortal injuries; it was his devout hope that, by subjecting Wolverine’s healing factor to intensive scientific analysis, he might find some chink in the Hulk’s all-encompassing immunity to physical harm. Moreover, even if this much longed for hope proved in vain, he might at least come away with some useful techniques he could employ to speed the recovery of future test subjects.

Hidden behind the reflective anonymity of the one-way mirror, the Leader watched his captives stir fitfully in their gleaming sarcophagi, as stimulants introduced to their I.V. lines roused them from exhausted repose. The trouble, he reflected, with conducting trial and error experimentation on fragile living beings was that they so seldom survived the experience.

“Gambit?”

Rogue awoke from Cajun-spiced dreams to find herself confined in the same cold steel casket she had been trapped in before. Shoot! she cursed inwardly. Here 1 was hopin’ this was all just a bad dream. No such luck, I guess.

Groggily, she blinked the sleep from her eyes. Unfortunately, that didn’t improve the view much; she was still staring at her reflection in the long horizontal mirror facing her, crammed like an Egyptian mummy into an upright coffin full of candy-colored wires and little blinky lights and other snazzy sci-fi gizmos, along with (how could she forget?) a hypodermic needle injected into her arm. Metal clamps, sturdy enough to resist her super-strength, held her flat within the casket, which was propped up at a forty-five degree angle to the floor. A clamp around her neck kept her from turning her head, but by moving her eyes from left to right she could spot the reflections of her two fellow prisoners, each stuck in an identical coffin on opposite sides of Rogue. She heard Wolverine breathing hoarsely a few feet to her left; to the right, the Scarlet Witch was silent, maybe even too silent.

Good thing Storm’s not here with us, Rogue thought. With her claustrophobia, this would probably be Ororo’s worst nightmare. Not that the rest of us are having a grand old time, that is.

She inspected herself in the mirror, not liking what she saw there. Dark, puffy circles ringed her tired brown eyes, giving her an uncomfortable resemblance to a raccoon. Greasy bangs, white in the middle and russet brown on the sides, dangled before her forehead. Her complexion, usually a picture of ruddy health, looked uncharacteristically pale and wan.

I look awful, she realized. Not too surprising, considering; getting poked and prodded like a New Orleans voodoo doll, while cooped up tighter than a heifer in a henhouse, wasn’t exactly conducive to a gal’s beauty sleep.

From the looks of them, her partners in captivity weren’t doing any better. Wolverine growled in his sleep, his face twitching angrily, his jagged teeth grinding noisily together, almost drowning out the constant low thrumming of the machinery surrounding the prisoners on all sides. Silver claws snikt’d in and out of his clenched fists every few seconds, flashing strobe-like beneath the harsh overhead lights.

Rogue was getting worried about Logan. Wherever his head was now, it wasn’t a good place to be. His personality had been regressing ever since they first woke up in this antiseptic hellhole, like he was losing his civilized inhibitions and reverting to the wild animal inside him. She knew why that was, of course; when their faceless tormentor forced her to absorb Wolvie’s memories and powers, she’d gotten a real taste of what he was going through now. This whole setup was dragging up all his buried memories of that other time up in Canada, the original “Weapon X” experiments, when a bunch of no-good government scientists filled him full of adamantium, torturing him to the point of insanity. All those bad days, and the bad feelings they left burrowed in his soul, were coming back now, stronger than ever, and Rogue wasn’t sure how much longer Logan would be able to hold it all together. She’d felt the unreasoning savagery, the sheer animal frenzy, building up inside him, and what scared her the most was just how irresistible and intoxicating that primal fury was.

How can Wolvie possibly keep that under control? I don’t think I could.

She squirmed within her unyielding bonds. How long have we been trapped here anyway? she wondered. Prickly stubble carpeted Logan’s cheeks, what looked like at least a days’ worth, but who knew with that hyped-up metabolism of his? Rogue always figured he just shaved with his claws whenever he felt like it. Beyond that, the sterile chamber seemed locked out of time, with no way to tell day or night, let alone chart the passage of hours. Even the gravity felt funny, like she didn’t weigh as much as she should. She glared at the translucent I.V. tube feeding into her elbow; the meals here weren’t much to speak of, but she couldn’t have lost that many pounds already, could she?

A soft groan came from the right. Rogue’s gaze shifted to the captive reflected on the other side of her own coffin. She scowled in sympathy for the woman in the mirror; if anything, the Scarlet Witch had it worse than either she or Wolverine. Not only was she encased in the same sort of raised, lidless sarcophagus, Wanda was also blinded by an opaque metal visor, so as to keep her from focusing her witchie powers on their prison. Likewise, polished silver hemispheres covered her hands, trapping her fingers so that she couldn’t begin to make anything resembling a mystical gesture.

Rogue knew from personal experience just how oppressive the blindfold and the metal mitts were. The sadistic mastermind behind their imprisonment had previously imposed the same restraints on Rogue, for as long as she had involuntarily possessed the Scarlet Witch’s powers, although the visor and such had slid back into hidden recesses within the coffin once the transference had worn off.

Her cheeks flushed with shame as she remembered how she had been compelled against her will to sample Wanda’s memories and abilities, the automated machinery pressing their uncovered hands together, the touch of skin on skin being all that was needed to effect the transference, draining the Scarlet Witch’s most private thoughts and secrets as surely as a vampire sucked its victim’s lifeblood. Rogue felt like a vampire, too, even if Wanda’s essence had been forced upon her. Bad enough to inflict such an invasive personal violation on a friend like Logan, someone who already knew and trusted her; how much worse to impose so unwanted an intimacy on a woman she barely knew, a woman who didn’t even like her.

There was bad blood between Rogue and the Scarlet Witch, dating back to the old days, years back, when Rogue ran with Mystique and her Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Wanda Maximoff still blamed Rogue, with good reason, for what the young mutant outlaw had done to her close friend, Carol Danvers, the former Avenger once known as Ms. Marvel. On that one terrible occasion, Rogue’s absorption of her opponent’s mind and attributes had been permanent; it was Ms. Marvel’s exceptional strength that still resided in Rogue’s limbs, Ms. Marvel’s defiance of gravity that granted Rogue the power of flight, and Ms. Marvel’s memories that still lingered at the back of Rogue’s mind. Carol Danvers, recently returned to the Avengers under the name of Warbird, had never been the same after her tragic encounter with Rogue, and the guilty X-Man doubted that Wanda Maximoff could ever forgive Rogue.

Especially now that I did to Wanda the same thing I did to Ms. Marvel, just less permanently.

The ironic thing was, Rogue mused, now that she’d melded with the Scarlet Witch’s mind, experienced the world from her perspective, she was surprised to discover just how much she and the Avenger had in common. Although raised on opposite sides of the world, they had both suffered the early pain of being mutant outcasts, both had been lured into a life of crime by a villainous parent.

Heck, we both started out in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, Rogue realized, before getting afresh start in the Avengers or the X-Men.

Even their love lives seemed similarly doomed from the start; was the Scarlet Witch’s failed marriage (to an android, of all things!) any more hopeless than Rogue’s own unfulfillable passion for a man she couldn’t even touch? Rogue would have shook her head in amazement if not for the restrictive clamp around her throat. Who would have ever guessed that the Avenger and the X-Man, one respected, one feared, would turn out to be sisters under the skin?

Too bad the transference doesn’t work both ways, she thought ruefully; maybe then Wanda would finally realize that I’m truly sorry about what I did to Carol Danvers, that I never meant to rob her of everything.

“RAWRR!”

With an angry roar, Wolverine came awake abruptly. Wild eyes opened, streaked with red. He fought and writhed against the clamps, straining frantically to free himself. His claws snikt’d impotently. Foam flecked his lips, and pulsing veins throbbed upon his brow as his fierce howl echoed within their prison.

“My God!” Wanda gasped, shocked to wakefulness by the deafening roar. “What is that?”

Rogue realized the blinded Witch had not guessed the source of the bestial tumult.

She probably thinks there’s an enraged tiger loose in the lab, Rogue thought. But there was no time to explain; Rogue feared Wolverine would injure himself in his frenzied efforts to escape from the casket—and the memories it held. “Logan!” she shouted. Her throat was dry and hoarse, but she swallowed hard to work up enough saliva to speak. “Logan! Listen to me. You’ve gotta snap out of it!”

But he didn’t seem to hear her. He looked like he didn’t even know where—or who—he was. If Logan could have chewed his own arms off to escape, Rogue believed he would have done it. She had only seen him like this a few times before, usually right before somebody got sliced to shreds.

“Logan!” she tried again. “It’s me, Rogue! Remember?!”    ~

This time she seem to get through to him. “RRRR— Rogue?” A hint of sanity crept into his bloodshot eyes. His limbs ceased their convulsive thrashing, and his contorted face relaxed into something closer to calm. He searched the images in the mirror, as if grounding himself once more in this particular time and place. His eyes held a look of weary regret, and he took a deep breath before speaking again. “Sorry, darlin’. You didn’t need to see that.”

“It’s okay, Wolvie,” she assured him, her throat tightening with emotion. “I understand. You don’t need to explain.”

The Scarlet Witch, on the hand, was still in need of elucidation concerning what her startled ears had just heard. “That was Wolverine?” she asked incredulously.

“Yeah,” Logan growled, sounding more like his old self. “You got a problem with that?”

Before Wanda could craft a reply, the rumble of moving machinery caught the attention of all three prisoners.

Oh no, Rogue thought. She didn’t know exactly what was about to transpire, but she knew what the resumption of mechanical activity meant: another round of inhuman medical experiments was beginning.

“Here we go again,” Wolverine snarled, and Rogue thought she heard a heartrending groan from the Scarlet Witch. What now? Rogue wondered apprehensively. In some ways, the anticipation—and the uncertainty—was almost worse than the painful and degrading tests themselves; it was like sitting outside the doctor’s office when you were little, worrying if you were going to get a shot and wondering how much it would hurt.

Previous experiments had tested the limits of their respective mutant powers, even subjecting Wolverine to a cruel variety of injuries just to see how quickly he healed. Rogue had gotten a spoonful of the same nasty medicine after getting Logan’s healing factor forced on her in another experiment. Their anonymous persecutor, cowardly hiding his or her face behind what had to be a one-way mirror, was always thinking ahead; Rogue figured her coffin had been deliberately situated between Wolvie and the Witch to make it easier for her to touch either one of them.

There had also been a series of grueling examinations in which remote-controlled waldoes had extracted samples of blood, hair, skin, saliva, bone marrow, and even spinal fluid from Rogue and her fellow human guinea pigs. She tried not to think about the grisly procedures, performed largely without anesthesia, except to wonder what the robotic limbs would come for next. So far she had been allowed to keep all of her teeth, but she figured that was only a matter of time. We’ve got to get out of here, she resolved fiercely, but how? By now the X-Men, and probably the Avengers, had to be looking for them, but Rogue wasn’t about to lay back and wait patiently for a rescue attempt. She tested the unbreakable steel clamps holding her in place, only to find them just as immovable as before.

Her casket, however, suddenly revealed itself to be surprisingly mobile. Unseen motors hummed as all three coffins began traveling along some kind of conveyor belt or tracks. Rogue felt like a prop in an old-fashioned shell game as the pinioned mutants were reassigned new positions before the mirror, with Wolverine now occupying the central berth between the two women.

So? Rogue asked silently, giving the mirror a dirty look she hoped penetrated through to the other side. Was I just demoted or what?

Not for the first time, she wondered who was hiding behind that silvered glass. Magneto? Bastion? The Hellfire Club? She wasn’t sure why any of the X-Men’s old enemies would bother to hide their identity like this. Heck, most of them could hardly resist a chance to gloat over a couple of captured X-Men. Mister Sinister, on the other hand, tended to be a bit more on the sneaky side; could they have fallen into the clutches of Gambit’s unscrupulous old boss? These sick experiments seemed like the kind of thing Sinister would get off on.

Is that you, you diamond-headed dirtbag? she accused the mirror. Killing all those innocent Morlocks wasn’t enough, you had to come after us, too?

No answers were forthcoming, only busy waldoes that swiftly and efficiently went to work reconfiguring the various lengths of plastic tubing flowing in and out of the punctured mutants. Wolverine grunted as a mechanical arm inserted another line into his left arm, stabbing a convenient vein right through the fabric of his orange jumpsuit. Multiple steel hemostats, mounted at the ends of articulated metal appendages, pinched the hollow tubes shut at strategic junctures. Rogue, whom as an X-Man had learned a thing or two about emergency medicine, could have sworn the waldoes were setting up some kind of complicated transfusion procedure.

Then a hemostat clicked open and the blood, dark and venous, began flowing from the flattened elbow of her right arm—straight into the tube newly inserted in Wolverine’s left arm. But that's crazy, she thought in horror, eyes wide at the sight of her blood pouring into Logan’s body. We’re not even the same blood type!

Yet that wasn’t the worst of it. Her shocked gaze swept across the face of the mirror until she saw an identical flow coursing from the Scarlet Witch to Wolverine.

“Ah don’t believe it!” she exclaimed out loud, her Southern drawl in no way softening the desperate panic in her voice. Logan was receiving simultaneous transfusions from both her and Wanda, thus doubling his chances of a fatal hemolytic reaction. Could even Wolverine survive such a devastating shock to his system? That, she realized bitterly, had to be the blasted point of the experiment.

“Stop it!” she hollered at the mirror. “You’re goin’ to kill him!” She saw a look of confusion come over the bottom half of Wanda’s face, the part not covered by the metal visor. Right now Rogue practically envied the Scarlet Witch; at least she couldn’t see the barbaric atrocity being committed upon Wolverine’s unsuspecting circulatory system.

Two, maybe three, incompatible blood types mixed in Logan’s veins, producing an immediate adverse reaction. His entire body jerked uncontrollably and his eyes rolled up until only the whites could be seen. His face and hands turned blue, proof that the clash in his bloodstream had cut off the flow of oxygen to his cells. The paroxysm shook him violently; Rogue knew that he had to be suffering internal shock and hemorrhaging. “Stop it, you maniac!”

Not that she truly expected any mercy from their unknown captor. Instead she placed all her hopes in Logan’s mutant immune system. In the past, it had saved him from any number of toxins and hostile organisms, even the implanted embryo of a sleazoid Brood warrior; now it was up to that same superhuman resilience to protect him from the hemolytic warfare tearing him apart from inside.

The automated hemostats cut off the flow of blood after a minute, but the damage had already been done. His corpse-like blue pallor increased and his breathing grew weak and ragged. The bone-shaking seizure ceased abruptly and Wolverine sagged within his restraints, his chin dipping as much as his neck-clamp permitted. Rogue couldn’t hear any breathing, and her own heart skipped a beat. Had the unconquerable fighter, the best there was, finally met an enemy he couldn’t defeat? If so, Rogue vowed that, one way or another, she would make someone pay for Wolverine’s ugly death, even if she had to tear this miserable place down to the ground to find out who was responsible.

“What is it?” the Scarlet Witch asked anxiously, her blindfold sparing her the ghastly sight. “What’s happening?”

Choking back angry sobs, her eyes tearing despite her best efforts to stay strong, the way Logan would have wanted her to, she wondered how to break the terrible news to Wanda. The Witch had not known Wolverine well, but she knew the heroic Avenger would mourn his death regardless. “It—it’s Wolverine,” she began haltingly. “He’s—that is, I think—”

An explosive gasp broke the silence between the two women. Rogue’s heart pounded as she saw Logan’s body jolt back to life. The cyanotic blue tint of his oxygen-deprived flesh began to fade, supplanted by a healthy shade of pink. He coughed wetly and a trickle of black, clotted blood dribbled from his lips. Then his head lifted, and pained, exhausted eyes met Rogue’s in the mirror. “Well, that was a ball and a half,” he said gruffly.

Rogue couldn’t contain her relief. “Oh, Wolvie!” she gushed. Logan had often warned her about wearing her emotions on her sleeve. “Ah wasn’t sure you was goin’ to make it.”

“Tell you the truth, darlin’,” he admitted. “Neither was I.” He closed his eyes again, just to give them a moment’s rest. When he spoke again, she could hear the simmering fury in his voice. “Whoever’s behind this flamin’ stab lab’s got a really twisted idea of hospitality.”

An impatient sigh emerged from the visually-deprived Avenger two caskets away from Rogue. “Good to hear you’re still with us, Wolverine, whatever they did to you, but, if it’s not too inconvenient, could someone please let me know what’s going on.”

A word that rhymed with “witch” briefly popped into Rogue’s mind, but she realized that was unfair. I’d be getting pretty fed up and frustrated, too, if I couldn’t even see what all the shouting was about. Rogue started to explain about the latest perverted experiment their jailer had devised when, with brisk proficiency and dexterity, the waldoes went to work again. Hemostats clicked and tiny plastic valves were opened and closed in careful sequence. Flowing saline flushed clean the lines connecting the three mutants.

For a second or two, Rogue feared that the same awful experiment was about to be repeated, subjecting Wolverine to another round of near-fatal agony. Then she realized that, no, something different was in store. The transfusions had resumed, but now the dark venous blood was streaming in one direction only, from the Scarlet Witch to Wolverine, through Wolverine, to Rogue herself. Dear God, no! she thought, overcome with dread as the mingled essences of both Logan and Wanda ran into her veins, bringing with them a flood of alien thoughts and sensations.

Blood-to-blood communion proved even more effective than mere skin-to-skin. In the space of a few frightened heartbeats, she lost all sense of her own identity. She was at once all three individuals: Rogue and Logan and Wanda. X-Man and Avenger. Donor and recipient. Brown eyes turned blue, then brown again, before splitting the difference somewhere in-between. Streaks of auburn colored the white swath running through her hair, while raw animal vitality, only slightly depleted by her/his/her recent brush with death, set her senses aflame. Fragments of fresh memories spun like a kaleidoscope within her roiling, disordered mind. Hand-carved marionettes attacked her in an empty museum gallery. Flying tee-shirts, inscribed with virulent anti-mutant slogans, wrapped themselves around her face and hands, suffocating her and cutting off her vision while, all around her, terrified fairgoers shrieked in panic. A family of shape-changing deer gored her with their antlers in the shade of a towering forest. “Gambit!” she cried out in torment. “Mariko! Vision!” Her mouth was full of unfamiliar fangs and languages. She screamed obscenities in English, Japanese, and Romany, then begged for relief. “Help me! Help us! Please!”