The Doc Samson-Sentinel added to Storm’s difficulties by snatching whatever heavy objects were at hand—lab-stands, stools, computer monitors, even hefty fragments of ice—and throwing them with superhuman strength at the X-Man. So far, Storm’s superlative aerial abilities had allowed her to evade both the Harpy’s blasts and the Doc Samson-Sentinel’s projectiles, but Iron Man knew it was only a matter of time before the dual assault overcame Storm’s uncanny maneuverability. Even now, as the Golden Avenger came zipping across the lab, a flying file cabinet, propelled by the Doc Samson-Sentinel’s synthetic thews, narrowly missed Storm’s skull, clipping off a comer of her black, tiara-like headdress.

That was too close for comfort, Iron Man decided, making the Doc Samson-Sentinel his target.

A well-aimed repulsor ray deflected the filing cabinet back at the muscular Adonis with the flowing green hair, who batted it away with a swipe of a larger-than-life hand. The cabinet rebounded into a wall-sized Cray supercomputer that looked like it had already been bored through the middle.

What a waste of good hardware, Iron Man thought. He knew how much a Cray cost. Perhaps, when this was all over, Stark Solutions could offer the Genetic Research Centre a good price on an upgraded computer network.

Leaving the Harpy-Sentinel to Storm, Iron Man rocketed toward the other Gamma Sentinel. This shouldn’t be too hard, he thought confidently. The real Doc Samson was, when you got down to it, just an overeducated muscleman with a natural punk hairdo and an Old Testament nom de guerre. No match for an Avenger, or even an X-Man.

Some of his self-assurance slipped away, though, when Iron Man spotted what the Doc Samson-Sentinel had chosen for his next piece of ammunition. No mere filing cabinet this time, the cylindrical sample containment vault was clearly marked with the universal symbol for highly biohazardous material.

Wait a sec, Iron Man thought, as the Doc Samson-Sentinel raised the dishwasher-sized vault high above his green-haired head, hadn ’t the Beast said something, back at the Mansion, about Dr. MacTaggert searching for a cure for the Legacy Virus?

Instantly, Iron Man activated the airtight seals on his armor, switching to his internal air supply, and elevating all defensive systems to Level 4 readiness, suitable for protection from all known biological organisms.

If that mechanical maniac cracks open that vault, he realized, lord knows what sort of mutated viruses could escape.

In theory, the deadly Legacy Virus had no effect on ordinary humans (or Sentinels, for that matter), but Iron Man didn’t want to take chances. Furthermore, if an airborne form of the vims got loose, Storm and the other X-Men could be infected.

“Put that vault down—carefully!” Iron Man ordered the Doc Samson-Sentinel, increasing the volume of his vocal-izer to be heard over the Hulk-induced earthquake that was suddenly rocking the building. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

Unfortunately, the Gamma Sentinel seemed to know exactly what he was about. “Targeting: mutant designate: Storm. Calculating necessary trajectory along x-y-z axis, compensating for gravity versus momentum.” Before the Avenger could raise a hand to stop him, the Doc Samson-Sentinel catapulted the vault at Storm.

“No!” Iron Man shouted. His navigational computer performed its own calculations, boosting the output of the appropriate boot-jets. The Golden Avenger shot between Storm and the pitched containment vault, which struck him squarely in the chest. Ignoring the impact, he wrapped both arms around the wide metal cylinder, hoping against hope that his chest-beam had cushioned the collision enough to preserve the structural integrity of the vault.

Upon closer inspection, he discovered that the vault had already been coated by a protective layer of solid frost. Iceman’s doing, he guessed. The frozen sheath had melted away in places, but that could be easily remedied.

Let it never be said I’m too proud to appropriate another man’s good idea, Iron Man thought.

A special rapid-freezing solution spurted from miniature nozzles in his gauntlets, undoing the damage that time and temperature had inflicted on the original icy casing. “That’s better,” he said, holding onto the vault with both arms. Now where the devil was he supposed to put the blasted thing?

He couldn’t leave Storm alone against two Gamma Sentinels again. That would be pushing their luck too much. Instead, he stayed where he was, hovering several feet above the slush, and tossed the vault out through the window to the bay below. Powerful servomotors within his armor amplified the force of his throw, so that the ice-packed container easily cleared the narrow strip of land between the building and the cliff, as well as the beach and docks below, splashing at last into the sea, where the cold northern waters would surely keep the icy seal intact—at least until Iron Man had a chance to retrieve the vault later.

Then a searing blast of atomic heat caught him by surprise, scorching him even through multiple layers of armor and protective insulation. Blast! he thought, cursing himself for his carelessness. I forgot about the Harpy-Sentinel.

It seemed the winged bird-woman had not limited herself (itself?) to the division of labor that Iron Man had unilaterally drawn up among the combatants, switching her murderous attentions from Storm to Iron Man while the Avenger’s concentration was elsewhere. Iron Man felt like he was being roasted alive inside his armor, a situation made decidingly worse by the fact that he had just expelled most of his primary coolant in the course of refreezing the vault of viruses. Already he could feel first-degree bums reddening his skin.

Fortunately, Storm was alert to the Harpy-Sentinel’s intentions even if Iron Man had not been. A miraculous gust of wind caught the Harpy-Sentinel beneath her emerald wings, flinging her unwillingly to the opposite end of the lab. The potent zephyr also carried away much of the hell-bolt’s unbearable heat. The sudden cessation of the scalding radioactive hellfire, followed by the sweet relief of that cooling breeze, made for some of the best air conditioning Tony Stark had ever experienced.

I owe you one, lady, he thought gratefully.

He could think of no better way to pay Storm back than by taking care of the Samson-Sentinel, permanently. The tempest-taming X-Man had proved she could steal the wind from the Harpy-Sentinel’s wings; the Doc Samson Gamma Sentinel was his job.

He raised his gauntlets, palms up, and targeted his pulse bolts at the long-haired LMD, who had already tom out another chunk of the vivisected Cray to use as a missile. Iron Man wasn’t worried; at this range, his plasma pulses, perhaps the most devastating weapon in his armor’s arsenal, would reduce the rampaging robot to a pile of nuts and bolts.

“Have no fear, Doc Samson is here!” the Gamma Sentinel bragged unconvincingly.

Not for much longer, Iron Man thought, smiling grimly beneath his faceplate. Yet before he could discharge the devastating pulse bolts, the wreckage-littered floor of the lab exploded between Iron Man and his target, as a monstrous green giant, straddled by Wolverine in his blue-and-yellow costume, blasted through the lab like a Saturn rocket heading for orbit. The leaping Hulk (or was it the Hulk-Sentinel?), along with his luckless rider, tore through the ceiling on their way to the roof three stories above, leaving an open, raggedy-edged shaft that stretched the entire height of the building. In the snowy battleground the lab had become, a yawning pit now divided the chamber in twain.

The unexpected force of the Hulk’s passage sent Iron Man tumbling out of control, away from the Gamma Sentinel he had meant to blow to pieces. The Doc Samson-Sentinel recovered from the eruption faster than Iron Man, vaulting over the beckoning pit with ease and racing across the floor beneath his spinning armored adversary. By the time Iron Man restabilized his flight controls, the Doc Samson-Sentinel was waiting for him. Sensor beams shone from the Gamma Sentinel’s eyes, spotlighting Iron Man and scanning his armor for weaknesses. “Analysis: Sophisticated exoskeleton housing ordinary human genotype. Tes-selated armor shielding, consisting primarily of epitaxially deposited diamond and high temperature enamel over tiles of crystallized iron, with automated command and communication functions via gallium arsenide microcircuitry. Internal power generation and storage capabilities.” The Doc Samson-Sentinel sounded undeterred by the varied and abundant attributes of Iron Man’s state-of-the-art metal suit. “Adapting required offensive functions.”

Oops, Iron Man thought. Beneath the impeccably reproduced facade of Leonard Samson, super-strong shrink, lay concealed technological resources and capabilities he could only guess at. Judging from those unexpected sensor beams, there was more to the Gamma Sentinel than met the eye.

For now, though, this “Doc Samson’ ’ relied on his powerful legs to spring at the airborne Avenger. Brawny hands captured Iron Man and dragged him down to the floor. His boot-jets scorched the ice-cold tiles, but the Doc Samson-Sentinel held Iron Man down, keeping him from blasting off again. Iron Man struggled to break free, only to find that the anthropomorphic powerhouse’s brute strength was more than a match for his armor’s muscle-enhancing servomotors. What’s worse, he could no longer fire his pulse bolts at the Gamma Sentinel, not at this close range. The resulting explosion would obliterate him as much as the Doc Samson-Sentinel.

Then something alarming happened. The Doc Samson-Sentinel’s splayed fingers magnetically adhered to Iron Man’s shoulder assemblies—and began draining the power from his armor! Warning displays, projected directly onto his retinas, charted a catastrophic drain in his energy reserves. Auxiliary systems began to shut down, redirecting available electricity to primary functions, including life support and propulsion, but, at this rate, his entire suit would be out of power in less than a minute. Thinking quickly, Iron Man opened the air intake valves in his mouthpiece while he still could, before he found himself suffocating inside the sealed armor. This could be bad, he thought.

“Implementing conductive neutralization of obstacle designate: Iron Man,” the Sentinel announced. “Power transfer 78.101 percent complete.”

The deadpan recitation only confirmed what Iron Man’s own internal monitors reported. At this point, the Golden Avenger doubted he could light a candle, let alone fire a repulsor ray. His armor was rapidly becoming a customized prison as the motors that gave him mobility whirred to a stop. Luckily, there was a convenient alternative power source available—if he could just get her attention.

“Storm!” he shouted. With the mike in his vocalizer out of juice, he had to rely on Tony Stark’s natural lung power to be heard. Thankfully, the ear-splitting tremors had subsided with the Hulk’s dynamic exit from below. “I need a boost, pronto! You know what to do. You did it before, at Niagara Falls!”

High in the air, the elemental X-Man understood. Without question or hesitation, she released her lightning, not at the Doc Samson-Sentinel but at Iron Man. The rampant electricity recharged his armor in an instant, firing up his dormant systems and leaving him with power to spare.

That’s the ticket! Iron Man thought exuberantly. I’m back in the game.

He decided to give the Doc Samson-Sentinel a taste of his own medicine. Activating the electromagnetic energy conversion layer beneath the surface of his armor, and inverting the polarity of his protective force field, Iron Man reversed the conductivity between himself and the malignant facsimile of Doc Samson. Streaming electrons flowed out of the Gamma Sentinel and into the Avenger’s armor, increasing the hero’s strength and endurance. “Danger!” the Doc Samson-Sentinel’s voice blurted. '‘Experiencing critical power loss. Unable to arrest battery depletion. Available reserves at 29.866 percent and falling—”

The Gamma Sentinel’s deceptively human-looking hands attempted to disengage from Iron Man’s armor, but gleaming crimson gauntlets locked onto the Doc Samson-Sentinel’s wrists, stopping the robot from breaking the connection. With the combined energy of both Storm’s majestic lightning and the Doc Samson-Sentinel charging through his circuitry, Iron Man easily overcame the gamma-powered mechanoid’s efforts to escape. He leeched every volt of electricity from his enemy, until the once-powerful Gamma Sentinel was . reduced to a statue of Doc Samson. Then, releasing the robot’s wrists, he blasted the inert Sentinel with his chest-beam once for good measure. The repulsor ray knocked the Samson-Sentinel onto his back and shredded his stylish red vest.

Let’s hear for good, old-fashioned, human teamwork, he thought. Between the two of them, he and Storm had thrown at least one Gamma Sentinel on the scrap heap.

A high-pitched squawk reminded him that the Harpy-

Sentinel remained to be dealt with. Turning his gaze upward, he discovered that Storm’s galvanic intervention on his behalf had apparently left her vulnerable to a physical attack by the synthetic bird-woman. Emerald wings flapping furiously, the Harpy-Sentinel had come up on Storm from behind, clawing the X-Man’s bare midriff with her bird-like talons while one of Betty Banner’s shapely arms was crooked around Storm’s throat, leaving her other hand free to scratch at the mutant heroine’s face. Storm twisted her neck, trying to keep the Harpy-Sentinel’s dark green nails away from her eyes, and flailed her arms and legs, letting the Harpy-Sentinel’s wings alone bear both their weight. Wind and rain pelted mutant and Gamma Sentinel alike, but Storm’s meteorological assault failed to shake the Harpy-Sentinel free from her prey. “Iron Man!” she cried out, even as the Harpy-Sentinel’s prying fingers tugged at her lips. “Your assistance is required!”

One Avenger, at your service, he thought. The hovering robot, holding Storm in front of her like a living shield, presented a difficult target, but Iron Man had spent years fine-tuning his armor’s tracking technology. Letting his online automated targeting system take careful aim, double-checking the correct coordinates via both laser and sonar sighting mechanisms, he fired a high-intensity laser beam with pinpoint accuracy, nailing the Harpy-Sentinel between the eyes. The incandescent beam burned through the Gamma Sentinel’s camouflaged cranium with surgical precision, giving it a cybernetic lobotomy.

At once, the robot released Storm, who began to plummet precipitously. Less than a meter above the floor, however, a hastily-summoned wind came to her rescue, so that, moments later, she was able to spiral gracefully downward under her own power, landing softly upon the floor next to Iron Man. The Harpy-Sentinel, on the other hand, crashed into a half-melted snowdrift, where it jerked spasmodically for a few seconds before ceasing to move at all.

“A most satisfactory outcome,” Storm commented, looking from the grounded Harpy-Sentinel to the immobile replica of Doc Samson. Four parallel scratches streaked her mahogany cheek but did not appear to be serious. Ditto for a few shallow gashes in her side, joining the minor cuts and abrasions she received during their tussle at Niagara Falls.    "    '

Am I the only superhero, he thought, who actually thinks to wear armor to these rhubarbs? Still, thanks to the Harpy-Sentinel’s hellbolts, his burnt skin felt raw and sore beneath his armor, like he’d spent the whole day at Coney Island without a drop of sunscreen. Thank goodness I didn ’t end up well done.

“We make a good team,” he said, hoping that Banner and Wolverine were working together as effectively.

“So it appears,” she agreed. She glanced at the broken window and twisted metal shutters. “Bobby and Moira?”

‘ ‘Safely tucked away in the quinjet.” He instructed his armor to remind him about the sunken viruses before he left the island. It occurred to him that the very individual who had summoned them to Scotland remained among the missing. “The question is ...,” he began.

Storm finished the sentence for him. “... where is Nightcrawler?”

At first, all Kurt heard was heavy footprints coming down the hall. Lying on his side upon the carpeted floor of the unoccupied containment cell, Nightcrawler allowed himself to hope that help was on the way. His right ankle still throbbed where that counterfeit Abomination had crushed his bones and the rest of him didn’t feel too well either.

It could be Colossus or the Beast, he thought optimistically. He had managed to send out an SOS, after all, before that mechanical Hulk caught up with him. The monster’s mighty fists had left him with a pounding headache and a ringing in his ears, but he figured he had gotten off lucky. Good thing these Sentinels wanted me alive.

“Hello?” he called out, although his throat was dry and parched. "Vos is das? Is anybody there?”

The footsteps, too heavy to be any X-Man but Colossus, came closer. Chances were, it was just another bulky Sentinel, but Nightcrawler was not the sort to abandon hope. Rocking back and forth, his arms, legs, and tail tightly wrapped by the ersatz Hulk’s snare, he managed to roll over onto his back. Alas, he discovered, he was still in no position to see who was at the door. It was always possible, he supposed, that the thunderous tread had drowned out the footsteps of less ponderous visitors. “Moira? Bobby? Is that you?”

An ominous silence stretched on for longer than he liked, and it occurred to Nightcrawler that the shadowy confines of the cell would render him completely invisible to anyone in the corridor outside. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? he wondered.

Just as he was about to speak again, the lights came on overhead, blinding him. Then he heard the armored door of the cell fly open. A mountainous shadow fell over him, turning him invisible once more, until a powerful hand seized him by the collar and yanked him roughly off the floor.

“Aieel—Nein!” he shouted, the sudden movement jarring his fractured ankle. His bound legs, squeezed tightly together by his restraints, dangled above the floor while the massive arms, which almost certainly did not belong to his dear friend Colossus, turned him around so that he ended up face-to-face with an all-too-familiar jade countenance.

The Hulk. Again.

“Ach, so it’s you, Herr Sentinel.” Nightcrawler tried to keep the disappointment, to say nothing of the pain, from his voice. He was determined to maintain a brazen demeanor to the end, in the best swashbuckling tradition, yet couldn’t help wondering what had brought the mechanical monster back to the very cell the Sentinel had personally tossed Kurt into mere hours before. Was he now to be transported to an even more heinous captivity, or was a cursory execution on the agenda? Farewell, sweet world, he thought grandly, just in case. ’Tis a far, far better thing I do—

“You got that wrong, elf,” the great green troglodyte informed him brusquely. His hot breath hit Kurt like an open furnace. “I ain’t no cheap imitation. I’m the real McCoy.”

Luminous yellow eyes widened. The real Hulk? Here? Nightcrawler was dumbfounded; he couldn’t imagine what might have brought the original gamma-spawned goliath to Muir Island. If this was true, however, then it was, as the Americans were prone to say, a whole new ball game.

“What?” he asked, flabbergasted, the pulsing ache in his ankle forgotten in the excitement of the moment. “How?” He looked up at the ceiling, thinking at once of the friends he had left behind three stories above. “Moira and Bobby?”    .

But the Hulk wasn’t interested in answering Nightcrawler’s questions. “Let’s go,” he said. “I got things to do.” Tucking the tightly-wrapped X-Man under his arm like a load of groceries, he stepped out of the cell and marched down the corridor to the far end of the hall. Light from the floor above filtered down through a haze of drifting dust and plaster. “Mein gott,” Nightcrawler gasped at the destruction, catching a glimpse of the gaping breach in the ceiling. What have / missed?

Every lumbering step the Hulk took sent a fresh pang of agony through Nightcrawler’s ankle. The pain would even be worse, he thought, were his legs not tightly bound together, turning his unfractured leg into a splint of sorts, *-Please, Herr Hulk,” he entreated. “A little more gently, if you please. My right ankle, I’m afraid it is broken.” “Sorry, elf,” the Hulk replied gruffly. He gazed speculatively up through the gap in the ceiling. “Last I saw, your pal Wolverine was tacklin’ that cast-iron copy of me on the roof, so that’s where we’re goin’ next.” He squatted down on his powerful legs, preparing to jump.

“Wait!” Nightcrawler cried out in alarm. “My ankle!” The Hulk ignored him, springing into the air. A short, excruciating leap brought them out of the basement onto the ground floor. Nightcrawler bit down on his lip, fighting back waves of nausea; the last thing he wanted to do was vomit over the ill-tempered man-brute’s feet. His vision blurred momentarily, then came back into focus. Kurt realized he was in shock, and very close to passing out.

Wolverine? he thought, as the Hulk’s remark sunk in at last. Wolverine is here, too? It seemed as though his longdistance SOS had been well and truly answered. What about the rest of the X-Men? Are they here also?

The Hulk gave him no time to recover from that first, jolting jump. Directly overhead, a greater chasm stretched all the way from the ground floor to the roof. ‘ ‘Hold on to your stomach,” the jade goliath said by way of warning, then cleared six stories in a single bound. He landed heavily onto the roof of the rectangular building, his bare feet smacking soundly against the granite floor of the observation deck. He grabbed Nightcrawler by the collar again and, with one swift motion, ripped the metallic netting off the dazed mutant’s body. “There,” he rumbled. “You’re on your own now.”

He casually dropped Nightcrawler to die rooftop. Kurt landed on both feet, but his injured leg would not support his weight and he fell to his knees, gasping for breath. The world blurred again, growing dark around the periphery of his vision, but he held onto consciousness through sheer willpower. He couldn’t give out now, not until he knew Moira and Bobby were safe. “Unglaublich!” he whispered. The pain and fatigue were almost overwhelming.

Clutching his aching ankle with both hands, he looked up to see the Hulk flying away from the building, brilliant orange gouts of flame shooting from the soles of his feet. No, wait, he realized groggily; that couldn’t be the Hulk, that had to be the Gamma Sentinel disguised as the Hulk, taking advantage of a hitherto-concealed mode of transportation.

The jet-propelled Gamma Sentinel rapidly disappeared into the horizon, where the starry sky met the moonlit surface of the Atlantic. Returning his gaze to the rooftop, he saw the real Hulk shouting at Wolverine, who was standing at the edge of the observation deck staring out at the sky into which the counterfeit Hulk had vanished. Judging from the greenish saliva spraying from the real Hulk’s enormous jaws, the towering monster was not at all happy about this latest turn of events. “I can’t believe it!” he bellowed at Logan. “You let him escape!”

Wolverine shrugged, unintimidated by the irate ogre. “Sorry, bub,” he said, walking away from the guardrail around the perimeter of the observation deck. A crumpled satellite dish lay nearby, folded over like a crepe. “He got away.” He retracted his claws with a decisive snikt. “It happens.”

Nightcrawler had to admit he was a little startled too. Logan let a bad guy get away? That wasn’t like him. Still,

Kurt was in too much pain to obsess over Wolverine’s apparent lapse. “Excuse me, mein freunds,” he called out. Two heads, one masked, one chartreuse, turned in his direction. “If it’s not too much trouble, could someone kindly take a look at my ankle? And perhaps inform me vas in the world is going on?”

The Columbia Icefields in Alberta, Canada, are one of the largest accumulations of ice and snow outside the Arctic, covering nearly four hundred square miles in area. The last enduring remnant of an ice age that had covered most of Canada some twenty thousand years ago, the huge frozen mass, over a thousand feet thick at points, had carved out three valleys via a trio of conjoined glaciers.

Hard to imagine that anyone could live here, Cyclops considered, let alone an entire underground city.

Yet the Hulk had sworn, in his incorrigibly ill-tempered fashion, that just such a city had been erected by the Leader only a few years ago, shortly before the malevolent mastermind’s apparent death. Cyclops glanced out the window of a chartered SnoCoach at a snowy plain riddled with deep blue crevasses. The customized bus rolled across the icefield on large, balloon-like wheels. Could it be, the somber X-Man wondered, that Rogue and the Scarlet Witch were somewhere beneath them at this very moment? Let’s hope so, he thought fervently; otherwise, they had come a long way on a wild-goose chase.

Flying west from New York had gained them a few-more hours of daylight. The sun had not yet set behind the Canadian Rockies, casting a twilight glow over the snow. Nevertheless, Captain America, behind the wheel of the SnoCoach, switched on the vehicle’s headlights, the better

to watch out for treacherous cracks and crevices in the ice. Unwilling to risk the Blackbird by landing upon ice of uncertain stability, Cyclops had parked the X-Men’s aircraft several miles away in Jasper National Park. He envied the ease with which Cap’s Avengers I.D. had allowed them to commandeer the tourist coach for the rest of their journey.

If the X-Men tried that, they’d probably sic a pack of Mounties on us, Cyclops mused. Working alongside the Avengers felt like traveling first-class instead of steerage, with all the special privileges and amenities that entailed.

The third member of their party, the Vision, flew on ahead of them, searching for a hidden entrance to the Leader’s buried city. Dr. Banner had provided the android Avenger with a specific set of coordinates, but Cyclops was impressed that the Vision could navigate at all amidst this glacial desolation, even with the looming presence of Mount Athabasca to use as a landmark. Contemplating their surroundings from the heated interior of the coach, it was easy to imagine that they were at the South Pole instead, approaching the cavernous tunnels that led to the Savage Land.

I hope Jean is okay, Cyclops thought, taking a moment to think about his absent wife. He reminded himself that Phoenix was perfectly capable of defending herself from any irate dinosaurs or cavemen.

The snowbound landscape outside also reminded him of Iceman, currently menaced by Sentinels in Scotland, along with Moira and Nightcrawler. Had Storm and her team come to their rescue yet? Muir Island was so many time zones away that Cyclops found it hard to calculate when the Avengers’ quinjet would have delivered its reinforcements to the island.

“Almost there,” Captain America announced from the driver’s, seat, interrupting the X-Man’s calculations. The

SnoCoach came to a halt somewhere astride the Athabasca Glacier, a few yards away from a deep crevasse that stretched across their path for at least a mile or so. From where Cyclops was sitting, this gap in the ice looked no different from any of a dozen others they had passed. Could they be sure this was the right place?

Pulling on fleece-filled parkas over their respective uniforms, Cap and Cyclops disembarked from the bus and trudged through the snow to the edge of the ravine, where the Vision patiently waited for them. Cyclops could not help noticing that the immaterial synthezoid left no tracks in the snow, unlike him and Captain America. “According to Dr. Banner,” the Vision reported, “the entrance to Freehold lies through this trail, ingeniously camouflaged as a natural fault in the glacier. A preliminary reconnaissance indicates that the crevasse is indeed reinforced with artificial support beams constructed of super-hard translucent plastic.”

“Good work,” Captain America said to his teammate. His hot breath fogged the frigid air. With no room beneath his parka for his shield, Cap carried the concave steel discus in his right hand.

Cyclops peered over the edge of the ravine. He spied a sloping pathway starting at about a hundred feet below the surface of the icefield. Good thing Storm joined the expedition to Scotland instead, he reflected; her claustrophobia would have made this trek difficult for her. The idea of dropping down into that deep fissure gave him the creeps and he didn’t have any particular problem with enclosed spaces. I just hope the Vision is right about those concealed support beams. I wouldn’t want this thing closing up on me before we find the Leader’s former residence, he thought.

“Let me go first,” he volunteered. Cybernetic controls

2 1 3

in his visor lifted the ruby quartz lens just a fraction, and he used his eyebeams with careful precision, chiseling out a series of handholds and footholds in the icy wall of the crevasse. Once that task was finished, he stepped over the edge of the ravine and swiftly climbed down to the top of the inclined pathway.

Not quite as nimbly as the Beast, perhaps, he graded himself, but good enough, I guess.

“Watch your step,” he called to Captain America as the Star-Spangled Avenger began his own descent, tossing his shield to the Vision before starting down. “It’s slippery down here.”

It was cold, too. Flanked by rising walls of ice that seemed to suck the heat from his body, Cyclops rubbed his hands together. Despite his yellow gloves, his fingertips were already starting to feel as numb as his toes. He pulled the hood of the parka over his ears, and found himself hoping that the Leader’s so-called city came complete with central heating. Captain America dropped lightly onto the ice behind Cyclops, then signaled the Vision to throw him the shield, which he caught one-handed on the first try.

The Vision had no need for a parka, of course, nor for Cyclops’ improvised ladder. He merely floated silently to the floor of the ravine. ‘ ‘The frozen surface of the pathway indeed appears conducive to slips and other mishaps,” he confirmed upon landing. He increased his mass so that his yellow boots sank deeply into the packed ice and snow. “I recommend that you both walk in my footsteps to avoid accidents.’ ’

Stepping into the android’s deep tracks proved a good idea, and the trio of heroes descended the slope much faster and less precariously than they might have otherwise. The trail soon led, however, to an apparent dead end: a sheer wall of blue ice stretching nearly five hundred feet above their heads.

Now what? Cyclops wondered, growing increasingly cold and impatient. I hope we don't find Rogue and Wanda frozen in a glacier somewhere. Rogue might be invulnerable enough to survive such an ordeal, but he had his doubts about the Scarlet Witch.

“Vision?” Captain America asked.

The synthezoid required no further instruction. Turning intangible once more, he passed through the solid ice, disappearing from sight. Mere seconds later, he reemerged from the face of the frozen wall. “Dr. Banner’s directions were correct,” he reported. “There is an artificial tunnel continuing downward beyond this camouflaged barrier, which consists of a layer of real ice over a glazed plastic gate. By my estimation, the entire barrier is approximately 15.62 inches thick.”

“Sounds like we’ve come to the right place,” Cap said. ‘ ‘In theory, there should be some sort of concealed locking mechanism, unless the whole operation is automated, in which case the gate may be waiting for a verbal password.” He glanced over his shoulder at the way they’d came. “The Leader certainly didn’t make it easy for people to find their way here.”

“When you have access to trans-mat technology,” Cyclops pointed out, “you don’t really need a driveway or front door. Besides, I imagine he didn’t want to encourage visitors.” He stepped ahead of the two Avengers. “Let me ring the doorbell.”

Crimson energy poured from eyes, merging to form a single beam that smashed through fifteen-plus inches of reinforced ice and plastic like an incandescent battering ram. Stepping beside him, the Vision added his own thermo-scopic beams to the endeavor, melting away any chunks of ice that collapsed onto the path before them. The combination of extreme heat and concussive force quickly exposed the man-made tunnel beyond. Cyclops stepped off the slick surface at the bottom of the crevasse and onto a paved walkway that sloped away into the distance. A dusting of snow fell upon his hood and shoulders as he passed beneath the blasted entrance of the tunnel. Overhead lights, perhaps activated by pressure-sensitive pads in the pavement, came on automatically.

Stealth, they had all decided on the way to the icefield, was not an issue here. If the Leader was as near-omniscient as his reputation would have it, then he doubtless already knew they were here. And if, against all expectations, he really was dead, then he wasn’t likely to object to their forced entiy.

While the Vision soared above their heads, just beneath the curved ceiling of the tunnel, Cap and Cyclops jogged downhill, pacing each other. The further they descended, the warmer the tunnel became and soon the two heroes gratefully discarded their'parkas, although Captain America kept his shield at hand rather than strap it onto his back. Like Cyclops, he obviously wanted to be ready for anything.

By the time they reached the end of the tunnel, Cyclops guessed that they were well below the icefield. He was surprised therefore when he ran out from beneath the overhanging ceiling and saw a clear night sky above him.

How is that possible? he wondered; they had to be hundreds of feet below the glacier at this point. He could tell by Captain America’s startled expression that the veteran Avenger was puzzled as well.

Closer inspection, however, revealed that the starry indigo sky was nothing more than a fraud, an elaborate and highly realistic simulation, complete with shining crescent moon, installed upon the underside of an immense, citysized dome.

Shades of The Truman Show, Cyclops thought; Jean had dragged him to that movie on one of her periodic campaigns to get him to relax. Like Jim Carrey, he felt as though he had just stepped onto the world’s largest sound-stage. The illusion was convincing enough that it might even have fooled Storm’s claustrophobia.

Beneath the phony sky, a shimmering city rose toward the purely decorative stars. Cyclops spotted skyscrapers, monorails, even what appeared to be a full-sized cathedral, adorned with lavish stained-glass windows. Streetlights, posted at regular intervals, supplemented the cool radiance of the counterfeit stars and moon. The path through the tunnel opened out onto a main thoroughfare that led to the very heart of the city: an open plaza spread out around a central fountain. Sparkling water, no doubt melted from the glacier above, sprayed fifty feet in the air, then cascaded down into a foaming pool surrounded by low marble steps. No litter or graffiti marred the pristine and elegant design of the plaza, nor any other visible part of the city. The streets and buildings were all spotless and in good repair. At first glance, the entire city looked remarkably clean, civilized—and empty?

“Where are all the people?” Cap asked, voicing the same question that Cyclops was silently asking. According to Banner, Freehold was populated by hundreds of refugees from the outside world, many of them suffering from cancer or radiation poisoning. Cyclops had to assume that the Leader had possessed his own nefarious reasons for creating this haven; still, he could think of worse places to live. In some ways, Freehold reminded Cyclops of Avalon, the orbital sanctuary Magneto created for his mutant followers. Like Avalon, Freehold seemed proof that even the most ambitious and power-hungry of would-be conquerors could sometimes create an oasis of peace and beauty, no matter how unworthy their intentions.

“Listen,” Captain America said. “I hear something, 1 think. An alert—about us.’ ’

Cyclops heard it, too, but not with his ears. The announcement came not from any conventional loudspeaker, but via some manner of telepathic public address system. He heard an unfamiliar voice inside his head, the same way he had so often communicated with Jean or Professor X.

“Attention, citizens of Freehold,” the voice commanded. “Strangers from the outside world have entered our city, but there is no cause for alarm. All non-powered citizens are requested to stay indoors until further notice. The Riot Squad is on the way.”

“Correct that,” a younger voice declared, the old-fashioned way. “The Riot Squad is here!”

Cyclops turned toward the source of the second voice. Four unusual figures stood between the three heroes and the fountain plaza, having apparently materialized out of thin air, thanks to the Leader’s trans-mat beams. Three of the newcomers bore the unmistakable evidence of gamma mutation: complexions and tresses colored in varying shades of green. The fourth was a black man, whose entire body seemed encased in a craggy block of brownish-gray stone, so that only his face could be seen through an aperture in the levitating boulder. He hovered in his granite shell a few feet above the marble steps leading down into the plaza.

That has to be Rock, Cyclops deduced without too much difficulty. Banner had briefed the X-Men and the Avengers on the so-called Riot Squad, Freehold’s own team of superpowered defenders, created by the Leader through the ruthless expedient of exploding a stolen gamma bomb in the middle of a small city in Arizona. Thousands had died, but a select few had survived, endowed with a variety of gamma-spawned traits and abilities; those lucky (?) survivors had been recruited by the Leader to fight for Freehold against such foes as the Hulk. According to Banner, the Riot Squad’s powers were not to be underestimated.

“We mean you no harm,” Captain America insisted, lowering his shield. “All we want is information.”

“Is that why you smashed your way in here?” challenged the same young man who had spoken earlier, whom Cyclops identified as Hotshot. He looked like he couldn’t be more than nineteen years old, tops, and wore a dark purple uniform identical in hue to his two nonpetrified teammates. His pale green hair, a few shades lighter than his jade-colored skin, was neatly cut above his ears. His youthful appearance and brash attitude reminded Cyclops of the X-Men’s earliest days, when they were just a bunch of overenthusiastic kids. He even looks a bit like Bobby did then, Cyclops thought, minus the ice, that is.

“We don’t much care for uninvited visitors here in Freehold. They’ve never brought us anything but trouble,” said Hotshot.

“I don’t know, Lou,” said the attractive young woman at his side. She looked even less mature than Hotshot, which might be why she called herself Jailbait. Cyclops shook his head as he remembered her unlikely appellation; super hero codenames just aren’t what they used to be, he thought.

Dark green tresses, the color of tropical ferns, fell to her shoulders, while her purple uniform could have passed for a supermodel’s swimsuit. “Maybe you shouldn’t be talking to him like that. I mean, it’s Captain America,” she said, breathing the name in an awestruck hush.

Hotshot was considerably less impressed by Cap’s status as a living legend. “So what?” he countered bitterly. “Captain America, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four.. . none of them stopped the Leader from nuking Middletown, killing all our friends and family—and turning us into freaks.” He glared at Cap angrily, as if daring the Avenger to refute his accusation. “We’re not Americans anymore, Jess. We have a new home, Freehold, and we’re not about to let anybody walk all over us again!” Hotshot eyed them skeptically. “Besides, how do we even know that he is Captain America? Probably just another Hydra trick; they want to steal our technology again, force us to work for them.”

Sounds like these kids have seen some rough times, Cyclops thought. It was a pointed reminder that branded-at-birth mutants weren’t the only people whom life had dealt a tough hand. He decided to let Captain America continue as the spokesman for their joint expedition; despite Hotshot’s hostility, Cap still presented a more trustworthy appearance than either a fire-eyed mutant outlaw or a spooky android.

“I sympathize with your loss,” Captain America said gently. “What happened to Middletown was a terrible tragedy. But you have to believe me when I tell you that we wouldn’t disturb you or your city unless it was a matter of life and death.” He held his shield at his side, in a nonthreatening fashion. “We come in peace, I promise you that.”

The fourth and final member of the Riot Squad answered Cap not with verbal threats or accusations, but with a deep-throated roar like a bull gorilla’s. Ogress, as she was now known, was the biggest woman Cyclops had ever seen, if she could still be called a woman. She was taller than the Hulk or Colossus, and her gigantic muscles bulged with power and menace. Tufts of shaggy emerald fur bristled along her arms, and her misshapen face made her look like the Missing Link; beady green eyes glowered from beneath sloping brows, while her prognathous jaw was crammed with oversized yellow incisors. Lacking anything resembling a neck, her elephantine skull merged with her massive shoulders, which strained the overstressed fabric of her king-sized purple uniform. Her matted, unkempt mane looked like it hadn’t been combed since the day she first came to Freehold.

According to Banner, this grotesque, growling giantess had once been a polished and articulate attorney. If so, Cyclops observed, little trace of that prior existence remained in the Ogress that now faced them across the deserted thoroughfare. That poor woman, he thought; her monstrous transformation made Banner’s look like a makeover.

“Maybe we don’t care about your stupid problems,” Rock said harshly, a mean-spirited sneer upon his face. Unlike his teammates, he had not been caught in the gamma blast that destroyed Middletown; instead, Samuel John La Roquette was a disgraced former college professor and Hulkbuster, whom the Leader had surgically modified through his own insidious super-science. He had thrown his lot in with the Riot Squad even before the Leader was presumed dead. “You may be big shot super-heroes up top, but down here we’re bigger than the Avengers and the Fantastic Four put together, and, like Hotshot said, we don’t stand for surprise visits.”

Jagged spikes, like stalactites, sprouted suddenly from the great stony mass enclosing Rock, demonstrating his Leader-given ability to control the shape of his granite shell. Before Captain America could argue the heroes’ case any further, Rock charged the heroic Avenger, scooting over the pavement like some sort of mineralogical hovercraft, his foot-long spikes aimed straight at Cap.

“Wait!” Jailbait called out. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea!” Her words held little sway over her less peaceable teammates, however, as both Hotshot and Ogress took Rock’s preemptive strike as their signal to rush into battle. “Oh, drat!” the green-skinned teenager cursed and bit her lip. She hurried after her comrades, apparently giving in to the inevitable.

Cyclops knew just how she felt. Here we go again, he thought, pinpointing Rock with his visor. Another clash of titans. Another senseless fight. . .

Captain America brought up his shield just in time to avoid being impaled upon Rock’s spiky exterior. The shield, composed of an unbreakable alloy unlike any on Earth, blunted the jagged points of the spikes, but the force of the human boulder’s charge knocked Cap flat on his back. “Stop this!” he called out as he fell, stubbornly determined to prevent any unnecessary violence. “We don’t have to fight each other.”

“You’re wasting your breath,” Rock replied. He retracted his stony spears, then turned the bottom of his shell into an enormous hammer, with which he began pounding away at Captain America’s shield. The indomitable shield resisted the blows, but the impact of each hammer strike jarred Cap to the bone. “I didn’t like you self-righteous hero types calling the shots back when I worked for the Feds, and I like you even less now. This is our city— ours!—and nobody’s taking that away from us, not even Captain God-B less-America! ’ ’

We don’t want your city, Cap thought, grunting as another blow from the hammer squashed him between his shield and the pavement, but it seemed that Rock didn’t want to hear that.

All right then, he decided with steely resolve. Nobody

can say we didn’t try to do this the peaceful way.

He counted the seconds between each hammer strike, then, with perfect timing, rolled out of the way during the pause between blows. The hammer came swinging after him, but Cap was already halfway to his feet by the time he blocked Rock’s latest attack with his shield. The red-white-and-blue discus rang like a bell beneath the hammer, yet its patriotically-painted surface was not even scratched.

“What the devil is that thing made of?” Rock complained, frustration evident in his voice. “I’m the Rock. I’m the hardest thing there is!”

You may be wrong there, friend, Captain America thought, proud of the lost wartime ingenuity that created his decades-old weapon. Not even the Hulk’s vast strength, nor Wolverine’s adamantium claws, had overcome his shield’s durability. He had no reason to expect that Rock’s granite appendages would fare any better. Not that Rock himself won’t be a tough foe to bring down, he reminded himself; apparently the shape-changing Squad member had given the Hulk a run for his money on a couple of occasions.

Cap readied himself for Rock’s next move, while watching carefully for a chance to go on the offensive. Adrenalin flooded his body, mixing with the Super-Soldier Formula in his blood and raising all his well-honed reflexes to peak performance levels. But before Rock could strike again, a crimson beam blindsided the monolithic assailant, sending his rocky form tumbling head over hammer. Cap’s eyes followed the luminous red beam back to its obvious origin: Cyclops’s open visor. “Thanks for the assist, mister,” he called to the X-Man.

“No problem,” Cyclops stated, taking the fight to Rock, and Cap paused to take a breath before diving back into the fray. Then a red-hot fireball slammed into his shoulder.

What in blazes—? He clutched his shoulder with his free hand. That smarts, he thought, wincing. I don’t want to take many more of those if I can help it.

Looking away from Rock and Cyclops, Cap saw Hotshot running toward him, with Jailbait chasing after him. In my day, he thought, Jailbait was not a name any young woman would voluntarily assume for herself. Then again, things had changed a lot since the Forties....

“You should have left when you had the chance!” Hotshot shouted angrily. Apparently his temper was just as fiery as his codename, not to mention his trademark fireballs. A volcanic glow suffused his palm as another burning projectile formed within his grip.

Just like the Human Torch, Cap noted.

“Listen, son,” he tried again, keeping one eye on the nascent fireball and another on Hotshot’s expression. He didn’t think the youth was evil at heart, just cocky and quick to fight, like many other boys his age.

Hawkeye used to be the same way, Cap thought, recalling many dustups with the Avengers’ boisterous bowman before he had picked up a little hardwon maturity. Cap felt inclined to give Hotshot the same benefit of the doubt he had always given Hawkeye. “Think again before you do anything you might regret later. You don’t want to do this,” Cap said

“Oh yeah? You don’t have the slightest idea what I want. You don’t belong here!” Hotshot shot back, punctuating his retort with a flying fireball that came whizzing through the air at Cap.

The fireball exploded against Cap’s shield in a shower of bright red sparks. “Maybe not,” he agreed, running to meet Hotshot, “but you ought to learn not to shoot first and ask questions later, especially when you’re not under attack.” A third fireball came at his legs, but Cap deftly hurdled the sizzling globe which landed on the pavement behind him, scorching it. “That’s three misses in three pitches,” Cap pointed out. “If I were you, son, I’d think twice about trying out for the Yankees just yet.”

Cap came within an arm’s length of the green-skinned pyrokinetic. “This is no game,” Hotshot sputtered indignantly and swung a glowing fist at Captain America’s head as it rose above the outer rim of the shield. “I’m fighting for my city!”

The Avenger easily parried the punch with his shield; despite the youth’s gamma-induced energy powers, he was no Joe Louis. “That’s an admirable sentiment,” Cap said, even as he rammed his fist into the boy’s mid-section. He took care to pull his punch; he didn’t want to batter Hotshot into unconsciousness, just knock the wind out of him. “First, though, you need to learn when to fight.”

Dazed, Hotshot lay sprawled on the marble steps of the plaza. His fingers sparked like firecrackers as he blinked his blurry eyes and tried to shake the fogginess from his head. “Just a lucky punch,” he gasped defiantly. “Just give me a sec, and we’ll see who’s got a lot to learn.”

The kid’s got spunk, Cap noted with approval. Who knows? He might actually make a decent hero someday. He reached down to help Hotshot up.

“Don’t you touch him!” Jailbait shouted, misunderstanding his intentions. “Nobody beats up my boyfriend as long as I’m around.”

A shimmering cage enclosed Cap, cutting him off from his recovering opponent. Crisscrossing lines of scintillating energy, crackling with restless electrons, formed a radiant dome above the Star-Spangled Avenger. Cap experimentally tried to step through the coruscating bars, only to receive an intense electrical shock the instant he came into contact with the energy lines. Cap clenched his teeth to keep from crying out and stepped back from the bars. He stared through the gaps in the cage at Jailbait, who stood a few feet away, her green hands extended before her, palms out.

“Good work, Jess!” Hotshot praised, springing to his feet with all the resilience of youth. He held a hand over his bludgeoned abdomen, though, as he joined his girlfriend. “That’s the way to do it. I’ll bet he wasn’t expecting that.”

Actually, I should have, Cap castigated himself. Bruce Banner had warned them all about Jailbait’s ability to create webs of highly-charged energy, but Cap had overlooked the mild-looking teenager, possibly because she never sounded too enthusiastic about fighting in the first place.

Never underestimate an adolescent girl whose sweetheart is in trouble, he concluded. The smell of ozone filled his nostrils.

Even now, though, she didn’t seem very committed to the battle. “Are you sure we’re doing the right thing, Lou?” she asked Hotshot.

“Remember the Hulk?” he reminded her. “Remember Hydra? Heck, remember the Leader?” He placed a comforting arm over her shoulder. “The whole world wants what we’ve got here, wants to exploit us and steal our technology. We can’t trust anyone.”

“Not even Captain America?”

“Not even,” he insisted. “It’s us against the world, just like always.”

“That’s not true,” Cap said from within the cage. ‘‘You should listen to that young lady, son. She’s the only one of your bunch who is not declaring war before checking the facts.”

He tried to appeal to Jailbait, even if he couldn’t bring himself to call her by that name. “Look, miss, I’ll bet we can work this whole mess out if we just talk it over for a few minutes. All we want is information about the Leader. Call off your teammates, let us make some inquiries, and we’ll be on our way. You have my word on it,” Cap said “Don’t listen to him, Jess,” Hotshot warned her. “He’s trying to trick you.” He expressed his anger by hurling a fireball through a gap in the cage, but, despite his cramped circumstances, the Avenger deflected the flaming sphere with no difficulty. Cap was worried more about Hotshot’s obvious influence over his girlfriend; it was going to be hard to get through to her as long as Hotshot was worked up.

He had to try, though. “Where’s the harm in a ceasefire?” Cap asked her. “Why not give us a chance to explain?”

“Shut up!” Hotshot shouted at Cap. “Stop messing with her head.” He lowered his voice to plead with Jailbait. “Think about it, Jess.” He pointed at Cyclops, now squaring off against Rock. “What’s the real Captain America doing with one of the X-Men? An Avenger hanging out with a mutant criminal? That doesn’t makes sense. This guy’s got to be a fake!”

“You think?” Jailbait asked, eyeing Cap more suspiciously than before.

“For sure!” Hotshot said confidently. “He’s probably not even human. Just an adaptoid wrapped in a flag.”

Cap sensed he was losing ground in his campaign to strike a peace initiative with Jailbait. I might get her to come around eventually, he thought, but we don’t have that much time to spare. His blue eyes probed beyond the confines of the glimmering cage, searching for an alternate strategy. Looking around the plaza and its surroundings, his gaze lit upon Freehold’s impressive cathedral. That imposing edifice stood several stories above the level of the street, its stained glass windows looking out over the plaza. Cap noticed in particular a marble ledge running along the second story of the cathedral. He hefted his shield and calculated the correct angle. Yes, he thought. That looks like just what the doctor ordered.

He lifted his shield until it was parallel with his chest, then aimed it at an open space between two crackling lines of electrical energy. “Jess, watch out!” Hotshot yelled, spotting Cap at work. “He’s trying something!”

Captain America flung his shield like a frisbee and it went spinning out of his hands. At the same time, Jailbait mentally tightened her cage so that it fell like a net over his head and shoulders, delivering painful electrical shocks wherever the lines of the snare came into contact with him. Cap stiffened in pain, nearly biting his own tongue off, but his shield had escaped the net, soaring out over the heads of the two mutated teenagers.

“Hah!” Hotshot crowed. “He missed us by a mile.” He hugged Jailbait to his side. “You did it, Jess! You stopped him!”

Cap watched as his shield flew gracefully toward the waiting cathedral, striking the correct comer of the sturdy ledge, and ricocheting back toward the unsuspecting teenagers. Without a single wobble, the metal disk slammed into Jailbait from behind, knocking her onto the pavement. Sorry about that, miss, Cap thought sincerely, but your hotheaded boyfriend didn’t give me much choice. He knew the shield hadn’t hit her hard enough to do any permanent damage; after several decades of constant practice, he could gauge the force of a rebounding shield to the nearest ounce.

With Jailbait’s concentration broken, her luminescent net flickered for a split-second, then disintegrated entirely. Cap seized his freedom with breathtaking speed. Hotshot was still staring aghast at the prone figure of his girlfriend when

Captain America barreled into him. Hotshot was sent tumbling down the steps even as Cap retrieved his shield from where it had landed after knocking Jailbait unconscious.

Flying toward the hypertrophic organism known as Ogress, his synthetic body lighter than air, the Vision experienced a peculiar sensation that it took him approximately 1.73 seconds to identify as trepidation. The mere sight of the jade giantess was apparently sufficient to induce a disturbing fluctuation in his synaptic functions. How unusual, he thought, ascending higher, out of reach of even Ogress’s exceptionally long arms. Better to delay his conflict with the mutated attorney while he performed a hasty selfdiagnostic in hopes of isolating the cause of his uncharacteristic consternation.

Vivid images sprang from his memory banks, of his intangible right arm plunged up to the elbow in the broad green chest of the Hulk, of the extreme discomfort he had experienced when the atomic structure of the Hulk’s organic substance refused to be displaced by the Vision’s own rapidly solidifying limb, and of that indelible moment when the Hulk tore the Vision’s arm from its socket, throwing his entire system into the cybernetic equivalent of shock. The Vision found he could not dismiss these disruptive memories, despite a concerted effort to do so. A human being, he suspected, would label such persistent and counterproductive recollections as “post-traumatic flashbacks”; the Vision preferred to think of them as an unwanted perturbation of his artificial thought processes.

The reason these freshly-recorded memories were resurfacing now was readily apparent; obviously, some portion of his analytical faculties had equated his present antagonist, Ogress, with another hostile green brute: the Hulk. Hence, his previously inexplicable trepidation at the prospect of engaging in hand-to-hand combat with Ogress. A predictable consequence of his recent dismemberment, perhaps, but not one that he could permit to interfere with the proper execution of his duties as an Avenger.

My course is clear, he resolved. Captain America and Cyclops require my aid.

“Grrr!” Ogress roared at him, shaking her immense fists at the unreachable android. Even from high above, she looked much larger than the Hulk and arguably more bestial in manner and appearance. Unable to lay her hands on the flying Avenger, Ogress turned her attention to targets closer at hand, scanning the vicinity with a predatory gleam in her eyes. The Vision realized he needed to intervene immediately, before Ogress could unleash her considerable wrath upon either Captain America or Cyclops.

“You are unwise to look away from me,” he warned as he swooped down at her, increasing the mass in his outstretched fists enough to accelerate his descent along the desired approach vector. His thermoscopic beams preceded him, specialized lenses in his eyes focussing the discharged solar energy upon the distracted Ogress. “Do not attempt to harm my companions or I will be forced to take further action against you,”

Neon-red heat rays fell like a spotlight upon Ogress. Her transformation having reportedly rendered her mute, she could respond only by howling in pain and anger; discouragingly, the Vision believed he detected more of the latter than the former. Her coarse green hide showed no sign of blistering beneath the thermoscopic barrage, but the furry tufts upon her bare arms and legs began to smoke and smolder. She snarled at the Vision, baring her brick-sized teeth, then loped across the plaza to the cooling relief of the spewing fountain. Like a prison searchlight, the Vision’s heat rays chased her down the low marble steps, but the intense photonic bombardment did not even slow her down; hurdling the raised curb of the fountain in a single leap, she splashed into the churning pool. Cascading streams of water rained on her, providing partial protection from the burning thermoscopic beams, which raised dense clouds of steam, concealing Ogress from the Vision’s visual receptors.

Floating silently above the pool, his saffron cloak billowing above him, the Vision extinguished his heat rays and considered his tactical options. He could narrow the focus of his eyebeams, significantly increasing their Iaser-like intensity, but he was reluctant to employ potentially deadly force against an opponent who was merely defending her homeland from unwanted intruders. True, the circumstances hardly warranted the excessive animosity and violence with which he and his traveling companions had been greeted, yet the Riot Squad could not reasonably be considered villains on the level of, say, the Masters of Evil or the Sons of the Serpent.

The sheltering steam dissipated, revealing the titanic form of Ogress. Bending over, she dug her mammoth fingers into the base of the fountain, tearing loose a huge chunk of cement that she hurled at her android attacker. The washing machine-sized cement fragment shot like a cannonball toward the Vision, only to pass harmlessly through his spectral form.

“I cannot fault your accuracy or endurance,” he informed her, “even if you have failed to take into account the full difficulty of defeating an intangible foe with such a crude physical attack.”

Unfortunately, the Vision realized, that same intangibility limited his ability to subdue Ogress long enough for the three heroes to complete their mission. To achieve anything more than a stalemate with this female goliath, he would have to become solid enough to touch and be touched.

With that in mind, he descended to the floor of the plaza, experiencing yet another surprising surge of apprehension as soon as his yellow boots touched down on the pavement. For exactly .753 seconds, his basic self-preservation subroutines threatened to override his higher cognitive functions. A photographic afterimage of the Hulk, triumphantly flourishing the Vision’s sundered arm superimposed itself over the daunting sight of Ogress, waiting impatiently for the Vision beneath the spray of the fountain. For .753 seconds, his legs malfunctioned, unable to take one step nearer the fountain despite his deliberate intention to do so.

Ogress is not the Hulk, he told himself emphatically. That she is is a false equation.

Or was it?

His cybernetic synapses still firing off nonstop signals to retreat, the Vision walked purposely into the fountain, passing like a ghost through the raised concrete curb. Ogress, watching him approach, cupped her gargantuan hands over the fountain’s central spout, redirecting the full force of the pillar of water at the Vision so that it jetted into the Avenger like a liquid battering ram. The Vision increased his mass and density, however, becoming hard as diamond and as heavy as neutronium. The high-pressure spray broke harmlessly against his immovable form.

Physically, the watery cannonade could not deter him; psychologically it was another story. The surging torrent only raised more associations with his catastrophic encounter with the Hulk amidst the driving currents of Niagara Falls. He remembered the cataract carrying his broken body over the edge of the Falls, and his motor functions froze once more, leaving him standing immobile at the edge of the circular reservoir. Not again, he thought, feeling an alarmingly human sense of panic.

Ogress was neither frozen nor afraid. Tiring of her trick with the waterspout, or maybe just disappointed with its results, she pulled back her hands, then charged straight through the resulting column of sky-high water. A savage roar drowned out the thunder of falling water as she grabbed onto the Vision with Hulk-like strength. A single massive fist wrapped around both of the synthezoid’s legs, while her other hand ripped the yellow cape from his shoulders. letting it flutter to the pool around their feet where it floated like a yellow oil slick atop the water. She raised the Vision like a club and began hammering his head and shoulders against the concrete curb of the fountain. Again and again, she lifted the android Avenger high above her head, then brought him slamming down onto the paved plaza. With each blow, his super-hard body reduced the solid cement to powder.

The Vision felt like he was repeatedly hitting the bottom of Niagara Falls. Then, as each jarring collision with the ground rattled his synthetic enamel teeth, another memory inserted itself into his fading consciousness. He saw a woman, blue-eyed and auburn-haired, reaching out to him from the past, a past they once had shared.

“Wanda,” he murmured, remembering with renewed intensity the cause that had brought him first to Niagara Falls, then to this uncharted realm beneath the Canadian ice. There was more at stake here than simply the continued existence of one malfunctioning synthezoid. Wanda was in danger. Wanda!

Confused and contradictory directives came together in his computerized mind. Priorities were assigned, files rearranged, and counterproductive programming discarded as irrelevant. An immediate course of action presented itself as clearly as any other step-by-step procedure:

1. The Vision shed his accumulated density, slipping easily between the atoms of Ogress’s clenched fist until he was completely free of her grip. A befuddled expression supplanted the animal fury on her simian face. She snatched fruitlessly at the Vision’s immaterial form, her grasping paws seizing only empty air.

2.    The Vision turned his thermoscopic vision on the spout at the center of the fountain. The tremendous heat melted it into slag, sealing the nozzle. The towering plume of water collapsed into the pool.

3.    The Vision eyed Ogress with a look of implacable calm upon his plastic features. His body still intangible, he stepped entirely inside Ogress’s enormous frame before beginning to become solid once more. There was more than enough room inside the mutated lawyer’s vast torso, but less so as the Vision’s own unstable molecules started to occupy space formerly occupied by Ogress’s flesh and bone.

As the Hulk’s tissues had before her, Ogress’s gamma-enhanced body resisted his incursion, fighting his accumulating substance for every nanometer of available space, competing with him on a molecular, if not an atomic level. But the Vision’s revised programming would not permit him to terminate this procedure until its ultimate objective was achieved. The face of his former wife, the one and only Scarlet Witch, lingered like a hologram in his mind’s eye, providing him with all the software he needed to override obstacles both within and without.

Even an android, it seemed, could be inspired by a vision.

“I know you,” Rock accused. “You’re one of those renegade mutants. One of the X-Men.” He glared at Cyclops with a contemptuous look on his face, the only part of him that wasn’t concealed within a lumpy gray shell. “Back when I worked for the military, I saw contingency plans for dealing with you freaks.”

Look who’s talking, Cyclops thought. Electrodes attached to Samuel John La Roquette’s forehead linked him to the bulky chunk of rock from which he drew his new identity. Banner had described Rock as the most dangerous member of the Riot Squad, as well as the least innocent. Unlike the luckless survivors of Middletown, Rock had bought into the Leader’s agenda more or less willingly, motivated by years of bitterness and resentment over his personal and professional failures. Cut off from humanity in more ways than one, Rock had retreated like a hermit crab into his forbidding stone carapace.

How can he live like that? Cyclops thought, appalled at the idea of spending the rest of your life encased in a floating boulder.

After being sent tumbling through the air by Cyclops’s eyebeams, Rock swiftly regained control of his own orientation and locomotion. He coasted above the pavement in a manner that reminded Cyclops of Charles Xavier’s anti-gravity wheelchair. He suspected a similar form of technology was at work within Rock’s monolithic cocoon. How else could Rock pilot himself so freely without any visible means of propulsion?

“Thought you’d thrown me for a loop with that sneak attack, did you?” Rock challenged Cyclops. “Tough luck, mutie. You just moved to the top of my hit list.”

The roughhewn granite that enclosed the man hardly looked very malleable, but in this case appearances were deceiving. Through the ruby lens in his visor, Cyclops saw Rock extrude a pair of gigantic concrete claws from his shell. Craggy fingers, sharp and jagged at their tips, reached for the X-Man, who threw himself backwards to avoid their clutches. His eyebeams lashed out at the grasping stone talons, blasting the points off the nearest of the claws so that they looked more like stumps than stalagmites.

“Arrgh!” Rock cried out, evidently sharing a psychic link with his prosthetic appendages. Having successfully declawed one stony hand, Cyclops aimed his force beam at the remaining claw, breaking it off at the wrist. La Ro-quette’s face contorted in pain, and Cyclops allowed himself to hope that the hostile cyborg might have learned his lesson.

“Had enough?” the X-Man asked. Banner said Rock was a bad apple, but maybe he could be made to see sense. “We don’t need to fight you. Just tell us what we want to know and we’ll go.”

“You’re not going anywhere but down!” Rock spat at him, saliva spraying from his lips. The truncated claws regenerated, growing new talons just as deadly as before. Rock zoomed across the wide thoroughfare at Cyclops, intent on skewering the mutant hero with his rocky projections. “I’ve speared the Hulk with my claws, so I’m not going to take any lip from some mutie troublemaker.”

Cyclops watched Rock speed toward him like a sentient asteroid.

I wonder if it’s too late to borrow Captain America’s shield, he wondered as he dropped to the pavement only a second before Rock’s claws would have impaled him. Rock’s momentum carried him over the prone X-Man. A closer shave than I want or need, he concluded, thankful as ever for all the hours he’d spent training in the Danger Room. He scrambled to his feet while Rock slowed to a stop, then spun around to face the X-Man once more. Noting the vengeful gleam in Rock’s dark eyes, Cyclops suddenly felt like a matador missing both his cape and his sword.

“Pretty slick move,” Rock conceded, “but you can’t 24 1

keep dodging me forever.” He retracted his concrete claws, replacing them with sharp-edged spikes that protruded from his cocoon in every direction. “Get ready to bleed, mutie.”

Cyclops knew better than to argue with this sort of unreasoning malice. Rock was right, though; it was only a matter of time before one of those spikes ran him through, unless he took out the man inside the shell. Forget the stone, he advised himself. Rock could regenerate his lethal appendages indefinitely. Instead Cyclops aimed his visor at Rock’s achilles’ heel: his exposed face.

A crimson beam shot from Cyclops’s unshielded eyes, but Rock was way ahead of him. The levitating boulder began spinning like a top, carrying La Roquette’s face out of the line of fire. Flaky chips of stone flew off the rotating Rock as Cyclops’s beam struck home, but his petrified adversary had become a blur. Whirling like a dervish, or perhaps the Tasmanian Devil in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, Rock came at the X-Men’s stalwart co-leader. His cyclonic rotation whipped up a fierce wind that raised a swirling cloud of dust beneath him. Cyclops held his ground, firing blindly at the twirling juggernaut, but trying to hit La Roquette’s face under these conditions was like playing roulette with eyebeams; the odds were against him.

Cyclops was forced to retreat, running back the way he and the Avengers had come. Rock can’t possibly see where’s he’s going while he’s spinning like that. He’s going to have to stop twirling sometime, just to find out where I am. That’s my chance, Cyclops theorized, so the X-Man zigzagged back and forth across the deserted street, finally taking refuge beneath the awning of a six-story apartment building.

Moving at random over the wide paved road, Rock came unnervingly close to the X-Man’s hiding place. The wind generated by the whirling cyborg threw dust in Cyclops’s face, but his visor protected his eyes from the abrasive particles—and vise versa. Cyclops held a gloved hand over his mouth and nose to keep from coughing or sneezing, and thus alerting Rock to his location.

He couldn’t be sure at first, but he thought that the spinning boulder was slowing down. His head leaned forward, his neck taut, as he waited tensely for an opportunity to strike. This was what a sharpshooter felt like, he imagined, right before he pulls the trigger. “Come on,” he whispered. “Give me a clean shot.”

Rock was definitely spinning slower now. Cyclops glimpsed La Roquette’s features as they whipped past him every other split-second, still moving too quickly to pose a viable target. Finally, the rotation slackened enough that Rock and Cyclops were able to lock eyes across a narrow strip of sidewalk.

There you are! they both must have thought simultaneously. Cyclops centered the cyborg’s scowling visage within his sights. Ready, aim ... fire!

He let loose his eyebeams, which streaked toward their target, but Rock had already formed a shield from his carapace of living stone, raising it in time to block the crimson forcebeam. Granite crunched beneath the impact of eye-beams, yet La Roquette’s vulnerable countenance was spared. Cyclops attempted to fire past the rectangular shield, which was connected to the core boulder by a thick gray pseudopod, only to find himself parried once more. “Not so fast, mutie,” Rock mocked him from behind his protective curtain of stone. “You didn’t think I was going to make it easy for you, did you?”

I guess not, Cyclops thought. Rock then proved he could attack and defend at the same time by extending a well-aimed spike at the cornered X-Man. The petrified spear tripled its length in a heartbeat, hurling at Cyclops like a jouster’s lance. His eyebeams darted downward, intercepting the deadly javelin before it could pierce his abdomen. Already, however, another spike was stretching toward him. How was he ever going to fend off all of Rock’s vicious jabs, let alone get past the murderous cyborg’s homegrown shield?

“Cyclops! Over here!” a deep voice cried out. Cyclops spotted Captain America several yards away, off to one side of Rock. The living legend of World War II held his own shield up high, catching the moonlight—and La Roquette’s reflection. Got it, Cyclops thought swiftly, comprehending at once the Avenger’s strategy. Twisting his body violently to one side, to avoid yet another oncoming stone pike, he fired his eyebeams at Captain America’s shield. The crimson rays caromed off the polished surface of Cap’s shield and back at Rock’s face.

From where he now stood, Cyclops couldn’t see the beam hit La Roquette where it hurt, but he could imagine the wide-eyed look of shock and alarm the man must have displayed just before several dozen foot-pounds of extra-dimensional energy wiped the sneer from his face. The X-Man heard a single shouted obscenity disturb the moonlit tranquility of Freehold, then the entire levitating boulder hit the pavement like, well, a rock. The spike-covered shell, looking something like a petrified porcupine, rolled back and forth for a moment or two, breaking off many of the concrete spines on its underside, before ceasing to move at all.

Cyclops ducked under a protruding spike and prodded Rock with his foot. The boulder continued to squat lifelessly on the pavement, suggesting that its animating intelligence was indeed out for the count. “Thanks for the use of your shield,” the X-Man called to Captain America. “Your timing couldn’t have been better.”

‘ ‘Just glad I could return the favor,’ ’ Cap said warmly, prompting Cyclops to recall that he had first fired his eye-beams at Rock to defend the Avenger. Cyclops stepped away from the fallen rock and surveyed the vicinity. The two super-powered teenagers, Hotshot and Jailbait, were both sprawled limply on or near the steps to the plaza. They didn’t look like they’d be giving anyone a hard time anytime soon; Hotshot, in particular, had a bruise on his chin that was getting darker by the moment.

“Those two give you any trouble?” he asked Cap.

“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” the Avenger said, with neither arrogance nor false modesty in his tone. He wasn’t bragging, just stating the facts. “Once you get past their specialized tricks, they’re still only a pair of inexperienced kids, with not much skill or training in hand-to-hand combat.” He flexed a set of sore knuckles beneath his scarlet gloves. “Hotshot’s got a bit of a glass jaw, to tell the truth.”

That left Ogress, Cyclops realized, who appeared to be having problems of her own. The mammoth she-creature stood ankle-deep in the basin of the fountain, where once a towering plume of water had leaped toward the sky. Inexplicably, the last Squad member still standing seemed gripped by some kind of seizure. Her marble-sized eyes, too small for the rest of her face, bulged from their undersized sockets while convulsive palpitations shook the enormous timbers of her legs and arms. Greenish foam frothed at the comers of her ape-like jaws, and she clawed at her chest with meaty fingers, shredding the front of her purple uniform, as if trying to extract the source of her agony from somewhere deep within her mighty frame.

Good Lord, Cyclops thought, experiencing a moment of panic, what if she’s having a heart attack? It was a terrifying idea; how in the world could you perform CPR on such a behemoth?

‘ ‘Wait a minute,’ ’ Cap said beside him. The veteran hero glanced around the street with a puzzled expression. “Where is the Vision?”

Cyclops noticed for the first time that the synthetic Avenger was missing. Had the android, so recently reassembled, been demolished again? If the Hulk could commit such an atrocity, why not Ogress as well? The worried X-Man hastily scanned the plaza for any evidence of disaster, such as bits and pieces of the artificial hero, and quickly spotted the Vision’s yellow cloak, floating in the fountain not far from Ogress’s quivering legs.

What does that mean? Cyclops wondered anxiously. If his latex cape had ended up discarded and drifting in the basin, like a greasy film upon the water, what had become of Vision himself?

“GRRR!”

A final, wrenching spasm shook Ogress, and her eyes rolled back so that only the bloodshot whites, streaked with grisly green veins, could be seen. She collapsed, toppling forward in a heap. The ponderous weight of her falling body smashed the rim of the basin and shook the ground beneath Cyclops’s feet. Water from the shattered fountain spilled out onto the plaza, drenching the marble tiles around the stricken giantess and lapping at the heroes’ boots.

Captain America rushed to Ogress’s side and placed a hand where her neck should have been. “I feel a pulse,” he reported with audible relief. Cyclops was glad to hear it, even if he remained unsure what had happened to the Riot Squad’s ferocious answer to She-Hulk. “She’s still breathing, too.”

An unexpected shudder rocked the unconscious monster, and Cap stepped back warily from her colossal form. Cyclops backed away, too, only to watch in surprise as a phantasmal green figure emerged from Ogress’s broad back without even rustling the fabric of her uniform. “You need not be concerned, Captain,” the Vision informed him calmly. “Ogress has suffered no permanent damage, merely a neurological shock sufficient to render her insensate for the time being.”

“I see,” Captain America said, nodding. He took the Vision’s startling reappearance in stride; having seen the immaterial android perform many similar stunts before. “Good work.”

I wonder if he can teach Shadow cat that trick? Cyclops thought. Like the Vision, the X-Men’s most precocious recruit could phase through solid objects, although Cyclops had never seen young Kitty Pryde incapacitate a living being as devastatingly as the android Avenger just had. Then again, he recalled, Shadowcat’s phasing invariably disrupted electronic equipment—like androids, perhaps? Hmm, you’ve got to wonder who would prove most dangerous to whom, the Vision or Kitty?

That was a question for another day, however. Here in Freehold, the night was not getting any shorter. Cyclops looked around the plaza, from which an entire underground city spread. There were altogether too many buildings to search effectively for the answers they sought. “Now what?” he asked his Avenging companions, daunted by the task ahead of them. ‘ ‘Go door to door?’ ’

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Cap said. Eyes widening, he pointed past the X-Man’s shoulder.

Cyclops spun around in time to see a peculiar optical phenomenon only a few yards away. Beneath the moonlight and the soft glow of streetlamps, a man-sized column of air shimmered above the marble tiles, like the ripples one sometimes saw above the blacktop on a hot day. The seeming mirage took on color and definition, presenting the image of a humanoid figure swiftly coming into focus. A hologram, Cyclops speculated, or the Leader’s matter transporter at work? He suspected the latter, and aimed his visor just in case.

In a matter of seconds, the figure looked as real and tangible as the rest of them. “That’s quite enough,” he stated decisively, his mild, phlegmatic voice sounding more bored than annoyed.

Was this the Leader? He looked much as Cyclops recalled the gamma-mutated mastermind was supposed to appear: a slight figure, with skin green as malachite, whose most predominant feature was a skull large enough to house an unusually well-endowed brain. The man’s elongated forehead rose twice as high as the rest of his face and his hairless cranium was not so much a dome as a silo with a rounded top. All in all, the implied cerebral capacity of the man’s head made Professor X look like a troglodyte.

Aside from the distinct green tint of his flesh, the rest of the man was unremarkable. He had a thin, unathletic build and, if not for his towering cranium, would have stood less than six feet tall. A purple nehru jacket and violet trousers echoed the color scheme of the Riot Squad’s uniforms and his hands were clasped before his chest in a meditative pose. Frankly, the man did not present a very threatening appearance, but Cyclops did not lower his guard. “Is this him?” he asked Captain America. “The Leader?’ ’

“No,” Cap said, “although the resemblance is striking, especially to the way the Leader looked when he first fought the Avengers.” Cyclops recalled that, in recent years, the Leader’s mutated skull had continued to swell, taking on mushroom-like contours, or so Banner reported.

“Great minds think alike and look alike, I suppose,” the

newcomer said. He seemed unoffended by the comparison. “You may call me Omnibus. I’m in charge of this city.” “Omnibus?” Cap asked.

The image shrugged. “I was once an encyclopedia salesmen, before my transfiguration. As the late, unlamented Leader once quipped, it was that or name me Britannica.” He rolled his eyes at the very notion. “He had a peculiar sense of humor, you see.”

“Right,” Cyclops commented brusquely, unconcerned about the idiosyncracies of the Leader’s funnybone. “The Hulk mentioned you earlier.”

“The Hulk!” Omnibus reacted negatively to the name. Much of his diffident manner slipped away as he regarded Cyclops anxiously. “That monster’s not coming back here, is he?”    "

“Not unless there’s a reason,” Captain America stated, his shield at his side. “Our apologies, by the way, for whatever damage your city sustained during our altercation with the Riot Squad, but you should know that your people started the fight.”

Omnibus looked unconcerned by the recent violence. “No harm done.” He coldly surveyed the vanquished Squad members, making tsk-ing sounds with his tongue. “Obviously, our security forces are in need of additional combat experience.”

Cyclops got the impression that Omnibus had deliberately sicced the Riot Squad on them, simply to test their fighting abilities. “For what purpose?” Cyclops asked, suspicious.

“Why, to better defend Freehold, of course,” Omnibus replied, perhaps a touch too quickly. Cyclops found himself doubting the man’s sincerity; could it be that he had other plans for his super-powered storm troopers? “But you have yet to explain your own reasons for visiting our isolated and reasonably inaccessible domain,” Omnibus pointed out, effectively changing the subject.

“Fair enough,” Cap admitted. “Let me get straight to the point. We have reason to suspect that two of our respective teammates, the Scarlet Witch and Rogue, have been abducted by the Leader. Evidence of gamma-based teleportaiion technology, of the sort formerly employed by the Leader, was found at the scenes of both disappearances. And, according to a reliable source, this city of yours is the Leader’s last known address.”

“That’s true enough,” Omnibus conceded, “but Freehold’s singular founder has not been seen alive since that terrible occasion, over a year ago, when a Hydra assault team invaded our city, in tandem with the Hulk. I myself personally saw the Leader cut down by gunfire during the resulting chaos, shortly before his laboratory was consumed by a dreadful conflagration.” He dipped his lofty forehead in memory of the dearly departed. “I’m afraid there’s no way he could have survived.”

Spoken like someone who has never seen Magneto or the Shadow King return from the dead a dozen times, Cyclops thought, then asked. ‘‘But you never actually saw his body?”

The Vision sounded equally skeptical. “The Leader has been reported dead on many previous occasions, but such pronouncements have always proved premature.’⁴

“Let me assure you,” Omnibus said, shaking his head, “after the battle we searched every square inch of the wrecked laboratory. All we ever found were minute traces of his blood. Green blood, naturally. Like my own.” Cyclops could not miss the note of pride in his voice. Just what the world needs, he thought dourly. A selfappointed successor to the Leader.

“I can’t help noticing that you’ve helped yourself to the

Leader’s trans-mat technology. Perhaps the Leader isn’t the guilty party after all. You could have beamed our friends away,” Cyclops said.

“That’s a plausible hypothesis,” Omnibus admitted, unfazed by the accusation. “I can’t deny that I have inherited many of the fruits of my predecessor’s genius. But what would be my motive? Naturally, I have heard of the two remarkable ladies the Captain mentioned—since the ... unfortunate ... incident at Middletown, I’ve become a veritable fount of information—but I certainly have no compelling reason to abduct either woman, let alone bring down the combined wrath of the X-Men and the Avengers on our humble community. Please believe me, the people of Freehold, myself included, wish nothing more than to be left alone and in peace.” He assumed a benign, smugly serene expression, like that of a pale green bodhissattva. “Furthermore, as far as we know, the mortal remains of the Leader were completely incinerated in the fire. For better or for worse, he is no more.’’

Times like this Cyclops wished he was a telepath like Jean or the Professor. I’d like to read Omnibus’s mind right now, find out what’s he hiding. He didn’t buy the man’s peace-loving act for a minute; Cyclops had met too many self-important, would-be dictators not to spot one more when he saw one. Omnibus’s ambitions would not be confined to Freehold forever, that was for sure. In his gut, however, Cyclops sensed the man Was telling the truth about one thing; he had nothing to do with yesterday’s kidnappings in New York.

They would not find Rogue or Wanda here.

fn vain pour eviter les reponse ameres ...”

The Beast sang along with his favorite recording of Bizet’s Carmen as he held down the fort at Avengers Mansion. Just as Carmen herself passed the time reading her fortune in the cards, the shaggy blue mutant perused the latest reports from S.H.I.E.L.D,, searching for a hidden pattern that would reveal the malevolent purpose at work behind recent events, events that had brought the X-Men and the Avengers together, then sent them spreading out across the globe.

UFO sightings. Kidnapped super-heroines. Stolen Sentinels. Gamma rays. The Beast had to admit, it was quite a puzzle. He crouched atop the circular meeting table, sorting through freshly-printed hard copies of the reports with his toes. A pitcher of hot coffee sat dangerously close to the piled papers, along with a tray of finger sandwiches that Jarvis had generously provided before retiring for the evening. A pair of wire reading glasses perched upon his nose, the Beast nibbled on a cucumber sandwich while perusing his handwritten notes one more time.

In truth, he had made some little progress already. According to his estimations, two of the UFO sightings reported by S.H.I.E.L.D. corresponded almost exactly with the abductions of, first, the Scarlet Witch, then Rogue, which seemed to confirm everyone’s assumption that the

aerial assault on the Helicarrier, conducted later that same day, bore a direct connection to Wanda and Rogue’s enigmatic disappearances.

A third UFO sighting, made much further upstate, troubled him, primarily because he had yet to link that appearance of the elusive aircraft to any contemporaneous event. Surely, the mystery ship had not been out joyriding on that particular occasion! No, he had to assume that the UFO had been about some business of which he as yet remained unaware. What, pray tell, could that be? the Beast wondered. Last he’d heard, no one up in the hinterlands had reported any missing mutants or purloined hunter-robots.

The Beast glanced at the silent communications console. He did not resent being left behind—someone had to stay here to monitor communications and coordinate the two teams’ activities—but he was anxious to receive word from his farflung friends and colleagues. The imbroglio at Muir Island particularly disturbed him, since there seemed little doubt that Bobby; Kurt, and Moira were in immediate peril from the ominously-named Gamma Sentinels. Granted, he was quick to remind himself, Iceman and Nightcrawler had each survived numerous encounters with various generations of Sentinels, so there was no reason to assume the worst in this instance, not until he had a compelling reason to do so.

A color photo of a bizarre green countenance, freshly downloaded from the Avengers’ database, caught his eye. The infamous Leader, he decided, certainly lent new and very literal meaning to the hackneyed phrase “a swelled head.” The Beast did not believe for a second that this virtuoso of villainy had gone to his eternal reward as reported; the Leader was surely sequestered in some obscure location, far from prying eyes and inquiring minds.

Indeed, the Leader’s bulging file revealed an inveterate fondness for hidden strongholds in unexpected and remarkably inaccessible locales. A desert lair in New Mexico. A hidden city beneath a glacier. A cloaked space station in orbit above the earth. Where, I wonder, might he be hiding nowadays?

He looked again at those intriguing UFO reports. He felt sure the answer lay in those cryptic accounts of aerodynamic hijinks. He could practically feel his impatient unconscious nudging him toward some waiting revelation, had he but eyes to see it.

Is there anything about their flight plans, he speculated, that might point to a common point of origin? Earlier calculations along those lines had proved unrewarding, yet he felt compelled to noodle with the data again.

Counting the forcible boarding of the Helicarrier by those fraudulent X-Men, somewhere over Montana, he had four documented sightings of the UFO, complete with precise readings of its speed and heading each time it appeared and disappeared from surveillance. Trying to track all four flights back to a single location, in the continental United States or elsewhere, had led to naught but to a dispiriting sense of futility.

But what if he was losing the forest for the flight plan trees? Maybe the answer lay not in the particulars of all the sightings, but only in the UFO’s first and final manifestations. Yes! he thought enthusiastically, taking another gulp of liquid caffeine.

Let’s assume the UFO came a long way from anywhere, as the Leader’s proclivities presuppose. Then wouldn 7 its pilots have wanted to take care of all their inequitable errands in one trip, before returning to the Leader’s exclusive enclave? Of course! the Beast concluded, energetically endorsing his own supposition.

In which case, the UFO would have zoomed first to New

York City, to pick up the Scarlet Witch and Rogue, then zipped upstate for who knew what, before flying west to intercept the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier over the great state of Montana. Then, and only then, its felonious scavenger hunt completed, would the UFO have returned to its home berth—wherever that might be.

So, he silently asked the empty conference room, given the trajectories reported by Nick Fury’s assiduous agents, from whence did the UFO come and to where was it homeward bound?

He did the calculations in his head first, then scribbled with a pencil over the napkins left behind by the sandwiches he had consumed. “Oh, my stars and garters!” he exclaimed, lifting the spectacles from his nose to peer at the surprising results with his naked eyes.

His hypothesis had yielded two probable locations for the launching pad of the busy UFO, and hence the Leader’s secluded abode: downtown Duluth, Minnesota. Or the moon.

The former hardly fit the Leader’s modus operandi, but the moon ... ! You could hardly get more remote than that. The Beast somersaulted across the table, clapping his feet together in glee. Intuitively, he knew he had arrived at the truth. The Leader was on the moon!

And so, presumably, were Wanda and Rogue.

He bounded from the table, eager to share his epiphany with his fellow X-Men and Avengers. But just as his sasquatch-sized soles smacked against the floor, within easy reach of the communications console, a seismic jolt vibrated the very walls of the venerable mansion.

An earthquake—in Manhattan? he marveled, before hearing ponderous footsteps stomping up the stairs from the foyer below. The Beast gulped nervously. Please, he be-seeched the fickle Fates, let this merely be our old friend Hercules, with a bit too much wine in him.

Instead a monumental green figure filled the doorway, casting a shadow the size of a lunar eclipse. Carmen continued to play, reaching its violent climax as Don Jose stalked the streets of Seville, driven to hot-blooded murder while the roar of the corridia provided a sanguinary accompaniment.

“Hulk?” the Beast asked uncertainly. Every one of his bushy blue bristles seemed to be standing on end. “What are you doing here? Where are the others?”

“Identified: mutant designate: Beast,” the jade giant stated implacably. He stepped into the conference room, rattling the floor with his heavy tread. ‘ ‘Threat assessment: minimal. Immediate priority: termination.”

Carmen screamed her last aria. The Beast knew exactly how she felt.

Chapter Ten

The sun was rising over Muir Island as Iron Man inspected the stiff, unmoving form of the Doc Samson-Sentinel. A pretty good likeness, he decided, all the more impressive when you consider all the nasty surprises they built into this baby.

Thanks to some super-powered teamwork, the third floor laboratory of the Genetic Research Centre no longer looked like the interior of an old-fashioned icebox. The Hulk, not surprisingly, had declined to help out at all, instead slouching against the butchered Cray and shooting dirty looks at Wolverine. The irritated brute had yet to forgive the Canadian X-Man for letting his mechanical doppleganger escape the island.

Iron Man regretted letting one of the Gamma Sentinels get away, too, but bowed to the inevitable. These things happened; he’d be lying if he said he snagged the bad guy every time himself. Sometimes you just had to be satisfied with chasing a dangerous felon off before too many innocents got hurt.

We’ll catch up with that Sentinel eventually, Iron Man resolved. How long could a mechanical Hulk remain hidden anyway?

Speaking of blameless people getting hurt, Nightcrawler limped toward Iron Man, an aluminum crutch under his right shoulder. Dr. MacTaggert had already applied a cast around the blue-furred mutant’s fractured ankle and given Nightcrawler something for the pain. Despite his injury, the hobbled X-Man seemed in admirably good spirits. Is that the painkillers, Iron Man wondered, or just his natural personality?

“Mein gott, that thing is realistic,” Nightcrawler said of the Doc Samson-Sentinel, “although not nearly as ugly as the mechanical Abomination that chased me around downstairs.” He poked the inert figure with his tail. “Ach, I think I liked it better when a Sentinel looked like a Sentinel. At least you always knew where you stood.”

Iron Man recalled that the Abomination-Sentinel still rested lifelessly at the bottom of the pit the Hulk-Sentinel had tom through the floor. Given that the armored Avenger was the strongest person present, excluding the steadfastly uncooperative Hulk, Iron Man realized he’d have to personally retrieve the mock Abomination from the basement before returning the damaged Gamma Sentinels to S.H.I.E.L.D., where they would promptly become Nick Fury’s problem.

First, though, he wanted to take a closer look at Doc Samson-Sentinel’s internal mechanisms. Technically, that was probably classified technology, but Iron Man felt he had a right to know just how much of it was lifted from Tony Stark’s patented research and inventions. Lord knows, he thought, it wouldn’t be the first time those cloak-and-dagger types at S.H.I.E.L.D. had twisted my own discoveries to dubious ends.

“Excuse me,” he said to Nightcrawler, gesturing for the German mutant to step away from the Sentinel while Iron Man subjected it to an exploratory scan along the entire electromagnetic spectrum. His multipurpose sensor beam radiated from his chest projector, probing beneath the Sentinel’s crimson uniform and synthetic skin for vital data, such as the composition of the various alloys composing the Sentinel, the structure of its cybernetic nervous system, the amount of available memory in its central processor, its primary and secondary operating systems, and so on. He was both amused and distressed, but more the latter than the former, to discover that the sophisticated microcircuitry maintaining the Sentinel’s artificial intelligence bore a suspicious resemblance to his own ground-breaking HOMER technology, otherwise known as a Heuristically-Operative Matrix-Emulation Rostrum. I think Tony Stark needs to have some serious words with the bigwigs at S.H.I.E.L.D., after we ’ve taken care of the Leader.

A dense layer of lead shielding enclosed the portable gamma reactor that theoretically provided the Gamma Sentinels with the atomic energy that powered them. Turning his most sensitive instrumentation upon the reaction chamber, which was located, with a fine sense of verisimilitude, just where Doc Samson’s heart would be, Iron Man expected to find the reactor shut down entirely, its radioactive isotopes cooling into unreactive slag.

Instead he registered a gamma spike of over 500 kilo-electron volts—and climbing. “Good Lord!” he exclaimed, the shock in his voice catching the attention of every human, mutant, and gamma-spawned behemoth in the demolished laboratory.

“What is it, my friend?” Storm asked him, soaring over the open pit to join Iron Man and Nightcrawler by the supposedly inactive Sentinel. The breeze her flight generated blew bits of shattered plaster and circuitry across the lab. “Is there something wrong?”

“You could say that,” Iron Man said tensely. He rapidly recalibrated his instruments, but the results were no better. The gamma emissions coming from the Sentinel’s interior had already increased 32 percent. Within the shielded heart of the robot, he realized, electrons and positrons were colliding at a geometric rate, annihilating each other in subatomic reactions that spewed out quantities of gamma radiation proportional to the mass of each electron destroyed. The discharged radiation subsequently energized more electrons and positrons, leading to further collisions, resulting in yet more unleashed gamma rays. “It’s a chain reaction building inside the Gamma Sentinel,” he said to the others, his hushed voice struggling to convey the magnitude of what his sensors were recording. He stepped back from the Doc Samson robot duplicate, knowing all the while that he wasn’t getting nearly far enough away to survive what was coming.

On the other side of the lab, Moira MacTaggert hastily waved a handheld radiation sensor over the feathered remains of the Harpy-Sentinel. “Iron Man,” she called to him desperately, “I’m pickin’ up a gamma surge, too. Over 600 keV and heatin’ up fast!”

The same thing must be happening inside the third Sentinel as well, Iron Man guessed. The Abomination in the basement. He clicked off his sensor beam as the full horror of his inadvertent discovery sunk in.

“They’re not just Sentinels!” he announced to the X-Men and their associates. “They’re walking, talking Gamma Bombs—programmed to detonate upon defeat!” That got even the Hulk’s attention. ...

To be continued. ..