The Ultimate X-Men (22 page)

Then came the day Professor Charles Xavier came to Ororo’s African home and persuaded her to use her mutant powers to benefit all humanity. Xavier, a mutant himself, had used his telepathic abilities, technological expertise, and diplomatic skills to found the X-Men—a group of mutant heroes whose mission was to find and protect emerging young mutants from prejudiced humans, and to educate the mutants in the proper control and use of their powers, so that they would be a danger neither to themselves nor anyone else.

Ororo agreed to accompany Xavier back to her native New York. There she was given the code name “Storm” and enlisted in the X-Men. Over the years, she and her teammates had many adventures, and saved the lives of countless humans and mutants. Eventually, the X-Men lineup grew, changed, and split into subteams. The latest spin-off team was called Generation X, a group of younger mutants under the tutelage of Sean Cassidy and Emma Frost. It was to this latest X-team that the mutant firecracker Jubilation Lee was assigned.

“. . . not like I exactly
asked
to come along, y’know,” Jubilee’s still-whining voice penetrated Storm’s reminiscenses, as the two women emerged from the far side of the bazaar and turned toward the Corniche, Cairo’s traffic-clogged main avenue. “ ‘It’ll be good for you to get away for a few days,’ ’’Jubilee quoted Emma Frost, while doing a passable impersonation of the blonde leader’s icy tone,

“ Aye, ’t’will at that, darlin’, good experience f’r ya,’ ” Jubilee continued her solo conversation, now imitating Cassidy’s thick Irish brogue. Then, switching to her own Valley Girl singsong accent: “Yeah, like I can’t figure out that you

THE ULTinm Mtffl

and die rest of Gen X just want this spaz out of your hair for a few days. Not
too
obvious ...”

“Jubilee, stop acting like Oliver Stone,” Storm chided her gently. “There’s no conspiracy here,”

Jubilee’s eyebrows shot up in mock surprise. “Whoa, reality check—was that a semihip pop-culture reference? From
you?”

“See? I
have
been in America too long.” Storm smiled. She could see their hotel in the distance, not more than ten blocks away. “Almost there now, Jubilation.”

“Jubilation is
right”
Jubilee grumbled, hoisting her bags to a more comfortable position, blowing sweat-drenched hair out of her eyes, and pressing on. “Can’t believe we didn’t get a taxi, had to hoof it right through Body Odor Central, get my wallet picked, you showin’ off your powers, swear I never should’ve let myself get talked into . .

Storm found herself tuning Jubilee out again, as the sights of the Corniche evoked other, more recent—and more disturbing—memories. The previous week, Storm had received a letter from her childhood pickpocket friend Alia Taymur. Years earlier, the two girls had been semiregular partners in crime; one would cause a distraction, while the other picked the tourists’ pockets clean. Both had escaped the life of crime before it consumed them. Storm had graduated first to goddess, then to full-fledged heroine. Alia had gone back to school and become a prominent Egyptian mathematician.

But the letter Storm had received via Federal Express wasn’t from a dignified, reserved mathematician, it was from the frightened little girl Ororo remembered from her childhood.
Ororo, please come back to Cairo. Meet me at our old secret

cache, next Friday at 9 p.m. I need your help. I can’t do this alone —Alia

The thirty-story Cairo International Hotel loomed large above Storm and Jubilee as they approached its revolving doors. “You see, Jubilee?” Ororo said. “We survived.”

“Aces,” Jubilee moaned, limping up the steps while stubbornly refusing to let the bellboy help her with her luggage. “Now, if we can only find a toilet I don’t have to hover over . . .”

It would be wrong to say he saw them enter the city, check into the hotel, unpack their bags. Or that he saw them at all.

No, he simply sensed two new variables entering the equation; strange attractors invisibly pulling the data in a new direction. He felt the numbers changing, the future shifting.
Everything is numbers,
he reminded himself.
Reality is math. Nothing is random. There are no accidents.

Damian Sharpe breathed shallowly, blinked sweat from his eyes, and tried to stay focused on his meditation. But standard perception of reality kept penetrating. It was too small in here, not at all comfortable.

Of course it’s uncomfortable,
he nearly blurted to himself
It’s a damn tomb!

He blinked again, found himself coming out of the trance. The candles had burned about halfway down, and outside the sunlight was fading fast. Staying in his cross-legged yoga position, Sharpe looked down at the ancient Egyptian tomb’s stone floor. Carefully arranged around him were the nine artifacts he’d worked so long and hard to gather. Six years of scamming university research grants, tracking down talismans, translating ancient glyphs, learning incantations, studying chaos theory .
. .

lit illTIHATE X-HtH

//e
stood at the brink of impossibility itself, grasping at science so advanced it seemed like magic, and effectively
was
magic. Practicing ancient spells that bridged the gap between science and the supernatural. Decrypting the work of mathematicians who used chaos theory over two thousand years before Western science even noticed or named it.

What it came down to was simply this: all things are predictable, if you know the initial conditions and understand physics to an infinite degree. Everything that seems random is just the interaction of so many variables that we can’t keep track of them, so we write them off as being random. But they ’re not. And he who can keep track of all the variables can predict the future with one hundred percent accuracy.

Predict the future—and control it.

Sharpe sighed and began meditating again, trying to achieve affinity with the nine chaos talismans. Their power, though hobbled by the lack of the tenth and final artifact, was still great. And soon, very soon, he would use the combined power of the nine to locate and retrieve the tenth.

Once the two new variables were factored out of the equation, of course . . .

“Thank God the concept of a bath is universal,” Jubilee sighed from the hotel bathroom.

“Glad you’re enjoying it,” Storm called back while finishing her unpacking.

“Totally,” Jubilee replied, blowing bubbles across the bathwater’s gently undulating surface. Then, realizing she might not be the only person feeling the need for cleanliness after their midafternoon trek, she added, “Hey, you waiting for the tub?”

“No, you relax,” Storm told Jubilee almost absentmind-edly, as she closed her bureau drawer, then looked out their tenth-floor window at the darkening Egyptian sky. Cairo, the Jewel of the Nile, was starting to glisten as, one by one, city lights were turned on. “I want to feel like a native right now,” Storm continued, as much to Jubilee as to herself.

“Well, you’re sure gonna smell like one,” Jubes whispered, but Storm’s acute hearing picked up on it. She was too distracted to chide the youth on her manners, however; Jubilee was deep in the throes of culture shock, and Ororo knew she w
^r
as secretly loving every minute.

Besides, Ororo’s mind was otherwise occupied. The original note from Alia was disturbing enough, and the message left at the hotel’s front desk—in which Alia had mysteriously changed tonight’s meeting time and place—only added to Storm’s uneasiness.

But there was something else too. Something
wrong
out there. Waiting. Watching. And, most of all, calculating.

Ororo knew she wouldn’t get any answers sitting around the hotel room for the next three hours, waiting for the rendezvous with Alia. And she wanted more information before she walked right into what might turn out to be some kind of trap.

“Jubilation, I’m going to go out and get some air,” she called out. “I’ll bring something back for dinner, and then we can meet up with Alia.”

“Fine by me,” Jubilee called back as Storm headed for the door. “Don’t drink the water.”

Storm chuckled, then left Jubilation to relax in the tub.

* * *

THE ULTIMATE Ml EH

Ororo walked out into the rapidly cooling Egyptian air, watching the sky turn a hundred shades of red, orange, blue, and purple as the sun mercifully withdrew, giving the desert city some respite from the day’s searing heat.

She wished she could fully appreciate the sunset’s beauty, but that strange feeling of wrongness was growing more intense, almost as if it w
^r
ere watching her. There was a coldness to it, the kind of razor-sharp logic and order you feel when confronted by a dizzying mathematical equation you can’t solve.

Mathematics
—was it Alia herself who was the threat? That hadn’t even occurred to Storm until she arrived at the hotel, and felt the bizarre oppressiveness of the city. She’d never experienced anything like it before, and barely even understood why she associated these feelings with numbers.

But Cairo had changed little since she last called it home, at least in the important ways. Ororo still knew where to go to get the word on the street, without getting her throat slit. She had been more than capable of taking care of herself as a gawky street urchin; now, returned as a virtual goddess, Storm knew the city’s secrets would soon reveal themselves to her probing eyes, one way or another.

She ducked into a dark alley. . . .

Towels aren’t too shabby, either,
Jubilee silently admitted to herself as she pulled a comfortable oversized sweatshirt over her black tights and hung the fluffy white hotel towel up to dry.
This place is starting to look up.

She flopped onto one of the queen-sized beds, fearing the worst—and finding herself once again pleasantly surprised by the mattress’s enveloping softness. “This’ll be

ORDER EROH CMOS

murder on my back,” she muttered to herself, her face halfburied in a pillow. “But that’s what vacation’s all about, right?”

It was starting to feel like a proper vacation, too, instead of the hellish obligatory field trip Jubilee had thought it was going to be. She almost wished the rest of Generation X were here so they could all do a way-cool night on the town. . . . But she knew was too tired for that, anyway.

Noticing the old-fashioned-looking television remote control on the bed table, Jubilee rolled over lazily and grabbed it, turning on the small TV across the room. “Foreign TV—cool,” she told herself, until she realized that there were only five channels, and they were all in Arabic. “My best friend in the whole wide world, turned against me,” she sighed, turning the TV off and rolling again onto her back. “Maybe I’ll see if there’re any cute guys . . . down . . . stairs. ...” Her voice trailed off as the long day’s journey and jet lag caught up with her, and she dropped off to sleep.

At first Jubilee thought the buzzing was her alarm clock. Through a fog of half-sleep, she reached over to the night table, and began her usual ritual of flopping her hand around until the offending noise stopped. She knocked the TV remote onto the floor, smacked the phone, and banged her hand into the bedside lamp. But the buzzing was coming from the other direction.

Then Jubilee remembered that her alarm clock was over five thousand miles away.

Her sticky eyelids blinked reluctantly open as she turned to see what was making the buzzing, crackling noise. It

THE ULTIMATE X-HCH

seemed to be coming from outside, or from near the window. But she didn’t see anything there. Jubilee wondered if maybe there were an electrical short-circuit in one of the walls, or—

Her eyes caught movement. Sitting up, she kept her gaze focused on the window. The air was undulating, crackling,
moving.
Like the heat distortion she’d seen in the desert from the jet, or like the kind of fluid distortion you might observe underwater.

It was moving toward her.

Flowing through the cracks in the multipaned window, the boundaries of its amorphous form were now becoming clearer to Jubilee. It was like the thing from that old
Blob
movie, except that it was nearly invisible and hovering in the air. The crackling noise it made was definitely getting closer. Tendrils of the thing reached toward Jubilee, who scrambled to get off the bed while grabbing for the phone.

She suddenly felt a sharp stinging sensation on her lower right leg, and yelped as she instinctively pulled away and fell onto the floor, with the phone falling on top of her. “Help!” Jubilee screamed into the phone receiver, not waiting for the front desk to pick up. She saw that the skin on her leg where the tendril had touched her had exploded outward, as if a microscopic firecracker had been implanted under her skin and detonated.

“Firecrackers, huh?” she asked herself as she watched the thing still pulling itself through the spaces between the window panes, still reaching for her. “Two can play at that game, Sparky,” she answered herself, pointing at the bizarre phantom and letting her mutant ability handle the rest.

Bursts of brightly colored energy shot from her out-

stretched hand and exploded in and around the faceless thing. Jubilee was used to seeing the bright flashes of her infamous “energy plasmoids”—they’d saved her skin on more than one occasion—but right now the dazzling display was making it hard to see what (if any) effect her attack had had on the creature.

“Hello?” the front desk clerk’s voice came through on the phone, in heavily accented English. “What is going on up there?”

“Your freakin’ see-through curtains are tryin’ to eat me, dude!” Jubilee yelled back into the mouthpiece, ceasing fire and trying to see if the phantom was still there. “If you’ve got cops in this town, you better send for ’em, pronto!”

The confused clerk started asking more questions, but Jubilee had stopped listening as she let the receiver drop to the carpeted floor. The barely discernible phantom had been blown into several chunks by her onslaught of “fireworks”—and now they were all converging on her!