The Ultimate X-Men (5 page)

“It’s over. Shut him down.”

Slowly the blurring of possibility faded, leaving Phoenix alone in her own mind once more. And with the lessening

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of that psychic din, the sound of other minds that was a normal part of Jean Grey’s daily existence became audible once more.

The sense of deadly purpose from the craft hovering above her was unmistakable.

She looked upward through the trees, and instinctively stepped away from David Ferris. When she used her powers against the helicopter, she didn’t want him fried by the backlash.

“Shut him down.
” She shook her head at the weird doubling effect of hearing the words and hearing someone hear them. Where were Scott and the others?

Then the helicopter fired, and she had her answer.

The bolt was as instantaneous as light and as colorless as air: a carbon-dioxide laser, enabled for only one shot. Not really that powerful—it wouldn’t even have slowed Rogue down—but powerful enough. There wasn’t even time for a scream.

As an X-Man, Phoenix had seen death too many times to count, but murder never lost its power to horrify her with its very casualness. At the same moment that the laser pulse reduced David Ferris and all his spectrum of possibility to a smear of greasy ash, Phoenix launched herself skyward. Intent on the copter and its cargo, she barely registered the reappearance of the other X-Men or the reestablishment of the psychic rapport that allowed her to brief them in the space of a heartbeat on what she’d gleaned from David Ferris’s mind.

It seemed wrong that it was still afternoon, still summer. To live so many different lives should have taken more time than this. But that didn’t matter now. She was nearly there.

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WMDFRFIH LIFE

The skin of the helicopter was so close that her outstretched fingertips almost skimmed it, and Iceman and Archangel were only a second or so behind her. She’d tear the helicopter apart; they could catch the passengers. A maneuver the teams had rehearsed a thousand times in every possible combination of heroes.

But Ashton and Keithley—and their faceless masters— had other ideas, and the black budget toys to implement them.

The ultrasonic whine of the warp-gate enabling skirled up past the range that bats and dogs could hear, crossed the threshold of pain, and vanished into the hydrogen song of space. The skin of the black copter began to crackle with heat as its fusion generator ran flat-out, powering up for Jump. The amount of energy that had to be wasted into the environment when space-time was folded made the warp-gate of very little use except as a last resort.

Or a weapon.

She felt the radiant heat of the helicopter’s skin on her hands and face, and intuition deep as instinct made Phoenix recoil.
It’s a trap!
she cried mentally, just as the chase copter gave up its local space-time referents in an incandescent pulse of energy.

The shock wave gathered Phoenix into its superheated embrace and flung her backward. Protected from physical harm by her telekinesis, she nonetheless crashed through Bobby’s already-melting ice bridge, sending him flying as

THE UlTinATE X-HEH

well. Disoriented, she couldn’t see where her teammates were, or even be sure in which direction the ground lay.

But Phoenix had shielded Archangel from the brunt of the explosion. With less than five seconds to intercept both his teammates before they hit the ground, Warren spread his wings wide, angling each pinion for maximum drag as he surfed the wave of sweltering air, and reached out to snatch Iceman’s falling body out of the sky.

One.

Reaching out with the blind instinct of a seasoned aer-ialist, Bobby grabbed Warren’s reaching hand.

Two.

Muscles and wings both creaked with the strain of absorbing the momentum of Bobby’s helpless plunge, and in a moment more both men would fall.

But the air was Archangel’s element.

Three.

“Heads up, Hank—catch!” he shouted. Using Bobby’s own momentum, Archangel made his own body a fulcrum to swing his teammate over and down into the Beast’s waiting arms.

Four.

Converting the braking maneuver into a forward glide, he slid forward with a raptor’s casual grace to intercept Phoenix’s falling body less than a dozen feet above the ground, carrying her safely to earth.

Five.

Down and safe.

“It’s
wonderful
to have wings,” Archangel said fervently. He straightened out of his landing crouch, setting Jean Grey

lightly on her feet. She smiled at him and reached up to brush back a stray curl of blond hair from his forehead.

“I know,” she said gently.

“How come I end up with you and Warren gets the girl?” Iceman complained to the Beast.

“Because, Robert m’lad, some things never change,” Henry McCoy said absently. He set Iceman down and stepped back, staring skyward with a frown and absently brushing melting frost from his coat. He looked toward Cyclops, brows raised in puzzlement.

Scott Summers glanced at his watch. It was a quarter after three; less than five minutes had elapsed since Archangel had gone to investigate a peculiar noise.

And then. . .

And then
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Cyclops looked around, but as far as he could see and hear, the threat was over. He allowed himself to relax slightly; Bobby and the others were all right. None of his team killed
—this time,
the ever-present fear reminded him—no one captured, no one hurt. As fights went, that was the best the X-Men could expect these days. The only definite casualty of the engagement was one might-be innocent man, the so-called Wheel of Fortune.

The faint wail of a siren in the distance warned that the alarms and excursions at the mansion on Greymalkin Lane hadn’t gone unremarked by the citizens of Salem Center.

“Just another Pleasant Valley Sunday,” Archangel said derisively. “Business as usual for the X-Men, the Hard-Luck Harrys of the super hero trade.”

Scott Summers glanced toward the edge of the trees,

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where the only evidence that anything had happened at all was one splintered tree and a charred spot on the ground.

No. Not the only evidence,
Scott corrected himself. With a profound sense of unreality, he stared at the swimming pool, now located inexplicably at the foot of the terrace. The water was liquid—had Bobby really fallen into it, or had that been some bizarre sort of hallucination? He shook his head in bafflement.

“Come on, team, let’s take this inside before the authorities come looking.” He turned his back on the unaccountable swimming pool and started up the steps. The others followed as he opened the French doors and went into the house.

The welcoming quiet of the mansion’s interior told Scott that any alarms triggered by the intruder hadn’t disturbed the mansion’s other inhabitants. The flash had been visible for miles, though, which meant he’d better have some kind of an explanation ready for any of the teams that were heading home because of it.

“What the hell
was
that?” Bobby Drake demanded indignantly, breaking into Scott’s thoughts. “Another nutty government agency? A crazed multinational? Girl Scouts?”

“We’ll probably never know,” Cyclops answered. “Go and change, Bobby,” he added out of habit.

“Not if we’re lucky,” Iceman muttered under his breath. He headed for the stairs to find his room and a change of clothes.

The other four looked at each other.

“It’s a strange world,” Archangel said finally. The words sounded hollow even as he spoke them.

“Maybe,” the Beast answered, as if Warren had said more than he had, “but it’s a wonderful life.”

STILLBORN IN THE HIST

Dean Wesley Smith

Illustration by Ralph Reese

The swirling mist off the Mississippi gripped the narrow streets of the French Quarter in a deadly blanket of silence as her body was dumped out onto the black, damp cobblestone like so much garbage. The last of her blood dripped from the slash across her neck, adding only slighdy to the bloodstain on her white prom dress.

She rolled once, ending up against the shallow curb, eyes open, staring unseeing up at the moss- and vine-covered buildings around her.

“Hurry,” a hoarse whisper said from the driver’s seat of the black insides of the dented old Caddie.

“Done,” another voice from the black interior said. “Go.”

The rear door on the passenger side of the old car slammed, sending a hollow echo down the narrow street. Then, tires spinning on the damp surface, the car fishtailed forward, disappearing into the mist like a fleeing ghost, leaving behind only the echo of its passing.

The mist swirled in the faint light over the young woman, closing down over her white face and dress as if trying to protect her from being seen in the night. Only the blue orchid corsage still pinned to her new dress marked her location like a flower on a grave.

Two blocks away Remy LeBeau walked almost aimlessly through the mist, not seeming even to notice the pre-dawn night around him. His long brown raincoat was pulled tight across his chest, the collar up as if protecting his neck from unseen rain. A black headband held the long, unruly brown hair out of his face. A lit cigarette drooped from his lips, the orange glow of the ember giving his face sharp, deep

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shadows. In his left hand he carried a long staff, using it almost as a cane.

His eyes seemed blank, as if he were walking the street at a different time. In a sense, he was doing just that. He was living the time of his youth. The time of his marriage. The time of his banishment from this, his hometown.

The memories of those days swirled around him, mixing with the mist, filling the streets and buildings with his past life. This was his first night back in New Orleans in a very long while, and he wasn’t sure why he was even here now. Somehow, he just knew he was needed here. Over the years he had learned to trust that feeling.

So now he walked in the mist through the streets of the Quarter in the hours just before sunrise, the only time
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ever was truly quiet, thinking of the past, of his life as it had been, and paying very little attention to the present.

Suddenly he stopped and glanced around. A few blocks to his right a group of drunk tourists on Bourbon Street laughed too loudly, sending echoes of their party through the sleeping Quarter. Otherwise, the streets were empty.

Yet suddenly the present called to him, pulling him from his memories of his wife and his family. He didn’t know how, exactly, but he knew something was happening.

He turned away from the tourists and toward the edge of the quarter where it was bordered by the projects. At a fast run he followed his instincts, his raincoat flapping behind him like wings.

It was only moments before he found her.

“Oh, no,
chere,”
he said, kneeling beside her.

He ignored the gash across her neck and gently picked

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up her head, looking into her open, staring eyes. Again his memories took over and he went back to the moment he’d last seen those eyes, beaming from the radiant face of a sixteen-year-old girl standing beside her father while they waited to board a plane back to New Orleans.

Cornelia Hayward, daughter of Julian Hayward, the most powerful man in New Orleans, and one of the ten most powerful people in the country. Rumors were that he controlled the powers of the night, as well as the businesses of the day. Even the assassins’ and the thieves’ guilds didn’t cross Hayward and he in turn left them alone. But Remy knew him and had helped him a number of times.

That day in the airport Remy had taken Cornelia’s hand and kissed the back of it, and she had almost blushed. Her father had smiled and shaken Remy’s hand. He had invited Remy to visit, even though he knew Remy was an outlaw in his own hometown.

Remy would never have guessed he had been drawn back here because of Cornelia.

As if picking up a rag doll, he lifted Cornelia’s thin young body from the damp street. Her head started to roll back, exposing the huge slash across her neck, and he quickly braced her head against his arm, making her seem more like a lover passed out from too much drink.

He didn’t know how, but some way he needed to get her to her father. Hayward owned a large home in the Garden District, near where Remy used to have a home. A home he had hoped to settle in with his wife. A home he lost when he lost his city.

“Put her down, LeBeau,” a voice said from behind him.

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He spun and again her head lolled back, showing the huge gash.

His hand under her quickly grasped the cards in his coat pocket and waited as a figure stepped from the shadows of a courtyard door.

Remy almost staggered back as the face of the intruder came into the faint light.

Julian Hayward stopped a few feet from Remy, never taking his gaze from the Cajun X-Man.