Back to Gatefold#18 - "Civil Unrest - Part VI"
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EDITOR'S NOTE: This story may contain scenes of graphic violence and sexual situations. It is recommended for mature readers.
In Case You're Just Joining Us: In response to The Fallen Angels' kidnapping of the French prime minister, France sends a fleet of warships armed with nuclear weapons to Genosha. Meanwhile, the Magistrates--with the help of Hardcase and his mercenary Harriers--begin a suicide run against the mutants of Hammer Bay so that their families can flee to the African mainland. When Magneto begins killing Magistrates, he quickly learns that they had inside help from one of his lieutenants, Shatterstar. At the end of last issue, Magneto had executed Shatterstar far above the streets of Hammer Bay.
""Put down that weapon or we'll all be gone,
You can't hide nowhere with the torchlight on,
And it happens to be an emergency,
Some things aren't meant to be,
Some things don't come for free."
- Midnight Oil, Put Down That Weapon
"All I'm sayin' is, alla us better be ready to go out there and fight if it comes down to it. And you know it might."
The woman with six eyes--two of which were in the normal places, with the other four scattered across her forehead and cheeks--shook her head at her friend as they strolled down the first floor corridor of Avalon Tower in Genosha's Hammer Bay. They could smell the smoke from the smoldering remains of the Magda Gardens drifting in from outside, and even though the fighting had tapered off, they could still hear the occasional gunshot. "And what could I do out there, Viggo? Perhaps one of them would be willing to engage me in a staring contest..."
"Well, you'll just have to pick up a gun," Viggo replied, cracking his knuckles. "Alla us will. Look at me. I mean, the mutant ability to determine the precise weight of anything I lay my eyes on ain't gonna be much help on a battlefield."
"You sound eager."
"Are you kiddin'? Hell no, I'm just tryin' to psyche myself up!"
"Well, I wouldn't worry too much about it. It sounds like the fighting's almost done out there, and--"
There was a hollow funt, and the eye on the woman's right cheek vanished just before the left side of her face blew outward in dozens of bloody fragments. Viggo stared at her as she went down, her blood covering his face, dripping into his eyes and his gaping mouth, and then he caught just a glimpse of a door left ajar, and a shoe-blackened gun barrel sticking out of it.
And then Viggo's life was torn away as well.
The sniper lowered his weapon and gestured to two of the men standing behind him. They pushed the door the rest of the way open, and stepped out into the hall, each of them pointing their weapons in opposite directions. After a moment, they gave hand signals, and the sniper--an aging Muslim man with a long white beard--emerged from the basement stairwell he'd fired from, followed by four more black-garbed men. The men all formed up on the sniper, and they began moving quickly and decisively toward another stairwell.
The Magistrates had infiltrated Avalon Tower.
The mercenary known as Shotgun shielded his eyes from the sun as the final convoy of trucks pulled up to the edge of the cliff. He was an American, a Texas boy born and bred, and he supposed that made him a bit of an optimist--the Lone Star State didn't breed people who didn't think they were going to win. Still, even he could hardly believe they'd managed to ferry nearly 2,500 civilians across Genosha without being spotted or taken out by mutant commandos.
Beside him, Ranger said, "Why's Blindside hanging out of the truck?"
Shotgun frowned, squinting through his heavy bifocals. The others Harriers joked that the reason he used a shotgun was because he was too damn blind to aim anything else, and that was almost true. It was another couple seconds before he saw Bobbi Chase, aka Blindside, hanging off the passenger side of the lead truck and waving.
"Uh oh," he said. Then, after a moment's thought, he added, "Shit on a stick."
"You got a way with words, hermano."
Blindside was off the truck before it had stopped, not stumbling or even breaking stride as she hit the ground and began sprinting toward them.
"Get the others!" she was saying. "We have to get these trucks unloaded immediately!"
Shotgun turned without a word and moved back toward the cliff to get the others, but Ranger put a hand out. "Whoa, whoa, Blindside. What's going on? If something's wrong, why didn't you radio ahead?"
"That's just it: I tried. They're jamming our signal. I was sure I'd get here and find you all dead. Come on, we don't have time for this, Jesus! Help me get these refugees unloaded!"
Ranger nodded and moved to do as she'd said. Shotgun had already disappeared down the side of the cliff and apparently he'd already told the others to get ready, because Warhawk rose into view over the edge of the cliff.
"Others are on their way," Tom Nakadai said, guiding his jetpack down until he was hovering several feet above Blindside's head.
"Are there refugees in the water?"
"Yes, we've been sending them out in small groups all day. I been running out every couple hours to check on their progress and everything's kosher so far, but they're strung out between here and the mainland in those rafts o'--"
There was a tremendous flash of light from behind them, back in the direction of the idling convoy. Blindside whirled, and just caught a glimpse of a roaring platoon of mutants, their powers flashing from their fists, their eyes, their pores, as they rumbled out of a teleportational hole ripped in the midday air.
And then the truck closest to them, the one she'd stepped off of barely a minute ago, exploded. Two dozen civilians died instantly, their cries drowned by the roar of combusting fuel and tearing metal, and Blindside was hurled from her feet by the concussion.
For a moment, everything went black.
When the world came back into view, and the soundtrack whirred back up to full speed again, she saw a sprinting line of magistrate refugees from the trucks that hadn't been incinerated, moving swiftly past her in the direction of the cliff. She saw her fellow Harriers--Ranger in the lead, followed by Shotgun, Lifeline, Piston, and Timebomb--running in the opposite direction, eager to meet the enemy and deflect them if they could. Blindside shook her head, hearing it ring, and knowing she was concussed. She looked around.
Tom Nakadai, Warhawk, was lying on the ground beside her. Rather, his head was, the dead eyes looking at her blankly while the jetpack--following its last given command--kept his decapitated body hovering two meters above the ground. He'd been hit by shrapnel.
"Oh Tom," Blindside breathed. She reached over, still a little dazed, and closed his eyes. Then she stood shakily and, combat and destruction raging about her, tried to figure out how she was going to get that jetpack.
Magneto, Lord of Genosha, watched the limp, mangled body of one of his most trusted lieutenants tumble out of the air. Shatterstar turned over once, twice, and then hit the shattered street below with something that sounded too much like a wet splat to leave any room for argument on whether the boy was still alive or not. From far away, Magnus heard a mournful cry of "NOOO!", but that may have just been his imagination.
The fighting in the streets was almost finished. The raiding magistrates had managed to kill a large number of the mutants living in Hammer Bay, but the humans had never really had any chance at all. They were too badly outnumbered, by a populace that was fighting for its homes and its families rather than vengeance or an ideal. And yet, they wouldn't even have accomplished as much as they had if not for Shatterstar. If not for his treason. For a moment, Magneto regretted not being able to learn why the boy had done what he'd done. But only for a moment. Betrayal was the one unforgivable sin in the mind of Erik Lehnsherr, and he would not abide by it, nor entertain its rationalizations.
He heard the cry of "NO!" again, and looked downward. Another of his lieutenants, Rictor, was sprinting down the mangled street toward Shatterstar's body. How deeply did the treason run, Magneto wondered. Were Rictor and his cohorts in the Fallen Angels all guilty here? Had he been mistaken in trying to convert Xavier's flock to his cause? He reached out a hand, intent on bringing Rictor up here to discuss the matter.
"Magneto!"
He turned, but not quite fast enough. An inkspill star in the shape of a man rocketed out of the smoke-filled sky and slammed him down and backwards. He just managed to get a shield of magnetized ions up, turning an impact that would have equaled what he'd done to Shatterstar into merely a bruising one. He and the black star arrowed downward and smashed through the side of a decrepit building.
"Jesus, Bobby," the girl known only as Chance muttered, watching her friend and the man she'd sworn fealty to fall out of the sky together. She'd seen Magneto kill Shatterstar, and she'd been stunned enough to agree to amp Bobby's powers in his attack on the man, but now, circling above the scene in the Fallen Angels' shuttle, she wondered what she would do if Sunspot killed Magneto. She'd already seen, in China, what Bobby's powers could do when her own amplifying gift got behind them, after all. And what if she was making a mistake? They didn't know why Mags had killed Shatterstar yet. Hell, Chance didn't even know the guy, and--
A chunk of brick and masonry the size of a Volkswagen Beetle shot upward from the place where Bobby and Magneto had punched through the building. Chance had time to yell "Shit!" and yank the stick to the side, but the shuttle was skimming too low to get out of the way in time. The brick tore through the left wing, and alarms started flashing all across her boards.
Shitshitshit!" She checked her indicators. She was going down, and the only chance she had of walking away from it was getting the damn shuttle out of the city before it happened. The closest spot without buildings was the harbor, so she pulled the stick to the right, and the craft began to describe a slow, clumsy circle. When she was pointed in the right direction, she babied it into a straight heading again, and double-checked her restraints.
"Sorry Bobby," she breathed as the craft continued to descend toward the water, "you're on your own."
Magneto slammed through three floors and two interior walls before hitting a surface that resisted his forward momentum. The ground floor of the building he found himself in had been a shambles before his arrival, but now it was ready to come down around his ears. Rubble and dust sifted downward and the entire structure seemed to groan as the man regained his feet. Sunspot, who had released him as soon as they'd punched through the exterior wall, descended through the hole Magneto had made.
Magneto resisted the urge to crush the boy like a flea. He had lost too many of his people today as it was, and if there was any chance the rest of the Fallen Angels weren't involved in Shatterstar's treason...
"You killed him! Why, damn you? Why do you always destroy?"
"Roberto, listen to me," Magneto said, and just in case the boy wasn't prepared to do so, ripped a chunk of concrete laced through with metal pipes and conduit out of the floor at his feet. He hurled it in Sunspot's direction.
Sunspot dodged it easily, despite the arm that hung uselessly in a sling on his right side, and gave it no more thought as it sailed through the building on its collision course with Chance's shuttle. "No, never mind," he said. "I don't care."
He hit Magneto with an amplified solar blast, and the master of magnetism was driven backwards, through the first floor wall of the building and back out onto the empty street. He bounced once, skidded, and finally came to a halt on the opposite sidewalk.
"Sunspot," he said, pushing himself up on one arm, astonished to find that his lip was bleeding. "I am rapidly losing my patience with you."
"What about me, you murdering pendejo?"
Magneto looked around, though he hardly had to. He knew the voice as soon as he heard it, and understood what was coming a moment later.
In the months since his recruitment by Magneto, Rictor had refined his abilities to the point where he no longer needed solid matter to conduct seismic waves. He could create reverberatory walls of pressure in the very air itself. But when he was shooting for maximum destructive power, nothing beat having a nice stretch of pavement to transmit his powers through.
Rictor had his hands on the street Magneto was currently lying prone in, and even as Erik Lehnsherr noted this, the entire city seemed to shift upward and to either side. The nearby buildings, already damaged by the recent urban warfare, began to come down immediately. Magneto barely had time to rise to his feet before he was buried in tons upon tons of debris.
Rictor rose to his feet, dusting his hands off.
"Rictor!"
He turned, and saw Bobby rocketing toward him in Sunspot form. He nodded once as his friend came in for a landing.
"Shatterstar's dead," Bobby said. It wasn't a question.
Rictor nodded and looked back in the direction he'd come from, where Shatterstar's body lay mangled in this filthy street. "Shit, 'Star. I'm sorry. That did you no good at all, amigo."
"Nor did it do you any."
Rictor and Sunspot whirled, and saw Magneto emerging from the small mountain of rubble he'd been buried beneath. He had lost his helmet in the melee, and a line of blood was stitched across his aging forehead.
"I got this," Rictor said, and slapped his hands to the pavement. The street began to shake again.
And then, abruptly, it stopped.
Magneto had raised a hand, palm down, and the street had obeyed. It had stopped shaking.
"You control seismic vibrations, Julio. But I am master of one of the four fundamental forces. If I tell these structures to be still, they will be still."
Rictor was straining, still pumping his power into the street, and still nothing was happening. Roberto fired a solar blast in Magneto's direction and the man deflected it with his other hand.
"Yield, Julio."
"Bite me!" Rictor cried. And then he screamed as his power, stymied in the direction it had been ordered to flow, fed back into him. He was flung backwards half a block, and was already unconscious by the time he landed hard next to Shatterstar.
Roberto launched himself at Magneto, solar blasts punching through the air, but his progress was halted by a wall of rock that suddenly ripped itself up directly in his path. He tore through it, his solar-powered strength protecting him from the worst of the impact, but his injured shoulder and arm took the brunt and the pain was too intense for him to stay aloft. He corkscrewed briefly, then crashed into the rubble at Magneto's feet.
He lay there for a moment, trying to gather his wits and get his limbs working again, but the cacophony of pain from his arm was too much. He couldn't concentrate, couldn't even scream out his agony. Not surprisingly, his lord and master didn't give him time to recover. Magnetic fingers wound about him, into him, lifting him by the iron in his blood and the metal on his uniform, first into a standing position and then several feet into the air.
"Now Robert," Magneto said. "You will listen to me boy. Or you will see Shatterstar again sooner than you would like."
Carmella Unuscione stood up, one hand on the frame of the hospital bed. Her head was spinning, and when she touched a finger to the sides of her crushed nose, she received a jolt of pain that convinced her to leave it be.
Sunspot was gone, of course. She'd come here, hoping to kill the bastard in his hospital bed--kind of a gift to herself, a way to kick off the revolution. But then his bull-dyke girlfriend Chance had shown up and negated Carmella's powers and beaten her down. Then she'd gotten DaCosta away from here. And judging from the sounds of combat and the screams of the dying filtering into the medical center from outside, it seemed Unuscione's allies had since started the revolution without her.
Another time then. As much as she hated the punk, there were much more important things than DaCosta to take care of. She had assisted the magistrates in planning this attack on Hammer Bay, had helped them plant their bombs, all for the greater good of seeing Magneto dethroned, and the only slightly lesser good of seeing those who had worshipped him in vain rise to power. She wasn't particularly concerned about the magistrates--those flatscans could be dealt with at her leisure--but the rest of the Acolytes would need her leadership if they were going to make a run at Magneto.
Slowly, Carmella began to move down the length of the hospital ward, toward the sounds of war.
The Marx Theater and Playhouse had stood for decades in Genosha's capital city of Hammer Bay. Once it had been at the very center of the city's culture and nightlife, offering an assortment of international productions from the relatively obscure to the universally popular. It had not fared well, however, in the years since the outlaw band of mutants called the X-Men had first helped to topple the country's mutant-enslaving regime. The rapid succession of governments that followed were never in power long enough to re-establish the theater (nor much of anything, if truth be told), and while Magneto had held sway over the country far longer than the failed leaders that had preceded him, the Playhouse had been somewhat less of a priority to the man than supplying food, running water, and reliable power to his people.
And now it would never become a priority. Because with a crackling boom of incandescent electrical power, half the building was separated into its component atoms and blown outward over the city.
In the middle of that ball of power, Siena Blaze laughed and repelled another wave of the mutants who had once been known as Magneto's Acolytes. Lightning from the electromagnetic storm that surrounded her flashed out, reducing many of them to ash. And still they came at her, though none had managed to so much as touch her yet.
An electrified whip came out of nowhere, and Siena vaporized it before its tip had come within twenty feet of her. Then she reached down its length and killed its wielder. A curtain of flame descended on her, and she tore it and its creator apart.
Reveling in the full glory of her power and her unfractured personality for the first time in months, Siena continued to laugh. And the Acolytes continued to die.
Magistrate Talib Singh Chauhan gestured to the black-clad men behind him and, as one, they pressed themselves against the wall of the corridor. They had been lucky so far, managing to penetrate most of the way up the building undetected. Their blood was hot, and to a man, they wanted nothing more than to run pell-mell down these corridors, spraying bullets and mutant blood wherever they went. But their countrymen were out on the streets of Hammer Bay, dying to give them this chance to stop Magneto once and for all. They couldn't be careless with the chance they were being given.
Talib, an aging Muslim man with a long beard and old tired eyes, peeked around the corner they were stopped at. Their objective was somewhere on the top three floors of Avalon Tower and, while he would have preferred their mole had given them something a little more definite than that, they would just have to make do with the information they had.
Unfortunately, that necessitated exposing themselves like this as they searched the floors room by room. There weren't many mutants left in the building, particularly on these uppermost floors, but the magistrates had still had to silence three stragglers before they could sound an alarm.
He raised a hand toward his men without looking back, and swept it sharply forward. Move, that gesture said, and do it fast.
The men detached from the wall and moved quickly across the T-intersection while Talib covered them. They were almost done with this floor, but it had taken them almost twenty minutes. They couldn't afford to squander that much time on the next two floors. Perhaps if he split them up...
There was a scream, and it took a heartbeat for Talib to realize it was coming from one of his men. He swung his eyes up, and saw one of the black-clad men he'd brought here wailing in disbelief and agony at the cleanly severed stumps of his right and left arms. Talib looked past the maimed magistrate, and saw a young black man charging down the corridor toward the others. His hands were splayed out in front of him, and Talib could just make out the tiny glints of fluorescent light off the thin, nearly-invisible lines of filament trailing out of the tips of each of the young man's fingers. His body and naked chest were hatchmarked with thin scars, presumably from the filaments. As Talib was still processing all this, one of the lines flashed out and sliced another magistrate's stomach open. Blood and split intestine spilled out onto the pristine tile floor, and that one didn't even have a chance to scream.
"Gitchoo!" the young man was crying. "Razorwire gonna gitchoo, flatscan Nazi fucks!"
Talib's remaining four subordinates were stumbling backward, away from the charging mutant. Gunfire rang out as they sprayed the hallway in what seemed like a perfect circle around the mutant, but not one bullet hit its mark. One magistrate had the presence of mind to go for the negator launcher slung over his shoulder, but he was fumbling, and there was no way he would get it into position before the mutant sliced his head off.
Coolly, Talib raised his M-16, allowed himself half a second to aim, and fired once. The round punched through the mutant's right palm, slamming him to a halt and jerking his arm backwards. He surely would have cried out in pain, but before he could, the razor lines on his right hand whipped backward and sliced his skull into four uneven cuts of flesh and brain. The chunks plopped to the floor, and Razorwire thunked down on top of them.
One of his remaining men leaned over, lifting his mask to vomit, but Talib grabbed him by the back of the neck and flung him down the hallway, back toward the stairwell, before he could.
"Hurry," he said. "They surely know we're here now. We must search the other floors."
The men complied, and Talib allowed himself one regretful glance back toward the two magistrate corpses he was leaving behind before following them.
The Prime Minister of France had dozed off ten, maybe fifteen minutes ago, and Gomi was starting to think he wasn't far behind him. He knew intellectually that falling asleep when there was so little oxygen was tantamount to just rolling over and dying, but it wasn't like he could do anything else about their situation. He'd thought, early on, that if things got really desperate, he'd just use his psychokinesis to try to batter a path through the four floors that were lying on top of this sub-basement--as futile a gesture as that would be--but his head was pounding and his eyelids felt gummy, and he honestly didn't think he could focus enough to try at this point.
He tipped over onto his side, thinking about the man on the other side of the room, and how Gomi had played a part in his imprisonment and ultimately his death. He had wanted to make it right, had wanted to get the prime minister out of here and appeal to Magneto on the Fallen Angels' decision to kidnap him. But that was moot now. They were both going to suffocate. And how much trouble would <i>that</i> cause for Genosha, he wondered.
Gomi allowed his eyes to flutter closed for what seemed like just a moment, but what must have actually been minutes. He opened them again when he heard footsteps.
"Ariel," he said, thumbing his thick glasses further up the bridge of his nose. "How've you been?"
The tall girl dressed in loud primary colors, her hair a bright purple and the lenses of her sunglasses twisted into audacious geometrical shapes, knelt down next to him, touched his cheek briefly, then curled her fingers into the shoulders of his hooded sweatshirt. She was talking, her lips were moving, but Gomi couldn't hear her. In fact, he couldn't hear anything, not even the labored breathing of the prime minister across the room. It was like God had hit the cosmic MUTE button.
She started to pull him by the sweatshirt, lips still moving soundlessly. Gomi tried to get to his feet, but he had no strength left, and so Ariel had to drag him first to the door, then out into the corridor and down to the open stairwell.
Only when he was here did his eyes flutter open for real, dream-Ariel gone and replaced by a blue-shelled lobster named Bill. The crustacean was sitting on Gomi's chest, staring at him with an expression that was equal parts unease and exasperation.
Gomi felt warmth on his forehead, and tilted his face back, looking above and behind him at the narrow tunnel dug through the concrete that had collapsed into the sub-basement stairwell, a tunnel that ended in blue sky and allowed what seemed like all the blessed, cool air in the world to filter down to him.
"Get the--get the prime minister, Bill. Get him out here. Hurry."
Bill thumped Gomi's chest once with his big claws, then scampered down onto the floor and hurried toward the room he'd liberated his friend from.
"Why--why did you kill him?"
Magneto's helmet had emerged from the rubble, and was shooting swiftly toward him when Sunspot asked this question. The older mutant raised an eyebrow in Sunspot's direction but, instead of answering, turned and caught the approaching helm. He held it in his hands for a moment, looking at it with his back turned to Sunspot.
"Now you ask me this, Roberto? You ask for parlay now, but not when you were free to attack me?"
He slipped the helmet on and turned to face Sunspot. "Shatterstar betrayed me. He betrayed Genosha."
"I...don't believe that."
"You are not required to believe it. It is fact. He helped the magistrates plant the bombs that have been tearing this city apart all day. He helped plan their ground attack." Magneto gestured, and Roberto's pinioned body moved forward, closer to him. "Was he the only viper in this nest, Roberto? Or does the treason run deeper?"
"What the hell...does that mean?"
"Are you truly devoted to me, or were the Fallen Angels simply a convoluted way to gain my trust? Are you here to serve my dream, or Xavier's?"
Roberto gritted his teeth, breathing steadily through his nostrils and fighting to keep his rage in check. Even through the pain, even through the helplessness, he wanted to reach out and break the old man's neck.
"Do you think...the Angels can just change our minds...go back to Westminster after everything we've done in your name? Do you? Do you have any idea...what we gave up to be here?"
"Gave up?" Magneto laughed. He took a step to the side, and then began to move slowly around Roberto, pacing. "Maria was imprisoned for matricide before I liberated her. Shatterstar was directionless, unsure of his origins or his attachments. Tabitha had been spurned by her lover. Julio was literally doing nothing. And you..."
He had circled back around to Roberto's front again, and paused, standing close enough to feel the boy's hot breath on his face. "You were so torn by jealousy over Sam Guthrie's achievements that you couldn't abide to be near him any longer."
"That's--that's bullshit..."
Magneto's eyebrows went up again. "Really? I think not. You've always been envious of Sam, Robert. I knew it from the day I took over as headmaster of Xavier's all those years ago, I knew it on the day I left. Do you remember that day, what I said to you?"
Sunspot scowled. Of course he remembered. There hadn't been a day he hadn't thought about it since he'd agreed to become one of Magneto's soldiers. Years ago, when there had still been a New Mutants, and Roberto had been best friends with Sam Guthrie, and they had all just lost a friend and teammate named Doug Ramsey, and the Xavier School had been destroyed by Mister Sinister, Magneto had turned his back on Xavier's dream and abandoned the New Mutants in order to serve full-time with the Hellfire Club. He had told them that they were free to join him, and when Roberto had railed against him, he had told Roberto that he would be the first.
And years later, Magneto had turned out to be right.
Sunlight pierced the clouds of smoke overhead and glinted off of Magneto's helmet as he leaned closer. "I'm going to ask you one more time, Robert--and I want you to think carefully before you answer: Have you betrayed me?"
As terrible as she felt about it, Blindside had to stand on top of Warhawk's severed head, driving his neck stump into the soft earth below, in order to snag the man's ankle and drag him and the jetpack he was wearing to the ground. She deactivated the pack manually, slipped Warhawk's corpse out of the harness, and laid it down gently next to his head. Then she slipped the pack over her own shoulders and fired it up.
A moment later, she was soaring over the battlefield, weapon out and tucked in the crook of one arm. She wasn't half as good with the flight gear as Tom had been, and the concussion she'd suffered wasn't making the going any easier, but judging from the sight below her, she wasn't going to get much chance to recover.
The Harriers had dug in behind a small rise, with the cliff at their backs, and were presently returning fire from the attacking mutants. Most of the refugees had managed to reach the cliff, though she saw three or four dead bodies marking a trail from the trucks to the land's edge.
Blindside dodged a column of white flame that flashed by on her right, and dropped down to where her fellow soldiers were holding the line.
Things were bad. Andrei--strong-as-a-bull Piston--was covered in what looked like electrical burns, and was jittering in the grass, half-conscious, while Lifeline worked to stabilize him. Ranger, Shotgun, and Timebomb were forcing the approaching mutants to slow their headlong charge--fortunately, none of them seemed to be bulletproof--but at the moment that was all they could do.
"My God, Blindside," Timebomb said, his French accent coming out in spades in this time of stress, making his words almost unintelligible. "You're bleeding."
"We all are," she said, firing off a few rounds. Then as an afterthought she added, "Tom's dead."
"I gathered as much," he replied, eyeing the jetpack.
"Bobbi!" Ranger had shimmied closer to her, still keeping his gun trained out onto the field, where the mutants were still moving, close to the ground now. "They're chewing us to pieces! But there aren't very many of 'em, and they don't seem to have any fliers. If you could get in the air, take some of Timebomb's ordnance with you..."
"Good idea." She looked around at Timebomb. "Hook me up, Louis?"
Timebomb opened his mouth to reply, perhaps to point out that he was a little too busy shooting to put together any explosives, when the discussion was interrupted by the triumphant hooting of Shotgun.
"I got one!" he said, pumping his gun one-handed and returning it to his enormous shoulder. "And he ain't gettin' back up unless his mutant power involves growin' a new hea--"
There was a flash of light immediately behind Shotgun, and when it cleared, it took Blindside a moment to understand what she was looking at. Shotgun had simply...vanished from the waist down, along with a semi-circular chunk of the ground he'd been stretched out across. The big man got a puzzled look on his face, craned his neck around, and a stringy wad of gut and blood slumped out of the stump of his torso at the movement. Lifeline was already duckwalking toward him, shouting empty words of encouragement, but Shotgun said, "Oh..." and expired in the grass before the medic could reach him.
"Fuck! What the fuck was that?"
"Teleporter," Blindside said, oddly calm. Maybe it was the concussion, but she welcomed the sudden serenity that tamped down her own panic, the panic she could see in Ranger's and Timebomb's eyes. Four of them left now, with Hardcase and 'Axe clear on the other side of the island. "Could be Amelia Voght."
"Fuck!" Ranger repeated, and began hosing the enemy line with his rifle.
Blindside put a hand on Timebomb's shoulder. "No time for bullshit, Louis. Give me the biggest fucking boomer you got."
Timebomb nodded at her, then rolled over onto his back and began plucking parts out of his specially insulated jacket. Blindside fired over the rise while he put his bomb together.
Vice-Admiral LaPointe of the French Navy stood on the bridge of his flagship and watched Genosha burn from the dubious safety of Hammer Bay.
<"Sir,"> his first officer said, <"the last of the fleet have entered the bay. They await your orders.">
<"Tell them to stand fast,"> he said.
<"Sir?">
LaPointe turned a cocked eyebrow on his subordinate.
<"Sir, if I may speak plainly...why aren't we attacking? This would seem to be the perfect moment, with all the hostilities in the capital. If we threw our lot in with the magistrates...">
The commander smiled a small, mysterious smile. <"Then we would die along with them."> He was quiet for a moment, and then, <"Tell me, were you ever interested in magic as a child? The work of Houdini perhaps?">
<"I--I guess so, sir.">
<"Then you understand that the most important part of any successful magic trick is misdirection. And if there is one thing this operation most certainly is, it is magic.">
The younger officer shook his head, baffled. LaPointe simply continued to smile.
The tunnel widened as they climbed higher, and Gomi began to suspect that Bill had had some help when he'd first started digging through what was left of the embassy. For some reason, that help had vanished before Bill had reached the sub-basement, because, when Gomi at last pulled himself up into the open air, there was no one near the wreckage of the embassy. Located on the edge of Hammer Bay as it was, Gomi could see the smoke rising from the Magda Gardens and from the commerce district from where he stood, and he could see the warships arrayed in the harbor. He could even hear the occasional gunshot or scream, but for the most part there was an eerie calm settled over the city, and Gomi knew what it was without being told and without ever having experienced such a thing. It was the quiet shock that inevitably follows an awful lot of death and bloodshed.
Gomi heard the rattle of careful footsteps on loose concrete behind him, and turned. The Prime Minister was making his way up the tunnel, exhausted but alive. It had been a tighter squeeze for him, but he'd cleared the tunnel, and was now stepping carefully up the makeshift ramp. Gomi moved to help him, and a moment later they were standing side-by-side--French politician and New York street urchin--on top of the ruins of the embassy, watching Hammer Bay smolder.
"Those are French ships," the older man said matter-of-factly, pointing toward the harbor.
Gomi nodded. He'd figured as much. "Come on then. We're going to have to go all the way around the city if we want to get you to the water without being seen."
The Prime Minister turned a surprised look on him. "Then you still intend to let me go." Gomi shrugged, and began moving down the side of the rubble, toward the street. The PM followed close behind, and Bill scuttled in-between them. "You realize that this doesn't change my stance on my country's mutant registration act."
Gomi didn't answer right away. When the three of them had reached the street, he turned and said, "I'm sorry I threatened your family when we first met. I shouldn't have done that, regardless of what I was told. And if it makes you feel any better, it was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do."
The prime minister was taken aback by this. He simply nodded.
"But when you seek to register mutants, when you set your country on the road to that kind of persecution, you're threatening my family. Do you see? I may be human, but everyone I love on this world is a mutant. Even Bill here." He nudged the blue-shelled lobster with his toe, and Bill snapped at him. "Think about th--"
There was the crack of a gunshot, and the left side of Gomi's chest seemed to explode. The boy took two stumbling steps forward, fell into the Prime Minister's arms and looked up at him with eyes that seemed as big as silver dollars behind his thick glasses. Then he slowly slid down the politician's front, leaving a wide slick of fresh blood down the man's dirty, rumpled suit.
The Prime Minister was speechless. He stood there for a moment, looking at the boy and the pool of thick blood spreading like oil beneath his prone form.
A hand was on the Prime Minister's arm. A large, black hand belonging to a large, black man. He looked up from the impossible amount of blood flowing out of Gomi and saw that the hand was missing its first two fingers, and that the injury was recent, as the fresh bandages around it were spotted with dried blood.
"Mr. Prime Minister," a new voice said, and this wasn't the black man, but another--this one white-skinned and older--standing behind the first. It was immediately obvious, though neither of them were wearing rank on their fatigues, that this older man was in charge. "My name is Sgt. Major Malone. You can call me Hardcase. We've been ordered to exfiltrate you, sir. Nick Fury sends his regards."
The prime minister was almost too stunned to talk. "Fury?" he finally managed to sputter. "SHIELD?"
"The one and only. You're lucky we happened to be in-country on another contract op for the UN. Now if you please, we have to hurry..."
The hand on his arm tightened, and the black giant began to pull him away, but then there was a click-<i>snap</i> from below, and the black man began to scream.
"Axe!" Hardcase shouted, and moved forward, bringing his rifle up and pulling the Prime Minister away from the toppling giant. At their feet, a largish blue lobster stood, its eyestalks narrowed in fury as its crusher and pincher claws flexed against the air. Laying on the ground next to one of these claws was one of the black man's feet, severed clean from his leg at the ankle. As the prime minister was still digesting this, the crustacean leaped toward the fallen mercenary to finish the job.
"Goddamnit," Hardcase said, and held the trigger down on his rifle.
Bill the Lobster was cybernetically-enhanced, and while this didn't make him in any way impervious to a hail of automatic gunfire, his shell was a great deal tougher than the average lobster's. He lifted his big claws to protect his eyes and abdomen and stood his ground as the bullets punched against his exoskeleton, cracking it and blasting chunks free in places. Hardcase held the trigger down for half a minute, and when he finished, great pink swatches of lobster flesh showed through Bill's fractured shell.
"Christ, bulletproof lobster," Hardcase hissed. He could have kept firing, but whatever the thing was, it was too hurt to come after them anymore, and he didn't want to waste the bullets or risk drawing attention to themselves by prolonging the gunfire. He shouldered his weapon and pulled the PM back well out of the crustacean's range. Then he knelt down, told 'Axe to shut it, and quickly applied a field tourniquet to the man's bleeding stump.
Bill stumbled backwards, his eyes for once glazed rather than angry. He didn't notice Hardcase plucking the severed foot up and dropping it into a pouch on his uniform, didn't note him helping the big man, 'Axe, to stand, and certainly didn't get a look at the French Prime Minister, looking back at Gomi with something like remorse partially numbed by shock. In fact, Bill was in so much pain that he forgot the bipeds were there at all until they were long gone.
When he came back to himself, he turned and regarded his friend, still bleeding from his chest. Bill couldn't tell if Gomi was still breathing or not. He thought it likely that he wasn't--lack of exoskeletons made bipeds remarkably fragile creatures--but he wasn't about to gamble on it.
With his cracked, nearly shattered claws, Bill clamped onto Gomi's sweatshirt and, somehow, found the strength to begin dragging his friend toward the city.
"I never betrayed you," Roberto hissed. "And neither did Shatterstar. You're just looking for a scapegoat."
Magneto's eyes narrowed dangerously. He raised a hand threateningly in the boy's direction, but that didn't stop him.
"Everything that happened here today, all the death, is on your head, Magneto. All of it. And you know it."
"That's preposterous. I routed the magistrates almost singlehandedly."
"Sure...after they'd leveled most of the city and killed half the mutants here. Damnit...you can't have it both ways."
"What are you talking about?"
"This," Roberto whipped his head to the side, to indicate the city. "You want to build a mutant utopia, so you make concessions to the UN, you build embassies. And all the while, you tell us to terrorize humans wherever we can. That's why this happened, because you can't decide whether you want to be Magneto or Charles Xavier!"
Magneto's lip curled in a snarl. There was a beat of silence, pregnant with anticipation, and then he closed his hand.
Roberto screamed as all the blood in his body came to a halt. His heart continued to pump, but no new blood was entering the organ, and the outgoing paths were filling up, expanding his vessels until they were near ready to burst.
Magneto released his fist, and Roberto's blood began to flow again. The boy gasped, and Magneto turned from him.
"Do you know what the difference between myself and Charles was, Roberto? As much as he squandered in his life, Charles never understood loss. Not really. That is why I have always been hesitant to simply destroy his X-Men, and he never thought twice about taking away what is mine." He waved a hand, and the magnetic hooks that had been holding Sunspot aloft released, dropping him to the rubble. "And it is why I'm not going to kill you now."
"Didn't...didn't stop you from...killing Shatterstar..."
"No it did not. And that should tell you something about his crimes, shouldn't it?" Magneto turned, crossing his arms behind his back. "Now go. And never set foot on Genoshan soil again."
"Where is it?"
Magistrate Talib Singh Chauhan was wondering the same thing, but didn't take the time to tell his subordinate this. They had lost another man since the altercation with Razorwire--not bad considering they'd killed half a dozen mutants in the same space of time, but still far from acceptable. They were down to four now, and they still had one more floor to search.
Talib raced up the stairwell to the top floor of the tower, wrenching the door open and making only a cursory inspection of the hallway before plunging out into it. His men were on the edge of panic, beginning to lose sight of their goal, and even he was beginning to wonder if they'd been had. He <i>knew</i> the transfer equipment they were looking for existed, but he wondered if their source had perhaps not been as truthful as he'd believed.
This line of thought led him to his other informant, Shatterstar, and what he'd been forced to do to the boy. He turned away from that.
Talib gave his hand signals, splitting them up into two teams to take opposite ends of the corridor. The four men divided into twos and began to move in opposite directions.
Talib's team had made it halfway down their stretch of corridor, with nothing to show for their efforts but a succession of empty rooms, when Talib felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. Something was wrong. He turned.
The other team was nowhere to be seen, but several doors stood open in the direction they'd gone. Probably they were searching one of those rooms.
His partner gave him a look, and Talib nodded. The younger man kicked the next door open and the two of them moved in, visually sweeping the room. It was definitely a laboratory of some sort. Monitoring equipment lined the walls and, in the center of the room, was a large circular platform with two shining metal pillars thrusting vertically out of opposite sides. Talib knew what it was instantly.
"I don't believe it," his partner said. "I'd almost begun to think--"
"Yes," the older man said. "But there it is. The machine Magneto used to transfer his power recently." He shouldered his rifle and moved forward. It was exactly as it had been.
In Case You're Just Joining Us: In response to The Fallen Angels' kidnapping of the French prime minister, France sends a fleet of warships armed with nuclear weapons to Genosha. Meanwhile, the Magistrates--with the help of Hardcase and his mercenary Harriers--begin a suicide run against the mutants of Hammer Bay so that their families can flee to the African mainland. When Magneto begins killing Magistrates, he quickly learns that they had inside help from one of his lieutenants, Shatterstar. At the end of last issue, Magneto had executed Shatterstar far above the streets of Hammer Bay.
""Put down that weapon or we'll all be gone,
You can't hide nowhere with the torchlight on,
And it happens to be an emergency,
Some things aren't meant to be,
Some things don't come for free."
- Midnight Oil, Put Down That Weapon
"All I'm sayin' is, alla us better be ready to go out there and fight if it comes down to it. And you know it might."
The woman with six eyes--two of which were in the normal places, with the other four scattered across her forehead and cheeks--shook her head at her friend as they strolled down the first floor corridor of Avalon Tower in Genosha's Hammer Bay. They could smell the smoke from the smoldering remains of the Magda Gardens drifting in from outside, and even though the fighting had tapered off, they could still hear the occasional gunshot. "And what could I do out there, Viggo? Perhaps one of them would be willing to engage me in a staring contest..."
"Well, you'll just have to pick up a gun," Viggo replied, cracking his knuckles. "Alla us will. Look at me. I mean, the mutant ability to determine the precise weight of anything I lay my eyes on ain't gonna be much help on a battlefield."
"You sound eager."
"Are you kiddin'? Hell no, I'm just tryin' to psyche myself up!"
"Well, I wouldn't worry too much about it. It sounds like the fighting's almost done out there, and--"
There was a hollow funt, and the eye on the woman's right cheek vanished just before the left side of her face blew outward in dozens of bloody fragments. Viggo stared at her as she went down, her blood covering his face, dripping into his eyes and his gaping mouth, and then he caught just a glimpse of a door left ajar, and a shoe-blackened gun barrel sticking out of it.
And then Viggo's life was torn away as well.
The sniper lowered his weapon and gestured to two of the men standing behind him. They pushed the door the rest of the way open, and stepped out into the hall, each of them pointing their weapons in opposite directions. After a moment, they gave hand signals, and the sniper--an aging Muslim man with a long white beard--emerged from the basement stairwell he'd fired from, followed by four more black-garbed men. The men all formed up on the sniper, and they began moving quickly and decisively toward another stairwell.
The Magistrates had infiltrated Avalon Tower.
The mercenary known as Shotgun shielded his eyes from the sun as the final convoy of trucks pulled up to the edge of the cliff. He was an American, a Texas boy born and bred, and he supposed that made him a bit of an optimist--the Lone Star State didn't breed people who didn't think they were going to win. Still, even he could hardly believe they'd managed to ferry nearly 2,500 civilians across Genosha without being spotted or taken out by mutant commandos.
Beside him, Ranger said, "Why's Blindside hanging out of the truck?"
Shotgun frowned, squinting through his heavy bifocals. The others Harriers joked that the reason he used a shotgun was because he was too damn blind to aim anything else, and that was almost true. It was another couple seconds before he saw Bobbi Chase, aka Blindside, hanging off the passenger side of the lead truck and waving.
"Uh oh," he said. Then, after a moment's thought, he added, "Shit on a stick."
"You got a way with words, hermano."
Blindside was off the truck before it had stopped, not stumbling or even breaking stride as she hit the ground and began sprinting toward them.
"Get the others!" she was saying. "We have to get these trucks unloaded immediately!"
Shotgun turned without a word and moved back toward the cliff to get the others, but Ranger put a hand out. "Whoa, whoa, Blindside. What's going on? If something's wrong, why didn't you radio ahead?"
"That's just it: I tried. They're jamming our signal. I was sure I'd get here and find you all dead. Come on, we don't have time for this, Jesus! Help me get these refugees unloaded!"
Ranger nodded and moved to do as she'd said. Shotgun had already disappeared down the side of the cliff and apparently he'd already told the others to get ready, because Warhawk rose into view over the edge of the cliff.
"Others are on their way," Tom Nakadai said, guiding his jetpack down until he was hovering several feet above Blindside's head.
"Are there refugees in the water?"
"Yes, we've been sending them out in small groups all day. I been running out every couple hours to check on their progress and everything's kosher so far, but they're strung out between here and the mainland in those rafts o'--"
There was a tremendous flash of light from behind them, back in the direction of the idling convoy. Blindside whirled, and just caught a glimpse of a roaring platoon of mutants, their powers flashing from their fists, their eyes, their pores, as they rumbled out of a teleportational hole ripped in the midday air.
And then the truck closest to them, the one she'd stepped off of barely a minute ago, exploded. Two dozen civilians died instantly, their cries drowned by the roar of combusting fuel and tearing metal, and Blindside was hurled from her feet by the concussion.
For a moment, everything went black.
When the world came back into view, and the soundtrack whirred back up to full speed again, she saw a sprinting line of magistrate refugees from the trucks that hadn't been incinerated, moving swiftly past her in the direction of the cliff. She saw her fellow Harriers--Ranger in the lead, followed by Shotgun, Lifeline, Piston, and Timebomb--running in the opposite direction, eager to meet the enemy and deflect them if they could. Blindside shook her head, hearing it ring, and knowing she was concussed. She looked around.
Tom Nakadai, Warhawk, was lying on the ground beside her. Rather, his head was, the dead eyes looking at her blankly while the jetpack--following its last given command--kept his decapitated body hovering two meters above the ground. He'd been hit by shrapnel.
"Oh Tom," Blindside breathed. She reached over, still a little dazed, and closed his eyes. Then she stood shakily and, combat and destruction raging about her, tried to figure out how she was going to get that jetpack.
Magneto, Lord of Genosha, watched the limp, mangled body of one of his most trusted lieutenants tumble out of the air. Shatterstar turned over once, twice, and then hit the shattered street below with something that sounded too much like a wet splat to leave any room for argument on whether the boy was still alive or not. From far away, Magnus heard a mournful cry of "NOOO!", but that may have just been his imagination.
The fighting in the streets was almost finished. The raiding magistrates had managed to kill a large number of the mutants living in Hammer Bay, but the humans had never really had any chance at all. They were too badly outnumbered, by a populace that was fighting for its homes and its families rather than vengeance or an ideal. And yet, they wouldn't even have accomplished as much as they had if not for Shatterstar. If not for his treason. For a moment, Magneto regretted not being able to learn why the boy had done what he'd done. But only for a moment. Betrayal was the one unforgivable sin in the mind of Erik Lehnsherr, and he would not abide by it, nor entertain its rationalizations.
He heard the cry of "NO!" again, and looked downward. Another of his lieutenants, Rictor, was sprinting down the mangled street toward Shatterstar's body. How deeply did the treason run, Magneto wondered. Were Rictor and his cohorts in the Fallen Angels all guilty here? Had he been mistaken in trying to convert Xavier's flock to his cause? He reached out a hand, intent on bringing Rictor up here to discuss the matter.
"Magneto!"
He turned, but not quite fast enough. An inkspill star in the shape of a man rocketed out of the smoke-filled sky and slammed him down and backwards. He just managed to get a shield of magnetized ions up, turning an impact that would have equaled what he'd done to Shatterstar into merely a bruising one. He and the black star arrowed downward and smashed through the side of a decrepit building.
"Jesus, Bobby," the girl known only as Chance muttered, watching her friend and the man she'd sworn fealty to fall out of the sky together. She'd seen Magneto kill Shatterstar, and she'd been stunned enough to agree to amp Bobby's powers in his attack on the man, but now, circling above the scene in the Fallen Angels' shuttle, she wondered what she would do if Sunspot killed Magneto. She'd already seen, in China, what Bobby's powers could do when her own amplifying gift got behind them, after all. And what if she was making a mistake? They didn't know why Mags had killed Shatterstar yet. Hell, Chance didn't even know the guy, and--
A chunk of brick and masonry the size of a Volkswagen Beetle shot upward from the place where Bobby and Magneto had punched through the building. Chance had time to yell "Shit!" and yank the stick to the side, but the shuttle was skimming too low to get out of the way in time. The brick tore through the left wing, and alarms started flashing all across her boards.
Shitshitshit!" She checked her indicators. She was going down, and the only chance she had of walking away from it was getting the damn shuttle out of the city before it happened. The closest spot without buildings was the harbor, so she pulled the stick to the right, and the craft began to describe a slow, clumsy circle. When she was pointed in the right direction, she babied it into a straight heading again, and double-checked her restraints.
"Sorry Bobby," she breathed as the craft continued to descend toward the water, "you're on your own."
Magneto slammed through three floors and two interior walls before hitting a surface that resisted his forward momentum. The ground floor of the building he found himself in had been a shambles before his arrival, but now it was ready to come down around his ears. Rubble and dust sifted downward and the entire structure seemed to groan as the man regained his feet. Sunspot, who had released him as soon as they'd punched through the exterior wall, descended through the hole Magneto had made.
Magneto resisted the urge to crush the boy like a flea. He had lost too many of his people today as it was, and if there was any chance the rest of the Fallen Angels weren't involved in Shatterstar's treason...
"You killed him! Why, damn you? Why do you always destroy?"
"Roberto, listen to me," Magneto said, and just in case the boy wasn't prepared to do so, ripped a chunk of concrete laced through with metal pipes and conduit out of the floor at his feet. He hurled it in Sunspot's direction.
Sunspot dodged it easily, despite the arm that hung uselessly in a sling on his right side, and gave it no more thought as it sailed through the building on its collision course with Chance's shuttle. "No, never mind," he said. "I don't care."
He hit Magneto with an amplified solar blast, and the master of magnetism was driven backwards, through the first floor wall of the building and back out onto the empty street. He bounced once, skidded, and finally came to a halt on the opposite sidewalk.
"Sunspot," he said, pushing himself up on one arm, astonished to find that his lip was bleeding. "I am rapidly losing my patience with you."
"What about me, you murdering pendejo?"
Magneto looked around, though he hardly had to. He knew the voice as soon as he heard it, and understood what was coming a moment later.
In the months since his recruitment by Magneto, Rictor had refined his abilities to the point where he no longer needed solid matter to conduct seismic waves. He could create reverberatory walls of pressure in the very air itself. But when he was shooting for maximum destructive power, nothing beat having a nice stretch of pavement to transmit his powers through.
Rictor had his hands on the street Magneto was currently lying prone in, and even as Erik Lehnsherr noted this, the entire city seemed to shift upward and to either side. The nearby buildings, already damaged by the recent urban warfare, began to come down immediately. Magneto barely had time to rise to his feet before he was buried in tons upon tons of debris.
Rictor rose to his feet, dusting his hands off.
"Rictor!"
He turned, and saw Bobby rocketing toward him in Sunspot form. He nodded once as his friend came in for a landing.
"Shatterstar's dead," Bobby said. It wasn't a question.
Rictor nodded and looked back in the direction he'd come from, where Shatterstar's body lay mangled in this filthy street. "Shit, 'Star. I'm sorry. That did you no good at all, amigo."
"Nor did it do you any."
Rictor and Sunspot whirled, and saw Magneto emerging from the small mountain of rubble he'd been buried beneath. He had lost his helmet in the melee, and a line of blood was stitched across his aging forehead.
"I got this," Rictor said, and slapped his hands to the pavement. The street began to shake again.
And then, abruptly, it stopped.
Magneto had raised a hand, palm down, and the street had obeyed. It had stopped shaking.
"You control seismic vibrations, Julio. But I am master of one of the four fundamental forces. If I tell these structures to be still, they will be still."
Rictor was straining, still pumping his power into the street, and still nothing was happening. Roberto fired a solar blast in Magneto's direction and the man deflected it with his other hand.
"Yield, Julio."
"Bite me!" Rictor cried. And then he screamed as his power, stymied in the direction it had been ordered to flow, fed back into him. He was flung backwards half a block, and was already unconscious by the time he landed hard next to Shatterstar.
Roberto launched himself at Magneto, solar blasts punching through the air, but his progress was halted by a wall of rock that suddenly ripped itself up directly in his path. He tore through it, his solar-powered strength protecting him from the worst of the impact, but his injured shoulder and arm took the brunt and the pain was too intense for him to stay aloft. He corkscrewed briefly, then crashed into the rubble at Magneto's feet.
He lay there for a moment, trying to gather his wits and get his limbs working again, but the cacophony of pain from his arm was too much. He couldn't concentrate, couldn't even scream out his agony. Not surprisingly, his lord and master didn't give him time to recover. Magnetic fingers wound about him, into him, lifting him by the iron in his blood and the metal on his uniform, first into a standing position and then several feet into the air.
"Now Robert," Magneto said. "You will listen to me boy. Or you will see Shatterstar again sooner than you would like."
Carmella Unuscione stood up, one hand on the frame of the hospital bed. Her head was spinning, and when she touched a finger to the sides of her crushed nose, she received a jolt of pain that convinced her to leave it be.
Sunspot was gone, of course. She'd come here, hoping to kill the bastard in his hospital bed--kind of a gift to herself, a way to kick off the revolution. But then his bull-dyke girlfriend Chance had shown up and negated Carmella's powers and beaten her down. Then she'd gotten DaCosta away from here. And judging from the sounds of combat and the screams of the dying filtering into the medical center from outside, it seemed Unuscione's allies had since started the revolution without her.
Another time then. As much as she hated the punk, there were much more important things than DaCosta to take care of. She had assisted the magistrates in planning this attack on Hammer Bay, had helped them plant their bombs, all for the greater good of seeing Magneto dethroned, and the only slightly lesser good of seeing those who had worshipped him in vain rise to power. She wasn't particularly concerned about the magistrates--those flatscans could be dealt with at her leisure--but the rest of the Acolytes would need her leadership if they were going to make a run at Magneto.
Slowly, Carmella began to move down the length of the hospital ward, toward the sounds of war.
The Marx Theater and Playhouse had stood for decades in Genosha's capital city of Hammer Bay. Once it had been at the very center of the city's culture and nightlife, offering an assortment of international productions from the relatively obscure to the universally popular. It had not fared well, however, in the years since the outlaw band of mutants called the X-Men had first helped to topple the country's mutant-enslaving regime. The rapid succession of governments that followed were never in power long enough to re-establish the theater (nor much of anything, if truth be told), and while Magneto had held sway over the country far longer than the failed leaders that had preceded him, the Playhouse had been somewhat less of a priority to the man than supplying food, running water, and reliable power to his people.
And now it would never become a priority. Because with a crackling boom of incandescent electrical power, half the building was separated into its component atoms and blown outward over the city.
In the middle of that ball of power, Siena Blaze laughed and repelled another wave of the mutants who had once been known as Magneto's Acolytes. Lightning from the electromagnetic storm that surrounded her flashed out, reducing many of them to ash. And still they came at her, though none had managed to so much as touch her yet.
An electrified whip came out of nowhere, and Siena vaporized it before its tip had come within twenty feet of her. Then she reached down its length and killed its wielder. A curtain of flame descended on her, and she tore it and its creator apart.
Reveling in the full glory of her power and her unfractured personality for the first time in months, Siena continued to laugh. And the Acolytes continued to die.
Magistrate Talib Singh Chauhan gestured to the black-clad men behind him and, as one, they pressed themselves against the wall of the corridor. They had been lucky so far, managing to penetrate most of the way up the building undetected. Their blood was hot, and to a man, they wanted nothing more than to run pell-mell down these corridors, spraying bullets and mutant blood wherever they went. But their countrymen were out on the streets of Hammer Bay, dying to give them this chance to stop Magneto once and for all. They couldn't be careless with the chance they were being given.
Talib, an aging Muslim man with a long beard and old tired eyes, peeked around the corner they were stopped at. Their objective was somewhere on the top three floors of Avalon Tower and, while he would have preferred their mole had given them something a little more definite than that, they would just have to make do with the information they had.
Unfortunately, that necessitated exposing themselves like this as they searched the floors room by room. There weren't many mutants left in the building, particularly on these uppermost floors, but the magistrates had still had to silence three stragglers before they could sound an alarm.
He raised a hand toward his men without looking back, and swept it sharply forward. Move, that gesture said, and do it fast.
The men detached from the wall and moved quickly across the T-intersection while Talib covered them. They were almost done with this floor, but it had taken them almost twenty minutes. They couldn't afford to squander that much time on the next two floors. Perhaps if he split them up...
There was a scream, and it took a heartbeat for Talib to realize it was coming from one of his men. He swung his eyes up, and saw one of the black-clad men he'd brought here wailing in disbelief and agony at the cleanly severed stumps of his right and left arms. Talib looked past the maimed magistrate, and saw a young black man charging down the corridor toward the others. His hands were splayed out in front of him, and Talib could just make out the tiny glints of fluorescent light off the thin, nearly-invisible lines of filament trailing out of the tips of each of the young man's fingers. His body and naked chest were hatchmarked with thin scars, presumably from the filaments. As Talib was still processing all this, one of the lines flashed out and sliced another magistrate's stomach open. Blood and split intestine spilled out onto the pristine tile floor, and that one didn't even have a chance to scream.
"Gitchoo!" the young man was crying. "Razorwire gonna gitchoo, flatscan Nazi fucks!"
Talib's remaining four subordinates were stumbling backward, away from the charging mutant. Gunfire rang out as they sprayed the hallway in what seemed like a perfect circle around the mutant, but not one bullet hit its mark. One magistrate had the presence of mind to go for the negator launcher slung over his shoulder, but he was fumbling, and there was no way he would get it into position before the mutant sliced his head off.
Coolly, Talib raised his M-16, allowed himself half a second to aim, and fired once. The round punched through the mutant's right palm, slamming him to a halt and jerking his arm backwards. He surely would have cried out in pain, but before he could, the razor lines on his right hand whipped backward and sliced his skull into four uneven cuts of flesh and brain. The chunks plopped to the floor, and Razorwire thunked down on top of them.
One of his remaining men leaned over, lifting his mask to vomit, but Talib grabbed him by the back of the neck and flung him down the hallway, back toward the stairwell, before he could.
"Hurry," he said. "They surely know we're here now. We must search the other floors."
The men complied, and Talib allowed himself one regretful glance back toward the two magistrate corpses he was leaving behind before following them.
The Prime Minister of France had dozed off ten, maybe fifteen minutes ago, and Gomi was starting to think he wasn't far behind him. He knew intellectually that falling asleep when there was so little oxygen was tantamount to just rolling over and dying, but it wasn't like he could do anything else about their situation. He'd thought, early on, that if things got really desperate, he'd just use his psychokinesis to try to batter a path through the four floors that were lying on top of this sub-basement--as futile a gesture as that would be--but his head was pounding and his eyelids felt gummy, and he honestly didn't think he could focus enough to try at this point.
He tipped over onto his side, thinking about the man on the other side of the room, and how Gomi had played a part in his imprisonment and ultimately his death. He had wanted to make it right, had wanted to get the prime minister out of here and appeal to Magneto on the Fallen Angels' decision to kidnap him. But that was moot now. They were both going to suffocate. And how much trouble would <i>that</i> cause for Genosha, he wondered.
Gomi allowed his eyes to flutter closed for what seemed like just a moment, but what must have actually been minutes. He opened them again when he heard footsteps.
"Ariel," he said, thumbing his thick glasses further up the bridge of his nose. "How've you been?"
The tall girl dressed in loud primary colors, her hair a bright purple and the lenses of her sunglasses twisted into audacious geometrical shapes, knelt down next to him, touched his cheek briefly, then curled her fingers into the shoulders of his hooded sweatshirt. She was talking, her lips were moving, but Gomi couldn't hear her. In fact, he couldn't hear anything, not even the labored breathing of the prime minister across the room. It was like God had hit the cosmic MUTE button.
She started to pull him by the sweatshirt, lips still moving soundlessly. Gomi tried to get to his feet, but he had no strength left, and so Ariel had to drag him first to the door, then out into the corridor and down to the open stairwell.
Only when he was here did his eyes flutter open for real, dream-Ariel gone and replaced by a blue-shelled lobster named Bill. The crustacean was sitting on Gomi's chest, staring at him with an expression that was equal parts unease and exasperation.
Gomi felt warmth on his forehead, and tilted his face back, looking above and behind him at the narrow tunnel dug through the concrete that had collapsed into the sub-basement stairwell, a tunnel that ended in blue sky and allowed what seemed like all the blessed, cool air in the world to filter down to him.
"Get the--get the prime minister, Bill. Get him out here. Hurry."
Bill thumped Gomi's chest once with his big claws, then scampered down onto the floor and hurried toward the room he'd liberated his friend from.
"Why--why did you kill him?"
Magneto's helmet had emerged from the rubble, and was shooting swiftly toward him when Sunspot asked this question. The older mutant raised an eyebrow in Sunspot's direction but, instead of answering, turned and caught the approaching helm. He held it in his hands for a moment, looking at it with his back turned to Sunspot.
"Now you ask me this, Roberto? You ask for parlay now, but not when you were free to attack me?"
He slipped the helmet on and turned to face Sunspot. "Shatterstar betrayed me. He betrayed Genosha."
"I...don't believe that."
"You are not required to believe it. It is fact. He helped the magistrates plant the bombs that have been tearing this city apart all day. He helped plan their ground attack." Magneto gestured, and Roberto's pinioned body moved forward, closer to him. "Was he the only viper in this nest, Roberto? Or does the treason run deeper?"
"What the hell...does that mean?"
"Are you truly devoted to me, or were the Fallen Angels simply a convoluted way to gain my trust? Are you here to serve my dream, or Xavier's?"
Roberto gritted his teeth, breathing steadily through his nostrils and fighting to keep his rage in check. Even through the pain, even through the helplessness, he wanted to reach out and break the old man's neck.
"Do you think...the Angels can just change our minds...go back to Westminster after everything we've done in your name? Do you? Do you have any idea...what we gave up to be here?"
"Gave up?" Magneto laughed. He took a step to the side, and then began to move slowly around Roberto, pacing. "Maria was imprisoned for matricide before I liberated her. Shatterstar was directionless, unsure of his origins or his attachments. Tabitha had been spurned by her lover. Julio was literally doing nothing. And you..."
He had circled back around to Roberto's front again, and paused, standing close enough to feel the boy's hot breath on his face. "You were so torn by jealousy over Sam Guthrie's achievements that you couldn't abide to be near him any longer."
"That's--that's bullshit..."
Magneto's eyebrows went up again. "Really? I think not. You've always been envious of Sam, Robert. I knew it from the day I took over as headmaster of Xavier's all those years ago, I knew it on the day I left. Do you remember that day, what I said to you?"
Sunspot scowled. Of course he remembered. There hadn't been a day he hadn't thought about it since he'd agreed to become one of Magneto's soldiers. Years ago, when there had still been a New Mutants, and Roberto had been best friends with Sam Guthrie, and they had all just lost a friend and teammate named Doug Ramsey, and the Xavier School had been destroyed by Mister Sinister, Magneto had turned his back on Xavier's dream and abandoned the New Mutants in order to serve full-time with the Hellfire Club. He had told them that they were free to join him, and when Roberto had railed against him, he had told Roberto that he would be the first.
And years later, Magneto had turned out to be right.
Sunlight pierced the clouds of smoke overhead and glinted off of Magneto's helmet as he leaned closer. "I'm going to ask you one more time, Robert--and I want you to think carefully before you answer: Have you betrayed me?"
As terrible as she felt about it, Blindside had to stand on top of Warhawk's severed head, driving his neck stump into the soft earth below, in order to snag the man's ankle and drag him and the jetpack he was wearing to the ground. She deactivated the pack manually, slipped Warhawk's corpse out of the harness, and laid it down gently next to his head. Then she slipped the pack over her own shoulders and fired it up.
A moment later, she was soaring over the battlefield, weapon out and tucked in the crook of one arm. She wasn't half as good with the flight gear as Tom had been, and the concussion she'd suffered wasn't making the going any easier, but judging from the sight below her, she wasn't going to get much chance to recover.
The Harriers had dug in behind a small rise, with the cliff at their backs, and were presently returning fire from the attacking mutants. Most of the refugees had managed to reach the cliff, though she saw three or four dead bodies marking a trail from the trucks to the land's edge.
Blindside dodged a column of white flame that flashed by on her right, and dropped down to where her fellow soldiers were holding the line.
Things were bad. Andrei--strong-as-a-bull Piston--was covered in what looked like electrical burns, and was jittering in the grass, half-conscious, while Lifeline worked to stabilize him. Ranger, Shotgun, and Timebomb were forcing the approaching mutants to slow their headlong charge--fortunately, none of them seemed to be bulletproof--but at the moment that was all they could do.
"My God, Blindside," Timebomb said, his French accent coming out in spades in this time of stress, making his words almost unintelligible. "You're bleeding."
"We all are," she said, firing off a few rounds. Then as an afterthought she added, "Tom's dead."
"I gathered as much," he replied, eyeing the jetpack.
"Bobbi!" Ranger had shimmied closer to her, still keeping his gun trained out onto the field, where the mutants were still moving, close to the ground now. "They're chewing us to pieces! But there aren't very many of 'em, and they don't seem to have any fliers. If you could get in the air, take some of Timebomb's ordnance with you..."
"Good idea." She looked around at Timebomb. "Hook me up, Louis?"
Timebomb opened his mouth to reply, perhaps to point out that he was a little too busy shooting to put together any explosives, when the discussion was interrupted by the triumphant hooting of Shotgun.
"I got one!" he said, pumping his gun one-handed and returning it to his enormous shoulder. "And he ain't gettin' back up unless his mutant power involves growin' a new hea--"
There was a flash of light immediately behind Shotgun, and when it cleared, it took Blindside a moment to understand what she was looking at. Shotgun had simply...vanished from the waist down, along with a semi-circular chunk of the ground he'd been stretched out across. The big man got a puzzled look on his face, craned his neck around, and a stringy wad of gut and blood slumped out of the stump of his torso at the movement. Lifeline was already duckwalking toward him, shouting empty words of encouragement, but Shotgun said, "Oh..." and expired in the grass before the medic could reach him.
"Fuck! What the fuck was that?"
"Teleporter," Blindside said, oddly calm. Maybe it was the concussion, but she welcomed the sudden serenity that tamped down her own panic, the panic she could see in Ranger's and Timebomb's eyes. Four of them left now, with Hardcase and 'Axe clear on the other side of the island. "Could be Amelia Voght."
"Fuck!" Ranger repeated, and began hosing the enemy line with his rifle.
Blindside put a hand on Timebomb's shoulder. "No time for bullshit, Louis. Give me the biggest fucking boomer you got."
Timebomb nodded at her, then rolled over onto his back and began plucking parts out of his specially insulated jacket. Blindside fired over the rise while he put his bomb together.
Vice-Admiral LaPointe of the French Navy stood on the bridge of his flagship and watched Genosha burn from the dubious safety of Hammer Bay.
<"Sir,"> his first officer said, <"the last of the fleet have entered the bay. They await your orders.">
<"Tell them to stand fast,"> he said.
<"Sir?">
LaPointe turned a cocked eyebrow on his subordinate.
<"Sir, if I may speak plainly...why aren't we attacking? This would seem to be the perfect moment, with all the hostilities in the capital. If we threw our lot in with the magistrates...">
The commander smiled a small, mysterious smile. <"Then we would die along with them."> He was quiet for a moment, and then, <"Tell me, were you ever interested in magic as a child? The work of Houdini perhaps?">
<"I--I guess so, sir.">
<"Then you understand that the most important part of any successful magic trick is misdirection. And if there is one thing this operation most certainly is, it is magic.">
The younger officer shook his head, baffled. LaPointe simply continued to smile.
The tunnel widened as they climbed higher, and Gomi began to suspect that Bill had had some help when he'd first started digging through what was left of the embassy. For some reason, that help had vanished before Bill had reached the sub-basement, because, when Gomi at last pulled himself up into the open air, there was no one near the wreckage of the embassy. Located on the edge of Hammer Bay as it was, Gomi could see the smoke rising from the Magda Gardens and from the commerce district from where he stood, and he could see the warships arrayed in the harbor. He could even hear the occasional gunshot or scream, but for the most part there was an eerie calm settled over the city, and Gomi knew what it was without being told and without ever having experienced such a thing. It was the quiet shock that inevitably follows an awful lot of death and bloodshed.
Gomi heard the rattle of careful footsteps on loose concrete behind him, and turned. The Prime Minister was making his way up the tunnel, exhausted but alive. It had been a tighter squeeze for him, but he'd cleared the tunnel, and was now stepping carefully up the makeshift ramp. Gomi moved to help him, and a moment later they were standing side-by-side--French politician and New York street urchin--on top of the ruins of the embassy, watching Hammer Bay smolder.
"Those are French ships," the older man said matter-of-factly, pointing toward the harbor.
Gomi nodded. He'd figured as much. "Come on then. We're going to have to go all the way around the city if we want to get you to the water without being seen."
The Prime Minister turned a surprised look on him. "Then you still intend to let me go." Gomi shrugged, and began moving down the side of the rubble, toward the street. The PM followed close behind, and Bill scuttled in-between them. "You realize that this doesn't change my stance on my country's mutant registration act."
Gomi didn't answer right away. When the three of them had reached the street, he turned and said, "I'm sorry I threatened your family when we first met. I shouldn't have done that, regardless of what I was told. And if it makes you feel any better, it was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do."
The prime minister was taken aback by this. He simply nodded.
"But when you seek to register mutants, when you set your country on the road to that kind of persecution, you're threatening my family. Do you see? I may be human, but everyone I love on this world is a mutant. Even Bill here." He nudged the blue-shelled lobster with his toe, and Bill snapped at him. "Think about th--"
There was the crack of a gunshot, and the left side of Gomi's chest seemed to explode. The boy took two stumbling steps forward, fell into the Prime Minister's arms and looked up at him with eyes that seemed as big as silver dollars behind his thick glasses. Then he slowly slid down the politician's front, leaving a wide slick of fresh blood down the man's dirty, rumpled suit.
The Prime Minister was speechless. He stood there for a moment, looking at the boy and the pool of thick blood spreading like oil beneath his prone form.
A hand was on the Prime Minister's arm. A large, black hand belonging to a large, black man. He looked up from the impossible amount of blood flowing out of Gomi and saw that the hand was missing its first two fingers, and that the injury was recent, as the fresh bandages around it were spotted with dried blood.
"Mr. Prime Minister," a new voice said, and this wasn't the black man, but another--this one white-skinned and older--standing behind the first. It was immediately obvious, though neither of them were wearing rank on their fatigues, that this older man was in charge. "My name is Sgt. Major Malone. You can call me Hardcase. We've been ordered to exfiltrate you, sir. Nick Fury sends his regards."
The prime minister was almost too stunned to talk. "Fury?" he finally managed to sputter. "SHIELD?"
"The one and only. You're lucky we happened to be in-country on another contract op for the UN. Now if you please, we have to hurry..."
The hand on his arm tightened, and the black giant began to pull him away, but then there was a click-<i>snap</i> from below, and the black man began to scream.
"Axe!" Hardcase shouted, and moved forward, bringing his rifle up and pulling the Prime Minister away from the toppling giant. At their feet, a largish blue lobster stood, its eyestalks narrowed in fury as its crusher and pincher claws flexed against the air. Laying on the ground next to one of these claws was one of the black man's feet, severed clean from his leg at the ankle. As the prime minister was still digesting this, the crustacean leaped toward the fallen mercenary to finish the job.
"Goddamnit," Hardcase said, and held the trigger down on his rifle.
Bill the Lobster was cybernetically-enhanced, and while this didn't make him in any way impervious to a hail of automatic gunfire, his shell was a great deal tougher than the average lobster's. He lifted his big claws to protect his eyes and abdomen and stood his ground as the bullets punched against his exoskeleton, cracking it and blasting chunks free in places. Hardcase held the trigger down for half a minute, and when he finished, great pink swatches of lobster flesh showed through Bill's fractured shell.
"Christ, bulletproof lobster," Hardcase hissed. He could have kept firing, but whatever the thing was, it was too hurt to come after them anymore, and he didn't want to waste the bullets or risk drawing attention to themselves by prolonging the gunfire. He shouldered his weapon and pulled the PM back well out of the crustacean's range. Then he knelt down, told 'Axe to shut it, and quickly applied a field tourniquet to the man's bleeding stump.
Bill stumbled backwards, his eyes for once glazed rather than angry. He didn't notice Hardcase plucking the severed foot up and dropping it into a pouch on his uniform, didn't note him helping the big man, 'Axe, to stand, and certainly didn't get a look at the French Prime Minister, looking back at Gomi with something like remorse partially numbed by shock. In fact, Bill was in so much pain that he forgot the bipeds were there at all until they were long gone.
When he came back to himself, he turned and regarded his friend, still bleeding from his chest. Bill couldn't tell if Gomi was still breathing or not. He thought it likely that he wasn't--lack of exoskeletons made bipeds remarkably fragile creatures--but he wasn't about to gamble on it.
With his cracked, nearly shattered claws, Bill clamped onto Gomi's sweatshirt and, somehow, found the strength to begin dragging his friend toward the city.
"I never betrayed you," Roberto hissed. "And neither did Shatterstar. You're just looking for a scapegoat."
Magneto's eyes narrowed dangerously. He raised a hand threateningly in the boy's direction, but that didn't stop him.
"Everything that happened here today, all the death, is on your head, Magneto. All of it. And you know it."
"That's preposterous. I routed the magistrates almost singlehandedly."
"Sure...after they'd leveled most of the city and killed half the mutants here. Damnit...you can't have it both ways."
"What are you talking about?"
"This," Roberto whipped his head to the side, to indicate the city. "You want to build a mutant utopia, so you make concessions to the UN, you build embassies. And all the while, you tell us to terrorize humans wherever we can. That's why this happened, because you can't decide whether you want to be Magneto or Charles Xavier!"
Magneto's lip curled in a snarl. There was a beat of silence, pregnant with anticipation, and then he closed his hand.
Roberto screamed as all the blood in his body came to a halt. His heart continued to pump, but no new blood was entering the organ, and the outgoing paths were filling up, expanding his vessels until they were near ready to burst.
Magneto released his fist, and Roberto's blood began to flow again. The boy gasped, and Magneto turned from him.
"Do you know what the difference between myself and Charles was, Roberto? As much as he squandered in his life, Charles never understood loss. Not really. That is why I have always been hesitant to simply destroy his X-Men, and he never thought twice about taking away what is mine." He waved a hand, and the magnetic hooks that had been holding Sunspot aloft released, dropping him to the rubble. "And it is why I'm not going to kill you now."
"Didn't...didn't stop you from...killing Shatterstar..."
"No it did not. And that should tell you something about his crimes, shouldn't it?" Magneto turned, crossing his arms behind his back. "Now go. And never set foot on Genoshan soil again."
"Where is it?"
Magistrate Talib Singh Chauhan was wondering the same thing, but didn't take the time to tell his subordinate this. They had lost another man since the altercation with Razorwire--not bad considering they'd killed half a dozen mutants in the same space of time, but still far from acceptable. They were down to four now, and they still had one more floor to search.
Talib raced up the stairwell to the top floor of the tower, wrenching the door open and making only a cursory inspection of the hallway before plunging out into it. His men were on the edge of panic, beginning to lose sight of their goal, and even he was beginning to wonder if they'd been had. He <i>knew</i> the transfer equipment they were looking for existed, but he wondered if their source had perhaps not been as truthful as he'd believed.
This line of thought led him to his other informant, Shatterstar, and what he'd been forced to do to the boy. He turned away from that.
Talib gave his hand signals, splitting them up into two teams to take opposite ends of the corridor. The four men divided into twos and began to move in opposite directions.
Talib's team had made it halfway down their stretch of corridor, with nothing to show for their efforts but a succession of empty rooms, when Talib felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. Something was wrong. He turned.
The other team was nowhere to be seen, but several doors stood open in the direction they'd gone. Probably they were searching one of those rooms.
His partner gave him a look, and Talib nodded. The younger man kicked the next door open and the two of them moved in, visually sweeping the room. It was definitely a laboratory of some sort. Monitoring equipment lined the walls and, in the center of the room, was a large circular platform with two shining metal pillars thrusting vertically out of opposite sides. Talib knew what it was instantly.
"I don't believe it," his partner said. "I'd almost begun to think--"
"Yes," the older man said. "But there it is. The machine Magneto used to transfer his power recently." He shouldered his rifle and moved forward. It was exactly as it had been.