Back to Gatefold#5 by D. Golightly
March 2017 |
"Hidden Agenda"
The Archive
A government repository of all mutant files
Operating headquarters of the Mutant Response Team
“What’s your assessment of the team so far?”
Xorn pulled in a deep breath before responding. She looked Havok over, wondering what he expected of her. Hadn’t he contained her enough? Did he really expect her to do this little introspective dance with him yet again?
When she exhaled, the air was filtered through the heavy metal helmet she wore. She hated wearing it, but it was a necessity. She couldn’t argue with Havok on that point. Despite their disagreements, she did respect him. If only he was a little more like the Havok she had known before, perhaps there wouldn’t be this passive aggression between them.
He had cornered her in one of the small workrooms, designed for research. The facility was not built to be a base of operations for a paramilitary group of mutants. The Archive stored hard copies of every known mutant encounter throughout the world and was mainly used now for deep storage. Rows upon rows of cardboard boxes lined the majority of the building, with these small rooms meant for a place where someone could spread out file folders and get organized.
Instead of giving him what he wanted, she threw a different question back at him. “When are you going to let me see the rest of the X-Men?” she asked.
Havok ground his teeth, saying, “C’mon, are you serious? You know I can’t take you to the Xavier Institute.”
“I want to see Bobby.”
“We’ve been over this.”
“No, you’ve put me with this pseudo-team to keep an eye on me. Look, I know that I can’t just go gallivanting around town, but the X-Men were my friends. Some of them were more than friends, as you well know. I do not see the harm in letting me just talk to them. They’ll understand what I’m going through. Don’t you trust them?”
Havok scoffed. “Of course I trust them! That’s not the issue. The problem is that if you’re out in public then it’s all the easier for him to find you. You know that.”
“I won’t take my helmet off. He can’t scan for me. No one will know who I really am.” She stepped closer to Havok. “Alex. Please. I miss them. You have no idea what it was like over there on the…on the other side.”
Havok took an equal step away from her and held out his hands. “I’m sorry. You know it’s too dangerous. This is your team now. Until we get a handle on—”
She quickly turned away, wishing that the room wasn’t so cramped. “Forget it,” she blurted out. “If all you want to talk about is this team, then fine. But do not, and I repeat, do not come to my quarters again like you did the other night. You want to put some distance between me and the X-Men? Then start with yourself, Alex Summers.”
Havok opened his mouth to respond, but couldn’t find the words to express what he felt. Taking his silence as a queue to answer his original question, Xorn said, “The shape-shifter obviously dislikes being part of a team again. He’s done his own thing several times without letting the rest of us know, like at the TransGenics lab. He blew his cover on purpose and rationalized it away.”
“Yes, I read Doug’s report,” Havok replied, referring to the real name of their field leader, Cypher.
“Doug himself equally dislikes being in charge. There’s a coldness to him, though. Did you know him before he was resurrected? Was he always like that?”
Havok shook his head. “The Doug Ramsey I knew was carefree, but never careless. I’m worried about him.”
“You should be. He took down a Brood Queen. And an entire colony, basically. Cypher said he talked the Queen into ordering her soldiers to commit suicide.”*
* [Last issue!]
“His powers have been augmented somehow since being resurrected by Wicked’s actions**,” Havok muttered. His brow was furrowed in concentration. Then he relaxed and looked up at Xorn, saying, “I’m honestly not sure how much he’s changed. I wouldn’t mark him as ruthless like Daken, though.”
** [Check out X-Men: The Lazarus Contract for more details!]
“That one is a true killer. How is he connected to Wolverine? The claws, the healing factor, the feral nature…it’s like he’s—”
“Too good to be true?” Daken said as he entered the room. “This team would function better if people would stop gossiping and focus on the mission. The mannequin especially.”
Havok straightened up and turned halfway to face the newly arrived member of the Mutant Response Team. “Mannequin…oh, Morph,” Havok said. He nodded at the file folder that Daken had carried in with him. “Is that the TransGenics’ shipping manifest filed with the Federal Trade Commission?”
“Yes, but I don’t believe a word of it,” Daken answered. “They claim to be exporting lab equipment to their facilities in Russia. We already know from the worm that the mannequin installed in their servers that they’re not developing cures to mutant diseases. Do we really think they’ll stick to the rules when shipping something across international borders?”
Havok took the proffered folder. “I’ll pull the others into the conference room so we can coordinate our next steps,” he said. He cleared his throat and turned back to Xorn. “We’ll talk more later.”
As soon as Havok had left, Daken said over his shoulder to Xorn, “If you have a question about me, then ask. We’re not in high school. You don’t have to whisper about me behind my back.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Xorn stated.
“Doesn’t matter. I’m here because I’d be in prison otherwise. I’m not the kind of person who harbors secrets unless I’m paid to keep them.”
“Fair enough. What’s your connection to Logan?”
Daken smirked. He was wearing a grey v-neck that showed off the tattoos on his collarbone. His mohawk was slicked back like he had just showered off from a workout. She had read the dossier that Havok had provided, which explained that in addition to his physical attributes and healing factor, he also had some kind of pheromone emission.
She wondered if that was what was making her heart pound harder in her chest or not.
“We’re linked, sure,” Daken said with a shrug and he stepped closer. “I suppose what you know about me is dependent mostly on what you know about him. I’ve been heavily involved in government wet work and most of my training is classified.”
“Classified, huh?”
“Like I said, I keep secrets when I’m paid to do so. The only thing you need to know,” Daken added, “is that I’m a hell of a lot more dangerous than him.”
# # # # # # # # # #
SHiP Depot
A van line/rail line dock yard
Loading point for TransGenics, LLC shipments
“I still say this would be way cooler if we jumped the train in transit like cowboys,” Morph said. “I could even turn into a horse!”
Cypher tried not to yell at his teammate over the comlink. Not only would it put a target on him in front of the gate guard he was supposed to be distracting, but it wouldn’t do any good anyway. Morph had shown a tendency to just act out more when told to keep quiet.
Still, Cypher couldn’t help but wince. The earbud now seemed like an invading parasite instead of a usual tool, especially since Morph hadn’t shut up since being elevated to a thousand feet via Xorn’s electromagnetic powers. He could only imagine the irritation that Xorn and Daken, also held aloft over the dock yard in a cocoon of energy, must feel being right next to him. Xorn was probably even tempted to drop him.
“You okay?” the guard in front of Cypher asked. He was standing behind bulletproof glass, but as far as security went, that was the most impressive feature. He wasn’t even carrying a gun.
“Yeah, sorry,” Cypher replied. “Just trying to remember everything my boss told me to take care of while I’m here tonight.”
“Well,” the guard continued, “it’s like I already said. I can’t let you into the main yard. It’s after hours and there aren’t any personnel inside that can help you find your company’s container.”
Cypher and the lone security guard had been going in a conversational circle for the last five minutes, and thanks to his omnilinguistic abilities, he would keep that loop going for as long as the team needed.
Before their original plan had been interrupted by Corsair***, the Mutant Response Team had intended to raid this depot in search of a TransGenics shipment. The genetic research company moved their shipments via van and then on a train, or rail line. The truck itself would make an easy target, but was too exposed. A moving train, as Morph often reminded them, would be more akin to a movie than a covert operation. Therefore, the optimal move was to get into a sealed shipping container while it awaited transport at the depot.
*** [X-Factor #3, wherein the team was teleported into the middle of a Brood skirmish!]
The depot itself was laughably vulnerable. Cypher doubted that they even needed to take the extra precaution of detaining the single security guard at the front gate, but there was also no need to take an unnecessary risk. His cover story of having to switch the paperwork attached to the container would be easy enough to believe, even without a little coercion from Cypher’s mutant abilities.
“Can’t I just, ya know,” Cypher said with a shrug, “slip in and make sure the manifest is correct? I’m pretty sure I accidentally ordered the container sent to Madripor instead of Singapore. Crazy, right? But my boss will kill me if I don’t fix it. He’s already pretty mad. He said I needed to talk to Carlos. Is Carlos here?”
The guard sighed. “Like I said, there’s no Carlos here. Maybe he works daytime. Let me see the paperwork you brought with you, okay?”
And so it went. Cypher could keep the conversation spinning that way as long as he needed to, providing the rest of his team with enough time to get in and get back out again.
Overhead, Xorn was hovering in midair near the cloud line, her arms outstretched and the eye sockets of her helmet flashing cobalt blue. The translucent sphere of energy she maintained held her, Daken, and Morph aloft. Nearly a thousand feet below them sat the darkened depot and hundreds of shipping containers stacked into rows.
“SHiP’s network says that the container we’re looking for is in the third row from the left,” Daken said. “According to the bill of lading that TransGenics filed with the FTC, we’re looking for container number NYKU-0043401.”
“Still a needle in a haystack,” Morph said. “There must be five hundred containers down there, not counting the ones that haven’t been taken off the chassis yet. Oh! Look, there’s where the trains unload. Can I please, please, please—”
“No,” Daken and Xorn said in unison.
“—please find the 3:10 to Yuma?”
Xorn dropped their altitude suddenly, causing Morph’s stomach to flip and his mouth to shut. She stopped their rapid descent a few dozen feet above the ground, then lowering them gently down. She broke the sphere around them with a few inches still to go. She and Daken touched down lightly while Morph fell onto his back.
“It’s amazing that you survived in the field by yourself as long as you did,” Daken muttered as he set off for the targeted row of shipping containers.
“And it’s amazing that you—ow!” Morph was cut short by the playful slap on the back of his head from Xorn. “What was that for?”
“Can you focus, please?” she asked as she again took to the air. “Don’t buy into his bullying. We have a job to do.”
Morph thought of a dozen different replies, insults, and fart jokes to throw back at her, but decided that the sooner they got out of here, the sooner he could plot his comical revenge. As he rubbed the back of his head and watched Xorn take an overwatch position above the third row of containers, he shape-shifted into a perfect facsimile of Sir Ben Kingsley, saying, “You’ll never see me coming.”
He laughed to himself, shifted back to his normal white, plaster-esque face and stylized yellow and blue X-Men uniform, and trotted off toward Daken.
The perforated sides of the stacked metal containers reflected the starlight and Xorn’s iridescent blue glow. The depot appeared to be completely dead. SHiP had several lucrative contracts, but wasn’t on par with the larger shipping yards and kept personnel to a minimum. There weren’t even any overhead strobes to illuminate the yard. Beside the stacks was a lumbering crane that could be used to move individual containers into and out of position.
Daken, dressed in black BDUs with tactical webbing weighed down by weaponry, ran a hand gently along the side of a container, looking up at the top corner to read the number imprinted there. He estimated that the row had something along the lines of seventy containers stacked four or five high in some places. The yard’s network, which had been much too easy for Morph and Cypher to hack, mapped out the location by row of each container to make it all the easier for quick loading and unloading, but it didn’t tell you where in the row it could be found. They would have to look at each one.
Morph trotted up beside him, smiling and staring at him.
Daken glanced at him and rolled his eyes. “Make yourself useful,” the assassin said.
Morph mock-saluted and ran ahead. Within seconds he shouted, “Found it!”
“Christ,” Daken responded. “Can’t you for once—”
“No, he actually did,” Xorn said as she lowered herself down to hover in front of the container Morph was pointing up at. “NYKU-0043401. This is it.”
Daken narrowed his eyelids, giving Morph a death stare, but he walked over and looked up to confirm. Stacked as the third container out of four, there it was, plain as day. “Even a broken watch is right twice a day,” he said.
Morph clapped his hands over his heart and sniffed. His normally chalk-white face turned a deep crimson. “Do you really mean that? Gosh, I hope I’m not blushing.”
“Both of you, step back,” Xorn ordered as she extended her hands toward the containers.
They complied just as she used her powers to lift the top container straight up into the air effortlessly, regardless of how heavy the bulky metal actually was. There was a slight hum when she used her abilities, and it filled their ears now, especially being so close to her.
Using her powers, she slid the third container out and lowered the top one back down onto the stack. She hoisted their target up and over the rows and set it down in the dock yard where there would be room to examine it more closely.
“I can feel several power fluctuations coming from inside,” Xorn warned as the three of them approached. “Some low level radiation, too.”
“They claim to be shipping equipment,” Daken said. “But it shouldn’t be on during transit, I would think.”
Morph grabbed the padlock fixed to the container doors. “Simple enough,” he said. “No seal, though. Once the container is loaded they’re supposed to put a metal bracelet around the door-swing bars. That way they know if thieves break in before the shipment gets to destination.”
“Skipping port protocol,” Daken said. “Big surprise. Open it.”
Shape-shifting his right index finger into the shape of a key that would slip into the padlock, Morph fidgeted for a moment as his finger reshaped itself to hit all of the tumblers in the mechanism. A second later he twisted his wrist and the lock popped off. He swung the doors open and stepped back.
He pointed his thumb at the container and said over his shoulder, saying “Bigger surprise?”
“They aren’t shipping equipment, documents, or genetic samples to Russia,” Xorn said as she dropped completely to the ground beside Daken. “They’re shipping mutants.”
Lining the sides of the interior of the container were several stainless steel cylinders with glass fronts. Touchscreens were mounted in the center of each one, with wires and thick cables running from the top of each one to what looked like a generator in the back of the container. In the very center of the container was another cylinder, totaling nine in all.
The glass fronts were all frosted over, but they could see people inside each one, seemingly asleep.
“They’re in some kind of stasis,” Daken said as he stepped inside to get a closer look. “Patients of TransGenics? Experiments maybe? All Cryogenically frozen.”
“Mutant-sicles,” Morph added. “Why the hell are they shipping them to Russia?”
Before they could posit an answer, a charging sound came from the central cylinder, as if it were powering up. Daken leaned forward and when his face was mere inches from the glass, the eyes of the man inside suddenly opened. He jumped back.
“Shit,” Daken said. “He’s waking up. We must have triggered something.”
The frost on the glass quickly evaporated as the body of the man in the cylinder glowed a fiery red. He was dressed in an orange bodysuit, but his face, hands, and feet were uncovered. He pulled his arm up, seemingly stuck at first, or perhaps just not fully aroused yet. He placed his red-hot hand on the glass and just as Daken yelled for them to get back, he unleashed a torrent of red energy, blasting the assassin full in the chest.
Daken was catapulted back out of the container, tumbling head over heels through the air. He smashed against the end of a row of containers and hit the dirt in a heap.
“I didn’t do it!” Morph shouted as he dove out of the open container’s doorway.
“That’s no patient,” Xorn said as she leapt into the air and erected a blue sphere of energy around herself. “That’s a guard! Take him down before--OOF!”
The searing blast of red energy engulfed her completely, knocking her out of the sky. She fell to the ground, rolling near Daken, who was struggling to get back up. Steam wafted off of her body and her helmet was glowing her signature cobalt as she fought against passing out.
“Xorn!” Morph called out. He fell forward on his hands as his muscles and bones started to realign and reshape themselves at his command. Within half a heartbeat he had doubled his mass and reformed himself into a stampeding rhinoceros, plowing into the assailant just as he took one barefooted step out of the container. He sent the man flying across the yard, but he righted himself quickly upon landing.
“The power fluctuations I felt,” Xorn muttered as Daken helped her to her feet. “It was the generator. But the radiation was all him. Daken, he’s pumping out millions of rads! We have to shut him down, and quickly!”
“Your helmet,” Daken said as he raised a hand up to a crack that had appeared across her forehead.
She brushed his hand away, saying, “Stop him! Now!”
Daken instantly turned, extracting a Desert Eagle from a shoulder holster strapped to his tactical webbing. He squeezed off three shots in rapid succession, but the nuclear man kept walking back toward them. He didn’t even pause or flinch as the bullets were melted in midair by the extreme field of radiation surrounding him.
Dropping the handgun, Daken ran straight for his new mark instead. His arms were out at his sides and after closing half the distance, three bones claws popped out of his hands on each one; two from the back of his hands and one protruding from the underside of his wrists.
He roared as he leapt when just a few feet from his quarry, slamming the claws into each shoulder of the nuclear man. He finally faltered, but instead of screaming in pain or dropping down to his knees in agony, he ground his teeth and latched onto Daken’s wrists.
“That…hurt,” the nuclear man said, and he extracted the claws from each side by pulling on Daken’s wrists.
Daken’s flesh felt like it was bubbling where he was being gripped. He drew his feet up and kicked both of his heels into the man’s abdomen, pushing himself free. He somersaulted backward and landed on his feet, ready to fight, but he looked at his wrists and saw that his bone claws had all but disintegrated away. Only blackened stubs remained.
He let out a guttural cry of mixed madness and fury, charging the man and tackling him around the waste. The pain of just touching the man almost made Daken pass out. Bullets did nothing and he might not be able to take him on physically. Things were going from bad to worse with every passing second.
“Get clear!” Morph shouted.
Daken drove his knee into the man’s face and spun around, crashing his elbow into the bridge of his nose. The cartilage, a supposed weak point on any adversary, remained intact. Whatever this man was, he seemed to be nearly unstoppable.
Despite his bloodlust, Daken stepped back to get clear, and was surprised to see a metal hook the size of a small car slam into the side of the nuclear man. Attached to a thick cable that went skyward, the hook carried the man off into the night. At the apex of the ascent, the hook paused for a moment as momentum shifted, transferring fully into the man and sending him a few feet further into the darkness. The hook swung back down, devoid of its impromptu passenger.
Tracing the cable up, it was latched thirty feet up to a crane arm with faded yellow paint. The arm came back down to a small cab, with Morph at the helm. He stuck his head out and gave Daken a thumbs up before shutting it down and hopping out.
“We need to regroup and—” Morph shouted, but was cut short by a sizzling blast of brilliant red radiation slicing into the ground just in front of him. He fell back, his uniform singed from being so close to the discharge.
He and Daken both turned to see the nuclear stalking back toward them, an aura of fiery red swirling around him. “The guy is a freakin’ Saiyan!” Morph blurted out as he scrambled back to his feet.
“I don’t know what that is,” Daken replied, genuinely curious. “What kind of classification is that?”
A second blast erupted from the man’s hands, but a bolt of blue energy suddenly swept into its path, deflecting the radiation into the rows of containers. Several of the long containers were knocked down, turning the organized rows into utter catastrophe.
Xorn appeared between the man and her teammates, a portal of black and blue energy churning in front of her chest. As the nuclear man cast beam after beam of crimson power at her, she maneuvered the portal to catch each one and absorb as the majority of the force behind the attacks. With each barrage, however, she waivered, unable to take in that much energy at once.
“We’ll flank him!” Daken shouted. “Keep him there!”
“Get away!” Xorn shot back. “I don’t think I can hold all of this for long! I need to…to…”
The intensity of her blue encapsulating sphere turned from cobalt blue to pure white, reflecting the intensity of the energy she was attempting to manipulate. Now a steady stream of red radiation poured directly into her, unwillingly fueling her and throwing her deeper into a growing nightmare.
Finally, with an effort of sheer willpower, Xorn rallied her strength and control, circulating the energy coursing in and around her back around to discharge at her aggressor. The white beam rocketed from her body, matching her height in circumference, and blasting the nuclear man apart at the seams.
Even his ashes had been reduced to atoms so far apart that they could no longer form solid matter.
Xorn lay in a crater carved from the ground beneath her last assault. Daken and Morph rushed to her smoking side just as Cypher made his way around the stacks of containers to join them.
“What happened?” he demanded as he approached. “I knocked out the guard when the light show started. What’s going on? Is she hurt?”
“We have to get her to a hospital,” Daken said. “Call for evac.”
“No time. I can fly her out,” Morph offered. “Move out of the way. I’ll turn to something and—” Morph gasped.
Xorn as lying on her side, her black and yellow uniform tattered and charred. Her skin and hair, however, looked undamaged. On opposite sides of her head was her bulky helmet, split in two right down the middle, revealing her soft features.
And her green hair.
“Lorna,” Cypher whispered, and then louder he said, “Polaris! She’s Lorna Dane!”
Next issue: Xorn stands revealed! Her secret history and what terrible force comes calling for the team will rock them to the core.
A government repository of all mutant files
Operating headquarters of the Mutant Response Team
“What’s your assessment of the team so far?”
Xorn pulled in a deep breath before responding. She looked Havok over, wondering what he expected of her. Hadn’t he contained her enough? Did he really expect her to do this little introspective dance with him yet again?
When she exhaled, the air was filtered through the heavy metal helmet she wore. She hated wearing it, but it was a necessity. She couldn’t argue with Havok on that point. Despite their disagreements, she did respect him. If only he was a little more like the Havok she had known before, perhaps there wouldn’t be this passive aggression between them.
He had cornered her in one of the small workrooms, designed for research. The facility was not built to be a base of operations for a paramilitary group of mutants. The Archive stored hard copies of every known mutant encounter throughout the world and was mainly used now for deep storage. Rows upon rows of cardboard boxes lined the majority of the building, with these small rooms meant for a place where someone could spread out file folders and get organized.
Instead of giving him what he wanted, she threw a different question back at him. “When are you going to let me see the rest of the X-Men?” she asked.
Havok ground his teeth, saying, “C’mon, are you serious? You know I can’t take you to the Xavier Institute.”
“I want to see Bobby.”
“We’ve been over this.”
“No, you’ve put me with this pseudo-team to keep an eye on me. Look, I know that I can’t just go gallivanting around town, but the X-Men were my friends. Some of them were more than friends, as you well know. I do not see the harm in letting me just talk to them. They’ll understand what I’m going through. Don’t you trust them?”
Havok scoffed. “Of course I trust them! That’s not the issue. The problem is that if you’re out in public then it’s all the easier for him to find you. You know that.”
“I won’t take my helmet off. He can’t scan for me. No one will know who I really am.” She stepped closer to Havok. “Alex. Please. I miss them. You have no idea what it was like over there on the…on the other side.”
Havok took an equal step away from her and held out his hands. “I’m sorry. You know it’s too dangerous. This is your team now. Until we get a handle on—”
She quickly turned away, wishing that the room wasn’t so cramped. “Forget it,” she blurted out. “If all you want to talk about is this team, then fine. But do not, and I repeat, do not come to my quarters again like you did the other night. You want to put some distance between me and the X-Men? Then start with yourself, Alex Summers.”
Havok opened his mouth to respond, but couldn’t find the words to express what he felt. Taking his silence as a queue to answer his original question, Xorn said, “The shape-shifter obviously dislikes being part of a team again. He’s done his own thing several times without letting the rest of us know, like at the TransGenics lab. He blew his cover on purpose and rationalized it away.”
“Yes, I read Doug’s report,” Havok replied, referring to the real name of their field leader, Cypher.
“Doug himself equally dislikes being in charge. There’s a coldness to him, though. Did you know him before he was resurrected? Was he always like that?”
Havok shook his head. “The Doug Ramsey I knew was carefree, but never careless. I’m worried about him.”
“You should be. He took down a Brood Queen. And an entire colony, basically. Cypher said he talked the Queen into ordering her soldiers to commit suicide.”*
* [Last issue!]
“His powers have been augmented somehow since being resurrected by Wicked’s actions**,” Havok muttered. His brow was furrowed in concentration. Then he relaxed and looked up at Xorn, saying, “I’m honestly not sure how much he’s changed. I wouldn’t mark him as ruthless like Daken, though.”
** [Check out X-Men: The Lazarus Contract for more details!]
“That one is a true killer. How is he connected to Wolverine? The claws, the healing factor, the feral nature…it’s like he’s—”
“Too good to be true?” Daken said as he entered the room. “This team would function better if people would stop gossiping and focus on the mission. The mannequin especially.”
Havok straightened up and turned halfway to face the newly arrived member of the Mutant Response Team. “Mannequin…oh, Morph,” Havok said. He nodded at the file folder that Daken had carried in with him. “Is that the TransGenics’ shipping manifest filed with the Federal Trade Commission?”
“Yes, but I don’t believe a word of it,” Daken answered. “They claim to be exporting lab equipment to their facilities in Russia. We already know from the worm that the mannequin installed in their servers that they’re not developing cures to mutant diseases. Do we really think they’ll stick to the rules when shipping something across international borders?”
Havok took the proffered folder. “I’ll pull the others into the conference room so we can coordinate our next steps,” he said. He cleared his throat and turned back to Xorn. “We’ll talk more later.”
As soon as Havok had left, Daken said over his shoulder to Xorn, “If you have a question about me, then ask. We’re not in high school. You don’t have to whisper about me behind my back.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Xorn stated.
“Doesn’t matter. I’m here because I’d be in prison otherwise. I’m not the kind of person who harbors secrets unless I’m paid to keep them.”
“Fair enough. What’s your connection to Logan?”
Daken smirked. He was wearing a grey v-neck that showed off the tattoos on his collarbone. His mohawk was slicked back like he had just showered off from a workout. She had read the dossier that Havok had provided, which explained that in addition to his physical attributes and healing factor, he also had some kind of pheromone emission.
She wondered if that was what was making her heart pound harder in her chest or not.
“We’re linked, sure,” Daken said with a shrug and he stepped closer. “I suppose what you know about me is dependent mostly on what you know about him. I’ve been heavily involved in government wet work and most of my training is classified.”
“Classified, huh?”
“Like I said, I keep secrets when I’m paid to do so. The only thing you need to know,” Daken added, “is that I’m a hell of a lot more dangerous than him.”
# # # # # # # # # #
SHiP Depot
A van line/rail line dock yard
Loading point for TransGenics, LLC shipments
“I still say this would be way cooler if we jumped the train in transit like cowboys,” Morph said. “I could even turn into a horse!”
Cypher tried not to yell at his teammate over the comlink. Not only would it put a target on him in front of the gate guard he was supposed to be distracting, but it wouldn’t do any good anyway. Morph had shown a tendency to just act out more when told to keep quiet.
Still, Cypher couldn’t help but wince. The earbud now seemed like an invading parasite instead of a usual tool, especially since Morph hadn’t shut up since being elevated to a thousand feet via Xorn’s electromagnetic powers. He could only imagine the irritation that Xorn and Daken, also held aloft over the dock yard in a cocoon of energy, must feel being right next to him. Xorn was probably even tempted to drop him.
“You okay?” the guard in front of Cypher asked. He was standing behind bulletproof glass, but as far as security went, that was the most impressive feature. He wasn’t even carrying a gun.
“Yeah, sorry,” Cypher replied. “Just trying to remember everything my boss told me to take care of while I’m here tonight.”
“Well,” the guard continued, “it’s like I already said. I can’t let you into the main yard. It’s after hours and there aren’t any personnel inside that can help you find your company’s container.”
Cypher and the lone security guard had been going in a conversational circle for the last five minutes, and thanks to his omnilinguistic abilities, he would keep that loop going for as long as the team needed.
Before their original plan had been interrupted by Corsair***, the Mutant Response Team had intended to raid this depot in search of a TransGenics shipment. The genetic research company moved their shipments via van and then on a train, or rail line. The truck itself would make an easy target, but was too exposed. A moving train, as Morph often reminded them, would be more akin to a movie than a covert operation. Therefore, the optimal move was to get into a sealed shipping container while it awaited transport at the depot.
*** [X-Factor #3, wherein the team was teleported into the middle of a Brood skirmish!]
The depot itself was laughably vulnerable. Cypher doubted that they even needed to take the extra precaution of detaining the single security guard at the front gate, but there was also no need to take an unnecessary risk. His cover story of having to switch the paperwork attached to the container would be easy enough to believe, even without a little coercion from Cypher’s mutant abilities.
“Can’t I just, ya know,” Cypher said with a shrug, “slip in and make sure the manifest is correct? I’m pretty sure I accidentally ordered the container sent to Madripor instead of Singapore. Crazy, right? But my boss will kill me if I don’t fix it. He’s already pretty mad. He said I needed to talk to Carlos. Is Carlos here?”
The guard sighed. “Like I said, there’s no Carlos here. Maybe he works daytime. Let me see the paperwork you brought with you, okay?”
And so it went. Cypher could keep the conversation spinning that way as long as he needed to, providing the rest of his team with enough time to get in and get back out again.
Overhead, Xorn was hovering in midair near the cloud line, her arms outstretched and the eye sockets of her helmet flashing cobalt blue. The translucent sphere of energy she maintained held her, Daken, and Morph aloft. Nearly a thousand feet below them sat the darkened depot and hundreds of shipping containers stacked into rows.
“SHiP’s network says that the container we’re looking for is in the third row from the left,” Daken said. “According to the bill of lading that TransGenics filed with the FTC, we’re looking for container number NYKU-0043401.”
“Still a needle in a haystack,” Morph said. “There must be five hundred containers down there, not counting the ones that haven’t been taken off the chassis yet. Oh! Look, there’s where the trains unload. Can I please, please, please—”
“No,” Daken and Xorn said in unison.
“—please find the 3:10 to Yuma?”
Xorn dropped their altitude suddenly, causing Morph’s stomach to flip and his mouth to shut. She stopped their rapid descent a few dozen feet above the ground, then lowering them gently down. She broke the sphere around them with a few inches still to go. She and Daken touched down lightly while Morph fell onto his back.
“It’s amazing that you survived in the field by yourself as long as you did,” Daken muttered as he set off for the targeted row of shipping containers.
“And it’s amazing that you—ow!” Morph was cut short by the playful slap on the back of his head from Xorn. “What was that for?”
“Can you focus, please?” she asked as she again took to the air. “Don’t buy into his bullying. We have a job to do.”
Morph thought of a dozen different replies, insults, and fart jokes to throw back at her, but decided that the sooner they got out of here, the sooner he could plot his comical revenge. As he rubbed the back of his head and watched Xorn take an overwatch position above the third row of containers, he shape-shifted into a perfect facsimile of Sir Ben Kingsley, saying, “You’ll never see me coming.”
He laughed to himself, shifted back to his normal white, plaster-esque face and stylized yellow and blue X-Men uniform, and trotted off toward Daken.
The perforated sides of the stacked metal containers reflected the starlight and Xorn’s iridescent blue glow. The depot appeared to be completely dead. SHiP had several lucrative contracts, but wasn’t on par with the larger shipping yards and kept personnel to a minimum. There weren’t even any overhead strobes to illuminate the yard. Beside the stacks was a lumbering crane that could be used to move individual containers into and out of position.
Daken, dressed in black BDUs with tactical webbing weighed down by weaponry, ran a hand gently along the side of a container, looking up at the top corner to read the number imprinted there. He estimated that the row had something along the lines of seventy containers stacked four or five high in some places. The yard’s network, which had been much too easy for Morph and Cypher to hack, mapped out the location by row of each container to make it all the easier for quick loading and unloading, but it didn’t tell you where in the row it could be found. They would have to look at each one.
Morph trotted up beside him, smiling and staring at him.
Daken glanced at him and rolled his eyes. “Make yourself useful,” the assassin said.
Morph mock-saluted and ran ahead. Within seconds he shouted, “Found it!”
“Christ,” Daken responded. “Can’t you for once—”
“No, he actually did,” Xorn said as she lowered herself down to hover in front of the container Morph was pointing up at. “NYKU-0043401. This is it.”
Daken narrowed his eyelids, giving Morph a death stare, but he walked over and looked up to confirm. Stacked as the third container out of four, there it was, plain as day. “Even a broken watch is right twice a day,” he said.
Morph clapped his hands over his heart and sniffed. His normally chalk-white face turned a deep crimson. “Do you really mean that? Gosh, I hope I’m not blushing.”
“Both of you, step back,” Xorn ordered as she extended her hands toward the containers.
They complied just as she used her powers to lift the top container straight up into the air effortlessly, regardless of how heavy the bulky metal actually was. There was a slight hum when she used her abilities, and it filled their ears now, especially being so close to her.
Using her powers, she slid the third container out and lowered the top one back down onto the stack. She hoisted their target up and over the rows and set it down in the dock yard where there would be room to examine it more closely.
“I can feel several power fluctuations coming from inside,” Xorn warned as the three of them approached. “Some low level radiation, too.”
“They claim to be shipping equipment,” Daken said. “But it shouldn’t be on during transit, I would think.”
Morph grabbed the padlock fixed to the container doors. “Simple enough,” he said. “No seal, though. Once the container is loaded they’re supposed to put a metal bracelet around the door-swing bars. That way they know if thieves break in before the shipment gets to destination.”
“Skipping port protocol,” Daken said. “Big surprise. Open it.”
Shape-shifting his right index finger into the shape of a key that would slip into the padlock, Morph fidgeted for a moment as his finger reshaped itself to hit all of the tumblers in the mechanism. A second later he twisted his wrist and the lock popped off. He swung the doors open and stepped back.
He pointed his thumb at the container and said over his shoulder, saying “Bigger surprise?”
“They aren’t shipping equipment, documents, or genetic samples to Russia,” Xorn said as she dropped completely to the ground beside Daken. “They’re shipping mutants.”
Lining the sides of the interior of the container were several stainless steel cylinders with glass fronts. Touchscreens were mounted in the center of each one, with wires and thick cables running from the top of each one to what looked like a generator in the back of the container. In the very center of the container was another cylinder, totaling nine in all.
The glass fronts were all frosted over, but they could see people inside each one, seemingly asleep.
“They’re in some kind of stasis,” Daken said as he stepped inside to get a closer look. “Patients of TransGenics? Experiments maybe? All Cryogenically frozen.”
“Mutant-sicles,” Morph added. “Why the hell are they shipping them to Russia?”
Before they could posit an answer, a charging sound came from the central cylinder, as if it were powering up. Daken leaned forward and when his face was mere inches from the glass, the eyes of the man inside suddenly opened. He jumped back.
“Shit,” Daken said. “He’s waking up. We must have triggered something.”
The frost on the glass quickly evaporated as the body of the man in the cylinder glowed a fiery red. He was dressed in an orange bodysuit, but his face, hands, and feet were uncovered. He pulled his arm up, seemingly stuck at first, or perhaps just not fully aroused yet. He placed his red-hot hand on the glass and just as Daken yelled for them to get back, he unleashed a torrent of red energy, blasting the assassin full in the chest.
Daken was catapulted back out of the container, tumbling head over heels through the air. He smashed against the end of a row of containers and hit the dirt in a heap.
“I didn’t do it!” Morph shouted as he dove out of the open container’s doorway.
“That’s no patient,” Xorn said as she leapt into the air and erected a blue sphere of energy around herself. “That’s a guard! Take him down before--OOF!”
The searing blast of red energy engulfed her completely, knocking her out of the sky. She fell to the ground, rolling near Daken, who was struggling to get back up. Steam wafted off of her body and her helmet was glowing her signature cobalt as she fought against passing out.
“Xorn!” Morph called out. He fell forward on his hands as his muscles and bones started to realign and reshape themselves at his command. Within half a heartbeat he had doubled his mass and reformed himself into a stampeding rhinoceros, plowing into the assailant just as he took one barefooted step out of the container. He sent the man flying across the yard, but he righted himself quickly upon landing.
“The power fluctuations I felt,” Xorn muttered as Daken helped her to her feet. “It was the generator. But the radiation was all him. Daken, he’s pumping out millions of rads! We have to shut him down, and quickly!”
“Your helmet,” Daken said as he raised a hand up to a crack that had appeared across her forehead.
She brushed his hand away, saying, “Stop him! Now!”
Daken instantly turned, extracting a Desert Eagle from a shoulder holster strapped to his tactical webbing. He squeezed off three shots in rapid succession, but the nuclear man kept walking back toward them. He didn’t even pause or flinch as the bullets were melted in midair by the extreme field of radiation surrounding him.
Dropping the handgun, Daken ran straight for his new mark instead. His arms were out at his sides and after closing half the distance, three bones claws popped out of his hands on each one; two from the back of his hands and one protruding from the underside of his wrists.
He roared as he leapt when just a few feet from his quarry, slamming the claws into each shoulder of the nuclear man. He finally faltered, but instead of screaming in pain or dropping down to his knees in agony, he ground his teeth and latched onto Daken’s wrists.
“That…hurt,” the nuclear man said, and he extracted the claws from each side by pulling on Daken’s wrists.
Daken’s flesh felt like it was bubbling where he was being gripped. He drew his feet up and kicked both of his heels into the man’s abdomen, pushing himself free. He somersaulted backward and landed on his feet, ready to fight, but he looked at his wrists and saw that his bone claws had all but disintegrated away. Only blackened stubs remained.
He let out a guttural cry of mixed madness and fury, charging the man and tackling him around the waste. The pain of just touching the man almost made Daken pass out. Bullets did nothing and he might not be able to take him on physically. Things were going from bad to worse with every passing second.
“Get clear!” Morph shouted.
Daken drove his knee into the man’s face and spun around, crashing his elbow into the bridge of his nose. The cartilage, a supposed weak point on any adversary, remained intact. Whatever this man was, he seemed to be nearly unstoppable.
Despite his bloodlust, Daken stepped back to get clear, and was surprised to see a metal hook the size of a small car slam into the side of the nuclear man. Attached to a thick cable that went skyward, the hook carried the man off into the night. At the apex of the ascent, the hook paused for a moment as momentum shifted, transferring fully into the man and sending him a few feet further into the darkness. The hook swung back down, devoid of its impromptu passenger.
Tracing the cable up, it was latched thirty feet up to a crane arm with faded yellow paint. The arm came back down to a small cab, with Morph at the helm. He stuck his head out and gave Daken a thumbs up before shutting it down and hopping out.
“We need to regroup and—” Morph shouted, but was cut short by a sizzling blast of brilliant red radiation slicing into the ground just in front of him. He fell back, his uniform singed from being so close to the discharge.
He and Daken both turned to see the nuclear stalking back toward them, an aura of fiery red swirling around him. “The guy is a freakin’ Saiyan!” Morph blurted out as he scrambled back to his feet.
“I don’t know what that is,” Daken replied, genuinely curious. “What kind of classification is that?”
A second blast erupted from the man’s hands, but a bolt of blue energy suddenly swept into its path, deflecting the radiation into the rows of containers. Several of the long containers were knocked down, turning the organized rows into utter catastrophe.
Xorn appeared between the man and her teammates, a portal of black and blue energy churning in front of her chest. As the nuclear man cast beam after beam of crimson power at her, she maneuvered the portal to catch each one and absorb as the majority of the force behind the attacks. With each barrage, however, she waivered, unable to take in that much energy at once.
“We’ll flank him!” Daken shouted. “Keep him there!”
“Get away!” Xorn shot back. “I don’t think I can hold all of this for long! I need to…to…”
The intensity of her blue encapsulating sphere turned from cobalt blue to pure white, reflecting the intensity of the energy she was attempting to manipulate. Now a steady stream of red radiation poured directly into her, unwillingly fueling her and throwing her deeper into a growing nightmare.
Finally, with an effort of sheer willpower, Xorn rallied her strength and control, circulating the energy coursing in and around her back around to discharge at her aggressor. The white beam rocketed from her body, matching her height in circumference, and blasting the nuclear man apart at the seams.
Even his ashes had been reduced to atoms so far apart that they could no longer form solid matter.
Xorn lay in a crater carved from the ground beneath her last assault. Daken and Morph rushed to her smoking side just as Cypher made his way around the stacks of containers to join them.
“What happened?” he demanded as he approached. “I knocked out the guard when the light show started. What’s going on? Is she hurt?”
“We have to get her to a hospital,” Daken said. “Call for evac.”
“No time. I can fly her out,” Morph offered. “Move out of the way. I’ll turn to something and—” Morph gasped.
Xorn as lying on her side, her black and yellow uniform tattered and charred. Her skin and hair, however, looked undamaged. On opposite sides of her head was her bulky helmet, split in two right down the middle, revealing her soft features.
And her green hair.
“Lorna,” Cypher whispered, and then louder he said, “Polaris! She’s Lorna Dane!”
Next issue: Xorn stands revealed! Her secret history and what terrible force comes calling for the team will rock them to the core.