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Authors: Christopher Golden

Tags: #Adventure, #X-Men, #Mutant, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Comics & Graphic Novels, #Contemporary, #Literature & Fiction

Sanctuary (8 page)

BOOK: Sanctuary
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There was so much on his mind that Scott didn't really have time to digest their exchange. But somehow, some way, he felt like he'd let Warren down. He promised to himself that, if they survived this, he would try to figure out how, and rectify his mistake.

But then, first things first. Survival.

• • •

He'd always thought of it as the cold expanse of space. Scott supposed that, nearly anywhere else, that would be about right. But this was different. This was death on the horizon. The irony was not lost on him. The sun was vital to all life on Earth, and the battery that powered his own optic beams. It was the symbol of life, growth, power. But move too close, and it became a voracious inferno, consuming all.

Sweat trickled down Scott's forehead, underneath the lip of his ruby quartz visor, and he blinked it away. There was sweat on his back as well, and he could feel the disorienting fatigue that extreme heat always seemed to bring on. He wondered for a fleeting moment if his face would blister, even through the force shield, this close to the sun.

He didn't intend to find out. They'd been very careful to make certain none of them would have to discover the effects of such exposure. Twenty minutes of complex navigational maneuvers, without the real power to make them, combined with brute force to allow them to turn the
Starjammer
so that the area where they would be working was not directly in the path of the sun's burning glare.

An additional half hour had passed, and they toiled away in the shade provided by the
Starjammer
itself. Tethered together like mountain climbers, with Raza tethered to the ship itself, they used their respective knowledge and skills to make what repairs were possible to the hull and warp drive of the vessel.

"Cyclops," Ch'od's voice slithered into his ears from the comm-link in their suits. "Raza and I seem to be doing fine here, perhaps you and Rogue ought to attempt to repair some of the more serious structural damage."

"You're sure you don't need the backup?" he asked, doubtful.

"You are out here, if we really need the help," Ch' od asked. "That is enough. While you are repairing, you should also look for any stress points that look as if they might lead to a pressure breach."

"You got it," Cyclops said, listening to the tinny sound of his own voice filtered back to him. "Rogue, you catch that?"

"Sure did, Cyke," she said. "I s'pose it's time for a little spot-weldin', huh?"

Cyclops was floating free of the ship, drifting along with it, secured only by his tether to the others. The slightest motion was magnified by the gravity-free environment of space, so Scott was very careful and measured with his actions. He had dealt with anti-gravity in other situations as well, and not just in space.

Rather than kick his feet as if he were in a swimming pool, which had been his inclination the first time he'd experienced the sensation, he performed a slow, forward somersault. A few moments later, he came around to face Rogue only a few feet from the
Starjammer's
hull.

As he had expected, she reached out a hand to arrest his motion, and reeled him in.

"This ain't the time for showin' off, Cyclops," Rogue admonished, and Scott smiled despite their plight.

She might not be able to conduct herself as though this were all business as usual—not that anyone could have—but at least she was trying. Scott had to give her credit for that.

Together, they examined the section of the hull that had experienced the worst damage.

• • •

Rogue felt particularly parched. Dehydration was no fun, but she knew they wouldn't get a break until they'd finished what they'd come on their little space walk to do. It was hard for her to deal with their situation. Not merely the danger of it, but the entire reality of space travel, space walking. Of course, the danger was there too, helping keep her mind off of Remy.

She didn't want to think about it. Couldn't. Rogue kept telling herself that if they could just get home, get back to Earth, that Gambit would be okay. She kept reassuring herself, but a little voice inside her head called her a liar every time. Truth was, she didn't know if he'd be okay or not. It was all in God's hands, now, she figured. Rogue had never been much for prayer, but she'd always believed in God. She figured, out there in the middle of space they had to be closer to him than ever, and hoped that meant he'd hear the prayers that were screaming through her head right then.

"Watch it, Rogue!" Cyclops snapped at her side, and she looked up to see the warning in his eyes, then back down at what she was doing. They'd been working together, her trying to bend back into shape portions of the hull that had been damaged, so that Cyclops could attempt to weld these breaches closed with his optic blasts. But when she looked down, she pulled her hands quickly from the ship with a frightened gasp.

The material of her pressure suit around her hands had been too near a sharp edge of metal hull. Had she continued to press, distractedly, on the tom section, she might well have ripped a hole in her suit. Back on Earth, Rogue thought herself nearly invulnerable to injury. But without the pressure suit, she guessed that she'd be dead just as quickly as any of them.

"Thanks a lot, " she said, sighing in relief, then grabbed hold of the hull yet again.

"No problem," Cyclops answered. "I know you're tired. We all are. And you've got a lot on your mind. But let's just be careful, okay? We can't afford any accidents out here."

"You said it," she agreed.

She finished reshaping a small hull breach, and pulled herself along the surface of the ship so Cyclops could move into place. While his optic beams were normally concussive in nature, when tightly focused, they could bum as hot as the nastiest laser. And with the sun so close, Cyclops seemed to be brimming with nearly inexhaustible power. A reddish glow filled the inside of his helmet, and a small cloud of energy was constantly flowing through it, only to dissipate in space.

"It's a wonder your head doesn't explode with all that energy you got stored up in there," she said in amazement. "Well I suppose there should be some benefits to being so dose to the sun other than working on our tans," Cyclops responded, keeping his attention on the job at hand.

"My goodness," Jean's voice filtered into Rogue's helmet on the comm-link, "Did Scott Summers just make a joke?"

"I try," Cyclops said in response, and Rogue was warmed by their exchange. Though Jean was inside, the communications setup that linked them all reassured her that their resident psi would be on hand if anything went wrong. Not that it was likely to. The work had reached the point where it was almost boring.

"I feel like an egg fryin' on the sidewalk in July," Rogue said, then lapsed into silence as she watched Cyclops at work again.

His optic beam melted the metal edges of the hole together like a soldering iron. Rogue was reminded of the time Fred Dukes, a mutant who called himself the Blob, had bragged one too many times about his invulnerability. Nothing could hurt him, Dukes had boasted. Cyclops, usually the picture of calm, had used that tight focus beam to bum a hole right through Dukes' shoulder. Far as she could tell, Cyclops had. felt guilty about it later, but Rogue still chuckled as she remembered the look on the Blob's face. Served him right.

When Cyclops finished, they moved on to the largest hull breach. Rogue did what she could, but when she was through the hole that remained, it was too large for Cyclops to simply weld closed. Rogue looked around the ship's hull for something to use as a "band-aid," but didn't see anything immediately.

"Ch'od," she said on her comm-unit, "I need somethin' to patch this dang hole. Any ideas?"

"Give me just a minute, Rogue," Ch'od said, and the sound of his voice made Rogue realize that all this time he and Raza had been working together in near absolute silence. After years as Starjarnmers together, it seemed they had reached the point where they functioned together as smoothly as clockwork without having to ever say anything

That was the X-Men at their best. Apparently, the same applied to the Starjammers. No wonder, she thought, since both teams were led by men of the Summers clan. Even if she hadn't been involved with Gambit, Cyclops would never have been Rogue's type. Too squeaky clean, straight and narrow for her tastes. Yet those same traits made her admire him greatly.

"Now, Rogue, what was it you wanted?" Ch'od asked on the comm-link.

Rogue boosted herself up lightly to see where Ch'od had turned away from the warp drive to address her directly, though their voices did not carry in space. The
Starjammer
had two enormous "legs," each of which ended with an engine well, similar to the turbines on a jet airplane. Those were the hyperburners, she knew, the
Starjammer
's main propulsion system. With them out of commission, they were forced to rely on warp drive. She guessed that, with it fixed, they could warp into an appropriate navigational pattern, come out of warp just above Earth's atmosphere, shut down the ship and let momentum take over.

If they could get the warp drive fixed.

Raza and Ch'od worked at the burnt and shattered casing of the warp system, further up on the starboard leg from where Rogue and Cyclops labored. While she and Ch'od spoke, Raza continued to work, a greenish glow from the broken casing reflected off the force field that covered his face.

"I got a major breach here, and I gotta patch it," she repeated.

"That certainly is a problem," Ch'od answered. "I'll have a look."

Ch'od pushed away from the ship in a movement calculated to bring him directly to where Rogue clung to the ship's hull. As she watched him, her peripheral vision picked up movement beyond him. Raza's head snapped back in a defensive motion as sparks flew from the drive system, alighting on his suit. He shook his head, obviously annoyed, and brushed them away. Rogue almost looked back at Ch'od then, her mind consumed with the need to finish with their repairs and get back inside the ship, to see if they could get home.

She didn't turn away, however. Instead, she saw Raza lower his head once more over the shattered casing, only to draw it back again, more slowly this time.

"Sharra and Ky'thri," Raza's astonished voice whispered in Rogue's ears.

"Raza?" Ch'od began, turning toward his friend clumsily, losing the careful control of his motion. "What is—"

The warp system seemed to explode in Raza's face, blasting him backward as his tether snapped like a whip and slammed him against the ship's hull. Simultaneously, blue flames shot from the engine well just behind Rogue and the ship began to spin with extraordinary speed. The misfiring of one half of the warp drive lasted only a moment, but it set the
Starjammer
moving like a maniac top, trailing Ch'od, Cyclops, and Rogue behind it—

—directly into the trail of the engine blast. Their tethers were incinerated immediately, and had they been wearing anything other than the Shi'ar pressure suits Corsair had given them, their bodies would have fared no better.

With a burst of power, Rogue lashed out with her left arm at a silver flash of hull that whipped past her peripheral vision. She snagged the ship and, with her extraordinary strength, dug in to the
Starjammer's
hull, hanging on for dear life as the ship continued to spin. It was already slowing, but it was all Rogue could do to keep from vomiting inside her helmet.

When she regained her equilibrium, though the ship still moved, she began to look around for the others. Raza was still tethered to the
Starjammer
, but his unmoving form was being towed along behind the ship as it turned. Rogue assumed the force of the explosion had knocked him unconscious. Anything else was unthinkable.

But what of Cyclops and Ch'od? As the ship's rotation slowed further, nearing a stop, Rogue frantically searched for some sign of them. Her last image of them was that of the moment the warp engine blasted all three of them, destroying their lifelines. She had been lucky enough to grab hold of the vessel to keep from being shot out into space.

Now there was no sign of either of the others. Ch'od and Cyclops were, quite simply, gone.

Chapter 4

"B
race yourselves, people," Bishop said from the cockpit of the
Blackbird
. "We've just crossed into Manhattan."

There were no more words. There didn't have to be. The five X-Men on board the plane went on immediate alert. The Sentinels were supposed to guard the city's perimeter, but Magneto had claimed all mutants would be allowed entry into this new "sanctuary" he had carved out of one of North America's largest cities.

Question was, did that hospitality extend to the X-Men, or had the Sentinels been given specific programming to keep them out? They'd know in a minute, Wolverine thought. Some part of him hoped the answer was yes. If they were attacked upon entering Manhattan, they'd get down to the nitty gritty all the quicker.

That's what he was here for. To fight. To win. The politics of it just bored him. It didn't matter to Wolverine whether the government sanctioned their presence or not—and so far they'd had no word one way or the other. In any case, there was a job to be done, and the faster they got around to this latest fracas with Magneto, the better.

BOOK: Sanctuary
7.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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