X-Men: The Last Stand (4 page)

“You asked me to come to Bangalore, Dr. Rao. I’m here. What do you have to show me?”

In terms of size, this was a modest laboratory, a small part of an industrial estate that was accommodating India’s burgeoning software industry. The reason for placing it here was mainly to have access to dependable power and state-of-the-art computing facilities, not to mention the geeks to tweak the systems. Kavita Rao was both an MD and a geneticist, rated on a par with Moira MacTaggart of Edinburgh University and considered just as likely to someday claim a Nobel for medicine. The team she’d gathered in Worthington’s name was nearly on a par with her, and the clinic she’d built with his money was worthy of them all.

One wall consisted of nothing but a giant flat-screen display, which would have cost a decent fortune in and of itself but for the fact that another company in the park specialized in making them. One meeting between Kavita and their managing director, the promise of medical care for their employees, and with that quid pro quo goods and services were speedily and regularly exchanged.

What Worthington Jr. saw on the display was a succession of double helices, which he knew were representations of someone’s DNA, the genetic building blocks of life. He hadn’t a clue what they meant, despite voluminous reading over the past half decade.

Kavita indicated a rail-thin boy, far younger than Worthington expected, lying in an isolation room. The room had been decorated with an eye to the boy’s comfort and peace of mind—it was as much a boy’s space as it could be given the circumstances, with games and stuffed animals sharing the venue with monitors and IV stands. He was reading a stack of comics; sensing Dr. Rao’s attention on him, he offered up a wave.

“His name is Jimmy,” she told Worthington. “It will take some considerable time to explain, and even more to bring matters to fruition, but the initial tests look quite promising. If the fates are kind, all our work may not have been in vain.”

“Time is of no consequence,” Worthington Jr. said, pulling up a chair beside her. “Tell me everything.”

Now

War zone, pure and simple.

Officially, it was night, but the darkness only served as a backdrop for a fireworks display of incredible lethality. The setting had once been a fair-sized town, decent central business district, buildings of some substance, two to five stories tall, built to last, of brick and stone. Spreading outwards in a grid pattern, residential streets, single-family homes, everything from Arts and Crafts bungalows to modern “McMansions.” Couple of parks, one mostly green space, the other intended for kids and recreation—playgrounds, baseball diamonds, bikeways and running tracks. Schools, of course, and churches.

All gone.

The battle lines had surged back and forth over the town, in a manner more reminiscent of the Civil War than modern warfare, but played out with weapons that made the rifles and cannons of that bloody conflict look like toys. Not a building in the town had been left whole and hardly any of the ruins that remained were still standing. The trees had been reduced to shattered stubs, trunks and branches either blown to wicked-deadly splinters or scorched beyond recognition. The earth was so pockmarked with shell holes, the streets so choked with debris, that vehicular transit was out of the question. Moving on foot was no fun either, since the piles of rubble afforded ideal hidey-holes for snipers and ambush parties, as well as for booby traps of every shape and description.

It was a rat’s nest, a meat grinder that would chew up any force fool enough to take it on.

So of course, the X-Men had been tasked to do just that.

In the distance, the sky lit up with a line of tracers, curving gracefully through the night as the gunner tracked an airborne target, and a few seconds later the sound of firing followed,
bup-bup-bup-bup.
Both sight and sound were then overwhelmed by an ugly fireball as the falling bombs hit their target.

Logan’s eyes narrowed to slits as he watched from the minimal shelter afforded by the intersection of a house’s two stone walls. His senses were more acute than any hunting predator’s, but in a scrap like this the advantage became a liability. He could see clearly in almost total darkness, yet a surprise burst of tracer rounds could strip him of that night vision in a flash. The healing factor that was his main mutant power would deal with the loss in a couple of heartbeats, but in a firefight those seconds usually made the difference between survival and disaster. Logan’s sense of smell allowed him to follow trails that bloodhounds couldn’t trace, but there were so many scents to choose from here that it took conscious effort to process them. Suddenly, he had to use conscious thought to direct processes that were normally backbrain second nature. Didn’t matter that he still did it with a speed and accuracy that left everyone around him in the dust, whether mutant or sapien. It blunted his edge—and that was unacceptable.

He sniffed the air, to catalogue who—or what—was in his immediate vicinity, and smiled at one smell he recognized.

Somebody had been kind enough to lose their cigar.

Cuban. Vintage. Hand-rolled. He caught just the smallest residual flavor of the woman who’d made it enough to recognize her if they met, smiled as he considered the possibilities.

He cupped his lighter to shield the flame from view, aware as he did that this habit from previous battlefields wouldn’t help in the least against a heat-sensitive thermal imager; on the other hand, such a device would have nailed him right from the start. No response suggested no such device, which gave him leave to indulge. He didn’t get the opportunity very often these days. Too many flamin’ rules, too many flamin’ busybodies hell-bent on enforcing them, too much flamin’ aggravation.

Harsh snaps through the air off to the right caught his attention and he sank a little deeper into the building’s shadows, instinctively hiding the glowing end of the cigar with the hollow of his hand as multiple pulses of laser fire burned their way overhead, clipping a nearby building and creating a shower of heat-fused masonry. Like hail, only harder. Had it hit something more significant with a more powerful pop, he would have had a spray of shrapnel to contend with.

Had nothing to do with him, though; someone
else
was the target.

Logan didn’t move; there was no point. Given the lay of the ground, the intensity of the strafing fire, they had nowhere else to go but right past him.

Bingo.

Two figures, male and female, in the black leather uniforms of the X-Men. The man was in the lead, big sucker, but moving with surprising grace despite his evident bulk, bare arms standing out from the rest of him in the glow of various explosions. The skin of those arms and of his head reflected the light in a way that told Logan he was metal—even his hair gleamed as though cast from chrome. This was one of the newbies, Piotr Nikolievitch Rasputin. Colossus.

Logan spared him only the merest glance; his focus was mainly on Rogue.

She used to flinch at loud noises; now she kept pace with her companion, bobbing and weaving with practiced grace, presenting a random and unpredictable target for the opposition—showing excellent instincts for dealing with any trouble that came her way.

“How long do we have?” the man called to her.

“Two minutes, tops,” she replied, as she dove with him to cover.

Smart girl. The obvious place to hide was the shadowed corner where Logan himself stood, yet she realized that any infantryman worth the name would recognize that as well, and probably drop a brace of rounds on the location just to make sure. She’d chosen a nearby shell hole instead, part of a string of depressions that afforded a messy but relatively secure means of slipping across this open patch of ground.

The moment Rogue hit, she turned her back to the way they’d come, every one of her senses on high alert. Rasputin was a step behind, his attention still on whatever might be chasing them; he hadn’t yet twigged to the possibility of a threat from anywhere else. His wasn’t as artful a landing, either. Downside to all that bulk was, despite his relative ease of movement, Colossus still landed like a falling bank safe. Slid all the way to the bottom and made a deeper hole of his own.

Logan couldn’t help a grin. The girl was pretty damn good. All it had taken was a whiff of his lit cigar.

Better yet, he realized she was looking right at him.

But that was when she made her mistake, standing straight up to greet him, all thoughts of the mission banished behind her smile of welcome and pure delight.

“Logan,” Rogue cried.

“I’m away for a while, the whole world goes to hell.”

He should have known better. They had both breached battlefield discipline, had forgotten for a fateful split second what was happening all around them. And nearly paid dearly for the lapse.

He heard footsteps, the
kling
of a grenade pin flipping free, but never saw the bomb until it blew on the far side of Rogue. No time to pull her clear, no chance to cover her body with his own. She was too far out of reach.

But Colossus wasn’t. His view wasn’t masked by Rogue, as Logan’s was—he saw the grenade—and in the instant it took to fall, the fraction of a heartbeat before it exploded, he grabbed Rogue’s bare hand in one of his.

Back in the day, when Logan first knew her, the assimilation process was gradual. It took a definable length of time, enough for Rogue to have second thoughts, for the subject to pull away, as he felt his life literally pouring out of him. This was virtually instantaneous.

From the point of contact, Rogue’s skin flashed chrome as armor rolled up her arm across her body—while Peter’s reverted the other way, from organic steel back to normal flesh—so that when the spray of antipersonnel shrapnel reached her, it deflected off…

…to clip Logan instead.

It hurt like hell, both from slashing open a stretch of his side—which bled freely—and because the metal was red-hot, burning him as well. That’s why he favored T-shirts and clothes older than most of the junior X-Men; the way he generally got himself torn up, they were the most easily replaceable. Made him smile inside and shake his head, to wonder at the replacement cost of the custom-constructed X-Men uniforms.

Logan pressed his hand against the wound, but no more blood was flowing; there’d been just enough for that first, glorious, indelible stain before the skin regrew. It was still tender, but in a matter of minutes there’d be only a scar, and by tomorrow nothing at all. No sign whatsoever that he’d been wounded.

If only he could dump the sense memories of those hurts as easily. One thing to be a man who’s almost impossible to kill; totally another to remember pretty near every one of those quasi-death experiences.

He took another puff of his cigar. They’d been here long enough.

“You gonna stand here and get blown up, or what?”

“I didn’t see you at briefing, bub,” Rogue sassed him back, giving as good as she got, which cheered him. “D’
you
have the slightest idea where we’re goin’?”

She had the knowledge from the briefing, but he had the experience. As a brace of searchlights speared down from some hovering platform to illuminate the scene for the enemy gunners, he gestured towards a squat and ugly structure some distance away, across what had been the town’s central square.

“I’m thinkin’ that bunker.”

The look she gave him told Logan he’d scored, and also that if she had just absorbed Cyclops’s optic blasts instead of Colossus’s steel, the frustration in her eyes might have propelled him all the way over there in a single shot!

He felt a tremor through the ground, saw ripples in a pool of water pulse inward to the center.

Another pulse, establishing a steady cadence whose spacing suggested the march of something massive.

“Time to go, children,” he told the others, noting that both were reverting to their original states: Rogue human, Colossus in armor. She’d
way
improved since he saw her last.

“We get to that door,” Rogue announced, stress making her Mississippi accent a bit more pronounced, breathless from the double-sided transformation, “we’re clear.”

The two younger X-Men began moving from cover to cover, just as they’d been trained.

Logan started walking, right out in the open, as though he were out for an evening stroll—making himself a stalking horse for anyone dumb enough to take a shot. Watching him, Rogue didn’t know whether to admire his courage or shake him silly for being such a damn fool!
Logan,
she hissed to herself,
don’t you realize, dummy, that the price of havin’ friends, people who truly
care
’bout you, is that when you’re hurt,
we
feel it, too! Only we maybe don’t get over it quite so quick.