The Ultimate X-Men (3 page)

“He’s been gone too long.” Bobby Drake’s voice was hard and decisive. He stood up, taking a step toward the edge of the terrace as though that would tell him where Warren had gone.

“Jean?” Scott said.

I’ll scan,
the redhead answered through their psychic link. Jean Grey got to her feet and closed her eyes, search-

THE ULTirtATE
im

ing telepathically for the imprint of Warren’s thoughts through the background static of thousands of other minds.

It had been less than ninety seconds since Archangel had departed on his aerial reconnaissance, but the outcome of battles had been decided in far less time. Their former teammate Kitty Pryde had once said that being an X-Man was like wearing a psychic sign that read,
come and kill me,
and those who had been X-Men longest had that worldly wise paranoia burned into their very bones.

“Forget that. I’m going to look for him,” Bobby said.

like some illusion wrought by time-lapse photography, a puddle first of frost, then of ice, spread beneath his feet, broadening into a frozen wave that became an ice-slide sweeping him aloft.

“Bobby!” Scott snapped in exasperation.

“Wait!” Jean Grey said.
Scott, there’s
—

And then everything happened at once.

There was a blinding flash of sunlight on silver wings— Archangel’s return flight. There was w
^r
arning in his very bearing, from the low, fast flight barely above the tree line to the way he kept looking behind him.

With a faint frosty crackle, Bobby Drake’s clothing froze into brittle glassy shards and fell from his body. Iceman’s body transformed into a glittering form of ice that melted and reformed a thousand times a second over his entire body, giving the unyielding ice the illusion of flexibility. The sun glinted from his frozen form in a heliographic display, and a wave of arctic cold cut through the baking August heat.

At the same moment on the terrace below, Scott Summers got to his feet. From the table beside him he lifted

in A WONDER fill lift

what at first appeared to be a pair of fancy sunglasses; a gleaming gold visor echoing the helm of a knight of old, bisected horizontally by a thin line of brilliant ruby quartz. A more delicate instrument than the blast goggles he had been wearing, the battle visor allowed him to wield the full force of his incredible optic blasts with the delicacy of a surgeon. Closing his eyes tightly, the wiry and supremely ordinary-looking young man first removed the bulky goggles and slipped the gold-and-ruby visor into place. As the cybernetic contact points touched his temples, the X-Man known as Cyclops opened his eyes, and the annihilating blood-red light of his destructive optic blasts washed over the inside of his cybernetically controlled battle visor.

“Let’s go, folks,” the X-Men’s team leader said.

Beside him, Jean Grey’s body began to glow, and she telekinetically launched herself into the summer sky.

As for Hank McCoy, he had no need for a flashy transformation or display. He merely set down his lemonade glass and removed his glasses as the shimmering figure came crashing through the trees at the edge of the lawn.

Assuming they’d still been alive and in a talkative mood, Egan and Gilman could have told David what had hit him— and was about to cause the X-Men such trouble. The Moe-bius Lance was, in fact, a weapon that had been specifically designed to subdue supernormals with powers classified as parapsionic, such as Gambit or the Scarlet Witch. It had been developed during experiments conducted on the mutant known as Angar the Screamer before his death, and was supposed to scramble a parapsi’s nervous system, setting

Tilt umnm mien

up a feedback loop that would render them the victim of their own power for a short but undetermined period.

There were only two problems.

The Moebius Lance had never actually been tested on the people it was supposed to control.

And its effects weren’t anything like the ones its designer had predicted.

Thoughts and memories spilled through David Ferris’s mind as his neurochemistry reconfigured, wiping memory and personality from the intricate architecture of his brain. All that he was drained away, the tangled skein of memory unknotting into smoothness once more.

Above the other X-Men, Archangel braked and veered groundward. He didn’t know what connection the glowing man below him had with the wrecked car he’d seen back on 9A North, but he did know that the car looked as if it’d been bear-hugged by the Hulk and that even in Westchester normal people didn’t glow in the dark.

Archangel and the former David Ferris broke through the trees at about the same time.

A moment ago he’d been hungry, tired, and afraid. Now he was none of those things. He no longer remembered that he’d been fleeing, or from whom. The running man stopped when he reached the edge of the trees. He didn’t, in fact, remember being David Ferris very well at all.

Probabilities cascaded through David’s mind like a winning hand of solitaire on Windows 95.

say something you have to

So many ways to go, so many paths to choose, and who he was had been lost forever, buried in a thousand might-be-maybes, and who was he?

you have to remember it was important you were—you were
— “I am the Wheel of Fortune!” David Ferris shouted. “In that case, I’d like to buy a vowel, Vanna,” the Beast replied smoothly, loping forward. The glowing man was a threat, but possibly not the main threat. In torn jeans and ripped shirt, their little glowworm looked more like one of the victims than like the vanguard of an attacking force— but it didn’t pay to take chances . . .

“For God’s sake, Beast, be—” Cyclops shouted.

The glowing man flung out his hand.

—killme goingtokillme extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice
—

And that was the last thing Hank McCoy saw.

In this world, at least.

“I said, ya gotta get over yerself, Torchy.”

Henry P. McCoy twitched ever so slightly as the unmistakable gravel voice of Benjamin J. Grimm cut through his concentration.

There was a crash from the room beyond and the sound of a rushing
whoosh
of flame. Hank sighed and pushed his glasses farther up on his nose. Working as Reed Richards’s research assistant w
^r
as a wonderful opportunity, it was true, and if not for Stark International’s continuing-education program, he wouldn’t have had it.

If only it weren’t so . . . stressful.

“Look here, brick-face—” Another crash.

Hank winced. He sincerely believed that violence was

lit UlTMATE X-HEfl

the last refuge of the incompetent; he abhorred physical brutality and shunned strife in every form. He’d managed to forget that in addition to being one of Earth’s foremost scientists, Dr. Richards was a lightning rod for trouble. Usually super-powered trouble.

And me without a supemormality to my name,
Hank thought mournfully. A litde agility hardly counted. In fact, it was a positive prerequisite for his current assignment.

The building shook. Hank leapt to his feet with a yelp of dismay. While he’d been distracted, the chemical he’d been timing had boiled over and was now foaming greenly across the lab bench.

What you need, Henry old son, is a guardian angel
. . .

A thousand presents, a thousand worlds; each as real as the next. . . .

And the Wheel was Spinning. . . .

Cyclops was the farthest away of any of the team: Archangel, Iceman, and Phoenix were airborne and in all the years he’d known him he’d never been able to persuade Hank that a full frontal assault wasn’t the best way to assess a new and unknown threat. In the instant that the Beast disappeared in a flash of light, all the rules changed, and the glowing man calling himself the Wheel of Fortune went from potential victim to certified threat.

Making sure his teammates were out of the fire line, Cyclops opened his visor far enough to emit a thin ruby lance of raw power.

Split-second calculation raced through Scott’s mind:

in A WONDERFUL UfE

Should, be enough to KO him if it hits; he
looks
human enough
—

There was a grinding crash from above. At the same time a tree beside the stranger’s head exploded in a shower of splinters. Chunks of ice fell out of the sky. A dozen different things clamored for Cyclops’ attention all at the same time.

Bobby?

Missed!

How?

“X-Men—pull back!” Scott shouted.

Phoenix had chosen to come at the glowing man from behind. She heard Scott’s shout through the link they shared, and her automatic running assessment of the danger they were in spiked. Hank had vanished, but the clean abruptness of it told Phoenix that it was probably some sort of teleportation—

And if it weren’t, the years ahead would be time enough to grieve.

There’s something wrong here. And whatever it is, it’s getting worse.

When he’d first appeared, the stranger had been surrounded by a chatoyant nimbus of biogenetic energy, almost a halo. Now the area of affect began to spread; the figure inside it to blur, to multiply—and as it did, its psi-signatures did as well. The sensation for Phoenix was similar to being in a rapidly filling auditorium where everyone was talking at once. Ten, a hundred, a thousand: the force of his multiplied thoughts was drowning all other thoughts in a wave of telepathic static.

IRE OLimAIE
im

Hoiv does he—? There are more of him every instant.

Above and ahead there was the sound of an explosion; Jean Grey swerved groundward to avoid the flying chunks of ice. What had happened to Bobby?

What had happened to all of them? She could no longer “hear” her teammates, nor any of the ordinary human minds that made up the community of Salem Center—and in fact, she was no longer sure any of them were there at all. But above all things, Jean Grey was a professional, and the Mission Objective came first. Stop the intruder; shut him down.

Seconds before, Iceman had been twenty feet overhead. Trained always to fight as part of a team, he’d kept a running check of where the others were—Warren was above and on his left, Jean should be coming up from the bogey’s blind side. Hank and Cyke were somewhere on the ground; not in his attack path. Now was the time to put a set of ice handcuffs on their unfair unknown and have him wrapped up and ready to deliver.

Bobby angled his ice slide groundward—

—and smashed directly into Archangel below him, also coming in for an attack run.

But that’s impossible
—
he was
behind
me
—

“Drake, you—moron!” Archangel shouted, silver feathers chiming faintly as he battled desperately to stay airborne.

But Bobby Drake had troubles of his own. The collision with Archangel’s wings had shattered his ice slide; Iceman was four stories up with no visible means of support.

Where’s Hank? Bobby wondered as he fell. He didn’t

!H A WONDERFUL IIEE

want to nail him with an ice pylon if Hank was moving into position to catch him, but at the same time, he didn’t want to
crash
—

Snow. Just the thing on a hot day.
With reflexes honed in a thousand Danger Room sessions, Iceman flung out both hands, making the air beneath him cold, colder, coldest. . .

It was only too bad that what was beneath him wasn’t ground at all.

No! That’s impossi
—

The rest of his life was going to be measured in seconds if he didn’t time this just right. Bobby Drake drew a deep breath and launched himself into space. A terrifying moment of free fall, and then the crossbar smacked into the palms of his calloused hands. He was glad he’d taken the time to apply the extra coat of rosin to his hands; it was August, and sweat and high-wire acts didn’t mix. He pulled himself up and over, taking a moment to steal a glance at the audience in the seats far below.

The Big Apple Circus was one of the few tenting circuses still working. Five years ago Bobby Drake had signed up as a rigger. It was exciting to work a hundred feet above the ground, but Bobby craved excitement the way a couch potato craved junk food. He was always looking for the next thrill.

Case in point. Bobby Drake, boy aerialist. He launched himself from the trapeze to the slack wire ten feet below. To the ringside audience, it looked as though he were jumping to his death.
Angel bait,
the others called him.

Bobby Drake always worked without a net.

* * *

THE ULTIMATE Ml Ell

It was the unexpectedness of the sound that made Cyclops turn toward it. What he saw made his eyes widen with disbelief behind their ruby-quartz firewall at the sheer . . . idiocy of it.
Funny. I didn’t remember the swimming pool being on this side of the house,
Cyclops thought inconsequentially. But if it hadn’t been, it was now; Scott could even see the place on the concrete lip where Wolverine had etched graffiti years before.

But what was by far the most interesting thing about the swimming pool at the moment was the fact that every drop of water it contained had been turned into a filtered, pH-balanced, chlorinated block of solid ice. And Iceman was frozen into the middle of it, entombed like a fly in amber.

Chipping him free would have been a delicate task at the best of times, but as Cyclops turned back from his split-second assessment, he realized that time had run out.

He was alone, facing the Wheel of Fortune.

And then he wasn’t there anymore.

And the Wheel of Fortune was Spinning.

I know every sound my ship makes.
Scott Summers looked out across the bridge with the satisfaction that came from the awareness of being in his proper place. All around him, overlapping holographic screens showed him images of a starfield adjusted to compensate for redshift distortion and modified with the data feed from the navigational computers.