The Return Read online

  First Prologue

  Peter Corbeau sat in his quarters onboard Starcore One, trying to work out how many seconds remained before the first of July.

  Across from him sat two of the station’s crew, Colonel Mikhail Kutuzov and Dr. Stephen Beckley, in a heated discussion about something or other.

  “Look Dr. Corbeau,” Beckley was saying, “all I’m asking is to retask the array for a few tens of hours, to get the final data I need for the Edmund Project.” “With all due respect, Beckley,” Kutuzov said, his tone indicating anything but, “the administration allowed you onboard only as a courtesy to NASA. I refuse to allow your project to disrupt any of Starcore’s ongoing experiments or data-gathering efforts.”

  It was something on the order of twenty-seven million, give or take three hundred thousand, Corbeau estimated. Twenty-seven million seconds before he’d be back on Earth, fishing the waters of the Caribbean from the deck of his yacht, the Dejah Thoris II. And in the meantime, he’d be busy playing chaperone to a group of quarreling schoolchildren. Or highly respected scientists. Sometimes he had difficulty deciding which.

  It was his fault, ultimately. Not just that shifts on the UN-sponsored solar observatory ran the better part of a year, though he’d had a voice in that decision, as well. No, the whole Starcore operation itself could be laid at his feet. So when it came time to bemoan the fact that he would not be able to fish again for the better part of ten months, he had no one to blame but himself

  He’d had two passions since childhood, linked in his mind: the sun and the sea. Peter had spent years studying the former, and devoted what little free time he had to enjoying the latter. But now his love of the one meant he was denied the other, and he couldn’t help but feel that was somehow unfair.

  Peter was a scientist, after all. So how did he end up in management?

  “Dr. Corbeau, I must insist,” Beckley said, and Peter found that he’d completely lost the thread of the discussion. He didn’t worry too much, though, since if there was one characteristic the two men before him shared, it was an inability to avoid endlessly repeating their own arguments.

  Despite having initiated Project Starcore just so he could study the sun in ways that were impossible from Earth, Peter was now personally responsible for overseeing the work of a dozen men and women, scientists of different disciplines and nationalities, each a leader in their field. Collectively they held almost a dozen Nobel prizes, and any one of them could have retired comfortably on the patents generated by their work. And yet they still fought like kids in a schoolyard, jostling for access to the wide variety of monitoring equipment on the station, each with their own experiments to run and hypotheses to test.

  And all Peter really wanted to do right now was fish. But that would have to wait until the first of July, another twenty-seven million seconds away.

  Starcore had been Peter’s idea, his baby from the beginning, and he’d personally overseen the design of every inch of the Starcore One space station, garnering two Nobel prizes along the way. When the UN tapped him to act as director of Project Starcore, it came as a surprise to no one. And yet it wasn’t until strapping into the Starcore-Eagle-One shuttle, bound for his first tour of duty on the station, that it first occurred to Peter what he’d be giving up, leaving Earth for such long stretches of time.

  He was a genius, sure, and had the paperwork to prove it, but too often he missed the blindingly obvious, even when it was staring him right in the face.

  His comm pinged, interrupting whatever Kutuzov was about to say. With a sigh of gratitude, Peter toggled on the display, and the face of Talia Kruma filled the screen.

  “Yes, Talia?” Peter said. “What is it?”

  “Something pretty strange, Peter. A ship of unknown design has just popped up in our sensor data.”

  “Where?”

  Kruma glanced to one side, lips pursed. “It’s close.”

  Peter was already on his feet and heading to the door. “I’ll be right there.”

  Moments later, Corbeau was on the bridge, Beckley and Kutuzov at his heels.

  “Well, Talia, what can you tell me?”

  “That’s it,” Kruma said, pointing to the indistinct image displayed on the overhead monitors. The still was blurry and distorted, but the overall impression was of an immense ship of strange angles and proportions. “It appeared near the sun a bit over four minutes ago, and passed within a few thousand miles of Starcore One.”

  Peter’s eyes widened. “That puts its velocity at a significant fraction of the speed of light.”

  Kruma nodded. “We figure it at just over .75 c, Peter. And slowing. ”

  “What’s its bearing?” Beckley asked, breathless. Kruma glanced over at Alexander Hilary, who was busy collating the most recent data at his station. Hilary looked up, face ashen, and said a single word: “Earth.”

  Second Prologue

  “I don’t know, Cap’n. This seems like a real bad idea to me.”

  “Well, Frank, maybe if you didn’t drink away what little money you don’t lose at cards, you could scrape together enough to buy your own boat, and then you could make the decisions.”

  The crewman shook his head ruefully, and left Aley-tys Forrester in the wheelhouse. It was her boat, and her decision, but the crew was clearly none too happy about it.

  When Frank had gone, Paolo came in from the deck, carrying a steaming cup of coffee in either hand. Lee gratefully accepted one, her attention still on the far horizon.

  “Frank’s an idiot, Lee, but he’s right about this. Let the Coast Guard take care of this mess. Nothin’ good’ll come of us sailing the Devil’s Triangle.”

  Lee Forrester had known Paolo since she was a little girl. He and her father had been good friends, and when she’d blown her savings on buying the trawler right out of college, Paolo had been the first to sign on to her crew. He’d been onboard ever since, and he knew more about the sea than he could ever teach her. But despite Lee’s repeated insistence that there was nothing to the legends of the Bermuda Triangle other than the periodic eruption of methane hydrate deposits on the ocean floor, affecting the buoyancy of ships and the ability of planes to maintain lift, the old man refused to believe that these waters were anything but cursed.

  “Heard and understood, Paolo,” Lee said, with a weary smile. “But my decision stands. We’ve radioed it in, but if there’s somebody left alive from that crash, we’ll be able to get to them long before anyone else can.”

  Paolo shook his head, but kept silent, taking up his accustomed position at her side.

  The trawler Arcadia was about five hundred miles off the east coast of Florida, and making its way steadily northeast, roughly in the direction of Bermuda. It had been a few hours since they’d seen the craft arcing overhead. Lee thought it might be some sort of NASA craft, or maybe an experimental airplane. Either way, it was coming in hot and fast, looking like it was going to crash into the ocean somewhere just over the horizon. Lee hadn’t needed to think about it too long before she ordered the men to haul in the nets, and headed at full steam toward the place the craft must have gone down.

  The vapor trail lingering in the air led them like a beacon, and by midmorning the little atoll came into view. Lee didn’t have to check the charts to know where they were. She’d once washed ashore on that little strip of land, after being tossed overboard in a squall. One of her crew had dived in after her, for all the good it did either of them. The two of them had spent days on the atoll, unsure if they’d ever be rescued, until he appeared and they went from the frying pan into the fire.

  “God preserve us,” Paolo said, his mouth drawn into a tight line, his gaze fixed on the shapes hulkingjust beyond the atoll.

  Lee nodded, expression grim. As the Arcadia motor
ed around the little island, the strange prominences of the city beyond came into view. The island was Julienne Cay. The city had no name, at least not one that Lee knew. All that she knew was that it was older than civilization, and had not been built by human hands. And the vapor trail they followed pointed directly at its heart.

  Over the objections of the crew, Paolo included, Lee made landfall, mooring at the makeshift dock she’d used on her previous visits to the strange, unearthly city.

  “Come on, you lunks,” Lee said, slinging her pack on her back “If there are any survivors, we’re not doing them any favors standing around here.”

  There were four members of the crew besides Lee and Paolo, and they now gathered around Frank, their de facto spokesman in times of dispute. He was the one who typically brought any of their grievances to the captain, all of them invariably minor and easily settled, and though he’d never done more than win the crew a few more percent of the ship’s haul to split amongst themselves, he carried himself like a shop steward facing down the oppressive forces of big business.

  “Look, Cap’n,” Frank said, squaring his shoulders and trying his best to look intimidating. “The guys ’n me have been talkin’ it over, and we’ve decided we’re stayin’ on the boat.”

  “Is that so?” Lee asked sweetly.

  Frank nodded. “Yeah, it is.”

  “What are you afraid of, guys?” Lee asked “Bogeymen swimming up out of the triangle to drag you down to a watery grave?”

  A couple of the younger crewmen exchanged worried glances, and Lee knew that was precisely what they were worried about.

  “Well,” Lee said, nodding slowly. She stepped back into the wheelhouse, and stepped out holding a rifle, normally kept racked on the cabin wall. A Lee-Enfield .303 that her grandfather had brought back from the first World War, it was euphemistically called the “shark gun.” It had been used to shoot more than sharks in its day. Lee planted the rifle’s butt on her hip, her hand on the stock “Unless I’m very mistaken, this is the only firearm on the boat. And its coming with me. So you’ve got to ask yourselves. Do you feel safer inland with me and my rifle or here on the boat with Frank?”

  The crew looked to one another, and with a ripple of shrugs prepared to follow Lee inland.

  “How about you, Frank?” Lee said, stepping up onto the ship’s railing, and then vaulting to the dock a few feet away. “You coming along, or are you going to stay on the boat all by your lonesome?”

  “I’m cornin’,” Frank said reluctantly, glancing up at the strangely shaped towers of the city. “But I still say this is a bad idea.”

  Following Lee’s lead, the crew made their way through the labyrinthine concourses of the city, moving through narrow passages and across broad avenues, under the gaze of towering statues depicting unearthly, inhuman creatures. At the feet of many of these enormous monsters were sculpted human figures, lounging in submissive poses in various states of undress. The crew walked in silence, unsettled by the strangeness surrounding them.

  At last they found the craft, parked in the middle of a broad plaza without a scratch on it.

  “What the devil is that?” Paolo said.

  “Whatever it is,” Lee said, looking at the odd angles and unsettling protuberances of the vessel, “it isn’t local.”

  “Cap’n?” Frank said uneasily, pointing at the strange figures issuing from the craft’s open hatch, who began to advance on them menacingly.

  “Frank,” Lee said, unslinging the shark gun from her shoulder, “I’m beginning to think you might have been right after all.”

  More of the strange figures were in view now, and some of them had taken to the air, shouting at Lee and her crew in an alien, guttural language.

  “Captain?” one of the younger crew said plaintively. “What are we ... ?”

  “Quiet, Joe,” Lee said, and tossed the rifle to Paolo, who trained it on the nearest of the figures. She then slung her pack from her back and grabbed the satellite phone from the side pocket.

  “Lee?” Paolo said, warily. “These folks don’t seem too friendly, I don’t think”

  Lee finished punching in the number, and held the phone up to her ear. “Come on, come on, pick up, damn it!”

  “Cap’n? A little help, here?”

  “I’m working on it, Frank,” Lee said, and then heard the click on the other end of the line. “Oh, Scott, thank god you’re ..

  “Thank you for calling Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters,” came the voice on the other end of the line. “I’m afraid we’re not able to take your call at this time, but if you’ll leave your name and a brief message after the beep...”

  1

  This wasn’t the slums, or the war-torn streets of some distant city, or a savage and distant land. This was Manhattan, Park Avenue to be precise, somewhere in the upper seventies. Kitty Pryde knew it as one of the swankiest neighborhoods in the city, perhaps even the world, but on this moonless night, the streets strangely empty of vehicles and pedestrians alike, the shadows pooling under every awning and around every door, she felt an inescapable sense of menace.

  For the moment, it seemed that the world consisted of nothing but Kitty and the buildings towering on either side. But she knew that was too good to last.

  As if in response to her thoughts, a pair of street thugs emerged from the shadows. They looked like rejects from The Warriors or a Street Fighter arcade game, one of them done up like a B-movie Indian with Mohawk, face paint, and feathers, the other in a battered top hat and tattered tails.

  The Mohawk carried a hunting knife, whose blade glinted dully in the low light, while the top hat swung a Louisville Slugger like a batter approaching the plate.

  “How do, Chicken Little?” said the Mohawk in a rasping voice. “Ready to have some fun?”

  “What’s the matter?” Kitty asked, crossing her arms over her chest. “You guys get lost on the way to a Village People tribute?”

  ‘You hear that, Robbo?” the Mohawk said to the top hat. “Chicken Little thinks she’s a comedian.”

  Robbo, the top hat, snickered like a dutiful sidekick but said nothing.

  Kitty sighed, and shook her head. “That doesn’t even make any sense, you know. Chicken Little? Since when have I worried about the sky falling?”

  “Oh,” the Mohawk said, dramatically, “it’s gonna fall.”

  Kitty rolled her eyes. ‘You need to work on the script a bit. If this is the best you can do, well, it’s just embarrassing.” She motioned to the two street thugs. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

  As the pair advanced, menacingly, Kitty sized up her options. Ninjitsu? she wondered. No, she thought with a smile. Krav maga.

  The Mohawk attacked first, swinging the hunting knife down in a wide arm, the blade toward the ground. Kitty responded instantly with a simultaneous block and strike, punching the Mohawk in the throat with the heel of her palm, grabbing hold of his wrist with her other hand. As the Mohawk pulled away, Kitty kept her hold on the knife. A brief tug-of-war ensued, ended quickly with a knee to the Mohawk’s groin. As he staggered backward, moaning, Kitty sent the knife flying off into the darkness, end over end, finally landing with a clatter some yards away, well out of reach.

  The top hat came next, swinging the bat like a club. Kitty ducked under the swing, knocking his arm aside with her left elbow, then went in close with a shovel hook with her right, fist held palm up, elbow tucked down by her ribs, the force of motion coming from her hips. The short-range punch caught the top hat in the soft tissue just beneath the ribcage on his left side, knocking the wind from him. Then, as the top hat reeled, she swung around and followed the body shot with a head shot that caught the top hat in the side of the face.

  Kitty kicked the bat away as the top hat dropped to the pavement, just as the Mohawk regained his composure. She set her feet, arms held lightly to either side, and smiled sweetly at him. “Ready for another go?”

  The Mohawk looked at his friend, moaning sem
iconscious on the sidewalk and without another word turned and ran.

  Kitty shrugged, and started to head up the avenue in the opposite direction. Logan would have been proud. She hadn’t even had to use her phasing powers.

  “This is too easy,” she said to the empty air. “I was expecting something a bit tougher.”

  Just then, a hulking metal figure rounded the comer of 71st Street, blocking her path. It was roughly manshaped, but towered over her, taller than the two street thugs combined.

  “Okay,” Kitty said, whistling appreciatively. “That’s tougher.”

  Kitty’s first thought was that it was some sort of robot. A bit cliched, perhaps, but more of a credible

  threat than the Village People rejects of a moment before.

  No, she thought, seeing the very human eyes in the faceplate, high overhead. It’s a powered combat suit, like Iron Man on steroids.

  As the towering figure of yellow metal approached, Kitty recognized the design. It was a Mandroid, tech originally developed by Tony Stark for SHIELD, but since fallen into the hands of any number of well-funded criminal masterminds and megalomaniacs bent on world domination. But who the suit’s owner might be was of much less concern to Kitty at the moment than what its operator might be planning.

  Okay, Kitty thought, dancing backward as the Mandroid slowly advanced, if this model is anything like the ones I studied, it’ll be made of vanadium steel, with a laser cannon mounted on its left arm, a power claw of some kind on the right.

  How well the armaments would be employed, of course, depended largely on the skills of the operator inside, but even a complete novice could be ruthlessly effective in a rig like that.

  Kitty phased as the laser cannon sent a gout of coherent light right at her, and though the beam passed harmlessly through her phased molecules, she could still feel the heat of its passage. It felt like stepping out of an air-conditioned plane into a hot desert summer, and Kitty didn’t like to imagine what the full intensity of the beam would do to her if she weren’t phased.

  The Mandroid didn’t give her a chance to counter, but swung the power claw at her in a vicious arc. Kitty remained phased, nonchalantly waiting for the arm to pass through her. But just as the metal of the suit’s claw passed through her phased molecules, Kitty winced, feeling as if she’d just been kicked in the head. Spots danced in her vision, and the worst migraine she’d felt in ages flared up behind her eyes.