Friend or Foe Read online

  The self-destructing Sentinel perfectly mimicked the appearance of Leonard Samson, Ph.!). taking the form of'a large muscular figure with shoulder-length green hair. A bright red vest covered the Sentinel’s brawny chest, beneath which surged the miniature gamma reactor that had served as the robot’s heart.

  Time for a little cardiac surgery, Iron Man thought grimly. Magnifying lenses dropped into place before his eyes. A countdown appeared at the comer of his vision, projected directly onto his retinas by HUD (Heads Up Display) units mounted in his helmet’s eyepieces. 4 min 29 sec, it began to tick down, keeping him perpetually aware of the need for swift action. A pencil-thin laser beam, ideally suited for such delicate work, emerged from the index finger of his right gauntlet.

  Before he could get to work, however, a freezing gust of wind enveloped the Sentinel, frosting its synthetic skin and garments. Iron Man’s helmet swiveled to one side, and he saw Storm standing by, her open hands elevated before her. The backwash from the frigid blast lifted her hair, whipping the snow-white tresses about her head.

  ‘ ‘My arctic winds are not nearly as cold as what Iceman can summon,” she volunteered, “but perhaps this can buy you a few more precious seconds.”

  “Thanks,” Iron Man said sincerely. He wasn’t sure Storm’s icy gusts could actually slow the reaction on a sub-atomic level, not unless she cooled the gamma reactor down to absolute zero, but he wasn’t about to look a gift breeze in the mouth; he needed every edge he could get. “Keep it up,” he urged her.

  His finger-laser sliced right down the middle of the Sentinel’s chest....

  ‘'‘Ach du lieber,” Nightcrawler muttered, biting down on his lower lip in frustration. If only there was something I could do ...!

  Watching Iron Man perform surgery on “Doc Samson’s” mechanical innards, while Storm did her best to delay the predicted explosion, Kurt Wagner felt singularly useless. There wasn’t much his trademark acrobatics and swordsmanship could avail them in this crucial instance, even if his right ankle hadn’t already been crushed by that inhuman facsimile of the Abomination. He considered joining Wolverine on the roof, but Logan hardly needed any help watching out for danger, not with those incredibly acute senses of his. Instead Nightcrawler limped closer to the Samson-Sentinel for a better look at Iron Man’s efforts to defuse the bomb, the aluminum crutch beneath the German mutant’s shoulder making him uncharacteristically clumsy. Ouch, he thought, wincing as the movement caused a sharp pain to throb up and down his injured leg. His long blue tail twitched in sympathy.

  Like Moira, he was no expert in nuclear weapons, but he could see that Iron Man had already exposed the Sentinel’s internal mechanisms and was now hastily examining a globe-shaped metal chamber located approximately where Doc Samson’s heart should be. A shame that Iron Man’s employer, the famous Tony Stark, is nowhere nearby, Nightcrawler thought, the man is supposed to be a mechanical genius. A devout Catholic, the demonic-looking X-Man prayed that some of Stark’s brilliance had rubbed off on his armor-plated bodyguard.

  “I think I recognize the design,” Iron Man called out. “It’s similar to the bomb that destroyed that town in Arizona a few years back.” Fingers sheathed in flexible steel gloves carefully probed the interior of the Sentinel. “In theory, the damping rods must have retracted into the lower chest cavity—yes, there they are!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” the Hulk shouted back impatiently. “I figured that out already.” Metal and plastic tore apart loudly as the Hulk dissected the imitation Harpy with his bare hands. “Race ya to the finish, Shellhead!”

  It occurred to Nightcrawler that the Hulk had been created by a gamma bomb not unlike the ones that now menaced Muir Island, just as gamma radiation had spawned the real Harpy, the original Abomination, and even the malignant mastermind known as the Leader, whom, according to Storm, was believed to be responsible for the Sentinels’ unprovoked attack on the Centre. If even one of these bombs goes off, he wondered apprehensively, bathing the entire island with gene-altering gamma radiation, what sort of mutated menaces might emerge from those villages that survived the cataclysm?

  Another Hulk, perhaps? “Mein gott,” he whispered, appalled by the frightening possibilities.

  “Less than a minute to critical mass,” Iron Man reported. He thrust both hands into an assemblage of circuits and cables beneath the spherical reactor. “Here goes nothing.”

  “Easy for you to say, mein freund,” Nightcrawler remarked, “you’re the one wearing the protective metal suit.” Not that he really thought the Avenger’s armor could shield lion Man at ground zero of a nuclear explosion; he was just trying to lighten the mood as much as possible. If this was indeed to be the end of his illustrious career, Kurt Wagner wanted to go out with a quip on his lips and a smile in his heart. And a bum ankle, he reminded himself. Let’s not forget that.

  Something clicked into place within the Sentinel, and Nightcrawler held his breath, waiting for the firestorm to reduce him to atoms. The moment passed, though, and he heard a sigh of relief escape the anxious Avenger’s gilded faceplate before Iron Man spun around to check on the green-skinned component of this impromptu bomb squad. “Hulk! What’s happening over there?” The jade giant casually lifted the false Harpy by one enormous pinion, yanked both her wings off, then drop-kicked the mutilated Sentinel into the closest comer. “Don’t cry so hard you rust, tin man,” the Hulk said with a sneer. “This feathered fake ain’t ticking anymore.”

  Nightcrawler recalled that the Harpy-Sentinel had been made to look like a mutated form of the Hulk’s late w'ife. He wondered if that had anything to do with the disdain and violence with which the Hulk had disposed of the disarmed Sentinel, or if the Hulk was just constitutionally cranky? He found himself leaning strongly toward the latter explanation.

  Iron Man had better things to do than respond to the Hulk’s belligerent gibes. Jets flared from the soles of his iron boots as the Avenger launched himself down the adjacent pit after Iceman. Less than thirty seconds later, he rocketed up from below, carrying a Hulk-sized figure encased in a block of solid ice; through the frosty trans-lucence of the ice, Nightcrawler dimly glimpsed the scaly hide and reptilian features of the Abomination, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. His fractured ankle ached as he recalled how the absurdly powerful grip of this particular Sentinel had squeezed his ankle until it shattered. Moira had prescribed him enough painkillers to numb the pain somewhat, but the drugs were not enough to spare him from the memory of that excruciating ordeal. In his mind, he could still feel the splintered bones grinding against each other before he teleported to safety.

  A beam from Iron Man’s chestplate scanned the Sentinel through six centimeters of ice. “What’s the story?” Iceman asked the Avenger, ascending from the basement atop a rising pillar of ice. His crystalline form glistened in the sunlight. ‘ ‘Did the freeze treatment do any good?’ ’

  “You slowed the collision rate between the electrons and positrons,” Iron Man informed him, “but not enough to shut down the chain reaction.” The glowing sensor beam vanished in a blink, but the Avenger’s ominous words hung in the air. “It could go any moment,” he said; clearly, there was not enough time to crack open the ice, let alone defuse the bomb. Is that it? Nightcrawler thought. Are we doomed?

  Iron Man refused to give up. His helmet turned toward the immense chartreuse goliath over by the window. “Get over here, Hulk,” he ordered. “Throw this blasted thing straight up as hard as you can. You probably can’t get it high enough fast enough, but it’s our only chance!”

  He didn’t sound very optimistic, but, for once, the Hulk didn’t put up a fuss. He bounded across the laboratory in a single leap, then wrapped his massive arms around the frozen Sentinel, lifting it off the floor. Nightcrawler shook his head in disbelief; the Hulk’s colossal strength was legendary, but could even those herculean muscles propel the bomb into orbit before it exploded? Maybe with a little bit of help ...

  “Wait!” Nightcrawler call
ed out. Tossing his crutch aside, he somersaulted over to the Hulk’s side and placed a three-fingered hand against the giant’s ribs, using the Hulk’s unyielding mass to support his weight. “Excuse me, Herr Hulk,” he gasped, ignoring the sudden burst of agony radiating from his ankle. “Permit me to give you something of a foot up.”

  BAMF!

  Without further explanation, Nightcrawler teleported himself, the Hulk, and the ice-covered Abomination-Sentinel two miles straight up. A puff of sulfurous black smoke greeted their instantaneous arrival in the sky-high above Muir Island, as well as a wracking wave of discomfort that left Nightcrawler doubled over in pain and shock. Transporting such a heavy load over so great a distance would have been a strain even under the best of circumstances; in his drugged and debilitated state, the effort had nearly killed him.

  Kurt prayed that the Hulk would take full advantage of the ’port, right before he blacked out and began falling back to earth.

  What the heck? the Hulk thought, confused by his unexpected translocation. One minute he’d been down in that Scottish chick’s lab with Shellhead and the others, getting ready to fling an Abomination-on-ice for all it was worth; now here he was, up among the clouds. For an instant, he thought he’d been snatched by one of the Leader’s patented trans-mat beams. Then he got a whiff of brimstone and realized that the X-Men’s resident blue devil had hamfed them both into the sky, giving the Hulk a sizable head start in getting rid of the bomb.

  The very thought of owing that mutant gimp a favor, along with the implication that he even needed the help in the first place, fueled the Hulk’s anger, adding strength to his already stupendous sinews. He used that extra oomph to hurl the ticking Gamma Sentinel away a split-second before gravity seized hold of him. The force of his throw sent him speeding downward, accelerating past the plummeting form of Nightcrawler.

  Motivated by a certain crude decency that he would have vigorously denied if queried on the subject, the Hulk reached out for the unconscious mutant as they passed each other on their way to the island several thousand feet below. His outstretched fingers barely missed Nightcrawler’s sagging limbs, but, at the last second, he managed to snag hold of the X-Man’s ropy tail right above the triangular point at its nether end. Holding onto the tail with a clenched fist, the Hulk dragged Nightcrawler behind him as he plunged through the gray northern sky. “Great,” he muttered sourly to himself, a cold wind whipping against him, carrying his words away. “Now what do I do with him?”

  A blinding flash of emerald light, followed almost simultaneously by a thunderous blast of sound and force, interrupted the Hulk’s sarcastic monologue. High above the clouds, at least an additional mile or two from where the Hulk had launched it skyward, the gamma bomb detonated, taking with it a near-perfect replica of Emil Blonsky, the Abomination. Good riddance, the Hulk thought, regretting that it wasn’t the real Blonsky even as the shock wave hit him, battering his indestructible frame and searing his flesh, which healed just as quickly as it burned away. Gotta hand it to Banner, he admitted grudgingly, while his clenched teeth rattled in his skull, those babies deliver one heck of a kick.

  The impact was enough to loosen his grip on Nightcrawler’s tail, which slipped through his gargantuan fingers before he realized what was happening. Oops! He groped hastily for the escaped appendage, but seized only empty air. The force of the explosion drove their falling bodies apart, until Nightcrawler was well out of reach.

  Above him a spreading mushroom cloud, distinctly viridescent in hue, blotted out the sun, casting emerald shadows over the bean-shaped island below, which appeared to grow larger by the second as the Hulk and Nightcrawler rushed toward the ground. He spotted MacTaggert’s think tank near the northern tip of the island, its imposing steel and glass structures standing out amidst the rural villages and rolling hills carpeted in purple heather. The Hulk hoped he wouldn’t miss Muir Island entirely and splash into the sea instead; he didn’t feel like getting wet.

  The fall itself didn’t worry him. He’d walked away from every sort of crash landing before and didn’t expect that this one would be any different. Too bad Nightcrawler probably couldn’t say the same. Hey, I tried to catch him, the Hulk thought defensively. Nobody forced him to bamf without a parachute. He knew the odds.

  The elflike X-Man sped earthward like a fuzzy blue meteor, until a purple ray of light swept over him, slowing his descent. The Hulk watched in surprise as the violet beam brought Nightcrawler’s freefall to a standstill. His wide green eyes followed the tractor beam back to its source: the glowing projector at the center of Iron Man’s chestplate. Yeah, right, he thought. I should’ve guessed Shellhead wouldn ’t let the gimp go splat.

  While Iron Man carefully began to lower Nightcrawler to the ground, the Hulk fell past both X-Man and Avenger. He didn’t expect similar treatment, figuring he was on his own as usual, so he was caught by surprise when a sudden whirlwind arrived from out of nowhere, lifting him back into the sky well before he impacted with the waiting bedrock of Muir Island. The Hulk gasped out loud, puzzled by the timely twister, until he glimpsed Storm soaring above him, the black fabric wings beneath her arms catching the updrafts carrying her aloft. Her arms were outstretched before her, commanding the weather like a conductor leading an orchestra.

  The whirlwind ferried him back to the roof of the Centre, where he found the X-Men and their Avenger buddy waiting for him, Dr. MacTaggert already leaning over the baked and battered form of Nightcrawler as he lay sprawled upon the rooftop. Storm touched down gently seconds after her tamed tornado evaporated back into the cool Scottish air. Miles overhead, the seething mushroom cloud had yet to dissipate entirely. “Praise the Goddess!” Storm exclaimed, eyeing the emerald turbulence with a mixture of awe and disgust. “We have been spared after all.”

  “You praise her,” the Hulk snarled back. “I didn’t need any help. And still don’t.”

  Despite his angry words, the sight of the gamma bomb’s unleashed atomic fury sent a chill down his spine, forcing him to remember another explosion, years ago in the New Mexico desert, that had changed Banner’s life forever—and given birth to the hated and hate-filled being now looking out over the North Sea. Hi, Mom, he thought to the bomb’s aftermath, reflected in the icy blue waters of Cape Wrath. Sorry I didn’t get you a card.

  Thankfully, the Gamma Sentinels had not totally destroyed the Centre’s medlab. Many of the overhead lights were smashed, the walls bore serious dents and jagged scratches, the tile floor was badly scuffed, and at least one bedframe was now a crumpled mass of metal shoved into an unoccupied comer of the infirmary, but there was still enough intact equipment for Moira to immediately treat Nightcrawler for his injuries. An antiseptic medicinal smell, common to medical facilities everywhere, suggested, in a vaguely subliminal fashion, that, despite everything, the medlab was open for business.

  Storm stood by, helpfully holding a tray of instruments, as Moira completed her examination of Kurt, now resting in bed beneath a display of sophisticated diagnostic monitors. It pained Ororo to see her friend in such a ravaged state. His once-colorful uniform had been burned away, reduced to charred black rags that were almost invisible against the patient’s dark indigo fur. In places, the fine blue fuzz covering his body had been scorched away as well, revealing reddened patches of caucasian skin. Beneath sagging eyelids, his normally incandescent yellow eyes were clouded and streaked with red. Blisters covered his pointed ears. At least Iron Man caught him as he fell, she thought, but look what that hateful bomb has done to him,!

  Finished taking his pulse, Moira let go of Kurt’s wrist and inspected the monitors above the injured X-Man’s head. “He’ll live,” she pronounced eventually, granting Storm a welcome sense of relief. “He’s in shock, his ankle’s still broken, and he’s picked up some nasty radiation bums, but he should recover in time.”

  Thank you, Bright Lady, Stomi thought. “Are you certain he’ll be well, doctor?” Nightcrawler had not truly regained consciousness si
nce his selfless decision to teleport both the Hulk and the bomb away from the island. If only she could be sure that he knew how much his sacrifice had bought them. “I trust your judgment, Moira, but he looks worse than I ever remember seeing him before.”

  Moira gave her a reassuring smile, then glanced at Wolverine. “Kurt may nae have Logan’s mutant healin’ factor, but I’ve learned never t’underestimate the recuperative powers of any X-Man.” She took the instrument tray from Storm and laid it down atop an adjacent bed. “You folks take the proverbial lickin’, then keep tickin’ along more reliably than Big Ben. Have nae fear,” she assured the other heroes. “He’ll be fine soon enough.”

  “That’s great news, doc,” Bobby Drake said. Now that the immediate crisis was over, Iceman had defrosted himself, so that he now looked like nothing more than a brown-haired youth in a pale blue uniform. He stood at the end of Nightcrawler’s sickbed, beside Wolverine. Iron Man, not wanting to intrude on the X-Men’s bedside vigil, kept his distance, as did the Hulk, who sulked impatiently against an already dented supply cabinet. “Doesn’t look like he’s coming with us, though,” Bobby added.

  “No,” Storm agreed, shaking her head sadly. She wished they could linger to comfort Kurt through his recovery, but there was no time for delay. Rogue and the Scarlet Witch remained missing, presumably in the hands of a diabolical villain, the Leader, whom Storm herself had never fought before, but whom both the Avengers and the Hulk insisted was a formidable foe. We must return to our quest, she realized, hoping that Cyclops, Beast, and Iron Man’s fellow Avengers had discovered some means of tracking the Leader to his hidden sanctuary. ‘ ‘The sooner we rendezvous with our comrades at Avengers Mansion, the better.”

  “I’m coming with you, of course,” Bobby insisted. Visiting Moira in Scotland, he had missed the early stages of their hunt for Rogue, but could hardly be expected to stay behind now, especially since, as Storm now recalled, there had once been the early stirrings of a romance between Iceman and the X-Men’s missing southern belle; nothing much had come of their flirtation in the end, since Rogue’s heart remained inextricably bound with the mutant thief Gambit, yet Storm had no doubts that Bobby wanted to see Rogue restored to safety as much, if not more, than any one of them.