The Ultimate X-Men Read online

  Warren’s train of thought abruptly broke off and he smiled wryly. Old habits died hard; in his teen years as a student at the school, such thoughtless musings would have earned him a severe rebuke from the X-Men’s mentor and taskmaster, Professor Charles Xavier. From the very first,

  THE UtTIHATE X-HEtl

  Xavier had insisted that his X-Men think of themselves as human, not homo superior, as Magneto and some other would-be mutant messiahs would have it. Human. Not better. Only different.

  But some differences were basic—as fundamental as the difference between walking . . . and flying. His fellow X-Men didn’t really understand that their teammate’s need to fly was as basic as theirs to walk. Archangel banked, spreading his wings wider and gliding in a slow spiral. His overflight of Salem Center and its surroundings wouldn’t compromise site security; he was high enough up that anyone watching from below would probably take him for a kite or a plane. He’d stay up here long enough to be able to say he’d checked out the area and then go back. It was the least he could do, considering that his reconnaissance was really only an excuse for a little harmless exercise.

  Then Warren looked down at the ground below, and what he sawr made him fling his wings forward, spilling the wind through his pinions and bringing his body to a shuddering halt in the warm summer air.

  The Indianapolis police kept him for endless hours before deciding that they could not prove responsibility in Martin Mathers’ death; could not prove that he had actually been involved; could not even prove what everyone at the school now knew to be the truth . . .

  David Ferris was one of them.

  He came home to an apartment that had been violated, the furniture destroyed, the walls painted with slogans that had used to be familiar only from the evening news. Die

  n

  in A WOfiDERflll lift

  Mutie Scum—genejoke—read the letters in dripping paint, and in that moment David knew that his life was over.

  But his dying had hardly begun.

  This is it. I’m through. He’d finally managed to stand, clutching at a tree trunk for support, but he knew that forcing his exhausted body to run was beyond all possibility. And the part of David Ferris that wanted to pay for his crimes— rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft—welcomed the hunters who followed him so relentlessly.

  Black Team 51. Their names were Gilman and Egan, and they’d come into his life a little over a week ago, while he was still staring helplessly at the wreckage of his apartment. They’d told him their names, but they hadn’t told him anything else. Except the most important thing.

  “There’s a man who’cl like to meet you. He wants you to work for him. You’re special, David. He’s interested in your special abilities. And face it, after yesterday how many choices do you have?”

  Come with us, and Spin dross into gold, into fire, into blood . . . And all across the Multiverse, a thousand David Ferrises refused and died.

  But David Ferris knew more about choices than any other man alive. He’d played along, played for time, and when they’d let their guard down he’d given Egan and Gilman the slip and fled to New York—hoping to get out of the country—only to find that Black Team 51 had second-guessed him, just as they had at each step down the line. They’d been waiting at the airport.

  He’d panicked and run, hitchhiked, anything to find a reality that didn’t place him in the back seat of that black sedan. And for a few hours he’d thought he’d won, but

  Itlf ULTIMATE MIEH

  every time he reached the road it seemed the car found him again within minutes. Content to follow, playing some sadistic game of cat and mouse, waiting for the moment when David Ferris could run no longer.

  Waiting for this moment.

  W?hy were they so cautious? Were they expecting him to fight back? David smiled without any particular humor. It was true that they didn’t know what he was capable of, but the real joke was: he didn’t know what he was capable of. And it didn’t look like he was going to live long enough to find out either.

  There was a sound of tires on gravel on the road behind him. David turned on unsteady legs to face it. The black sedan’s side windows were tinted, and the windshield was some sort of one-way glass. The car might be full of Martians, for all David could see, but in some universes the windows weren’t tinted, and he knew it was Egan and Gilman. Who were through playing. David heard a faint hum as the powered side window rolled down and some monstrous and evil machine of chrome tubes, flashing lights, and wicked flanges poked out.

  It looked as if it had been dropped here from some alternate reality, like something out of a Star Wars movie, something that could not possibly function. David stared at it in disbelief. As it sighted on him a thin keening grew louder, sliding out of audibility until it was only an ultrasonic pressure against his skin. And in a moment of despairing clarity, David Ferris realized that he did not want to die, that he would do anything to stay alive—and free.

  He’d even do what they wanted him to do.

  The Wheel that hovered at the edge of his consciousness

  n

  every waking moment came sharp. David reached for it, Spun it into manifestation with the last of his mutant stamina, braiding all the possible realities together as the power surged through him into the woi'ld. His body cracked like a whip as living flesh completed the circuit, and David Ferris reached out from What Was to What Could Be—

  And in the blink of an eye, Could Be became Was.

  The summer sunlight went flatly yellow, and the stench of burning sulphur seemed to hang on the air. Beneath the wheels of the black sedan, the asphalt pulled and turned to tar and stretched like hot taffy. . .

  Until it burst.

  Ropy tentacles the color of rotting eggplant slithered through the tarry chunks of broken road, writhing themselves around the car, tightening and beginning to pull. The hood gave a sharp ping! as it buckled, and under the unrelenting pressure the tinted windows crazed, then shattered, then spilled over the doors of the car like dangerous candy.

  Someone screamed. The weapon in the car slewed crazily about, then fired, and for a brief instant David Ferris’s body was outlined in a corona of multicolored light.

  “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 wrarning 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 f
rom 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 wras 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 w
as 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.