The Ultimate X-Men Read online

  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.

  What season was it at home? Scott shook his head, smiling at the foolishness of wondering about a homework! he’d left while still a child. The glory of that day was something that would burn in his memory like a nova until the day he died: Alex, the orphanage, the great golden god dressed in polychrome buccaneer’s leathers, striding in to claim them both, take them away. . .

  Christopher Summers. Their father.

  Still, Earth was his home; Scott had been born there, in the Midwestern United States. He might go back there someday. It was summer there now, he thought. What was the name of the month? August, that was it. . .

  “Shi’ar raiders detected by long-range sensors, Captain!” the helm said.

  Scott Summers brought his mind back to the present with a jolt.

  “Battle stations, everyone—go to Condition Red. Okay, Starjammers, it’s time to break up this little party—”

  A moment before, there had been five of them; now Phoenix was alone. She reached out for the mind of the intruder. A moment later she realized her chosen tactic was wrong, and four seconds after she began her intervention, Jean Grey knew that she’d just made a potentially fatal mistake.

  In her years as an X-Man, she had probed the minds of aliens, madmen, and demons, linked together members of the team across both years and light-years, travelled from the far side of the galaxy to a future that never was.

  This was different.

  This was like all of them at once.

  With a dim, fading part of her mind, Jean Grey could feel the earth beneath her feet, the warmth of the sunlight beating down on her shoulders, the roughness of the tree bark beneath her fingers. They were part of one reality.

  But not the only one.

  THE Mm Ml Ell

  * ❖ *

  “If I had the wings of an angel—” The melodious baritone came to a distracted halt as the singer tried and failed to remember the next line. Oh, well. Hardly matters, Warren Worthington III told himself philosophically.

  Below him the green of the Hudson River Valley unrolled in an immaculate carpet, and Warren almost felt as if he could taste the wind on his face. This little flight up to Albany was just what the doctor ordered to chase those boardroom blues away.

  Making a small adjustment, Warren maneuvered the Piper Cub into a showy sideslip. He’d always loved to fly . . .

  I’ve always loved to fly. Why did that simple statement fill him with panic? Of course he did; been flying since he was sixteen; his father had bought him his own plane for his twenty-first birthday. Sailplaning; hang gliding; Warren had always loved anything that would take him into the air.

  My wings! He could feel his heart hammering in his chest, racing faster and faster. Black spots danced before his eyes and the Piper Cub’s stick slipped forward, taking with it the nose of the small plane. Falling forward in an uncontrolled dive, the small plane began, lazily, to spin.

  Where are my wings ?

  The scream of air past the Cub’s cowling roused him to his immediate plight. Frantically Warren clawed at the controls, trying to pull the plane out of its deadly dive. He heard the singing in the guide wires as the ailerons snatched at the treacherous air. The surface of the Hudson rushed closer with each passing second. Only the wings of an angel could save him now.

  IT’5 A WOflDERfUl Lift

  But Warren Worthington III didn’t have wings.

  He never had.

  And as the surging tides of David Ferris’s mind closed over her, Jean Grey was linked to a universe in which every possibility was just as real as every other.

  Every one.

  August in New York, and even in the 1990s, some addresses are still more fashionable than others. Submitted for your approval: a particular Park Avenue penthouse, somewhere in the East Seventies.

  She called herself Jeanne Grey, having changed the spelling of her first name to the more exotic French form when she reached adulthood. She was born with the power to read people’s minds—and cloud them too. She grew up in a small town—Annandale-on-Hudson—knowing what people were going to say before they said it.

  Sometimes it was an advantage.

  “Mrs. Byrne, how lovely to see you again. I’m so glad you’ve heard from your son—didn’t Kra Tho tell you everything would be all right?”

  The regal redhead took the arm of the older woman, and led her from the vestibule of the lavish penthouse to the drawing room where the others were waiting for their Wednesday-afternoon sitting. She smiled inwardly as Mrs. Byrne’s surprise and awe reverberated through her mutant senses. Amelia Byrne believed absolutely in the power of Kra Tho, a disembodied being from ancient Atlantis who spoke through his contact, Jeanne Grey, to bring messages of hope and purpose to the modern world.

  I tit UlTIIIATf xncn

  Kra Tho did not exist, though he was a very lucrative fiction. And an easy road to travel, for a young woman who had never heard of either Professor Charles Francis Xavier or his unique private school.

  No. That isn’t me.

  Although she knows it is.

  I have to change it.

  But how do you change the present?

  That isn’t me. . . . Thrust into an alternate universe, her ego merging with her body double’s, Phoenix fought desperately to free herself from the trap of David’s thoughts. But she was only one person, trapped in only one possible present. The Wheel of Fortune turned for them all. . . .

  He’d been sorry to have to leave the party, but he’d promised Barry he’d put in some hours this weekend. Too bad he hadn’t been born rich instead of so good looking.

  Scott Summers smiled at his own feeble joke and shifted the briefcase to his other hand. Among his other regrets was that there wasn’t a subway stop nearer to his job than West Fourth Street; it was a long walk in this heat. Too bad he hadn’t been born lucky instead of smart; luck would at least have arranged things so he didn’t have to go in to work on a Sunday afternoon in August. But the presentation to the client hadn’t gone at all well, and Barry had promised an entire new ad strategy by Monday.
And that meant overtime. A weekend full of it.

  Scott sighed, welcoming the coolness in the lobby as he went through the revolving doors at 375 Hudson. August in New York wasn’t for sissies. The guard knew him and waved

  Id

  in k wonitim lift

  him through, proof that he was putting in too many hours at the job. And for what? Athletic shoes. An account as ordinary as the rest of his life . . .

  Everything about him was ordinary, Scott Summers thought to himself.

  Horror lent her strength. He’s shuffling us farther and farther away—into realities where mutants don’t exist at all—I can 7 let him blot us out this way—David! David, listen to me! We aren’t the enemy. We don’t zuant to hurt you . . .

  . . net profits down every quarter for the last six years, eaten alive by Korea and Japan; what did I expect?” Bobby Drake sighed.

  Not this. He scanned the “Help Wanted” columns of the Sunday New York Times again, although he knew he wouldn’t find anything there. The available jobs for obsolete middle-management former programmers were few to nonexistent, but nobody’d thought that IBM would make the cuts it had.

  Now he was out in the cold. Despite the August heat, Bobby Drake shivered. He wasn’t even thirty yet—his life couldn’t be over.

  Could it?

  Deliberately closing her mind to Ferris’s perception of the world, Phoenix turned her thoughts away from the present, sinking deeper into Ferris’s psyche. Into the only place that help could come from. Into the past.

  * * *

  m ULTIHM X-HEI!

  His name was Davey Ferris, and he was eight years old. Starbuck had been his companion and best friend for as long as Davey Ferris could remember, which was, why, it was years and years. Starbuck was no particular kind of dog—a Heinz, as Davey’s father liked to say, because he contained fifty-seven varieties of dog within his rangy frame—but that didn I matter to Davey.

  And then one day Starbuck died. Hit by a car.

  “Daddy, where’s Starbuck gone?”

  “Fm afraid he’s dead, son,” Davey’s father told him. But in hundreds and hundreds of universes right next door Davey’s dog was still alive . . .

  “But he doesn’t have to be, Daddy!”Davey Ferris had tried, for the first time, to explain.

  “Hush, son. No one can bring back the dead. ”

  “But, Daddy, he isn’t all dead. Not everywhere. ”

  Davey Ferris wasn’t quite sure why his father said Starbuck was dead, when Davey could see him, alive, in the universe next door. He supposed that Starbuck had tracked mud in or broken something, and as he was a good boy, he thought he wouldn’t bring Starbuck back until they’d gotten over being mad. But he was only eight, and eventually he forgot. . .

  His father’s fear had bridled David’s use of his mutant power more effectively than any prohibition could, but he hadn’t been able to bear to give it up entirely. Instead he’d only used it for little things.

  Until it was too late.

  In his mind ... the car. . . Black Team 51 ? Another government agency or private corporation that desires to enslave the supernormal for their own purposes? Weariness and anger threatened to break her concentration: when would governments and

  in A WONDERFUL LIFE

  would-be governments stop treating paranormals as mindless puppets to be exploited for some nationalistic agenda? All we want is our own lives . . .

  But David Ferris hadn’t been given the luxury of autonomy.

  The Moebius Lance—energy weapon ? Drug-delivery system ? Whatever it is, David didn’t mean to fight us at all—now, if I can only make him see that!

  Phoenix’s battleground was a world where will and desire were weapons; where passion took all and good intentions were the best defense. She no longer knew where she was at all, in this psychic realm where every possibility was as real as every other. All she knew was that she must succeed.

  Come with me, David. Come back with me—

  But the lure of Might Have Been was strong. . . .

  Let’s get this over with so I can go home.

  Parts of Long Island were scenic and pleasant and delightful to visit. Stark Industries wasn’t built on any of them. Though it had been years since this location was a particularly important manufacturing plant—or even the main one, Morgan Stark having moved most of Stark Industries assembly overseas—most of the administration for the Stark financial empire was still located here. Despite the fact that the corporation had been deprived of its guiding genius with Anthony Stark’s death a decade earlier, Stark Industries continued to hold thousands of lucrative patents, and a number of top-secret industrial processes too confidential even to patent.

  That was why she’d come.

  THE ULTIflATE MIEII

  It’s too bad my telepathy is so short range, Jean Grey thought as she made her clandestine way as close to the fence as she dared. If I had more range, I could do this from a hotel room in Montauk and avoid all this mess.

  But the fact of the matter was that telepaths were in short supply in the competitive world of industrial espionage, so as she sent her mind out to tap the minds of others and began to speak her findings quietly into the small tape-recorder she carried, she reflected that this truly was the best of all possible worlds.

  The helicopter that hung motionless in the sky over the mansion on Greymalkin Lane was the same one that had been following David Ferris all morning. It was stealth configured, sonic suppressed, and transparent to nearly every form of tracking and monitoring device that could be matched against it by the major players in the field, but in the end, technical superiority had come down to a simple matter of looking out the window and keeping in radio contact with the chase car below.

  Sometimes the old-fashioned methods worked the best.

  Ashton and Keithley were the sort of faceless professionals who populated the field arms of an uncounted number of alphabet organizations from SHIELD to A.I.M. to SAFE. It didn’t matter to them whether they were sent out to retrieve David Ferris or a quart of milk from the corner deli; they did what they were assigned, collected their security clearances, and, if they were lucky, their pensions.

  As Egan and Gilman would not.

  Ashton and Keithley’s first warning of trouble had been the mirror flash of light that zeroed every bean counter in

  in I WONDERFUL LIFE

  the bird. They didn’t see what happened to the chase car, but when the light was gone, it was easy to see that the car below had been crushed like a paper cup and sunk into the roadway.

  “Did they use the lance?”

  “Do I look like a mind reader, Ash?” his partner said.

  Once the sensors started mapping again, Techlnt told them there was no one left alive below. Their quarry was gone, but, flying a standard search configuration, they found Ferris again without trouble—rather too easily, in fact.

  “Who’s that guy with the wings?”

  “Wait one . . . congratulations, Mr. Ashton,” Keithley drawled. Like his partner, Keithley wore a dark suit and dark glasses, his only concession to individuality being the silver gargoyle earring dangling from his left earlobe. “You’ve just won yourself your very own Archangel. Known to be affiliated with both X-Factor and the X-Men, the database says; also known to operate solo.”

  “You mean there’s more of them,” Ashton said resignedly.

  “Look down there, off to the right,” Keithley said helpfully. “One, two, three more that I can see. We’re blown.”

  “Time to phone home.”

  A shielded zip-squeal transmission to base, and a few moments later the surviving members of Black Team 51 had their new orders.

  “It’s over. Shut him down.”

  Slowly the blurring of possibility faded, leaving Phoenix alone in her own mind once more. And with the lessening

  the liiiinATE x-heh

  of that psychic din, the sound of other minds that was a normal part of Jean Grey’s daily exis
tence became audible once more.

  The sense of deadly purpose from the craft hovering above her was unmistakable.

  She looked upward through the trees, and instinctively stepped away from David Ferris. When she used her powers against the helicopter, she didn’t want him fried by the backlash.

  “Shut him down. ” She shook her head at the weird doubling effect of hearing the words and hearing someone hear them. Where were Scott and the others?

  Then the helicopter fired, and she had her answer.

  The bolt was as instantaneous as light and as colorless as air: a carbon-dioxide laser, enabled for only one shot. Not really that powerful—it wouldn’t even have slowed Rogue down—but powerful enough. There wasn’t even time for a scream.

  As an X-Man, Phoenix had seen death too many times to count, but murder never lost its power to horrify her with its very casualness. At the same moment that the laser pulse reduced David Ferris and all his spectrum of possibility to a smear of greasy ash, Phoenix launched herself skyward. Intent on the copter and its cargo, she barely registered the reappearance of the other X-Men or the reestablishment of the psychic rapport that allowed her to brief them in the space of a heartbeat on what she’d gleaned from David Ferris’s mind.

  It seemed wrong that it was still afternoon, still summer. To live so many different lives should have taken more time than this. But that didn’t matter now. She was nearly there.

  in h WMDFRFIH LIFE

  The skin of the helicopter was so close that her outstretched fingertips almost skimmed it, and Iceman and Archangel were only a second or so behind her. She’d tear the helicopter apart; they could catch the passengers. A maneuver the teams had rehearsed a thousand times in every possible combination of heroes.

  But Ashton and Keithley—and their faceless masters— had other ideas, and the black budget toys to implement them.

  The ultrasonic whine of the warp-gate enabling skirled up past the range that bats and dogs could hear, crossed the threshold of pain, and vanished into the hydrogen song of space. The skin of the black copter began to crackle with heat as its fusion generator ran flat-out, powering up for Jump. The amount of energy that had to be wasted into the environment when space-time was folded made the warp-gate of very little use except as a last resort.