Friend or Foe Read online

  Then the moment passed. Animation fled from her features, which relaxed into unthinking lassitude. Without any prompting from the Leader to do so, the enslaved X-Man made no response to Logan’s angry pleas. She didn’t seem to hear a word he said, unlike the Scarlet Witch, who called out to him desperately. “What is it? Tell me what’s happening!”

  Logan remembered that the blindfolded Witch could not see a thing. Probably better off that way, he thought grimly, but he answered her anyway. “It’s the Leader,” he spat in disgust. “He’s turned Rogue into a friggin’ zombie.”

  “Proving the efficacy of my chemical suppressant,” the Leader congratulated himself. “Not that any such precautions are required when it comes to you remaining specimens.” He raised his hands before him, methodically cracking each sickly green knuckle, like a pianist getting ready to sit down at his instrument.

  Logan saw where this was going, and his heart sank. Leaving Rogue standing stiffly in front of Logan, the Leader disappeared briefly to the left. Wanda gasped once, perhaps surprised by the sudden touch of a stranger’s fingers against her face, then she fell unnervingly silent. “For convenience’s sake,” the Leader instructed her. “You will answer to the designation: Specimen #2.”

  “Yes.” Steel bonds unfastened once more, a metal visor slid away, and the aubum-haired Avenger stepped down from the open sarcophagus. At the Leader’s direction, she joined Rogue, padding barefoot across the floor until she came to a stop beside her fellow thrall. “Be careful, #2,” the Leader warned her as he paced back to where Logan could see him. “You don’t want to get too close to Specimen #1, formerly known to you as Rogue, at least not until we get a pair of gloves on her.” “Yes,” Wanda Maximoff answered obediently. Her exotic green eyes were just as empty as Rogue’s. Looking at them both, silent and docile, made Logan’s blood burn. He didn’t know the Scarlet Witch anywhere near as well as he knew Rogue, but that didn’t stop him from feeling enraged on her behalf. Nobody deserved to have her free will stripped away like this, and especially not an Avenger who had risked her life to save the whole planet a hundred times over. This bites, big time.

  Now it was his turn. Logan gritted his teeth, bracing himself for the psychic violation he knew was coming. Was there any chance his high-powered healing factor could overcome the Leader’s mental mesmerism? It was a slim hope, but it was the best he had. Give me your best shot, he thought defiantly as the Leader approached, his enormous skull obscuring Logan’s view of the two entranced super-heroines.

  “For what it’s worth,” the Leader informed him snidely, “you’ve already made a genuine contribution to my own brand of superior science. The insights I’ve gained from studying your mutant metabolism, particularly your extraordinary ability to heal, have given me some intriguing ideas as to how to counteract the Hulk’s even more astonishing recuperative powers.” He smirked beneath his bushy black mustache. “I hope knowing that you’ve played an instrumental part in the future destruction of the ever-incredible Hulk provides you some measure of comfort—in the brief interval that your mind remains your own.”

  Unable to reach his tormentor with his unsheathed claws, Logan spit in the Leader’s face. He glared at the cerebral megalomaniac through a blood-red haze. ‘ ‘One of these days, buster, you’re going to end up at the wrong end of my built-in pigstickers.” Visions of bloody carnage flashed through his brain. “I can’t wait.”

  “A rabid animal to the last, eh?” The Leader smirked and lifted his hands toward Logan’s exposed face. The fettered X-Man flinched at the touch of clammy, uncalloused fingers. A cold, numbing fog descended over his mind, driving out the red-hot blaze of his homicidal bloodlust like a high-pressure front dispelling a heat wave. No! he thought fiercely. Keep out of my flamin’ brain! He tried to construct a psychic barricade, just like the Professor advised, but the fog was already dulling his mental faculties, making it hard to think straight. Or even think at all.

  “No!” he groaned, dragging the words up from somewhere deep inside him. “No, no, no ...”

  Yes?

  ‘ ‘Try not to lose all of that innate savagery, Specimen #3,” his Leader said approvingly. “I can always use whatever’s left.”

  890 Fifth Avenue. Over the years, the venerable mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side had opened its doors to many unusual visitors, ranging from alien ambassadors to pagan deities, but Hank McCoy could have done without Avenger Mansion’s latest unwelcome guest: an immense humanoid juggernaut that bore an uncanny resemblance to the Avengers’ most infamous founding member, the rampaging Hulk.

  “Identified: mutant designate: Beast,” the menacing simulacrum stated implacably. Two tons of lethal machinery, encased in synthetic green flesh and hair, stepped into the high-tech conference room, rattling the floor with its heavy tread. “Threat assessment: minimal. Immediate priority: termination.”

  Oh my stars and garters! the Beast thought, momentarily transfixed by the imposing figure barging through the entrance, its massive shoulders shattering the reinforced titanium doorframe. Behind wire-frame reading glasses, the Beast’s blue eyes widened in alarm. He gulped loudly, his mouth suddenly dry as the Living Mummy’s desiccated bandages.

  Despite the invader’s picture-perfect impersonation of the Hulk, the Beast recognized the Gamma Sentinel immediately; not only did the murderous robot’s speech patterns reveal its true nature, Nick Fury had earlier revealed to the assembled Avengers and X-Men that this

  new line of Sentinels had been constructed to mirror the physical appearance of various celebrated gamma-mutated monstrosities, the better to provide S.H.I.E.L.D. with plausible deniability should another anti-mutant pogrom be deemed necessary—as they too often were.

  “I beg to differ,” the shaggy blue anthropoid protested. He looked around quickly for a place to stow his glasses, then decided they’d be safest on his nose. Seeking higher ground, he bounded onto the circular meeting table, nimbly avoiding the pitcher of hot coffee that Jarvis had thoughtfully prepared for the Beast before retiring for the evening. Computer print-outs on the Leader’s past activities and bases of operation littered the polished chrome tabletop, which was emblazoned with a stylized capital “A” designed by one of Tony Stark’s best graphic artists. “Sorry to say, I fear our respective priorities are fundamentally irreconcilable.”

  In other words, the bouncing Beast definitely hoped to stay alive. Which wasn’t going to be easy, considering that he was currently holding down the fort all by his lonesome, while the rest of the X-Men and the Avengers pursued undeniably urgent endeavors throughout the world. With the exception of Jarvis, the Avenger’s faithful butler, the Beast was on his own. I wonder if it’s too late to join the Fantastic Four? he speculated mordantly, even as the hostile Sentinel (a redundancy if ever there was one) reached out for him with the Hulk’s huge hands. “Hulk will smash!” the robot recited, programmed to perpetuate its perfidious imposture for the benefit of any possible witnesses, human or otherwise.

  “You will have to do considerably better than that, o’ masquerading mechanism,” the Beast replied. His powerful legs propelled him upward, out of reach of the

  Sentinel’s grasping arms. At the same time, one prodigiously dexterous foot flung the entire pitcher of steaming coffee into the robot’s face. “Have a heaping helping of mountain-grown java on me!”

  The Beast’s leap carried him backwards over the table’s edge. Somersaulting in mid-air, he landed squarely on the floor behind the round table. He had no illusions that the spilled coffee would drive off the Sentinel for good; trying to repel even an imitation Hulk with nothing more than a hot beverage was tantamount to swatting a stampeding elephant with a lady’s fan. At most, he hoped the opaque liquid would foul the robot’s optical sensors long enough to buy him a few more seconds.

  No such luck. “Switching to sonar targeting,” the Sentinel announced. Its cavemously deep voice captured the basso profundo quality of the real Hulk’s speech, if not exactly t
he flavor of his dialogue. “Eliminating physical obstacles prior to termination of mutant designate: Beast.”

  The sturdy table, around which Earth’s mightiest heroes so often conferred, had been securely mounted to the floor, and built to last by the same unparalleled engineering expertise responsible for Iron Man’s armor. The Hulk-Sentinel wrenched it free of its steadfast moorings with a single tug, then shoved the dislodged table to the side. Sparks flew, and tortured metal shrieked, as the table slammed into the nearby communications console. A tray of half-eaten finger sandwiches clattered to the floor. Now nothing stood between the Beast and his attacker but a few yards of empty air and a couple of egg-shaped chairs. “Hulk will smash!”

  Although spacious enough for its intended purpose, the conference room was too confined to let the Beast take full advantage of his preternatural agility. Fortunately, he had other options at his disposal. “Intruder alert!” he shouted with atypical succinctness. “Activate emergency detainment measures. Command authorization : McCoy-alpha-one! ’ ’

  Voice-activated security systems came into play, no longer mistaking the disguised Sentinel for the real Hulk, whom had been welcomed into this very meeting room several hours before. Automated panels slid open in the walls, floor, and ceiling, releasing an impressive array of Stark-built and -designed mechanisms, intended to subdue and/or immobilize any uninvited visitors to Avengers HQ. Low-yield plasma guns, descending from the ceiling, blasted the chartreuse behemoth with coruscating bursts of ionized gas that had distressingly little effect on the robot’s artificial skin. Capture coils, snaking out from concealed apertures in the floor, wrapped around the Gamma Sentinel like electrified pythons, squeezing the counterfeit Hulk’s impossibly muscled arms against its sides while simultaneously delivering a high-voltage shock.

  Thank providence that I never gave up my associate Avengers status, the Beast thought. He had retained his privileges, including access to top-secret Avengers security codes, even though his first loyalty remained to the X-Men. As an erstwhile alumnus of both distinguished super-teams, he had been the logical choice to man the communications center while his assorted teammates scattered hither and yon. Then again, no one had anticipated that one of the missing Sentinels would stage a frontal assault on Avengers Mansion.

  Blue electricity crackled around the ensnared Hulk-Sentinel, causing the hairs of its emerald scalp to stand on end. The galvanic jolt administered by the coils was capable of overloading the nervous system of any ordinary being—which the Gamma Sentinel, lamentably, was not. Fighting back against the constricting coils, it flexed its mighty arms and strained to break free from the thick cables, each one a full six inches in diameter. The Beast heard concealed servomotors whirring madly within the fraudulent Hulk’s huge biceps, and realized that, if he was ever to make a break for it, the time was now, before the mechanical monster was loose once more. “Nothing can stop the Hulk!” it bellowed ominously, increasing the Beast’s understandable sense of alarm. *

  His natural agility matched only by Nightcrawler, and, maybe Spider-Man, too, the Beast leaped and rolled through the blistering barrage of plasma bursts, simultaneously giving the Hulk-Sentinel a wide berth on his way to the exit. The impromptu obstacle course reminded him of many a training exercise back in the X-Men’s legendary Danger Room, but this time the stakes were substantially higher. No sooner had he dived through the ruptured doorway into the carpeted second-story hallway outside the conference room, than he heard the unmistakable sound of sundered metal giving way before an irresistible force. The hiss of the electrified cables died out at once, and the liberated Gamma Sentinel barrelled noisily through the wall in pursuit of the Beast, who tumbled down the corridor only a few cartwheels ahead of the lumbering robot. Framed portraits of the Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and other distinguished former residents crashed to the floor, knocked loose by the Gamma Sentinel’s charge.

  Jarvis appeared at the bottom of a stairway leading down to the ground floor. The middle-aged Englishman, clad in a dressing gown and slippers, had no doubt been roused from sleep by the bogus Hulk’s clamorous rampage. Shocked and confused, he stared aghast at the conflict and destruction upstairs. “Master Hulk! Master Beast! What in heavens are you doing?”

  Despite his own peril, the Beast spared a moment to warn the loyal retainer. “Head for the hills, Jarvis, old boy! Contrary to appearances, this rambunctious barbarian is not the Hulk—it’s a Sentinel!”

  “My word!” the balding butler gasped. Accustomed to the unusual occurrences that so often befell the mansion, he did not require any further explanation. “Understood, sir,” he said, moving briskly toward the front door., An ordinary man with no special powers, aside from his uncommon discretion and the ability to brew a first-rate pot of tea, Edwin Jarvis knew better than to stick around the mansion during an assault, where he might well end up a hostage or a casualty. “Good luck to you, sir! I will notify the authorities post haste.” Running atop the wooden bannister at the top of the stairs, the Beast heard the front door open downstairs. One less thing to worry about, he thought gratefully, relieved that the veteran manservant had escaped unscathed. He was sorely tempted to join Jarvis in fleeing the house, but that would mean unleashing the relentless Sentinel on the unsuspecting city streets, not to mention sacrificing his home field advantage.

  Even now, the Mansion’s automated defenses continued to deploy new weapons against the ersatz Hulk. Bean bag guns pelted the Sentinel with weighted bags of silicon gel, concussive vibranium missiles exploded soundlessly against the robot’s verdant epidermis, and anesthetizing gas hissed out of pipes hidden above the landing. Do Sentinels breathe? the Beast wondered, holding his own breath until he was safely free of the narcotic fumes. Regretfully, I suspect not.

  Alas, he recognized the ultimate futility of this automated exercise in pest control. Apparatus intended to administer non-lethal amounts of force against the likes of the Grim Reaper or Baron Zemo would inevitably prove insufficient against any mechanoid even approximating the quite literally immeasurable might of the Hulk. The most he could hope for was that the Mansion’s state-of-the-art security system would slow the Sentinel down.

  “Hulk will smash mutant designate: Beast,” the Ga'rftma Sentinel said, mixing its syntax a bit. The Beast recalled that this trespassing automaton was, in fact, an experimental prototype stolen from S.H.I.E.L.D., so it only stood to reason that all of the bugs hadn’t been worked out yet. Not that the hijacked robot wasn’t perfectly capable of inflicting stupendous quantities of damage on whatever came within reach of its implacable fists, as proven by the brutal ease with which the Hulk-Sentinel uprooted the entire bannister, throwing the Beast off-balance.

  “Allez oop!” the X-Man exclaimed. A crystal chandelier hung over the foyer below and the Beast kicked off from the broken bannister, his simian arms stretching out to grab hold of the chandelier, which he used to swing out over the foyer, away from the deadly Gamma Sentinel. Reaching the end of its arc, he let go of the pendent chandelier before it could swing back toward his enemy, whereupon he performed an aerial backflip that landed him feet first upon the ground floor of the Mansion.

  Similarly eschewing the stairs, the Gamma Sentinel jumped directly from the landing to the floor below, hitting the bottom with a reverberating thud that shook the whole Mansion and cracked the marble tiles beneath his feet. “Nobody gets away from the Hulk!” he roared, still spewing incriminatory sound bytes as he chased after the Beast, who bolted for the auxiliary elevator at the back of the building.

  Best to lure him below, the Beast strategized on the run. The Mansion’s sub-basements, where many of the Avengers’ most secure facilities were housed, had been triple-reinforced with an adamantium/vibranium-strand ceramic, which just might be enough to contain the Gamma Sentinel until help arrived. If nothing else, taking the fight underground reduced the chances of any innocent bystanders getting caught up in the conflict. Sometimes I’m so selflessly noble I scare myself, he tho
ught; dividing one’s time between the X-Men and the Avengers could do that to a person.

  With the world’s biggest and most dangerous “Hulk” action figure charging after him, trampling heedlessly over pricy antique furniture that was rapidly reduced to splinters, the Beast arrived at the rear elevator and jabbed the down button with a furry finger. According to the lighted display above the closed metal doors, the actual elevator compartment was currently residing two floors above. No time to wait, he thought, prying open the sealed double doors to expose a set of cables hanging in the empty elevator shaft. “Open sesame!”

  The elevator car had already begun its descent from the third floor. Nevertheless, the hirsute X-Man seized onto the greasy cables with both his hands and his feet, then slid to the bottom of the shaft, another three stories below the ground floor. “Basement, Level Three,” he reported cheerily to an imaginary audience, pressing an emergency release button to open the bottom doors from inside the shaft. “Ladies Lingerie and Disabled SuperWeapons.”

  He sprang from the shaft into the darkened storage space beyond, pushing the corresponding down button with his big toe as he leaped clear of the open doorway. Mere seconds later, a resounding tremor proclaimed that the Hulk-Sentinel had likewise reached the bottom of the shaft. Sentinel see, Sentinel do, the Beast thought, amusing himself at the expense of the killer robot’s imitativeness. A margin of a few moments made a tremendous difference, however, as the floor of the descending elevator smashed into the Sentinel before the Hulk’s manmade doppleganger had a chance to exit the shaft. The Beast watched with satisfaction as the crushed elevator compartment wrapped itself around the surprised Sentinel.

  Unhappily, the collision was harder on the elevator than the Hulk-Sentinel. The Beast had to admire the preeminent quality of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s workmanship; the Sentinel had plainly been built to stand up to most anything. All the worse for yours truly, the X-Man thought. Feeling as though he were somehow trapped in an interactive remake of The Terminator, or perhaps Westworld, the Beast turned his back on the crumpled elevator even as the undamaged Sentinel tore the metal compartment to shreds in order to free itself from the wreckage. What would Linda Hamilton do in a situation like this? the Beast wondered. Probably call for her stunt double . . .