The Return Read online

  Lee had been watching their captors carefully, though, both when they were captured in the courtyard and when they were escorted here to their makeshift cell, and Lee suspected that they, too, shared all those same strengths. And, more to the point, all the same weaknesses.

  She tried to outline her plans for escape to the others, but they were having none of it.

  “Look Cap’n,” Frank had said, managing to turn the syllables of the title into a curse, “we got this far fol-lowin’ your suggestions, so maybe you’ll excuse us if we don’t hurry up and listen to the next brilliant idea to fall out of your head, m’kay?”

  And that was that. Frank had sulked back to his corner, his little coterie of crewmen gathered tight around him, and fell to whispering plans of their own. Paolo, for his part, had just propped his chin on his hands, looking older and more tired than Lee had ever seen him. At one point, Frank raised his voice just loud enough and long enough for Lee to hear the word rifle, and beside her Paolo blanched, averting his gaze.

  She knew the old man blamed himself for letting their captors get hold of their only weapon, but what choice had he had? One of the bald UFO people had pulled some sort of crystal rod out of his pocket, pointed it at the rifle, and the next thing anyone knew the shark gun had gone white hot. Paolo’s hands were still blistered and burned from the heat of it, but Frank and his cronies hardly cared about that. Like Lee, Paolo made for a convenient scapegoat, a target toward which they could pour their anxieties and fear, redirected as aggression and blame.

  Then, suddenly, they had another target, if only briefly.

  The door to the chamber slid open, with a whisper of stone upon stone. The mechanism responsible completely eluded Lee, as it had in all her previous visits. One moment the door was closed, and the wall looked unbroken and smooth; the next moment part of the stone had collapsed back into itself, revealing an open doorway.

  A slim, hairless figure stood in the opening, regarding them serenely. He looked to be about thirty, but there was something about his eyes that suggested a far greater age. He was dressed in a loose-fitting robe of deep purple, with scarlet bands around his wrists and ankles, his feet and hands bare. In his hand, he held a crystal rod that was all too familiar.

  Wordlessly, the figure advanced into the room, seeming more to glide across the floor than walk so graceful were his motions. As he approached, another figure was revealed behind him, staying in the corridor beyond the doorway. It appeared to be a woman, but Lee couldn’t be sure; with large eyes in a round, wide face, no ears, and only two slits for a nose, the figure regarded them with an unreadable expression.

  “Get ’im!” Frank yelled, without warning, and launched himself into the air and at the purple-robed figure.

  “Wait!” Lee shouted.

  With a somewhat disinterested air, the robed figure raised the crystal rod fractionally, pointing its end at Frank But while the movement was slight, the results were dramatic.

  Blinding white light leapt from the rod’s tip, and Frank was sent tumbling head over heels, slamming into the far wall with a thud. He slid down to the ground, alive but only semiconscious, moaning softly.

  “This one requires to know which of you is the leader,” the robed figure said, speaking in soft, gentle tones.

  Richie, Jose, and Merrick looked at Frank, moaning insensate against the far wall, then turned to look back at Lee.

  She began to rise, but Paolo spoke up first. “I am,” he said, climbing unsteadily to his feet. “What of it?”

  Lee wasn’t sure whether to expect some kind of “I am Spartacus” moment, but the other crewmen averted their eyes and stayed resolutely on the ground, so it looked like the competition would be pretty light.

  “No,” Lee said, climbing to her feet and laying a hand on Paolo’s shoulder. “I’m the captain.”

  Lee stepped forward, planting her hands on her hips, and narrowed her eyes at the robed figure.

  “You are the leader, then?” he asked serenely.

  “Yes. I’m responsible for bringing these men here.” She planted her hands on her hips. “Now, just what do you want with us? Who are you people, anyway?” “Please excuse this one,” the robed figure said, bobbing his bald head slightly. “This one had only now been instilled with the ability to communicate in your tongue, and some of your conceptual structures are still problematic.” He paused, and then added, “People, did you say?”

  Lee raised an eyebrow. “Right. Who are you?”

  “Ah,” the robed figure said. “I am Vox Septimus, servitor unaugmented clade, of the House Nine-Mirror-Eclipse, preeminent among the Collective.” In response to Lee’s blank stare, he added, “Merely a humble servant of the masters of Earth, the Kh’thon.”

  “The who, now?” Paolo asked, stepping forward to stand beside Lee.

  “The Kh’thon, of course,” the man named Vox Septimus said, as though it were the simplest thing in the world. “The Kh’thon were the original sentient inhabitants of this planet, though there is some debate among their servitors whether they originated here or on some other world or plane. This city, called Dis, was once one of their strongholds.”

  “So you’re one of these Kh’thon things, then?” Lee asked.

  Vox Septimus’s eyes opened wide, and he let out a short, loud bark of laughter. “This one? Oh, gracious no. This one is simply one such as you, an unaugmented servitor, descendant of those first raised up from among the other animals to serve the needs of the Kh’thon.”

  “Where in the what now?” Paolo said, brows knitted.

  “The distant ancestors of us all were subsentient organisms native to this biosphere,” Vox Septimus continued. “As they had need for such, the Kh’thon altered the genetics of a strain of subsentients, creating the first servitors. This one, and you as well, are made in that same phenotype.”

  Lee opened her mouth, then closed it again. She thought she understood what the strange man was saying, but if she did, she didn’t like it.

  “The Kh’thon are, of course, near immortal,” Vox Septimus went on, “and aeons ago a contingent of them grew weary of their perhaps too comfortable existence on Earth, and decided to explore the distant reaches of the galaxy. Dozens of millennia passed, and at long last those Kh’thon explorers have decided to return home, to rejoin their earthbound brethren.

  The journey has been long, but at last they have arrived. However, in the intervening millennia, it appears that the Kh’thon who remained on Earth have departed for other worlds themselves, or for other planes of existence, or perhaps migrated on to some more advanced form of being. Whatever the reason for their departure, they evidently left their servants behind, who have since multiplied uncontrollably, and now run rampant over the planet.”

  No, that clinched it. Lee knew she didn’t like what the strange man was saying.

  “But as though matters were not already bad enough,” Vox Septimus continued, “it now appears that some of these errant servitors have been triggered, without the control of a Kh’thon master.”

  Lee regarded him through narrowed eyes. “Triggered?”

  “Yes,” Vox Septimus said, growing impatient. “The randomizing element in their genome activated, secondary and tertiary mutagenic characteristics allowed to come to the fore. Some are even ... Exemplar class.” An expression of extreme distaste twisted his lip, as though he’d just smelled something horrible. “To think of augmented servitors, running rampant.” He shook all over, like someone had just walked over his grave. “It is anathema, the height of blasphemy.”

  Lee shook her head slowly.

  “I don’t buy any of this,” she said, keeping her tone level. “I can’t accept that humanity is little more than stray pets for inhuman aliens who moved out hundreds of thousands of years ago.”

  Vox Septimus shrugged. “Your opinions on the matter are of no special importance. It is the truth.”

  Lee thought for a moment. “So what do you want with us anyway?”

>   “Ah,” Vox Septimus said, nodding slightly. “Yes. It has been given to this one and another”—he gestured to the large-eyed, earless woman still standing in the corridor beyond the doorway—“to discover how best to communicate to the current inhabitants of Earth a simple message.”

  Lee glanced at Paolo, who cast back a worried look. “What sort of message?” Lee asked.

  “Only this,” Vox Septimus said. “That the Kh’thon have returned, and will now put their home in order.”

  12

  Elizabeth Braddock wasn’t at all sure what she’d gotten herself into. It had been only a few days since she’d accepted the invitation to come and live at the Xavier mansion, and while everyone had welcomed her with open arms, she couldn’t help but feel like an outsider.

  She’d accepted the invitation, in large part, because she didn’t have anywhere else to turn. Betsy had possessed her psi talents for years, and even though she’d put them to use a time or two in the service of queen and country, she still felt like a novice. She had tremendous potential—or so she’d been told—but so far, Betsy herself had seen precious little evidence of it.

  Betsy knew she was no hero, as much as she’d tried. Her brother, Brian? Now, he was a hero. True blue and courageous, no question about it. But for all her ability to peer into the minds of others, to peek momentarily into the future, Betsy had ended up too often a victim, someone to be rescued by others.

  Most recently, she was rescued by students of the Xavier school.

  It had been a year since Betsy was taken by the ex-tradimensional slavemaster known only as Mojo and forced to cavort for his pleasure. Brian had searched for her for the better part of a year, and then managed to get himself captured, in the process. In the end, Doug Ramsey and a handful of other Xavier students had managed to rescue Betsy and her brother.

  What little remained of her old life back in England had crumbled to dust in the long months she’d been away, and Betsy found herself with no compelling reason to return. When she’d been invited to come and live at the Xavier mansion, to study with the X-Men and learn how better to use her powers to protect herself and help others, she’d jumped at the task She’d had visions of studies, and exercises, and careful training. Things like that Danger Room down in the sublevels, where she’d watched Kitty Pryde fight gangsters and giant holographic robots that morning.

  What she hadn’t foreseen, however, was that before she’d even unpacked her bags, she’d be sitting with the world-hopping X-Men in the tastefully appointed library, hearing the details of an alien encounter.

  Scott Summers, Kitty Pryde, and Logan had left the mansion in a rush only a few hours before, flying off over the waters of Breakstone Lake in their sleek jet-black spy plane. Now, they were back, more than a little worse for wear, with an unbelievable story to share.

  “Unglaublich!” said the blue-skinned man named Kurt Wagner, code name Nightcrawler, who perched on the arm of the couch, his prehensile tail swaying slightly behind him like a charmed snake.

  “You took the words right outta my mouth, sugah,” said the woman known only as Rogue. She ran a gloved hand through her white-streaked hair.

  Kitty was curled up in a big reading chair, her legs folded under her, a steaming cup of coffee in her hands. Logan was stretched out on the couch, his feet propped up on a low coffee table—which to Betsy’s untrained eye looked to be a priceless antique, its value no doubt only slightly decreased by the scuff marks of Logan’s sand-crusted boots. Scott, for his part, paced impatiently back and forth in front of the fireplace, his hands behind his back.

  “Enough of this jawin’ already,” Logan said, taking a deep sip from his bottled beer. “The only reason to turn tail and run was to come back for reinforcements, and now that everybody’s back from Scotland we oughta load up and head back there, already.”

  Scott opened his mouth to say something, but quickly shut it and continued his pacing.

  Betsy had no desire to read anyone’s mind without their permission, unless circumstances truly demanded, but whatever was going through Scott’s head was so intense that stray thoughts bled off him like heat off a stove. Without even trying to peer into Scott’s consciousness, Betsy knew that he was tempted to do just as Logan suggested, but that long years of training and experience demanded that he have a more complete picture of the situation before charging in half-cocked.

  Even after a year as a mind-slave of an extradimen-sional impresario, Betsy felt more than a little out of her depth with all this discussion of aliens.

  “Isn’t it possible,” she said, raising her hand tentatively, like the new kid in class asking the teacher a question, “that this all mightn’t be some kind of misunderstanding? Couldn’t we just reason with these aliens?” “We got a mighty good taste of the aliens’ reasoning style, darlin’,” Logan said with a sneer. “It seems to come at the end of a fist, and punctuated by death rays. So really, thanks, but no thanks.”

  “Look,” Kitty said, putting her coffee cup down on a side table and swinging her feet to the floor. “I think everyone is missing the point here. These aren’t aliens. They’re Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens superior.” “What about these... Kh’thon?” Rogue asked. “Whatever the flippin’ heck they are.” Logan finished off the last of his beer, and tossed the empty bottle into the corner.

  Scott stopped his pacing, and regarded the others, his expression hard. “Focus, people. We’ve got a problem, and we need a solution.”

  “The problem being Captain Forrester and her crew, nicht wa.hr?” Kurt rubbed his chin with one of his oversize fingers, and Betsy tried hard not to stare. As many odd creatures and beings as she’d dealt with in recent years, she still found it difficult to get used to six fingers, six toes, a prehensile tail, and blue fur.

  Which, come to that, reminded her of something. “Um, if you don’t mind?” Betsy raised her hand again, and Scott and the others turned to her. “From your description of these . .. Exemplar, it sounds as if they might be a little ... familiar?”

  Beside her on the couch, Logan narrowed his eyes, but nodded slightly.

  “Like familiar, how, sugah?”

  “Well, Rogue,” Betsy said, and placed her hands on her knees. “It’s a little untoward and out of the ordinary, I know, but if Scott, Kitty, and Logan wouldn’t mind, I could show everyone what I mean by sharing their memories of the Exemplars telepathically.”

  Kitty merely shrugged. “Sure, take whatever you need.” Betsy could tell that she had been around telepaths for a long time, and had never learned to fear them.

  “Okay, Bets,” Logan said guardedly, “but don’t touch anything else in there, or else I might just forget my manners.” Logan, too, clearly had long experience with telepaths, but Betsy could see that his experiences had perhaps not all been as positive as Kitty’s.

  Scott was the most reluctant to accede to her idea. A long silence ensued. “Okay,” he said at length, “but make it quick.”

  Betsy nodded, a small, almost notional gesture, and closed her eyes. She reached out with her mind, looking for the minds of the others.

  Kitty was easy to find. Her mind flared like a searchlight in the night, bright and optimistic. She’d seen darkness, that much was clear, but hadn’t let it overwhelm her. Betsy found the memories of the day scattered haphazardly through Kitty’s thoughts.

  Betsy took only what she needed, sensory information specifically, and primarily the visual record. She brushed aside the lingering fears and anxieties about the day, Kitty’s emotional and intellectual responses to the situation, her impressions of the tall British soldier

  Colonel Stuart, even residual bleed-over of Kitty’s feelings about and toward her companions, Logan and Scott. Betsy couldn’t help noticing the way that Kitty looked at both men as older brothers, or as avuncular figures, even while she was aware that they were in many respects polar opposites. Each had served as a different kind of role model for Kitty since she first came to join the X-Men
. Whenever Kitty faced danger, an unconscious part of her always seemed to ask “What would Scott do?”, and then “What would Logan do?”, and then puzzled out which of the responses best suited the situation.

  Drawing back gracefully from her brief communion with Kitty’s thoughts, Betsy turned her attention to Logan. While Kitty’s memories had been scattered and haphazard, though intermingled with other impressions and recollections, the far-reaching skein of associative memory, Logan’s thoughts were quite different. Here, it was like looking at an animal in a cage. But what surprised Betsy was not the animal, which one might have expected in the mind of such a fierce warrior, but the cage itself It was an incredibly complex and sophisticated bit of mental architecture, and suggested a mind of considerable dimension and discipline. At first glance, Betsy was sure that this was a structure imposed on the man by someone else, perhaps theX-Men’s founder and mentor, Charles Xavier. But on closer examination, it was apparent that, instead, this was a self-imposed structure. Through careful study, meditation, and self-examination, Logan had learned to keep his thoughts under careful control.

  Which wasn’t to say that the cage door couldn’t be opened, on occasion, and the animal within allowed to run free. But when it did, it was Logan himself who opened that door, and closed it again when the need arose. Betsy shuddered to think what reserves of selfcontrol that must require.

  Betsy found Logan’s memories of the day set in front of the cage door, wrapped up like a present, waiting for her. She was neither invited nor welcome to view anything else of Logan’s mind. Gratefully, she accepted the memories, and withdrew.

  Scott was next. In one sense, his mind was precisely as Betsy might have expected. The mental and emotional landscape of a complex man in the prime of life, with the fears and hopes, loves and hatreds of someone who has spent a lifetime in the service of others. What was surprising, however, was the tendril that ran from Scott’s thoughts out into the ether, like a golden thread, unseen by any but a telepath allowed a brief and privileged view into his mind. Where the thread went, and to what it connected Scott, Betsy couldn’t say, but she didn’t have time to contemplate further. She found Scott’s memories of the day. After dusting off Scott’s anxieties about the safety of the captured crew, and his confusion over his unresolved feelings for Lee Forrester himself, Betsy folded the memories close to her, and withdrew.