25: For We Are Many
"Things sound like they're on track over there. Although you don't look like you've had any sleep since the last time we talked," Steve said. He felt guilty for bringing it up given that he was the one asking Tony to perform miracles. But the communications link with the SHIELD labs was of sufficient quality that the dark circles under Tony's eyes probably looked as bad as they actually were. Just because his friend thought he could run indefinitely on inspiration and caffeine didn't mean he actually could.
Tony waved a dismissive hand. "Can't yet. I need to make sure the command and control systems on those minefields are up to snuff. If we can't alter their positions if the need arises they won't do us much good."
The orbital mines that had been Tony's first suggestion had been deployed over the course of the last forty-eight hours by Illyana Rasputin, who'd been able to teleport them into high earth orbit with ease. Positioning them that far away had been a strategic choice; it meant that whatever elements of the Shi'ar fleet got through Cable's ambush would fly directly into the minefields before they were within weapons range of the planet. The mines might not get them all, but the key here was attrition.
"Fair enough. Just you keep in mind that tired minds make mistakes," Steve said, then cracked a slight smile. "I know I sound like a mother hen, but try and get a few hours before you do too much more. We all need our heads on straight this week."
"Consider me making a mental note to schedule a nap," Tony said, tossing back the last of what Steve recognized as one of the particularly noxious energy drinks Tony preferred. "Oh, nearly forgot. I might be able to do something with what's left of my Phoenix gun."
Steve raised an eyebrow in invitation, and Tony went on. "I mean, the basic idea came from MARAUDER to start with - ah, the plasma weapon research project, not the mutant assassins. The point is, it was meant to destroy electronic systems. I just happened to figure out a way to tweak it to potentially disrupt the energy patterns of our favorite cosmic entity. So if I can get back to the fundamentals and improve on them..."
"We might have a gun that can disable Shi'ar warships," Steve said, letting the air in his lungs out on a sigh. "Seems too good to be true, Tony."
"It may be. I'd have to figure out a platform. And find the time to build it. There's the kicker." Tony smiled a bit sourly. "'Must have' versus 'nice to have', remember."
"I know." They had so little time that Tony and everyone else had been forced to prioritize ruthlessly. "Do what you can," Steve said, then smiled again, tiredly. "If you need me to rattle anyone's cage over there, just let me know."
"They're being plenty cooperative, Steve, not to worry. I tell them what I need, they deliver it. Or the scary little Russian blonde does. There's no way we would have gotten those mines deployed so fast without her," Tony said, cracking open another energy drink. "If we all survive this, remind me to-" He stopped, his head whipping around as alarms started to shrill in the background.
Before Steve could do more than open his mouth, the unmistakable flash of an explosion lit the screen before it flickered to static. He froze for only an instant before he leaned over the console, trying to reopen the link with Tony at the same time that he opened one to the command center at SHIELD headquarters. Some sort of lab accident, he tried to tell himself, his pulse thundering in his ears. Tony wasn't the only one who'd been working himself into exhaustion, the same was true for the whole SHIELD scientific staff, and tired minds made mistakes—
"Incoming!" Clint's tense, urgent voice cracked across the Tower's internal communications system. "Something's firing on us, I don't know the source-"
The windows of the conference room had been repaired a few days ago. As the air outside flashed white, they shattered in an instant. The only blessing was that the shockwave blew Steve against the interior wall rather than sucking him outwards.
The fact that it blew him through the wall left him unable to appreciate his good luck.
"I don't believe it." Nemesis scowled at the test results displayed on the screen in front of him. "She actually did it. She reactivated that child's mutant gene incidentally."
"Astonishing," Hank said, his eyes locked on the same results. Hope's breakthrough with Dani had been just the beginning. In only a handful of days, she had repowered a staggering number of volunteers. Those with close ties to the X-Men had gone to the head of the line, of course; it had been Scott's suggestion, and Hank had agreed with the strategic necessity. But that had been a relatively short list, and so they had started to reach out to other depowered mutants to offer them the option as well. Just because X-Corporation had been dissolved didn't mean its records had been lost.
They'd been honest about the situation with each mutant they had contacted. Ethically speaking, they could do no less. There was no guarantee that the conflict with the Shi'ar would end well, and every chance that if it didn't, repowered mutants might become targets. Hank had been surprised that so few had opted to wait, in the end. They had been forced to move here to the Baxter Building to make themselves more accessible to the steady stream of volunteers.
This morning's schedule had been suspended temporarily while they had examined this latest twist. Hope's first 'customers' this morning had been a couple who had both been associated with X-Corporation before the Decimation. Formerly an empath of moderate strength and a feral, they'd brought their child with them, a girl of seven who'd tested X-factor positive at birth but whose mutant gene had been rendered inactive after M-Day as well.
Something very unexpected had happened when Hope had repowered her parents. Though the girl had been two floors away, playing with Valeria Richards, she had been surrounded by the Phoenix's glow at the same moment that Hope had repowered her parents. Sue had brought her immediately to the lab, and a distraught Hope had apologized frantically to the girl's mother. I didn't mean to, all the knots are connected! she'd said. Which had only one interpretation, really.
So they had tested the girl, and the results were quite clear. Her mutant gene had been reactivated. It remained dormant, for which Hank was devoutly grateful; seven was far too young, especially given the chances of her inheriting some variation on her mother's psionic mutation. Just as thankfully, the girl's parents had been a sturdy sort, emotionally speaking. The empathic mother had been the one to soothe Hope, reassuring her that if she and her husband had realized it was an option, they would have asked her to do it in the first place.
"That was one of our big unanswered questions, wasn't it?" Reed asked from his chair. Strange was elsewhere; after Hope's breakthrough, he had been devoting more of his time to more mystic investigations of his own into the source of whatever had possessed Charles. "Whether she could reactivate the gene in someone who hadn't manifested yet. I'd call this good news, although it certainly introduces a whole new set of complications."
"Oh, you don't like the idea of her repowering existing mutants while simultaneously kicking countless thousands of mutants who should have manifested into making up for lost time?" Nemesis asked, very dryly. "Frankly I think it should be terribly exciting. And interesting, in the Chinese sense."
"I suspected this would be the case," Hank said pensively. "It only makes sense; the Phoenix is after the restoration of the race, not just the powers of individual mutants. But it alters our... public relations strategy rather dramatically."
The initial plan had been to wait until the firebird was close and then send out a carefully crafted public message that the government had come into the possession of information suggesting that M-Day would soon be reversed. That taking precautions, especially for those who had possessed dangerous mutations, would be in order. There had been a number of plans for what would have happened then, many of which had been questionably feasible from Hank's perspective. It was all well and good to suggest that depowered mutants assemble at rallying points where medical attention would be on hand, but he hadn't been the only one to point out that too many mutants would see it as lining up to be rounded up. Not to mention you'd be providing targets for the Shi'ar, Scott had pointed out grimly.
But if they were looking at the full-scale reactivation of the mutant gene once the Phoenix arrived, there would be no containing the chaos. The world could only brace itself.
"The long-term consequences of a mass manifestation are ugly, to say the least," Reed said, looking deeply troubled. "There has to be a way to manage this."
"To spin it, you mean," Nemesis said darkly. "Dream on, Richards. If we survive the Shi'ar and Hope pulls this off, we might just revive the mutant race. But we'll all be standing on some damned precarious ground. No getting around that."
"I'm as troubled by the fact that she didn't do this consciously," Hank said, in an effort to draw them back to something they could address today. The question of what to tell the world required far broader input. "That it was simply an unintended side effect of repowering Anais and Pierre. We need to help her figure out why the 'knots' are all connected. I think that-"
He didn't manage to finish his sentence before the roof of Reed's lab caved in.
There were days that Kitty Pryde wondered if anyone would really mind if she just... happened to phase Quentin Quire into a solid wall somewhere. Then again, chances were good that it wouldn't work on an omega-level psi. Wishful thinking on her part, and quite inappropriate for someone in her position.
Still. There were days. This would be one of them. Kitty knew she wasn't at her best. There was no getting away from the grief, not when she walked down the main hall every day and saw the faces of her lost friends in the pictures that hung there. She hadn't cried herself to sleep every night, but only because she'd hardly slept at all. Her patience had worn down to a fraying thread, which meant she was having to work particularly hard to manage an appropriate headmistress-ly tone at the moment.
"Psionic assaults on your teachers are not acceptable, Quentin," she said to the young man slouched in the chair on the other side of her desk. "I don't know what we have to do to get that through your head." Rachel had tried, she knew, and swallowed back the pain at the thought. So had Charles, before her.
Quentin shrugged. "World's coming to an end, Ms. Pryde," he said casually. "Haven't you heard? If I want to take a poke at the gym teacher, none of us are going to be around for much longer to worry about it."
"Quentin," Kitty said, trying very hard not to snap at him, "the world is not going to end." He knew more than what was good for him about what was going on, of course; he'd never had any qualms about eavesdropping. "I know things look grim right now, but I'm not going to let you use that as an excuse to abuse the staff. Or your fellow students."
Quentin rolled his eyes. "Sure you're not. Going to ask one of the Phoenix hosts down here to take me over their knee?" He put on a fake eager smile. "Oh, oh, make it Hope. I like redheads."
"Quentin, enough-" Kitty said, or rather started to say. Because in the next instant, Quentin's eyes unfocused and he raised a shaking hand to wipe at a sudden trickle of blood from his nose. "What's wrong?" she asked, her tone sharpening with concern instead of anger.
Quentin opened his mouth, but the only noise that came out was almost a moan. He slumped forward briefly in his chair, and Kitty was buffeted by a sudden projection of shock and terror. The emotions were accompanied by the half-formed image of something high in the sky, something blindingly bright and plummeting towards the school.
Kitty didn't ask again; she simply reacted, rising at the same moment that she hit the alarm on the underside of the desk. The kids needed to be in the shelter. Now. Phasing Quentin through his chair, she pulled him with her out into a hallway abruptly filled with students. All of whom were taking this much more seriously than they might have a month ago.
"He's going to kill all of us," Quentin said thickly, stumbling.
"Who?" Kitty demanded.
"Legion."
Fight, his father's voice had whispered to David, when the Raptors' attention had been focused elsewhere. You have to fight them, David. We can't let them use us to destroy what's left of our people.
'Our' people. As if belonging to the mutant race had ever done much for David. And it was hard to remember the need to fight, when the Raptors had given him so much. Peace in his own head, for the first time David could remember. Not the temporary peace provided by the neural switchboard the X-Men's science team had created for him, but real peace.
And all he had needed to do was let them in. Instead of the teeming horde of alternate personalities, his mind was an army of dark-armored Raptors. Working in concert. Mastering the power-sets of the other personalities they had taken as their hosts. The quiet was... blissful. Part of him had wondered if it was too much so. But then, even his father had learned to appreciate the Raptors in the end. Before he'd headed back to Earth, the whispered warnings had become infrequent, then rare.
He was on Earth himself now. Hovering over SHIELD headquarters - no, Avengers Tower. Now the Baxter Building. A school that didn't look anything like the old mansion. A military base. A naval base. Then back to SHIELD headquarters. The facility with which the Raptor in charge of his ability to fold space moved him from place to place was so impressive. Like it had been using those powers all its life.
David watched the SHIELD hangars burn. Watched as plasmatic flame poured downwards through the Baxter Building, melting everything it touched. The ships at the naval base were being refitted with Stark weapons, one of his Raptor personalities informed the others; they would be a threat to the Shi'ar fleet when it arrived. They burned as well.
Human soldiers ran for cover - too slow, always too slow. But they were peripheral. It was the equipment, the infrastructure that needed to be destroyed right now. Fighter jets turned into salt sculptures. Acid gas billowed through the corridors of the Helicarrier, destroying systems, and only a few of its crew escaped the gas as the great ship fell towards the water.
You don't seem bothered by this, the Raptor inhabiting the Delphic personality observed as they found themselves above the Jean Grey School once more. The first attack had shattered the buildings, but there were still rats in the basement, David thought darkly. Young mutants in their shelter, thinking they were safe.
I'm not, he replied. Another Raptor brought its host personality's geokinesis into place, and seismic shockwaves tore through the ground beneath the school. The living ground, a telepathic Raptor observed - Krakoa? - but David shrugged that off as well as he sensed the creature's death through the Raptor.
If he'd had any empathy left for his fellow mutants, young or old, human or not, it had died when Scott Summers had shot his father in the head.
Three questions, he said to the Raptor that had been Delphic, his precognitive self, as the ground churned like water. The Raptors were accommodating, he'd found. Perfectly willing to indulge him. They had used his powers to create whole worlds for him inside his own head. All of them had been preferable to the real world.
If you like, the Raptor said. That is how this personality used to work, isn't it?
The shelter resisted the geokinetic disturbance, and they moved on, to hit another target while the Raptors considered what powers set might solve that problem. They were above Avengers Tower once more, and there was a burly blond thunder god with a hammer flying directly at him.
Will any of them survive? David asked. I don't ask because I care, particularly. I'm just curious. Thor's lightning slashed into him, but several of his personalities were some variety of energy-absorber or electrokinetic. It was simplicity itself for those raptors to throw all that energy right back at the god of thunder, and Thor's armor smouldered as he went spinning through the air towards the ground.
We can't allow it. Not with the child Phoenix repowering so many. The seeds of the Imperium's destruction lie in every mutant. There was a large, roaring red thing leaping at him from a shattered set of windows. The Raptor collective consulted, and a portal opened, dropping the Red Hulk directly onto Thor as the thunder god tried to recover.
So why aren't we attacking her directly? Time-manipulation next, and Thor and the Red Hulk slowed to a crawl. Making them perfect targets. David felt his body swell with massive muscles as he flew down to the two of them, and another Raptor added the superspeed punches that were ten times as fast in the altered perceptions of the two trapped Avengers. Unable to move quickly enough to even begin to defend themselves, they were soon battered to a pulp.
Because she will destroy us. Our only salvation is that they will keep her out of the fight until the last possible moment, to protect her.
Back into the air, and then there were seismic waves targeting him. Trying to explode his heart in his chest, David knew as a forcefield formed around him, dissipating the waves. The attack came from the dark-haired woman at the windows where the Red Hulk had emerged. Strong, but physically vulnerable, the Raptor collective analyzed, and in the next moment, Daisy Johnson started to scream as she caught fire.
Last question, David said as they shifted to SHIELD headquarters for long enough to drop what was left of the main building into a sinkhole, then went back to the Jean Grey School. Why am I not targeting all the mutants?
Because you are here to break their resistance, the Delphic-Raptor said. Killing the last of their children is as important as destroying their military strength, such as it is. It is a knife in their hearts. Exterminating them is the other's job. You will make it much easier.
He felt the Raptors draw more deeply on a mixture of his telekinesis and his reality-warping, and then the shelter was cracking open. His telepathy heard the screaming. The cluster of empathic personalities fed on the terror in a way they never had before, converting it to more energy. More power.
Just in time. The sky above him tore open and there was a Phoenix there. Not Hope, just as the Raptor had predicted. Cable, who had tried to thwart him once before, years ago in the desert.
The Raptor collective, as if they were one mind and not hundreds, turned immediately to fight.
He'd been too slow. Even when he'd figured out the pattern, where Legion would strike next, Nathan arrived at each place an instant too late. In each case, just in time to see a flash of light as Legion headed to his next target. It seemed impossible to Nathan that he should be so far behind, at least until he stopped for long enough to look, really look at the residual energy at each site.
Then he knew. Legion wasn't just folding space, he was folding time as well. Even Phoenix-aided bodysliding couldn't keep up.
There had to be another option. There was another option, he realized, the answer coming to him immediately. A door in his mind needed to be opened, one that had been closed ever since that night in the Negev when he'd used his latent chrono-variant ability to warn the X-Men lost in the past of Legion's plans. This wasn't going to be comfortable, Nathan thought grimly, mustering as much of the Phoenix's power as he could, but he couldn't see the alternative.
Bracing himself, he directed all that power inward – directly at the deeply-rooted mental block that had kept him from consciously accessing his chronal powers for so many years. It fractured, instantly and explosively. Nathan couldn't bite back a scream that came out sounding more like the Phoenix's raptor-cry as he fell out of the air, his thoughts reeling with pain and shock. He didn't register the impact with the ground.
Someone was shouting his name, he realized dimly. But he couldn't focus. His sense of place and time had been turned upside down, spinning like a child's top. He was here, sprawled on a pile of rubble on the street outside Avengers Tower. But he was also at SHIELD headquarters, just beginning to react to the initial alarms and the explosion at the labs.
He was training with Hope and Rachel on Utopia.
He was at the naval base in Norfolk, lifting a warship out of the water to try and save its drowning crewmen.
He was checking on Scott in the SHIELD infirmary, and tallying up how many Shi'ar he was going to kill for what they'd done to his father and his sister.
He was teleporting into Jupiter's orbit as the Shi'ar fleet approached. That finally snapped him out of the stunned daze, and past, present, and future stopped blurring into each other. He could focus again, could see that there was something wrong. There weren't as many branch points in the timestream as there should be. There should be countless alternate possibilities and there weren't. It was as if the timestream had narrowed to a trickle.
Down the line, in the near future, he saw Logan drop to his knees in front of a massive hole in the ground, screaming out his grief and rage at the sky.
The school! Without hesitation Nathan launched himself into the air, the firebird propelling him skyward as he reached out and tore reality open. Ten minutes. He needed to be ten minutes into the past to stop this.
Calling it the timestream wasn't a figure of speech. Time flowed just like water, and he submerged himself in it, light and color and sound streaming around him as he forced himself against the tide to find the place he needed. The moment he needed.
It didn't take long; he wasn't going that far. Nathan re-emerged into ordinary time in a blaze of fire and slammed into Legion before the other mutant could even begin to mount a defense.
Below them, the school's shelter laid open to the sky. But there were people down there already trying to organize an evacuation, Nathan sensed – Kitty and the other staff members and some of the older students. I need to buy them some time. Looking into the future, he saw that if he could keep Legion busy for three minutes and fourteen seconds, Illyana would appear and start teleporting them away to safety. Ten seconds after that, Pixie would arrive to help.
But three minutes and fourteen seconds was easier said than done. Legion launched a barrage of attacks, all of them different, an impossible variety of destructive powers. Fire and electricity and energy of various sorts he could block, but countering the sudden slowdown of time around him, that was far harder. He managed it by launching himself into a sequence of flickering, rapid-fire jumps of only seconds ahead, but it was far from a perfect solution. When he emerged from the last jump, Legion was right there, disproportionately massive fists flying at superhuman speeds and connecting with such force that Nathan felt the blows even through the firebird.
He was getting tired of playing defense. Nathan gritted his teeth and feinted; Legion reacted just as he'd hoped, leaving an opening wide enough for the firebird to lunge forward and grab him. Talons bit deeply into Legion's body, but Nathan felt the pain as if it had been reflected back on him tenfold. Nathan roared in agony as he lost his grip on the other man and fell out of the air. Sheer bloody-minded stubbornness allowed to recover before he hit the ground, and he launched himself back skyward, flying at Legion with enough speed and force that it should shatter every bone in his body.
But then space folded around him and all that momentum carried him directly into the ground.
#You've miscalculated the variables, Askani'son. Again.# The voice wasn't Legion's, but with a flash of teleportational energy the other man was right there. Long, curved psionic claws extended from his fingers and he slashed at the firebird, disrupting its energy patterns.
In the next instant the claws slammed home, directly into Nathan's chest. Nathan found himself struggling to breathe, choking on blood, and for a moment he wasn't sure whether he was here or back on the moon, dying.
#You rushed into the fray to protect her,# the unfamiliar voice told him. It seemed strangely textured, as if it was hundreds of voices speaking as one. #An emotional decision. One we predicted. You will die, just as the Starchilde did before you.#
Legion's mind was wide open and all Nathan could see were rows upon rows of dark-armored figures just like the ones that had accompanied Xavier on the moon. Baleful crimson light glowed behind their visors, and all of their attention was focused on him, a murmur of cold triumph echoing in their ranks.
#She will be alone. Defenceless. We will end this.#
He was facing the enemy, part of Nathan thought. For the first time since this had all started, he was face to face with the force behind it all. The shadows responsible for all this death, all this loss.
And he saw, all at once, who and what they were. All those countless centuries of brutal manipulation, of darkness perpetuated in the name of the Shi'ar. The Datasong sang through him, the cold mathematics of galactic dominance, and he saw their goal: the Imperium ascendant, unchallenged and strong. Humanity's flame extinguished before it could shine more brightly, all to satisfy the Fraternity of Raptors and their icy, voracious hunger for an orderly galaxy. A Shi'ar heaven.
Perfect. And unchanging.
Somewhere out among the stars, still at an impossible distance, he heard the Phoenix scream in pure, unbridled rage, its very nature rebelling against the wrongness of it. Still too far away, it still reached out to him, and the turbulent fiery sea at the back of his mind went an incandescent white, erupting like the heart of a volcano.
And he blasted Legion away with raw power. Not telekinesis, but the substance of the Phoenix itself. There was no subtlety, nothing but pure force that buffeted the possessed man again and again, keeping him off-balance as the Phoenix repaired Nathan's injuries.
The overcharge faded as quickly as it come, but his wounds were healed and the air around him burned with all the power he could hold. The Phoenix was still looking out from behind his eyes, its molten rage pouring through him. More perfectly in union with him than it had ever been before.
#We see you,# he snarled, back in the air as the firebird reassembled itself around him. It swelled into immensity, its energy patterns hardening into armor. #You should have stayed hidden. Don't you understand what you're fighting? HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO DIE BEFORE YOU UNDERSTAND IT'S NOT GOING TO TAKE?#
This was war. This was what he was meant to do, the reason that the Phoenix had come to him in the first place, so that he could stand between Hope and harm. So that he could set the Fraternity's cold heaven afire.
#We will end you. You cannot beat us. You are one man. We are an army,# the shadows told him.
#THEN BURN TOGETHER!#
He and Legion went for each other in the same moment, energy attacks of countless types coming at him. They didn't penetrate the firebird, but the cumulative force staggered him enough to create an opening for the other mutant's telekinesis to reach out to grab him. Space folded around them as Legion, or rather, the Raptors puppeting him, blinked them in and out of reality.
They were over New York. London. San Francisco. Washington. Rio. The tundra. The desert. The open ocean. Each time they stopped, the shadows in Legion's mind manifested a new attack, and Nathan couldn't counter all of them. Claws slashed open the firebird again and bolts of electricity penetrated the cracks. Flame, real flame sheathed the Phoenix's psionic fire and superheated the air, and that took more healing to counter, to restore his lungs to working order for a second time.
But he landed attacks of his own, plenty of them. Phoenix-amplified telekinesis tore at Legion, and it didn't matter if the pain was reflected right back at him because he wasn't feeling it, not with this much of the Phoenix's power flowing through him. He alternated massive sledgehammer blows with more precise strikes, and Legion's body jerked and spasmed as internal organs started to shut down from the damage. One of the possessed personalities was a healer, but it couldn't keep up with the pace of the damage being inflicted. Nathan started to alternate the telekinetic strikes with telepathic attacks, blasts of psychic fire scouring that wide-open mind. Possessed personalities screamed as they withered into ash.
Montreal. Paris. Moscow. The ocean again. The Australian outback. Berlin. Dubai. Salem Center. They tumbled through the skies of Earth like two comets, fatally tangled.
And then there was a third.