Future Pluperfect: Chapter 3
Something was not right. That much was clear. But that's hardly novel. Something has not been right since I returned to this flonqing time.
"D'jya say somethin', sir?" Rahne Sinclair turned around to face Cable.
"Just muttering to myself. It's a sign of creeping senility, or so I'm told," he replied. In her transitional form as she was, the girl's hearing was dangerously sharp.
"T'ain't that, I fear," Wolfsbane said as she sniffed the air. She had only been visiting Westchester to deliver some computer parts when the call had come in, so instead of returning to Muir Island she had flown down to the Mexican highlands. "T'is the smell a' the unfamiliar. Something is amiss."
"The question is what, my lupine associate," Henry McCoy said as he walked back from where he had been filling vials. "The CDC took water and soil samples, but while I can double-check their results, I am at a loss to come up with additional possibilities."
"Sirs, have yae taken anything from the... victims?" Rahne asked carefully.
Looking over, Cable could see the young woman standing over what looked like a bloodstain in the dirt.
"What is it, Wolfsbane?"
She paused, hesitant to bring up anything that would associate her with the more primal side of her wolf persona. "The blood... it smells wrong. It dinnae smell like the blood of a kill."
"It could be the toxins in the bloodstream," Beast mused aloud as he knelt by the spot. "Or it could be the de-oxygenation factor. Everyone here suffocated, after all."
Rahne shook her head. "It's nae poison. It's... I dinna know what it is."
"We'll look it over at the lab," Cable assured her. "They've also got the CDC doing tox screens on the victims. But that blood may not be from the townsfolk. It could be from the perpetrators."
The three went about their work mostly in silence. McCoy followed the young wolf-woman and collected samples where she paused and looked uneasy. He noticed that Cable was, too, looking more and more distant.
"Pardon me for saying so, but your usual stoicism seems to have slipped into something more approaching saturnine," the blue-furred doctor said quietly as he finally approached his teammate. He didn't have much of a relationship with Cable and was not especially concerned that the other man would snap at him. "I know better than to think that you are merely perturbed by the scenery..."
"Especially since I've been the cause of a lot worse than this," Cable completed the thought. "I can't quite explain it. This attack... these attacks... they seem familiar to those that take place in my time. But why they would be happening now... but I can't shake the idea, at least not until we come up with a better one."
McCoy nodded and walked away, having, for once, nothing to say on the matter. Cable continued to wander around the village looking for possible sources of contamination, each step convincing him more thoroughly that there would be none.
Where's Blaquesmith when I need him? More precisely, when is he? I can't spend the time running an analysis of Haight's cyborg raids, especially if all this is going to be is some superimposed flashback on my part. The cyborgs aren't here, but just once, I'd like to hear it from Blaquesmith that I'm working myself so hard that I'm seeing things that aren't there.
Blaquesmith had departed abruptly a few weeks ago, barely leaving enough time for Nathan to answer the summons to the New York safe house and say G'Journey in person before the little man winked out and back to his own time. Blaquesmith claimed it was for equipment restocking, but Cable had his suspicions.
In the meanwhile, however, he was left to his own devices. And a flonqing good job you're doing, Cable taunted himself. This is probably a simple merc job, just a bunch of hired pros. Very good pros, but mercs always leave a marker. Trick of the trade - trademark your destruction for brand recognition.
But if this was just a mercenary show, these weren't any mercs that had been around when the Six Pack had been operational. And anyone who hadn't been around then was still new to the job. But this wasn't the work of an inexperienced newbie just making a name for himself. This was quality destruction, which meant precisely one thing. Trouble.
***
"Goddess, not again!" Storm cried to herself as the wind shifted and the air was filled with the smell of death. Too many times, too many times...
The call had come in mid morning in Westchester, just after dawn here in New Mexico. A Pueblo village lay in ruins, discovered by their neighbors across the desert. This time, the corpses of the residents were desiccated, shriveled as though they had been left in the desert for weeks, although it had only been at most two days. The buzzards had been busy, but there was still flesh on bone.
"Look at this," Alex Summers called out as he picked up a large rock and handed it to his brother. "If I didn't know better, I'd say this looked like your work."
"There's no scoring on the side... that's not consistent with plasma weapons," Cyclops admitted as he looked over the rubble. "I'll take this back with us. Maybe something will turn up under a microscope."
"Or maybe Wolverine will smell something," Alex suggested, trying to make light of a situation that was only darkness.
"Vampires, perhaps?" Storm walked over to the brothers. "I, especially, have had experience with them..."
"And were it not for this rubble, Storm, I'd be inclined to rely on that experience," Cyclops sighed, running a hand over his head. "But of all the times we've tangled with Dracula or his family, we've never seen evidence of a firefight."
"Lorna and I used to come here in the summers," Alex said as much to himself as to the others as he stood up from his crouch and looked out over the horizon, trying to decide whether the weight in his chest was from the memories of love lost or from the evidence of destruction that surrounded him. "This was a very prosperous village and every August they'd have a big festival to thank their gods for their good fortune. Where were their gods for this?"
Ororo felt his gaze. "I was a goddess once. I did not brook questions out of fear that I did not know the answers. But that does not make the need for understanding disappear."
"Let's finish up here," Cyclops broke the silence that followed. "The folks from the reservation will want to come and perform their rituals for the dead."
The trio worked mostly in silence, collecting potential evidence and looking around for any sort of clue that might lead to those who had perpetuated the assault.
Alex drove them back to the area where the Blackbird had been parked, but after loading the up the plane, only one boarded.
"I'd like to fly back on my own, if I may," Storm said when Cyclops motioned for her to precede him onto the ladder.
"It's a long way," he began, his mouth quirking more in concern than dismay.
"It should take me until shortly after nightfall," she replied. "It took me only a day to do a trans-Atlantic flight. I need time to myself to think. I shall not let my team down."
"Your next shift won't be for a few days, Storm, you've earned the downtime. Take your time and call in if you'd like to be picked up."
Storm nodded and with a quick hug for Alex, took off.
"She'll be all right?" Alex Summers asked his brother.
"I hope. This is the second massacre she's had to investigate in two days. I didn't want her to come out here in the first place, but she insisted and everyone else was gone - even Gambit was off chasing rumors."
"You still chaining him to the back fence? You've never really been the grudge-bearing type."
"It's not me, although I suppose it is me because I'm not telling everyone to shut up and get over it," Scott Summers admitted with a frown. "We've been stretched so thin the past week or so, it's not going to matter what everyone thinks. Gambit's going to have to be included in the general rotation or everyone else is going to collapse from exhaustion. This way, nobody's going to have the time or the energy to snipe at him and I won't have to play 'bad cop' to get people to work with him."
"Sly of you, big brother. Quite sly."
"I'm too tired to be a dictator. If I dedicated the energy required to keep everyone's personality quirks from rubbing everyone else the wrong way, I'd have no energy for anything else."
"And then Jean really would replace you."
"Thanks. Thanks a lot."
"I'm making up for all the time I didn't get to be an annoying little brother back when we were teenagers."
"Funny, that's the excuse Nathan uses with Jean every time he sends me off the deep end."
"Then it's a family thing and I can't help myself."
Cyclops laughed, probably the first time he had in days. "Are you sure you don't want to come back with me? We've got extra space."
"I'm sure. I'll help you out if I can, but I'm not superhero material, Scott. I'm still a little too anti-establishment. Besides, from what Jean says, you couldn't take both me and Nathan."
"You I can deal with. Nathan? He's really not that bad if you catch him after a few cups of coffee. Or after he's cleaned his gun."
"You know us Summers boys and our toys. I'll catch you around, Scott. Let me know if anything comes out of that stuff we collected."
"Will do. I don't think we've ever seen anything like this, though. This is slaughter without a message - how often do you see that?"
"Senseless killing has been around since the dawn of time, I suspect. But I know what you mean. We have to be missing something."
Cyclops nodded slowly and with a pat on his brother's back, he boarded the Blackbird. Alex waited until the plane disappeared from the horizon before heading back to the jeep.
***
"Fair tidings, friend Gambit," Mirrin said quietly as she stood away from the tree she had been hiding behind.
"What're you doing here, Askani?" Gambit growled, lowering his hand and willing the charge out of the card between his fingers. "I'm not alone, you know."
Mirrin shrugged, then pulled out a diskette. "I bring you possible information. Mayhaps I have divined the next sites of interest to the Kurioon."
"And how'd you do that?" Gambit looked around, but Wolverine was nowhere nearby.
"Do you really want to know?"
"Non," he agreed. "You put it information on a disk?"
"It should be readable on your computers. I used the most basic computer language I had access to," she explained. Blaquesmith would have a fit once he returned and saw what she had done to his precious mainframe, but it was necessary both to get the results of the data analysis into a readable format as well as to obscure the disk and data's provenance - just in case Nathan got suspicious.
"Suppose it's gonna be up to me to figure out a way to use the information without anyone knowing where I got it from?" Gambit asked rhetorically. "Can't just say I found it on the street, you know. They're gonna be suspicious."
"They are suspicious already, it is their nature," Mirrin replied airily. "Guilt by association is one of the hardest mistruths to eradicate." Left unspoken was how much a sign of a weak clan was this persistent mistrust. They'd be torn to shreds in a heartbeat in my there-and-then.
"An army will either watch each other's backs or stab them," Mirrin finished the thought aloud.
"Cyke's got my back," Gambit returned, feeling a little defensive about her blanket dismissal of the X-Men. "But he's gonna want to know why my bright idea," he waved the disk, "is better den anyone else's bright idea."
"Has anyone been so illuminated recently?"
"Non."
"Then your 'bright idea' shall shine all the more brilliant in the absence of competing flames."
"I guess so," Gambit agreed reluctantly, then jumped back a step when Mirrin suddenly disappeared. Turning around, he nearly collided with Wolverine.
"Who're ya talkin' to?" The smaller man asked with a cocked eyebrow.
"Personne," Gambit muttered, shaking his head.
"Either you're lyin' or that time up in the snow froze your brain and yer seein' things," Wolverine half-snarled. "Whoever it was, you've met them before. I've caught that scent by your room and in the mansion. Who was it?"
Gambit thought fast. "Person who rescued me. Wanted ta make sure I was all right."
Wolverine nodded. It sounded plausible enough - the Cajun had been absolutely unwilling to talk about how he got back from Antarctica - and the nervousness he smelled was not the sort usually associated with lying. "This mysterious benefactor want anything from you?"
"Non. Jus' my acceptance back wit' de X-Men, would you believe."
"I'll think about whether or not I believe that. C'mon, I got what we came for."
***
"Oy gevalt."
"Did you say something, Katzchen?"
"Oy gevalt," Kitty Pryde announced, this time louder. She leaned forward so that her forehead rested on the gel pad she used as a wrist rest for her keyboard. Eyes closed, she could feel Lockheed's tail skim against her ankle.
"The request from the mansion is proving too much?" Kurt Wagner stopped leaning against the monitor-room doorway and moved to sit down next to Kitty.
"I've run every conceivable statistical analysis on the villages that have turned up massacred," Shadowcat sighed and sat up. Lockheed took the opportunity to climb onto his mistress' lap and nuzzle her hand. "Demographics, economics, average yearly rainfall, everything."
"And nothing?"
"And nothing. Not a single thing in common. One was good at farming, another hunting, another was known for their athletes, and the fourth, the one in Slovenia, wasn't good at anything."
"The Slovenians are hardy folk," Nightcrawler said with a smile of reminiscence. "A lot of good history takes place there. The gypsies have a high regard for them, as much as they like anyone who settles down."
"History... I wonder if that's it. Maybe they were once warriors or something. But how could I find that out? Cap's encyclopedias aren't nearly up to date and I've already bothered Moira enough."
Wagner smiled and sighed. "You know exactly how to find that out. You just won't."
"Piotr's not that good in history. I'm sure the encyclopedia knows more."
"Kitty, you are being silly. European history was his specialty while he was a student of Professor Xavier's. If he doesn't know the answer, then he will know where to look. We are trying to save hundreds, maybe even thousands of people. He is your teammate."
"He's also the bane of my existence right now," Kitty mumbled and then sighed. "Fine, I'll ask him when I see him."
Wagner got up with a chuckle. "Good girl."
After Nightcrawler left, Kitty frowned as she scratched the drowsy Lockheed's eye ridges. "I can't go talk to Piotr. You understand, don't you? The fates are cruel. Save the world or save my pride. Why couldn't Pete know more about history?"
At the mention of Wisdom, Lockheed's rumble of contentment turned into a snort.
"No editorializing, dragon."
Meanwhile, on his way to the kitchen, Kurt congratulated himself on fleeing the monitor room before Kitty could launch into another tirade.
He loved both Colossus and Shadowcat dearly, he truly did, and he held them equally close to his heart. Both of them had risked their lives for his and he had and would do the same for them. But that does not mean that I cannot occasionally wish to do them in myself.
Kurt sometimes wondered if he should be angry or not with Kitty for her bouts of unreasonableness. Still so young, the girl had been through so much that her biological age was oft just a technicality. Kitty Pryde had stopped being a child long before she had convinced Professor Xavier that she was too mature to be trained with the New Mutants.
Yet he also wondered if Kitty did not use to her own advantage the guilt that all of her teammates felt for that stolen childhood. Kitty almost expected them - especially Piotr - to change as she changed, to treat her as the adult that she insisted she was. But Kurt, Wolverine, and especially Storm were also required to stay the same when she was comfortable as things were, to still be the nurturing buffers they had always been. And when the rest of the X-Men could not halt nature to suit her whims... Kitty's temper tantrums were a force of nature unto themselves.
'The lass jus' needs a friend,' Moira had once told Kurt as the two had found themselves waiting out one such storm together. Perhaps it was so, but how do you tell that to someone who has lost all of her best friends so dramatically?
Both Ilyana and Rachel had been so well-suited to Kitty - even in her most petulant mood, Kitty could not deny that both Magik and Phoenix had suffered more greatly than she had, and yet they were so eminently well-adjusted to 'normal' life. Even Doug Ramsay had managed to soothe Kitty's fury through his own terminally even temper. But they were all gone now, having sacrificed themselves for a greater good. And Kitty was left to rage alone.
Rahne was around now, but the two girls could not be further apart in temperament and there was too much history between the two. Rahne had confided to Kurt that even if Kitty managed to look past the fact that Rahne was a former 'X-Baby', she didn't think Kitty would ever forgive her for getting Doug killed, regardless of the actual circumstances.
"Afternoon, Kurt. Would yae like some coffee?" Moira MacTaggert greeted him as he entered the kitchen. "I'm putting up a pot. I'm fallin' asleep over my notes again."
Kurt swallowed his shudder of revulsion. MacTaggert's coffee rivaled blue Kool-Aid as the most noxious substances officially labeled safe for human consumption. "No thank you, Moira, but I'm fine. Orange juice will do."
Finishing his glass of juice, Kurt noticed idly out the window that Meggan was frolicking with some ducks on the lawn. She had turned her top half green and her bottom half brown to blend in with her new friends. But when Kurt noticed that she had also taken on webbed feet, he decided it was a very good time for an early afternoon nap.
A while later, Kurt awoke to the distinctive sound of Wisdom shuffling down the stairs. Not wanting to think of why the man was in this wing and on this floor - his room was nowhere nearby, although Kitty's certainly was - he stretched and instead turned to the blinking phone that sat on his desk. Opening his door to officially put himself back on duty, he saw Lockheed walk by.
Lockheed was on his way to his cushion for a nap when he passed by Piotr Rasputin's room. The door was open, so he decided to step in. Colossus, unlike Kitty's current amour, did not smell of cigarettes and did not threaten to kill him whenever Kitty was out of earshot. And he most certainly never kicked Lockheed out of his own room.
Were it not for the fact that Kitty would have been most upset, Lockheed was quite sure he could have enjoyed watching Colossus (cooo!) take on Wisdom (nyaa!!). It would have been especially nice had the organic steel giant been able to rid Kitty of her foul-smelling boyfriend.
Instead, Kitty was now even closer with mister hot fingers (fthhppb!) and not speaking to Piotr at all, except when it was absolutely unavoidable. And Kitty's ability to phase through walls to avoid her teammate made those times quite few, indeed.
"Privet, Lockheed," Piotr looked up after he heard the dragon clear his throat. "So you do not share Katya's feelings? Good. I am glad. Perhaps you could put in a few words with your mistress?"
Lockheed raised an eyebrow but went to the window ledge to catch the last of the sun's rays.
Colossus continued to search through his books. He had gotten a post-it note with a request from Kitty scrawled on it to look up the history of a village, but he was having such little luck that he wondered if Kitty had not misspelled the name. That, or her handwriting was proving more troublesome than usual.
"Do you know, Lockheed, that Katya used to have such lovely handwriting? I used to admire it when she would teach Ilyana the English alphabet. She would have had a beautiful Russian script had she ever learned it. But now? Now she only ever types at her keyboard and her hand is not nearly as fine. No flourishes, no elegance... no personality. It is as faceless as the printouts from her precious computers."
"You, mein freund, are a Luddite," Kurt Wagner announced from the open doorway. "I see Kitty has spoken to you about the village."
"If you call this," Piotr said as he waved the post-it attached to his right index finger, a wistful frown on his face, "a conversation. This was attached to my door when I got back from my workout."
Wagner sighed. If Kitty vacillated between selfless young woman and spoiled child, Piotr could choose equally well between invulnerable superhero and insecure wallflower. Now, as it had been since a few well-placed hot knives to the spine, Piotr was the latter. He hid in his room, did not speak unprovoked unless only Nightcrawler was around, and generally tried to blend in with the scenery. And that was no easier for an organic steel hulk than it was for an indigo-furred teleporter with a tail and three toes per foot.
Kurt always suspected that Piotr, a temperamental artist buried under a lifetime of conditioning to fulfill duty to state and family, enjoyed being unhappy. Or, at the very least, Piotr had convinced himself that he enjoyed it. How else to explain things? He had been happy as Peter Nicholas, amnesiac SoHo artist, but that was the exception that proved the rule - Piotr had only been content when he had been somebody else. Kurt had watched Piotr tear himself to shreds over Kitty, then break up with her, then become murderously jealous when she finally moved on to another as Piotr had wished for her to do.
Of course, had Amanda moved on to Wisdom, I would most probably have not taken it much better than Piotr.
"Is there anything that I could say, Piotr?" Kurt finally asked. "It will take time."
And, truth be told, for all of Kitty's mood swings, she did have a right to be angry with Piotr. Attacking Wisdom had been stupid, beyond the fact that the former Black Air operative's mutation meant that he was naturally armed with dangerous weapons. Even if Kitty hadn't been in the right, what protest could Piotr lodge after what he had done to her in the wake of the Secret Wars?
When they had returned from the Beyonder's universe, Kurt had gone along with Wolverine when he had dragged Piotr off that day on the pretense of making sure Logan didn't get the big Siberian killed. If Kurt were honest with himself, however, he would admit that he had been less offended at Logan's version of payback than he had made himself out to be. Suave, swashbuckling pirates lived by a certain code of conduct with the fair damsels, and Piotr had broken nearly every rule in the Errol Flynn Guide to Life. And one did not do that and still expect to get the girl.
"Apparently I will have to wait," Piotr sighed, noticing his friend's distant expression, then looked behind him. "But at least Lockheed has agreed to be my friend."
"Good afternoon, Lockheed, I did not see you there," Nightcrawler apologized, bowing with a flourish. "Are either of you having any luck?"
"Nyet. Are you sure..."
A frantic call from the main level of the house, sounding suspiciously like Meggan-the-half-a-duck, interrupted the conversation. Wagner made his apologies and went towards the stairs. Lockheed decided to follow as the sun had faded beyond Colossus' ledge.
"Kurt!" Piotr called after Nightcrawler. "The name of the village again, please?"
"Ljubdoren!"
"Spacebo," Colossus called back, figuring that distance had made his friend's voice sound so odd.
"Always a motormouth when Pryde's not around," Pete Wisdom snarled as he exchanged stares with the dragon as they crossed on the steps.
***