After Kurt teleported out, Logan moved back to the fallen amplifier suit for a closer look. He sliced open the cockpit and kicked the top away. The piece flew much further than he had expected, considering how heavy that same bit had been on the first two suits they encountered. His lip turned up in disgust as he examined the cockpit. It looked like Kurt had set off a bomb in there. And in the center of that gory detonation, a shaft of rebar stuck out.
Scott's gonna have a field day figuring out the physics for this, he thought. Some kind of matter displacement thing. Whatever Kurt did, it was pretty damn effective. I just hope he gets the use of his arms back.
He bent down and tried to pick up the head, which he remembered to be the lightest single part of the ensemble. To his shock, he overcompensated and almost fell flat on his back, the piece was so light. What the hell was this thing made out of? Balsa wood and tin foil? He looked up into the head, expecting a mass of wire. Instead, he saw fiber optics. He sniffed it. No, there wasn't a single whiff of metal. He quickly checked the rest of the limbs. All shared the same lightweight plastic and ceramic structure. This whole unit, including the pilot, couldn't weigh more than 600 lbs.
A quiet explosion behind him meant Kurt had returned. Logan turned around, holding onto the suit's head and right arm. Kurt looked dubious.
"I don't know if I'm strong enough for all that," he warned.
"Bet you are," Logan quipped.
He tossed the head to Kurt, who managed to catch it with his tail. Kurt's jaw went slack when he realized how light the part really was.
"Looks like they're trying out a whole new model," Logan went on. "Torso's fubar, but the limbs are intact. I say we bring back all we can. Scott an' Hank are gonna want to see this."
Kurt make the mistake of looking behind Logan to where both cockpit and pilot laid open and exposed, skewered on a piece of rebar, chest exploded outwards--.... Kurt closed his eyes and turned away, his stomach churning. Lord help him, what had he done?
:
Ororo's vision was tunneling. The edges grew hazy and indistinct, then faded entirely. She couldn't feel the warmth from the little one beside her. Her whole body was going numb. At some point, Kurt and Logan must have returned, because both she and the girl were lifted up, placed on the bed, wrapped in several blankets, and the bed tilted up at the feet to keep the blood from pooling in their extremities.
She blinked, trying to clear her vision, as Logan strapped her and the girl down. "Who's… flying the plane?"
Logan glanced back at the cockpit. "Both of us, I guess. Kurt's done better on the simulator than I have, but it'll be hell for him to do this with just his tail…."
His words faded and blended together. She had no idea what he was saying for the last half of the statement. She shook her head, forcing herself to stay focused. There was a team that needed her alive. There was a girl that was relying on her. There was a man she loved dearly. She couldn't black out. She just couldn't. But as the world dimmed further around her, she realized that she no longer had a choice….
"Hey! Stay with me, Storm!" Logan called, shaking her shoulder.
Kurt shook his head as he watched. "She's in shock. She needs a hospital."
"Great. You know where the closest one is? Maybe there's a triple-A map in the glove compartment."
Kurt's gaze rested on the little girl curled up next to Ororo. "Maybe she does." He switched to Castilian. "Little one. We need you to help."
She did not answer. She kept looking straight ahead, but not at them.
"Logan, can you get her attention, please?" Kurt requested. "If I touch her with my tail, it may startle her too much."
Logan gently pulled some of the blanket away from the girl's head and tapped her shoulder. She blinked and looked up at him for the first time.
"Little one, we need you to help," Kurt repeated softly.
She looked at Kurt and tensed. She swallowed nervously, biting her bottom lip to form a seal that her cleft upper lip otherwise denied.
"What be your name?" Kurt asked her.
"Rosa," she whispered.
"Rosa, do you know a hospital close here? You need a doctor and she need a doctor."
Kurt nodded to Ororo as he spoke. Rosa looked up at Ororo's face.
"Is she hurt bad?"
Kurt forced his voice to remain calm. "Yes. She needs a hospital. It be important."
She paused, obviously thinking. When she spoke, her words were formed with difficulty, due to her mangled lip. "I don't know any hospitals. They take too much money. We go to a curandera. She lets us pay in chickens and corn when we have any."
Kurt blinked. "What be a curandera? I do not know that word."
"She's a healer. She uses God's power to heal people. She couldn't heal my lip, but she once healed a broken leg. I saw her do it. The man could walk after seeing her."
Kurt sighed and closed his eyes. "She only knows of a faith healer," he said in English.
"Yeah, well, lots of times the locals will surprise you," Logan said. "Maybe that faith healer has a phone book. So far, it's our best option. I don't want to try and land this baby in Mexico City if I don't gotta."
And Ororo might not last long enough to get there, Kurt added silently. In Castilian, he spoke aloud, "Where be this woman of God, Rosa? How far away be she?"
Rosa looked down at the nice woman, then up at the strange "not-demon" and the fierce-looking man, none of whom cared what she looked like. They didn't stare at her lip, they didn't call her cursed, and they saved her from the robot. The nice woman had even gotten hurt helping Rosa. She owed them.
"I… I don't know how many miles it is, but I can show you how to get there," she said.
She started to get up, then the belt stopped her. Logan unhooked the belt and she started to sit up again, and then her side started hurting. Something was always getting in the way of her getting up. She winced, then forced herself upright, biting her lip all the way. Kurt politely averted his gaze. Logan moved away quickly.
"Gimme a sec," he mumbled.
Out of the corner of his eye, Kurt could tell that Rosa was moving out from under the blanket. He could hear the fabric sliding, hear the bed creaking just a little as she jerkily pushed herself up. He cautiously raised his tail and extended it a few inches over the bed.
"Do you need help to sit?" he asked. "My arms be not moving now, but my tail does move."
"I'm not supposed to pull tails," Rosa answered meekly.
Logan came back with a clean, spare, T-shirt. On Rosa's tiny frame, the shirt would be more like a shift. Rosa looked back at him as he held up the soft cotton garment.
"Oh, to Hell with it," Logan muttered.
He bent over and picked Rosa up off of the bed, then gently set her on the floor and helped her put her arms through those of the shirt. The white fabric looked glaringly pale against her, and it covered all the way down to her knees.
"She's decent, Kurt. You can look, now."
Kurt turned to them both. Logan crouched on the steel floor of the Blackbird while Rosa leaned on him for support, one hand on his shoulder and her other arm across her stomach. Her body language screamed that she was about ready to faint, that she was sick, wounded, weak. Her eyes alone showed whatever strength was keeping her upright.
"I'll take you to the curandera, now," she stated. "I'll stand up and watch through the windshield and tell you which way to go."
That meant she would have to sit on someone's shoulders; the windows were far too high for her to see through otherwise. Ordinarily, it would be Logan's job to lift the girl, and Kurt's to fly the unwieldy beast. These were hardly "ordinary" circumstances. Once again, Kurt willed his arms to move. Once again, he failed. It was as if they had been replaced with wooden planks.
Make do with whatever you have at hand, he thought. Even if you have no hands at all.
He walked toward the main pilot's seat. Logan picked the girl up and cradled her in his arms as he made his way back with him.
"Wait a minute, you're not doing what I think you're doing," Logan said. When Kurt silently sat in the pilot's seat, Logan continued, "Are you out of your mind? How the hell are you gonna fly this thing without arms? You've only got one tail, bub."
Kurt started flipping switches with the tip of his flexible tail. "Remember in the simulator I said I could beat you with both hands tied behind my back?"
"Look, your scores were good, but they weren't that good! You can't fly with just your tail! You need two hands for that!"
Kurt adjusted his perch in the seat, clamping his toes around the molded plastic, as the jets roared to life. As his tail wrapped around the thruster controls for a firm grip, he reached out with one foot and grabbed the yoke. Logan and Rosa stared with equal expressions of disbelief.
"Jesus, Kurt, only Cyc's supposed to be this macho," Logan muttered. "Just let me fly the fucking plane, already."
Kurt turned his head Logan's way. "I flew this way in the simulator, just to see if I could. Even this way, I'm still a better pilot than you. I will get us there much faster."
The jet began to tremble, the thrusters kicking up a spray of dirt and sending vibrations through the floorboards. If it was one thing Logan had learned about Kurt over the past eight months, it was that he was ninety-five percent pushover and five percent stubborn mule. Right now, he was staring into a whole lot of five percent. Logan settled into the copilot's seat, sitting Rosa on his shoulders for a good view and surreptitiously placing one hand within easy reach of the controls. Rosa leaned on Logan's head for support as the jet slowly raised away from the packed ground.
"Which way, Rosa?" Kurt asked.
"Left some," she said. As Kurt swung the plane around, she suddenly called out, "Stop! Go forward."
They were heading into the interior, farther away from what little civilization the maps knew. Kurt had to fly much lower than he was used to in order to give Rosa a view she could still recognize. They must be eating through their fuel at a much higher rate than usual. They could be seen and heard by anyone on the ground. All these things swirled through Kurt's head, but it was the image of Ororo, motionless and wrapped in a blanket, that took center stage.
:
Matt and Angelou waited silently, watching the monitors, waiting for a sign. Unit six had gone down twenty minutes ago, the retrieval team had gone out fifteen minutes ago, and still nothing.
"Man, why's it taking so fuckin' long?" Angelou complained. "Aren't they supposed to get there really fast?"
"What, you mean the teleport thing?" Matt asked back.
"Yeah, that thing. I saw it work once."
"I saw it not work once. That thing's not safe. They're probably hiking in."
"You saw it fuck up? What happened?"
Matt shivered. "I don't wanna talk about it. It was bad. That's all I'm gonna say."
It wouldn't have been so hard for the two of them to wait if they hadn't seen Unit six's live feed. Or if they hadn't heard the constant beeping from their mutant detector, and seen the targets pulled up on the screen. Or, to top it off, if the retrieval team hadn't reported hearing and seeing Xavier's jet flying low.
Unit six had encountered the Oval Office Assassin, Weapon X, and another one of Xavier's inhuman brood code-named Storm. At first, it went well. Unit six incapacitated Logan, and while Storm was playing around, it went into the mining shaft after its original target. The ensuing battle was even better, as no one could penetrate its forcefield. Everything was going exactly as Larry predicted. Storm went down, and Weapon X was in its grasp. Then Unit six's feedback readings spiked and flatlined in short order, the live feed quit, and nobody could figure out what went wrong. One this was for certain, though. The Assassin used his powers several times after Unit six's demise. At least one of the mutants was still alive.
Finally the speaker squawked to life. "Roving base three, this is hound party one."
Matt grabbed the radio's call set. "Hound one, this is base three. Find anything?"
"You want the good news or the bad news?"
Matt paused. "What do you have more of?"
"We found part of Unit 6, specifically the cockpit. It's got a rod shoved clean through it. Went through the forcefield and ceramic like a hot knife through butter."
"I didn't think even Adamantium could do that."
"That's the weird part; it's just plain old rebar. Larry's gonna have a field day figuring out the physics for this. The bad news is that that's the only thing we found. The arms, legs, and head are all gone. They've been sliced off. And that means they've been taken for study."
Matt bowed his head and rested the call box on his scalp. Shit. They were so screwed. The one thing Larry did NOT want to have happen, and it happened right under their noses.
He lowered the box to his lips. "Guess the recall button didn't work, huh?"
"Kind of hard to teleport with the cockpit this shredded. I don't think Larry ever expected disruption on this scale."
"Can you track the limbs at all?"
"We're not getting a damned thing. I bet they're on the Goddamn jet."
"Yeah, that'd explain it. The jet's supposed to be loaded with more ECMs than we are."
"Considering it didn't exist on any of our instruments, I'd say they were right. It was going inland. Going that low, I wonder if they were looking for something ground based."
Matt raised his head slowly. "Or they were making a short hop. Maybe they were gonna land somewhere close."
"Why?"
"Hell, I don't know! Maybe they got a flat!"
They didn't dare go back without the amp suit, let alone without even a mutant hide to show for it. They had to find something; the rest of the parts, or their target. They couldn't just pack up and leave empty-handed after losing billions in hardware. But if Xavier's freaks were flying their jet that low, it meant something was up. Maybe they'd land within 100 miles. Maybe one of them would activate his power again….
Matt clicked on the handset. "All right, put a recall thingy on the cockpit and send it back. From what you're telling me this thing couldn't get more fucked up by a bad 'port. Then just hang out for a while. Lou and I will keep scanning from here We'll tell you when we find something."
"Fine by us, base. I don't wanna see Larry blow his stack any time soon. Hound one out and monitoring."
"Base three out and monitoring."
He lowered the box again, lost in thought. Trailing Xavier's battle-trained freaks was dangerous business. Very dangerous business. But if his team brought them down, even one of them… if he could bring back proof that Storm was dead, let alone Weapon X…. He looked over at Angelou, who was surely thinking the same thing.
"Man, if we pull this off, there's gonna be bonuses like you wouldn't fuckin' believe," Angelou said, his eyes glistening.
"I'm just glad it's not us out there risking our asses," Matt grunted as he stood up. "You wanna drive or let me?"
TBC…