Chapter 10: Defection

"CARL! Tom! Riley!"

Jubilee stood frozen in the doorway, staring in shock as her three friends blinked up at her from the floor of her bedroom. "What are you…how did…" She stopped, at a complete loss for words.

Carl rose first, blinking the spots from his eyes, and staggered over to Tom. "Tom? You okay?" He gave the smaller man a hand up, ignoring Jubilee for the moment. Jubilee left Logan, Carey, and Nate standing by the door as she reached down to Riley.

"You guys okay? I didn't hit you all that hard, did I?" she asked anxiously. "Riley? Say something. Please?"

Riley looked up and grinned crookedly. "Hi, boss."

Jubilee frowned. "'Boss'? I'm not your…boss…" she trailed off as she followed his line of sight to the door. "Nate." Her eyes narrowed as the pieces clicked into place. "Nate? Riley was your contact with me?"

It was Riley who answered. "Guilty." He touched the 'watch' on his arm, and his outline shimmered, changing from the smiling good-natured visage that she saw so often to a taller, broader-shouldered, much more muscled man with slit-pupil yellow cat's eyes, a shock of almost orange hair, and four fingers that ended in sticky pads. "Also known as 'Gecko', to my friends." He indicated her apartment, and the blinking Tom and Carl, behind him. "We were going to come here and pick up your stuff so you wouldn't have to come here and pack." He turned to Nate. "I was going to give them two of our new image inducers and take them to the airport, and take a commercial flight to New York. I guess, now that you're here, we can scrap the plans and just go with you?"

Nate shook his head. "Nightshade has opted not to join us. As much as we might not like her decision, she has the right to make it."

Carl made a choked coughing sound that made everyone turn to look at him. "Jubes? You refused? Why the hell would you do something stupid like that?"

Jubilee stammered for a moment, caught off guard. "Hold on here," she said finally. "Stop. Rewind. I refused because if I went with the X-Men instead of staying with Project Nightshade, you would be out of a job. Tom might still find work somewhere in the corporation with his knowledge of nanotechnology, but you'd be out of a job."

"She didn't know?" Carl asked Nate by way of Riley.

"I didn't tell Nate you were coming," Riley said. "After all, I hadn't been able to call him and tell him you insisted on defecting, too."

Jubilee shook her head. "Wait a minute here. I'm hungry and my nanites aren't working right, so I'm going to take a shower, a real one, while Tom and Carl set up my portable charger. You all make yourselves at home. There's coffee in the cabinets in the kitchen, real coffee, not synth, and you can all help yourselves to whatever I might have in my refrigerator. I'm going to shower, and dress, and when I get out I'll charge up. Then we'll sit down and talk." She shook her head and disappeared into the bathroom.

Carey poked Logan in the ribs. "Is she always this…forceful?"

Logan had to grin. "Since I met her," he said. "Come on. I could use some coffee."

By the time Jubilee had gotten out of the shower, Tom had set up her portable recharger. It consisted of a small electrical pack he plugged into the wall and inserted the plug into her port in the back. Jubilee picked up the two small barbell-type 'handles' feeding into the other side of the machine, and Tom opened the current up. "Twenty percent," he said.

She shook her head "Forty."

Tom shook his head. "The nanites aren't working because the dampening field at Estillo's palace shut them down too quickly, and they haven't been told to 'wake up' yet. If I start feeding that much electric into them they'll start zooming around in your blood so fast they might rupture a major blood vessel."

Carl looked at Tom. "Twenty, Tom. No more. We don't want her friends to think we torture her, after all."

"Well, isn't that what this is all about?" Tom muttered, but he adjusted the flow to twenty percent. Jubilee's hands tightened instinctively on the 'handles', her teeth clenching around her moan and her eyes squeezed shut. Nate watched in silence, soberly. Carey stared wide-eyed. Riley shuddered and looked away. Logan refused to watch at all. He retreated to the kitchen and began to fix a huge sandwich for Jubilee.

By the time he came back out Tom was unplugging the charger from Jubilee's back, and she was putting the handles down. Her sigh of relief was inaudible to anyone but him, and he handed her her sandwich carefully, trying not to let the sight of her hands shaking bother him. She could read the tension in his body language, though, but neither one brought it up.

"Now, while I eat, tell me what's going on. Starting with you," she pointed to Nate.

Nathan leaned back against the plush stuffed pillows of the couch. "Okay. After you left, Charles and Dad were really upset. Charles started using all his contacts in the government and in all parts of the world, to keep track of where you were and who you were with. Once an X-Man, always an X-Man, I guess. When Charles died, he left everything to Dad. Dad left it all to me when he died. And I've been keeping tabs on both you and Logan since. Not always by Carey and Riley. Actually, Jubilee, one of your former teammates for Project Nightshade was an…ally of ours…of sorts. Not a member of the team, but a mercenary who signed on to the Project. I approached him with money to bribe him to keep track of you, and he did…up until he got killed on that mission ten years ago."

Jubilee thought back to her teammates. "Hemlock," she said. "Hemlock. He was the only one who dared defy our orders to try and get close to me, and his death was the one I regret the most." She looked at Nate sorrowfully. "He didn't deserve to die the way he did. I'm sorry. If I'd been a better leader, that mission wouldn't have gone so wrong and maybe more of us would have made it back."

"Don't blame yourself," Nate said, his voice kind. "From what I heard in the messages he managed to get out to us, Project Nightshade's leaders weren't preparing you adequately to lead a team. And what you were put in charge of wasn't a team; just a bunch of different people working toward the same goal. There was no bond between the team members; you, of all people, should know from the days of running with Dad and the rest of the X-Men, that a close bond with your teammates can make the difference between life and death, between who goes home and who doesn't. From the few reports we received after the incident, I don't know how you survived, after what happened to you. And I slipped Gecko in there after that to try and keep better tabs on you, to try and give me a clearer picture of how the Project was organized."

"What about Logan?"

Nate grinned widely, teeth flashing. "He was a lot easier. The name 'Patch' Logan is almost legendary in Madripoor, did you know that? Logan, you also got quite a reputation for being a conscientious killer for hire. I sent Manny to you with a contract out for that former criminal, and you turned it down and threw him out. I was hoping you wouldn't do the same when I sent him to you with Estillo's contract."

Logan stared at Nate incredulously. "You set all that up?"

Nate nodded. "Yes. It was time to bring you and Nightshade 'back to the fold', as it were. She's becoming increasingly disenchanted with her boss and her job, and you were stagnating in lowtown Madripoor. Both of you need a change. When Gecko told me Rennick was sending you after that petty dictator, I sent one of our contacts out to Logan with the contract on Estillo. That whole thing was a setup to get the two of you together. Carey was there to make sure you two saw and talked to each other…and then Gecko was supposed to get you out right before the palace blew up. At least, that's the way it was supposed to happen. When Logan took off after you, Carey figured you both would kill Estillo and find your own way out of there. We'd already seen you demonstrate your 'flying' ability; she figured if she brought the shield down, you could get away. Then she got out of there. The tracer she slipped on Logan helped her find you the next morning, and we decided on the way there that we'd destroy the boat so it would look like you all were killed trying to escape. It would hopefully be convincing enough that the government wouldn't look too hard for Nightshade and you both could 'die' and resume your lives as someone else." He smiled. "What I don't know is what Gecko's doing here. Care to explain?"

The big man shrugged. "When you told me what you had planned, Nate, I went and told Shady's friends Carl and Tom that she was going to be 'disappearing' and to not grieve for her because she wasn't really dead. I didn't mean to give them the information, but they can be very persuasive when they want to be. Especially Carl there." Gecko rubbed a dusky discoloration on his chin ruefully. Carl blushed but didn't look at all repentant. "I told them that Shady was going to be 'defecting' from the government...well, I didn't know," he said to Jubilee, who looked indignant that he had guessed at what she would do. "I knew you weren't really happy killing for money, for the government. Tom asked where you were going to be going. I told him. And then he asked if we had any specialists in nanotechnology to handle your nanites. I told him no. So he and Carl offered to come along. They wanted to defect too, Nate. Who was I to tell them no?" Gecko shook his head. "So we came here to pack up some of the equipment she has that she needs, and some personal mementos that Carl and Tom thought she would want, and we were doing that when you guys showed up here and Shady sprayed us with those living fireworks."

Jubilee turned pink. "Oh damn. Look, guys, I didn't mean it. I'm sorry. I really thought someone had broken in and was trashing my place. Forgive me?"

Tom eyed her warily. "As long as you tell us our 'retirement' letters to Rennick wasn't wasted and we are getting the heck out of Dodge."

Jubilee stared at him, mouth hanging open. "What?"

Carl placed a hand on Tom's knee to quiet him. "What he's trying to say, Jubilee, is that we're tired of the whole Project bit. If it wasn't for you, we wouldn't have signed on in the first place.

"You know, when we first did a walk through of the Project and the facility we didn't even know your name yet. They showed us the whole facility, then we saw you lying on the regen bed getting your nanites charged up. The guys who were doing it were jackasses. They didn't even try to make it any more comfortable for you, even as bad as it was then. They just strapped you in and plugged you in and ran that current through you like you were just some big battery, instead of a human being. Tom saw a million different ways the process could be made easier for you, and he felt sorry for you, being shoved around like that. That was why we signed on.

"After we were put in charge of you and made your 'handlers', the first thing to go was that barbaric chair and straps. And he found a way to control the power feed, control the levels of electricity going in, and I found that lower levels didn't stress your body and brain out so much. We hate seeing what this charging stuff does to you. We hate seeing you walk off on missions you might never come back from. We hate seeing you bowing and scraping and kissing Rennick's ass. We wanted to walk out so many times. We've actually been talking about it again the last week or so. But we couldn't just walk away and leave you to the mercies of these jokers in charge of the Project. If we left Rennick will probably bring in someone worse than us to be your new handlers, and you'll go back to being just an object to them."

"Yeah," Tom said heatedly, sitting up. "When Riley—or Gecko—came to us and told us you were defecting, you had faked your own death and were leaving, we were overjoyed. Finally you were going to get out of that hellhole! But to make sure you would be able to enjoy that freedom, someone had to come along who could care for your nanites. So we wrote little letters saying since you were dead, we were leaving, and we'd had enough of CyberTech. We promised them we wouldn't talk about company secrets, and we left. Rennick should be getting those letters when he walks in this morning. Wish I could be there to see his face!" he chortled. "So. Look at it this way, Jubes. You either come with us to wherever it is Riley wants to take us, or you get tied up and forcibly lugged along. Personally, I'd rather you went on your own steam; be kind of hard to explain why we're lugging around a struggling female over Carl's shoulder…but if we have to do it that way, we will."

Jubilee studied Tom's face, serious under his thatch of red hair, and then Carl's expression, set and unyielding under his garishly-dyed platinum blond fuzz. "You mean it?" she asked finally. "You guys would give up all that money, the nice apartments, all the perks of working for a huge government contractor, just to make sure I was happy?"

Tom sighed. "You're our friend, Jubilee," he said as gently as he could. "If I weren't sure of my orientation, and I didn't have Carl…well. But you're a very close friend, almost a sister, to us. We want to see you happy. What use is money if you can't enjoy it? I mean, look at you. Cybertech pays you an almost embarrassing amount of money for being their first guinea pig; but you're not enjoying it."

"No," Jubilee said quietly. "I'm not." She reached out and folded them both into a hug, one in each arm. "Thanks guys," she whispered, too softly for anyone but Logan with his enhanced senses to hear it. She gave each of them a squeeze, which they returned…and then turned to Nate and Logan. "All right. I'm in. We're all in."

Nate smiled broadly. Logan muttered, "Took yer time about it," but didn't say anything else, and his smile belied the gruff tone.

Nathan sighed. "All right. Gecko and I are going back to the mansion via regular transport. Jubilee, Carl, Tom, Logan, and Carey, take the cloaked craft we used to get here and go to Logan's place in Madripoor to pick up his stuff. Then come directly to the mansion from there. Okay?"

"Gotcha, Boss," Tom, Carl, Carey, and Gecko chorused, teasingly. Logan caught Jubilee's eye over their heads and smiled at her. Finally, after so long, they were going home.

Rennick stared around the lab, incredulous. Gone was everything that made the lab seem used. All the medical instruments were packed away or placed neatly in their places; the regen bed was bare, as if the user didn't intend to return to it. The equipment was all powered down and silent. And in the middle of that regen bed were two squares of folded paper.

He picked up the first one, opened it incredulously. Read it. And scowled as he opened the second letter. Read this one. Angry, he threw the notes to the floor and stomped out, heading for the data room for Project Nightshade.

"Has security seen Professor Tom Donaldson or Doctor Carl Windham today?' he fumed to the man sitting at the desk just inside the room.

The man checked the computer's sign in sheet. "Uh, they left in the company of Security Officer Aaron Riley," the man said, "Very early this morning." He showed Rennick the sign in screen.

Rennick made a strangled sound in his throat and hurried farther into the room, approaching a tall man who stood at the far end of the room looking at a dim figure floating in a large tank of viscous green fluid. 'The project has been compromised," he said to the man, his superior. "Professor Donaldson and Dr. Windham left these in Nightshade's lab. And Nightshade herself has been declared missing."

The man remained calm. "Indeed," he said gravely. "I trust you saw this morning's reports? There were no biological remnants left with the wreckage of the boat. Therefore, since her disappearance and theirs coincide, we must assume they're all together." He turned to a nearby technician. "Activate the tracking device."

"T-tracking device?" Rennick frowned. "What tracking device?"

"When the surgical modifications were first implemented in Nightshade's body, the government authorized the installment of a small implanted tracking device. It's a microchip attached to the inner curve of her pelvic girdle, held in place by an adhesive and also prevented from slipping by the weight of her intestinal mass. We put it there and hid its existence from her, and from her handlers so that if she ever went missing or tried to defect, we would have a way to bring her back. The tracking device can be traced via GPS; and it will also incapacitate Nightshade so that we can recover her safely." He turned his attention to the huge floor-to-ceiling screen, on which was displayed a map of the world.

A small red dot appeared on the screen. Currently over ocean, it was definitely heading toward Europe and maybe parts east.

"Continue tracking that signal," The man told the technician. "Notify me when it comes to rest for more than an hour, and then activate its secondary programming." Turning away from the screen, he returned to his brown study of the tank and the dim figure inside it. "Nightshade appears to have impeccable timing," he said to Rennick conversationally. "Project Exterminator is about to go online. Pitting it against Nightshade will be the ultimate test of its capabilities." Rennick stared at the tank. Though its features were hard to make out amidst the green gel filling it, he didn't have to see it to know what Project Exterminator looked like.

But he didn't have enough compassion for Nightshade to truly feel sorry for the way she was going to die. After all, she was only another government project.