The control room was almost empty: two Shi'ar troops standing guard. As the heavy steel entrance door slid open, they both turned and saw Cyclops and Wolverine enter. Before they had time to be afraid, Logan was upon them.
"Two o'clock, Slim."
As Wolverine pummeled the Shi'ar he'd chosen, Cyclops let loose a crimson optic blast in the direction indicated, launching the other soldier off of his feet, and into the observation window that made up the entire far wall of the control room. Built to withstand a meteor strike, the window hardly made a sound as the unfortunate foot soldier ricocheted off of it, and fell limp.
"That all of them, Logan?"
"Yeah, Scott. That's it."
Scott was still working blind. It was a very high-tech base, but the chances of running across a ruby-quartz visor in the next few minutes before the galaxy was destroyed seemed slim. Wolverine was Scott's eyes from now on, and they didn't have time to hate it.
Why do I know that galaxy will be destroyed if we fail, Logan thought as he recalled the dream. That didn't fit, somehow. But the nightmare continued.
Wolverine looked around the control room, blocking out the sound of the alarm. Through the transparent observation wall, he could see a vast landing strip, built to accommodate ships much larger than those he had seen in the hanger. Bigger than the X-Men Blackbird he had arrived on.
Wait, he thought has he ran through the dream in his fractured mind, did we fly the blackbird here?
How did I get here?
Where the heck is here, anyway?
But you can't ask questions of your memories.
Outside, the sky was cloudy. Yellow clouds. Pulsing black. Not a planet Logan had ever been on, that he could recall.
The landing strip was as far wide across as a dozen football fields. But there were only a few scattered ships on it, and no troops that he could see. The base was in a disarray, still regrouping from a surprise attack, the left hand trying to coordinate with the right.
Cyclops, still clutching his broken ribs, caught his breath.
"Good. We still have a chance. Logan, there should be a large touchscreen showing missile trajectories somewhere on the control panel. See it?"
He spotted a screen that displayed a glowing circle, and a swarm of fast-moving dots approaching it.
"Scott, does it look like Missile Command?"
"What?!"
Kid was probably in diapers when Atari came out, Logan thought.
"Nothing. Yeah, I got it Cy. The screen is right there."
"Okay. Okay, touch and slide up from the bottom of the screen, and a keyboard will pop up.
Logan did, and Scott was right: an array of squares with alien symbols on them, too many to match an English QWERTY keyboard, slid up into view. A grid of nonsense.
Logan couldn't help but look again at the screen a few feet further down the console, the one with the dots moving toward the giant globe. The missiles were closing in.
No way is there time to get a shield up. We are all dead.
Cyclops seemed so determined. But he was the brave leader in the face of certain doom. That was his job, to never give up. And besides: he couldn't see the screen.
"Okay I did it, but it's all Greek to me, Cy."
Cyclops positioned himself in front of the console, pushing Wolverine aside.
"Nevermind, just put my thumbs on the outer, bottom row."
Wolverine maneuvered Cyclops's thumbs as requested. Immediately upon touching the screen, Cyclops started typing away on the alien keys, his eyes still shut tight.
"Don't need to read it, I practiced this a dozen times before we left. Know it by heart."
Boy-scout and his homework, Logan thought. There's a reason he calls the shots.
The screen flashed, eliciting a BEEP.
The speakers on the ceiling, which until now had been reciting alarm instructions in an alien voice, switched to another message, this time in English.
"MISSILE SHIELD ACTIVATED. INITIATING SHIELD PROCEDURE."
Machines in adjacent rooms hummed to life, rattling and whirring. The lights in the control room flickered. Through the observation window, Wolverine saw a curtain of blue energy rise from the pylons ringing the landing pad. Bolts of blue light shot into the sky, pooling just behind the clouds, creating a shimmering barrier. A force-field.
Wolverine looked again to the screen with the missile tracker. A shallow ring appeared around the globe representing the planet. As the dots met the ring, they halted; at the same time, he felt the thunder of the explosions out the window, in sync with the display. As the explosions reverberated behind the red clouds, the shockwaves caused the lights in the base to flicker. The screen with the missile readout fuzzed over.
"Way to save the day, boy-scout."
"I did the best I could, Logan."
Then, through the windowed observation wall, Logan saw it: a single warhead, punching through the cloud cover, screaming down like a meteor. Heading right for the base.
They were too late.
"…oh, no…."
Cyclops grabbed Wolverine on the back of his neck.
"What? What is it?"
"It's…one. One got through. The shield must have went up behind it!"
"You gotta stop that missile, Logan!"
"How!?"
An alert chirped over the speakers again, and the lights over the doors on each side of the control room flashed. A swarm of footsteps could be heard drawing closer, from both directions. Reinforcements, and lots of them.
"I DON'T KNOW, JUST DO IT! NOW!"
As the security doors on both wings of the control room flew open, and scores of heavily-armed Shi'ar troops stormed into the control room, Wolverine leapt up, planting his foot on top of the row of instrument consoles. He dove at the blast-proof observation window, his claws emerging to pierce the transparent barrier.
The "unbreakable" glass shattered, and Logan passed through a shower of diamond-sharp shards of Shi'iar security barrier, shredding his X-Men deep-space uniform, and drawing blood all about him.
But he hit the ground running. Full-tilt.
Logan sprinted across the vast landing pad, looking up at the approaching missile and extrapolating its eventual impact point: about a mile ahead. With perhaps three minutes to go.
I can't run that fast, he thought. I'm not Magneto's brat kid. I got these short, stubby legs. I can't make it.
But he didn't slow down. He ran even harder, feeling the adamantium inside himself, stuck to his bones, slamming against his joints and their soft tissue. A reminder he wasn't born with the metal in him. It was an alien substance, always weighing him down.
Wolverine heard Scott scream, from behind him. He didn't slow down, only turned his head back to the shattered window leading to the control room, just in time to see Cyclops being overwhelmed by a mass of Shi'ar troops. He disappeared, screaming and firing madly from his eyes, under a frenzy of swinging energy blades.
It's too late for him, Logan thought. If this missile hits, we're all dead anyway. Like Ororo. Too late.
Wolverine, playing this memory over in his head, couldn't figure it out: why did he remember this? He knew this never really happened.
He tried to brush it off, and to just stop thinking of this scene. Let it go.
But that was the problem.
His memory had been messed with enough in his life. Department K had stripped out what didn't help their Weapon X project, and dropped in fake memories wherever they thought it would result in a more efficient killer. He'd gotten used to that; not knowing what was real and what wasn't.
But the fake memories never operated quite like this one. That was part of what made those government implants so painful, emotionally: they felt so real, and he could remember every single thing about how he felt in those "fake" moments.
When Silver Fox kissed him in that cabin in Canada, and he told her he loved her and he waited to hear those same words back from her, in that voice he could never forget. It felt real every time he remembered it, lying awake at night and staring at the ceiling: his heart froze in his throat, and she smiled and kissed him back and told him she loved him, and she held him close, and as they undressed, out of the window of the cabin, just over her shoulder, he saw a perfect snowflake fall, swaying in the Canadian winter air, and he thought this is my moment, in the blizzard of pain I finally found my single perfect snowflake. He fell back on the bed with Silver Fox, and they made love under the harsh, wool blanket he had hung onto from World War I. The one that still held a hint of the mustard gas that had killed his friends. The one that kept him alive when he should have frozen to death in a trench, alone and forgotten.
That moment. That was fake. And that hurt. It never happened, but he wanted it to be real. He felt like he couldn't go on living without that memory.
This was something different. He knew it was fake; it didn't make any sense otherwise. And he didn't want it to be real. But he couldn't get rid of it. Couldn't figure out where it came from.
But there was no way it was real. His friends aren't dead. And he had never been to this planet. He knew that.
Still.
Logan sprinted along the massive landing pad, as energy blasts from the Shi'ar soldiers behind him, the ones that surely had murdered Cyclops by now, ricocheted and burst into flames around him.
This is bigger than the X-Men. If that missile lands, the whole galaxy is toast, he heard himself think.
Wait, how do I know that?
And if this is the Shi'ar base, then why are they trying to stop us from raising their own defense shields? Who is attacking them? Where are the missiles coming from? Why? NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE!
Logan hardly had time to ask himself these questions. None to answer them.
He looked up and suddenly saw the massive interstellar missile diving down at the base, almost aiming right at him. Five seconds left, he knew.
The missile was so close he could recognize Skrull markings on the side of it, feel the air rushing away around him from its imminent force, smell the scorching fuel blasting from its engines. He could hear the sound of distilled horror accompanying its descent. The death-knell of the X-Men. Of countless civilizations erased in a moment.
Four seconds.
He didn't even know what he was going to do to stop a missile anyway. I'm not Magneto, he thought. I'm not strong enough.
He wondered what happened to the other X-Men. Scott would never have abandoned Jean. Unless…
Two seconds.
I'm sorry. I failed.
One second.
He popped his claws and slid under the tip of the missile, hoping for one last, desperate swing at it before it erased countless lives in a wave of incalculable heat and force. Maybe he could slice a key wire at the last moment. Maybe adamantium was the antidote for whatever cataclysm was about to take place.
Zero
...
Logan waited. Nothing happened.
The tip of the missile had stopped, one inch from of Logan's extended claws.
The missile hung in the air like an ornament, five feet from the ground. 100 feet long and dozens of tons of metal and fuel and Skrull explosives. Just frozen in space.
What is this? Did I die?
Logan couldn't move. He was stuck in the pose of what should have been his dying moment, bleeding head to toe with shards of glass stuck in every inch of his skin, howling at the sky, mid-swing as his claws were aimed at a hulking weapon of mass destruction, about to vaporize him.
But time hadn't stopped. Only physical matter had frozen.
Wolverine could see the missile in front of him, and he could think about it. He head himself wonder why he wasn't dead. He could hear the alarm still sounding in the base behind him. He could feel the heat pulsing from the missile's jet engines. He could smell the metallic exhaust.
But nothing moved. It was as if the whole planet was in stasis.
And then he saw it. Saw him.
A figure, descending from the sky, steady, his arms outstretched. Passing through the clouds, but not parting them like the missile had. Just passing right through.
As he got closer, Logan saw that he must be ten feet tall. The moonlight glinted off of his body; he's made of metal, or wearing some kind of armor.
Growing closer, Logan felt an uncontrollable urge to look away, to close his eyes. Anything to avoid seeing the figure as it ascended from the clouds. It was the same aura of doom that had surrounded the missile before it froze, but more pure. A distilled sense of utter doom, of wrongness, surrounded the man.
But Logan couldn't look away, and couldn't close his eyes. He couldn't move at all, couldn't even feel his muscles flex in the attempt to fight whatever force held him in place. He had no choice but to see the man that descended toward him.
As the form came into view, Logan saw that he was entirely metal. No flesh. Plates of heavy steel interlocked along his torso. Circuit jutted out in a few places. A dull blue light hummed in the gaps between the plates. With heavy steel rivets and a circle in the face of the helmet, it was not unlike an old, steel diving suit, built for a planet with oceans unimaginably deep, far deeper than any light could ever reach.
The diver was just a few stories in the air above Logan, now. Looking down at him.
Logan wished he could stop the memory there. And in the memory, for a brief and shameful moment, he even wished that the bomb would go off and obliterate everything. Anything to prevent the figure from getting closer. Anything.
But the diver touched down. The heavy steel boots touched on the cement landing strip, and should have elicited a thundering impact, should have cracked the landing pad, but he didn't even make a sound. It was as if the man in the metal diving suit existed outside this dream, or on top of it.
He strode right over to Logan. Nearly twice Logan's height, and three times thicker. Calm, but exuding pure power.
As he peered directly into Wolverine's frozen eyes, inches from his face, Logan realized he might not even be wearing a helmet; it was impossible to tell. His face was like a lantern, its light only bright because it erased the light from all around it. There were no features, and no sound of breath, and no scent. Just a vortex of nothingness where a face should be.
Logan couldn't speak, his jaw and vocal cords not responding. But he thought with clarity and terror.
Who are you?
YOU KNOW MY NAME.
The voice answered back from within Logan's own mind, shaking the walls of his being. It was impossibly deep, and more force than sound. Like the force of gravity itself speaking to him.
You set this all up.
YES. EVERYTHING. WHAT HAPPENED HERE WAS MY DESIGN.
Why!?
I GAVE YOU A CHANCE. AND I WATCHED YOU FAIL.
But why go through the effort to-
THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE FOR. NOT TO UNDERSTAND IT. TO BE IT.
Logan couldn't respond. There were no words. He knew he was about to die, and that there would be no explanation.
HOW DOES IT FEEL?
Logan felt the berserker rage build in him. Being unable to act on it, to release the desire to kill, exacerbated the feeling. He could barely think, and thinking was all he could do.
Just go ahead kill me, coward.
The lantern head tilted to one side, taking in what he had heard.
THIS IS ALREADY YOUR DYING MOMENT, LOGAN. THERE WILL BE NOTHING TO KILL.
Logan thought he recognized a hesitation in the diver's manner; it seemed the ominous figure had expectations of this exchange, and they were not being met.
Then I want a name to tell the devil when I'm on my way back out of hell.
This time, the lantern didn't tilt. This had been expected. He almost seemed disappointed.
IF YOU HAVE ANY MEMORY, LOGAN, YOU WILL HAVE MY NAME.
With that, the lantern-headed shadow-form lifted from the surface of the planet, fading backward into into the vulgar clouds.
And then, the movement returned.
For a brief moment, Logan felt himself move. The momentum that had paused for so long picked back up, and his claws swung toward the descending missile for a faction of a second.
The tip of the missile crashed into the concrete under Logan's feet. As a split burst open in the fabric of being, and a black hole spread that erased billions of civilizations, Logan recognized the visitor. With his dying breath, Logan knew.
He knew the murderer's name.
THE DEEP.