Silver Fox from the relative anonymity of a dark sedan watched the life in suburbia; Forest Hills, Queens, New York unfold.
The black BMW 5 series didn't carry the usual descriptive badges. Its rims weren't the kind that wore the bone jarring but fashionable low profile tires. A second glance by some one who knew about these things would have perhaps noticed the lower stance, the twin tail pipes, one for each bank of the highly tuned V8 lurking under the hood. Silver Fox sat behind the tinted glass. Knuckles white her hands gripped the wheel tightly, letting go only to ignite the engine into life.
Something was very wrong, her developed sixth sense tried to focus, to drill down to feel what that something was.
She watched as the lithe NYPD detective John Jones stepped down from the front porch of the house that belonged to Ben and Martha Parker. It was to here, that Silver Fox had brought the orphaned baby boy Peter, to his great aunt and uncle, after she had failed to save the childs parents, their nephew and his wife, from an assassins bullet.
The Detective stood briefly still, like a man who'd forgotten something; say left behind car keys, or a hat or coat, but it wasn't so.
There was something very odd about this plain clothes cop, something which lay beyond the ken of normal human beings. He looked like a tall well built man, he moved like an athlete, but Silver Fox didn't just perceive Jones with five senses, but six. A siren scream, a piercing wail of grief and torment swept from Detective Jones like an angry whirlwind. It slammed into her mind with all the force of a flashing crashing thunder storm. All this before he was even aware of her presence. This wasn't a pre-emptive attack by a hostile psychic, it was just who John Jones really was.
He turned towards her, staring at the parked car. His eyes seemed to deepen, darken to burning coals, as he stared through the tinted glass directly into her mind.
There was contact. No longer than a heartbeat. A meeting of minds.
In that moment she and the man hunter reached an understanding.
Jon Jones was a cop, he worked his beat, took home a cop's salary, and didn't take up the many opportunities to supplement that, in every way he was true blue. But then again he wasn't all that either.
Silver Fox had encountered an alien mind before, the star child, now safely enrolled, or so she believed, in the Xavier School for the gifted. However Jones's mind was of a different even more alien kind.
His thoughts raced like the Kent's adopted son, but the similarity ended here. Jones's human appearance was a complete deception. 'John' was alien in both mind and body, different in radical ways from both her and the star child.
John Jones shared memories with her. She glimpsed his purpose, and he hers.
Silver Fox gasped, her mouth dry as the red sands that she could see spreading away as far as the eye could see. Across jagged mountains and deep gorges, peaks and troughs greater than any on Earth.
Mars.
Long dead, the red planet Earth's near by sibling had once sustained life, time and circumstance had conspired to erode and erase the evidence of a long past civilisation from the surface of this world. A twist of fate had conspired to transport Jon Jones across time and space, casting him down to Earth eons later.
A stranger in a strange lands.
He was looking for Logan.
The alien man hunter reached for the door handle of her car. She obliged by releasing the lock, it was a less a gesture of trust but an acceptance of the reality of this situation. Silver Fox knew German engineering stood no chance against this otherworldly shape shifter.
Jones lowered himself into the passenger seat. In truth this alien life form had no definitive physical appearance. Jones had shared with her memories of a tall gangly alien humanoids, green creatures happy on the red sands of Mars, but this was still only a half truth, for them identity wasn't a solid form with topographic features, because that changed as the environment dictated, rather identity was a psychic one, the pattern of their thoughts, not their outward form.
Jones didn't recognise a friend by their noses or their hair cut and colouring, Jon instead looked for the shape and pattern of the minds. Earth was an alien world to Jones, it's natives were both primitive and savage, but it wasn't their faces he found strange, but rather their thoughts, for a long time humans looked all alike to him.
"You are different." He told her, his voice was deep, with that musical quality that a baritone brings to gospel. "You see things are they are – not what the appear to be."
His smile was sincere, it was measured – matched by his mind. Silver Fox in turn frowned deeply, concentrating, for her this was a different experience, her thoughts had to sprint to match Detective Jones in contrast he was relaxed.
"The Parkers alerted you." He stated. It wasn't a question.
She nodded. They had hit the panic button she had installed, a pager that signalled her in the event that anyone should ask any questions connected to the events and people that linked them all together.
"You are looking for James." She told him. Five words spoken, five thousand more poured from her mind in as many pictures, memories. Their first kiss, Sabre tooth, the arrival of the star child on the slopes of Mount Logan, the man called Jimmy Olsen.
In turn the alien from Mars said "The man you know is not the same man as the one I hunt."
Silver Fox recoiled from the images of blood and death he shared. She shook her head in denial.
But she knew that by man Jon Jones had really meant mind. Logan's mind had been altered, broken, erased, remade into something dark, something brutal. Outwardly he looked the same – inwardly changed.
"I can reach him." She told Detective Jones. More in faith than reason. "There must be something of Logan left."
Jones reached out and touched her face. "Perhaps." He said after a moment, he let his hand fall away. "You carry his true self within you still."
Silver Fox processed his words, along with the psychic meta-information which accompanied them.
"Then what are waiting for." Silver Fox replied, her decision made. She gunned the throttle, guiding the car out and onto the street with screech of complaint from the rubber wrapped wheels.
-X-
Crane 'Bolivar' Trask wiped the perspiration from his brow, staining his white handkerchief. On the central monitor of the war room the path of the six B52's flying in formation. Armed with conventional iron bombs this flight could level a rectangle of ground two miles long by just over half a mile wide, but carpet bombing a major American University wasn't going happen, even if two figures from myth were presently fighting each other at that location.
Another option was needed when dealing with enormously powerful individuals on home soil.
Trask smiled, years of planning and research had gone into this moment. There had been casualties along the way. He had taken PPM Bio-Mechanicals. A public merger with Trask Robotics, but one that Wall Street Journal called a thinly veiled hostile takeover. Forcing out Pym and Palmer driving them back into the cloistered walls of Academia had been a price worth paying. But the loss of the reclusive Wil Magnus in an accident at PPM's labs shortly before the merger was completed had robbed Trask of the greater prize. Magnus's individual genius.
He had forged other alliances. With the retirement from industry of Pym and Palmer, the loss of Magnus, Trask had found new associates.
Thomas Oscar Morrow shared Trask's fondness for facial hair, he was slick and professional, a Silicon Valley pioneer. Anthony Ivo was by contrast dishevelled, almost the storybook hair-brained professor made real, but their was method in Ivo's madness, a steely purpose in his eyes that demanded respect, however wrinkled his clothes might appear.
"Ultron is online." Morrow informed them. His fingers danced over the keyboard. Monitors displayed the data. Deep below them in an air conditioned room a super-computer was drawing power from the installations military nuclear reactor.
"Up link is established." Ivo confirmed. "ARGUS is operational."
"Delay between the Master Mould Psyche and the ground units should be negligible." Ivo told General Lane Ross.
The officer nodded and took a sip of his coffee.
"Provided your boys keep those birds flying," Task added, "we won't experience the usual satellite delay."
"I don't worry about the proven technology." Lane Ross replied.
Trask thought he detected contempt in the General's voice. The newly promoted professional airman stood at arms length both literally and metaphorically from them. The President had appointed Lane Ross to oversee the ARGUS program and to be the gate keeper to the resources of the US Military.
"Ultron is more than a computer General Lane, it is an artilect, and artificial intellect running the Master Mold program remotely through each discrete drone. Each robot reacts both intelligently and collectively in the combat environment."
"Save the sales talk." Lane Ross responded. "We'll know how effective this program is before the day is done."
-X-
Elaine Grey had no idea her daughter Jean, and her fellow X-men were only a few hundred yards away and closing. She cowered under her husbands desk, pressed into his chest, wrapped in his arms, around them the building shook, plaster dust fell from the cracked ceiling, broken glass that littered the commercial grade nylon carpet beloved of institutions. Exterior explosions flashed like lightning. Each reflective shard glistened against the neutral caramel. Blasts like thunder followed, punctuated by screams of terror, and inhuman roars. Noise that echoed around the impromptu battlefield, that had been minutes before been just another campus parking lot.
Pressed between John and Elaine was his precious discovery, excavated from high ground above the Hudson, the artefact had been interred with ceremony. Surrounded by marker stones, monoliths carved with the characteristic runes of the Northmen. Time had seen some upended, fallen, some buried completely. Eric the Red had hidden this treasure, wrapped in oil cloth, in pitched oak box, in a hollowed stone casket.
The Jord-box shone like gold, even now when pressed close to her chest, the gems stones that were mounted on the intricately decorated raise rune relief surface burned as if on fire. Even for a man of science her husband had whispered in awe, as the dirt had been lifted from its brilliant surface. It seemed otherworldly. The script was formed unlike any Rune script so far discovered, deciphering the oddly styled glyphs was problematic, yet the Norse title of the archetypal Earth-mother goddess was clear enough, and so the Jord-box was named.
Elaine Grey carried the mutant gene which had manifested itself so forcefully in Jean. Elaine was a latent telepath, a natural empath, she had gone through life trusting her instincts, leaning on her woman's intuition with the confidence that comes getting it right more often than not. Right now she was holding onto her husband, her thoughts were of love and family. The archaeological treasure of unparalleled value was an uncomfortable reality, Elaine knew this strange box had brought this calamity upon them. It was this anguish, her heightened emotional state, her thoughts of a family bereft of both parents, should death overtake her and John, and as the sounds of gunfire, explosions and screams continued to intensify, that fatal prospect looked all the more certain, coupled with her latent telepathic power that set in motion a series of events that would shape the world.
-X-
"You know what's important, is that we do something, we try." Scott Summers declared. He then released from his visored mask a blast red and brilliant force, that burst from his eyes. His mutant power flashed across ground smashing into a cyborg soldier, sending the reanimated corpse careering across the pavement.
"We're just kids." Bobby yelled, his voice was carried on a fierce blast of cold, air freezing around a matrix of ice that wrapped around one of the robot man hybrids.
Jean reflected, it was a peculiar war cry, here maybe not so much. The school she knew so well, had left behind had once been representative of her future, okay not this college, she imagined something different for her, farther afield, perhaps California, maybe even a foreign land. Now this institution of higher learning for fledgling adults was the playground of inhumans and the ambulatory dead, it was something Xavier confirmed, something she had felt certain of in her own mind, these cyborgs weren't truly alive.
Angel-Hawk had taken to sky, giving him a birds eye view of their mission, a path was mapped out by Xavier using C.W's perspective, taking them to her father's place of work. For her the mission had started out being about Kent. Raven had questioned the legitimacy of this incursion, the risks involved, and now Jean found she was closer still to the problem. For her the mission wasn't just about bringing Kent home, fixing the mess she'd inadvertently made, it had become even more personal, involving her parents in a way she hadn't expected.
Seeing the battle raging outside the history department had concentrated Jean's mind. The mission had been about Kent, now her thoughts were with her parents, or at least she was trying to make that happen, but as much as she tried to reach out to them, it wasn't. In this moment Jean Grey felt a lousy telepath. They had been scheduled to attend a college fund raiser, they were most probably on campus.
They might even be in the middle of all of this, she thought.
Raven took point, melting into the mayhem as if disappearing, striking out of sight, camouflaged to the point of invisibility she struck the opposition's man-machines with impunity, shifting her body shape into deadly forms, striking surgically with blade like claws, sometimes bluntly with a horny club, but always effective.
The division of labour followed their practised routines following Xavier's guidance. C.W. struck the cyborgs from above, Angel-Hawk dashing through their inverted rain of bullets, with mercurial speed and lightning changes of direction, his enhanced musculature, the strength his wings possessed, his gravity defying abilities, came together as he connected with their enemy. Combatants fell as his limbs struck glancing, passing blows. Angel-Hawk's dive turned into an upwards curve skywards. Cyclops covered Angel-Hawk's back as C.W climbed, his optic blasts scattering and confusing the mechanically augmented dead. Bobby cut his own swath through them, ice rendering them immobile, fouling both meat and metal.
Creating confusion, and opportunity. Hank loped through, his movements bombastic, but fluid, simian, and powerful, earning his codename Beast. Jean followed close, and brought her own telekenetic talent to bear on the enemy, using a Cyborg warrior as a weapon, bludgeoning his comrades with the man-machine held in her minds grasp like a flail.
Together they progressed to where the Warrior Woman was engaged with the bestial berserker.
This man's demeanour was polar opposite of Hank, whose animal like motion was measured and graceful. Whereas this Wolverine snarled and snapped with rabid rage and violence. The inhuman creature's claws burned with red hot intensity.
Jean recognised another mutant at instinctual level, recognising the psychic signature, and at the same time being repelled by something else both alien and familiar.
It was this sense of deja-vu that threatened to become terrifying.
Jean concentrated on the present, pushing these thoughts aside. She had no hesitation in picking sides, in this fight. However she then surprised heself.
The telepathic shunt she aimed at the berserker, separated him from the Warrior Woman. Telekentic energy shoved the Wolverine into the pavement, literally; cracking the concrete, and pushing the thrashing, raging predator into the black dirt below.
Jean felt exhilarated, as she pushed the Wolverine with her mind, crushing the breath from his lungs, to the point of unconsciousness.
Jean then stopped short of killing him. It took her all her strength to stop, she stood, still stunned, frozen in the moment by the enormity of her own actions. Staring at the Wolverine as he lay stunned in the deep makeshift grave his own form had dug, as the orange light his hot extended claws began to dim.
"Thank you sister for you aid." The Warrior Woman said with a smile of admiration, she staggered nonetheless, exhausted from the ceaseless battle with the Wolverine, bloodied but not defeated. "By Hera, you have great power."
"Thank you." Jean mumbled, thinking she was more surprised by her great power than the Warrior Woman who towered over her.
"Go," Hank shout to Jean, "find them" he meant her mom and dad. Hank rolled a shattered SUV into the hole, it fell front end in on top of the stunned berserker. Scott aimed a directed optic blast at another wrecked automobile, his red psychic energy hitting the ground and the base of car flipping it over like a coin, toppling it on top of the first with a resounding crash.
Kent stepped across the void towards them, emerging from the damaged grown floor of History building, alighting on the ground in an effortless fashion, this was not so remarkable, she had seen him leap far further, far higher, his companion, was another matter. Tall dark and beautiful.
"Jean?" Kent asked. "Are you okay?"
"Marvel Girl." Jean corrected him. "What do you think you doing here?" She demanded. Listening to her own angry voice as if an observer.
"Errr." Kent rubbed the back of his head, ruffling his hair. "This is Diana." Kent told her , not an answer, but the name at least identified the tall woman with him. "She's her mother's daughter." Kent added gesturing to the Warrior Woman. Who for her part did not seem to recognise Kent as an ally, even if he stood with her daughter.
Instead she held her sword at arms length between them. She addressed Jean. "You know this boy-thing?"
"I do." Jean replied. "We're classmates. Friends."
"Very well." The Warrior Woman noted, sheathing her blade. "And Diana, what do you make of him?"
"He isn't here for the artefact." her daughter replied.
Jean detected a host of conflicting emotions from the girl called Diana, realising at the same time, that they were of an age. She frowned deeply, glad her X-men mask hid her features, she felt conflicted too, Kent had that kind of effect on people.
He just stood there as if it were any other place, any other time, nonchalant.
Raven Darkholme appeared at her side, emerging from a camouflaged state as vivid blue Mystique, she was dressed for war in as much as her mutation allowed her to modify her form, she wore scale armour like some plated lizard, and sword like talons extended from her blue fingers. Deep yellow eyes stared into Jean's own. "Snap together Marvel Girl" She said taking her arm. "Take us to your parents."
"I..,"
"Jean." Xavier's voice sounded inside her mind, his tone reassuring and familiar. "Everything is fine, can you find your mother? I am certain your parents are close by."
"Professor?" Jean gasped as Raven urged her forward. "What about Kent."
Jean felt like saying this isn't the plan. Yet at the same time she felt it should be, and again she felt something very strange was going on.
"I'm coming with you." Kent answered.
"There's a powerful energy source too, Jean, it's creating a lot of psychic noise, I can't cut through it, not from here; but you're much closer, closer to your parents, use that closeness, reach out to them, find them."
Jean realised the mission parameters had changed.
She did what Xavier asked. Reaching out with her mind-memory Jean Grey tried to peer through the psychic noise, the interference the Professor had described.
In her minds eye she became like a mist weaving between a web of crackling branches of light and energy, reaching through the maze. The energy construct was growing, an invisible lattice, spreading outwards. Jean plunged deep into the centre of the complex. She knew now not only were parents were in the building, they were the nexus of the expanding energy field.
A long moment later she gasped to Mystique. "My parents are here! Oh God help them, they are inside, in my dad's office. They've been in the middle of – all this."
Jean pointed upwards to the second floor.
"No plan survives contact with the enemy." Raven told her as they ran to the broken gaping wall of the History Department building. "This is why we train for the unexpected. Everything can change in a heartbeat."
Jean knew this was true, but it was cold comfort; her parents were in middle of something – an invisible power that even the Professor's mind couldn't penetrate. Yet hers could. Yes she was nearer, closer to the problem, but, Jean asked herself, should that matter?
Then the consequences of so much force expended in one place became plain. Still fighting Thor and Hercules tussle shook the ground again, broken and blistered the History Department, the building that housed her Father's office, cracked as its foundations moved. The weakened structure began to collapse.
"No!" The young man in the leather jacket growled. Kent now stood under the sagging structure his hands grasping a fallen beam, pushing against it, and contrary to common sense and the laws of physics the History department's imminent collapse was arrested.
Jean could see her parents cowering under her father's desk, as around them the fabric of the building crumbled. Blinded by dust and noise they could neither see or hear her voice; but Jean used her mind.
She slammed into the heart of the force that enveloped them, the growing energy lattice. The Jord-box her mother held throbbed with power, so much unbridled potential.
"Marvel Girl!" Mystique cried out.
Jean Grey fell to her knees, the feedback from her mother was overwhelming, the emotionally charged energies; love, concern, righteous indignation, and fear was a psychic crescendo.
Jean could see the Jord-Box alive with energies that flowed invisible to normal human perception. She could see with second sight that the box was cracked open, a tiny fraction, a clink of a whisper of a crack, but in doing so it had unleashed an irresistible force. One which took the shape and form of her mother's complex emotions. Some how the Jord-box had forged a psychic connection with Elaine Grey, and in a feedback loop this device, for Jean saw the golden box for what it was; was amplifying her mother's latent paranormal abilities.
"I have them." Diana stated with confidence fast become motion as she leapt from the ground past Kent whose incredible strength both held up and held together the collapsing building, and through a first story window, crashing through glass and wood with deliberate abandon, her grace like a dancer. Jean pushed herself up from the pavement, more an act of will than meat and bone, energy coursed through her, and her feet no longer touched the ground. In that moment Jean felt connected to her mother, to the device, to the Earth itself, and beyond. The enormity of everything, past, present and future, altogether at once was indescribable.
Jean pushed back once again, she felt like she had to keep pushing, this was her family. She concentrated on this moment, this location. On the tall dark haired girl, sharing Diana's thoughts.
Diana had an almost instinctual awareness of where Jean's parents were in the crumbling building above them. The predators perception inexplicably wed to the prey's unrelenting vigilance. Some unique genetic legacy was in play, a foundation that had been built upon.
Jean spoke the word. "Amazon."
Jean wondered at what kind of training could hone a human beings senses to such a developed extent, and then there was more than education, an unbridled potential, as yet unexpressed. Odd that Diana's beating heart, her pulsing blood should echo the otherworldly power that whelmed from the ancient box her mother held so tightly. Drywalls tumbled as the Amazon wrecking ball crashed into the office, and flipped the desk aside. It crashed through the window, making a opening.
"Your daughter sent me." She said as she reached out to Elaine Grey.
"Jean is here?" John Grey asked.
"Yes, outside." Diana lifted Elaine to her feet. Jean noted that her mother's arms were still around the Jord-Box, pressed into her chest Elaine's grasp did not loosen. "Quickly the building is collapsing." Diana continued.
At the nearest window Angel-Hawk alighted onto the sill.
"Here to me." He called out.
"Go." Diana said half pushing half propelling John Grey. Her father stumbled and fell towards the clutching hands of the winged mutant. Diana took up Elaine Grey, holding the adult woman as mother might a child. Angel-Hawk snatched the History Professor out of the room as a trapeze artist might, pulling him through the aperture, in a shallow arc, before dropping him in a controlled fashion to the ground.
Following the next instant after, Diana leapt clear past them. Her somersault no less graceful than before, even with Elaine Grey clinging to the young Amazon. She landed hard, falling into a deep crouch. Jean saw that her mother was however safe and sound in the young woman's arms.
Jean was also aware her feet were now planted back on the pavement. Aware the energy connected to the Jord-Box was waning, dissipating, leaving her feeling spent, drained of energy.
Behind them Kent shrugged off the weight of the building. Around him the structure collapsed almost immediately as if the young man had been holding the stricture together by force of will.
Xavier's telepathic voice returned, shouting through the waning psychic static. "Get out of there now!" He ordered. Jean realised that her Mentor had been absent, shut out by the power she had experienced.
Jean looked up, she could see the shapes of six planes flying in formation. Flashes of light followed them, falling away from the bellies of the aircraft.
Xavier's telepathic command was repeated, louder more emphatic. "Get out!"
Jean turned to run. Raven was indicating to the X-men to come together, to run out back to the helicopter.
"Professor Grey, Mrs Grey. Come with us – quickly." She stated.
Kent joined her beside Darkholme, as did the Amazons; Diana, and Diana's mother. Between them was Jean's mom. Elaine Grey still held the Jord-Box.
The first of the six objects dropped by the planes hit the ground. It's glide path slowed to near stop by a late opening parachute. This fabric brake fluttered away from the mainly cylindrical shape as it's payload touched down. The metal cylinder was barrel like, shaped like a fat bullet with stubby wings, with equal four fat fins, two on either side. As the object came to rest vertically these fins acted like feet.
Moments later that action was magnified. Six in total landed around the bard campus. Each immediately began the transformation from the aerodynamic winged cylinder into something else. The stubby nacelle like wings extended becoming legs, the fins opened to reveal tracked feet. From the top of the cylinder something resembling a head, extended and rotated, packed with mechanical sensory equipment, like a many eyed giant.
Splashed across the metallic body of the machines was makers mark "Trask Industries" followed by the the legend "SENTINEL"
Then the shooting started.
-'0'-