New X-Men

NOTE: This takes place one week prior to the events of Astonishing X-Men

The Xavier Institute for Higher Learning

[[Plague Dogs, you have your orders. Locate and transport each of the targets on your lists. Alert me of any problems you may encounter and I will run interference. Failure will not be tolerated.]]

She hovered in the air, floating through the smashed edifice of the school’s common room with a grouping of scared and confused children cowering below her. Her name was Karima Shapandar, and she was something far more advanced than human or mutant. Her cybernetic, mutant-hunting CPU ran streams of data across her retinas, the faces and identities of each child uploading to her attack cortex.

[Target Ident: Cessily Kincaid a.k.a. Mercury. Abilities: body composed of morphable metallic alloy capable of blunt shape-shifting. Threat level: 5]

“Listen to me, children,” she addressed the students of the X-Men, her voice amplified via the speaker system in her throat. “Your guardians have been disabled by a meta-virus which has rendered them incapable of coming to your aid.”

[Target Ident: Santo Vaccaro a.k.a. Rockslide. Abilities: body composed of rock, capable of reforming when destroyed. Threat level: 6]

“The Plague Dogs have been released into your environment with a list of names,” Karima continued, “and the mutants on that list will be taken, tagged, and cataloged for use by my owner.”

[Target Ident: Sooraya Qadir a.k.a. Dust. Abilities: capable of transforming into cloud of sentient silicate particles. Threat level: 9]

“I advise you all to remain seated and await appropriation,” the cybernetic Indian girl stated, “as three of your number are on the list. Thank you for your cooperation.”

“You gotta be shittin’ us, right?” Rockslide asked, the first of the teenagers to actually vocalize what each of them were thinking. “I mean, you know we’re the freakin’ X-Men,right?”

Shapandar furrowed her brow and narrowed her cybernetic eyes. She knew everything about every one of them, from the three on her owner’s list to the freshmen class proliferated amongst them, with names such as “Pixie,” “Loa,” “Anole,” “Wolf Cub,” and the typical mutant branding techniques. She knew it all, because she was built to be their ultimate destroyer.

Karima Shapandar was the Omega Sentinel, and she refused to tolerate mutant back-sass.

She raised her gauntlet, energy building to a lethal charge to incinerate the insubordinate genejokes, but before she could fire the wall behind the children exploded inward, throwing the young mutants to the floor. “Down, y’all!” a voice thick with Southern drawl ordered.

Sam Guthrie, former X-Man and Avenger, blasted through the wall, colliding hard with the Omega Sentinel. Cannonball was there to save them, but as he carried the Indian woman back into the night sky above the grounds of the school he could only think about one thing.

Just who the hell was going to save him?

“Holy shit,” Cessily said as the students stood from the rubble of the demolished common room, watching as Cannonball sailed away into the night sky with the enemy, “did that really just happen?”

“Listen, guys, you heard what that chick said,” Victor Borokowski said, trying to attract the attention of each stunned and confused student with a snap of his green fingers, “the X-Men are all sick and stuff and those dog things are here to kidnap some of us! We have to do something!”

“Like what, Salacommander,” Rockslide asked, again being the voice of the collective group, “throw your diapers at ‘em?”

“It is simple,” Dust spoke up from the back of the group, cutting in before Anole could answer, “we have to save them.”

“Ohmygod,” Pixie stammered, “does that mean we’re the X-Men now? I totally don’t have a costume yet…”

DISORIENTATION

Part II

By Chris Munn

Third Star to the Left…

“C’mon, Sentinel Gal,” Cannonball said with a smile as he zoomed away from the school, his arms wrapped around Karima’s waist, “we’re goin’ for a little ride.”

“I’m afraid not,” she replied as her hands began to spin and whir, transforming with each snap of bionic component until her fingers were replaced by various articles of high-tech weaponry. As they sped further and further away from the Institute, the Omega Sentinel employed attack after attack, each one in succession failing to disable the mutant who had apprehended her. Flame, ice, electricity, bullets; nothing seemed to faze the young man.

“Might as well cut that out,” Sam advised as he dove down toward the forest that sat at the edge of Breakstone Lake, “can’t hurt me long as I’m blastin’, and there ain’t a thing you can do to slow me down.”

“Sam Guthrie, code-name Cannonball,” the female Sentinel said aloud, information speeding across her optical units, “threat level: 3. Counter-measures calculating.”

“Mah threat level’s just a 3?” Sam asked, indignant. “Well screw you too, lady.”

With that, Guthrie took a sharp 90 degree turn, causing he and his passenger to slam hard into the water of the lake. It was too much to hope she wasn’t water-proof, Sam thought, but the lake had more to offer than just getting wet. With his vision clear due to the aviation goggles across his face, Sam plowed through the water until he reached his destination – releasing his hold on the Omega Sentinel before pulling another high-speed turn back toward the lake’s surface.

“Time to boogie, Guthrie,” Cannonball thought to himself as he raced for the surface. Karima, meanwhile, slid slowly across the lake bottom, an oxygen filtration mask already covering her face. She took only a moment before activating her propulsion units, but she made it only a few feet before being stopped and then pulled back into the brine. Detention coils had emerged from a defensive suite at the lake bottom, wrapping tightly around her lithe body. She flexed, attempting to snap the coils, only to realize that she had severely miscalculated.

Sam broke free to the surface air just as the coils released thousands of volts of electricity into the water, the result of the Sentinel’s attempt to rip herself free. “Sorry all you fishies,” Sam said as he arced back toward the Institute, “couldn’t be helped.”

Inside the Xavier Institute, six beasts roamed through the campus halls, prowling for the young mutants they had been tasked to kidnap. The Plague Dogs were at their master’s beck and call, whipped by the lash and held by the leash of Pandemic – and what Pandemic wanted this night were the mutant babes, each of them suitably weakened by the virus introduced to them earlier in the day.

Screams floated through the hallways of the school as the students, those whose illness had not yet caused them to pass out into unconsciousness, witnessed the monsters as they seemingly devoured their classmates. One such student was David Alleyne, code-named Prodigy, who had been caught in his bathroom praying to the porcelain god as he vomited up the ham and cheese sandwich he’d eaten hours before.

“Oh god,” David whispered as the creature, the monstrous figure who seemed more canine than man, burst down his bathroom door. It had no skin on its body, it was instead covered by knots of sinewy muscles – yet the muscular structure seemed to shift and sway with each movement of the creature’s body, as if it was constantly mutating as it approached him.

“Plague Dog Three,” the monster communicated to its fellow five hunters, “acquiring Target Nine.” The creature pounced onto Prodigy, toppling the boy back onto the floor. Alleyne screamed as the creature’s flowing musculature enveloped and consumed him, absorbing him into the Dog’s heaving torso. Too weak to fight back properly, David was no more, contained and sedated inside the Plague Dog itself.

“David, no,” a girl’s voice said from the bedroom adjacent to the boy’s bathroom. The Plague Dog turned to find Noriko Ashida, barely standing from her sickness yet still cascading with arcs of electricity from the gauntlets around her hands and forearms. “Let him go!”

The creature smiled, revealing rows of shifting, sharpened teeth. “Plague Dog Three, acquiring Target Seven…”

It was only a moment before Noriko, too, was gone.

“Is that…is that a fucking grizzly bear?”

Joshua Guthrie, also called Icarus, could barely see through the haze of his fever. His red wings were folded back behind him as he lay cradled in the arms of a young girl he’d only just met yet had felt such an undeniable connection with. Her name was Laurie Collins, and even though she was sick too he didn’t understand why she was reacting to what had to be a fever-induced hallucination.

“Plague Dog Five,” the monster that had only seconds before exploded into Josh’s room said with a snarl, “acquiring both Target Eleven and Target Prime. Must be my birthday or something, huh?”

“Stay away from him!” Laurie yelled, trying to sound as mean and tough as she could, trying her best to sound like an X-Man. Truth be told, however, Laurie was scared out of her mind and felt as if she could pass out at any moment from the virus that had invaded her body. Josh was useless to her, for some reason he had taken the illness far worse than anyone else, and she was fairly sure there wouldn’t be any adults coming to their rescue.

The Plague Dog took two lumbering steps forward, walking on all fours like an animal despite having the voice of a man, before stopping in its tracks. It hesitated, and Laurie noticed a look of sheer, blinding panic in the monster’s eyes. That’s when she realized what was happening – Laurie was a projecting empath, her body releasing pheromones that would affect the emotional states of those around her to match how she herself felt. The Dog had just been hit with a wave of the same intense fear she was feeling at the moment, and the situation could go one of two ways. Either it would run away in terror, or it would attack and maul them both to death in a panic-induced insanity.

Fortunately, Laurie received a third option as a blast of sand came exploding out of the air vents in the room’s ceiling. “Laurie, run!” Dust ordered as she swirled around the creature, her sandstorm shredding strips of tissue away from the Dog’s body while it attempted to protect its face and eyes.

While Dust enveloped the creature, Laurie attempted to revive the now unconscious Josh. “Come on, get up!” she ordered while pulling on the young man’s wing.

Suddenly, the wall behind them broke open, torn apart by massive claws that groped and pawed through the opening it had made. “Lucky girl,” the Plague Dog said as it pulled Guthrie away from her grasp, “that I’ve only got room for one in here, and you’re low on the target list.”

“Josh, no!” Laurie shouted, but it was too late. She watched as Josh, wings and all, were wrapped and consumed by the monster.

“Plague Dog Six,” the monster announced before it went loping off toward the nearest window, “Prime Target acquired, returning to rendezvous point.”

“Freshmen unite!”

“Shut up, Borokowski!”

Anole and Rockslide burst into the third floor hall just in time to see yet another Plague Dog (by now they’d long lost count of how many there actually were) enveloping a student named Ben Hammil into its torso. “Plague Dog Two,” it said with its back turned to the two junior X-Men, “Target Eight acquired.”

“Acquire this, skinless!” Rockslide said, foolishly announcing his presence as he swung his massive stone fist at the equally large, yet far more agile, Dog. The creature ducked the swinging fist, then leapt over Santo’s head. The canine dug the claws in its hind legs into the cracks of the boy’s stone body, and with tons of pressure the creature shattered Rockslide’s shoulders, removing his arms. Santo fell to the floor with a yelp more of surprise and shock than of pain.

“You’re not on the list,” the Dog said as it circled around Anole, “that makes you dinner.”

“Victor, duck!” The words were followed by a fierce growl, and while his teammate hit the floor the student named Wolf Cub sailed over his head. The lycanthropic mutant pounced onto the larger creature, his claws slicing ribbons of diseased tissue from the monster’s body and face. Then, before the Dog could react, Wolf Cub dove to the side to make room for yet another young X-Man. Her name was Alani Ryan, a.k.a. Loa, and when she took a similar head-long dive into the creature’s chest there was a far different reaction. Her arms, then her whole body, passed through the Plague Dog, unzipping its molecules as she went, effectively disintegrating it. As she passed through, she caught onto to the imprisoned body of the captive Ben Hammil, and showing a surprising amount of control Loa pulled her classmate free of the rapidly dissolving creature.

“Wow, okay, it’s official,” Anole said as he leapt to Alani’s side to help with Ben, “you guys are awesome.”

“Stay away, I’m warning you…”

Kevin Ford, named Wither due to the uncontrollable “death touch” that caused all organic matter to die and dissolve upon skin contact, was backed against the wall. Though he could barely stand, he felt relatively confident that the creature would back off, unwilling to make physical contact. The monster was circling around, thick gobs of saliva dripping from its snout, while Wither waved his hand in the air, trying to shoo the thing away.

“Any minute now,” the Dog muttered. Kevin’s knees buckled beneath him, sending him to the floor, while the virus finally did its job and rendered the boy unconscious. The Dog scooped him up, placed a tight-fitting helmet atop his head, and promptly absorbed him. “Plague Dog One, Target Two acquired. I have to hand it to the boss, not having any X-Men around sure has made this a cake walk.”

Almost in direct reply to the monster’s cocky statement, the window at the end of the hall exploded inward as Cannonball flew through it on a straight line to his target. “Say that again?” he asked as he bulldozed into the creature’s midsection, sending it flying out the window on the opposite end of the hall.

“Mister Guthrie!” Laurie Collins said from two doors down the hall, gripped tightly onto the doorframe to keep from falling. Sam stopped his flight and touched down at the girl’s side, and as he helped her up he noticed the scattered red feathers on the floor behind her.

“Josh…?” he asked. Laurie just shook her head and pointed out the window he’d just entered.

“Stay here, alright?” Sam ordered before putting his goggles back on his face. “Ah’m goin’ to get mah brother.”

Cannonball rocketed back outside, leaving the Collins girl alone. She didn’t see the Plague Dog approaching silently at her back until it was far, far too late.

…and Straight On ‘til Morning!

Sam poured on the speed as he flew toward the shimmering light on the hill overlooking the school at the far end of the forest. He noticed a few Plague Dogs loping through the woods below, racing the X-Man to what had to be their extraction point. He had no idea how many of the creatures had already made their escape, nor could he follow them through the gateway – to do so, with no knowledge of just what would be awaiting him on the other side, would be a noble but foolishly suicidal gesture. What Cannonballcould do, however, was catch the Dogs that hadn’t yet made their getaway.

“Round two, X-Man,” the Omega Sentinel said as she appeared in flight beside Sam, her cybernetic body soaked and singed but otherwise unharmed, “implementing counter measures…”

Guthrie turned, trying to arc away from the bionic woman before whatever “counter measure” she’d come up with was used. He didn’t quite get far enough to escape the tightly-focused sonic blast that came from Karima’s vocal chords, shattering his concentration completely. All he could think about was getting away, eyes closed and blasting as fast and hard as he could. Ultimately, however, he miscalculated and blasted straight into the ground, impacting the forest floor with tremendous force.

Karima touched down, her rockets cutting off as her feet touched the soil. A small impact crater had formed where the mutant had crash landed, but the body she expected to find laying at its center was absent. Her optical units switched to their scanning mode, sweeping the surrounding forest for any sign of her target. She found him when he tapped firmly on her shoulder, causing her spin around with a whirr of moving parts.

Cannonball smiled and swung his fist, connecting hard with the Sentinel’s jaw. Guthrie had long ago learned to use his “blast field” offensively as well as just for flight, and the accumulated force of his impact with the ground had been stored and then channeled through his body and into his fist, releasing as his knuckles impacted with the robotic woman’s face. The resulting explosion sent Shapandar flying backward until a firmly-rooted tree stopped her flight. If she’d had a spinal cord, it would have easily snapped in two.

Sam walked over to his fallen foe and rolled her onto her back to check her vital signs. His attention was immediately caught by the strange choker collar affixed around her neck, a totemic face etched into the iron fasten. A burst of light from the nearby hilltop made him look back over his shoulder, and when he realized that the Plague Dogs had escaped through their portal and sealed off their door he merely sighed and hefted the deceptively heavy Karima into his arms and took flight back toward the school.

An hour later, the members of the student body who hadn’t fallen ill or taken captive had assembled in the Danger Room. Sixty hectic minutes had been spent doing a headcount of students, the moving of infirm faculty members and students to the infirmary, and finally a securing of their prisoner. Karima Shapandar sat strapped to a chair in the center of the Danger Room, wires and widgets plugged into her various input hubs.

“Wake up, darlin’,” Cannonball said as he slapped the captive woman hard across the face, “we got questions and you got the answers.”

“Why can’t I move?” the stunned Sentinel asked after a moment’s hesitation, where she’d obviously attempted to employ her numerous weapon suites.

“The kids and I lowjacked you,” Sam answered, waving a hand to show her the assembled students behind him, “slaved you to the Danger Room controls. You can’t even blink without us telling you to first.”

The Sentinel smiled. “This won’t stop me.”

“Karima Shapandar was a woman turned into one of Bastion’s Prime Sentinels,” Sam explained, still looking the woman in the eye with a stone cold gaze, “but not long ago she got freed from her programming. With Charles Xavier’s help, she regained her free will and denounced the mutant-hating doctrines that Bastion had programmed into her. Karima wouldn’t – and didn’t – attack us, did she?”

“I think I’ll be leaving now,” the Sentinel said. Sam smirked when she realized she wasn’t going anywhere after all.

“Kids, meet Malice, one o’ Mister Sinister’s scum-suckin’ Marauders. She’s a psychic entity that possesses people, bringin’ out the nasty sides of ‘em.” Guthrie gestured for one of the students to step forward. “Malice, this blonde haired cutie is named Fusion, and she’s got an interesting pedigree. See, she’s Emma Frost’s daughter…”

The Sentinel scowled.

“That’s right,” Sam confirmed, “she’s telepathically keeping you from skipping out on another host. You’re trapped right where you are, but don’t get too comfortable. You won’t be staying very long.”

The Sentinel jerked, violently, then looked at the mutants with confused, pleading eyes. “What have you done to me?”

“There’s another student here, name o’ Integer,” Cannonball continued to explain, “and he’s got about the strangest damn mutation I’ve ever encountered. He’s a sentient mathematical concept that communicates via binary code. I let him loose in Karima’s system about thirty minutes ago with the order to root you out and kick your ghostly teeth in.”

The Omega Sentinel had another spasm, rocking forward and back in her chair with screams that sounded eerily digitized, like she’d been auto-tuned. This continued for several moments before stopping just as suddenly as it began. Sam waited patiently, arms folded across his chest, until Sophia Frost placed her hand on his shoulder. “Integer says he’s done,” she told him, “Malice has been destroyed.”

“Cut her loose,” Guthrie ordered. Hesitantly, unsure of whether they should release the woman who had tried to kill them all, a few of the students nervously unhooked the wires that were keeping her immobile. “Miss Shapandar?” Sam asked, awaiting her answer.

“Where am I?” Karima questioned as she stood from the chair, confused and obviously frightened. “Oh my god, this is Xavier’s house, isn’t it?”

“Miss Shapandar, mah name’s Sam Guthrie,” Cannonball said as he extended his hand to take hers, “and ah desperately need your help.”

Elsewhere
Destination Unknown

“Only ten subjects retained out of a list of fifteen. That’s somewhat disappointing.”

The doctor crossed the room for the umpteenth time, pacing back and forth as he adjusted the fur-trimmed coat across his shoulders. The Plague Dogs were working to secure the children they’d kidnapped into individual stasis tubes, as per their creator’s orders. Only five of the six Dogs had returned, the sixth having been destroyed, and the capture of the Omega Sentinel had been a substantial loss.

“Sir, what would you like done with Target Prime?” the bravest of the Plague Dogs asked. Held in his clawed hands was a barely conscious Joshua Guthrie, his red wings hanging limp against his back.

“Ready this one for immediate transference,” the doctor ordered, “when I’ve finished we will prepare him for transport.”

“That was not our arrangement, Doctor Palance,” the figure standing in the back of the dimly-lit room interjected, his red eyes glowing like tiny furnaces in the dark. “The Guthrie boy will be leaving with me immediately. The rest are yours to play with at your discretion, of course.”

Palance put on a forced smile and nodded at the Plague Dog. “Prepare him for immediate transport. Prep one of the other children in his stead.”

“I wish to commend you for your assistance on this matter,” the shadowy conspirator said, “losing the Sentinel is an acceptable price to pay for what you’ve acquired for me.”

“Allowing me access to your people makes us even, my friend,” Palance said in return, “now if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

“Very well,” the other agreed, “though be forewarned, Doctor Palance, that the X-Men will not take the kidnaping of their charges lightly. They will find you eventually.”

“Let them come,” the doctor said with a hearty laugh as he placed his hand on the stasis tube containing the unconscious Noriko Ashida, “the Pandemic will overtake them all!”

To be continued

 

 

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