“Hmm…how very interesting. Camilla, could you do another spectral scan of the body’s surface? I’m picking up a reservoir of power that has fluctuated wildly, in both directions negative and positive, between our last few sequence scans.”

Doctor Peter Corbeau tapped his fingertips against the rim of his ceramic coffee cup, eyes dashing rapidly across the stream of numbers displayed on his terminal port. Several others buzzed to activity behind his work station, and another scientist by name of Camilla Brown arrived at his back. “Could it be a type of flare?” she asked while adjusting a knob to the doctor’s left.

“Not any I’ve seen,” Corbeau answered, “and I’ve lived on this heap so long that I’ve encountered just about every variable of solar flare on record. This…this, my dear, is something new.”

The “heap” so endearingly referred to by Peter Corbeau was called Starcore One, a massive space station positioned in orbit around the Sun. The crowning achievement of NASA science, built from a design by Corbeau himself, Starcore One had been established to chronicle and analyze any and all fluctuations in the solar fields of the Milky Way’s great star. Assignment to the station came with a mandated occupational minimum of five years, and it had been three years since the crew had seen another human person outside of themselves.

Until today.

“Keep your eye on this, Camilla,” Peter said as he stood from the station, “I think I’ve just reached my threshold of sleep deprivation after my thirty-five hour marathon. If I don’t grab a few hours sleep, I may just go all Event Horizon on you.”

“The doctor just made a movie reference,” another crew member named Jefferson Powell remarked after his superior scientist left the room, “he must be exhausted.”

“You know, this phenomenon looks kinda familiar,” Camilla said as she stared at the date streaming on her screen. “I did my residency under Reed Richards, and one of the things he was studying at the time was something with really similar energy signatures.”

“…and?” Powell asked after the woman’s dramatic pause.

“He called it a stargate.”

Doctor Corbeau stumbled wearily down the corridor to his bed chamber, the exhaustion threatening to buckle his knees before he made it under the sheets. Most of the crew were already asleep, aside from the skeleton shift he’d just left behind. The halls were empty and dark, illuminated only by the low hum of neon above. He reached the door to his room and tapped in the code sequence to unlock it, thoughts of dreamless sleep occupying his tired mind.

The last thing he expected to see when the door slid open was the smiling brunette in a mini-skirt and leather jacket. “Sorry, Doc,” she apologized while grabbing him by his shirt collar, pulling him into the dark room, the door sliding shut again behind them.

“What’s the meaning of this?” the scientist asked, more agitated than afraid. “Who the hell are you and how did you get aboard this station?”

“My name’s Lila,” she said as she pushed him down onto the bed, “and I’m just the taxi driver.”

Before Corbeau could respond, his attention was diverted by the sound of a match striking to life in the far corner of the room. The flare of light touched the end of a cigarette held between pursed lips, illuminating the strange man’s face with a fiery glow. “You Peter Corbeau, I assume?” the man, his voice thick with a rough accent of French, asked through an exhale of cigarette smoke.

“Who wants to know?” Corbeau demanded, wondering all the while why the stranger’s face seemed so familiar to him.

“The name, m’sieu, is Gambit,” the Acadian answered, “and we come to rob you blind…”

EXIT STRATEGY

By Chris Munn

Central Australia

“I have to admit,” James Proudstar said as he stepped from the iron capsule onto the outback sand of the deserted town, “it’s good to be friends with one of the most powerful mutants on the planet. Just sayin’, y’know.”

Levitating to the Apache native’s side was Erik Magnus Lensherr, current vice-president of Genosha, former mutant terrorist, and current secret benefactor to the X-Men. “Powerful or not,” Magneto responded, “carrying you inside a refurbished train car across an entire continent has left me a bit winded.”

“Then sit back and let me work, kemosabe,” Warpath said as he crouched down, allowing his fingers to brush against the sand. The two mutants were standing on Main Street of the desolate Outback town that had served as the X-Men’s base of operations numerous times throughout the years. “Hard to believe that just a few months ago this place was fully operational,” James reported. “When X-Corps shut down so suddenly, it looks like the agents stationed here just pulled up stakes, left, and never looked back.”

“Which is why, I understand,” Magneto inferred, “Summers believed this to be an ideal location for his team. Though I fail to understand his desire to depart the Genoshan shores. My protection is absolute and your sanctuary is guaranteed, as I believe I evidenced during the American Sentinel attack.”

“That’s the point,” Warpath said as he motioned for Magneto to follow him down the street. “Our presence there just invites more attacks, meaning more innocent mutant lives put in jeopardy for no good reason. The more remote we are, the safer everyone else will be.”

Magneto chuckled. “My dear boy, do you honestly think your departure will keep my country from being a target? My head on a pike would be on the cover of Time Magazine alongside the words ‘Mission Accomplished’; we’re used to having bullseyes on our foreheads.”

“Okay, this isn’t good,” Warpath said, ignoring his partner’s comments, “I’ve got their tracks and scents all over the place; Alex, Rachel, and Dominic were here alright. But I’m also picking up military issue combat boots and the smell of both gun oil and machine parts. Best guess? Cyborgs, not Sentinels, due to the intermingling human scents and man-sized tracks.”

“You’re correct,” Magneto said as he removed his helmet, “I can sense the bionic components reverberating in the magnetic fields of this place. There were three of them, three soldiers who were more machine than man.”

“If you can sense that,” Proudstar stated, “then you probably already know this: none of them, cyborgs or X-Men, seem to have left this spot. There’s no trace of anyone leaving here once they arrived…the trail just fucking stops.”

“Then that leaves us but one avenue to explore, Mr. Proudstar,” Magnus said as he placed the helmet atop his head once again, “we tear this town to the ground until we find them.”

Starcore-One
Solar Orbital Platform

“Knock, knock,” the pink-haired girl in the Gypsy dress and beads said with an amused smile on her face as she stepped through the sliding door of Starcore One’s male lavatory, “anyone t’ home?”

“Uh, what?” Jefferson Powell asked as he craned his neck to look at the strange girl, trying valiantly to keep from pissing on his shoes in front of the urinal.

Another woman’s arm, this one toned and more muscular, emerged over the Gypsy’s shoulder with a pistol in its grip. The gun fired silently, blowing Powell’s blood and brains across the bathroom stall. The Gypsy stepped into the room and allowed her partner to enter behind her, the two women emerging from a hole in space contained within the doorframe. “This rest room is occupied, sweetheart.”

“Kimura,” the Gypsy addressed, smile still wiped across her mouth, “my portal is down, you can check out the hallway now.”

The raven-haired assassin nodded in confirmation as she stepped back over the dead man’s body, careful to not place her black curb-stomping boots in the pooling blood and piss. Kimura peeked her head out into the hallway, followed by her raised pistol, and slowly crept along the metal wall. “Everything is 5 by 5, Ariel. We can proceed to the target and keep our fingers crossed in hope that we stumble upon some more nimrod scientist types for me to shoot dead.”

“Girl power, my sister from another mister,” the alien mutant teleporter named Ariel answered as she skipped into the corridor, following behind her partner’s footfalls. “We do this right, drinks are on me for the rest of your unnatural lifespan.”

Kimura turned a corner and spied another Starcore crew member at the far end of the hall. Another soft implosion of air was followed by another dead victim, smoke rising and swirling from the barrel of her pistol. “I fucking hate science nerds…”

Doctor Corbeau tried not to make his nervousness obvious as he watched the stranger make himself at home in the doctor’s living quarters. The mutant named Gambit had kicked back in a chair, his legs swung up to rest on the desk in the back of the room, and was presently balancing a small throwing spike on the end of his index finger. The girl, Lila, remained at Peter’s back, cutting him off from the room’s only exit. “So what can I do for you?” he asked, unable to disguise the quiver in his voice.

Gambit smirked in response to the question. Before providing an answer, the mutant tossed the spike into the air and allowed it to fall onto the desk, sticking into the wood like an arrow hitting a target. “I’ve got me a friend,” the Cajun finally said, “she can read people’s thoughts. Me, I don’t see nothin’ special ’bout that. I know what you be thinkin’ without benefit o’ no fancy telepathic powers.”

Corbeau cocked a curious eyebrow. Gambit reached forward onto the desk and clicked on the small lamp that rested atop it, bathing the room in a eerie spotlight. “See, you thinkin’ you know me from somewhere, am I right? My face be right there on the edge o’ your memory, so close yet so out o’ reach. Out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes.”

“So I do know you, then?” Corbeau asked. “We’ve met?” “I was an X-Man,” Gambit clarified, “il était une fois.“

“Well, technically,” the Cheney woman chimed in from behind the scientist, “we kinda still are X-Men. Depends on who you ask, I guess.”

The X-Men, such a surprise, Corbeau thought – though he had to admit that was also relieved. The X-Men were heroes, regardless of their less than stellar reputation amongst the world’s law enforcement agencies, which meant that the potential danger threat of his current situation could be downgraded from severe to moderate. “Does this mean Starcore One is in jeopardy?”

“So me being an X-Man,” Gambit replied, “that mean we friends now, non?”

“That depends,” Peter reiterated, “on your reasons for being here and if said reasons will place my crew and station in jeopardy.”

“Lemme tell you a story, homme,” Gambit began. Corbeau, despite himself, couldn’t help but hang on the mutant’s every word, his eyes a slow pulse of red pupils embedded seas of black. Without realizing it, Peter Corbeau had been mesmerized. “Few years back,” the X-Man continued, “two alien races went t’ war wit’ one another and our little Mama Earth, well she was stuck in the middle. One of those alien races, a bunch o’ feather-heads called Shi’ar, utilized somet’ing they called a stargate to hop from one galaxy t’ the other. Now, this stargate, it played hob with Earth’s sun, causing a bunch o’ solar flares and other nasty space stuff to happen.”

“I remember,” Corbeau answered, his voice dulled to a soft drone, “I was here on Starcore One. The Avengers came to help us.”

“That’s right, mon frère,” Gambit acknowledged, “and one Avenger in particular saved the sun from being consumed by somet’ing called dark matter.”

“Yes, Quasar stopped the dark matter from extinguishing the sun,” Corbeau stated.

“He thought he destroyed it all,” the mutant needled, “but he didn’t, did he? You science-types, you kept a sample o’ this dark matter, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Peter confirmed, “but its inert now, useless, once the stargates stopped being used.”

“Well,” Lila chimed in again, “not so much anymore, I’m afraid.”

“My friend there,” Gambit explained, “she be a celestial-scale teleporter…she opens up personal stargates of her own, you follow me?”

Corbeau blinked rapidly, taken aback to the point where the trance began to slip. “You…you’ve placed this whole station in danger, you fools! If the dark matter were to be released from containment it could destroy us all!”

“That won’t happen,” Gambit assured. He stood from the leather chair and approached the doctor, placing a firm grip on his shoulder. “You gonna take us to it, then we gonna take it home wit’ us. Space station be safe, you lose something that’s—in your own words, no less—uselesss, and my lovely companion and I get paid a hefty sum for delivering it. Savvy?”

“You can’t just walk in and out of here,” Corbeau warned as Gambit pushed him toward the door, “what, you think after all the times this facility has been attacked we wouldn’t have some form of security?”

“They’ll never know we here,” Gambit said with a wink and a smirk.

“Attention all personnel,” a hollow voice boomed over the station’s loud-speakers, “we have intruders on level 13! Science staff please proceed to your designated safe zones and await commands from SHIELD.”

Corbeau looked at the two mutants and scowled. Lila sighed while Gambit could do nothing more than shrug his shoulders. “C’est le vie.“

Kansas City, Kansas

Inside the antique DC-10 aircraft owned and operated by Havok’s renegade team of X-Men, four such members of the team gathered around a holographic projector that had been jury-rigged inside the plane’s cargo hold. Xorn, his voice hollow as it echoed out from the iron mask clasped around his head, began the debriefing while his three teammates watched impatiently. With the rest of team missing in action, the X-Men had been reduced to Xorn, Chamber, Ecstasy, and Skullfire; none of them had a reputation for handling authority well.

“With Alex and Rachel unaccounted for,” Xorn began, “it seems to be our group’s consensus that enough time has been spent in hiding following the assault on Genosha by Storm and her others. Havok has kept us in a holding pattern for far too long, and Stacy and I have put together a mission of our own that we believe needs to be undertaken with haste.”

“Fuck yeah,” Stacy chimed in whilst flicking the ashes of her cigarette onto the floor, “tell ’em Xorney.”

“Yes, thank you, Stacy,” Xorn said as he pointed at the man displayed on the projector. “This man’s name is Phillip Fredericks, pastor of the Kansas sect of the Church of Humanity. Formerly a deacon under the mentorship of Reverend William Stryker, Fredericks has in recent years formed his own congregation around severe anti-mutant rhetoric. He and his followers routinely disrupt mutant peace activities and funerals for known mutants. They have openly denounced the legacy of Charles Xavier,” with that, Xorn changed the image to that of a website, the main image on which being a photo of Xavier with a red X crossed over it, “with the slogan ‘Xavier burns in Hell, let’s send his students to join him’.”

“God Hates Muties,” Chamber stated, “I’ve seen this tosser on the telly, and that was his main point of argument.”

“So what’s the plan?” Skullfire asked. “We going for shock and awe on this one?”

“No,” Xorn answered, taking Ecstacy’s hand to guide her from her seat to stand next to him, “first we discredit him.”

Stacy grinned. “And then we annihilate these fuckers!”

Starcore-One
Solar Orbital Platform

“So, what exactly are we looking for again?”

Ariel laughed at her partner’s question, responding to it with a spin that twirled her long, green skirt in the air around her. “Just stand by the door, Kimura, and keep us from having any company.”

“You have no idea, do you?” Kimura asked as she positioned her self at the door, propping it open with a knife pulled from her boot.

“Well, I know it’s something called dark matter,” Ariel replied as she tapped across the lab, reading labels and screens in hopes of finding her prize, “but the buyer wasn’t sure what it would look like, exactly. So unless I spot something really obvious, this is choose your own adventure.“

“Don’t suppose our client told you why he wanted this stuff, did he?” Kimura asked, but then suddenly shushed her companion before she could answer. The dark-haired assassin pointed in the direction of the hallway, then signaled Ariel to duck and cover.

As expected, the corridor was filled with an advancing phalanx of SHIELD security enforcers, each of them armored and toting weapons. Before they spotted her, Kimura crouched down and removed a small disc from the pouch attached to her hip. She pressed the only button on the discs top and sent it sliding down the hall toward the men, looking like nothing more than a hockey puck. Once the men reached where the disc had stopped, a bright flash of light exploded from the device, blinding the five soldiers with an intense burst of coherent sunshine. With spots still in their eyes, the SHIELD agents saw only the blurry outline of Kimura as she stepped without fear into the hallway and made her way toward them, a collapsible steel baton unfolding to length in her hand.

“Target is dead ahead!” one of the agents shouted, prompting all five men to open fire with their assault rifles. Kimura didn’t so much as flinch as the hail of gunfire bounced off her indestructible body. “Can’t use armor piercing rounds for fear of putting a hole in the ship’s hull,” she teased while disarming the first two agents, breaking limbs with each strike of her baton, “but take comfort in the fact that they wouldn’t have left a mark on my beautiful bod either.”

Five more seconds elapsed before the last of the security force was on the ground, those still alive cradling their broken appendages. “You ready to go, hon?” Kimura asked through her headset communicator. “I seem to have broken all my toys.”

While the brief skirmish unfolded outside the lab, Ariel grunted in frustration as she searched for any evidence of the dark matter. “Annoying, much?” she muttered while running fingers through her tangled mess of pink hair. She plopped down in the closest chair and sighed, then heard her partner’s question in her ear. “No such luck yet, sweetums,” she answered. Then, she saw her salvation—the quivering, cowering girl in the lab coat that was trying to hide under the far piece of equipment. Ariel sprang to her feet and bounced over to where the woman was hiding, quickly snatching her up by the coat’s collar.

“Please don’t hurt me,” Camilla Brown pleaded, trying not to cry.

“Oh, I’m not going to hurt you,” Ariel promised, “provided you help me out with a little problem…”

“I don’t understand,” Corbeau said as he walked briskly down the corridor, followed closely by Gambit and Lila, “if you’re not the ones responsible for the alarms going off, then who is?”

“We were told by our client that someone else might try to beat us to the score,” Lila answered, “so best guess is that we’re looking at another teleporter. Lucky for us that they’re looking in the wrong place, huh doc?”

“Understand something, young woman,” Corbeau said as he stopped at a doorway, placing his hand on the external sensor to grant them entrance, “the only reason I’m taking you to the dark matter is so you can take it away from the crew before something terrible happens. I may have helped the X-Men in the past, but I draw the line at working with crooks and thieves.”

“You wound our pride, m’sieu,” Gambit said as he pushed the other two into the room, “but your opinion of us, that be the least of Gambit’s worries.”

“Does he refer to himself in the third person often?” Corbeau whispered to Lila as he led her to the computer terminal in the back of the lab.

“He says he’s been working on that,” Cheney answered while glancing back at her partner, “but yeah, he does. Sad, huh?”

The scientist tapped in the security codes, ignoring his captors’ insistence that he hurry, and a panel in the wall beside them slid open. Slowly, a claw extended out from the chamber, a large container clutched in its steel fingers. “Inside that container,” Corbeau explained, “is a gravitational field that’s keeping the ball of dark matter suspended. If it were to be released, if the field was the fail, then any matter the substance touched would be pulled inside to increase its mass. This entire station would be consumed, do you understand?”

“We won’t be opening it,” Gambit assured him. “Lila, you ready to go home?”

“Wait, something’s wrong,” Corbeau announced just as Lila and Gambit reached for the container. “God damn it, this is what I was afraid of! Your teleporting onto this station, the opening of a stargate in such close proximity to the dark matter, its caused its energy to spike. The fields are weakening, X-Men…it has to be taken off Starcore One immediately!”

“One last question, then we go,” Gambit said, his hands placed on Peter’s shoulders to bring the two men eye-to-eye, “if it comes to it, how do we destroy this dark matter?”

“You can’t destroy it,” Corbeau said grimly, “you can only contain it. Otherwise I’d have been rid of it years ago.”

“Yoo-hoo,” a girl’s voice sounded from the door to the lab, causing all their attention to snap in that direction. Ariel and Kimura stood with Camilla Brown gripped in the taller woman’s grasp by her throat. “Avon calling!”

“Lila, grab the prize,” Gambit yelled as he pushed Corbeau onto the floor, a throwing spike sliding down the sleeve of his trench-coat into his gloved hand, “I’ll only be a minute!”

The spike began to glow a bright pink as it flew from Gambit’s fingers, the blade charged with unstable kinetic energy and thrown with impeccable aim. Kimura tossed her hostage away before the spike hit her chest, exploding violently as it made contact with her body. “Not as easy as you hoped, huh?” she asked with a smile as the smoke of the explosion cleared, proving to Gambit that his attack had done nothing but expose a rather large hole in the woman’s shirt.

“That’s okay,” Gambit replied as he jumped forward, legs propelling him into a fantastic flip through the air, “This here Cajun boy, he have more tricks up his sleeve.” As he landed, the steel bo-staff affixed to his back was brought to his hand, extending with the press of a button. Kimura extended her own baton just in time to block the Cajun’s first strike, the contact vibration of metal-on-metal causing his fingers to tingle and numb.

“Why so lovely a girl want to spend our time t’gether like this, I never know,” Gambit taunted as he moved with incredible speed and agility, reflexes keeping him a step ahead of Kimura’s attacks and easily allowing him to land his own blows. Against her indestructible body, though, his strongest hits were barely felt.

“Stand still, jack rabbit!” Kimura yelled as Gambit successfully dodged another of her baton swipes. His constant smirking and teasing was getting her blood up, and finally—finally!—one of her blows connected. The baton smacked hard against the X-Man’s knee, sending him down to the ground with a cry of pain. Before he could hit the floor, the 6’2” amazon had her fingers clutched around his throat, hefting him into the air. “Not so smart now, huh boy?”

“You should remember the rules ‘fore you place a bet, chere,” Gambit choked out as he reached inside his coat, removing a full pack of playing cards, “the house always wins!” Charging the cards with kinetic force, the mutant thief sprayed the deck one by one into the woman’s abdomen, sending her sailing back through the wall behind her. He fell to the floor in a fit of coughs, waiting for the indestructible girl to come flying back through the hole to finish him off. Thankfully, she never did – his gambit (pardon the pun) had paid off.

“Hey sexy!” Ariel called out as Gambit rose on shaky legs. He looked back and groaned when he saw the diminutive girl holding the dark matter canister in her arms. “Looks like your girlfriend decided to cut and run on you!”

Before Gambit could react, Ariel turned to step through the doorway behind her, preparing to escape via her own teleportational abilities (though she honestly had no idea what she would have done if there’d been a solid wall there, her particular power dependent upon a physical doorway to step through). A flash of light erupted from the doorway, followed by a gloved fist that crashed into Ariel’s jaw, causing her to sail backward – the dark matter container flying up and back through the air as she fell.

“Remy, the thingamajig!” Lila shouted as she stepped through the gateway, nursing the knuckles she’d bruised on Ariel’s face, having returned to save the day just in the nick of time.

“Merci beaucoup, Lila!” he said as he leapt forward, desperate to catch the sailing steel canister before it hit the floor. If it was to hit and break open then every man and woman aboard Starcore One would be sentenced to death. “Come to poppa Remy, little box!”

The dark matter container fell into Gambit’s outstretched arms and was immediately tucked into his chest as he fell into a roll across the laboratory floor. Lila exhaled a breath of relief, and then ran to check on her partner. “You okay?” she asked as she helped Gambit to his feet.

Remy LeBeau, with the container tucked under his left arm, grabbed Lila Cheney with his free hand and pulled her close. Their lips met in a passionate kiss, the kiss shared by two people who had come so close to death they could feel the Reaper’s cold touch on their shoulders. Their kiss lingered for several seconds before Lila pushed herself free, slapping LeBeau across the face as she stepped away. “Asshole!”

“It was worth it, chere,” Gambit said as he rubbed his reddened cheek, “so worth it.”

“Are we still alive?” Peter Corbeau groaned from the corner of the lab, pushing away the large desk that had pinned against him.

“Do what you want wit’ the ladies, doc,” Gambit said as he placed an arm around Lila’s waist, “and don’t feel insulted when I say I hope we no see each other for awhile, huh?”

The two X-Men disappeared in a flash of light, leaving Doctor Corbeau alone with the two unconscious female thieves for the briefest of moments before the room was filled with a contingent of SHIELD agents. “Doctor,” one of the agents began as he approached the shell-shocked Corbeau, “what happened here?”

Peter hesitated as he surveyed the destruction of the containment lab. “We’ve just been robbed…”

“Home sweet home,” Lila muttered as she and Gambit rematerialized instantaneously, “now get the fuck off me before I kick your ass.”

Remy stepped away, his free hand held up in a gesture of mock innocence, the smirk still present on his face. He looked around the lavish penthouse room, a whistle escaping his lips as he noted how impressed he was by his partner’s bordeaux. “What you call this place, a Dyson Sphere, right?”

“Be it ever so humble,” Lila said as she pulled off her dirty shirt, not caring that Remy was present to ogle her voluptuous body before she could change into a fresh one. “It comes in handy considering the limitations of my power, what with not being able to teleport over short distances I can always use this space station as my jump hub. Plus, being an intergalactic rock star had its benefits, and this was just one of them. I stole it off a particularly nasty alien, in fact.”

“Would that be the same alien that hired you to steal our whole planet for him?” Gambit asked.

“Would it make you feel better if I lied and said no?” Lila answered with a smirk of her own. “Earth had it coming, trust me. Any planet that sells me into slavery loses whatever remorse I may have for screwing it over.”

“How it feel to be back in the game, then, chere?” Remy questioned, tapping on the top of the dark matter canister held under his arm.

“You know, I was an interstellar thief par excellance for a good number of years, LeBeau,” she answered, moving closer to place her hand on her teammate’s arm, “and the only time I was nervous during a heist was when it came time to deliver the goods to my client. That hasn’t changed with time, I’m afraid.”

“The lady that wants this, she assured me it was to be used to help people,” Gambit assured her, “if I find out diff’rent, the game be changed. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I know,” Lila responded, “so let’s go collect our bounty, shall we?”

The two disappeared in another flash of light, Cheney’s power transporting them to the Earth coordinates provided to Gambit by their client. When they reappeared, however, something had obviously gone very, very wrong. Lila doubled over in pain, while it was all Remy could do to stay on his feet.

“That’s not supposed to hurt,” Lila groaned out, “I think we just got hijacked.”

Gambit looked around through blurred vision, realizing that the two of them had appeared in the center of a courtyard lined with stone statuary that all possessed the same familiar face – the face of Magneto, ruler of the island nation of Genosha, current home to Remy and Lila’s current team of X-Men.

“If I throw up,” Remy said as he tried to help Lila to her feet, “I try not to throw up on you.”

“This isn’t where we were supposed to go,” Lila explained, “and it gets worse.”

Remy nodded in confirmation. The dark matter canister was gone, taken from his arms mid-transit. “Someone just stole our booty, that’s plain rude I think.”

Elsewhere, more “else” than “where” really

“Go, go, go!” Ariel shouted as she pushed Kimura through the doorway, transporting them from the Starcore One facility to a more Earthbound location. Taser beams fired by the satellite security forces traveled through the portal with them, barely missing while Ariel dissolved the doorway behind them.

“I should’ve killed every last mother fucker on that space station,” Kimura growled, picking herself up off the floor as she complained. Burn holes riddled her leather cat-suit, but her indestructible skin showed not a mark. Ariel, on the other hand, had not a scratch on her minus a mess of tousled pink hair. “We got played, lover.”

“I know, I know,” Ariel sighed, flopping down on the couch resting in the corner of the room, “but at least we got back home without getting killed. Now I’m just afraid of what the boss is going to say.”

“As well you should,” a man’s voice came from the bathroom door, followed by the sound of the flushing toilet. “I thought I could count on you girls.”

“You didn’t tell us we’d have competition,” Kimura grumbled.

As he stepped out of the fluorescent-lit bathroom, the two women’s employer sighed and ran his hands back through his long, brown, and ridiculously unkempt hair. His clothes were stained, the white of his cotton shirt now faded to a tan coloration, and beneath the sandals he wore were the blackened soles of feet that had been walking for seemingly forever. “It’s okay,” he stated while scratching a spot in his thick beard (possibly because of fleas), “I took matters into my own hands. I may not have the materials, but neither do they, not anymore. Teleportation can be such a fickle bitch, sometimes things just don’t make the journey home, you know?”

Ariel laughed nervously. “So I guess we don’t get paid, then?”

“Oh, yes, you’re being rewarded,” the man named Adam said with a beaming smile, his head illuminated by an unearthly halo, “I’m going to convince my father not to kill you…”

To Be Continued…

So, some of you may be wondering why this story has been released as a new issue of X-MEN when it was obviously first released as GAMBIT # 1. Long story short, GAMBIT has been canceled due to me realizing I just didn’t have enough ideas to keep it going on a long-term basis. So, since Remy and Lila were already cast members in X-MEN, I just folded the first issue and relevant subplots into this series to be followed up on in future issues. To make it a little better, I added two NEW scenes to this issue alongside a brand-new ending that’s different from what you read at the end of GAMBIT # 1.

Regarding that new ending, if you’re wondering just who this Adam fella is I recommend taking a brief moment to read through GENERATION X 2.0, the mini-series I wrote several years ago that contained Adam’s first appearance. This new ending is also the first salvo, the opening shot, to what’s destined to become the biggest and baddest X-Men storyline to date here at Omega. “Intelligent Design” is coming, and that one scene has set the first stage.

Oh, and thanks go out to my gracious co-writer on this series, the abominable Dino Pollard. He requested his name be left off this issue, since I wrote it all myself, but he’s still very much my co-conspirator on X-MEN! In fact, ol’ Dino will be taking a more active hand in helping me plot once we reach the mega-awesome story-arc that’s starting with the long-coming X-MEN # 50.

But, we’ve still got four issues to go before we reach that milestone, so come back next issue to see the spotlight turned on some of the more neglected members of our cast; namely, Magneto, Ecstasy, and Xorn, who all get their time to shine.

Chris Munn
5/11/10