Ogress was neither frozen nor afraid. Tiring of her trick with the waterspout, or maybe just disappointed with its results, she pulled back her hands, then charged straight through the resulting column of sky-high water. A savage roar drowned out the thunder of falling water as she grabbed onto the Vision with Hulk-like strength. A single massive fist wrapped around both of the synthezoid’s legs, while her other hand ripped the yellow cape from his shoulders. letting it flutter to the pool around their feet where it floated like a yellow oil slick atop the water. She raised the Vision like a club and began hammering his head and shoulders against the concrete curb of the fountain. Again and again, she lifted the android Avenger high above her head, then brought him slamming down onto the paved plaza. With each blow, his super-hard body reduced the solid cement to powder.
The Vision felt like he was repeatedly hitting the bottom of Niagara Falls. Then, as each jarring collision with the ground rattled his synthetic enamel teeth, another memory inserted itself into his fading consciousness. He saw a woman, blue-eyed and auburn-haired, reaching out to him from the past, a past they once had shared.
“Wanda,” he murmured, remembering with renewed intensity the cause that had brought him first to Niagara Falls, then to this uncharted realm beneath the Canadian ice. There was more at stake here than simply the continued existence of one malfunctioning synthezoid. Wanda was in danger. Wanda!
Confused and contradictory directives came together in his computerized mind. Priorities were assigned, files rearranged, and counterproductive programming discarded as irrelevant. An immediate course of action presented itself as clearly as any other step-by-step procedure:
1. The Vision shed his accumulated density, slipping easily between the atoms of Ogress’s clenched fist until he was completely free of her grip. A befuddled expression supplanted the animal fury on her simian face. She snatched fruitlessly at the Vision’s immaterial form, her grasping paws seizing only empty air.
2. The Vision turned his thermoscopic vision on the spout at the center of the fountain. The tremendous heat melted it into slag, sealing the nozzle. The towering plume of water collapsed into the pool.
3. The Vision eyed Ogress with a look of implacable calm upon his plastic features. His body still intangible, he stepped entirely inside Ogress’s enormous frame before beginning to become solid once more. There was more than enough room inside the mutated lawyer’s vast torso, but less so as the Vision’s own unstable molecules started to occupy space formerly occupied by Ogress’s flesh and bone.
As the Hulk’s tissues had before her, Ogress’s gamma-enhanced body resisted his incursion, fighting his accumulating substance for every nanometer of available space, competing with him on a molecular, if not an atomic level. But the Vision’s revised programming would not permit him to terminate this procedure until its ultimate objective was achieved. The face of his former wife, the one and only Scarlet Witch, lingered like a hologram in his mind’s eye, providing him with all the software he needed to override obstacles both within and without.
Even an android, it seemed, could be inspired by a vision.
“I know you,” Rock accused. “You’re one of those renegade mutants. One of the X-Men.” He glared at Cyclops with a contemptuous look on his face, the only part of him that wasn’t concealed within a lumpy gray shell. “Back when I worked for the military, I saw contingency plans for dealing with you freaks.”
Look who’s talking, Cyclops thought. Electrodes attached to Samuel John La Roquette’s forehead linked him to the bulky chunk of rock from which he drew his new identity. Banner had described Rock as the most dangerous member of the Riot Squad, as well as the least innocent. Unlike the luckless survivors of Middletown, Rock had bought into the Leader’s agenda more or less willingly, motivated by years of bitterness and resentment over his personal and professional failures. Cut off from humanity in more ways than one, Rock had retreated like a hermit crab into his forbidding stone carapace.
How can he live like that? Cyclops thought, appalled at the idea of spending the rest of your life encased in a floating boulder.
After being sent tumbling through the air by Cyclops’s eyebeams, Rock swiftly regained control of his own orientation and locomotion. He coasted above the pavement in a manner that reminded Cyclops of Charles Xavier’s anti-gravity wheelchair. He suspected a similar form of technology was at work within Rock’s monolithic cocoon. How else could Rock pilot himself so freely without any visible means of propulsion?
“Thought you’d thrown me for a loop with that sneak attack, did you?” Rock challenged Cyclops. “Tough luck, mutie. You just moved to the top of my hit list.”
The roughhewn granite that enclosed the man hardly looked very malleable, but in this case appearances were deceiving. Through the ruby lens in his visor, Cyclops saw Rock extrude a pair of gigantic concrete claws from his shell. Craggy fingers, sharp and jagged at their tips, reached for the X-Man, who threw himself backwards to avoid their clutches. His eyebeams lashed out at the grasping stone talons, blasting the points off the nearest of the claws so that they looked more like stumps than stalagmites.
“Arrgh!” Rock cried out, evidently sharing a psychic link with his prosthetic appendages. Having successfully declawed one stony hand, Cyclops aimed his force beam at the remaining claw, breaking it off at the wrist. La Ro-quette’s face contorted in pain, and Cyclops allowed himself to hope that the hostile cyborg might have learned his lesson.
“Had enough?” the X-Man asked. Banner said Rock was a bad apple, but maybe he could be made to see sense. “We don’t need to fight you. Just tell us what we want to know and we’ll go.”
“You’re not going anywhere but down!” Rock spat at him, saliva spraying from his lips. The truncated claws regenerated, growing new talons just as deadly as before. Rock zoomed across the wide thoroughfare at Cyclops, intent on skewering the mutant hero with his rocky projections. “I’ve speared the Hulk with my claws, so I’m not going to take any lip from some mutie troublemaker.”
Cyclops watched Rock speed toward him like a sentient asteroid.
I wonder if it’s too late to borrow Captain America’s shield, he wondered as he dropped to the pavement only a second before Rock’s claws would have impaled him. Rock’s momentum carried him over the prone X-Man. A closer shave than I want or need, he concluded, thankful as ever for all the hours he’d spent training in the Danger Room. He scrambled to his feet while Rock slowed to a stop, then spun around to face the X-Man once more. Noting the vengeful gleam in Rock’s dark eyes, Cyclops suddenly felt like a matador missing both his cape and his sword.
“Pretty slick move,” Rock conceded, “but you can’t 24 1
keep dodging me forever.” He retracted his concrete claws, replacing them with sharp-edged spikes that protruded from his cocoon in every direction. “Get ready to bleed, mutie.”
Cyclops knew better than to argue with this sort of unreasoning malice. Rock was right, though; it was only a matter of time before one of those spikes ran him through, unless he took out the man inside the shell. Forget the stone, he advised himself. Rock could regenerate his lethal appendages indefinitely. Instead Cyclops aimed his visor at Rock’s achilles’ heel: his exposed face.
A crimson beam shot from Cyclops’s unshielded eyes, but Rock was way ahead of him. The levitating boulder began spinning like a top, carrying La Roquette’s face out of the line of fire. Flaky chips of stone flew off the rotating Rock as Cyclops’s beam struck home, but his petrified adversary had become a blur. Whirling like a dervish, or perhaps the Tasmanian Devil in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, Rock came at the X-Men’s stalwart co-leader. His cyclonic rotation whipped up a fierce wind that raised a swirling cloud of dust beneath him. Cyclops held his ground, firing blindly at the twirling juggernaut, but trying to hit La Roquette’s face under these conditions was like playing roulette with eyebeams; the odds were against him.
Cyclops was forced to retreat, running back the way he and th
e Avengers had come. Rock can’t possibly see where’s he’s going while he’s spinning like that. He’s going to have to stop twirling sometime, just to find out where I am. That’s my chance, Cyclops theorized, so the X-Man zigzagged back and forth across the deserted street, finally taking refuge beneath the awning of a six-story apartment building.
Moving at random over the wide paved road, Rock came unnervingly close to the X-Man’s hiding place. The wind generated by the whirling cyborg threw dust in Cyclops’s face, but his visor protected his eyes from the abrasive particles—and vise versa. Cyclops held a gloved hand over his mouth and nose to keep from coughing or sneezing, and thus alerting Rock to his location.
He couldn’t be sure at first, but he thought that the spinning boulder was slowing down. His head leaned forward, his neck taut, as he waited tensely for an opportunity to strike. This was what a sharpshooter felt like, he imagined, right before he pulls the trigger. “Come on,” he whispered. “Give me a clean shot.”
Rock was definitely spinning slower now. Cyclops glimpsed La Roquette’s features as they whipped past him every other split-second, still moving too quickly to pose a viable target. Finally, the rotation slackened enough that Rock and Cyclops were able to lock eyes across a narrow strip of sidewalk.
There you are! they both must have thought simultaneously. Cyclops centered the cyborg’s scowling visage within his sights. Ready, aim ... fire!
He let loose his eyebeams, which streaked toward their target, but Rock had already formed a shield from his carapace of living stone, raising it in time to block the crimson forcebeam. Granite crunched beneath the impact of eye-beams, yet La Roquette’s vulnerable countenance was spared. Cyclops attempted to fire past the rectangular shield, which was connected to the core boulder by a thick gray pseudopod, only to find himself parried once more. “Not so fast, mutie,” Rock mocked him from behind his protective curtain of stone. “You didn’t think I was going to make it easy for you, did you?”
I guess not, Cyclops thought. Rock then proved he could attack and defend at the same time by extending a well-aimed spike at the cornered X-Man. The petrified spear tripled its length in a heartbeat, hurling at Cyclops like a jouster’s lance. His eyebeams darted downward, intercepting the deadly javelin before it could pierce his abdomen. Already, however, another spike was stretching toward him. How was he ever going to fend off all of Rock’s vicious jabs, let alone get past the murderous cyborg’s homegrown shield?
“Cyclops! Over here!” a deep voice cried out. Cyclops spotted Captain America several yards away, off to one side of Rock. The living legend of World War II held his own shield up high, catching the moonlight—and La Roquette’s reflection. Got it, Cyclops thought swiftly, comprehending at once the Avenger’s strategy. Twisting his body violently to one side, to avoid yet another oncoming stone pike, he fired his eyebeams at Captain America’s shield. The crimson rays caromed off the polished surface of Cap’s shield and back at Rock’s face.
From where he now stood, Cyclops couldn’t see the beam hit La Roquette where it hurt, but he could imagine the wide-eyed look of shock and alarm the man must have displayed just before several dozen foot-pounds of extra-dimensional energy wiped the sneer from his face. The X-Man heard a single shouted obscenity disturb the moonlit tranquility of Freehold, then the entire levitating boulder hit the pavement like, well, a rock. The spike-covered shell, looking something like a petrified porcupine, rolled back and forth for a moment or two, breaking off many of the concrete spines on its underside, before ceasing to move at all.
Cyclops ducked under a protruding spike and prodded Rock with his foot. The boulder continued to squat lifelessly on the pavement, suggesting that its animating intelligence was indeed out for the count. “Thanks for the use of your shield,” the X-Man called to Captain America. “Your timing couldn’t have been better.”
‘ ‘Just glad I could return the favor,’ ’ Cap said warmly, prompting Cyclops to recall that he had first fired his eye-beams at Rock to defend the Avenger. Cyclops stepped away from the fallen rock and surveyed the vicinity. The two super-powered teenagers, Hotshot and Jailbait, were both sprawled limply on or near the steps to the plaza. They didn’t look like they’d be giving anyone a hard time anytime soon; Hotshot, in particular, had a bruise on his chin that was getting darker by the moment.
“Those two give you any trouble?” he asked Cap.
“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” the Avenger said, with neither arrogance nor false modesty in his tone. He wasn’t bragging, just stating the facts. “Once you get past their specialized tricks, they’re still only a pair of inexperienced kids, with not much skill or training in hand-to-hand combat.” He flexed a set of sore knuckles beneath his scarlet gloves. “Hotshot’s got a bit of a glass jaw, to tell the truth.”
That left Ogress, Cyclops realized, who appeared to be having problems of her own. The mammoth she-creature stood ankle-deep in the basin of the fountain, where once a towering plume of water had leaped toward the sky. Inexplicably, the last Squad member still standing seemed gripped by some kind of seizure. Her marble-sized eyes, too small for the rest of her face, bulged from their undersized sockets while convulsive palpitations shook the enormous timbers of her legs and arms. Greenish foam frothed at the comers of her ape-like jaws, and she clawed at her chest with meaty fingers, shredding the front of her purple uniform, as if trying to extract the source of her agony from somewhere deep within her mighty frame.
Good Lord, Cyclops thought, experiencing a moment of panic, what if she’s having a heart attack? It was a terrifying idea; how in the world could you perform CPR on such a behemoth?
‘ ‘Wait a minute,’ ’ Cap said beside him. The veteran hero glanced around the street with a puzzled expression. “Where is the Vision?”
Cyclops noticed for the first time that the synthetic Avenger was missing. Had the android, so recently reassembled, been demolished again? If the Hulk could commit such an atrocity, why not Ogress as well? The worried X-Man hastily scanned the plaza for any evidence of disaster, such as bits and pieces of the artificial hero, and quickly spotted the Vision’s yellow cloak, floating in the fountain not far from Ogress’s quivering legs.
What does that mean? Cyclops wondered anxiously. If his latex cape had ended up discarded and drifting in the basin, like a greasy film upon the water, what had become of Vision himself?
“GRRR!”
A final, wrenching spasm shook Ogress, and her eyes rolled back so that only the bloodshot whites, streaked with grisly green veins, could be seen. She collapsed, toppling forward in a heap. The ponderous weight of her falling body smashed the rim of the basin and shook the ground beneath Cyclops’s feet. Water from the shattered fountain spilled out onto the plaza, drenching the marble tiles around the stricken giantess and lapping at the heroes’ boots.
Captain America rushed to Ogress’s side and placed a hand where her neck should have been. “I feel a pulse,” he reported with audible relief. Cyclops was glad to hear it, even if he remained unsure what had happened to the Riot Squad’s ferocious answer to She-Hulk. “She’s still breathing, too.”
An unexpected shudder rocked the unconscious monster, and Cap stepped back warily from her colossal form. Cyclops backed away, too, only to watch in surprise as a phantasmal green figure emerged from Ogress’s broad back without even rustling the fabric of her uniform. “You need not be concerned, Captain,” the Vision informed him calmly. “Ogress has suffered no permanent damage, merely a neurological shock sufficient to render her insensate for the time being.”
“I see,” Captain America said, nodding. He took the Vision’s startling reappearance in stride; having seen the immaterial android perform many similar stunts before. “Good work.”
I wonder if he can teach Shadow cat that trick? Cyclops thought. Like the Vision, the X-Men’s most precocious recruit could phase through solid objects, although Cyclops had never seen young Kitty Pryde incapacitate a living being as devastati
ngly as the android Avenger just had. Then again, he recalled, Shadowcat’s phasing invariably disrupted electronic equipment—like androids, perhaps? Hmm, you’ve got to wonder who would prove most dangerous to whom, the Vision or Kitty?
That was a question for another day, however. Here in Freehold, the night was not getting any shorter. Cyclops looked around the plaza, from which an entire underground city spread. There were altogether too many buildings to search effectively for the answers they sought. “Now what?” he asked his Avenging companions, daunted by the task ahead of them. ‘ ‘Go door to door?’ ’
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Cap said. Eyes widening, he pointed past the X-Man’s shoulder.
Cyclops spun around in time to see a peculiar optical phenomenon only a few yards away. Beneath the moonlight and the soft glow of streetlamps, a man-sized column of air shimmered above the marble tiles, like the ripples one sometimes saw above the blacktop on a hot day. The seeming mirage took on color and definition, presenting the image of a humanoid figure swiftly coming into focus. A hologram, Cyclops speculated, or the Leader’s matter transporter at work? He suspected the latter, and aimed his visor just in case.
In a matter of seconds, the figure looked as real and tangible as the rest of them. “That’s quite enough,” he stated decisively, his mild, phlegmatic voice sounding more bored than annoyed.
Was this the Leader? He looked much as Cyclops recalled the gamma-mutated mastermind was supposed to appear: a slight figure, with skin green as malachite, whose most predominant feature was a skull large enough to house an unusually well-endowed brain. The man’s elongated forehead rose twice as high as the rest of his face and his hairless cranium was not so much a dome as a silo with a rounded top. All in all, the implied cerebral capacity of the man’s head made Professor X look like a troglodyte.