Aside from the distinct green tint of his flesh, the rest of the man was unremarkable. He had a thin, unathletic build and, if not for his towering cranium, would have stood less than six feet tall. A purple nehru jacket and violet trousers echoed the color scheme of the Riot Squad’s uniforms and his hands were clasped before his chest in a meditative pose. Frankly, the man did not present a very threatening appearance, but Cyclops did not lower his guard. “Is this him?” he asked Captain America. “The Leader?’ ’
“No,” Cap said, “although the resemblance is striking, especially to the way the Leader looked when he first fought the Avengers.” Cyclops recalled that, in recent years, the Leader’s mutated skull had continued to swell, taking on mushroom-like contours, or so Banner reported.
“Great minds think alike and look alike, I suppose,” the
newcomer said. He seemed unoffended by the comparison. “You may call me Omnibus. I’m in charge of this city.” “Omnibus?” Cap asked.
The image shrugged. “I was once an encyclopedia salesmen, before my transfiguration. As the late, unlamented Leader once quipped, it was that or name me Britannica.” He rolled his eyes at the very notion. “He had a peculiar sense of humor, you see.”
“Right,” Cyclops commented brusquely, unconcerned about the idiosyncracies of the Leader’s funnybone. “The Hulk mentioned you earlier.”
“The Hulk!” Omnibus reacted negatively to the name. Much of his diffident manner slipped away as he regarded Cyclops anxiously. “That monster’s not coming back here, is he?” "
“Not unless there’s a reason,” Captain America stated, his shield at his side. “Our apologies, by the way, for whatever damage your city sustained during our altercation with the Riot Squad, but you should know that your people started the fight.”
Omnibus looked unconcerned by the recent violence. “No harm done.” He coldly surveyed the vanquished Squad members, making tsk-ing sounds with his tongue. “Obviously, our security forces are in need of additional combat experience.”
Cyclops got the impression that Omnibus had deliberately sicced the Riot Squad on them, simply to test their fighting abilities. “For what purpose?” Cyclops asked, suspicious.
“Why, to better defend Freehold, of course,” Omnibus replied, perhaps a touch too quickly. Cyclops found himself doubting the man’s sincerity; could it be that he had other plans for his super-powered storm troopers? “But you have yet to explain your own reasons for visiting our isolated and reasonably inaccessible domain,” Omnibus pointed out, effectively changing the subject.
“Fair enough,” Cap admitted. “Let me get straight to the point. We have reason to suspect that two of our respective teammates, the Scarlet Witch and Rogue, have been abducted by the Leader. Evidence of gamma-based teleportaiion technology, of the sort formerly employed by the Leader, was found at the scenes of both disappearances. And, according to a reliable source, this city of yours is the Leader’s last known address.”
“That’s true enough,” Omnibus conceded, “but Freehold’s singular founder has not been seen alive since that terrible occasion, over a year ago, when a Hydra assault team invaded our city, in tandem with the Hulk. I myself personally saw the Leader cut down by gunfire during the resulting chaos, shortly before his laboratory was consumed by a dreadful conflagration.” He dipped his lofty forehead in memory of the dearly departed. “I’m afraid there’s no way he could have survived.”
Spoken like someone who has never seen Magneto or the Shadow King return from the dead a dozen times, Cyclops thought, then asked. ‘‘But you never actually saw his body?”
The Vision sounded equally skeptical. “The Leader has been reported dead on many previous occasions, but such pronouncements have always proved premature.’4
“Let me assure you,” Omnibus said, shaking his head, “after the battle we searched every square inch of the wrecked laboratory. All we ever found were minute traces of his blood. Green blood, naturally. Like my own.” Cyclops could not miss the note of pride in his voice. Just what the world needs, he thought dourly. A selfappointed successor to the Leader.
“I can’t help noticing that you’ve helped yourself to the
Leader’s trans-mat technology. Perhaps the Leader isn’t the guilty party after all. You could have beamed our friends away,” Cyclops said.
“That’s a plausible hypothesis,” Omnibus admitted, unfazed by the accusation. “I can’t deny that I have inherited many of the fruits of my predecessor’s genius. But what would be my motive? Naturally, I have heard of the two remarkable ladies the Captain mentioned—since the ... unfortunate ... incident at Middletown, I’ve become a veritable fount of information—but I certainly have no compelling reason to abduct either woman, let alone bring down the combined wrath of the X-Men and the Avengers on our humble community. Please believe me, the people of Freehold, myself included, wish nothing more than to be left alone and in peace.” He assumed a benign, smugly serene expression, like that of a pale green bodhissattva. “Furthermore, as far as we know, the mortal remains of the Leader were completely incinerated in the fire. For better or for worse, he is no more.’’
Times like this Cyclops wished he was a telepath like Jean or the Professor. I’d like to read Omnibus’s mind right now, find out what’s he hiding. He didn’t buy the man’s peace-loving act for a minute; Cyclops had met too many self-important, would-be dictators not to spot one more when he saw one. Omnibus’s ambitions would not be confined to Freehold forever, that was for sure. In his gut, however, Cyclops sensed the man Was telling the truth about one thing; he had nothing to do with yesterday’s kidnappings in New York.
They would not find Rogue or Wanda here.
fn vain pour eviter les reponse ameres ...”
The Beast sang along with his favorite recording of Bizet’s Carmen as he held down the fort at Avengers Mansion. Just as Carmen herself passed the time reading her fortune in the cards, the shaggy blue mutant perused the latest reports from S.H.I.E.L.D,, searching for a hidden pattern that would reveal the malevolent purpose at work behind recent events, events that had brought the X-Men and the Avengers together, then sent them spreading out across the globe.
UFO sightings. Kidnapped super-heroines. Stolen Sentinels. Gamma rays. The Beast had to admit, it was quite a puzzle. He crouched atop the circular meeting table, sorting through freshly-printed hard copies of the reports with his toes. A pitcher of hot coffee sat dangerously close to the piled papers, along with a tray of finger sandwiches that Jarvis had generously provided before retiring for the evening. A pair of wire reading glasses perched upon his nose, the Beast nibbled on a cucumber sandwich while perusing his handwritten notes one more time.
In truth, he had made some little progress already. According to his estimations, two of the UFO sightings reported by S.H.I.E.L.D. corresponded almost exactly with the abductions of, first, the Scarlet Witch, then Rogue, which seemed to confirm everyone’s assumption that the
aerial assault on the Helicarrier, conducted later that same day, bore a direct connection to Wanda and Rogue’s enigmatic disappearances.
A third UFO sighting, made much further upstate, troubled him, primarily because he had yet to link that appearance of the elusive aircraft to any contemporaneous event. Surely, the mystery ship had not been out joyriding on that particular occasion! No, he had to assume that the UFO had been about some business of which he as yet remained unaware. What, pray tell, could that be? the Beast wondered. Last he’d heard, no one up in the hinterlands had reported any missing mutants or purloined hunter-robots.
The Beast glanced at the silent communications console. He did not resent being left behind—someone had to stay here to monitor communications and coordinate the two teams’ activities—but he was anxious to receive word from his farflung friends and colleagues. The imbroglio at Muir Island particularly disturbed him, since there seemed little doubt that Bobby; Kurt, and Moira were in immediate peril from the ominously-named Gamma Sen
tinels. Granted, he was quick to remind himself, Iceman and Nightcrawler had each survived numerous encounters with various generations of Sentinels, so there was no reason to assume the worst in this instance, not until he had a compelling reason to do so.
A color photo of a bizarre green countenance, freshly downloaded from the Avengers’ database, caught his eye. The infamous Leader, he decided, certainly lent new and very literal meaning to the hackneyed phrase “a swelled head.” The Beast did not believe for a second that this virtuoso of villainy had gone to his eternal reward as reported; the Leader was surely sequestered in some obscure location, far from prying eyes and inquiring minds.
Indeed, the Leader’s bulging file revealed an inveterate fondness for hidden strongholds in unexpected and remarkably inaccessible locales. A desert lair in New Mexico. A hidden city beneath a glacier. A cloaked space station in orbit above the earth. Where, I wonder, might he be hiding nowadays?
He looked again at those intriguing UFO reports. He felt sure the answer lay in those cryptic accounts of aerodynamic hijinks. He could practically feel his impatient unconscious nudging him toward some waiting revelation, had he but eyes to see it.
Is there anything about their flight plans, he speculated, that might point to a common point of origin? Earlier calculations along those lines had proved unrewarding, yet he felt compelled to noodle with the data again.
Counting the forcible boarding of the Helicarrier by those fraudulent X-Men, somewhere over Montana, he had four documented sightings of the UFO, complete with precise readings of its speed and heading each time it appeared and disappeared from surveillance. Trying to track all four flights back to a single location, in the continental United States or elsewhere, had led to naught but to a dispiriting sense of futility.
But what if he was losing the forest for the flight plan trees? Maybe the answer lay not in the particulars of all the sightings, but only in the UFO’s first and final manifestations. Yes! he thought enthusiastically, taking another gulp of liquid caffeine.
Let’s assume the UFO came a long way from anywhere, as the Leader’s proclivities presuppose. Then wouldn 7 its pilots have wanted to take care of all their inequitable errands in one trip, before returning to the Leader’s exclusive enclave? Of course! the Beast concluded, energetically endorsing his own supposition.
In which case, the UFO would have zoomed first to New
York City, to pick up the Scarlet Witch and Rogue, then zipped upstate for who knew what, before flying west to intercept the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier over the great state of Montana. Then, and only then, its felonious scavenger hunt completed, would the UFO have returned to its home berth—wherever that might be.
So, he silently asked the empty conference room, given the trajectories reported by Nick Fury’s assiduous agents, from whence did the UFO come and to where was it homeward bound?
He did the calculations in his head first, then scribbled with a pencil over the napkins left behind by the sandwiches he had consumed. “Oh, my stars and garters!” he exclaimed, lifting the spectacles from his nose to peer at the surprising results with his naked eyes.
His hypothesis had yielded two probable locations for the launching pad of the busy UFO, and hence the Leader’s secluded abode: downtown Duluth, Minnesota. Or the moon.
The former hardly fit the Leader’s modus operandi, but the moon ... ! You could hardly get more remote than that. The Beast somersaulted across the table, clapping his feet together in glee. Intuitively, he knew he had arrived at the truth. The Leader was on the moon!
And so, presumably, were Wanda and Rogue.
He bounded from the table, eager to share his epiphany with his fellow X-Men and Avengers. But just as his sasquatch-sized soles smacked against the floor, within easy reach of the communications console, a seismic jolt vibrated the very walls of the venerable mansion.
An earthquake—in Manhattan? he marveled, before hearing ponderous footsteps stomping up the stairs from the foyer below. The Beast gulped nervously. Please, he be-seeched the fickle Fates, let this merely be our old friend Hercules, with a bit too much wine in him.
Instead a monumental green figure filled the doorway, casting a shadow the size of a lunar eclipse. Carmen continued to play, reaching its violent climax as Don Jose stalked the streets of Seville, driven to hot-blooded murder while the roar of the corridia provided a sanguinary accompaniment.
“Hulk?” the Beast asked uncertainly. Every one of his bushy blue bristles seemed to be standing on end. “What are you doing here? Where are the others?”
“Identified: mutant designate: Beast,” the jade giant stated implacably. He stepped into the conference room, rattling the floor with his heavy tread. ‘ ‘Threat assessment: minimal. Immediate priority: termination.”
Carmen screamed her last aria. The Beast knew exactly how she felt.
Chapter Ten
The sun was rising over Muir Island as Iron Man inspected the stiff, unmoving form of the Doc Samson-Sentinel. A pretty good likeness, he decided, all the more impressive when you consider all the nasty surprises they built into this baby.
Thanks to some super-powered teamwork, the third floor laboratory of the Genetic Research Centre no longer looked like the interior of an old-fashioned icebox. The Hulk, not surprisingly, had declined to help out at all, instead slouching against the butchered Cray and shooting dirty looks at Wolverine. The irritated brute had yet to forgive the Canadian X-Man for letting his mechanical doppleganger escape the island.
Iron Man regretted letting one of the Gamma Sentinels get away, too, but bowed to the inevitable. These things happened; he’d be lying if he said he snagged the bad guy every time himself. Sometimes you just had to be satisfied with chasing a dangerous felon off before too many innocents got hurt.
We’ll catch up with that Sentinel eventually, Iron Man resolved. How long could a mechanical Hulk remain hidden anyway?
Speaking of blameless people getting hurt, Nightcrawler limped toward Iron Man, an aluminum crutch under his right shoulder. Dr. MacTaggert had already applied a cast around the blue-furred mutant’s fractured ankle and given Nightcrawler something for the pain. Despite his injury, the hobbled X-Man seemed in admirably good spirits. Is that the painkillers, Iron Man wondered, or just his natural personality?
“Mein gott, that thing is realistic,” Nightcrawler said of the Doc Samson-Sentinel, “although not nearly as ugly as the mechanical Abomination that chased me around downstairs.” He poked the inert figure with his tail. “Ach, I think I liked it better when a Sentinel looked like a Sentinel. At least you always knew where you stood.”
Iron Man recalled that the Abomination-Sentinel still rested lifelessly at the bottom of the pit the Hulk-Sentinel had tom through the floor. Given that the armored Avenger was the strongest person present, excluding the steadfastly uncooperative Hulk, Iron Man realized he’d have to personally retrieve the mock Abomination from the basement before returning the damaged Gamma Sentinels to S.H.I.E.L.D., where they would promptly become Nick Fury’s problem.
First, though, he wanted to take a closer look at Doc Samson-Sentinel’s internal mechanisms. Technically, that was probably classified technology, but Iron Man felt he had a right to know just how much of it was lifted from Tony Stark’s patented research and inventions. Lord knows, he thought, it wouldn’t be the first time those cloak-and-dagger types at S.H.I.E.L.D. had twisted my own discoveries to dubious ends.
“Excuse me,” he said to Nightcrawler, gesturing for the German mutant to step away from the Sentinel while Iron Man subjected it to an exploratory scan along the entire electromagnetic spectrum. His multipurpose sensor beam radiated from his chest projector, probing beneath the Sentinel’s crimson uniform and synthetic skin for vital data, such as the composition of the various alloys composing the Sentinel, the structure of its cybernetic nervous system, the amount of available memory in its central processor, its primary and secondary operating systems, and so on. He was both amused and
distressed, but more the latter than the former, to discover that the sophisticated microcircuitry maintaining the Sentinel’s artificial intelligence bore a suspicious resemblance to his own ground-breaking HOMER technology, otherwise known as a Heuristically-Operative Matrix-Emulation Rostrum. I think Tony Stark needs to have some serious words with the bigwigs at S.H.I.E.L.D., after we ’ve taken care of the Leader.
A dense layer of lead shielding enclosed the portable gamma reactor that theoretically provided the Gamma Sentinels with the atomic energy that powered them. Turning his most sensitive instrumentation upon the reaction chamber, which was located, with a fine sense of verisimilitude, just where Doc Samson’s heart would be, Iron Man expected to find the reactor shut down entirely, its radioactive isotopes cooling into unreactive slag.
Instead he registered a gamma spike of over 500 kilo-electron volts—and climbing. “Good Lord!” he exclaimed, the shock in his voice catching the attention of every human, mutant, and gamma-spawned behemoth in the demolished laboratory.
“What is it, my friend?” Storm asked him, soaring over the open pit to join Iron Man and Nightcrawler by the supposedly inactive Sentinel. The breeze her flight generated blew bits of shattered plaster and circuitry across the lab. “Is there something wrong?”
“You could say that,” Iron Man said tensely. He rapidly recalibrated his instruments, but the results were no better. The gamma emissions coming from the Sentinel’s interior had already increased 32 percent. Within the shielded heart of the robot, he realized, electrons and positrons were colliding at a geometric rate, annihilating each other in subatomic reactions that spewed out quantities of gamma radiation proportional to the mass of each electron destroyed. The discharged radiation subsequently energized more electrons and positrons, leading to further collisions, resulting in yet more unleashed gamma rays. “It’s a chain reaction building inside the Gamma Sentinel,” he said to the others, his hushed voice struggling to convey the magnitude of what his sensors were recording. He stepped back from the Doc Samson robot duplicate, knowing all the while that he wasn’t getting nearly far enough away to survive what was coming.