A Captain Scarlet/X-Men Multiverse Story by Caroline Smith

Adam Svenson stared with haunted eyes at Karen Wainwright, the so-called White Queen of the Spectrum Society, as the woman he thought he loved tortured his friends right in front of his eyes. They had been resuscitated briefly, in order for their cries to be heard at the other end of the line, and then, almost immediately afterwards, they were sedated again. Through the entire nightmare, Adam had been powerless to do or say anything. He felt sick to his stomach.

Henderson spent a few more minutes talking to Karen. Adam watched her, the way her gaze flicked his way when she thought Henderson wasn’t looking. Finally, Henderson left the laboratory, leaving him and Karen together.

Her high heels clicked across the floor, until she was a foot away from him. For a long moment they stared at one another – frozen in time. She ripped the gag from his lips and he screwed up his eyes at the sting. When he opened them a second later he saw the hard-set line of her face, and yet beyond the expression, in the depth of her eyes, there was something else…

A wild and crazy notion entered his head – the only thing in his power that he had to turn the tables on the Spectrum Society. Despite her appalling actions, he was sure she still felt something for him, and perhaps he could use that, to resurrect the young woman he now truly believed might be hidden, deep down under all that protective armour that she wore.

But, am I so sure, even with what happened between us, that I can reach her?

“Do you get some kind of kick out of hurting people?” he said.

She moved closer to him and touched his temple with one of her long fingers. She slowly and deliberately scored a fingernail down his cheek. And he closed his eyes, remembering how in another time and place, those same fingers had caressed him to sweet jagged ecstasy.

“I do what has to be done. Gray would hardly be convinced of our intentions otherwise.”

“So why didn’t you try your mind-probes on me?”

The fingers stopped their caress and her eyes narrowed. “Don’t push me.”

“Or, just maybe, you care more about me than you really want to admit.”

“Nice try, but you’re wasting your time.”

She snatched her hand away from his face and turned her back on him, heading for the door.

Okay.

“What made you into such a bitch, Karen?”

She whirled around and he felt his throat tighten. He hadn’t thought her eyes could get any harder than they already were.

“Life,” she answered in a flat voice.

“Oh, yeah, that. Funny, we all have to suffer it. But we poor stunted souls on our lonely islands, we don’t have the privilege of being able to share our thoughts and emotions, as you can. Just imagine what you could have done with a power like yours – a gift – a wonderful gift – but you’ve perverted it and yourself. Does the realisation of what you’ve done really make you feel happy – deep down?

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“I know you aren’t happy, Karen, I can feel it, and I guess in some way, you’re not to blame for any of this; it must have been hell, locked away for all these years.”

Her eyes flared wide, uncertain.

“I know that you were placed in a mental asylum, at fifteen, by your parents, because you heard voices.”

The slap echoed loudly in the laboratory. “You have no right to pry into my life,” she said in a voice as cold as the wastes of the Arctic, and yet, there was turmoil behind her eyes.

He clicked his jaw; that had hurt. “No mind blast? I’m honoured.”

“My mental power could turn you into a jabbering, drooling idiot, right this second.”

“So, what’s stopping you?”

She didn’t answer him, but he noticed her chest rising and falling, as if she was fighting for breath.

“What hold has Henderson got over you anyway? Has he warped your mind so much that you can’t think for yourself?”

“I can think just fine.”

“No, I don’t think you can, and I don’t think all this is what you want – not really. In fact you know what I think? That deep down, you’re still that frightened young girl who was sent away. I want to bet you’re so terrified of anything that might make you vulnerable again. You daren’t let anyone too close, or you just might crack wide open –”

“Shut up, damn you!”

Her hand slammed palm down against his forehead, and was followed by a savage agony; raw fire that burned every nerve ending in his entire body. He sagged against the gurney, his breath ragged, and his eyes feeling like they were melted into his skull. Dimly, through the pain, he saw Karen’s face contort with myriad emotions; bitterness, regret and shame, struggling with the years of desire for control.

Come on Karen, I know you’re in there. He willed the thought to her mind, knowing she could pick it up. But she turned away from him, staggering, and sat down heavily on a chair near him.

“I’m sorry, I only want to help you,” he said.

“You have a strange way of showing it.”

“Karen,” he pleaded. “We all have had to suffer in some way for being born the way we are, but at some point we have to stop blaming others and take responsibility for ourselves.”

She whirled to face him and he saw the ragged trail of tears along her cheekbones. “Well, I took responsibility; I paid back everything they owed me.”

“Not like this. This doesn’t resolve anything.”

“And how the hell would you know, Mr. Know-it-all Svenson, with your happy childhood and loving parents? How could you know what I feel? They put me in that place – left me there to rot, beside all the other lunatics. They didn’t want their precious lives – their so-wonderful existence - to be tainted by even a whiff of scandal.”

“Surely they were only trying to help you?”

She gave a shriek of laughter, and he heard the hysterical edge in it. “Oh, just like you’re trying to do. I wasn’t crazy when I went in there, but by God I nearly was when I finally escaped. Drugs, electro-therapy, oh, my parents agreed to anything just so I could be normal again. All I ever wanted was for them to love me, and they ignored me, ignored my cries for help.”

“How did you escape – from the sanatorium?”

“One of the wardens, I always saw him watching me, and I could tell what he wanted. I hadn’t spent my time in that God-forsaken place entirely for nothing. I found that my mind was capable of things beyond hearing people’s thoughts.”

“You seduced him?” Adam failed to keep moral indignation from his voice.

“I had to get myself out of there.” She smeared away tears, fighting now to regain her self-control, and Adam suddenly felt out of his depth; perhaps he was a fool to believe he could repair the damage to this young woman. Nevertheless, he tried to reach out to her for one last time.

“Don’t do Henderson’s dirty work, Karen. Stop now before it’s too late, before you go down the path so far you can’t find your way back.”

“Forget your amateur psychiatry. There’s nothing you can do for me. I’ve had too many years of using my mind to get what I want; you have no idea what it’s like.”

“My God, it really is like a drug, isn’t it?” he said, and her haunted eyes told him he had hit the target dead centre. He felt an uncontrollable wave of sympathy. “You’re addicted; you’ve found the ultimate stimulant.”

“Yes, God help me, and I never cared –” Karen trailed off, but he heard her voice ringing in his head.

Until now.

“Henderson won’t let me go,” she said in a flat voice, as if all the emotion had suddenly drained out of her.

Adam felt an unreasonable stab of jealousy. “What is he to you anyway, some sort of Svengali figure? Your lover?”

“Yes, he was. And when you join the Inner Circle of the Spectrum Society, there’s no way you can leave.”

The way she said this sent a chill into his heart. “Professor Gray is a telepath; he can help you. I know he can. You don’t have to do this anymore.”

“I’ve said enough, Adam. I need to go,” she said, and rose from the chair. He took a last look at her face, that haughty mask of control in place again.

“Damn you. For God’s sake, just think about it. You have to let us go!” he shouted at her departing back.

But all he heard was the sound of her heels clicking across the floor, and then the slamming of the laboratory door. He threw his head back on the gurney in frustration and anger as Juliette and Brad remained comatose – silent witnesses to his failure.

Gray called them all together in the basement conference room to discuss the ultimatum from John Henderson. Edward had been burrowed away in his laboratory and was horrified when Gray brought him up to date with the situation. Fraser insisted that Magnolia was kept under surveillance and out of earshot; he wasn’t going to take any chances she would find some way to contact the blackmailers again. Paul privately agreed it was a sensible course of action, but as he watched the girl leave with Edward, her face a mask of dejection, he found only pity in his heart for her. She struck him as a lost soul, a bit of a loner, much like himself. Something inexplicably told him that her part in this was not as clear cut as it first appeared; she just didn’t strike him as a cold-blooded betrayer. For the moment, however, he thought he would keep his thoughts about the matter to himself; after all, it wasn’t his friends who had been tortured, hundreds of miles away.

They sat around the table, tight-lipped. Fraser looked even moodier than usual and Paul was under no illusions as to why. He suspected that the American blamed him for all of this, and in a way, Paul thought grimly, he was at fault. Ever since the first moment he had encountered the X-Men, he had caused them nothing but trouble with a capital T - Dropped into their cosy little group like a fox in a chicken–coop. He glanced involuntarily across at Dianne, her face a picture of anxiety. You’ve tried everything in your power to help me, and look at where it’s got you.

Gray’s voice broke into his gloomy reverie. “Well, at least we now know where our people are being held. So I’ll throw this meeting over to suggestions.”

Fraser opened his mouth to reply when Paul leant forward, interrupting him before he could say a word.

“There’s nothing to discuss. I give myself up to these guys, whoever they are, end of story. This has gone too far already, and I can’t allow them to hurt your people any more on my account. I was always going to leave after you sorted my memories out, looks like this is a good time.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw some fleeting emotion cross Dianne’s face. Dear God, how much he wanted to talk to her in her head – to know what she was thinking. Did she really feel something for him – or was her emotion just compassion? He tossed the yearning away – he didn’t need any distractions now that he had come to his decision.

“I had hoped you had begun to feel a part of this extended family, Paul,” said Gray, and Paul thought he could detect just the slightest hint of disappointment in his voice. “Whatever action we plan to take, I don’t expect that you should have to sacrifice yourself to these people.”

“I appreciate that,” he said, “You don’t know how much – really. But, it seems that all my life, every time I got close to people, they got hurt. It’s far safer if I just leave, give myself up to them; that way they’ll leave you alone. What if next time they were to attack this mansion – you have kids here, think of them.”

“I refuse to be blackmailed,” Gray said.

Fraser spoke up: “I don’t trust him – this guy, Henderson, if that’s who he really is. What’s to say he doesn’t just keep Juliette and the others, even if he gets what he wants?”

“What are you suggesting?” Gray asked.

“That we do what he says we’re not supposed to; follow Metcalfe and go in after our people –”

“And get Paul out of there too.” Patrick added. “We can’t really expect to leave him in their clutches, not after all we’ve done to keep him out of them. Right, Rick?”

Dianne placed a hand on Fraser’s arm, and said: “We don’t know what other terrible things they might do to Paul. We can’t allow it to happen – you know we can’t.”

Fraser seemed to be struggling with himself, and for a few minutes the silence in the conference room hung like a heavy curtain. At last he said: “I know.”

Paul pursed his lips and a feeling he didn’t recognise stole over him.

After three exhausting hours, during which time they prepared a plan of rescue, Gray finally opened the doors from the conference room to find a small group of students outside in the basement corridor. The rumour mill had run riot, and they crowded around Gray’s wheelchair, firing off a barrage of questions in excited, anxious voices.

“What’s happened to Ms Pontoin?”

“– We heard they were attacked at the mall; Davy Parks was there with his mom, and he just called me about it,” Joe McClaine jabbered, pushing his glasses up onto his freckled nose.

“– Where’s Magnolia?”

“We’re gonna rescue them, aren’t we?”

Gray waved his hands. “Quiet, please, all of you.” The clamour died to a hush and Gray felt a small knot in his throat as he noted their tension-filled faces. But they deserved the truth.

“Yes, it’s true, I’m afraid.”

“But why?” a girl called Cecily wailed.

“The people who were searching for Paul; they tried to capture him, they didn’t succeed in doing that, but they took the others as prisoners instead.”

“Are we gonna rescue them?” Joe shouted.

“Bags I be on the team!” Chip Morrison, another young mutant, added his voice to the general clamour.

“Magnolia was going to coach me today,” Cecily said in a dejected tone.

Gray shook his head, amazed at the resilience of youth, for some of them looked eager to rush off and save their teachers from the bad guys at that very moment. He said gravely, “We will get them back, of that you can be certain. But Cecily, I’m afraid Magnolia was sent here to spy on us – to reveal Mr Metcalfe’s whereabouts to his enemies.”

There were looks of dazed astonishment on the young faces.

“Not Magnolia, surely there must be some mistake,” Cecily wailed.

Gray shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry, but it’s the truth of the matter. I know how hard it is for you to deal with all of this, but the way you can all help us best is to continue with your life as normal. I’ve cancelled classes for the next couple of days while we sort things out.”

“Are we going to the police?” another said.

“Not yet, and all of you must promise me that you won’t say a word of this to anyone outside the school; do you understand?”

Heads bobbed and nodded, but not even the thought of some unanticipated free time could chase away the sadness on their faces.

Paul hummed quietly along to the radio as the black saloon ate up the miles to their destination. Beside him, in the passenger seat, Magnolia slept, her dark head facing away from him, her hands gloved and bound so she couldn’t use them to attack him. He hadn’t been happy about Fraser’s suggestion but he supposed he saw the sense in it.

The plan they had hatched to rescue the others and, hopefully save his own skin into the bargain, was all good and well; but he wondered just how much chance they had of pulling it off and, for the hundredth time, he asked himself just why he was doing this instead of just making a run for it, and he kept coming up with the same answer.

Because I have to.

He saw a diner up ahead, and made a sudden decision. He flicked on the aural commlink. Fraser wasn’t sure how reliable his ability to telepathically chat with Dianne was – or that was his story anyway - so they’d wired him up. He’d have no choice but to get rid of it once they reached journey’s end. Afterwards, his untried mental-link with Dianne would be their only way of keeping in touch if things got out of hand.

He heard Fraser’s voice in his ear. “What’s up? You can’t be there already?”

“I’m making a quick rest stop.”

He could almost feel the American frown. “That isn’t a good idea, what about the girl?”

“She’s been perfectly behaved, and I’ll make sure it stays that way.”

“You’d better. Don’t screw this up, Metcalfe. She escapes or causes a scene, you’ll be signing the other’s – ”

“You have my word.”

“What’s your estimated time of arrival?”

“About another hour and a half counting this stop.”

“Right, we’ll take off in the jet to get us there ahead of you. Stop about three miles from the facility and signal us. Then we’ll make our way on foot. At that point we’ll have to assume you and Dianne are able to maintain contact telepathically. Sign in when you’re within a mile from the facility.”

Paul took a deep breath and gently shook Magnolia’s shoulder to wake her. She tumbled out of her doze, her eyes wide and startled as she realised where she was.

He thumbed at the diner on his right. “Fancy a cuppa? I’m parched.”

She shrugged and indicated her bonds. He untied her, hoping his sixth sense wasn’t telling him lies. “Are you going to be a good girl and stay right by me?”

After her initial surprise died down, she gave him a nod. Paul got out of the car and escorted her into the glaringly-lit interior. They sidled into opposite sides of a booth and Paul ordered coffees and pastries for them both. As they waited, he watched her, tight-lipped and taut-strung. The waitress poured coffees, and afterwards they sipped out another uncomfortable silence. Finally she seemed to tire of his appraisal and flushed beneath her dark skin.

Paul was a trained soldier; his former life had relied on reading signs and minutiae other people would normally ignore. Right now, he was convinced that Magnolia Jones wasn’t keen to return to her masters, and for some bizarre reason, given that she had betrayed him, the notion bothered him.

“You must really hate me,” she said in a quiet voice, breaking the tortured silence.

“I can’t find it in me to hate you, Magnolia. I don’t know why, but I feel we’re not so different, you know. What were you really doing in my room that first night?”

She shrugged. “Just curious, I guess; needed to see this guy I was supposed to be spyin’ on. When you raked me with those claws of yours, maybe I felt it was some sort of warped justice.”

He grimaced. “You still don’t think I did it on purpose?”

She shook her head and took a deep breath. Her words came out quickly, as if she had finally tired of her reticence. “Betrayin’ you –and the others – just makes me hate myself.”

“They have a way of getting under your skin, don’t they?”

“Yeah, they sure do. At times I found myself wishin’ I really was just a mutant they’d found and I could stay at the mansion, the school, forever, work with the kids and have a good life. I wanted so badly to tell the truth – but I was so scared. Those guys who sent me to the school to spy on you – they’re bad. I knew it and I didn’t know what might happen to me if I disobeyed them. Do you believe me?”

He saw the tell-tale shimmer of moisture in her eyes. “Yes, I think I do. I just wish you could have trusted Gray and his people enough to believe they could have helped you.”

“Brad said the same thing, not long after I came to the mansion. He wanted to help me so much, he was a good friend. I feel such a fraud, such a coward and now he’s –”

She wiped her eyes and nose as the tears started to spill over now. “And the kids – they know about me, don’t they? They all looked at me in the hallway as we were leaving with such awful looks on their faces –”

She put her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking in silence. Paul didn’t think it was an act. He reached across and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“So what do you want, Magnolia?”

She swallowed again, and took another deep breath before she answered him. “I thought I knew. I thought that I’d already found someone who cared about mutants, about me and my stepbrother, but seeing all of you - living with you all - made me realise what I had was just a fantasy. It took seeing it at a different angle to know it, I guess.”

He smiled in understanding.

“I’m sorry, I’m rambling,” she said, looking up at him. “Anyway, how can you be so calm about this? I don’t know what they want with you, but I know it can’t be for any good.”

The conversation halted as the waitress came over to refill their cups. When she was once again out of earshot, Paul changed the subject. “Do you want to go back to these people?”

She stirred another sugar into the coffee and seemed once again to retreat into her self-imposed shell, not meeting his eyes. “What I want doesn’t matter. I’m a spy; I’m the one who sold you down the river, so why should you care what I want? Anyway, if I don’t return, they might make it worse for Brad and the others and I sure won’t be the cause of any more hurt.”

“It’s never too late, I know that. Why don’t you run, get away from here? I’ll say you escaped. No one has to know.”

She shook her head vehemently. “No way, I did enough to endanger all of your lives. I’m not runnin’ away again.”

Karen paced up and down in the bathroom after she left Adam Svenson. Her heart thumped with the adrenaline rushing through her body. She wasn’t used to losing the control her life had been built around. It had given her a purpose when she felt she had lost her way in the nightmare of her teens.

When she caught sight of her reflection in the long wall of mirrors, she was shocked at the stranger that stared back at her. Her face was pale, streaked with tears mingled with mascara. She stopped pacing and leant over a sink, ran the faucet, and splashed some water over her cheeks in an attempt to repair some of the damage. Henderson and Kruger would expect her to join them soon; she couldn’t afford to let them know what had transpired between her and the prisoner.

With his mind and body, Henderson had moulded her, like Galatea, into his White Queen of the Inner Circle. She met him at a recruiting drive at Yale, after she fled the sanatorium. Back then, she called herself ‘Honey’ Wainwright and the money for her studies came courtesy of a visit to the family banker. It hadn’t taken much effort to use her telepathy to ‘persuade’ him to change the details of her account so that she was able to access her frozen trust fund.

It was Henderson who finally wrested her inheritance back from hungry relatives, once he’d discovered her haunted past; secretly buying up all the shares and returning the company to her. She had been swept away by the sexual power of the man, and the excitement he offered, even more so when she discovered that he knew and understood the telepathic power she possessed, and didn’t find it abhorrent. When their sexual relationship finally ended – he was too egotistical to remain with one woman for long – Karen was devastated. However, still in thrall to him – her saviour, she continued to be bound in allegiance to both him and his Inner Circle. But, she had long ago promised herself she didn’t need love.

She wiped her face dry, and reapplied her make-up. But her hands shook as she did so, because she still couldn’t get that weekend she’d spent with Adam Svenson out of her head. She couldn’t forget the simple joy of lying in his arms, of his heartbeat in tune with hers. Something about him threatened to turn the fragile stasis of her carefully constructed world crashing down around her, and looking back, she imagined she had known it from the moment she set eyes on him in that crowded ballroom at the Spectrum Society. He had started the melting of the heart she had believed buried under the ice of her resolve. But there was only one problem. They were on opposite sides.

She swallowed, fluffing her hair and taking several deep breaths to calm herself. It was time for the White Queen to return.

Under the cover of darkness, Rick piloted the X-Zero towards Henderson Technologies, his hands firmly gripping the controls. For some time since they’d left the mansion, he had surrendered to the minutiae of flying, the feel of the sleek, beautiful craft under his command; it was a hell of a lot better than brooding needlessly over the mission ahead. There were way too many variables, and despite the number of times he and the others had thrashed out all the possible scenarios for a rescue – and at one point he and Metcalfe almost came to blows – they still had a thirty-percent possibility that it could all go to hell in a handbasket. Metcalfe, he admitted grudgingly, knew his stuff, obviously had field experience of getting hostages out of tricky situations against all the odds, and most of the people he’d had working with him hadn’t had the extraordinary abilities of the X-Men. But the Spectrum Society had a lot of firepower at their disposal, and they weren’t afraid to use it.

He felt a hand on his arm, and turned to catch Dianne’s face smiling encouragingly at him, although her smile was a little forced, as if she had gotten hold of the strands of his thoughts. He hadn’t even tried to stop her when she insisted on coming with them - just one look from her had killed his objection at birth. He realised she possessed a fiery spirit beneath that docile front. Maybe she always had – he’d just never seen it before – or wanted to.

He removed one hand from the controls and placed it upon hers, their fingers entwined in a gesture of solidarity. The time for drills and practice was now over. They were going to rescue their friends and they might get hurt in the process, for despite their extra-ordinary abilities any one of them, apart from Metcalfe, could die with a bullet between their eyes.

Sweeping in close to the coordinates displayed on the on-board computer, Rick scanned the ground for signs of the facility. Bright lights in the distance announced their target – and for miles around dark woods spread across the land. He flicked on the jet’s infra-red sensors. They needed somewhere to leave the X-Zero, somewhere out of sight but close enough to make a fast getaway if they needed one, which he was pretty damn sure they would.

There.

He could hardly believe his luck. The sensors showed a small clearing within the woods. Some tree felling had taken place; there were low stumps scattered around and a man-made path leading out of the wood to the main road. He judged the space was large enough to land the jet safely so he switched to VTOL mode and lowered the X-Zero into the clearing, with only a few broken branches as testament to his landing. They trooped down the ramp and, as last man out, he keyed in the remote-code to lock-out the ship.

Twenty minutes later they were at the perimeter of the facility and stopped for a few minutes to catch their breath. “Remember,” Rick said, “it’s code-names only when we get inside. No point in giving these guys any more information about us than they already have.”

The headquarters of Henderson Technologies comprised of three large gleaming black glass and steel buildings nestled in a beautifully landscaped setting. Not quite so pretty, however, was the ten-foot high perimeter fence that said: ‘keep out’ to unwanted visitors. The chain-link construction, with enmeshed sensor wires throughout its length, ensured there was no way that anyone could cut through, or climb over it, without activating the alarm systems that undoubtedly existed within the facility. Inside the fence perimeter, surveillance cameras mounted at intervals monitored the entire area of landscaped grounds and building entrances. Fifty yards to their right, electronic steel gates barred the front entrance and next door was a single-storey security block.

Patrick gave a low whistle. “Nice set-up. Wonder what little secrets they have in here?”

Rick nodded. This Henderson guy wanted Metcalfe really badly, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out they wanted to get hold of whatever genetic make-up made Metcalfe practically indestructible, with the intention of using it, as Charles put it, for nefarious ends.

“What I’m saying is, he’s not playing by the rules, and neither should we,” Patrick continued.

“What are you getting at, Banshee?”

The Irishman shrugged, but a gleam had appeared in his eyes. “I’ll just keep a look out for anything that we might use as insurance.”

“A bargaining chip, you mean?”

“Something like that, I’ll bet there’s a lot of interesting stuff burrowed away inside their systems.”

“You can’t hack into their computers!” Dianne gave Patrick a horrified glance. Rick’s own sense of moral order didn’t square with it either; he had too much of his dad in him. But Patrick came from a different world, even if he had mellowed since his years with the X-Men.

“If this company’s on the level, then fine. But I want to keep our options open.”

“We’re limited in both time and resources,” Rick said. “Our first priority is to get Storm and the others out of there, if this place is where they’re being held; we don’t even know that yet for sure.”

“Hey, if I get the chance, without jeopardizing the rescue, I’d like to try.”

“Okay, but first we have to get in. I’m making an assumption that the security block is where their surveillance equipment is.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Patrick agreed. “So we go there first.”

“Yes. Wolverine should be here by now, I’ll contact him.”

Paul was about a mile from the facility; he could see the floodlights casting a blue haze into the chilly night sky. Then he heard the tiny crackle from the comm. and heard Fraser’s voice in his ear.

“We’re at the perimeter fence. Can you talk?”

He grunted in reply, and rolled the car to a halt. Magnolia looked at him, a question in her eyes.

“Give me a minute,” he said, opening the door. “I just need some air to clear my thoughts – before I go through with this. Is that all right?”

She shrugged. Paul had seen her draw further into herself as they drew even closer to their destination. He stepped out of the car and moved far enough away so he could speak without her hearing him and activated the commlink again. “Okay, I’m out of earshot.”

“We’re going in over the fence-line and will head for their security block at the main gate where Banshee will rig the CCTV system. But just as we figured, we’ll probably need a diversion to get past the guards. Are you up to it?”

Paul snorted quietly. “Oh, I think so.”

“Good, but remember to ditch the comm. before that. And when you’re inside you really are convinced that you can keep Henderson, or whoever, occupied long enough for us to find the others?”

“I’ll do my best. They haven’t gone to all this trouble just to kill me straight off. I’ll keep them talking with my natural charm.”

“Wait a minute –” he heard Fraser say.

Then Paul felt her – butterfly-soft – brushing against his mind and his stomach fluttered.

<Paul, can you hear me?>

He closed his eyes at the sound of her silvery voice in his head, and couldn’t speak for a few seconds.

<Yes, every word,> he said at last.

<Keep your mind open, and concentrate on my name when you want to contact me, I’ll make sure my shielding is at a low level.>

<Okay.>

<And, Paul – >

His stomach fluttered some more at the gentle tone in her mind-voice.

<We promise we’ll come for you, before anything happens to you.>

<I’ll hold you to that.> he sent back with as flippant a mind-tone as he could muster, and he swore that he felt an invisible touch on his left cheek, as if she had placed her lips there, but, as the echo of her thoughts slipped away, he realised with dim annoyance that he was probably just imagining things.

Rick shifted the leather knapsack on his shoulders and studied the fence with pursed lips. He turned to his fiancée. “Dianne, do you think you could get us over this fence, without disturbing any of their alarms?”

“I’ll try,” she said. She’d never lifted an actual person before, but it couldn’t be any more difficult than the tallboy in our room, she thought. She focused on Rick first of all, stretching her hand out as if that somehow gave focus to her telekinetic power. She envisioned his contours, the shape, the mass of him in her mind’s eye – converting it all into the force required to lift him from the ground as a dead weight.

He rose jerkily and his arms flew up to counterbalance himself. She tried not to giggle, and thought it might be her panic-response to the deadly-seriousness of the situation. She concentrated. It really wasn’t difficult at all - just a nudge here and there – and up and across the fence he sailed. She settled him down gently on the other side, far enough away not to trip the fence’s ground sensors.

“Nicely done, babe,” he said, nodding at her through the mesh.

“You were only a little heavier than I expected,” she said with a self-satisfied smile.

“Gee, thanks,” was his miffed reply and he shot a dark look at Patrick who was stifling a laugh.

The Irishman was the next to go, but just before he left, he placed a small device in the ground, close to the fence.

“What’s that?” Dianne inquired.

“Locator beacon,” he replied, standing up again and winking at her. “Just in case we get lost. You just never know what might happen.”

She smiled and sent him over the fence.

Finally she floated across and dropped down to stand beside her fiancé. They locked eyes with one another and the enormity of what they were about to do hit them both simultaneously. On impulse Dianne kissed him softly on his lips. He started at the affectionate gesture and gave her a lop-sided grin.

“For luck –” she whispered against his cheek.

Patrick grinned. “Hey, you two lovebirds, time to go. We have a rescue, remember?”

The floodlights of a car at the main entrance ahead made them stop and look. Paul had arrived right on schedule.

“Quick, now’s our chance,” Rick whispered, and they moved rapidly in silence towards the main reception area. As they drew near, a guard emerged from the brightly-lit security block as the vehicle approached the gate. Paul leaned out of the car window and spoke to the man, who nodded and stepped back inside the building to make a call. Several minutes later two other men appeared, both of them wearing the ubiquitous charcoal-grey, padded uniforms and carrying heavy-duty firearms. They strolled up to the car, deceptively nonchalant.

Patrick said quietly, “They’re wearing the same uniform as those guys in Minnesota. Looks like they’ve got quite a private army here, not the sort of thing you see in your average corporate American company. If this operation is on the level, then I’m a leprechaun.”

Dianne touched her temple, signalling a telepathic interchange taking place. “Paul’s ready,” she reported. Rick nodded grimly and they waited.

One soldier went around the back of the car, and lifted the trunk, presumably checking to see if they had smuggled anyone in. He shook his head at his partner, and then waved the gun at Metcalfe. “Okay, get out of the car, hands up and no funny moves.”

Metcalfe slowly got out. Rick knew that these guys wouldn’t stand a snowflake’s chance in hell if he cut loose, but it was obvious the Englishman was keeping his claws to himself for the time being.

The second guard came up behind Metcalfe with some metal binders and attempted to put them on him. When Metcalfe whirled round defensively, cracking the guy’s cheek with the edge of his palm, Magnolia let out a shriek and the two security-men rushed outside to see what the fuss was all about.

“Quick,” Rick muttered. “That’s our cue.”

Dianne glanced backwards with concern as she heard the scuffle as the soldiers tried to subdue Paul, but he seemed to be handing out some punishment of his own, throwing a few desultory punches just to keep up the pretence of a fight. He didn’t even flick his eyes in their direction as they slid quietly into the security block.

Patrick made for one of two computer terminals in the room. He was familiar with the system; a Sphinx380 Terminal running a Sirius mainframe operating system. Thank the holy Virgin, he thought with a smile, as he saw that the screen was still open and the guard hadn’t bothered to activate the password lock.

Fearing that the fight would get out of hand and their prisoner escape, one of the soldiers pulled a stun-stick from his utility belt and jabbed it at Paul’s neck. The shock, strong enough to disable a bull elephant, convulsed his body and with an inarticulate cry, he crumpled onto the ground. Rick glanced at Dianne. “Is he okay?”

“I think so,” she whispered with a catch in her voice.

“I’ll say this for him, he’s no coward. That must have hurt, indestructible body or not.”

The two soldiers clamped the binders on the unconscious Paul and then another set on Magnolia. They dumped Paul in the back seat and got into the car to re-start the engine. The security guards turned around.

“Banshee!” Rick hissed into his commlink, “We’ve got company.”

The Irishman tapped his ear in acknowledgment, and backed out of the screens on the terminal, leaving it as he found it. Rick and Dianne scooted behind a convenient slatted-divider, effectively screening them from anyone at the desk. They crouched low and Patrick hurriedly slid across to join them just as the two security guards came back into the block. One of them crossed over to the desk and triggered a sensor on the large control panel. The gate mechanism activated and the car trundled into the facility. The three X-Men could hear the two guards joking with one another.

“– there’s sure some weird things going on around here.”

“Joe, my man, as long as we keep getting the fat pay-checks – who cares?”

“True. Hey, I gotta take a leak, mind the store.”

“Okay, but don’t be long, remember the last time you got caught reading those magazines –”

One guard left the room. The other one settled down in his chair, flicked on a personal holo-vid and immediately became engrossed in a basketball match, ignoring the bank of monitors displaying images relayed from various locations via the on-site security cameras.

Patrick whispered, “I didn’t get to finish messing with their camera system, I need to get back to that terminal. Dianne, can you keep the guard occupied – and I mean really occupied?”

She frowned. “I don’t like using my telepathy to tamper with people’s minds.”

“Well, it’s either that or knock him out and that little gambit might arouse a bit of suspicion,” he muttered back to her. “And I don’t have any better ideas at this point.”

She gave a small sigh and her brow creased in concentration as she sent a gentle probing command in the remaining security guard’s direction.

Patrick crept silently across to the terminal and entered the system again. It would only take him a few moments more to access what he required to fix things. He silently tapped the keypad, glancing every few seconds behind him, not that he didn’t trust Dianne, but…

From behind the divider Rick squinted at the cycling images on the camera-monitors through a pair of high-powered binoculars. He saw the guard, oblivious, and thought wryly, so much for their security. One image attracted his attention – that of a large single storey building with the legend ‘CLASSIFIED AREA – RESTRICTED ACCESS.’ He noted the building number on the upper left of the entrance. Drawing his eyes away, he scanned the room and found a large schematic of the facility pinned onto one wall – he trained his lenses onto it, and found its location – about half a kilometre from their current position.

His eyes narrowed behind his visor as another camera-screen flicked into life – this time showing a corridor in one of the buildings. The two goons strode into the camera’s vision. Metcalfe was slung over one’s shoulder and the other prodded Magnolia Jones towards a door. They knocked and entered the room beyond, closing the door firmly behind them. Rick caught the door number just before the image dissolved to another area of the facility. He cross-checked the location numbers on the wall-map and made a mental note of it. That would be their next stop if – and when – they had found the others.

Patrick was still busy at the terminal when the sound of a flushing toilet made him stiffen. Sweat broke out underneath his leathers – he ignored it – frantically sending the last code-string to activate the high-level worm-program. He could almost feel the others willing him away from the terminal. There was a sound of a door banging and he dived to the floor, at the same time as the guard at the desk whooped with joy at his team scoring a point over the opposition. Joe came back in the room just as Patrick scrambled behind the divider. Joe joined the first guard at the desk and they both remained engrossed in the match. While Dianne continued to send soothing messages of calm to the seated guards, the three of them crept silently out of the room and into the corridor.

“Nice timing, buddy,” Rick muttered once they were out of earshot.

“You know how much I like dancing on the edge,” Patrick replied with a grin. “I did enough, so as long as they don’t look too closely at those monitors they should be fooled.”

Rick gave him a look.

“What?”

“Anything else?”

“Well, I did have enough time to download another little program,” he said airily.

Rick and Dianne glanced at one another as they padded softly down the access corridor.

“To do what exactly?” Rick queried.

“It’ll start to quietly open up the low-level operating systems in their database. Mind you, I’ll need access to another terminal so I can hack into the higher, encrypted levels – just in case we need that insurance we talked about.”

Rick shook his head in mock resignation and Dianne stifled a smile. Patrick looked like a small boy looking forward to a day out at a fun-park.

Paul had been feigning unconsciousness for some time. His healing factor had cut in quickly to overcome the effects of the stun-stick. He’d been bound onto a chair, and heard a commanding voice tell Magnolia to sit next to him. After another few minutes he made what he thought was a convincing show of pretending he was coming out of his little nap, by groaning and fluttering his eyelids. When he opened his eyes he was hauled into a sitting position by the two men who’d brought him in, one of them he recognized as being the charming Doig, who’d masterminded the failed kidnap attempt at the mall.

They were in some sort of conference room, sparse but luxuriously appointed. A holographic image of the double-helix DNA molecule dominated the wall behind the sweeping desk, where several occupants sat regarding him with interest.

The big, silver-haired man was most likely Henderson; he radiated charisma of an unsavoury sort even at this distance from Paul. There was a chunky-faced man seated next to him at the desk, and his two bodyguards moved away to stand by the door. The left-hand wall was made entirely of glass and overlooked a cavernous factory area, its floor almost thirty feet below the conference room. A dark-clad figure with arms folded, stood beside the massive window, his sunken eyes dominating a pale face. Paul felt an uncontrollable shiver when the obsidian eyes turned their burning gaze full-force on him. But this man remained silent as the silver-haired man walked towards Paul, a suave smile on his face.

“Mr. Metcalfe, how splendid to meet you at last. I’m John Henderson.” His greeting was affable, almost as if Paul was an honoured guest at his dinner party. Henderson indicated the chunky-faced man still seated. “This is Matt Kruger. I’m sorry I can’t shake your hand, for you’re bound at the moment, for obvious reasons.” He strolled out of Paul’s eye-line, walking to his rear. “You know,” he continued, “I have to admire the way you eluded both the US Gover