Thirteen Days: Things Fall Apart
Oct. 28th, 2007 05:35 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
x-cable.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
xp_logsNo matter how careful the plan, how intensive the training, how determined the X-Men involved, sometimes a partial victory is all you get.
The element of surprise wasn't going to last long enough for them to get the airlock door open. That much had been easy to predict, and Scott had known to plan for it. Set that consideration beside the need to buy time to get his whole team off the glider and the answer had been obvious. Their first, best 'battering ram' option would still be outside the station, but thankfully the second option was almost as good.
"Cable, Phoenix," he muttered over the coms, the instant they had a hard seal on the outer airlock door, "go."
Nathan exchanged one quick, tense look with Jean, and laid his hand beside her on the inner airlock door. They'd practiced this in the Danger Room. Just enough push to force it open and turn it into a weapon without sending it through the hull of the station.
Jean could feel the mental presences outside the lock, taking up positions and getting ready for the X-Men's arrival. This, though, she didn't think they would be able to get ready for... #On three... One... Two... Three!# The inner airlock jerked forward, the force of their combined minds ripping it free of the hull and knocking back the defenders waiting on the other side.
They pushed themselves forward in the same moment, their layered shields a trick that well-predated this particular mission. Between the force of the door and the battering ram of their minds, they almost - almost cleared the way for their teammates.
Some of those inside had fought them before, however, and had expected just such a gambit. A slender blue-skinned form shot at Jean from her left - well out of the range of the flung door, and delayed for just long enough for Mystique to slip in behind the leading edge of the 'battering ram' and slam bodily into Jean.
The lack of telepathic signature meant that Jean had no warning. The history between the two women meant that Mystique had no desire to pull her blows and her momentum propelled Jean into the bulkhead, breath knocked out of her and only luck and poor aim on the blue-skinned woman's part kept her ribs from cracking. But while Jean might be out of breath, she wasn't out of the game yet, and a telekinetic shove sent Mystique spinning away from her.
Mystique moved like a dancer in the zero-g, catching herself on the nearest handhold and spinning back at Jean gracefully, and too quickly to let her do more than catch her breath. The battering ram having done what it was supposed to do, Nathan dropped his shield and started to reach out telekinetically to grab her and fling her aside.
Then the door came back at him, slamming him into a bulkhead and pinning him there. Wheezing, Nathan tried to force it back away - and caught a glimpse of Magneto, behind the unfamiliar faces, his hand raised in a fist. He looked quite comprensively pissed.
Jean's dodge wasn't thought out, and meant that she was suddenly moving much faster and farther than she'd meant, but the end result of getting her out of Mystique's line of motion was one positive. The fact that it gave her enough time to give Mystique another shove, speeding her up along her destination and slamming her into the wall Jean had been forced against earlier was another. #And now the hard part?# she managed to broadcast to Nate as she bounced against the far wall and secured a hand hold.
--
Nothing wasn't slightly surreal up here. Heavy bulkhead casements covered in cyrillic writing, attaching warnings and notes to areas and devices Garrison couldn't puzzle out, a design aesthetic wholly foreign and in its own way, somewhat frightening. On the whole, this would not be a comfortable place to die.
The Brotherhood was waiting for them, and why not? Since reaching the station, the X-Men hadn't bothered to try and avoid making noise. Garrison had started moving almost as soon as the breach was made. His own powers, including his enhanced strength and reactions, had a second advantage in the station. He could translate that into velocity. Kane moved in a deceptively random pattern, rebounding from point to point, almost skimming the walls. By keeping himself close to a point to push off from, Kane's powers had turned into blinding speed and control as he came up on the swarm, looking to thread the needle through them to the console.
Unfortunately, he wasn't the only one with those specific traits, as a man tracking him almost expertly cut off his path, moving with equal speed to intercept Kane.
Joszef Veres, unlike the last time the X-Men had encountered him in Berlin, didn't look like he was enjoying himself at all. In fact, he looked angry, if in a set, determined sort of way. He'd also had the benefit of over a week in zero-gravity, and came at Kane like the more compact version of the Juggernaut that he was. He slammed into Kane, driving them both back against the hull, and the station shook ominously.
The impact drove the breath from Kane, but the younger man didn't pause from the blow. His mental filecards threw up a name; Nimrod. Extreme end of physical enhancements, military training, and nearly Kyle level senses. It added up to the Mountie being heavily overmatched. Still, he had a few surprises.
Kane pushed aside a blow from the man, riding the force of the arm out of range. Zero gravity combat was very different from normal hand to hand, as each thrown punch was robbed of kinetic force without the anchor of gravity. They rebounded together, pushing off to re-establish a new combat position, fighting for an advantage.
Nimrod wasn't quite as quick as Kane, but he was more familiar with the environment. That counted for a lot. He managed to get Garrison into a headlock from behind, pushing off the nearest anchor point and propelling them towards a hard impact with the hull once more.
Fortunately for Kane, Nimrod had stumbled into his hasty plan. Kane's neural stunner didn't have much of an effect on the man, causing him to lock up enough that Kane could twist and strike the hull with his feet to kill the momentum. The main thing it did was slow Nimrod's explosively fast reactions, enough that Kane was able to grab a metal cylinder from his uniform, and point it right at Nimrod's face.
Enhanced senses and pepper spray make a uniquely potent combination.
--
There were plenty of handholds around the station, above his head, and for someone with Angelo's particular talents, that meant his feet would never have had to touch the floor at all even if there was gravity. His attention was fixed firmly on his goal as he swung from place to place, aiming for the console at the end of the module.
He'd moved so fast, coming into the station - the Danger Room simulation had familiarized him with where he could find every handhold, every anchor point - that he'd moved past the first of the fighting even as it started. But Magneto's companions had the advantage of more time in zero-g, and the man who snarled in Arabic as he came hurtling at Angelo moved with a startling amount of assurance and speed.
Angelo twisted, blessing the flexibility his stretching gave him - he could get pretty much unlimited movement out of what amounted to working limbs with no bones - and kicked out at the man's face from mid-air. "~Back the hell off~", he snarled back in Spanish, not knowing or caring if his opponent understood.
Kamal el-Alaqui reeled away. He managed to land on his hands and knees against the metal of the hull, and his skin started to shift, taking on the hue and texture of that metal. When he launched himself at Angelo again, it was something like watching an onrushing train, if a train could have eyes glowing with pure fanaticism.
...oh, great. It's a psycho Mondo. He swung up quickly, hooking onto his handhold with the skin of his ankles, too, to hold himself out of the way. Wonder if he still needs to breathe when he's metal?
--
She could move freely in zero-g. Scott had relied on that, more than he'd told Marie herself or anyone else on the team. She was beyond invaluable in combat terms, because of her mobility. But if all else failed, she could also force her way through just about anything - could go toe to toe with Nimrod, take whatever Magneto might throw at her. She could get to the target and destroy the control console for the satellites.
Information on the rescued prisoners had been sketchy. They'd gotten a name for the slender Indian man - Suvik Senyaka - but no real details on his powers, beyond that they were psionic in nature. So it came as a surprise to everyone, Marie most of all, when Senyaka, holding on to a handhold built into the hull of the station with one hand, extended the other calmly, and long, crackling whips of energy lashed outwards. They tangled around Marie, first trapping her limbs, then wrapping around her neck tightly.
Marie's first instinct was to struggle, and she couldn't stop herself from initially fighting against the psionic whips surrounding her. When her struggles got her nothing, she forced herself to take a deep breath and re-evaluate the situation. Narrowing her eyes, she stopped fighting the whips and instead flew straight at Senyaka.
Senyaka snarled and dodged, with the ease of someone who'd spent a week getting used to zero gravity. Even so, he dodged Marie only by inches, and the energy whips pulsed as if in panic, starting to drain energy from her.
Marie tried to fight the woozy feeling from the drain, knowing that to make it stop she had to take out Senyaka. He may have been practicing how to move in zero-g, but it was nothing compared to her natural aptitude for flying through space. Redirecting her motion slightly, she threw out a right hook, smiling in grim satisfaction as it connected.
--
Scott had put a lot of hope into the possibility that Clarice could step out of the airlock, get a clear look at where she was going, and simply blink her way to the console and wreck it, fast and easy. They hadn't quite been expecting the almost literal wall of bad guys waiting for them when Nathan and Jean blasted the airlock open, however, and before Clarice could even get a clear look past them at the target, one of the less familiar faces had propeled himself forward and enveloped her in a crushing bear hug that was not in the slightest bit affectionate.
He was enormous, seven feet tall and massively built. His name was Katu, and though the look on his face was empty of the anger and rage so obvious in his comrades, it was somehow still implacable. He squeezed, one arm sliding up and across Clarice's throat.
Why did she always get the big ones? Fighting in zero gravity was nothing like fighting on the ground, even with the zero-g training they had undergone, but it helped even things out a little given the massive size differences. Pulling herself into a ball, Clarice used all the momentum she had to push away from him, even a few inches so he couldn't get to her throat. Breathing, regardless of gravity, was a good thing. "I was told not to kill you," she said, hoping that might help things. She doubted it, he had that scary calm look in his eyes, but maybe. "So don't make me get in trouble."
Katu went with the movement, sinking downward towards the hull. His feet touched the 'ground' and he pushed himself and Clarice upwards hard, at a much faster rate. They hit the top of the module, Clarice pinned between the big man and the cold unyielding metal. Katu said something in Russian that sounded almost sorrowful.
Russian was not a pretty language or one that Clarice had studied. Futilely she tried to wiggle down again before opening a small teleportation disc in one hand, "Don't make me use this," she warned. She could disable him without killing him if he got to a medical facility quickly, which was unlikely given that they were in freaking outer space. This was what Nate had been talking about - using her brain to fight and not trying to wrestle people outside of her weight class.
--
It was pure aural chaos and, against all protocol, Terry ripped her comm unit out of her ear in self defense. She didn't need it in order to face the ugly demony looking mutant in front of her anyway and given the way he fought, she'd probably do better with less distraction rather than more. Remembering what Scott had said about their actions, she ignored the activity around her and launched herself off a side wall and screamed. She kept any mental quips about the impossibility of hearing that in space strictly mental.
Said ugly demony looking mutant took the sonic scream head-on and went somersaulting backwards, hitting the hull hard enough to leave him dazed and drifting, if not fully unconscious. Before Terry could make another move, to put him down for the count or anything else, a more familiar figure came hurtling at her, feet first. It was Toad, and looking grimly determined, by Toad-standards.
This time, she couldn't manage to keep the thoughts internal, drawing in a deep breath, her mouth twisting like she'd tasted something unpleasant, "Ew." Years before he'd gotten the better of her, nearly suffocated her. But she was better trained now and not planning on allowing history to repeat itself.
He missed her by inches, but his tongue wrapped around one of the handholds on the inside of the hull and he swung right back at her. Someone had clearly been practicing, during his time on the station.
With as fast as he moved, trying a targeted sonic lance was going to be a very bad idea. She was too likely to miss and punch a hole through the station wall and real life didn't come with a reset. Instead she modulated her voice, let out that dissonant broadwave keen that turned the stomach and shifted the world by stealing away balance. She didn't have to imagine the effects, she'd seen them, bringing the most hardened to their knees, heaving.
--
Cain could hear echoing snippets of the chaos inside the space station inside his suit, the sound carrying through the metal hull of the station to his feet, like standing on a loudspeaker with the volume turned down. Resisting the urge to just rip a hole in the hull and barge in, he held his position outside near the airlock and the glider. Cyclops hadn't wanted to risk the possibility that the Brotherhood had a mutant capable of surviving outside the station coming around and sabotaging the glider, and with the diagrams of the station, Cain would have been at a serious disadvantage in those cramped quarters.
He looked up over his head, feeling a sense of vertigo momentarily as he saw the Earth below him. The blue oceans could almost be a sky, he thought, and for a moment everything seemed almost normal until a dark shadow blotted out the sky, and he felt a heavy grip on his shoulders.
The man who'd quite literally snuck up on him in the silence of space was nearly Cain's own size. He wore no suit, but did have a helmet and oxygen tanks, obviously some sort of jury-rigged set-up, and there seemed to be pieces of metal strapped to his massive boots. Magnets, to judge by the way he was walking along the station's hull.
"Aw crap," Cain mumbled as he tried to spin, but found his feet leaving the station's hull without any gravity to keep him there. Fumbling around as he flipped head over heels, his fingers brushed along one edge of the glider's wing, scrambling for purchase before momentum yanked him away from the station and his gloating adversary.
Isaac Javitz watched Cain vanish over the edge of the station, smiled grimly to himself, and turned his attention to the glider. Once he took care of this, he would head back to the airlock he'd exited, on the other side of the module. Magneto had ordered one of the emergency capsules to be released, to allow for another exit from the station for just this situation. He would destroy their way out, and then go back inside and help the others defeat the interlopers...
--
Afterwards, Scott would wonder who'd cleared the way for him. Had to be one of the telekinetics; there was no other way to explain the way that hijackers and X-Men alike tumbled out of his path, the latter far more gently than the former. But Jean was still entangled with Mystique, and he hadn't seen Nathan since Magneto had pinned him down.
Didn't matter. Not right now. Scott pushed off the hull, hard, and shot through the opening. If they all made it back, he was going to have to admit that he'd been wrong. The key had been to work together after all. Because he was through, past the fighting and within sight of the console.
With a clear shot.
Angles and questions of force level tumbled through his head at top speed, calculations made in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
ZAK!!
The control console exploded in a shower of sparks and a hail of metal shrapnel. Scott raised an arm to shield his face instinctively, although even the shrapnel that landed closest to him was still a few feet short.
As his arm lowered, he saw the smoking ruin of the console. His gaze flickered back to the X-Men, still engaged with the Brotherhood - and the choice made itself.
He opened his mouth to shout for the retreat, but the words were choked off as the metal shrapnel that had missed him suddenly took on a life of his own and came flying at him. A wide-beam blast at the last second disintegrated most of the deadly hail, but several pieces survived, slamming into his arm and upper chest. The impact pushed him back against the hull, and a choked cry slipped out before he could bite it back.
Magneto was floating several feet away, white with rage, one hand outstretched. The shrapnel - and it had driven through the suit in at least a few places, Scott could feel it - twitched ominously, and Magneto's mouth formed words he couldn't hear over the noise of battle.
Scott's jaw clenched, and he aimed another blast, this time right at the old bastard. The remains of the airlock door were suddenly there, serving as a metal shield that did a very effective job of taking the blast.
No time for this. He could feel ominous tremors running through the hull behind him. "RETREAT!" he yelled in his best battlefield roar, repeating it down the switchboard.
He'd take a partial victory. There were more ways to finish this than continuing to slug it out in here. Outside, in command of the way back down, they had leverage. If he let this fight continue inside the station, even money said they were all going to wind up dead.
--
Angelo heard the order to retreat, but couldn't follow it. Kamal was insanely persistent - and quite determined to kill him - and while Angelo had managed to start to wrap him in skin, the other man had gotten his arms free and literally reeled him in to punching range.
Punching range meant he could punch back, and did, flailing simultaneously with strips of skin. Some of them were probably sharp-edged, with the situation he was in, but it was anyone's guess if they'd cut Kamal now.
"~Murderer,~" Kamal hissed in Arabic, his eyes glinting madly as he slammed a fist into Angelo's ribs. "~Tool of the oppressor!~"
His ribs had never quite got back up to strength from the last two times they'd been broken - just like any bone once fractured, they were more prone to it now. Angelo winced, hammering both fists into the man's gut, and retorted in mostly the same language, "~Didn't come up here to kill anyone, amigo. We can both still get out of here.~"
Kamal laughed madly, going with the momentum of the punch and letting his feet touch down on the hull once more. He pushed off hard, aiming to crush Angelo between his own metallicized body and the hull above them.
Angelo swallowed, and then just let his powers run free. They'd never just been restricted to his hands, even if that was 90% of the use he made of them. Under his suit, small protrusions appeared all over the front of his body, waiting for Kamal to land. Time to find out just how elastic his skin really was.
The impact with the hull was hard, but the expected crushing never happened. Kamal bounced, looking hugely affronted as he was sent spinning backwards, the skin strips Angelo had been using to try and keep him contained unraveling as Kamal flew in the opposite direction. His howl sounded indignant.
--
Tumbling, tumbling, tumbling... Cain saw the station growing further away, a silver blemish against the green and brown backdrop of Asia Major. He closed his eyes briefly, starting to cross himself, then felt a tug at his wrist.
That damn magnet cable.
This has got to be the dumbest thing I ever done in my life, Cain remembered saying to Nate.
No shit, he said to himself, whipping the magnet around in a circle and sailing it towards the station.
Direct hit.
As soon as the line went taut, Cain jerked, trusting in the greater mass of the station to act as his anchor, and the cable to do its job and reverse his momentum, stretching slightly, then sending him shooting back on a direct trajectory for Javitz's back.
Had they not been in space, the sound Javitz made them would have been considerably more pained than a simple 'oof!' as Cain slammed into him. The impact sent him flying forward, ripped from the hull despite the magnets on his boots. He grasped desperately at one of the modules as he floated clear of the main hull - and caught it, barely. One giant fist slammed against the hull of the module, seeking purchase.
Piercing it.
Cain's momentum carried him over Javitz, his feet landing against the hull and finding purchase. Turning to fight, he saw the rip in the hull begin to widen and the telltale steam vent of atmosphere escaping from the station. "Aw hell," he groaned, throwing himself forward.
One booted foot lashed out, catching Javitz in the ribs like a soccer player going for a penalty kick. "You stupid son of a bitch!" He punctuated the outburst with a punch to Javitz's helmet. "There's people in there, you moron!"
A spiderweb of cracks started to spread across the jury-rigged helmet, and in a panic, Javitz let go of his hold on the station and grabbed for Cain. Clutching at him, in a way that made it somewhat unclear if he was trying to grapple with the X-Man, or using him as an anchor.
Instinctively, Cain ducked away from Javitz's lunge, falling flat against the skin of the station and grabbing onto a protruding antenna for leverage.
Flailing desperately, Javitz floated back off into space. This time, he was well clear of any of the modules, of anything to arrest his movement. And while it wouldn't have helped him had he been headed Earthward, the site of him twisting and writhing desperately as he vanished into the starry black would have been worth at least a modicum of pity - had there been the time.
The station heaved under Cain, atmosphere exploding outwards from the joint of the damaged module.
Cain barely had time to glance up at Javitz tumbling away before the skin of the station began to split under him. Thinking quickly, he looped the cable around his waist, tying the other end to the most secure part of the station he could find. It's official, he thought, this is the dumbest thing I ever done in my life.
Getting a running start, he flung himself off the station at as flat an angle as he could manage. The cable drew taut, and carried him around like a tetherball on a pole. Once, twice around the station before his feet hit the metal surface again. He gripped the edge of a panel and hauled, trying to use the strong metal cable to hold the station together like an oversized hay bale.
NATE! he shouted telepathically, This place is coming apart, you guys need to get out NOW!
--
Katu said something gutteral-sounding and spun, as if to fling her away from him. The wash of feverish-blue energy that crackled down his arms and into Clarice was painful, if not incapacitatingly so.
"Ah!" Clarice did not like that at all. Her hair was probably sticking straight out now too, despite her french braid. "Way uncool, dude." She wasn't a surfer or from the valley, but the phrase worked. She grabbed his head in a choke hold and wrenched herself around until she was on his back. There. Now she was in slightly more control.
The lights in the module flickered erratically, the buzzing sound nearly drowning out the noise of the fighting. Katu clutched at her, more of the crackling energy coming off him, as if in waves, and Clarice's com shorted out.
"Oh no you don't!" Clarice muttered, blinking Katu away from her. Not far, but far enough to give herself a chance to do....something. Anything. Close quarters grappling with someone over a foot taller was just stupid if you could avoid it. At least she hadn't sliced and diced him to little pieces.
Katu spun backwards, hitting the hull. The lights flickered again, and some piece of equipment just below Clarice exploded, spitting sparks upwards and at her.
#Blink!# It was Nathan's voice in her mind, sounding urgent. #Stay put, I'm coming right past you-#
"No problem," she replied verbally, even though her comm was out. Damn electrical mutation thingy! Staying put was easy so long as big, tall and electric didn't come her way.
Nathan literally grabbed her by the scruff of the neck as he shot by. There was the sound of tearing metal from somewhere above them, and he swore, his voice low and desperate. #Hold on, the airlock's going to come up fast-# If he could get her into the glider, between his telepathy and her teleportation, they could get everyone else in, if they just had enough time...
--
The sound of tearing metal and the shrill of the station's emergency alarms as it tried - and failed - to seal off the damaged science module didn't seem to dissuade Kamal, who flung himself back at Angelo, howling more imprecations in Arabic.
It sure as hell alarmed Angelo, though there wasn't much he could do to investigate, help, or just get the hell out when he had an insane Arab terrorist trying to kill him. His next move was to grab Kamal firmly round the ankles with his skin and send him careening back across the room.
Kamal caught himself on a handhold - and swore again, this time in fear more than anger at another alarming bang!, the sound of another hull breach. He pushed off desperately, disappearing into one of the lower modules. Taking refuge, quite clearly.
It wasn't a bad idea.
It really wasn't, and since Kamal had stopped fighting, Angelo was free to follow suit. He turned and made a beeline for the escape pods, yanking on the pull rings to deploy the sleeves of his suit - it seemed more important to have full cover, just now, than have his skin free.
--
It seemed impossible that Magneto had kept this many of the station crew alive. Two of them had made their way into the glider earlier, under the cover of the fighting - Scott had spotted them in what passed for his peripheral vision - and now here were two more. Scott had headed towards the Soyuz capsules, reasoning that they needed to spread out the better pilots - not that getting back through the mess to the glider had been all that feasible in the first place - and he'd nearly missed the two men hammering frantically on the porthole of one of the science modules.
He couldn't get the lock open. Some sort of damned combination? One of the cosmonauts was shouting in Russian, pleading with him. And suddenly it didn't matter that these people might have had something to do with the trap the Russians had set for Magneto. They might have, might not have, but it just didn't matter. He wasn't going to leave them to die.
"Get back!" he shouted, gesturing at them to get away from the door. He aimed at the hinges of the hatch - first one, then the other. Then there were eager hands pushing it up from beneath, and he helped. The two men moved easily enough in zero-gravity, nimble with experience. They looked fearfully at the chaos that had erupted in the station's main module, and Scott lost patience. "Go, damn it!" he shouted at them, pushing them ahead of him and towards the capsules. He didn't follow right away, because no one was following him, damn it...
What he saw when he looked back wasn't encouraging. "DISENGAGE!" he shouted desperately - and in sharp contrast to what he'd just ordered, prepared to launch himslf back into the fight.
--
It was hard to move the side of her face, hardened slime plastering her hair down and covering her ear. Little shards of it still clung to her lips where she'd shattered it away on a hard scream and she was fairly certain she was bleeding though with her adrenaline pumping she felt nothing. She drew in a breath and heard, dimly, the sound of orders being given. Luckily, she'd taken her comm out earlier and it wasn't covered in slime.
Dodging and aiming a kick Toad's way, she lifted it to her other ear and registered Cyclops' order to retreat. She missed miserably, but tracked Toad's move...until the lights flickered off and on, off and on. Brief, disorienting and... Two feet slammed hard into her solar plexus, expelling the air in her lungs and she flew backwards.
Jean and Mystique were surprisingly well matched in zero-g. What experience Mystique had with moving without gravity Jean balanced out with TK manuevers, and much of Jean's attack power had to be limited to avoid damaging the satelite - a consideration Mystique didn't seem to share. For the moment, Jean had Mystique pinned, trapped in a tight TK grip far away from any surface she could use to fight her way free. The moment, unfortunately, didn't last long as she was suddenly slammed from behind by her projectile team mate. Jean managed, barely, to keep her TK hold on the shapeshifter, and the three of them went hurtling further down the hall.
Down, into another module of the station entirely. While the three women were trying to disentangle themselves - Mystique was first to get free, and was already pulling herself upwards, back towards the center of the fighting - all hell began to break loose. There was another explosion in the main module, followed by the unmistakable bang of the hull breaching yet again. To make things worse, two very large men came tumbling into the still-intact module, Kamal with his skin still reflecting the metal of the hull, Katu's arms still shrouded in crackling energy.
"F..." Terry started to say with the first gasp of breath that came back to her then thought the better of it, biting off the word. The lights flickered again as they all struggled to get free from the tangle of arms and legs. She shoved hard against a red head of hair that was digging into her side--she was pretty sure it was Mystique's but wouldn't have felt any guilt if it was Jean's and finally managed to push herself to the side of the module. She sucked in a breath but couldn't exactly scream in this small a space without exploding Jean's head too.
There was the brief shrill of another alarm, this one much closer. It turned out to be a warning that the station's automatic systems were taking measures to deal with the hull breaches and other damage. The module sealed itself off to preserve the atmosphere inside, just in time. There was the muffled sound of another explosion and hull breach, and the whole module shuddered, torn loose from the main body of the station.
There was a sudden cry - from Mystique. "Erik!"
--
The whole place was coming apart; someone had caused another hull breach, somewhere near the airlock and the glider. Nathan pushed Clarice ahead of him, into the glider, and his eyes narrowed in something close to outright rage as he saw Toad and one of the ex-prisoners - Senyaka - in there already. Like fuck are they stealing our way home- A burst of telekinesis knocked them both against the seats. Nathan turned his attention very briefly to the two cowering cosmonauts. They could stay conscious. "~Strap in!~" he snapped at them in Russian, looking back over his shoulder in the direction of the airlock, desperately.
No one was coming. And he could feel the atmosphere being sucked out of the glider, out through the hull breaches in the station. "Blink! Get in a seat!"
Clarice scrambled into a seat, fumbling with the straps as fast as she could. There wasn't any time to worry about the other X-Men, just hold on and pray. "Cable!" she screeched, not really having anything coherant to say so much as to express her displeasure and absolute fear. Turning towards the cosmonauts she tried to smile despite everything, "It'll be okay," she assured them in English with more confidence than she felt as they found seats for themselves.
No one was going to reach the glider on their own power; a quick scan of the station was enough to establish that. Nathan swore and pulled himself towards the pilot's seat, smacking the control panel to close the hatch as he pulled himself down into the seat. His hands were shaking badly. He hadn't wanted to close the door, but if this place turned into a vacuum, they were not only dead, but they wouldn't be able to help anyone else.
"Blink, open your mind to me," he said hoarsely. "We're going to have to spot the team and teleport anyone who's not going to reach one of the pods in here. I'll borrow their eyes, you do the teleporting." The whole glider lurched violently as he tried to strap himself in, the movement throwing him hard against the console.
This sounded like a supremely bad idea for so many reasons the primary one being that while this idea had been discussed, it had never been practiced. "Yessir," she replied, visibly forcing herself to relax. Physical relaxation and mental relaxation went hand in hand and after a minute she succeeded enough to let him in. She wasn't very comfortable with telepaths in her head, but that more to do with having someone other than herself in her head and less because she had something to hide. The X-Men knew her secrets. Being able to see through Cable and out other peoples eyes was disconcerting, but she was trying. "Now I know what LSD is like. Trippy."
Closest first. There - Garrison. Nathan started to send a warning to him, but was interrupted. Whips of energy uncoiled from the body of the Indian man with Toad, wrapping around Nathan's arms and pulsing with energy. Nathan gasped, falling against the console, his whole body convulsing. He had enough presence of mind to shut down the telepathic switchboard before the sensation could be transferred to his teammates. And he was just pissed and stubborn enough to muster enough telekinesis to lash out at Toad's 'friend', knocking him out cold this time.
--
Nimrod had dodged just enough that he didn't catch the pepper spray full in the face. Just mostly, and his snarl of rage and pain was audible even over the noise of the fighting and the crackling snaps of systems blowing out, not to mention the explosive bang of the hull breaching in the upper module. The sudden burst of Hungarian profanity was jumbled-sounding, even to someone who didn't know the language, and Nimrod hurled himself forward, fist drawing back in a punch...
Which missed Garrison entirely, but made a significant dent in the hull of the station, critically near a seam. He didn't punch through entirely - not even on the second, maddened blow - but the metal was visibly weakened, the pressure differential continuing to do damage.
"I think I made him mad." Kane called out to Marie, as he avoided another tremendous blow. He could hear the bulkheads behind him straining, as the pressure sucked at them. But Nimrod was too fast to simply disengage from without getting his head torn off in the process.
Nimrod was fighting angry, allowing Kane to land blows that would have caved in the front of a car, and not noticing them in the slightest. Yet another fist bowed out a steel plate, and only the fractional last minute movement had kept Kane from being between it as the blow.
"Marie!" Kane called out desperately. "Catch!" He yelled, as he doubled up his arms in a 'rope-a-dope' fashion on the punch aimed for his head. Nimrod's blow was mostly absorbed by his block, although Kane could swear he heard his bones groan at the blow. With Nimrod's power behind it, Kane was sent flying out of control from the position in which Nimrod had trapped him, tumbling end over end down the station towards Marie at high velocity.
Nimrod looked up at the bang of the hull breaching in the upper module. Something exploded behind him, showering him with sparks. He didn't even flinch, but the anger seemed to drain from his expression, leaving behind something more like calculation. Reaching for one of the handholds, he pulled himself back to the hull and then pushed off, sending himself rapidly in the direction of the Soyuz capsules.
And Scott, who was directly in his path.
Marie barely heard Kane's call, as her attention was focused on the man standing before her. "A little busy," she muttered, eyes narrowing at the white haired man standing maybe 25 feet away, her fist shooting out to knock a piece of metal headed towards her away. She'd had dreams and nightmares about this moment and now that it was here, she didn't want to let it go the route of her more painful dreams. Of course, all the nearby projectiles were metal, which made them completely ineffective, so Marie had been doing her best to get close to Magneto...a solid punch to the head would suit her quite nicely.
One of the many handholds placed at regular intervals around the module tore itself free of the hull and flew at Marie. It stretched and warped as it flew, then wrapped around her neck like a metal snake, tightening. Magneto's eyes were locked on her - but a faint, angry smile tugged at his lips as he looked past her and saw Garrison's uncontrolled tumble towards her from behind.
"Ah hell." Kane muttered, as he slammed into Marie from behind, unable to check his momentum or change his flight path in the slightest. It certainly wasn't enough to hurt her, but it was enough to past them past Magneto, ruining any chance of a quick blow on him.
Her invulnerable throat had easily withstood Magneto's attempt at strangulation - however, invulnerability didn't mean she wasn't affected by moving objects and the time it had taken her to regain control of her flight had been just enough to carry the pair out of range of Magneto. Halting herself and Garrison, Marie's eyes were full of frustration. Slipping her fingers through Garrison's, she began pulling the Canadian back in the direction they had come. She wasn't going to let Magneto get away this time.
It was at that moment that the damaged seam of the module split wide open. Explosive decompression was just that, it turned out. Atmosphere belched out into space, and the whole central module of the station shuddered, the tear spreading farther down its length.
It was going to break up. Within seconds, they were cut off from the Soyuz capsules as well as the glider. The secondary modules sealed themselves off, an automatic safety protocol to try and preserve their life support capability. The main module, however, was rapidly becoming a very unpleasant place to be.
--
The Soyuz capsules were designed to take you safely back to Earth. It wasn't as good in some respects as making it back to the glider, but the tangle of fighting between him and that airlock made one of the capsules the best choices. Like all the other X-Men on this mission, Angelo had trained on the flight simulator for just this set of circumstances. He'd done fairly well, too, according to Scott. There was every chance he could get the capsule down reasonably intact.
If he made it there. The module blew along its seam, atmosphere belching outwards from an increasingly gaping hole - right in Angelo's path.
He slowed, judging his options. He could try to go around it, but that risked it opening wider right under his feet before he could get clear. Or he could try to go over it. Deciding the second option was marginally safer, Angelo leaped, stretching for the nearest handhold.
It was already too late for something like that. He was sucked from the station and out into the blackness of space instantly.
There was no time to react before he was out, no time and no spare air to waste on screaming afterwards. No possibility to act, nothing he could think but a dazed Really should've worn my helmet inside... sorry, Nathan. The last was directed towards the station with as much force as he could.
--
The sharp motion of the module breaking free from the main station knocked everyone about, and it took Jean a few additional seconds to fight free of the mass of limbs. There weren't any view ports in this portion of the module, but it was easy enough to tell that something was wrong - having shoved away from the wall, Jean could now see how the module was moving relative to the people floating inside. Spinning. "This is not good..." she muttered, Mystique and the others momentarily forgotten as she took a deep breath, then keyed her comm. "Cyclops. Phoenix here. Siryn and I are.. cut off. I think our module's broken lose somehow." Which meant, without the station's thrusters to correct the orbit, they'd be falling into the atmosphere.
Terry kept clinging to the side of the module, aiming a kick at one of the mutants who had drifted too close, aiming for his head. "Let's just everyone get to different corners." The natural lilt of her voice hummed with power and turned it into nearly a song with the force of command. "Sure we could all try to kill each other but it'll get us nothing but dead."
All Jean got in reply to her comms call was static. Katu, who was holding onto the nearest handhold and watching the goings-on carefully, said something in Russian in a deep rumbling voice. It might have been an apology.
Hold on, was Scott's reply to her when she tried again telepathically. If we can get Blink to- There was a flash down the link of something hurtling towards Scott, the unmistakable impression of flesh-on-flesh impact.
Jean winced at the pain which flashed down the link from Scott, extending her senses even farther. Already she could tell that the distance between them and the station was widening faster and faster -gravity had them, and the end result was inevitable at this point. No time for Blink. Momentum's changed too much and she'd end up in space like as not. She took a deep breath, pushing away the voice in her head which said that this was a stupid, stupid idea and that they were all going to die, and said aloud, "I'm going to have to try to land us."
At times like this, Terry was reminded that her teammate was a crazy person. She gaped at Jean, attention momentarily diverted from watching the others in the module. "Are you mad? That's a ridiculous idea and you're going to kill us all!"
Jean... There was a terrible edge of desperation to the thought from Scott. Before she could respond, however, it was replaced by a grim sense of purposefulness. Don't try. Do. I love you.
I love you, too. There was resolve in her eyes as she turned to look at Terry. "Yes, yes I am. I'm also our only hope, unless you've got a better idea." Already her mind was mapping out the shape of the module, learning it's mass and size.
"Oh, look." Mystique's voice sounded brittle. "The X-Men are going to save us."
"Well, Erik's a little tied up saving his own precious skin," Jean snapped, eyes flashing as she turned on the shape-shifter. "So, again, if you have a better idea, by all means speak up. I'm not exactly looking forward to landing several tons of meteoritic metal with my brain here."
Terry wondered if she could kick Mystique in the head from here. Probably not, more's the pity. She settled for grumbling beneath her breath and glaring without discrimination around the module. The other two mutants were worth a second look and she spent some time studying them rather than paying attention to the brewing cat fight between her least favorite red heads.
Kamal was visibly seething, looking like he was seriously debating trying to kill the two X-Men and worrying about reentry later. He wasn't moving, though, so perhaps common sense was winning out. Katu just held on, gazing at all of them with dark, almost sorrowful eyes. His expression was almost resigned.
When it looked like they were done arguing, Jean gave a sigh of relief. She really couldn't afford to be distracted. Reaching out, she grabbed hold of one of the wall hand holds as she wrapped her power around the outside of the module's metal skin, an extra layer of pressure holding everything together. The gentle twisting of the walls stopped as she established what would be their new 'down', less than a minute before the juddering of the module let them know inside that atmosphere had been encountered.
--
He'd reflect afterwards that Nimrod had actually saved his life. Not intentionally, of course. It was pure chance that the Hungarian had slammed into him and actually sent him flying in the direction of the open airlock door. The cosmonauts had helped, pulling him in just in time as the station started to break up. Never let it be said you don't get a return on a good deed... One of the ex-prisoners was already in there, hunched in the corner and clearly fighting back panic. Scott didn't spare him a glance. Even as he finished the quick telepathic conversation with Jean, he was pulling himself towards the pilot's seat.
There was a yelp from one of the cosmonauts as Nimrod pulled himself into the capsule, his immense strength letting him fight the forces pulling him in the other direction. Before Scott could react, he was being hauled out of the pilot's seat, an arm like a steel bar around his throat. The atmosphere continued to rush out of the capsule through the open hatch, and Scott could hear continuing sounds of explosive decompression above them in the main module.
The other cosmonaut launched himself towards the console and managed to hit the control for the hatch, probably saving all of them. "You... pilot this thing?" Scott wheezed as Nimrod's grip on him tightened. "By... all means, k-kill me, then-" Reason with the madman, Summers. Sure. But he didn't dare risk a blast, not facing the wrong way and with the capsule's main control console still right in front of him.
Astonishingly, Nimrod's grip slackened, and Scott was given a sudden, brutal push towards the console. "On the ground," the Hungarian snarled, his voice harsh with hatred. It had the ring of a promise.
The older cosmonaut said something nervously in Russian. Scott ignored him and strapped himself in, swallowing tightly at what he was sensing down the link. No switchboard, no coms, no way to know what had happened to the others...
--
Magneto had been thrown down the module in the same direction as Garrison and Marie. He caught himself on one of the handholds, his grunt of effort inaudible over the noise of the station's destruction. Remarkably, he looked almost entirely calm, despite the situation. His eyes narrowed and one hand, shaking only slightly, came up in a fist.
The end of the module started to reshape itself, metal flowing almost like water, sealing Garrison, Marie, and one lone cosmonaut off, along with Magneto, from the chaos. The makeshift lifeboat shuddered as it tore free from the rest of the station.
"If you want to die," Magneto said in the sudden, shocking quiet, his voice low and harsh, "by all means, continue fighting." The lights inside the module were flickering, dying even as he spoke, and they were plunged into darkness. "Otherwise, be silent and stay out of my way."
--
"Fuckin' A!" Cable pulling out of her mind was not pleasant, although Clarice knew that if he had been in it when the bastard had tackled him it would have been worse. She quickly turned, checking to make sure the cosmonauts were okay before scrambling out of her seatbelts to check on Cable. "Nate! I am not explaining to your wife why I let your brain get scrambled! Got it?!" she said to him, checking his vitals and ignoring the unconscious bad guy.
Nathan groaned and pushed himself upright. "I can't-" His head was full of white noise. What the fuck? He shook it doggedly, but it didn't help. "Fuck," he said, his voice slightly slurred, "some kind of..." He felt like he'd been electrocuted. "Goddamnit, I lost the switchboard..."
Someone was floating into space, out beyond the glider. Nathan blinked, trying to clear his vision - and his heart nearly stopped. It was Angelo.
Angelo, in space, without a helmet.
"CLARICE!"
"Shitfuck!" Clarice really had a pottymouth sometimes. She followed Nate's gaze out the window, "Come to Blinky," she cooed, opening a portal and bringing him in the glider. She was over being scared shitless. She'd have a breakdown later, right now she had to try to save Angelo. If she could. No 'if's'. When.
"You are not dying on me," she informed Angelo's unmoving body as she felt for a pulse, all business. She could do this. She would. "Cable! Strip his shirt. Cut it if you need to."
The station lurched again, throwing Nathan against the console. The console that seemed afire with red lights. "~You,~" he snapped in Russian at one of the cosmonauts, not really sure how he was moving, let alone speaking coherently. Adrenalin was a wonderful thing. "~Help her!~" The man moved to do so, and Nathan's jaw clenched as he turned his attention back to keeping them all alive. Focus on flying. They'll look after Angelo. You're not going to help him if you get all of us killed... But his head was still buzzing, and he couldn't even reach out to see if Angelo was still alive.
He had a pulse. Barely. And she didn't have a crash cart or a MD. That was about par really, "Okay," she talked herself through this, pantomiming that the cosmonaut should cut open his shirt. While he did that she closed Angelo's nose between her fingers and said a silent apology to Amanda. Beginning CPR, the cosmonaut had the shirt cut and was ready to begin chest compressions and aid Clarice in CPR. It made sense that a cosmonaut would know how, she reflected, bobbing her head as she counted, "Spasiba," she said pulling one of her five or so words of Russian from the back of her brain. "Breathe!" she commanded Angelo. "Breathe!"
The glider shuddered again, and started to tilt sideways, alarmingly. Nathan swore, hitting the control to release the airlock desperately. They couldn't risk get trapping in the wreckage of the station, no matter what happened. Disengage, damn it-
He heard coughing, and involuntarily, his head jerked around for long enough to see Angelo's body jerk, the semi-conscious young man spitting blood all over the unconscious ex-prisoner who'd floated over, unnoticed, while Clarice and the cosmonaut had been performing CPR. Nathan felt a swell of relief so overwhelming that he was glad he was already in a seat.
"How are his vitals?" Nathan asked - and flinched as he saw part of the main station module falling towards the glider. Ignoring the agony in his head, he lashed out with his telekinesis - not at the module, but to force the glider to bank. All it did was make sure the wreckage hit the wing, instead of the cockpit, and there was suddenly no question of staying in orbit.
"I have a pulse!" Clarice cried as the glider got knocked around by space debris. Grasping, she tried to prevent Angelo from being jostled. "It's weak, but it's there!" Weak was better than none. And on the bright side, he wasn't peeing blood.
Nathan's breath caught in his chest for a moment, raggedly. That was all the time he had for reactions. "Strap him in and get up here," he choked out as the glider drifted away from the remains of the station. He saw at least one pod, maybe two, heading Earthwards. He couldn't tell who was in them, which of their teammates were still alive. His vision kept trying to gray out at the edges - whatever that shock had been, it felt almost like it combined with that brief use of telekinesis had resulted in powers overstrain. And he was about to make it a lot worse. "I'm going to need your help to land."
"Land?" How many 'oh shits' could she have on one mission?! "There's not land in outer space!" Clarice prayed he didn't mean real land as in Earth land. The glider was not made for that sort of thing! Checking to make sure that Angelo was okay other than attempting to breathe vaccuum, Clarice and the cosmonaut hauled him into a seat and strapped him in. He sagged, but he stayed.
"Unless you want to try and kill yourself teleporting to earth, we try it my way," Nathan growled shakily, and managed to get the glider's nose pointed downwards. "We've got to try and kill our momentum. I can do part of it telekinetically, but I could use some help."
Oh. Right. Yeah. Dying was bad. "You need me to teleport us down? I mean, so we don't burn the hull?" she'd seen a few scifi movies in her time. The random numbers that bounced around her head that composed her thought pattern could occasionally be quick on the uptake.
"NO!" A little too loud; he didn't need to yell at her. Even if the glider was starting to shudder as it tumbled deeper into the atmosphere. "Repeated blinks, on my mark, and I'll slow us telekinetically between them. Can you handle the weight?"
"I'm going to have to, aren't I?" she replied, coming up next to him and practically pressing her nose to the window. Anything to orient herself. Gravity was beginning to kick in. That was a bad, bad sign. Sitting down, she surveyed everyone. The scared cosmonauts looking after Angelo, the unconscious bad guys. Herself and Cable. There was a lot riding on this and she was way, way out of her depth.
--
Cain's muscles began to strain, his strength pushed to the limit as he felt the station continue to fracture under him. As powerful as he was, he simply didn't have the leverage to hold everything together. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see parts of the station cracking off and floating away. A couple of what looked to be escape pods vented propulsion gas, guiding them into a lower orbit that would bring them down to land.
Turning his head, he looked to the glider. It had barely managed to disengage from the station, and was taking a hell of a battering from the debris; it was beginning to tumble Earthward already, its descent semi-controlled at best. The best case-scenario plan had been to subdue the Brotherhood, bring him into the station, and bring everyone down in shifts. The plan, of course, had gone to hell.
The station shifted once more, and he knew that this was it. Looking out into the stars, Cain closed his eyes briefly and whispered a quick prayer, then braced his feet, kicked off from the station, and began to fall earthward.
The element of surprise wasn't going to last long enough for them to get the airlock door open. That much had been easy to predict, and Scott had known to plan for it. Set that consideration beside the need to buy time to get his whole team off the glider and the answer had been obvious. Their first, best 'battering ram' option would still be outside the station, but thankfully the second option was almost as good.
"Cable, Phoenix," he muttered over the coms, the instant they had a hard seal on the outer airlock door, "go."
Nathan exchanged one quick, tense look with Jean, and laid his hand beside her on the inner airlock door. They'd practiced this in the Danger Room. Just enough push to force it open and turn it into a weapon without sending it through the hull of the station.
Jean could feel the mental presences outside the lock, taking up positions and getting ready for the X-Men's arrival. This, though, she didn't think they would be able to get ready for... #On three... One... Two... Three!# The inner airlock jerked forward, the force of their combined minds ripping it free of the hull and knocking back the defenders waiting on the other side.
They pushed themselves forward in the same moment, their layered shields a trick that well-predated this particular mission. Between the force of the door and the battering ram of their minds, they almost - almost cleared the way for their teammates.
Some of those inside had fought them before, however, and had expected just such a gambit. A slender blue-skinned form shot at Jean from her left - well out of the range of the flung door, and delayed for just long enough for Mystique to slip in behind the leading edge of the 'battering ram' and slam bodily into Jean.
The lack of telepathic signature meant that Jean had no warning. The history between the two women meant that Mystique had no desire to pull her blows and her momentum propelled Jean into the bulkhead, breath knocked out of her and only luck and poor aim on the blue-skinned woman's part kept her ribs from cracking. But while Jean might be out of breath, she wasn't out of the game yet, and a telekinetic shove sent Mystique spinning away from her.
Mystique moved like a dancer in the zero-g, catching herself on the nearest handhold and spinning back at Jean gracefully, and too quickly to let her do more than catch her breath. The battering ram having done what it was supposed to do, Nathan dropped his shield and started to reach out telekinetically to grab her and fling her aside.
Then the door came back at him, slamming him into a bulkhead and pinning him there. Wheezing, Nathan tried to force it back away - and caught a glimpse of Magneto, behind the unfamiliar faces, his hand raised in a fist. He looked quite comprensively pissed.
Jean's dodge wasn't thought out, and meant that she was suddenly moving much faster and farther than she'd meant, but the end result of getting her out of Mystique's line of motion was one positive. The fact that it gave her enough time to give Mystique another shove, speeding her up along her destination and slamming her into the wall Jean had been forced against earlier was another. #And now the hard part?# she managed to broadcast to Nate as she bounced against the far wall and secured a hand hold.
--
Nothing wasn't slightly surreal up here. Heavy bulkhead casements covered in cyrillic writing, attaching warnings and notes to areas and devices Garrison couldn't puzzle out, a design aesthetic wholly foreign and in its own way, somewhat frightening. On the whole, this would not be a comfortable place to die.
The Brotherhood was waiting for them, and why not? Since reaching the station, the X-Men hadn't bothered to try and avoid making noise. Garrison had started moving almost as soon as the breach was made. His own powers, including his enhanced strength and reactions, had a second advantage in the station. He could translate that into velocity. Kane moved in a deceptively random pattern, rebounding from point to point, almost skimming the walls. By keeping himself close to a point to push off from, Kane's powers had turned into blinding speed and control as he came up on the swarm, looking to thread the needle through them to the console.
Unfortunately, he wasn't the only one with those specific traits, as a man tracking him almost expertly cut off his path, moving with equal speed to intercept Kane.
Joszef Veres, unlike the last time the X-Men had encountered him in Berlin, didn't look like he was enjoying himself at all. In fact, he looked angry, if in a set, determined sort of way. He'd also had the benefit of over a week in zero-gravity, and came at Kane like the more compact version of the Juggernaut that he was. He slammed into Kane, driving them both back against the hull, and the station shook ominously.
The impact drove the breath from Kane, but the younger man didn't pause from the blow. His mental filecards threw up a name; Nimrod. Extreme end of physical enhancements, military training, and nearly Kyle level senses. It added up to the Mountie being heavily overmatched. Still, he had a few surprises.
Kane pushed aside a blow from the man, riding the force of the arm out of range. Zero gravity combat was very different from normal hand to hand, as each thrown punch was robbed of kinetic force without the anchor of gravity. They rebounded together, pushing off to re-establish a new combat position, fighting for an advantage.
Nimrod wasn't quite as quick as Kane, but he was more familiar with the environment. That counted for a lot. He managed to get Garrison into a headlock from behind, pushing off the nearest anchor point and propelling them towards a hard impact with the hull once more.
Fortunately for Kane, Nimrod had stumbled into his hasty plan. Kane's neural stunner didn't have much of an effect on the man, causing him to lock up enough that Kane could twist and strike the hull with his feet to kill the momentum. The main thing it did was slow Nimrod's explosively fast reactions, enough that Kane was able to grab a metal cylinder from his uniform, and point it right at Nimrod's face.
Enhanced senses and pepper spray make a uniquely potent combination.
--
There were plenty of handholds around the station, above his head, and for someone with Angelo's particular talents, that meant his feet would never have had to touch the floor at all even if there was gravity. His attention was fixed firmly on his goal as he swung from place to place, aiming for the console at the end of the module.
He'd moved so fast, coming into the station - the Danger Room simulation had familiarized him with where he could find every handhold, every anchor point - that he'd moved past the first of the fighting even as it started. But Magneto's companions had the advantage of more time in zero-g, and the man who snarled in Arabic as he came hurtling at Angelo moved with a startling amount of assurance and speed.
Angelo twisted, blessing the flexibility his stretching gave him - he could get pretty much unlimited movement out of what amounted to working limbs with no bones - and kicked out at the man's face from mid-air. "~Back the hell off~", he snarled back in Spanish, not knowing or caring if his opponent understood.
Kamal el-Alaqui reeled away. He managed to land on his hands and knees against the metal of the hull, and his skin started to shift, taking on the hue and texture of that metal. When he launched himself at Angelo again, it was something like watching an onrushing train, if a train could have eyes glowing with pure fanaticism.
...oh, great. It's a psycho Mondo. He swung up quickly, hooking onto his handhold with the skin of his ankles, too, to hold himself out of the way. Wonder if he still needs to breathe when he's metal?
--
She could move freely in zero-g. Scott had relied on that, more than he'd told Marie herself or anyone else on the team. She was beyond invaluable in combat terms, because of her mobility. But if all else failed, she could also force her way through just about anything - could go toe to toe with Nimrod, take whatever Magneto might throw at her. She could get to the target and destroy the control console for the satellites.
Information on the rescued prisoners had been sketchy. They'd gotten a name for the slender Indian man - Suvik Senyaka - but no real details on his powers, beyond that they were psionic in nature. So it came as a surprise to everyone, Marie most of all, when Senyaka, holding on to a handhold built into the hull of the station with one hand, extended the other calmly, and long, crackling whips of energy lashed outwards. They tangled around Marie, first trapping her limbs, then wrapping around her neck tightly.
Marie's first instinct was to struggle, and she couldn't stop herself from initially fighting against the psionic whips surrounding her. When her struggles got her nothing, she forced herself to take a deep breath and re-evaluate the situation. Narrowing her eyes, she stopped fighting the whips and instead flew straight at Senyaka.
Senyaka snarled and dodged, with the ease of someone who'd spent a week getting used to zero gravity. Even so, he dodged Marie only by inches, and the energy whips pulsed as if in panic, starting to drain energy from her.
Marie tried to fight the woozy feeling from the drain, knowing that to make it stop she had to take out Senyaka. He may have been practicing how to move in zero-g, but it was nothing compared to her natural aptitude for flying through space. Redirecting her motion slightly, she threw out a right hook, smiling in grim satisfaction as it connected.
--
Scott had put a lot of hope into the possibility that Clarice could step out of the airlock, get a clear look at where she was going, and simply blink her way to the console and wreck it, fast and easy. They hadn't quite been expecting the almost literal wall of bad guys waiting for them when Nathan and Jean blasted the airlock open, however, and before Clarice could even get a clear look past them at the target, one of the less familiar faces had propeled himself forward and enveloped her in a crushing bear hug that was not in the slightest bit affectionate.
He was enormous, seven feet tall and massively built. His name was Katu, and though the look on his face was empty of the anger and rage so obvious in his comrades, it was somehow still implacable. He squeezed, one arm sliding up and across Clarice's throat.
Why did she always get the big ones? Fighting in zero gravity was nothing like fighting on the ground, even with the zero-g training they had undergone, but it helped even things out a little given the massive size differences. Pulling herself into a ball, Clarice used all the momentum she had to push away from him, even a few inches so he couldn't get to her throat. Breathing, regardless of gravity, was a good thing. "I was told not to kill you," she said, hoping that might help things. She doubted it, he had that scary calm look in his eyes, but maybe. "So don't make me get in trouble."
Katu went with the movement, sinking downward towards the hull. His feet touched the 'ground' and he pushed himself and Clarice upwards hard, at a much faster rate. They hit the top of the module, Clarice pinned between the big man and the cold unyielding metal. Katu said something in Russian that sounded almost sorrowful.
Russian was not a pretty language or one that Clarice had studied. Futilely she tried to wiggle down again before opening a small teleportation disc in one hand, "Don't make me use this," she warned. She could disable him without killing him if he got to a medical facility quickly, which was unlikely given that they were in freaking outer space. This was what Nate had been talking about - using her brain to fight and not trying to wrestle people outside of her weight class.
--
It was pure aural chaos and, against all protocol, Terry ripped her comm unit out of her ear in self defense. She didn't need it in order to face the ugly demony looking mutant in front of her anyway and given the way he fought, she'd probably do better with less distraction rather than more. Remembering what Scott had said about their actions, she ignored the activity around her and launched herself off a side wall and screamed. She kept any mental quips about the impossibility of hearing that in space strictly mental.
Said ugly demony looking mutant took the sonic scream head-on and went somersaulting backwards, hitting the hull hard enough to leave him dazed and drifting, if not fully unconscious. Before Terry could make another move, to put him down for the count or anything else, a more familiar figure came hurtling at her, feet first. It was Toad, and looking grimly determined, by Toad-standards.
This time, she couldn't manage to keep the thoughts internal, drawing in a deep breath, her mouth twisting like she'd tasted something unpleasant, "Ew." Years before he'd gotten the better of her, nearly suffocated her. But she was better trained now and not planning on allowing history to repeat itself.
He missed her by inches, but his tongue wrapped around one of the handholds on the inside of the hull and he swung right back at her. Someone had clearly been practicing, during his time on the station.
With as fast as he moved, trying a targeted sonic lance was going to be a very bad idea. She was too likely to miss and punch a hole through the station wall and real life didn't come with a reset. Instead she modulated her voice, let out that dissonant broadwave keen that turned the stomach and shifted the world by stealing away balance. She didn't have to imagine the effects, she'd seen them, bringing the most hardened to their knees, heaving.
--
Cain could hear echoing snippets of the chaos inside the space station inside his suit, the sound carrying through the metal hull of the station to his feet, like standing on a loudspeaker with the volume turned down. Resisting the urge to just rip a hole in the hull and barge in, he held his position outside near the airlock and the glider. Cyclops hadn't wanted to risk the possibility that the Brotherhood had a mutant capable of surviving outside the station coming around and sabotaging the glider, and with the diagrams of the station, Cain would have been at a serious disadvantage in those cramped quarters.
He looked up over his head, feeling a sense of vertigo momentarily as he saw the Earth below him. The blue oceans could almost be a sky, he thought, and for a moment everything seemed almost normal until a dark shadow blotted out the sky, and he felt a heavy grip on his shoulders.
The man who'd quite literally snuck up on him in the silence of space was nearly Cain's own size. He wore no suit, but did have a helmet and oxygen tanks, obviously some sort of jury-rigged set-up, and there seemed to be pieces of metal strapped to his massive boots. Magnets, to judge by the way he was walking along the station's hull.
"Aw crap," Cain mumbled as he tried to spin, but found his feet leaving the station's hull without any gravity to keep him there. Fumbling around as he flipped head over heels, his fingers brushed along one edge of the glider's wing, scrambling for purchase before momentum yanked him away from the station and his gloating adversary.
Isaac Javitz watched Cain vanish over the edge of the station, smiled grimly to himself, and turned his attention to the glider. Once he took care of this, he would head back to the airlock he'd exited, on the other side of the module. Magneto had ordered one of the emergency capsules to be released, to allow for another exit from the station for just this situation. He would destroy their way out, and then go back inside and help the others defeat the interlopers...
--
Afterwards, Scott would wonder who'd cleared the way for him. Had to be one of the telekinetics; there was no other way to explain the way that hijackers and X-Men alike tumbled out of his path, the latter far more gently than the former. But Jean was still entangled with Mystique, and he hadn't seen Nathan since Magneto had pinned him down.
Didn't matter. Not right now. Scott pushed off the hull, hard, and shot through the opening. If they all made it back, he was going to have to admit that he'd been wrong. The key had been to work together after all. Because he was through, past the fighting and within sight of the console.
With a clear shot.
Angles and questions of force level tumbled through his head at top speed, calculations made in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
ZAK!!
The control console exploded in a shower of sparks and a hail of metal shrapnel. Scott raised an arm to shield his face instinctively, although even the shrapnel that landed closest to him was still a few feet short.
As his arm lowered, he saw the smoking ruin of the console. His gaze flickered back to the X-Men, still engaged with the Brotherhood - and the choice made itself.
He opened his mouth to shout for the retreat, but the words were choked off as the metal shrapnel that had missed him suddenly took on a life of his own and came flying at him. A wide-beam blast at the last second disintegrated most of the deadly hail, but several pieces survived, slamming into his arm and upper chest. The impact pushed him back against the hull, and a choked cry slipped out before he could bite it back.
Magneto was floating several feet away, white with rage, one hand outstretched. The shrapnel - and it had driven through the suit in at least a few places, Scott could feel it - twitched ominously, and Magneto's mouth formed words he couldn't hear over the noise of battle.
Scott's jaw clenched, and he aimed another blast, this time right at the old bastard. The remains of the airlock door were suddenly there, serving as a metal shield that did a very effective job of taking the blast.
No time for this. He could feel ominous tremors running through the hull behind him. "RETREAT!" he yelled in his best battlefield roar, repeating it down the switchboard.
He'd take a partial victory. There were more ways to finish this than continuing to slug it out in here. Outside, in command of the way back down, they had leverage. If he let this fight continue inside the station, even money said they were all going to wind up dead.
--
Angelo heard the order to retreat, but couldn't follow it. Kamal was insanely persistent - and quite determined to kill him - and while Angelo had managed to start to wrap him in skin, the other man had gotten his arms free and literally reeled him in to punching range.
Punching range meant he could punch back, and did, flailing simultaneously with strips of skin. Some of them were probably sharp-edged, with the situation he was in, but it was anyone's guess if they'd cut Kamal now.
"~Murderer,~" Kamal hissed in Arabic, his eyes glinting madly as he slammed a fist into Angelo's ribs. "~Tool of the oppressor!~"
His ribs had never quite got back up to strength from the last two times they'd been broken - just like any bone once fractured, they were more prone to it now. Angelo winced, hammering both fists into the man's gut, and retorted in mostly the same language, "~Didn't come up here to kill anyone, amigo. We can both still get out of here.~"
Kamal laughed madly, going with the momentum of the punch and letting his feet touch down on the hull once more. He pushed off hard, aiming to crush Angelo between his own metallicized body and the hull above them.
Angelo swallowed, and then just let his powers run free. They'd never just been restricted to his hands, even if that was 90% of the use he made of them. Under his suit, small protrusions appeared all over the front of his body, waiting for Kamal to land. Time to find out just how elastic his skin really was.
The impact with the hull was hard, but the expected crushing never happened. Kamal bounced, looking hugely affronted as he was sent spinning backwards, the skin strips Angelo had been using to try and keep him contained unraveling as Kamal flew in the opposite direction. His howl sounded indignant.
--
Tumbling, tumbling, tumbling... Cain saw the station growing further away, a silver blemish against the green and brown backdrop of Asia Major. He closed his eyes briefly, starting to cross himself, then felt a tug at his wrist.
That damn magnet cable.
This has got to be the dumbest thing I ever done in my life, Cain remembered saying to Nate.
No shit, he said to himself, whipping the magnet around in a circle and sailing it towards the station.
Direct hit.
As soon as the line went taut, Cain jerked, trusting in the greater mass of the station to act as his anchor, and the cable to do its job and reverse his momentum, stretching slightly, then sending him shooting back on a direct trajectory for Javitz's back.
Had they not been in space, the sound Javitz made them would have been considerably more pained than a simple 'oof!' as Cain slammed into him. The impact sent him flying forward, ripped from the hull despite the magnets on his boots. He grasped desperately at one of the modules as he floated clear of the main hull - and caught it, barely. One giant fist slammed against the hull of the module, seeking purchase.
Piercing it.
Cain's momentum carried him over Javitz, his feet landing against the hull and finding purchase. Turning to fight, he saw the rip in the hull begin to widen and the telltale steam vent of atmosphere escaping from the station. "Aw hell," he groaned, throwing himself forward.
One booted foot lashed out, catching Javitz in the ribs like a soccer player going for a penalty kick. "You stupid son of a bitch!" He punctuated the outburst with a punch to Javitz's helmet. "There's people in there, you moron!"
A spiderweb of cracks started to spread across the jury-rigged helmet, and in a panic, Javitz let go of his hold on the station and grabbed for Cain. Clutching at him, in a way that made it somewhat unclear if he was trying to grapple with the X-Man, or using him as an anchor.
Instinctively, Cain ducked away from Javitz's lunge, falling flat against the skin of the station and grabbing onto a protruding antenna for leverage.
Flailing desperately, Javitz floated back off into space. This time, he was well clear of any of the modules, of anything to arrest his movement. And while it wouldn't have helped him had he been headed Earthward, the site of him twisting and writhing desperately as he vanished into the starry black would have been worth at least a modicum of pity - had there been the time.
The station heaved under Cain, atmosphere exploding outwards from the joint of the damaged module.
Cain barely had time to glance up at Javitz tumbling away before the skin of the station began to split under him. Thinking quickly, he looped the cable around his waist, tying the other end to the most secure part of the station he could find. It's official, he thought, this is the dumbest thing I ever done in my life.
Getting a running start, he flung himself off the station at as flat an angle as he could manage. The cable drew taut, and carried him around like a tetherball on a pole. Once, twice around the station before his feet hit the metal surface again. He gripped the edge of a panel and hauled, trying to use the strong metal cable to hold the station together like an oversized hay bale.
NATE! he shouted telepathically, This place is coming apart, you guys need to get out NOW!
--
Katu said something gutteral-sounding and spun, as if to fling her away from him. The wash of feverish-blue energy that crackled down his arms and into Clarice was painful, if not incapacitatingly so.
"Ah!" Clarice did not like that at all. Her hair was probably sticking straight out now too, despite her french braid. "Way uncool, dude." She wasn't a surfer or from the valley, but the phrase worked. She grabbed his head in a choke hold and wrenched herself around until she was on his back. There. Now she was in slightly more control.
The lights in the module flickered erratically, the buzzing sound nearly drowning out the noise of the fighting. Katu clutched at her, more of the crackling energy coming off him, as if in waves, and Clarice's com shorted out.
"Oh no you don't!" Clarice muttered, blinking Katu away from her. Not far, but far enough to give herself a chance to do....something. Anything. Close quarters grappling with someone over a foot taller was just stupid if you could avoid it. At least she hadn't sliced and diced him to little pieces.
Katu spun backwards, hitting the hull. The lights flickered again, and some piece of equipment just below Clarice exploded, spitting sparks upwards and at her.
#Blink!# It was Nathan's voice in her mind, sounding urgent. #Stay put, I'm coming right past you-#
"No problem," she replied verbally, even though her comm was out. Damn electrical mutation thingy! Staying put was easy so long as big, tall and electric didn't come her way.
Nathan literally grabbed her by the scruff of the neck as he shot by. There was the sound of tearing metal from somewhere above them, and he swore, his voice low and desperate. #Hold on, the airlock's going to come up fast-# If he could get her into the glider, between his telepathy and her teleportation, they could get everyone else in, if they just had enough time...
--
The sound of tearing metal and the shrill of the station's emergency alarms as it tried - and failed - to seal off the damaged science module didn't seem to dissuade Kamal, who flung himself back at Angelo, howling more imprecations in Arabic.
It sure as hell alarmed Angelo, though there wasn't much he could do to investigate, help, or just get the hell out when he had an insane Arab terrorist trying to kill him. His next move was to grab Kamal firmly round the ankles with his skin and send him careening back across the room.
Kamal caught himself on a handhold - and swore again, this time in fear more than anger at another alarming bang!, the sound of another hull breach. He pushed off desperately, disappearing into one of the lower modules. Taking refuge, quite clearly.
It wasn't a bad idea.
It really wasn't, and since Kamal had stopped fighting, Angelo was free to follow suit. He turned and made a beeline for the escape pods, yanking on the pull rings to deploy the sleeves of his suit - it seemed more important to have full cover, just now, than have his skin free.
--
It seemed impossible that Magneto had kept this many of the station crew alive. Two of them had made their way into the glider earlier, under the cover of the fighting - Scott had spotted them in what passed for his peripheral vision - and now here were two more. Scott had headed towards the Soyuz capsules, reasoning that they needed to spread out the better pilots - not that getting back through the mess to the glider had been all that feasible in the first place - and he'd nearly missed the two men hammering frantically on the porthole of one of the science modules.
He couldn't get the lock open. Some sort of damned combination? One of the cosmonauts was shouting in Russian, pleading with him. And suddenly it didn't matter that these people might have had something to do with the trap the Russians had set for Magneto. They might have, might not have, but it just didn't matter. He wasn't going to leave them to die.
"Get back!" he shouted, gesturing at them to get away from the door. He aimed at the hinges of the hatch - first one, then the other. Then there were eager hands pushing it up from beneath, and he helped. The two men moved easily enough in zero-gravity, nimble with experience. They looked fearfully at the chaos that had erupted in the station's main module, and Scott lost patience. "Go, damn it!" he shouted at them, pushing them ahead of him and towards the capsules. He didn't follow right away, because no one was following him, damn it...
What he saw when he looked back wasn't encouraging. "DISENGAGE!" he shouted desperately - and in sharp contrast to what he'd just ordered, prepared to launch himslf back into the fight.
--
It was hard to move the side of her face, hardened slime plastering her hair down and covering her ear. Little shards of it still clung to her lips where she'd shattered it away on a hard scream and she was fairly certain she was bleeding though with her adrenaline pumping she felt nothing. She drew in a breath and heard, dimly, the sound of orders being given. Luckily, she'd taken her comm out earlier and it wasn't covered in slime.
Dodging and aiming a kick Toad's way, she lifted it to her other ear and registered Cyclops' order to retreat. She missed miserably, but tracked Toad's move...until the lights flickered off and on, off and on. Brief, disorienting and... Two feet slammed hard into her solar plexus, expelling the air in her lungs and she flew backwards.
Jean and Mystique were surprisingly well matched in zero-g. What experience Mystique had with moving without gravity Jean balanced out with TK manuevers, and much of Jean's attack power had to be limited to avoid damaging the satelite - a consideration Mystique didn't seem to share. For the moment, Jean had Mystique pinned, trapped in a tight TK grip far away from any surface she could use to fight her way free. The moment, unfortunately, didn't last long as she was suddenly slammed from behind by her projectile team mate. Jean managed, barely, to keep her TK hold on the shapeshifter, and the three of them went hurtling further down the hall.
Down, into another module of the station entirely. While the three women were trying to disentangle themselves - Mystique was first to get free, and was already pulling herself upwards, back towards the center of the fighting - all hell began to break loose. There was another explosion in the main module, followed by the unmistakable bang of the hull breaching yet again. To make things worse, two very large men came tumbling into the still-intact module, Kamal with his skin still reflecting the metal of the hull, Katu's arms still shrouded in crackling energy.
"F..." Terry started to say with the first gasp of breath that came back to her then thought the better of it, biting off the word. The lights flickered again as they all struggled to get free from the tangle of arms and legs. She shoved hard against a red head of hair that was digging into her side--she was pretty sure it was Mystique's but wouldn't have felt any guilt if it was Jean's and finally managed to push herself to the side of the module. She sucked in a breath but couldn't exactly scream in this small a space without exploding Jean's head too.
There was the brief shrill of another alarm, this one much closer. It turned out to be a warning that the station's automatic systems were taking measures to deal with the hull breaches and other damage. The module sealed itself off to preserve the atmosphere inside, just in time. There was the muffled sound of another explosion and hull breach, and the whole module shuddered, torn loose from the main body of the station.
There was a sudden cry - from Mystique. "Erik!"
--
The whole place was coming apart; someone had caused another hull breach, somewhere near the airlock and the glider. Nathan pushed Clarice ahead of him, into the glider, and his eyes narrowed in something close to outright rage as he saw Toad and one of the ex-prisoners - Senyaka - in there already. Like fuck are they stealing our way home- A burst of telekinesis knocked them both against the seats. Nathan turned his attention very briefly to the two cowering cosmonauts. They could stay conscious. "~Strap in!~" he snapped at them in Russian, looking back over his shoulder in the direction of the airlock, desperately.
No one was coming. And he could feel the atmosphere being sucked out of the glider, out through the hull breaches in the station. "Blink! Get in a seat!"
Clarice scrambled into a seat, fumbling with the straps as fast as she could. There wasn't any time to worry about the other X-Men, just hold on and pray. "Cable!" she screeched, not really having anything coherant to say so much as to express her displeasure and absolute fear. Turning towards the cosmonauts she tried to smile despite everything, "It'll be okay," she assured them in English with more confidence than she felt as they found seats for themselves.
No one was going to reach the glider on their own power; a quick scan of the station was enough to establish that. Nathan swore and pulled himself towards the pilot's seat, smacking the control panel to close the hatch as he pulled himself down into the seat. His hands were shaking badly. He hadn't wanted to close the door, but if this place turned into a vacuum, they were not only dead, but they wouldn't be able to help anyone else.
"Blink, open your mind to me," he said hoarsely. "We're going to have to spot the team and teleport anyone who's not going to reach one of the pods in here. I'll borrow their eyes, you do the teleporting." The whole glider lurched violently as he tried to strap himself in, the movement throwing him hard against the console.
This sounded like a supremely bad idea for so many reasons the primary one being that while this idea had been discussed, it had never been practiced. "Yessir," she replied, visibly forcing herself to relax. Physical relaxation and mental relaxation went hand in hand and after a minute she succeeded enough to let him in. She wasn't very comfortable with telepaths in her head, but that more to do with having someone other than herself in her head and less because she had something to hide. The X-Men knew her secrets. Being able to see through Cable and out other peoples eyes was disconcerting, but she was trying. "Now I know what LSD is like. Trippy."
Closest first. There - Garrison. Nathan started to send a warning to him, but was interrupted. Whips of energy uncoiled from the body of the Indian man with Toad, wrapping around Nathan's arms and pulsing with energy. Nathan gasped, falling against the console, his whole body convulsing. He had enough presence of mind to shut down the telepathic switchboard before the sensation could be transferred to his teammates. And he was just pissed and stubborn enough to muster enough telekinesis to lash out at Toad's 'friend', knocking him out cold this time.
--
Nimrod had dodged just enough that he didn't catch the pepper spray full in the face. Just mostly, and his snarl of rage and pain was audible even over the noise of the fighting and the crackling snaps of systems blowing out, not to mention the explosive bang of the hull breaching in the upper module. The sudden burst of Hungarian profanity was jumbled-sounding, even to someone who didn't know the language, and Nimrod hurled himself forward, fist drawing back in a punch...
Which missed Garrison entirely, but made a significant dent in the hull of the station, critically near a seam. He didn't punch through entirely - not even on the second, maddened blow - but the metal was visibly weakened, the pressure differential continuing to do damage.
"I think I made him mad." Kane called out to Marie, as he avoided another tremendous blow. He could hear the bulkheads behind him straining, as the pressure sucked at them. But Nimrod was too fast to simply disengage from without getting his head torn off in the process.
Nimrod was fighting angry, allowing Kane to land blows that would have caved in the front of a car, and not noticing them in the slightest. Yet another fist bowed out a steel plate, and only the fractional last minute movement had kept Kane from being between it as the blow.
"Marie!" Kane called out desperately. "Catch!" He yelled, as he doubled up his arms in a 'rope-a-dope' fashion on the punch aimed for his head. Nimrod's blow was mostly absorbed by his block, although Kane could swear he heard his bones groan at the blow. With Nimrod's power behind it, Kane was sent flying out of control from the position in which Nimrod had trapped him, tumbling end over end down the station towards Marie at high velocity.
Nimrod looked up at the bang of the hull breaching in the upper module. Something exploded behind him, showering him with sparks. He didn't even flinch, but the anger seemed to drain from his expression, leaving behind something more like calculation. Reaching for one of the handholds, he pulled himself back to the hull and then pushed off, sending himself rapidly in the direction of the Soyuz capsules.
And Scott, who was directly in his path.
Marie barely heard Kane's call, as her attention was focused on the man standing before her. "A little busy," she muttered, eyes narrowing at the white haired man standing maybe 25 feet away, her fist shooting out to knock a piece of metal headed towards her away. She'd had dreams and nightmares about this moment and now that it was here, she didn't want to let it go the route of her more painful dreams. Of course, all the nearby projectiles were metal, which made them completely ineffective, so Marie had been doing her best to get close to Magneto...a solid punch to the head would suit her quite nicely.
One of the many handholds placed at regular intervals around the module tore itself free of the hull and flew at Marie. It stretched and warped as it flew, then wrapped around her neck like a metal snake, tightening. Magneto's eyes were locked on her - but a faint, angry smile tugged at his lips as he looked past her and saw Garrison's uncontrolled tumble towards her from behind.
"Ah hell." Kane muttered, as he slammed into Marie from behind, unable to check his momentum or change his flight path in the slightest. It certainly wasn't enough to hurt her, but it was enough to past them past Magneto, ruining any chance of a quick blow on him.
Her invulnerable throat had easily withstood Magneto's attempt at strangulation - however, invulnerability didn't mean she wasn't affected by moving objects and the time it had taken her to regain control of her flight had been just enough to carry the pair out of range of Magneto. Halting herself and Garrison, Marie's eyes were full of frustration. Slipping her fingers through Garrison's, she began pulling the Canadian back in the direction they had come. She wasn't going to let Magneto get away this time.
It was at that moment that the damaged seam of the module split wide open. Explosive decompression was just that, it turned out. Atmosphere belched out into space, and the whole central module of the station shuddered, the tear spreading farther down its length.
It was going to break up. Within seconds, they were cut off from the Soyuz capsules as well as the glider. The secondary modules sealed themselves off, an automatic safety protocol to try and preserve their life support capability. The main module, however, was rapidly becoming a very unpleasant place to be.
--
The Soyuz capsules were designed to take you safely back to Earth. It wasn't as good in some respects as making it back to the glider, but the tangle of fighting between him and that airlock made one of the capsules the best choices. Like all the other X-Men on this mission, Angelo had trained on the flight simulator for just this set of circumstances. He'd done fairly well, too, according to Scott. There was every chance he could get the capsule down reasonably intact.
If he made it there. The module blew along its seam, atmosphere belching outwards from an increasingly gaping hole - right in Angelo's path.
He slowed, judging his options. He could try to go around it, but that risked it opening wider right under his feet before he could get clear. Or he could try to go over it. Deciding the second option was marginally safer, Angelo leaped, stretching for the nearest handhold.
It was already too late for something like that. He was sucked from the station and out into the blackness of space instantly.
There was no time to react before he was out, no time and no spare air to waste on screaming afterwards. No possibility to act, nothing he could think but a dazed Really should've worn my helmet inside... sorry, Nathan. The last was directed towards the station with as much force as he could.
--
The sharp motion of the module breaking free from the main station knocked everyone about, and it took Jean a few additional seconds to fight free of the mass of limbs. There weren't any view ports in this portion of the module, but it was easy enough to tell that something was wrong - having shoved away from the wall, Jean could now see how the module was moving relative to the people floating inside. Spinning. "This is not good..." she muttered, Mystique and the others momentarily forgotten as she took a deep breath, then keyed her comm. "Cyclops. Phoenix here. Siryn and I are.. cut off. I think our module's broken lose somehow." Which meant, without the station's thrusters to correct the orbit, they'd be falling into the atmosphere.
Terry kept clinging to the side of the module, aiming a kick at one of the mutants who had drifted too close, aiming for his head. "Let's just everyone get to different corners." The natural lilt of her voice hummed with power and turned it into nearly a song with the force of command. "Sure we could all try to kill each other but it'll get us nothing but dead."
All Jean got in reply to her comms call was static. Katu, who was holding onto the nearest handhold and watching the goings-on carefully, said something in Russian in a deep rumbling voice. It might have been an apology.
Hold on, was Scott's reply to her when she tried again telepathically. If we can get Blink to- There was a flash down the link of something hurtling towards Scott, the unmistakable impression of flesh-on-flesh impact.
Jean winced at the pain which flashed down the link from Scott, extending her senses even farther. Already she could tell that the distance between them and the station was widening faster and faster -gravity had them, and the end result was inevitable at this point. No time for Blink. Momentum's changed too much and she'd end up in space like as not. She took a deep breath, pushing away the voice in her head which said that this was a stupid, stupid idea and that they were all going to die, and said aloud, "I'm going to have to try to land us."
At times like this, Terry was reminded that her teammate was a crazy person. She gaped at Jean, attention momentarily diverted from watching the others in the module. "Are you mad? That's a ridiculous idea and you're going to kill us all!"
Jean... There was a terrible edge of desperation to the thought from Scott. Before she could respond, however, it was replaced by a grim sense of purposefulness. Don't try. Do. I love you.
I love you, too. There was resolve in her eyes as she turned to look at Terry. "Yes, yes I am. I'm also our only hope, unless you've got a better idea." Already her mind was mapping out the shape of the module, learning it's mass and size.
"Oh, look." Mystique's voice sounded brittle. "The X-Men are going to save us."
"Well, Erik's a little tied up saving his own precious skin," Jean snapped, eyes flashing as she turned on the shape-shifter. "So, again, if you have a better idea, by all means speak up. I'm not exactly looking forward to landing several tons of meteoritic metal with my brain here."
Terry wondered if she could kick Mystique in the head from here. Probably not, more's the pity. She settled for grumbling beneath her breath and glaring without discrimination around the module. The other two mutants were worth a second look and she spent some time studying them rather than paying attention to the brewing cat fight between her least favorite red heads.
Kamal was visibly seething, looking like he was seriously debating trying to kill the two X-Men and worrying about reentry later. He wasn't moving, though, so perhaps common sense was winning out. Katu just held on, gazing at all of them with dark, almost sorrowful eyes. His expression was almost resigned.
When it looked like they were done arguing, Jean gave a sigh of relief. She really couldn't afford to be distracted. Reaching out, she grabbed hold of one of the wall hand holds as she wrapped her power around the outside of the module's metal skin, an extra layer of pressure holding everything together. The gentle twisting of the walls stopped as she established what would be their new 'down', less than a minute before the juddering of the module let them know inside that atmosphere had been encountered.
--
He'd reflect afterwards that Nimrod had actually saved his life. Not intentionally, of course. It was pure chance that the Hungarian had slammed into him and actually sent him flying in the direction of the open airlock door. The cosmonauts had helped, pulling him in just in time as the station started to break up. Never let it be said you don't get a return on a good deed... One of the ex-prisoners was already in there, hunched in the corner and clearly fighting back panic. Scott didn't spare him a glance. Even as he finished the quick telepathic conversation with Jean, he was pulling himself towards the pilot's seat.
There was a yelp from one of the cosmonauts as Nimrod pulled himself into the capsule, his immense strength letting him fight the forces pulling him in the other direction. Before Scott could react, he was being hauled out of the pilot's seat, an arm like a steel bar around his throat. The atmosphere continued to rush out of the capsule through the open hatch, and Scott could hear continuing sounds of explosive decompression above them in the main module.
The other cosmonaut launched himself towards the console and managed to hit the control for the hatch, probably saving all of them. "You... pilot this thing?" Scott wheezed as Nimrod's grip on him tightened. "By... all means, k-kill me, then-" Reason with the madman, Summers. Sure. But he didn't dare risk a blast, not facing the wrong way and with the capsule's main control console still right in front of him.
Astonishingly, Nimrod's grip slackened, and Scott was given a sudden, brutal push towards the console. "On the ground," the Hungarian snarled, his voice harsh with hatred. It had the ring of a promise.
The older cosmonaut said something nervously in Russian. Scott ignored him and strapped himself in, swallowing tightly at what he was sensing down the link. No switchboard, no coms, no way to know what had happened to the others...
--
Magneto had been thrown down the module in the same direction as Garrison and Marie. He caught himself on one of the handholds, his grunt of effort inaudible over the noise of the station's destruction. Remarkably, he looked almost entirely calm, despite the situation. His eyes narrowed and one hand, shaking only slightly, came up in a fist.
The end of the module started to reshape itself, metal flowing almost like water, sealing Garrison, Marie, and one lone cosmonaut off, along with Magneto, from the chaos. The makeshift lifeboat shuddered as it tore free from the rest of the station.
"If you want to die," Magneto said in the sudden, shocking quiet, his voice low and harsh, "by all means, continue fighting." The lights inside the module were flickering, dying even as he spoke, and they were plunged into darkness. "Otherwise, be silent and stay out of my way."
--
"Fuckin' A!" Cable pulling out of her mind was not pleasant, although Clarice knew that if he had been in it when the bastard had tackled him it would have been worse. She quickly turned, checking to make sure the cosmonauts were okay before scrambling out of her seatbelts to check on Cable. "Nate! I am not explaining to your wife why I let your brain get scrambled! Got it?!" she said to him, checking his vitals and ignoring the unconscious bad guy.
Nathan groaned and pushed himself upright. "I can't-" His head was full of white noise. What the fuck? He shook it doggedly, but it didn't help. "Fuck," he said, his voice slightly slurred, "some kind of..." He felt like he'd been electrocuted. "Goddamnit, I lost the switchboard..."
Someone was floating into space, out beyond the glider. Nathan blinked, trying to clear his vision - and his heart nearly stopped. It was Angelo.
Angelo, in space, without a helmet.
"CLARICE!"
"Shitfuck!" Clarice really had a pottymouth sometimes. She followed Nate's gaze out the window, "Come to Blinky," she cooed, opening a portal and bringing him in the glider. She was over being scared shitless. She'd have a breakdown later, right now she had to try to save Angelo. If she could. No 'if's'. When.
"You are not dying on me," she informed Angelo's unmoving body as she felt for a pulse, all business. She could do this. She would. "Cable! Strip his shirt. Cut it if you need to."
The station lurched again, throwing Nathan against the console. The console that seemed afire with red lights. "~You,~" he snapped in Russian at one of the cosmonauts, not really sure how he was moving, let alone speaking coherently. Adrenalin was a wonderful thing. "~Help her!~" The man moved to do so, and Nathan's jaw clenched as he turned his attention back to keeping them all alive. Focus on flying. They'll look after Angelo. You're not going to help him if you get all of us killed... But his head was still buzzing, and he couldn't even reach out to see if Angelo was still alive.
He had a pulse. Barely. And she didn't have a crash cart or a MD. That was about par really, "Okay," she talked herself through this, pantomiming that the cosmonaut should cut open his shirt. While he did that she closed Angelo's nose between her fingers and said a silent apology to Amanda. Beginning CPR, the cosmonaut had the shirt cut and was ready to begin chest compressions and aid Clarice in CPR. It made sense that a cosmonaut would know how, she reflected, bobbing her head as she counted, "Spasiba," she said pulling one of her five or so words of Russian from the back of her brain. "Breathe!" she commanded Angelo. "Breathe!"
The glider shuddered again, and started to tilt sideways, alarmingly. Nathan swore, hitting the control to release the airlock desperately. They couldn't risk get trapping in the wreckage of the station, no matter what happened. Disengage, damn it-
He heard coughing, and involuntarily, his head jerked around for long enough to see Angelo's body jerk, the semi-conscious young man spitting blood all over the unconscious ex-prisoner who'd floated over, unnoticed, while Clarice and the cosmonaut had been performing CPR. Nathan felt a swell of relief so overwhelming that he was glad he was already in a seat.
"How are his vitals?" Nathan asked - and flinched as he saw part of the main station module falling towards the glider. Ignoring the agony in his head, he lashed out with his telekinesis - not at the module, but to force the glider to bank. All it did was make sure the wreckage hit the wing, instead of the cockpit, and there was suddenly no question of staying in orbit.
"I have a pulse!" Clarice cried as the glider got knocked around by space debris. Grasping, she tried to prevent Angelo from being jostled. "It's weak, but it's there!" Weak was better than none. And on the bright side, he wasn't peeing blood.
Nathan's breath caught in his chest for a moment, raggedly. That was all the time he had for reactions. "Strap him in and get up here," he choked out as the glider drifted away from the remains of the station. He saw at least one pod, maybe two, heading Earthwards. He couldn't tell who was in them, which of their teammates were still alive. His vision kept trying to gray out at the edges - whatever that shock had been, it felt almost like it combined with that brief use of telekinesis had resulted in powers overstrain. And he was about to make it a lot worse. "I'm going to need your help to land."
"Land?" How many 'oh shits' could she have on one mission?! "There's not land in outer space!" Clarice prayed he didn't mean real land as in Earth land. The glider was not made for that sort of thing! Checking to make sure that Angelo was okay other than attempting to breathe vaccuum, Clarice and the cosmonaut hauled him into a seat and strapped him in. He sagged, but he stayed.
"Unless you want to try and kill yourself teleporting to earth, we try it my way," Nathan growled shakily, and managed to get the glider's nose pointed downwards. "We've got to try and kill our momentum. I can do part of it telekinetically, but I could use some help."
Oh. Right. Yeah. Dying was bad. "You need me to teleport us down? I mean, so we don't burn the hull?" she'd seen a few scifi movies in her time. The random numbers that bounced around her head that composed her thought pattern could occasionally be quick on the uptake.
"NO!" A little too loud; he didn't need to yell at her. Even if the glider was starting to shudder as it tumbled deeper into the atmosphere. "Repeated blinks, on my mark, and I'll slow us telekinetically between them. Can you handle the weight?"
"I'm going to have to, aren't I?" she replied, coming up next to him and practically pressing her nose to the window. Anything to orient herself. Gravity was beginning to kick in. That was a bad, bad sign. Sitting down, she surveyed everyone. The scared cosmonauts looking after Angelo, the unconscious bad guys. Herself and Cable. There was a lot riding on this and she was way, way out of her depth.
--
Cain's muscles began to strain, his strength pushed to the limit as he felt the station continue to fracture under him. As powerful as he was, he simply didn't have the leverage to hold everything together. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see parts of the station cracking off and floating away. A couple of what looked to be escape pods vented propulsion gas, guiding them into a lower orbit that would bring them down to land.
Turning his head, he looked to the glider. It had barely managed to disengage from the station, and was taking a hell of a battering from the debris; it was beginning to tumble Earthward already, its descent semi-controlled at best. The best case-scenario plan had been to subdue the Brotherhood, bring him into the station, and bring everyone down in shifts. The plan, of course, had gone to hell.
The station shifted once more, and he knew that this was it. Looking out into the stars, Cain closed his eyes briefly and whispered a quick prayer, then braced his feet, kicked off from the station, and began to fall earthward.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}