Melter Skelter

[x-dominion.livejournal.com]

The X-Men sneak aboard a squid shaped sub to reach the underwater city.



Shostakov spat discontentedly into the murky water splashing against the pier and jammed his fists into the pockets of his jacket. "I'm a senior citizen, you know, boychick." His pale, blue eyes did not for a second turn toward Nathan. "How is it that I end up on the fucking teamster detail, exactly?"

"Luck of the draw, I guess," Nathan said, his eyes slightly unfocused as he thinned out his shields. Finding nothing that required attention, he turned to the crates and did a slow walkaround, checking to make sure that everything was secure. "We make more convincing caterers, I guess."

The Russian grunted glumly. "Forty years of service, for this bullshit." The grey eyebrows moved together in a fierce frown and kicked the smaller crate spitefully. "I bet they gave Kane a fucking Italian villa. And for you Alexei - why, we have this lovely subsistence wage! Enjoy. Assholes." His muttering subsided suddenly as he gave a low whistle, gesturing to Dayspring sharply.

"Company."

The sub was surfacing slowly, and Nathan eyed it, then eyed the largest of the crates. It was the size of a small car and he could have lifted it with his telekinesis easily, but that would defeat the whole purpose of pretending to be Joe Average Cargo Handler. "I'll let you drive the forklift," he said to Shostakov in a deadpan tone.

Typical. Alexei thought as he strode off toward the machine, without another word.

Let the American jaw it out with Zemo's goons. Hell, he'll probably enjoy it, he looked the type. Chances are he's still in love with the martial and clandestine romance of it all.

Fuck, it sucked getting old.

***

Rico had done a lot of crazy things in his career. Getting discharged from the Navy after that "incident" at the embassy, sure. That time in Prague with the rockets. But piloting a submarine shaped like a giant squid, heading down three miles into one of the most dangerous and barely-explored reaches of the ocean floor? That took the cake.

As the squid-sub descended, he nodded to the sub's only other occupant, the big Turk whose name he could never pronounce right. "Hey, go bust open one of those crates, bring me up some of that caviar," he said with a grin. You had to hand it to Baron Zemo - as crazy as the old coot was, wearing that weird purple mask all the time, he treated his people well. They'd picked up the supercomputer as well as crates full of the finest caviar and champagne. Whatever they had to steal from this old Russian science city at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, at least the caper was going to be well-catered.

The Turk just grunted and walked back into the cargo hold, picking up a crowbar and approaching one of the crates. He lifted the crowbar and stopped suddenly when he thought he saw one of the boxes... move?

Before he could move, the crowbar was wrenched out of his hand by an invisible force. While he was still gaping, it floated upward and rapped him smartly at the base of the skull. Nathan dropped the 'don't see me' projection that covered himself and Shostakov, and looked in the direction of the crates.

#Everyone out,# he sent briefly as the crates opened themselves, the wooden sides lowered soundlessly to the deck of the sub. No point tipping anyone else off prematurely. #We've got a job to do.#

"Be very careful." Natasha Romanova had been silent up until now. In fact, the Russian agent had said little since getting off the plane with Shostakov in tow. Christian Kane and X-Force had made contact with Col. Vazhin of the GRU through back channels, explaining what happened. The undersea city represented another embarrassing situation for the current Russian government; a relic of the Cold War, which happened to violate about every maritime law existing. "The Soviets built failsafes into most of the systems down here. If one is accidentally breached, it could lockdown entire sections of the city, cut off vital systems, or, well, explode. Unfortunately, the Soviet engineers were very good at failsafes and very bad at everything else. Most of the systems are near failing as is. A missed energy blast or an unlucky impact, and we'll be swimming to Vladivostok. You still remember how to swim, don't you, otetz?"

"I already hate this place." Garrison said, sighing. A sub made to look like a giant squid, and it wasn't the oddest thing. That's what happened every time his dad turned up, something bizarre, strange, and making him work with highly dangerous and likely unbalanced international agents. This was his fourth mission that Romanova had appeared on, and he'd placed her in his mind as a human omen for disaster.

Angelo climbed out of his crate, stretching stiff muscles. "Only got two energy projectors with us. Meltdown, Alex, you heard that, right?"

Tabitha groaned as she stretched her bum knee, leaning heavily against the outside of a crate. "No blowing up the undersea station and killing us all, got it."

"Hey now! My blowing up days are behind me, dude. I totally have this covered." Alex couldn't help a wary grin as he added offhandedly. "You know, this is going to be very weird if you all use your codenames..." He looked around to see if everyone was getting out of the crates okay.

"Not everyone here has a 'codename'," Crystal pointed out, not at all happy with the fact that she had just been stuck in a crate, but deciding not to voice how disgruntled she was about it right now . "Besides, I am sure that you have heard at least a few of them before. Why should it be odd to hear them now, in the exact type of situation where they are generally meant to be used?"

"Now honey," Forge said in a singsong voice as he unfolded himself from a crate marked 'BELUGA CAVIAR', "let's not quibble over operational details. After all, we're headed down into one of the most dangerous and inhospitable places on the planet's surface. Plenty of time for -- speaking of which, who's driving this tub?"

"Let's find out." Kane crept down to the far end of the cargo area. It was surprisingly cramped once you passed out of the cargo section and towards the crew section. Romanova ghosted beside him, despite him waving her away a dozen times. Why did women never listen to him? He reached out to Nate's telepathic switch board as he peered around the hatch. #Small crew, Cable. Five men, four at the consoles, and one at... I guess a navigation table? For all the metal tentacles, this thing is mostly a cargo van. We'll have to take them quietly.#

He was cut off as Natasha smoothly drew her silenced pistol and fired several times. The hollow pings of the weapon echoed loud in the sub. Kane barreled into her, stopping the shooting, but the sounds were replaced by the screaming of a man in the crew compartment. Horrified, Kane risked a look, to see four men dead, headshot and left crumpled at their stations, and the man at the nav table now lying on the floor, screaming and holding himself where Romanova had shot him cleanly through the pelvis. "Jesus! Someone grab a first aid!"

"This is no time for games, X-Man. This one will live long enough to provide the docking codes to us."

The still-living crewmember's screams trailed off into gasps, some of the pain easing from his face even as the bleeding from his wound started to slow, then stopped. A faint glow around the site of the wound gave away the presence of a telekinetic pressure bandage.

There was a much brighter glow coming from the tip of the psimitar in Nathan's hand as he stepped into the crew section. It lit an expression colder than most of the X-Men were used to seeing on Nathan's face. The sudden deaths had slammed into his rocky shields like four sledgehammer blows, one right after the other. But the only trace of that reaction was the tightness around his eyes.

"You shoot anyone except in a fight, or kill anyone else unnecessarily," he said to Natasha, his words clipped, "and you will be finding your own way back to the surface. Without any sort of breathing apparatus." He knelt down beside the injured man, dipping into his mind to check for his native language. Spanish. That worked. "~Docking codes,~" he said in Spanish, quietly but firmly. The man was in shock and afraid, even if Nathan was dulling his pain receptors, and not unexpectedly, the question made the information surface briefly in his mind.

Jennie sidled up next to the Russian woman and gave her a cold glare. "I know you feel the need to prove your bad-assery, but save it for the actual fighting and not unarmed men," the younger girl said. She noticed Nate stumble a little but he righted himself quickly. Part of Jennie wanted to toss in a threat about dismantling the woman's gun, but she would save it for later. That was not her job. Her vision read clear for the most part, but the more time passed, the more red pulsed into her vision, like a slow, steady heartbeat.

"Driver? You wanna hop behind the wheel before the current eats us?" she said, turning back to Forge.

Forge blinked, looking at the bodies on the deck and suddenly flashing back to Budapest, seeing Barath's bodyguards shot to death right next to him. Shaking his head to clear the vivid memory, he nodded. "Driver. Drive. Right. I'm the driver, got it."

Scrambling up to the front of the squid, he smoothed his hands over the controls. "Okay, okay, okay," he mumbled. "Talk to me. Pitch and speed control, depth and pressure gauges, sonar navigation, UV beacon identifiers, map map map where is the map there you are a-ha..."

His hands paused before grabbing the yoke, recoiling slightly at the thin spray of blood over the instrument panel before guiding the sub into a smooth dive into the depths.

Tabitha found a place to sit down, resting while she could. "We gonna leave them there or find a morgue?" she asked cynically in an attempt not to toss her cookies at the casual bloodshed.

Alex was pointedly not looking at the bodies, instead having moved up to the front after Forge so he could put his geology degree to good use and help monitor the gauges.

This was the sort of person with whom the X-Men associated? This woman was their ally? That was... unexpected. Crystal remained silent, watching her boyfriend at work.

The first team moves to encounter and distract the Melter's men.



Minutes stretched out quietly as the sub's hull pinged under the pressure of the depths. With only instruments to guide them, the squid-shaped vessel descended into the chasm of the Mariana Trench and the blackness of the deepest point on Earth. After what seemed like an eternity of cold, empty darkness, the sub's spotlights illuminated their goal - the Russian deep-sea research facility.

Docking codes were transmitted and acknowledged, and after a short moment of maneuvering, the submarine connected with the station's airlock and the hum of connecting machinery could be heard. With minimal instructions, the men and women onboard split into two groups, ready to move as soon as the airlock cycled.

The lights turned green, and as the airlock hissed open, someone could be heard saying under their breath, "Well... here we go."

"Pretty place." Kane said to Shostakov. The walls were the same army green that the Soviet Union seemed to paint everything with, and ominous red Cyrillic writing covering hatchways and lines of piping running along the tunnels. The exterior lights cast murky light back through the thick windows that lined the access way, exposing the cold rock edges of the underwater trench. The air was musty, thick with the smell of dank, and the odd ping of a drop echoed in the recycled air.

"Where do we go from here?"

Alexei fought down the urge to give the Canadian extremely explicit directions on where he could go and what he should do when he got there. He checked the safety on his gun instead, before jerking his thumb down the corridor, toward a beige door covered in thick metal plates and decorated prominently with a massive lock. The station being the pinnacle of Soviet engineering of the early 1980s, the lack of any electronic component to the lock was clearly compensated heavily by its size.

Shostakov smiled nostalgically as he looked at it fondly. "Good times," he muttered. "Good times."

"Do you have a key, or are we going to have to use mine?" Tabitha asked. "Or perhaps you need a moment alone?" She reached into a thigh pocket to pull out a small tool-kit. It was less worn than its predecessor, but it served the same purpose.

Angelo glanced dubiously between her kit and the lock. "You can pick somethin' that size with that?"

"Less conversation, please," Nathan said under his breath as he scanned ahead, pinpointing hostiles telepathically and passing details down the switchboard. But where the hell was this Melter character? #We actually want to draw their attention to us, so no need to do this quietly.#

He extended his psimitar towards the door, concentrating until it flashed gold. The door, almost delicately and very precisely -Nathan wasn't about to accidentally breach the hull - tore itself off its hinges and was flung down the hall beyond.

#Kane, you're on point. Don't worry about gunfire, I'll shield you if you need it.# Kane's reaction speed would be most useful up front, at least until they had to split up.

There were at least fifteen guards in the room, and despite some truly embarrassing uniforms, they moved like professional soldiers; sure and confident. Each was armed with an impressive array of weapons, and were on guard at the back of the room. There was a screeching and then grinding noise which happened intermittently, and Kane grinned. They had gotten lucky. Nate must have ripped the door off at the exact time of the noise, obscuring the sound.

"Only a little while longer, sir." One of the men at the far end of the room said. "The release catch is in bad repair, and remote removal of the core is going slowly." He'd addressed a thin man in a bizarre multicoloured outfit. That had to be the Melter.

Well, time to get his attention. Kane motioned the X-Men forward, and turned to his left, to a steam exchange pipe. With a blow from his baton, he shattered it, and with a hissing squeal, a cloud of steam plumed into the room, drawing all eyes back towards it, and away from the door through which the X-Men were emerging.

Deeply involved with the exchange of instruction, the steam assaulted the uniformed men, setting a rush of confusion and they turned on their intruders, Kane most of all. "No! At the door--" came a condemning voice, shouting over the noise. Barrels turned to aim and intercept.

He'd jumped headlong into worse, Nathan reminded himself grimly. Holding tight to the switchboard - he needed to be able to see if anything was incoming at any of the others that they needed a TK shield to handle - he focused on the two soldiers closest to his team, the ones that were turning to face the threat the fastest. They were indeed well-armed. But guns made fabulous clubs, and the two men found themselves being smashed in the face by their own weapons before they could even finish making their initial decision to open fire.

One went down right away. The other didn't, but a few more hard TK blows took care of that.

Oh, hey, guns. And it was thirteen against five. Angelo was not liking this situation, but he did the best he could think of in that moment - which happened to be leaping straight up with his fingers outstretched, hand-over-handing along a convenient ceiling pipe, and kicking the nearest guard in the face with both feet. He'd been practicing that one.

Bombs probably wouldn't go over well this far under the ocean. Instead Tabitha ducked under an outstretched arm to plant an elbow in a thug's gut while pinching a nerve in his arm. His gun fell to the floor from suddenly numb fingers. Tabitha determinedly ignored the creaks of protest from her knee as she moved on to the next target.

"I think we got his attention!" Kane yelled, looking around for anyone that could shut this joker down before he blew a hole into the ocean, or liquefied one of them.

Tabitha slid along the floor, gratefully away from the path of destruction. She pushed herself up to her knees and threw out a handful of tiny bombs to roll along the floor. They rolled under feet like marbles, then exploded like firecrackers.

It was fairly inspired, as tactics went. The tiny explosions took some of the remaining hostiles off-guard, blinding a couple of unlucky souls temporarily. Nathan took advantage and slammed those two to the ground, shielding his teammates against the reflexive weapons fire from some of the others.

That, he thought, glancing at the Melter, was not something he wanted to test his shields against. Time for a shift in tactics, and he refocused briefly on the guards. #Skin,# he sent rapidly, sensing that Angelo had disentangled himself from the ceiling pipe. #One-two punch, and I'm going to put you right down into the middle of them...#

He lashed out telekinetically at the nearest knot of guards, sending half a dozen of them reeling even as he levitated Angelo, giving the younger man time to initiate the Flying Squirrel before he let go.

At the same moment, he grabbed the broken door and flung it, hard, at the Melter.

The Melter dodged the door and blasted along the wall with no predictability. His back stiffened and he gritted his teeth in rage, turning so suddenly that one of his own men was accidentally caught in the beam, lighting the room with the chaotic disintegration of his molecules. A heavy stench of burned flesh filled the room and he sneered, closing his fists and hollering orders. Foolish henchmen, he should have paid them more! "Would somebody just kill them already!!" He turned and blasted along the walls, trying to catch someone in his path.

Angelo was laughing like a maniac as he "flew" through the air, catapulting into the few guards left standing from that group and knocking them down like skittles with his flailing arms. Some of the guns got "accidentally" swiped out of their hands and into distant corners, while he was at it.

Shostakov observed most of the unfolding insanity from what he quickly evaluated to be the safest place in the compartment - crouching diligently behind the torn-off door, that was reinforced by the remnants of the wall in short order. As far as he could tell most of the X-Men were not even armed. He grimaced as one of them flew through the air - apparently on purpose.

He shrugged, not like it was his problem really. Sighting down the scope he let the grey-skinned mutant pass before gut-shooting the nearest goon.

"Say, boy." Alexei asked absently, without looking at Christian's son who was crouching next to him, as he reloaded. "You ain't married, are you? Didn't see a ring... My Natashka is getting to that age, is why I am asking... Really, past time for her to settle down with this foolishness. Start having babies."

"I cannot tell you how much I don't want to have this conversation. Also, I live in complete terror of your stepdaughter, so thank you, but no." Kane had noticed that many of the X-Men had been able to be nonchalant about the GRU Major, and he wished he had the same kind of ignorance. But Kane had trained with the best in Canada, and grown up with a man trained by the best in the world, and between them he recognized the utter confidence of a person trained not only in the physical actions of killing, but also possessing the personal assurance to do it without a moment's hesitation.

"Oops, time to move." Garrison pulled Shostakov out of the way as the door they had been behind disintegrated .He shoved the older man against the side of the tunnel, and impossibly fast, grabbed one of the fragments and flung it a discus like down the hall, knocking a guard senseless and forcing Melter's aim off.

There were reasons Nathan preferred not to be the one running the telepathic switchboard. It was too much sensory input in situations like this; the impressions from the other half of the team were fainter, more distant, but Tabitha and Angelo were very audible in their rapid-fire internal weighing of variables as they fought the remaining guards, and were Garrison and Shostakov chatting?

Irrelevant. None of them needed a shield, and it wasn't like he could spare much of his attention from the Melter anyway. Trying to block the man's blasts with pieces of equipment or debris didn't work, and he'd seen already that his TK shields were penetrated in a second or two. The man's reflexes were shockingly good, too; none of his impromptu projectiles had managed to connect before they'd been burned through, either.

Problematic. The best option seemed to be to stay on the move, and apply direct pressure. The blast that went wide gave him an opening, and he followed up with a TK blow, tightly focused, that smashed into the Melter's shoulder. Another landed with the force of a super-strength kick to the man's midsection.

The blow to his shoulder threw up his beam to the ceiling and shut it off momentarily but it was the midsection punch that knocked him to the wall. Breathless, the urge to sprout a logically obvious observation was squelched when he locked eyes with Nathan and turned the beam in that direction before turning around and melting through the wall. "Arghh!!!" He yelled, stepping through as seven more men emerged from the hole, pouring through to his defense.

Tabitha's mind cycled through possibilities as she flattened another goon. Sometimes a few extra pounds really came in handy. She hip-checked another man right into a bulk-head, then followed up with an upper-cut to the jaw. A quick glance showed her Nathan was handling the Melter, so she merely moved on to beat up more bad guys.

The second team moves to try and access the power core.



Meanwhile, at the other end of the station, the second group of mutants, accompanied by Romanova, crept through a dimly lit hallway. The sounds of pinging metal and distant machinery covered any ambient sound, so they had only their eyes and instincts to depend on.

The hallway was long and except for a few strategically placed spotlights, dark and murky. A few of the group stepped forward, only to be stopped when Jennie held out a hand, nearly clotheslining Forge in the process. "Wait," she whispered. "Something's off..."

Natasha paused and put her hand against one of the pipes. She then reached down and swiped her long fingers around the floor. "Intriguing." She held up her hand, showing the smudges of brownish grease on them, pulled from beside the panels. "Someone has disabled the emergency pumps in this sector, and shut down the hydraulics to the pressure doors. Once they close, the only way to get past them will be to cut through. You, American technician." The Russian woman pointed at Forge and smiled. "Can you think of a good reason to stop pressure doors from being reopened and pumps designed to clear water in case of a tunnel breach to be deactivated?"

Forge stopped, reaching out to flatten his metal hand against the wall. "Hydraulics are disabled, but not disconnected. Someone's intentionally set this up. Hold on, let me try something..."

Leaning forward, he pressed his cheek against the cold metal, heedless of the decades of grease and grime. Listening carefully, he tapped his fingers along the door. "Oh, this is not happy fun ball time...." He stepped back from the door and turned around, half his face covered in grease, but a smile visible through it. "In Soviet Russia, trap boobies you! With the pumps down, the system assumes the corridor is flooded. If we force the doors, the air pressure drop will register as a system clear, opening all the valves. Instant aquarium, and there's three miles of water above us. We need to get these doors open and somehow keep air pressure constant on the other side..."

Crystal nodded at Forge. "Leave that to me." There were no visible changes to show what she was doing; no hand motions were used and nothing changed color, shape, or size. Still, the effects of her abilities were noticeable as the young woman 'reached' out to feel the difference in the air pressure on the other side of the door. Mere moments later, the air pressure was balanced on either side of the door.

The sound of machinery releasing was music to Forge's ears, and he reached into an access panel, pumping a manual hydraulic lever to force the door safely open. "Good job, dear," he quipped, smiling at his girlfriend. "See? I told you this would be a simple in-and-out grab. Aren't you glad you came along?"

The door opened to reveal another corridor, more pipes and dampness. Signs written in Russian were posted above the doorways. Jennie wrinkled her nose at the smell. Saltwater plus metal plus about thirty years ago equaled her sinuses going into open revolt, but that was a concern for later. She squinted, tilting her head, and before anyone else in the group could react she flicked her wrist, sending a red disk sailing around the corner. There were two muffled shouts, a thud, a bang, and another heavy-sounding thud. Jennie looked back at the rest of the group.

"What?" she said.

There was no response from Natasha, the red headed woman simply stepping over the prone bodies of the men and reaching an internal door. She drew out a strange looking device, like a Geiger counter with a branching antenna attached with a wire. She slid the key like device into the access panel and tapped a few buttons on the base unit. It hummed for a moment, and then the lights clicked green. She pulled the key out and tossed it back at Forge. The electronic locks were primitive by his standards, and Romanova's device was equally crude, a sort of electronic skeleton key built from the technology of Soviet Russian of the period.

She tapped the buttons and levered open the door. There was a momentary noise of alarm and a wet impact, followed up by a single gunshot. Romanova leaned back out of the door and waved them in, stepping past a guard holding his throat and dying on the floor. Another lay crumpled in the corner, with a single gunshot wound to the forehead.

"American technician, the manual access to the power core is tied directly to a destruct sequence, which will detonate charges and pierce the integrity of the city. If that happens, the pressure will crush the entire facility. Do not make a mistake. I will monitor your progress." Natasha said, slipping her weapon back into the holster and turning to the crude readouts.

"Jesus Christ, you crazy bitch!" Forge exclaimed, "I swear to God, if you can't keep your kill-happy little fingers off those triggers, I'll push you into a goddamn airlock myself and see how you like it. Now get away from the valve monitors," he ordered with a wave of his hand. When he saw that Natasha wasn't moving, he stood his ground. "I mean it," he insisted. "if you need to be useful, watch our backs and make sure that none of these guys sneak up behind us. And for the love of Rocket J. Squirrel, have you ever considered not killing someone?"

Producing a multitool from one of the many pouches on his uniform, Forge began removing the screws on a nearby access panel, then looked over his shoulder. "Alex," he called, "I need you to monitor the pressure readouts. We're sitting on top of a geothermal vent, right? That means whatever this power core is channeling is probably throwing all sorts of random pressure variations through the system. Time to put that big college education to work and help me not get us all blown up and/or crushed by the immense weight of a three-mile water column. No pressure, dude."

"That's what the research they shoved at me before recruiting me on this little outing said so I'm taking their word for it, since I haven't actually seen the thing myself." Alex knew they probably would have preferred Lorna, what with her experience at this hero thing and all, but him being on hand had settled that. Still, his knowledge was what was needed and he figured as long as he could do that and keep out of the way of the crazy Russian chick, he was good. "Don't worry dude. I gotcha covered. Let's see..." He gave the dials a good examination and set their readings against what he knew before throwing a thumbs up in Forge's direction, eyes not leaving the dials. "You're good bro. I'll let you know if it changes."

Crystal was not at all impressed with the way things had progressed thus far. Scott had been right; she hadn't known the reality of the situation concerning the X-Men. The situation she now found herself in certainly wasn't helping matters any. With nothing for her to do at the moment, other than keep back a frown, once again Crystal found herself standing to the side silently.

Jennie meanwhile, had gone over to Natasha and was quietly admonishing the older woman. "--Now listen lady, we don't kill, there is more than enough power between all of us to incapacitate someone without a bullet to the brain. If you can not keep it in your pants, you may find yourself without your firearm," she looked the older woman in the eye coldly. "Don't think that I can't, Molotov Cocktease." She cracked her knuckles for emphasis and turned around, watching the boys progress slowly. There was a flicker of light in the edges of her vision. "Wait, shit--"

Forge looked up quickly. "Got it!" he chirped as the doors slid open. At the same time, behind him, a spray of molten metal erupted from the bulkhead as a large hole was melted in the steel.

"Thank you, boy," Bruno, aka, the Melter said, before stepping through and whirling around on the others. With a flash of colour, he rushed past Forge and picked up the core, melting his way through the next wall in the process and stepping through. The structure groaned as he carved his path and a hysterical laugh could be heard, playing off the walls.

Melter makes his escape, but rips open the undersea city to the ocean.



Well, at least they didn't have to bypass any bulkheads following the Melter. The massive holes that he had burned through the walls made it easy to see where he was going, and it didn't take them long to start on his trail. Kane skipped through the breaks, having to duck back regularly when Melter's goons fired back at him. They could all hear the groaning of pressure on the bulkheads, as the Melter's random blasts had obviously weakened the whole structure.

Kane peeked around the corner, only to nearly lose his head as the beam went past him, and behind him, a vast shudder of steam billowed out. "Fucking hell!" Garrison pedaled back and slammed his shoulder into the buckling wall. The Melter's beam had just sheared out a massive section between a pressure hold and the hydraulics, and the compromised area was starting to tear itself apart. The Melter had been successful in delaying them, forcing them to shore up the wall before they could follow.

"Somebody find some why to brace this!" Garrison said through clenched teeth as his feet started to slide against the pressure. Well, one person had a built-in way - yes, all right, he wasn't the only one, but he was a one - and Angelo punched the guard he was grappling with in the face and abandoned him to head for the wall. Standing in the middle of the hole, he proceeded to test just how far the tensile strength of his skin would go.

#Everyone else, keep moving,# Nathan sent. The benefit of the telepathic switchboard was that there was no need to shout. He moved past the critical point himself - but waited, reinforcing the wall telekinetically to give Angelo a chance to retract his skin and get moving.

Tabitha barely spared a glance at Angelo as she pushed herself up next to Garrison. She pressed her back against the wall as she generated a double handful of flashbang bombs. She glanced up at Garrison, the whacked out pressure made it hard for her to move fast, but he was supposed to be hot stuff.

"Can you toss me out and yank me back?"

"Without ripping your arm off, no." Kane braced his back more firmly against the buckling wall. Nate had fortunately stopped the ceiling from snapping in and killing them all, but now the wall was starting to give. He followed the line of Tabitha's stare, up past the piping and to what looked like a ceiling railtrack. Of course. They would have used that to transport heavy equipment through the tunnels and bulkheads, as opposed to creating a ramp. Drop one of those down--

"Here, give me the bombs." He held out his hands, and tucked them in the crook of one arm. With the other, he reached up and grabbed the rail. Bracing his feet against the wall, he pulled himself up, until he was hanging underneath it, using his strength to hold himself up and the wall back temporarily. "Chin up on my arm, and feed the bombs down the top length of the rail!" He yelled back down to Tabitha.

As each of the bombs went off, they chewed away the support beams on the massive rail, and once the give was enough, Kane switched his footing from the wall to the ceiling snapping the bar free from the supports in the front, and pushing the rail down. It slammed against the buckling bulkheads, and transferred all the pressure back to where it was braced against the pressure locks down the hall. It wasn't pretty and wouldn't last more than a few hours, but that would be long enough. Kane helped his teammate up.

"Good idea, Tabs. Let's go hit something now, eh?"

Across the station, Forge hit the deck after a section of the wall was melted into slag above his head. "Son of a bitch!" he shouted as the loud sounds of straining metal began to fill the station. He looked around, sparing a second to glare at Natasha. "Oh, him you couldn't have shot before he ran off with the power core? Come on, we need to follow him before--"

Whatever Forge was about to say was cut off by a loud rending noise, as further down the corridor, the metal walls buckled, folding in upon themselves like a tin can being stepped on. "--crap," the inventor breathed. "Crazypants Raygun Dude managed to take out most of the pressure-bearing supports. And we've got about ten and a half bajillion tons of seawater pressing down on us here."

Dying would suck, Shostakov decided grimly, trying to keep his footing as the entire structure shuddered again. But dying in this fucking overgrown submarine war simply unacceptable. They might kick him out of the Infantry Hell, for this.

The melting bulkhead (melting fucking bulkhead! He was way too retired to for this bullshit.) gave way and his hands moved of his own accord as he pushed through, only to see more individuals on the other side of the bulkhead. It was only a sixth sense of the sort he'd been trying for years to kill with copious amounts of Stoli that held him back and allowed his conscious mind to work through what his instincts had been telling him.

However, the new group was dressed in familiar outfits, and were yelling in American.

Must be friendlies.

The two groups of X-Men met up, quickly sharing information even as the station buckled again. There was something new about the latest tremor however, Alexei thought, almost as if...

Ah, hell.

Reaching toward Kane the old man tapped his shoulder, getting the Canadian's attention. As Garrison rounded on him, Alexei silently pulled back the way they just came, into the neighboring command compartment, ignoring the flames raging throughout the room. Kane tried to break free, but Russian's bony fingers clamped firmly down until the two stopped before dwarf-radar built into the wall.

The picture was flickering but discernible, and the yes of the two men fixed on the small green speck speedily enlarging the distance between itself and the station.

"We blew it, kid."

"Oh fuck me." Garrison hissed, tapping the screen. The only possible blip that it could be was the squid sub they'd snuck in on, now serving as the escape vessel for Melter and his men, and leaving them behind. "We've got a problem. Melter's gone, and he took our ride."

"The station possessed a group of submersible lifepods--" Natasha began, and paused as through the window, they watched a section of the undersea city literally crumple into itself. "--which are now destroyed." She finished calmly. The tall redhead thought for a moment, and shook her head. "There is nothing else on the station available to us that could serve as an escape craft other than the sub which our adversary has taken."

Natasha's statement was punctuated by a loud bang that echoed throughout the station. Then another, and another, and then the screech of collapsing metal. Alarms began to go off.

"Oh, goody, it got worse," said Jennie.

The station's structural integrity began to collapse from the damage Melter had down. The second half of the staion crumbled and shattered under the weight of the water, and the pressure inside the area where the team was assembled began to increase exponentially. Along with the unmistakable sound of rushing water.

Even though Jennie's head felt like it was in a vice, she held her hands up and began to concentrate. There was a way out of this, she just needed to buy some more time. With a cry, she flung out a white disk which disappeared into the wall. There was another series of bangs and mercifully the sound of water stopped abruptly. She had been able to trip a depressurization valve, which had sucked the water away from them. When the structure held, Jennie sagged against the wall in relief.

"Okay, someone think of something, and fast. That won't hold for long," she said.

Biting his lip, Alex was mentally calculating the mutations of everyone around him. He'd already had an idea when Natasha had said the pods were destroyed and there was no craft to take them, but he wasn't sure they could pull it off. Still it was worth a shot. He'd have to thank Jared extensively for the scuba lessons last summer.

"Hey guys. I think I have an idea. I think we can manage something with our powers." He looked at Nathan. "If Mr. Dayspring can hold all of us together, and Crystal," He turned to look at her, "If you can create a bubble of air around us and keep us at a constant pressure..." He looked down at his own hands, flexing them slightly, "I can get us to the surface in no time."

Nathan had been blank-eyed during Jennie's last-ditch tactic and Alex's explanation; the tip of his psimitar was blazing, too bright to look at as it amplified the telekinesis pouring through it. But his efforts to telekinetically reinforce the structure around them were going to last about another thirty seconds, tops. There was too much pressure. It wasn't at all like holding the glider together as it fell back to earth. He sucked in a sharp breath, not bothering to wipe the trickle of blood away from his nose.

"It'll do," he said aloud, his voice hoarse and strained but somehow still carrying. "Get right together, all of you. Hold onto each other." He triggered the exoskeleton even as he finished speaking, the wings of the firebird exploding outwards, the air burning gold.

With the water flooding in, seemingly from everywhere, there was no time to spare. A miscalculation could result in injury or worse, but Crystal had been using her powers for almost thirteen years now, and she was confident that following Alex's suggestion was something she could do. Once again, Crystal found herself altering the pressure in the submarine, this time continuing the change as they moved, maintaining the needed constant force around them.

The bubble held, and Forge knelt next to Crystal, ignoring the odd feeling of his feet resting on semi-solid water and trying to tune out the feeling of a few thousand atmospheres of pressure all around them. "You can do this, I know you can," he whispered in her ear, holding her tightly to him.

Alex moved to kneel on the 'floor' of their bubble and stuck his hands through it and into the water as he began to channel power to them. The familiar itch was worse since he was trying to channel so much at once and he clenched his teeth as he said, "Hold on dudes, here we go!" When the roof of the original sub gave way, Alex blasted down with as much power as he could, sending them speeding to the surface.

Angelo lost his footing as the bubble shot upwards, latching onto Nathan's arm with all five "fingers" of one hand to steady himself, as the nearest solid object available. "Sorry, Nate."

Nathan ignored him. Holding this many people together, moving at this speed, would have been challenging enough in the air. This was harder.

Kane had been staring up, away from the fearsome light of Alex' energy blasts, and was watching the ocean ahead him slowly begin to change, striped from black murk to a dank indigo and slowly working towards bluer hues as they went up. Not far ahead, he could see the reflection of the sun on the water.

"Surface in three seconds, guys." Kane said, as the bubble shot through the surface of the water like a leaping fish, and they found themselves hanging for a moment in open air before crashing back down on to the sea surface.

Debris from the broken station was sucked up in their wake, bursting to the surface along with the team. Jennie struggled and kicked to the surface gasping for air, and noticing a large orange buoy nearby. She paddled over to it and upon noticing the instructions, pulled a tag on the side. The buoy ballooned into a large orange liferaft. Too exhausted to say anything witty, Jennie shook her head and crawled inside, to be followed by the others.

The feel of resounding defeat didn't get any more enjoyable with repetition. Nathan sighed, letting his aching head rest against the edge of the raft for a moment as he watched some of the others, with commendable efficiency, crack open some of the crates that had floated to the surface, looking for supplies. What they found was caviar and champagne. Of course. The perfect surreal end to this whole mess.

"Someone tell me their com's working," he grumbled, after checking and finding that his had taken damage. "If I have to yell to get Charles's attention from all the way out here, with this headache, I'm drowning all of you."