Thermopylae - In this valley of dying stars (part 4)

[x-cable.livejournal.com]

Elsewhere on Youra, the X-Men and their allies are more than holding their own. Then the 'Masada' trigger takes effect and they find the tables beginning to turn.



~*~

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.
-'The Hollow Men', Eliot

~*~

#Hurray up,# the senior telepath sent impassively to the medic unhooking the candidate's IVs. #They're in the building."

"I'm moving as fast as I can," he muttered, half-deferentially, half-defiantly.

#Shall we go stall them?# the younger telepath asked, with a mental gesture that encompassed himself and the two empaths. #I don't sense any psis.#

#We're non-expendable,# the older man sent back sharply. #We're getting out of here with the candidate and evacing.#

The door was locked, with heavy-duty locks that would keep any potential candidate from escaping even if he or she did manage to overcome the conditioning team. They held out even against a blow from Hank's prodigious strength.

The hinges didn't.

Hank bounded through the wreckage of the door, beaming. "Candygram!" he said cheerfully, and lunged towards the table. Getting them away from the child had to be the first priority.

The little girl on the table - barely ten years old, from the look of her - was so heavily drugged that she didn't so much as twitch at the crash. The medic did considerably more than twitch; he flung himself backwards, drawing his sidearm instinctively.

Hank ignored the sidearm, and went for the arm instead, crushing it in his grip before tossing the man aside and turning to the next. His false smile was gone, his lips drawn back from many sharp teeth. "You evil, slimy little parasites," he growled. "This ends. Now."

The other four just stared at him, automatically falling into the usual link as they lashed out with their powers - and met resistance. The older telepath's eyes widened slightly, and he sent a signal to the empath to up the strength of their panic-projection.

Hank felt the blow against his shields and growled again, shaking his head a little. They were strong, but he could hold out... for a minute or two, anyway. Moving in a blue blur he went for the nearest psi, one of the younger ones. He crushed the man's shoulder with one hand, kicking his knee into a direction nature had never intended it to go. Physical pain was hard for all but the most heavily overtrained psis to work through, at least until shock kicked in... and if they were all linked, shattered bones for one would be felt by all.

The other empath crumpled with a choked-off scream, but the two telepaths didn't fall, shifting back into a link that contained the two of them alone and lashing out at Hank with even more force. Damaging force, if the attack got through his defenses.

Hank felt the blow, felt his shields weakening, and lunged. Another blow like that would definitely get through, maybe do damage...and he was very, very protective of his mind just now. He slammed one against the wall, hearing a crunch as skull met stone, and then turned to the other one, shaking him like a terrier shakes a rat before pinning him against the wall, one fist wrapped around the man's hand. "We're going to have a little talk, you and I," he growled, leaning in close enough for the swine to feel hot breath on his face, and see sharp teeth very close. "And don't try that again, or I'll start breaking pieces of you. I'm a doctor. I know exactly where every bone in your body is, and how much force will be required to snap it."

The older telepath met his angry gaze as levelly as he could, fighting to stay calm and find a more subtle way past the other mutant's defenses. "Talk... about what," he grated.

"About whether you are, in fact, aware that what you've been doing here is wrong," Hank said grimly. Slowly, taking his time about it, he broke the man's index finger. He had hurt too many people, too many children... Hank was going to hurt HIM, now.

A groan wrenched itself out from behind the telepath's gritted teeth. Had to be a way in, damn it, he thought. Had to...

"McCoy?" came Cole's voice from the door, and the telepath's eyes widened, then narrowed in rage. Cole stumbled backwards with a choked-off cry, clutching at his skull as his damaged conditioning flared up, obedience imperatives fighting to kick in.

Hank knocked the telepath out against the wall, grumbling. He'd wanted to do a little more chastizing. He settled for trampling both the man's legs as he crumpled on the floor. Compound fractures. Like those he'd had to treat, after their last encounter with Mistra. "Cole?" He hurried over to the man, supporting him with a large hand. "It's all right... shh... they're all out, now." He paused, looking down at one of the whimpering empaths, and kicked him in the head. "Okay, NOW they're all out."

Cole was shivering violently, Hank's firm grip on him the only thing keeping him upright until he managed to concentrate, to pull himself back together. "Fuck," he breathed raggedly, fighting to push the sudden, dizzying spiral of pain and rage and panic down and way. "Thanks... I think... he almost..." He swallowed, then forced himself to look up at McCoy, hoping the other man would assume that his eyes were just watering. "Thanks," he repeated, and then spotted the little girl on the gurney. "Oh, damn," he said miserably, hurrying over.

"They won't do THAT again." Hank followed him over to the gurney, expertly unhooking the remaining IVs. "Poor little thing," he said softly, picking the little girl up very gently. "How far do you think they got?"

Cole swallowed past the tightness in his throat. "She's... new," he said hoarsely, his eyes burning. "A few weeks. I--" He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, taking a deep breath. Calm. The job wasn't done yet. "Curran and the others are moving out the first batch of wounded. They can take her, too. I need your help - there's an injured first-gen operative somewhere here. In the secured section, I think. They were..." His voice faltered. "Suspicious, after the Canada mission."

"Of course." Hank looked around at the collection of prone bodies. "And when she wakes up..." He looked down at the little girl in his arms. "One of us can tell her she doesn't have to be afraid of coming back here. They won't hurt her... or anyone... anymore."

~*~


~Evac, this is Frederickson. We're bringing in three prisoners, one of them wounded. ETA two minutes…~

~…Under heavy fire, could do with some help here…~

~Copy, Frederickson, we'll have a welcoming committee waiting for you.~

~Medic required, we've got two men down, an energy blast of some kind, over by the directors' quarters. Grant's burnt pretty bad…~

~…looks like some sort of conditioning room…~

~Scarlet Witch here, we're advancing on our position now…~

The comms were a babble of chatter, and Madelyn was quickly growing used to filtering out the non-medical messages. One of MacInnis' people, whose name had slipped her mind, was brought into the evac area with several deep slash wounds across his chest and arms, and Madelyn moved forward as the stretcher was carried into the surgery tent.

"I need new dressing for these wounds," she barked out to one of the nursing assistants, a sandy-haired young man called Greg who was all elbows and knees and Adam's apple but who was one of the best surgical nurses she'd seen in a while. He came forward with swabs, and she peeled off soggy swabs to replace them with the new, pressing them down hard over the worst of the wounds, all the while checking his vitals. Strong, despite the loss of blood. Then her attention was caught by a new arrival, screaming weakly and struggling to get off the stretcher fighting back the doctor attempting to examine her.

"Little help?" he called to no-one in particular, trying hard to restrain her without opening up the extensive burns across her chest.

"Cross match and then get him stitched up - they're big gashes, but shallow," she instructed, already moving to the stretcher. "What have we got?" she asked, accepting the vial of pain killer from the

"Some sort of plasma blast, second and third degree burns…" replied Kwan, the military doctor who was trying to hold the woman down. Madelyn recognised her as one of MacInnis' people, one of the reclaimed second gens. No wonder she was freaking out - aside from the pain of the burns, there were the issues with being surrounded by military types.

"Clarissa? Hon? It's me, Maddie. I'm a friend of Nathan's, remember?" She'd met MacInnis' team briefly during one of the briefings, and gone through the files often enough to have memorised everyone and their powers. Clarissa was a metamorph, able to change her muscle density and mass, but not her skin - the plasma blast had been at a reasonably close range by the looks of the burns. At the sound of her voice, Clarissa stopped struggling a little, the screams dying to a low-level wail of pain.

"Nathan's... friend? Don't... let... won't go back..."

"No-one's taking you back to Mistra, Clarissa. This is the medical area, remember? Kwan's part of the taskforce, he's here to help you, the same as I am. Now, I'm going to give you something that's going to make you hurt less, okay? It might make you a little sleepy, but I promise, you're in safe hands, okay?"

Clarissa tensed at the mention of drugs, but nodded briefly, teeth clenched over the whimpers still escaping her throat. Madelyn quickly injected the painkiller, and patted the woman's unburned shoulder gently. "Okay, we're going to have a look at you, see what the damage is. We'll be as careful as we can." Clarissa gave another of those tight nods, and shut her eyes tightly as Kwan came forward again.

Between the two of them, and the painkiller, they managed to remove most of her uniform without taking off too much skin. "What a mess," Kwan sighed, looking at the burns. "We're talking major skin grafts here."

"Mmm-mmm," Madelyn agreed, frowning as they coated the worst of the burns with the spray-on synthetic skin one of Hank's colleagues had developed just for this kind of situation. "Let's get her out of here as quickly as possible - she needs a sterile environment, and somehow the dirt floor in here just isn't it."

Kwan chuckled as he helped wrap Clarissa in a silvery blanket, to help keep her warm as shock set in. "Definitely not," he agreed, beckoning over a couple of the young corporals acting as orderlies. "Get her to the helicopters now," he instructed. As Clarissa was taken away, he glanced at Madelyn. "Which hospital are you from? Most civilian doctors would be hiding in the corner in this sort of situation, but you're steadier than some military doctors I've seen."

"No hospital," Madelyn said with a slightly pleased grin.

"No?" Kwan looked surprised. "But you're not enlisted..."

"I work at a school," Madelyn told him with a snicker, looking up as the next stretcher came in. "For mutant teenagers. And believe me, it's not that different."

~*~


The small makeshift airfield was filled mostly with helicopters; the cargo plane Lorna had been detailed to disable was on the other side of the airstrip. "Shall we take these one by one?" Chepaitis, the woman leading the government team accompanying Wanda, asked, giving the X-Man a thoughtful look. Gunfire and the sound of energy blasts came from behind them; the rest of the teams meeting resistance, obviously. Chepaitis scanned the airfield, her eyes narrowing. "I'm not seeing any security. Damn it, I wish we had a telepath."

Red light flared lightly around Wanda's hands and she frowned. "I am not seeing anything that would possibly be linked to a person," she said softly and then shrugged. "But then again it is sometimes hard to tell. We shall just have to be careful, yes? And yes, one by one. Take out their transportation and we'll have them where we want them. Hopefully."

Chepaitis gave her a tight, but honest smile. She'd had her doubts about the idea of working with mutant vigilantes, but the X-Men seemed a lot more professional than she'd imagined. "All right, then," she said, gesturing to her team. "We'll take the four to the left, you take the three to the right." If the briefing on Maximoff's powers was accurate, she could certainly handle three on her own. "Let us know if you need help," she said, tapping the com in her ear.

She nodded and tapped her own com link. "Certainly, not a problem." Quietly, she headed towards the one's on the right, the red rings reappearing around her hands. The planes were kept in tip-top condition--under any other circumstances, Haroun would have never wanted to leave--but, well, leave it to her to find the glitches. Wanda was also grateful there was back-up not far away...X-Man or not, she was still new and was relieved to have more veteran people around.

There was an explosion, back towards the main area of the complex, and fire and smoke shot upwards into the clear blue Aegean sky. At the same point, there was a shimmer in the air beside one of the helicopters, and four body-armored men carrying guns appeared, clearly having been teleported in. They took cover behind the aircraft and opened fire on Wanda.

Not wasting any time to think, she dove behind the one that she had been going after, curling and rolling like she had done through training. Now, she took time to curse. Red light flared brighter from her hands--she would have to do this by following the strings. Peeking around at them could only get her shot and, seriously, that was not something she wished to have happen today. Or any day.

~Maximoff, you all right?~ Chepaitis' voice came over the coms. ~We've got company over here, too. One of their short-range teleporters has been busy.~ Bullets ricocheted off the helicopter Wanda was taking cover behind.

~I've been better,~ Wanda replied, trying to keep the chaos powers from disrupting the coms. ~I'll be better once they stop shooting at us.~ Taking just a second to glance up at where they were hiding at, she grinned and pulled. With a shrieking sound, a bullet had somehow managed to richoet _back_ and into the propeller, which--for some reason--fell off and tumbled toward their attackers. Already pushing her powers--it was going to be one hell of a day.

The Mistra troops scattered as the propeller fell, and Chepaitis was suddenly running to join Wanda again with one of her men, both of them returning fire. "Can you do anything else to them?" the older woman asked sharply, ducking behind the helicopter with Wanda. "If this turns into a running gunfight it's going to get messy."

"Well, it depends on what we need," Wanda replied, keeping low. "I can try and take out their guns...but I'll need to be able to see them, at least for a second, to decide how to affect them." Glancing up at Chepaitis, she frowned. "Can you give me that second?"

Chepaitis glanced at her companion, then back over her shoulder at where the rest of her team was trading fire with another group of Mistra security personnel, down the airfield a little. "You go right, Land," she said, turning back to the man beside her. "Head for the utility shed over there. I'll make for the last helicopter in the row." She glanced at Wanda, even as she pulled out a grenade, eyeing the distances. "We'll try and draw them out. Land, now," she said, and the two of them peeled off, out of cover.

Understanding that precious seconds--and perhaps lives, though hopefully not--had been given to her, she didn't hesitate and rose slightly as the group firing on them were distracted by the sudden movement. There, those lines. Gesturing, Wanda pulled hard on the strings, some of them redder than the others but right now she couldn't be picky.

One of the men firing suddenly let out a curse as the trigger broke off while his companion was suddenly faced with his jamming, though it shouldn't have done that.

And that's when they realized that a pin had fallen out of a nearly primed hand grenade.

It exploded. As did the grenade Chepaitis had just thrown, bouncing neatly through the open side hatch of one of the other choppers. Land reached the utility shed safely, even as he exchanged fire with the Mistra soldier who'd been out of range of both explosions. But another who hadn't been rolled back to his feet, firing as he did, and Chepaitis went down hard, a choked-off scream coming over the coms.

'Shit!' She ducked and skuttled around to get a better view. The man was hastily reloading, gun pointed down...with a dark frown, Wanda pulled sharply on the strings. The gun suddenly went off in his hands and his shrill scream echoed slightly and she saw him grab for his bleeding leg. She glanced over and tapped the coms. ~Land?~

More gunfire from Land's direction. ~He's got me pinned down - I can see her, but I can't get to her,~ Land said urgently. Chepaitis stirred, but went still again.

~Cover me, then,~ Wanda said, leaning out a little. Without bothering to wait for an answer, she broke out into a run, keeping herself as low to the ground as she could. Another round of gun fire was sharp in her hearing and she felt something against her arm as she reached Chepaitis. Only slowing a little, she managed to snag the injured woman--who thankfully was rather small--and half-carried, half-dragged her to behind the shelter she'd been heading for in the first place.

Chepaitis bit back a cry as Wanda set her down. One of the rounds had gone right through the body armor at her hip. Her face was white, sweat standing out on her forehead as she looked up at Wanda. "Helicopters," she gasped out. "Have to disable the rest of them."

~Can any of you lot get over here?~ Wanda sent through the com, undoing the cloth binding that had held her hair back. "It's as good as done," she assured the other woman, pressing the make-shift dressing against the wound.

Land came from one direction, one of the other team members from another. "Go," Land urged, grabbing the field kit the other man handing him and bending over Chepaitis. The rest of their team appeared to be taking down their Mistra opponents, one by one.

Nodding, she broke away from the group and headed towards the helicopters again. Reaching the first one, her powers flared up again and she studied the strings as quickly as possible. Within a few minutes, the fuselage suddenly started spurting liquid--another victim of a stray bullet.

That would take it down for the count.

~Cyclops to all X-Men,~ Scott's voice crackled over the coms. There was more noise in the background - gunfire, explosions, screaming. ~Something's happened - the second-gen operatives have gone berserk. Some sort of trigger - they're turning on other Mistra personnel.~

~Copy that, Scarlet Witch out,~ Wanda sent back, tuning it out as the others chimmed in their responses. Oh, that could not be good but for right now, she had to disable the other helicopters. As she ran towards the next one, she thought she heard a scream in the background.

~*~


Wanda and her team had headed off to take care of the helicopters, leaving Lorna and hers to look after this side of the airfield and the heavy transport. "All right," Morrison, the senior officer, said thoughtfully as he looked at the enormous cargo plane. "Do we go in and disable it, or do you have a better idea?"

Lorna flexed her wrist thoughtfully, feeling the metal under the surface of the leather bend with her. "I was thinking I'd fuse the moving parts of the engines together." She glanced at him, "Unless you wanted to be able to use them later?"

Morrison pursed his lips, then shook his head. "Safer to disable them completely," he said, then gave her a quick, speculative smile. "You go ahead. We'll cover you." He gestured to the rest of his team, who fanned out.

Lorna nodded and jogged to the side of the cargo plane, part of her already focused on sorting through the signatures of the various metals and alloys. She found the engine fairly easily but wanted a better grip on it first. She pulled her gloves off and reached out to the plane, burying her hands in the EM fields.

Gunshots echoed from the other side of the airfield, and Morrison frowned. "Chepaitis?" he asked, touching his com. "You got company over there?" No sooner were the words out of his mouth then the air a short distance away shimmered and armed men appeared, firing as soon as they materialized.

The sound of gunfire had Lorna turning, her systematic destruction of the engine aborted. "Down!" she shouted even as she threw up a highly magnetic shield, yanking any metal in her direction and hoping she wasn't about to riddle herself with bullets. A small detached part of her brain noted that it was probably going to be important to add this kind of thing to her training in the future. Bullets slid around her and slammed into the cargo plane behind her. She took off running at the attackers, pulling EM fields to her as she ran.

Morrison started to order his people to lay down covering fire but hesitated, suddenly not sure whether it might do more harm than good, with the magnokinetic obviously doing... well, whatever the hell she was doing to the EM fields. "Get that plane disabled," he snapped, gesturing at two of his men, then indicated for the others to follow him. They'd circle around, try and take the shooters from behind.

"What kind of moron," Lorna muttered as she yanked the gun out of a shooter's hands, "uses bullets against an unknown mutant?" She hit him with the butt of his own weapon and swore as she felt another bullet bounce off her shield. "Oh, give it a rest!" she shouted as she finished sorting through the EM signatures and isolated the gun barrels. A sharp twist closed them off. She looked around for Morrison, mostly ignoring the very upset men with the useless guns in front of her.

Morrison and his men moved in from behind. Since their guns worked very nicely still, the Mistra personnel apparently decided that discretion was the better part of valor and surrendered. Morrison got them safely restrained in plastic cuffs and delegated two of his people to take them back to the evac area. There was still gunfire coming from the other side of the airfield and he frowned worriedly. "Chepaitis!" he called as he jogged over to join Lorna. "We've got to get that plane disabled," he said.

She nodded, "I'll finish that now. Was just about done when our friends joined the part. Seriously, who shoots a magnokinetic?" She rolled her eyes then focused on the plane again and employed a quick and messy solution--she yanked the wings off. Then she fell down. "Whoa, heavy."

"Whoa indeed," Morrison said, crouching down beside her. "Efficient, though. You okay?" He offered her a hand.

Lorna grinned, "Yeah, I'm good. Just didn't expect that. Wings aren't as light as they look, if you were wondering." She shook her head and tried not to giggle. That had been sort of a rush. "Where to next?" she asked once she was on her feet.

Morrison listened to his com for a moment. "My team's being ordered to secure the hangar. I think--wait," he said, just as Morgan's voice came over Lorna's com.

~Polaris, we need you at the operatives' barracks,~ he said, his voice steady. ~We've got heavy resistance up there and the government teams are taking casualties. One of my people will go with you to see if he can't talk some of them down.~

~This is Piers,~ an unfamiliar male voice cut in, as if on cue. ~I'll meet you on the other side of the hangar, Polaris.~

~Got it, Morgan, on my way.~ Lorna responded. She nodded at Morrison. "Let's go."

Morrison and his remaining people peeled off at the hangar, going in quickly but somewhat cautiously, given that the last batch of hostiles had appeared out of thin air. As Lorna continued around to the back of the hangar, a tall, lean man in black body armor stepped out to meet her, clawed hands held up as if in surrender.

"Piers," he said curtly, his eyes flickering over her and his nose twitching as if something about her scent was enormously intriguing.

"Polaris," she replied, staying just out of his reach, sizing him up. "You know where the barracks are?" She did but was more interested in not having someone she didn't know at her back. Healthy skepticism was better than unhealthy trust, particularly when it was a physical mutation.

Piers snorted. "As I live there, yes." He turned and jogged in that direction, leaving it to her to follow. It made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, to let someone be behind him like that even if they were technically allies here, but he'd just have to hold his nose and bear it. "I don't know what Morgan's thinking," he said. "No way in hell can I talk the others into giving up. Their conditioning's still intact."

Lorna followed, having to stay near a flat out run just to keep up. "Conditioning can be broken. It's been done before," she replied then gave up on running and pushed the EM fields away from her so she was hovering a few inches above ground. Easy enough for now but sustaining it would require work later when her attention was divided. She moved forward so she'd be in Piers peripheral vision.

Piers cast her a semi-contemptuous look. "Easy as that, huh?" he growled, and then heard the unmistakable sound of safeties coming off from behind the building they were currently approaching. Security staff, he realized, catching a few familiar scents. "Watch it," he warned briefly and abruptly did the human version of a u-turn, circling around the building from the other side. "Hey, Vaclavik," he snarled cheerfully, launching himself at the head of the security team as the man turned. "Don't tell me you were going to shoot at me?"

"More bullets?" Lorna followed Piers, trying not to be irritated by his attitude. With a contemptous smile, she reached out and grabbed their guns again. "When will you crazy military types learn?"

"Aren't magnokinetics fun?" Piers asked merrily, letting her remove their guns before he sailed into the midst of the security detail. They were no match for him hand-to-hand, of course, and he had all of them on the ground, groaning, in roughly the amount of time it would have taken him to sing 'Happy Birthday'. Piers straightened and touched his com. "Pick-up to aisle twelve--pardon me, to the rear of the machine shop," he snickered.

~Stop fucking around, Piers,~ came Morgan's voice. ~Get your ass to those barracks.~

"Conditioning-free and he's still a bossy bastard," Piers muttered, still grinning fiercely, and took off in the direction of the barracks again, letting Lorna follow.

"I'm going to be really good and not suggest that it's a testosterone thing." Lorna sped after him, leaving a lump of metal behind her where the security team's guns had once been. She slipped her gloves back on. This good luck of stupid men with guns wasn't going to last and she'd rather not have to hit anyone without some kind of protection.

"Dominance thing," Piers tossed back over his shoulder at her. "Remember, we're pack animals. That doesn't go away just because Nate likes blowing up our minds."

"To be fair, it's not like he doesn't blow up his own brain on a regular basis. He's equal opportunity that way." Shouting from up ahead drew her attention, "The barracks I assume?"

"Yeah," Piers said and started to say something when he spotted the tall, red-haired man crouched down with the government team under cover at the front of the barracks. "Mark," he said quietly, the cynical light gone from his eyes. He hesitated, then hurried over, Lorna following, and his attitude when he knelt down beside the younger man was much crisper and more professional suddenly. "How many are holed up in there?"

"Not sure," Nolan said, with only a faint smile to acknowledge that yes, he knew that Piers' conditioning was damaged, and no, he wasn't particularly holding a grudge about their fight in Canada. The former second-gen regarded his former teacher for a moment longer, almost speculatively, then glanced back at the barracks. "Possibly as many as a dozen. Operatives, too, not security personnel."

"I've lost three men already trying to send people in there," the lieutenant in charge of the government team said, looking tense and worried. "They're not responding to coms, so I don't know if they're alive or dead."

"Well, we're going to have to find out. What are we facing? More guns?" Lorna wasn't hopeful about that. It had been too easy up til now.

"I don't know who all's in there, but there are at least a few energy projectors," Nolan said. "I spotted Havel when I went in with the last team."

Piers glanced sideways at Lorna. "Plasma projector," he explained, looking grim. "Damn it, I should have told Tim to come himself. There's at least a ghost of a chance that they'd listen to him, and he at least doesn't get fried as easily as I do." He was getting up as he spoke, though, hands held up as if in surrender as he emerged from cover and headed towards the front of the white stone building built
into the hillside.

"Piers!" Lorna swore and wrapped a shield around him then followed. "I can't shield against energy throwers forever but it should be long enough to get us inside." She was walking again, conserving energy.

"All right," the feral said with a glance back at her. "Thanks for the shield, but make sure you stay behind me. They might respond to me or they might not, but they're sure as hell not going to respond to a stranger." Piers turned his attention back to the door of the barracks as they approached, surprised by just how badly he wanted to be able to talk them down.

There was a blast from one of the narrow upper windows as they approached, a plasma fireball that splashed against the shield but didn't penetrate. Piers twitched nervously, then gritted his teeth. "Havel!" he shouted, walking towards the door. "Knock that shit off, kid, or I'm going to kick your ass when I get in there..."

Lorna flinched when the fireball splashed against the shield. She was really going to have to train past this. "I can probably hit him from here," she said quietly. In the palm of her right hand, she was gathering a largish lump of metal, sloughed out of the lining of her uniform.

Piers made a thoughtful noise, continuing towards the door. "Not yet," he said, "unelss you can't keep the shield up." He raised his voice as he approached the doors. "You guys going to let me in to talk?"

"I'll give you warning first." She hesitated. "I won't kill them. That's not how we work." She flexed her hand, let the metal flow back to its place. She tried to look harmless.

"I don't want any of them dead either," Piers said more quietly, then raised his voice again. "Come on, people! Don't make this more awkward than it has to be. At least let me explain."

There was silence from inside the barracks. "Just you, Piers!" someone finally shouted back, but Piers was already shaking his head.

"You're not in any position to make demands like that," he called back, not absolutely sure who he was talking to. If there were any of the first-gens who hadn't been in Canada in there... well, that might be a problem. "She comes in with me."

"I can shield you without line of sight but it will be harder." Lorna moved out from behind him slightly, eyes wide and hands up, a gesture significantly less useful than his. "There are eight... no, nine bodies within twenty feet of the door." She hesitated, "I think." Reading human's fields was much harder through a shield and it wasn't easy at the best of times.

"It doesn't matter," Piers murmured and kept walking. The door opened as they approached and he stepped in, the hair on the back of his neck prickling as he saw second-gen faces all around him. Young, shocked, angry faces. He took a deep breath. "Who's senior?" he asked, staying in front of Lorna quite deliberately.

"That'd be me," came a voice he hadn't expected, and the group parted to reveal a tall, lean, dark-haired woman whose eyes were iron-hard as she regarded Piers.

"Lauren," he greeted his fellow first-gen more quietly. He'd been afraid of this... and yet there was an opportunity here, if he was very, very careful. "What are your orders?" he pressed.

Lauren Bayliss raised an eyebrow at him. "The orders we didn't get when your friends knocked out our communications?" she asked, a touch of sarcasm - and perhaps appreciation - in her voice. "Those orders?"

Piers grinned tightly. "Those ones, yeah." Ignoring the dangerous murmuring among the younger operatives, he tilted his head and lowered his hands, taking a step closer to Bayliss. "Loophole, babe, come on..." he murmured encouragingly. Her eyes flickered, but she didn't respond.

"Fuck your loopholes, Piers," a blue-haired young man whose silver eyes were glowing fiercely hissed at him. "Stand and defend, that's all we need to know!"

Lorna shifted her attention to the blue-haired man briefly then went back to holding the shield around Piers. He was making her very nervous but she didn't dare say a word. He had a slight chance of reaching them, she had none. That didn't mean she had to like it.

"Then you're going to stand, defend, and fall," Piers said bluntly. "And don't give me 'with my shield or on it'. You're outnumbered. Dayspring, Morgan, and Foley are among the people out there taking this place apart." He stared right at Bayliss, daring her to blink. "If you have no orders you don't have to be idiotic about this. Stand down, and they'll take your conditioning out."

Bayliss stared right back at him, and if her eyes had widened slightly, it was barely noticeable. "Piers, you can't--" She stopped immediately as the second-gens around her abruptly stiffened, going still and blank-eyed as if someone had just shut them off, turned them to statuary. "What the fuck?" she asked, looking bemused. Her gaze went right back to Piers. "Ian, did you feel anything?"

Piers looked just as confused. "No," he said, or started to say. Before he could get anything past that first word out, the blue-haired operative had turned very calmly to Bayliss and blasted her, energy coalescing around his hands and then exploding outwards. The first-gen was thrown to the ground, where she immediately started to struggle back to her feet.

But three of the others were on her by then.

Piers backed away, his jaw dropping as the others turned towards him and Lorna. Nothing in their eyes, absolutely nothing... "Out!" he yelled, turning and pushing her in front of him. "Go, they've been triggered or something!"

Lorna let herself be pushed along in shock before coming to her senses and planting herself, locking into the EM fields to keep her there. "Are you crazy? You want to run? Where the hell are we going to go? There might be people inside who need us!" She shoved around him and ran back toward the barracks.

Piers whirled back towards her, fully ready to at least attempt to clock her upside the head and carry her back to cover if he had to. Before he could take one step in pursuit, the second-gens poured out of the barracks, energy-projectors in the lead. Blasting at anything, everything that moved.

Wrong. He saw it in a flash, in their body language. Something had happened, they'd been switched off or some such fucking thing... root programming? "Polaris, get to cover!" he screamed at her.

And they all turned for him, ignoring the X-Man completely.

There was an explosion from the upper part of the barracks and Havel flew out of the hole in the wall, plasma fire growing into a nimbus around him. Piers swore as the younger operative started to target him, plasma fireballs coming at him at a frightening rate. "Nolan, pull back!" he shouted, praying Mark heard him.

"Christ." Lorna tightened her shield and flung herself at Piers. In this case, proximity was going to keep him from getting fried. She bit her lip and tried not to scream as the plasma wrapped around the fields. She went to one knee and flung a softball-sized lump of metal at Havel. "What happened to them?"

The lump of metal hit Havel, knocking him out of the air. He hit the ground hard, was still for a moment - and then rose, showing no signs that the hit or the fall had injured him, and plasma blossomed around his hands again as he strode towards them.

Piers was already thumbing his com. ~All team leaders, we've got second-gens who're acting like they've been booted back to root programming here - where are the damned telepaths?~ Only when that was done did he answer Lorna's question. "They're gone," he said, his voice rough with a mixture of anger and horror. Another of Havel's fireballs hit the shield, and in a moment they'd be within range of Ashland's bioelectric charges, if they stayed here. "Conscious thought is off, they're reacting to preprogrammed targets... first-gens, obviously, who the fuck knows who else. We've got to fall back and regroup."

"Okay, here's the other question. What the hell can they do? I can block the energy mutants but I'm fucked against a teke or physical mutation. Fuck." The last was a commentary on Havel's plasma as it burned through her shield. She shoved it away hastily. "Hold on." Lorna seized Piers around the waist, grabbed the EM fields and shoved them away from the on-coming second-gens.

~Cyclops to all X-Men,~ Scott's voice crackled over the coms. ~Something's happened - the second-generation operatives have gone berserk. Some sort of trigger - they're turning on other Mistra personnel.~

"No shit," Piers growled, aware of the fact that he was airborne and not really liking it. "Left to right, Biron, Fraser, Gustafson, Maheu, Spivak, Ashland," he said hurriedly, in the moment she'd bought them. "Invulnerable, feral, low-level teek, and three energy-projectors."

~Polaris to Cyclops, new orders?~ Lorna returned curtly. She dropped them unceremoniously to the ground behind the blockade. "Those projectors of electricity or what?"

There was no answer from Scott. Nolan had one hand to his earpiece and was listening to someone's else's report. "Fuck," he muttered, looking sick. "It's all of them. All the second-gens."

"Two electrokinetics and whatever the hell that is that Spivak blasts, I don't know," was Piers' rough answer to Lorna's question. Another blast of that unknown energy came at them, and Piers growled under his breath. "Nolan, you're with me. We'll see if we can't take the other three down gently, Polaris, if you can keep the energy projectors off our backs."

"Got it." Lorna couldn't help grinning. The nice thing about being a magnekinetic was it was a) fairly rare and b) useful as all hell against electrokinetics. "Spin with me, boys."