Deliverance

Chapter Three: Catching Up

by: Sue Penkivech, Melodyrider, and Oldprydefan

Illyana watched as Bobby nodded, eyes dropping and face sobering for a moment. There was a story there, she knew - probably something to do with Lorna Dane, with whom if memory served he'd been entangled several times, and never in a way that ended happily for him. She wasn't sure if that’s what it was, though, or if something else entirely was behind his silent reflection. Being dead managed to put a serious kink in your ability to keep up with the gossip circuit.

She was working on that. Now that they were on their way to actually do something (and only Emma’s stern reminder that 'porting into a phased bullet probably wouldn't do wonders for the rescue effort had kept her from taking off on her own while they others sat around and planned), she'd managed to more or less settle down in her seat, her twitching tail the only outward sign of her impatience. For now, though, there wasn’t much to do except listen, and try to fill in the gaps between where her memory stopped and began once more.

A lot had happened while she'd been gone, it seemed. Hardly a surprise, she guessed, given how long it had been. No more New Mutants, Warlock dead, her former teammates scattered, Dani depowered, Emma Frost hooked up with Cyclops – she was having a hard time processing it all, even ignoring the revelation that Piotr and Kitty were once again dating.

Or had been. She supposed that was sort of on hold, considering the X-Men had let Kitty be shot off into space.

“Are you planning to participate in the conversation?” a voice said inside her head. “It would seem you’d have quite a bit to share yourself, given your extended absence.”

Illyana sent a glare in Emma's direction, her eyes sparking as she took on the other woman’s calmly dangerous expression. Apparently the inability of telepaths to read her mind was yet one more thing that had changed since she’d died and returned. “Get out of my head, Frost.”

“How can I when you're practically broadcasting, my dear? Besides, we have so much to discuss, you and I. Including your future intentions toward my former students. I notice you haven't brought yourself to inquire as to how Megan is coping with your last misguided attempt to...what was it, exactly, you were attempting again?”

Illyana ignored the leading question and shifted her eyes toward the wall. Not so much because she was annoyed with Emma for having asked it, though she was, but because she honestly wasn't sure anymore.

It had made sense at the time. Use Pixie’s soul, seeing as her own was lost, to create a new soul sword. Nevermind that magic didn’t work that way, nevermind that her own blade had been as much affirmation of her intent as it had been a weapon in and of itself. Nevermind that she knew, deep down where her soul had once been, that to destroy Belasco was to destroy herself…

Emma sniffed aloud, and Yana’s eyes darted back toward her.

“Melodramatic as always. But it may relieve you to know that she’s doing well, nonetheless.”

Thank whatever power for good in the universe that probably wouldn’t acknowledge her existence for that. Illyana sighed and settled back in her seat, cursing they way her misshapen legs wouldn’t allow her to pull them up so she could brood properly. At least with the monstrous tail resized, she could sit. It was scant consolation.

“How could you let this happen?” she thought, changing the subject and trusting that Emma was still lurking around somewhere in her mind. If the former headmistress of the Massachusetts Academy wanted to place blame, she was more than willing to counter with some of her own. “Drake said you’re running the team these days, with Scott. You should’ve done something to stop this. Or was this another one of your games? You always hated her.”

Much to her surprise, Emma’s uncaring expression broke a little, her lips setting in a tight line that for once had little to do with anger. “I didn’t. And I…tried. I did everything I could, but ultimately, she wasn’t able to phase back through. It was her choice…”

“Like hell,” Illyana said aloud, eyes glowing as her hooves hit the metal floor with an echoing crash. Only belatedly did she realize she’d interrupted whatever conversation Alison and Bobby had been having, and that they were now staring at her, eyes wide with worry.

She didn’t care.

“You should’ve done something!” Illyana shouted. “You may have the rest of them fooled, but I know you, Frost. You’re up to something. What is it? The Hellfire Club? The Hellions? Or was this just some new plot to get rid of Kitty? It’s not like it would be the first time.”

“The Hellions are dead,” Bobby interrupted softly, standing up and moving between her and Emma as if throwing his body into the breach. “Emma wasn’t responsible, either,” he added quickly to forestall any accusations when Yana opened her mouth, but this time, she had no intention of immediately confronting the White Queen. Instead, she was staring in sheer disbelief.

Tarot, Catseye, Jetstream…dead? She hadn’t liked most of them, and she hadn’t so much as thought of them since she’d returned, but…she’d known them. Not long ago, by her personal chronometer, she’d fought with them, and trained with them during the New Mutants brief sojourn at the Academy. Gone to dances with them, messed with Empath’s head after the crap he’d done to Tom and Sharon…

“You’ll note I didn’t bring that up,” Emma said coolly in her head, but Ilyana could sense the quaver in the White Queen’s mental voice as she met her eyes. Apparently even the implacable White Queen had her regrets.

It was about time.

“Just stay out of my way,” she said aloud, brushing off the hand Bobby extended to stop her. Enough of this. Whether Emma felt bad about what had happened to Kitty or the Hellions or not, she couldn’t be trusted. Past experience had taught her that much and she wasn’t about to revise her opinion now, with Kitty stuck out in space, alone. “I’ll be watching you. And if anything goes wrong, or I find out you’re responsible for any of this…” She let the threat hang and headed toward the front of the craft where the alien Beatle and Pete Wisdom were sitting, but Emma’s reply followed her.

“You won’t need to bother. I’ll do it myself.”

Illyana let out a snort as she stepped into the cockpit. She’d believe that when she saw it.

Neither of them men turned at the sound of her approach, apparently entranced by whatever it was they were seeing through the front sensors. Illyana opened her mouth to demand explanations of just what they’d been thinking bringing Emma Frost along on this trip, then closed it as she realized exactly what they were staring at.

Ships. There was a virtual battalion of ships in the sky before them, and craning her head just confirmed that it extended to all sides for as far as the sensors could read.

“So, think we can just blow through it?” Pete asked the pilot quietly, his voice gruff.

“If you want to be blown to bits, sure. Otherwise no.”

“Somehow, I knew you were going to say that.”

“What are those?” Illyana asked, staring at the sight before her. There was just no rhyme or reason to the battalion; they seemed to be of every model imaginable, as if a few dozen sci-fi films had coughed up all their designs, assembled them, and stuck them out in space.

“That,” Wisdom said as he turned to look at her with an impatient expression, “would be the Skrull invasion fleet. Who are-”

“Hailing,” the John Lennon look-alike said as he flipped one of a few million switches on the console. “I’m going to try to bluff my way through, like.”

“Is there any chance of that working?” Illyana asked Pete in a whisper as static began emanating from the console.

“Don’t know till we try, do we?” he snapped, then waved for her to be quiet and turned back to the console.

It wasn’t a great time for an argument, Illyana decided, and settled for leaning back against the wall of the cockpit to watch.

“Unidentified vessel,” a voice slurred over the intercom. “You have ten seconds to give your authorization code.”

“Now wait a minute!” the John Lennon wantabe protested, fingers flying over the controls even as he stared at the screen. “It’s been a long and winding road getting here, and my codes are all dated. You’ve gotta give me more time than that.”

“Eight seconds.”

Illyana watched as the Skrull Beatle flipped frantically through a beat up manual before tossing it aside. Right. Not going to work. She prepared to summon a stepping disk, and then paused as she heard a faint hum that grew exponentially louder each second.

“Hold off there, mate. I don’t have codes. Hurry to join back up with the fleet and all that, you know? But you’ve got to have my id. I’m John, of the Skrull Beatles.”

“John was reported executed as a traitor to the Empire during the invasion of Avalon. Provide the authorization code or prepare to be terminated.”

“Not true! All an act,” John said in a rush as he fiddled with buttons on the console, peering over the top of his glasses at some indicator she couldn’t quite see and wouldn’t have been able to identify if she could. “We were under cover, like. All walrus mode, you dig? Special orders and all, top secret hush-hush.”

“Two seconds.”

“Gordon Bennett,” Wisdom muttered, and turned toward the pilot as the humming sound grew exponentially louder. “You gonna take us out of here, or wait until we’ve been fried?”

“Going and gone,” John retorted, a dreamy smile forming on his face as he pressed a button and the Skrull armada disappeared in a rainbow of color. “I AM the Walrus!” He turned back toward her and smiled. “Care to find a free corner to occupy until we rejoin the universe, beautiful? Seems there should be celebrating, and I’m decades over Boko.”

Illyana let out a snort, but felt her face grow warm as she turned back to Pete. “How long until we’re there?” she asked, trying to maintain her composure.

“Hour, maybe two. That what you came up here for?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

She opened her mouth to say no, it wasn’t. She’d wanted to toss Emma out whatever airlock the ship might have, to hear her beg for mercy that wouldn’t be granted, to demand Pete explain why they were trusting someone who’d betrayed them so many times.

Instead, she nodded and settled back against the wall to watch the streams of color whiz past on the display. Maybe she knew the answer after all. The White Queen’s soul might be stained black from everything she’d done, but at least she had one, which was more than she could say for herself. And they’d trusted her to come along, too.

“Has it ever occurred to you, my dear, that someone who’d lost their soul utterly would hardly miss it?” Emma’s voice intruded in her mind, its tone tinged with sadness and a touch of exasperation. “Perhaps you’re not so far gone as you’d care to think.”

“And what, you know this from personal experience?” Illyana tossed back irritably, her eyes rolling.

“Why yes, actually. I do.”

Illyana opened her mouth to reply, then shut it again and closed her eyes. Much though she hated to admit it, Emma just might.

* * * * * * *

“They found something!” Illyana said, eyes bright with excitement as she rushed into the passenger bay. Ali paused mid-sentence from her conversation with Bobby to glance up at the girl as she stood in the door hatch, hands bracing her against the frame as she leaned forward. If it weren’t for the legs, horns and tail she would have looked like an ordinary teenager who’d just won tickets to see her favorite band play in concert. Not that Ali could blame her. They’d all been waiting for any bit of news since they came back out of hyperspace, and this sounded like it was the good kind.

Beaming back at her, Ali pushed herself off of her seat and said, “Took them long enough. Let’s go find out what it is.”

Lockheed was already flying past her and over Illyana’s head. The little guy was quick, that was for sure. Ali could have sworn he’d been taking a nap in the corner the last time she looked his way. Bobby and Emma also rose to their feet and moved to follow.

“Yes, let’s all try to squeeze our way into the cockpit,” Emma observed drily as the rush became something of a logjam at the door hatch. “It being such a spacious compartment.”

“If it can fit your ego, it can fit all of us,” Illyana tossed over her shoulder. Ali and Bobby tried unsuccessfully to disguise their tiny snorts of laughter while they shifted into a semblance of single file and climbed the rest of the way to where they could join Pete and John.

It was standing room only by the time Emma joined them, but Ali took it in stride. Compared to the average mosh pit this was nothing, after all. Besides, everyone’s attention was on the viewscreen in front of them, rather than each other.

The rectangular holographic display showed the misty blackness of space peppered with the tiny dots of stars in the distance. It was hardly empty space, however. A long trail of broken asteroids bisected the view like, well, a bunch of big rocks all in a line, really.

“Lovely,” Emma said archly as she glanced at Illyana. “Thank you, Ms. Rasputin, for calling us back here to engage in pointless sightseeing.”

Illyana glared back at the imperious blonde woman. “I can arrange for a closer view if you’d prefer,” she said in a sweet voice that was about as genuine as those ‘Pradas’ some jerk tried to sell Ali the last time she was in New York.

“Stow it, you two,” Pete said before either of them could argue any further. “Look over there.” His finger pointed toward a spot in the belt that seemed to be shy an asteroid or twenty. The viewscreen zoomed closer, and sure enough, there was a definite gap there.

“Is that what I think it is?” Ali said, placing one hand on Pete’s shoulder and leaning in for a better view. She thought she felt him tense a bit under her fingers, but when she glanced over at him, he looked perfectly relaxed and all business.

Giving her a nod, he said, “It’s about the right size. And there’s more. John, show them.”

The image zoomed in even further, centering on the break in the belt, until it filled the screen. At first it looked like the same thing, just closer, until Ali realized there was a second, smaller stream of rocks, some no more than specks of dust, drifting away from the rest and vanishing into the distance. “It’s a trail,” Ali breathed.

“And it should lead us right to her,” John said.

“So does that mean the bullet’s solid again?” Bobby asked with a hint of concern.

Pete’s lips thinned for a moment before he said, “Long enough to bust up those asteroids. Past that we can’t be sure, yeah?” His voice was too firm and decisive for the last part to be a question, and it wasn’t too hard for Ali to figure out why. If Kitty had managed to unphase the bullet, even for a moment, it was a good sign. If it had stayed solid, well, it could mean several more things, some of them very bad.

“Do we know how far away she is?” Ali asked, as much to change the subject as out of any real curiosity.

John continued to work his fingers over the console in front of him even as he glanced over at her. “Not yet, luv, but I’ve already got the long range sensors working on it.” He looked back at the viewscreen, where a stream of words in the jagged Skrull language scrolled along the bottom. “There shouldn’t be any trouble catching up to her once we…” the alien pilot’s voice trailed off as he read the next few lines. He adjusted his glasses as if that would somehow change the words displayed in front of him and in a deceptively neutral voice uttered a simple, “Ah.”

The others seemed to freeze at the sound of that one, ominous word. “Don’t you dare leave it at that,” Emma warned menacingly.

For once everyone seemed to be in agreement with the White Queen as they all looked at John with expressions ranging from concerned to mutinous. “Let’s hear it, John,” Pete told him.

“I’ve been plotting out the bullet’s course based on our current position and its probable speed and trajectory, given the dispersement of those asteroids it hit,” John explained as the viewscreen became a grid of green lights with a small yellow dot shaped like the bullet in the center. The grid quickly zoomed out to reveal a stellar chart, with a series of thin orbit trails contouring their way toward a central star. “This here’s the Tamabouki system. Used to be part of the Empire, but the natives were deemed too troublesome to keep, it being so far to the fringes.”

The dotted line that progressed its way ahead of where the bullet was on the grid told the rest of the story.

Pete’s eyes grew wide and he muttered a soft curse under his breath. Ali couldn’t blame him, and was halfway tempted to say a few choice words herself. “I don’t believe it,” he groaned, raking one hand through his ebony hair. “Are you telling me this thing’s on a direct path to hit another planet just like it almost did Earth?”

“Not directly, no,” the Beatle lookalike answered nonchalantly, cocking his head to the side as he gave the matter some consideration. He held up his hands and moved them as if spreading apart a curtain and said, “If my calculations are right it’s just going to graze it some. Which will probably shear a few thousand square miles off the surface, ignite the atmosphere, throw it off its axis and send it spiraling into that there gas giant it’s orbiting.”

For a moment all anyone could do was stare at him.

“Yeah…” Ali finally said when she picked her jaw back up from the floor. “That would be a very bad thing.”

Pete shook his head and rubbed at his temples as if fighting a sudden migraine. “Right, then. Let’s hope it want take long to find her. This rescue mission just got put on a deadline.”

* * * * * * *

The rattle of asteroids slamming into the hull was distracting at best, and Emma signed as she lost her concentration yet again. Honestly, one would think that the Skrull flying the ship would be able to avoid a little debris, even if it were that very debris which was indicating the course the bullet had taken.

It was a good sign, she assured herself as she brushed lint from her pants. For the bullet to have burst through an asteroid field and picked up a trail, Katherine must have solidified at least briefly. It spoke well for her mental state, her stamina, her strength of will…

Unfortunately, given that her efforts to contact Katherine since they’d emerged from hyperspace had been unsuccessful, her attempts to reassure herself weren’t entirely successful.

It was, of course, too much to ask that her companions in this venture assume some measure of sensitivity and cease their non-stop prattling. But no. Alison and Robert seemed to have determined it an appropriate time to compare their recent misadventures and to attempt (with increasingly nonsensical results) to rationalize Illyana’s return from the dead.

As if no one had foreseen that since the time of her initial disappearance. The discrepancies in the events of what had hence come to be referred to as Inferno had been too numerous even to be explained away as magic. Emma was more surprised that it had taken so long for the annoying child to reappear than she was that she’d done so at all.

She cast her thoughts outward once more, past those of her shipmates, and met only the deafening silence of space. Too far away still, perhaps, to contact Katherine’s mind.

The alternative, that there was no longer any Katherine to contact, was something she refused to consider.

Glancing up, she caught Pete Wisdom’s inquisitive look and gave her head a nearly imperceptible shake. A sharp intake of breath from her left confirmed that Illyana had caught the gesture as well, and she turned to give the former New Mutant a look far softer than her norm.

“Too far, still,” she lied.

The girl apparently accepted that explanation and returned to her incessant brooding, and Emma rolled her eyes internally as she attempted to dismiss her from her mind once more.

It proved somewhat easier said than done. Magik had been her student once, however reluctantly. The fact that appearances suggested she’d ultimately succumbed to her darker side wasn’t something Emma was proud of, though there was a time she might have considered it a success. Moreover, the girl’s continual self-loathing nagged at the edges of her mind at a time when she most needed every bit of optimism she could summon.

She’d failed Illyana, just as she’d failed her other students, time and time again. She wasn’t going to repeat the trend with Katherine. Not if there were anything she or anyone else who’d joined the rescue effort could conceivably do about it.

Robert, she knew, was the key. She sent a discrete glance in his direction. As usual, he seemed inappropriately cheerful for the situation, though she knew him well enough to realize that the humor was more a defense mechanism than it was an honest pre-disposition. Still…so much pure ability, wrapped in so unsuitable a package.

It had surprised her, earlier, when he’d thrown himself into the gap between herself and Illyana. In retrospect, she supposed it shouldn’t have. It was that very tendency to defend those he perceived as helpless that she was counting on when they found Katherine. In his own defense, he would never dream of doing what was going to be required of him. In someone else’s, though…

Well, if his continued support and defense of Lorna during her most recent bout of insanity didn’t prove the lengths to which he would go to help a “damsel in distress”, she didn’t know what would.

Still, there was a risk. If he stopped chattering long enough to wonder just how they were going to extract Katherine, he might realize she had something in mind, even though she rather doubted he’d be able to discern precisely what. The last thing she needed at this stage was him balking at what he would need to do, though if that came to pass she supposed she could simply take control of his mind and force him to act appropriately.

Still, she’d expended considerable time and effort in attempts to bolster the boy’s self-confidence. It would be far better for him to make the choice himself, even if she had to tweak the circumstances to ensure that he did.

Bracing herself for yet another failure, Emma reached out through the vastness of space, and gasped softly as her mind brushed over another consciousness. It was tentative, at best, but she latched onto the contact, fingers clenching in the edge of her plastic seat as she strained to increase the connection, even as she simultaneously reached out for Robert’s mind and made other preparations.

“It’s Emma, Katherine. Can you hear me?”