X-Men: The Return

by Chris Roberson Narrated by Thom Rivera

Overview

Feared and mistrusted by the very people they have sworn to protect, the X-Men are a band of mutant heroes dedicated to defending humanity from those who would use their powers to harm and destroy. The X-Men are often Earth's last defense against villains and mad-men...and the future's only hope. An alien race calling themselves the Kh'thon descend upon the planet, announcing that they are the former occupants and rightful owners of Earth. The evidence they present is startling: their ships are manned by Homo sapiens, supposedly descendants of human beings who served the Kh'thon on Earth countless millennia ago, and their will is enforced by the Exemplar, humans augmented with a dizzying array of powers, each the match of any one of the X-Men. The Kh'thon claim that they are responsible for the creation of the x-gene, devised so that they could breed whatever traits or abilities they required of their servants. And now they've returned to take back what they believe is rightfully theirs: the planet Earth, and everyone living on it. It is up to Wolverine, Kitty Pryde, Nightcrawler, and the rest of the X-Men-working in conjunction with Scott Summers, currently a member of X-Force-to find a way to repel the Kh'thon before humans and mutants alike are enslaved by alien masters....

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176220711
Publisher:	Dreamscape Media
Publication date:	11/25/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

This wasn't the slums, or the war-torn streets of some distant city, or a savage and distant land. This was Manhattan, Park Avenue to be precise, somewhere in the upper seventies. Kitty Pryde knew it as one of the swankiest neighborhoods in the city, perhaps even

the world, but on this moonless night, the streets strangely empty of vehicles and pedestrians alike, the shadows pooling under every awning and around every door, she felt an inescapable sense of menace.

For the moment, it seemed that the world consisted of nothing but Kitty and the buildings towering on either side. But she knew that was too good to last.

As if in response to her thoughts, a pair of street thugs emerged from the shadows. They looked like rejects from The Warriors or a Street Fighter arcade game, one of them done up like a B-movie Indian with Mohawk, face paint, and feathers, the other in a battered top hat and tattered tails.

The Mohawk carried a hunting knife, whose blade glinted dully in the low light, while the top hat swung a Louisville Slugger like a batter approaching the plate.

"How do, Chicken Little?" said the Mohawk in a rasping voice. "Ready to have some fun?"

"What's the matter?" Kitty asked, crossing her arms over her chest. "You guys get lost on the way to a Village People tribute?"

"You hear that, Robbo?" the Mohawk said to the top hat. "Chicken Little thinks she's a comedian."

Robbo, the top hat, snickered like a dutiful sidekick, but said nothing.

Kitty sighed, and shook her head. "That doesn't even make any sense, you know. Chicken Little? Since when have I worried about the sky falling?"

"Oh," the Mohawk said, dramatically,"it's gonna fall."

Kitty rolled her eyes. "You need to work on the script a bit. If this is the best you can do, well, it's just embarrassing." She motioned to the two street thugs. "Come on, let's get this over with."

As the pair advanced, menacingly, Kitty sized up her options. Ninjitsu? she wondered. No, she thought with a smile. Krav maga.

The Mohawk attacked first, swinging the hunting knife down in a wide arm, the blade toward the ground. Kitty responded instantly with a simultaneous block and strike, punching the Mohawk in the throat with the heel of her palm, grabbing hold of his wrist with her other hand. As the Mohawk pulled away, Kitty kept her hold on the knife. A brief tug-of-war ensued, ended quickly with a knee to the Mohawk's groin. As he staggered backward, moaning, Kitty sent the knife flying off into the darkness, end over end, finally landing with a clatter some yards away, well out of reach.

The top hat came next, swinging the bat like a club. Kitty ducked under the swing, knocking his arm aside with her left elbow, then went in close with a shovel hook with her right, fist held palm up, elbow tucked down by her ribs, the force of motion coming from her hips. The short-range punch caught the top hat in the soft tissue just beneath the ribcage on his left side, knocking the wind from him. Then, as the top hat reeled, she swung around and followed the body shot with a head shot that caught the top hat in the side of the face.

Kitty kicked the bat away as the top hat dropped to the pavement, just as the Mohawk regained his composure. She set her feet, arms held lightly to either side, and smiled sweetly at him. "Ready for another go?"

The Mohawk looked at his friend, moaning semiconscious on the sidewalk, and without another word turned and ran.

Kitty shrugged, and started to head up the avenue in the opposite direction. Logan would have been proud. She hadn't even had to use her phasing powers.

"This is too easy," she said to the empty air. "I was expecting something a bit tougher."

Just then, a hulking metal figure rounded the corner of 71st Street, blocking her path. It was roughly man-shaped, but towered over her, taller than the two street thugs combined.

"Okay," Kitty said, whistling appreciatively. "That's tougher."

Kitty's first thought was that it was some sort of robot. A bit clichéd, perhaps, but more of a credible threat than the Village People rejects of a moment before.

No, she thought, seeing the very human eyes in the faceplate, high overhead. It's a powered combat suit, like Iron Man on steroids.

As the towering figure of yellow metal approached, Kitty recognized the design. It was a Mandroid, tech originally developed by Tony Stark for SHIELD, but since fallen into the hands of any number of well-funded criminal masterminds and megalomaniacs bent on world domination. But who the suit's owner might be was of much less concern to Kitty at the moment than what its operator might be planning.

Okay, Kitty thought, dancing backward as the Mandroid slowly advanced, if this model is anything like the ones I studied, it'll be made of vanadium steel, with a laser cannon mounted on its left arm, a power claw of some kind on the right.

How well the armaments would be employed, of course, depended largely on the skills of the operator inside, but even a complete novice could be ruthlessly effective in a rig like that.

Delightful.

Kitty phased as the laser cannon sent a gout of coherent light right at her, and though the beam passed harmlessly through her phased molecules, she could still feel the heat of its passage. It felt like stepping out of an air-conditioned plane into a hot desert summer, and Kitty didn't like to imagine what the full intensity of the beam would do to her if she weren't phased.

The Mandroid didn't give her a chance to counter, but swung the power claw at her in a vicious arc. Kitty remained phased, nonchalantly waiting for the arm to pass through her. But just as the metal of the suit's claw passed through her phased molecules, Kitty winced, feeling as if she'd just been kicked in the head. Spots danced in her vision, and the worst migraine she'd felt in ages flared up behind her eyes.

"Ouch!"

Kitty staggered back, suddenly solid.

That is not vanadium steel, she thought ruefully. No, whatever the suit was made of, it was something so dense that it sat at the outer range of her ability to phase through it.

The migraine was just beginning to fade, her vision clearing, when Kitty saw the power claw coming back around for another swipe. Still disoriented, she just managed to duck, the arm whistling only inches overhead. In no rush to feel the sensation of phasing through that again, she rushed forward, crouched low, and slipped between the powerful legs of the combat suit and out the other side.

The Mandroid wheeled around as Kitty danced out of reach, trying to formulate a plan. She could continue to phase through its laser bolts indefinitely, but whenever the Mandroid closed the distance between them she was going to run the risk of another kick to the head.

I'll be lucky to handle another one or two phases through that muck, at best. And that's if I only have to contend with an arm or leg. If I have to phase through the bulk of the suit, I'll probably end up unconscious on the ground in seconds.

Her only hope was to knock the suit out of commission with her next phase. Unless she was extraordinarily unlucky, the electronics driving the Mandroid would be vulnerable to her ability to disrupt any electrical system she phased through. Her phased molecules acted like a miniature, localized electromagnetic pulse, and if she could get a hand into the suit's power source, she could immobilize it.

The problem was that the suit's power source was bound to be in some protected area, somewhere inside the chest carapace, and she was likely to have only one shot at this.

Sure, she thought, lips pursed. A piece of cake.

Kitty tried to think back and remember the schematics she'd studied. The models the X-Men faced years ago had been Stark Industries Mark I and Mark II Mandroids. The one she was facing now was a different design entirely, but seemed to be built on the same basic principles.

Engineers usually don't reinvent the wheel. It's easier to evolve a design from one model to the next. That's why cars almost always have their engine in the front and the trunk in the back. If a design works, why change it? So if this one is built on the same lines as the earlier model Mandroids, its power supply is probably in the same place. Right?

Unless, of course, Kitty realized with a grimace, the engineer had decided to get creative. There was always the chance that this was the Volkswagen Beetle of Mandroids, with its power supply squirreled away somewhere screwy, and nothing but a roomy storage space where the power supply logically should be.

So which was it? Simply this year's model, or a new design entirely? If the former, Kitty's play would work. If the latter, well...

I hope my friends remember me fondly.

Kitty crouched low, and waited until the Mandroid lunged at her. At the last possible moment she leapt into the air, legs out to either side, and planted her hands palms down on the Mandroid's forearm, using it like a pommel horse and going into a handstand. Kitty breathed a silent prayer as the Mandroid responded just as expected, swinging its claw upward. Kitty folded her arms for a brief instant, like springs soaking up kinetic energy, and then pushed off, letting the combined momentum carry her upward, doing a tuck and roll in midair that would make Stevie Hunter proud and landing gracelessly on the Mandroid's broad shoulders.

"Here goes nothing," Kitty said, and thrust her phased arm straight down into the back of the Mandroid carapace.

With a sputtering sound and a sudden smell of ozone the Mandroid shuddered once and then went still as a statue.

A blinding headache lancing through her skull, Kitty was barely able to remain phased long enough to pull her arm back out of the Mandroid before going solid, and then slipping unceremoniously down to the ground. She managed to keep her feet beneath her, just barely, and rubbed the bridge of her nose, waiting for the spots in front of her eyes to fade and the ice pick in her frontal lobe to dissipate.

"Ouch," Kitty said, rubbing her temples. "I'm not in a hurry to try that again."

The only answer was a deep, reverberating thud. Then another, and another, and another. Sounding like footsteps, but impossibly loud, and getting louder.

Kitty turned, and looked up 70th Street toward Madison Avenue.

A trio of Sentinels were emerging from the direction of Central Park. Purple and gray human-shaped robots, designed to hunt and eradicate the "mutant menace," stood a dozen stories tall, yellow eyes glaring in their expressionless faces, arms outstretched menacingly.

From the immobile mouth on the face of the lead Sentinel issued a strange, inhuman voice.

"Mutant, you are advised to surrender or face immediate termination. This is your only warning."

"Aw, come on, Doug!" Kitty yelled, hands on her hips. "Are you kidding me? Why not just toss in Galactus, too, and complete the set?"

The Sentinels were less than half a block away, their hands raised, palms forward, weapons no doubt trained on Kitty and ready to extinguish her life.

And then everything was gone.

All of it, the city, the street, the buildings, the Sentinels. Only Kitty remained, standing in an immense, featureless room of glittering steel. Where the Mandroid had stood was now an oversized humaniform practice dummy of the same featureless steel as the surrounding walls, ceiling, and floor, its holographic cloak now disabled.

Through the window of reinforced transparent aluminum, set high on the wall overhead, Kitty could see the smirking face of Doug Ramsey in the control room.

"Aw, come on, Pryde. Don't feel up to a little challenge?"

Kitty shook her head and stepped forward, lifting her foot as though to put it on a step. The fact that there was no stairway there, just empty air, didn't stop her from slowly ascending, air-walking gradually higher, step by step. It was another interesting side effect of her phasing abilities, one that had taken a while to get the hang of. She often felt like Wile E. Coyote from the Road Runner cartoons when air-walking, and preferred to keep from looking down, for fear that the sudden discovery that there was nothing beneath her but empty air might send her falling to the ground far below.

"Doug, have I ever told you about the first time I was in the Danger Room?"

His voice echoed through the speakers hidden in the walls around her, but the shake of his head was a slight, understated motion. "No, I don't think so. Why?"

"Well, it was just the standard first-timer test, just like all the New Mutants had to do on their first days — present company excluded. All I had to do was walk from one side of the room to the other. I don't think I'd ever been so scared in my life, even after being kidnapped by the Hellfire Club and all of that crazy. So I squeezed my eyes shut and just put one foot in front of the other. And you know what happened?"

Kitty was now only a few steps away from the control room, her eyes fixed on her destination, and not on the hard steel floor dozens of feet below.

"No, what?" Doug said.

"Nothing," Kitty answered with a smile. "I just kept walking. I didn't even realize I was phasing through tentacles, and projectiles, and force beams, and all kinds of nastiness Professor Xavier had cooked up."

Kitty was now in arm's reach of the control room window. She stepped through, feeling the slightest whisper on her exposed skin as her molecules phased through those of the transparent aluminum.

"Of course," Kitty added with a sigh, "then I was knocked unconscious by a psionic bolt, and spent the next few hours in a coma in someone else's body while an alternate version of me from the future of a parallel time line used mine to try to stop World War III, but that's a whole different story."

"Heck," Doug said, leaning back and lacing his fingers behind his head, feet propped up on the Danger Room's control panel. "I'd be lucky just to make it through the front door."

"Yeah," Kitty said, dropping into the chair beside him wearily. "I guess the ability to translate any language and talk to computers isn't all that handy when dealing with evil mutants or giant robots."

"I'll just have to get by on my good looks." Doug smiled.

"Well, good luck with that." Kitty punched him lightly in the arm. "I wouldn't count on the next mutant you meet succumbing to your boyish charms, though."

"Um, excuse me?" came a cultured voice from behind them.

Kitty looked to see a stunning woman with purple hair standing in the entrance to the control room. It was Betsy Braddock, former British fashion model, telepath, and newcomer to the Xavier mansion.

"On the other hand," Kitty said in a low voice, shooting Doug a sly look.

"B-Betsy," Doug said, jumping awkwardly to his feet. "What...what can I...?" He stopped, and glanced at Kitty nervously. "You didn't just..." He looked back to Betsy. "Did you?"

Betsy regarded Doug for a moment, a slight smile on her full lips, and shook her head. "I'm certain I didn't, whatever it was."

"What can we do for you, Betsy, is what the boy wonder here is trying to say," Kitty said dryly.

"Yes, well, it appears that someone is waiting at the front door. Or so it would appear on the monitors in the corridor. I'd have gone and answered it myself but..." A slight blush rose on Betsy's cheeks. "But to be perfectly frank, I couldn't find my way back to the lift, and I've been stuck in this bloody subbasement all morning!"

"No problem," Kitty said, standing. "That'll probably be Scott at the door, and I need to talk to him myself anyway." She strode toward the door, but paused as she came abreast of Betsy and glanced back at Doug. "Hey, Ramsey, why don't you give Ms. Braddock a full tour of the mansion. I'm sure she'd appreciate the attention."

As Kitty walked out, Doug gave Betsy a sheepish grin, looking like a kid at a middle school dance trying to work up the courage to approach a girl.

I don't know who to pity more, Kitty thought, heading up the corridor toward the elevator. Him or her.

Copyright © 2007 by Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.

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