13

He was aware of things in stages.

First stage was he was on a cold floor that could have used a sweeping. Stage two was an awareness of an odd, small choking noise. Stage number three was that the noise was coming from him.

Logan could hear other noises as well, farther away, like they were a room separated from him. It was an argument … no. It was one man speaking, and the other sounded distressed. He couldn’t make out the words, but he knew what was happening was bad, and he was glad he wasn’t a part of it.

He tasted something like old pennies in his mouth, bile and something metallic, and realized as his stuttering heart and ragged breathing smoothed out that someone had tried to kill him with … poison? No, he wasn’t getting a taste of poison. Drug overdose? That sounded about right.

Although it was an idiotic idea, truth was it was a nice try. He may have been dead for a few seconds there. Powerful drug.

Suddenly he remembered: Vogel. Operation Overlord. He had been a guinea pig in this bastard’s experiments, all for the sake of gathering intell, but beyond being aware a virus was involved, he knew jack shit. The whole operation had been a bust, and now Vogel decided to close up shop, take his toys, and go home. Why?

Pieces of information sifted down from his groggy mind like plaster dust from the ceiling. Somehow Vogel was tipped off that there was a spy on the inside, and the word came down from on high to scuttle the whole thing and bring his results back to them. But what results? Vogel’s security was tighter than a miser’s ass - he had no idea if he was even working on the damn thing here. It could be he was only torturing him for shits and giggles.

The voices faded … no, one did. Vogel was gone. The assistant was still around, making noises … choking? It sounded a little like that. Vogel had been conscientious enough to turn off the lights upon leaving his lab, so all was darkness, but Logan’s eyes adjusted quickly.

His body was still shaking off the dregs of the drug, so he couldn’t walk; he crawled to the transparent door that separated his little prison cell alcove from the rest of the lab and placed his fist against the partition and popped his claws, which Vogel had never discovered. The claws punched through the bulletproof glass, and with a couple of swipes he had cleared out a space big enough for him to crawl through.

The lab had a cold poured concrete floor, and while it was probably easy to hose down, it needed sweeping out here too. It didn’t have dust bunnies so much as it had dust buffalo. He sat back on his haunches, the drug aftereffects fading to nothing, while dark shapes formed into lab tables and equipment that wouldn’t have been out of place in Frankenstein’s lair, But there was something new on the floor several meters away, moving slightly in a spasmodic way, making choking noises. Federov? Yes, Vogel’s assistant.

Except it wasn’t really Vogel’s assistant, it was Mystique in his form. The real Federov was probably dead, weighted down at the bottom of a river somewhere. He moved closer, to see if she was conscious, but she wasn’t. She’d also reverted to her usual blue self, which was a solid indication of total unconsciousness.

Did Vogel figure out she wasn’t the real Federov? Was that why the hasty shut down? Had the great Mystique finally been tripped up? He’d have asked her, but she was a little busy dying.

Logan found the hypodermic used to dose her on the floor, and he sniffed the tip. He didn’t recognize the scent of the drug, but it was something from the opiate family, which explained why her breathing and heart rate were plunging precipitously. Of ways to die, it was probably one of the most painless - breathing and heart rate slowed until it stopped. It was basically going to sleep and never waking up again. Unless you had a real bitch of a healing factor that didn’t accept never waking up again.

He was aware he had heard some of what Vogel had said before leaving, he just filed it in the back of his mind, as he was too busy recovering from his own near death experience. Vogel was apologizing to Federov, saying he was sorry, but he was a loose end and needed to be tidied up. He also said he’d say his goodbyes to Svetlana for him. Who the hell was Svetlana? Well, there was that girl in Moscow, but somehow he doubted Vogel could be referring to her.

There were no papers scattered about, but then there never was. He’d left in a hurry, leaving equipment behind, but he wasn’t stupid enough to leave anything useful to the Overlord project. Which meant neither he nor Mystique (Federov) had been vital to it, which was a shame. Looking around, Logan found some old medications left behind, including adrenaline, which he grabbed. Was that enough for an adult of average height and weight? He thought so.

Here was a conundrum. Injected into her heart, it could revive Mystique, keep her from dying. But why the hell would he want to do that? The bitch was overdue for death.

Except …

Except she probably knew what Overlord was about, or at least knew more about it than he did. Together they could compare notes and see how it meshed up. She had information he was bound to need. Also, there was something in him that found it kind of offensive to just hang around and let a woman die, especially if he could prevent it. Shit shit shit. “If I was a decent assassin, I’d just let you die,” he told Mystique, finding a hypo and sticking the needle in the permeable membrane at the top of the vial. As soon as he had loaded the hypo, he squirted a bit of it out as he flicked it, making sure there were no air bubbles, and then hovered over her for a moment.

Should he do this? Yes, he might get some information out of her, but she was a crazy, murderous bitch. Her death would actually be a good thing, and would probably save many lives.

Oh, fuck it. He was never the heroic type anyways.

He pressed down on her sternum to confirm her heart was in the proper place (she might have shifted it elsewhere), and then rammed the needle through her chest wall, hoping the needle was strong enough to take it, and depressed the plunger.

She gasped reflexively as adrenaline filled her heart and made it start pumping furiously again, but it still took a moment for her eyes to flutter open. She quickly rolled over on her side and puked, as heavy duty downers and adrenaline both could do that to a person. “How did Vogel get you?” he wondered. Mystique was a hard target, so he was genuinely curious.

After she finished barfing, she said, “He just jabbed me while I was trying to find something for him. I had no warning at all.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and sat up, looking down to find the needle stuck in her chest. “You’ll want something for this, won’t you?”

“Just Vogel.” He grabbed the needle and looked at her. She gave him a grim nod, and he yanked the needle out. She cursed and grabbed her chest as he simply crushed the hypo in his hand and let the pieces fall to the floor. “What’s up with Overlord?”

It took her a moment to answer, as she was still catching her breath. Since he knew needles in the heart didn’t hurt that much (okay, they hurt a little, but still …) he figured she was still shaking off the opiate overdose. “It’s all gone fubar. There was a leak somewhere, someone let on that his operation was compromised. I think it might have been our people - yours or mine.”

It wouldn’t surprise him if the Organization had tried to screw him - that’s what they did, after all; Stryker was as trustworthy as an angry rattlesnake in a nursery anyways - but she included herself and her group in the equation, which struck him as odd. “Why do you think your people would fuck you over?”

Her yellow eyes were almost lambent in the gloom; they were nearly incandescent with rage. “Because Overlord is all about wiping us out.”

This wasn’t computing. “You don’t mean you and me.”

“No, all of us, Logan. Mutants. It seems the Russians have done projections that have us becoming the dominant life form, with mundane dying out and becoming an obsolete evolutionary strain within the next century or so. They decided to jump the gun and even the odds.”

“By killing us all?”

“That’s the idea.”

And the Organization wanted it, along with Mystique’s people. Somehow he doubted that their reasons for wanting it were benign. “Does he have another lab somewhere?”

“Since I heard him refer to this as the secondary lab, I imagine so. But I have no idea where it is.”

“Leave that to me,”

She looked at him askance, and said, “Maybe you want to put some pants on first.”

He looked down, and realized he was naked. Oh yeah, he forgot. He just got used to the idea of it always being cold.

There were probably worse things in the world than working with Mystique. But he had a feeling he was still going to regret it.

****

Suddenly Logan was staring into Bob’s eyes, and was extremely disoriented. It took him a second for reality to reassert itself. “You okay, mate?” Bob wondered, letting go of his face.

Logan took a deep breath, not sure he had actually had a breath since this began. “Was that all you could do?”

Bob shrugged sheepishly. “That was the most coherent bit I could put together. The rest is fragments, weird bits and pieces. I thought this was a pretty important bit, though.”

He rubbed his dry eyes and wondered when the ache in his head would fade. Bob brain surgery hurt more than he thought it would. Either that, or he was finally getting old.

“What happened?” Faith asked, looking between them almost suspiciously, like she didn’t expect either of them to actually answer.

“I did somethin’ real stupid,” he admitted.

“He saved her life,” Bob said, pointing at Mystique. “Which is admirable really, although it does have a sort of “What the fuck were you thinking” thing going for it.”

“I’m right here,” Mystique said snippily.

Bob gave her a big grin. “I know. And even you can’t believe he saved ya, ‘cause you’d have never done the same thing for him.”

“Not a shock,” he admitted, rubbing the back of his neck, pretending he didn’t notice the look Faith was giving him. It was a look that asked “Are you completely fucking nuts?” and he was glad she didn’t ask out loud, because if forced, he’d have to admit he probably was. “So after he tried to kill us both, we went and fucked up Vogel’s experiment, totally destroying Operation Overlord.”

“Like I said,” Mystique pointed out. She was desperately unhappy, and still couldn’t move or shift into another form, as Bob wasn’t allowing her to do anything. She was probably lucky to still have the ability to talk, although she didn’t know that. Yet.

Bob had turned his gaze to the ground - or at least Logan thought that at first. But he was actually staring down at the unconscious form of Vogel, who still hadn’t moved, and was probably still lucky to be breathing. Did she give him the same opiate cocktail he dosed them with so long ago? That would be quality irony, but it would probably kill the old buzzard.

Bob turned to him with a mischievous look in his eye that he knew couldn’t be any good for Vogel. “Why don’t we see what this dog’s bollocks has to say for himself, huh?”

He nodded, the pain finally starting to fade. “Do it.”

Faith came up beside him, leaning against his shoulder, and whispered in his ear, “Did you have a thing with her?”

That made him look at her curiously. “With Mystique?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck no. I have this personal code against sleeping with psychos.”

“But you’ve slept with me.”

Her gave her an exaggerated, evil look. “I’ll pretend you didn’t say that. Why d’ya ask?”

Faith shrugged and shook her head, but seemed to understand he wouldn’t settle for that. “Nothing. She said you two hooked up once upon a time.”

“Really?” That idea actually made his gut twist. You know, for all his apparent ease in getting involved with women way too good for him, he had many lonely and desperate times. Had he ever been that desperate? He almost shuddered to think. “She was prob’ly lying.” Actually, he was hoping she was lying, but he had no idea. He could ask Bob for the truth of the matter, but honestly he was a little afraid to know. What if he had? That was just something he’d rather be ignorant about. Keeping her alive was bad enough.

He didn’t have lots of time to think about it, though, as Bob had gotten the Vogel show on the road. “Wake up, Emil - you got some ‘splainin’ to do,” Bob said, far too cheerfully.

Vogel stirred and sat up slowly, taking his time, as a frail old man would. When he saw Bob, he recoiled slightly and asked, in Russian, “Who the hell are you?”

Bob replied, also in Russian, and with a big grin on his face, “I get that so much you wouldn’t believe it.”

Vogel looked a bit like a turtle. He had a bald, round head and a pointed chin, and all his facial features seemed to be piled in the middle of his face, like at some point his mouth migrated up and his eyes migrated down and they all met half way. He was clearly old, yet he seemed strangely ageless - he could have been anywhere between sixty and a hundred and two. His eyes were so pale they were almost colorless now, his lips so thin they were nearly theoretical, and yet he stared at Bob with a mix of apprehension and haughty offense. “You work for that other one.”

“I work for no one,” Bob said. “Seriously, no one can afford me.”

“Remember me?” Logan asked, not bothering to hide his contempt.

Vogel glanced at him, and his eyes widened almost imperceptibly. But the stink of fear was unmistakable. “I thought it was you, but I didn’t believe it. You should be dead.”

“I get that so much you wouldn’t believe it.,” he said, deliberately echoing Bob. Well, they all had their specific crosses to bear.

“You’re gonna tell us everything about Hype, and what the fuck you’re doing here, and who you’re working for, and even your shoe size if I deem it necessary, got it?” Bob told him, like he actually had a choice in the matter. Vogel turned back to him, probably to tell him to go fuck himself, but as soon as he looked into Bob’s eyes, his entire face seemed to freeze and go slack, like he’d just dropped into a narcoleptic coma. Except his eyes were open, and he was conscious, just totally under Bob’s supernatural sway.

And he told them everything.