2

This was one of those awful moments where you had to decide what kind of a leader you were. Were you one who shared everything with your people, or told them only what they needed to know? Logan was sure he’d be the cool guy, the one who shared, but after Storm briefed him on the situation, he had to consider how the kids would take it. He wasn’t worried about Shaheen, she was an adult, and Pyro had worked with Magneto, so fuck him, but Kitty and Piotr? Still had an air of naivety about them, and as for the dead weight of Zehra, she came off as super tough, which meant she was more naïve than Kitty and Piotr combined. Damn it.

By the time he called them all to one of the briefing room, he decided to tell them what they needed to know, but right now that was most of it. “Hey Pete, you familiar with an area called Sobolyad?”

Piotr, who must have come straight from the gym since he was wearing a blue tank top and grey sweatpants, cocked his head to the side like a curious parakeet. “Sounds Russian.”

“It is. Why I’m asking.”

He considered for a moment and shook his head. “I don’t think so. Where’s it close to?”

“From what I could tell, Yakutsk was the closest city.”

Piotr’s blue eyes bugged out slightly. “Yakutsk? Logan, that’s in Siberia.”

“I know.”

“What’s going on?” Kitty asked, looking between them. She was trying to pretend that she wasn’t alarmed, but she was.

“Why are we talkin’ about the ass end of Russia?” John asked, then added, “No offense, Piotr.”

Piotr made a helpless gesture with his hands. “I don’t care. It is the ass end of Russia.”

“You know, I’ve heard of Yakutsk,” Shaheen said. “In a British newspaper travel article. They called it the coldest place on Earth.”

“It’s not Antarctica,” Logan replied. “I mean, it’s fucking colder than any place where people live should be, but it ain’t McMurdo Station.”

Kitty gave him one of those remarkable looks of hers, one where she looked to be incredulous and slightly scolding at the same time. “Are you saying you’ve been to Antarctica?”

“Look, everybody just pay attention,” he said, aware that this briefing was starting to get out of hand. They gathered around the briefing table with various looks of trepidation, save for Shaheen, who had that blasé/neutral expression that she almost always seemed to have, and Zehra, who stayed out of touching range of everybody, lurking in the shadows like she was eavesdropping on the party. The display table lit up, but right now it wasn’t showing anything interesting. “Last night, our time, a friend of Xavier’s who studies mutants over in Europe picked up what he characterized as an extreme surge of mutant energy in this area.” He touched a holographic map of Russia, and it zeroed in on the area around Sobolyad, which was really a whole bunch of nothing. Not even military satellites had bothered to map the area, because it was part of the vast icy wasteland that made up that part of Northern Russia. There were thick stands of trees, sure, so it wasn’t a barren steppe, but there still wasn’t much to see. Not many people lived there, because, hell, would you if you had a choice to go somewhere where the rivers weren’t frozen solid for a good chunk of the year? “He went to check it out, but the only message he was able to get out before his radio mysteriously died was that something was very wrong. A satellite pass over the area confirmed no life signs were picked up, even though he brought a team of nine people with him.”

“Were they mutants?” Shaheen asked.

“He was, but only in the sense that he could pick up other mutants. Storm said the people he brought with him were just medical personnel and a couple of pilots.”

“So somebody wiped them out?” John asked, skepticism seeping into his voice. “Somebody who satellites can’t register as living?”

“Military satellites are kinda dumb,” Logan told him. “If you know what you’re doing, you can block or interfere with ‘em quite easily.”

Kitty threw up her hands in exasperation. “Why do you always say these kind of things like you’ve done them?”

“Could it be the government?” Piotr asked, meaning the Russian government.

“Or, um, those military people? Who were they, Organization?” Nariko asked hesitantly. Her English still wasn’t perfect, but it was really good. She was needlessly anxious about it.

“The Organization never really worked with the Russians, mainly ‘cause the Russians had their own program going and didn’t like the competition. And that program generally doesn’t run anywhere near Siberia; they generally operate in the Urals near Kazakhstan.”

Kitty looked almost furious with impatience. “How the hell do you know that?”

“I’m not even sure where Kazakhstan is,” John admitted.

“You’re better off not knowing,” Piotr told him, then glanced across the holographic display table at Logan. “What about scanning it with Cerebro?”

“Can’t be done. When Tabitha tries, she gets a severe headache and Cerebro shuts down. She said it’s almost like something’s attacking, although she doesn’t get a sense of intent behind it.”

“It could be Russian military,” Piotr said, in Russian. It was a message for Logan alone. “They always say they don’t do these kinds of things, and they always do.”

“That possibility is still on the table,” Logan told him, also responding in Russian. “But frankly, judging from my past experience with them, this is way too subtle. The Russian and American military is alike in one fashion: both very in your face. They want to trample you down, they let you know they’re comin’. Their cover ups are always quick and half-assed, as if daring anyone to dispute it.”

“Hey,” John interrupted sharply. “How ‘bout letting us non-Russian speakers in on this conversation?”

“I was just asking about seeing my family,” Piotr said, reverting to English. “If we’re going to Russia, I don’t see why we can’t stop by. Afterwords.”

“We’ll have to see how it goes,” he told him, surprised that Piotr had a cover story all ready to go. He wasn’t sure anyone bought it, but it didn’t matter. “We’re gonna land just outside the target area of Sobolyad and search for survivors. That’s our main mission. Secondary is locating the source of this energy. If we find survivors in need of help, we retrieve them and get out of there; secondary will be aborted. We clear on this?”

“If this person has wiped out everyone else, why do you think we stand a chance?” Zehra piped up, being her usual negative self.

Logan smirked at her. “We’re tough bastards. I don’t care who it is - worse comes to worst, they can get some of us, but they can’t get all of us.”

Or at least he hoped so. But he wasn’t about to tell them the rest of it.

****

He made sure they were geared up for cold weather before they headed out, but Logan couldn’t quite shake the feeling that this was a mistake. He wasn’t sure they were ready. But Storm wouldn’t let him go alone, and besides, he really did mean what he said: they couldn’t get all of them. Just most.

In a way he hoped it was military, because those stupid assholes were always overconfident and underfunded. They thought machismo could be a bridge between whatever they were lacking when facing off with mutants, and besides that, they had never perfected anything to catch someone with Kitty’s powers. It’d be like catching a ghost in a bottle. Of course, Logan knew there were ways to do that, but that involved magic, and no military on Earth put any credence into superstitious nonsense, which Logan had discovered the hard way wasn’t actually nonsense at all. So maybe that gave them another kind of edge.

He had Piotr run the pre-flight check so he could sneak off and make a call. An unfamiliar voice answered. “Yeah?”

There was just a hint of a Swedish accent, which told him all he needed to know. “Matt, it’s Logan. I need to talk to Marc.”

He heard a groan and some soft noises before a sleepy voiced Marcus said, “Yo.”

“What time zone are you in?”

“Fuck if I know. Now what’s up?”

“I need you to do me a favor. If you don’t hear from me in thirty two hours, I need you to high tail it to Sobolyad Siberia. Bring a rocket launcher and come to party.”

“If I don’t hear from you, I’ll pack enough incendiary bombs to burn down Vladivostok in its entirety.”

“That’s overkill, but thanks.”

“So why am I declaring war on Siberia?”

He gave him a very abbreviated version of events in Sobolyad, and told him what he hadn’t told his team: that he had a bad feeling about this. “Well, it doesn’t sound good,” Marc said, scoffing faintly. “People drop off the face of the earth for no reason, and their last message is a cryptic warning. Sounds like a surprise birthday party to me. Save me a piece of cake. Hope it has some marzipan ducks on it; I love me some marzipan ducks.”

“I’m gonna send you pictures of Shaheen, Nariko, and Zehra, so you can identify them.” He didn’t need pictures of Piotr, John, or Kitty; he already knew what they looked like. “If it’s all gone to shit, get ‘em clear.”

Marc sighed heavily. “Is this where I ask what about you, and you say what about me, since you’re bucking for your martyrdom badge? Although at this rate it’s not so much a badge as a very large Stanley Cup sized trophy you’ll have to build a shelf on your bike for.”

“Do you even need me in this conversation?”

“Prob’ly not, but if I’m up, you’re up.”

“You’re grumpy in the mornin’.”

“Coming from the eternal ray of sunshine, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

In the background, he heard Matt complain, “Would you two just fuck and get it out of your system already?”

This made Marc chuckle. “He’s trying to turn you gay, Logan.”

“Ain’t nothing gay about wanting to fuck your sweet ass,” Logan replied, and this sent Marc off on a full throttle laughing jag, until it sounded like he was choking for breath. Logan held the phone aside and laughed himself.

When Marcus had regained his breath, he exclaimed, “You bastard, you’ve been saving that one, haven’t you?”

“What, you’re the only one who gets to make smart ass comments? I was due.”

“Hey, I’ll be the arbiter of that, not you.” He yawned, then said, “Sobolyad. The clock’s ticking. You contact me, or I’ll hunt you down like the dirty dog you are.”

“Thanks. I owe you one.”

“You probably owe me about twelve by now, but who’s counting?”

Logan had told Storm to give him forty hours. It wasn’t that he didn’t think Storm could handle it, because he knew she could; competency wasn’t the issue. The issue was whether she could pull the trigger or not. If what was waiting for them in Sobolyad was so bad that they couldn’t even save themselves, that suggested implementing a scorched earth policy was in order. Storm might do it, depending on the circumstances; Marc would simply do it. So he won the coin toss. Mutant abilities or not, it was always a bit difficult to argue with fragmentation grenades, napalm, and surface to surface missiles.

It was some comfort to think that, even if they failed, someone would be coming in to kick their asses.

The flight over was a little tense, as Logan figured it would be. He got to fly the jet, though, so he had the excuse of concentrating on that and ignoring everything else. Shaheen tried to calm everyone’s jitters by mentioning that this was probably just a test run they engineered to see how everyone would do in the field. She knew that was a lie, but he gave her credit for trying.

It was a long flight, so by the time they reached Siberia, Kitty and John were both asleep. He wasn’t sure about Zehra - did she ever sleep? She disappeared into the back hours before, and he wondered if she’d jumped out the back. He then wondered, briefly and horribly, if that would be so bad.

The location just proved that he was right about this being bad. It was early dawn here, the grey half-light giving everything a deceptively calm demeanor, the tail end of winter still gripping this place in an iron fist. It was not flat arctic expanses but rolling white hills, most very gentle in their slopes, a slight meandering you probably wouldn’t even notice on the ground until you came to the copses of tall arctic pines, who stood out of the pristine snow like clutches of arrows that had fallen to the earth. The sky was a pearlescent grey and the ground was an unbroken swath of crystalline white between the gathered shadows of trees; it was gorgeous, a picture postcard of winter. And it would remain that way until you stepped out in it, and the icy wind threatened to rip the skin off your face and congeal your blood in your veins. Siberia wasn’t all dreary; parts of it were unspoiled and beautiful. But it was all deadly; the difference was where the landscape warned you it was a death trap or seduced you into thinking it wasn’t.

He set the jet down in a clearing between two shady stands of trees. The layer of frozen snow was so hard it was like landing on concrete. Looking out, he saw nothing but trees and snow, ice and sky; a peaceful picture of perfect contentment.

So right there was the first obvious sign something was wrong. Call him cynical, but as much as he liked peace, he didn’t trust it. Logan couldn’t help but wonder what was waiting for them out there in the wilderness, and why it bothered him so much.