Planet X - Michael Jan Friedman [23]
But thanks to Denara, it didn’t. Together, the two of them withstood volley after volley from the guards. Leyden even got a chance to take a couple more pieces out of the wall.
In time, however, Denara’s shielding seemed to weaken. The stun blasts began to get through. Leyden cried out as if in agony and went lurching away from her. And once he was no longer under Denara’s protection, he was as vulnerable as any of them.
In a moment or two, he was writhing and convulsing like a fish out of water. In another, he was on the ground, spent and senseless.
But the guards weren’t finished. After all, Denara had defied them as well. They kept up their barrage until she, too, began to stagger. She cursed them through clenched teeth, dropping to one knee.
Then her shielding gave way and the stun fire got to her. For a moment, the woman convulsed so badly it was agony for Erid to watch. Then, mercifully, she too lost consciousness.
The guards looked around, wary of the other prisoners. But the yard was quiet—ominously so. No one moved. No one even breathed, it seemed.
In the wake of the battle—for that was what it had been, without question—the prime guard wiped his brow with the back of his hand. Then he indicated Rahatan, Leyden, and Denara with a gesture.
“Pick them up and put them in cells,” he told his men. “And lock them so they can’t get out.”
Some of the guards descended from the battlements and entered the yard, their weapons at the ready. None of the transformed moved to stop them as they carried out the prime guard’s orders.
It was only after they had disappeared with Rahatan, Leyden, and Denara that the remaining prisoners began to exchange glances. Erid found himself studying Corba’s face.
He saw pain in her eyes. And hatred.
He couldn’t help wondering what she saw in his.
Chapter Eight
AS GEORDI ENTERED sickbay, tricorder in hand, Nightcrawler was already standing there waiting for him.
Not far away, Colossus—whose real name was Piotr—was lying full-length on a biobed while Dr. Crusher ran some routine scans on him. But the doctor’s responsibility began and ended with medical anomalies.
It was the chief engineer’s job to put the X-Men’s abilities under a microscope. Figuratively speaking, of course.
As he caught sight of Geordi, Nightcrawler held his hands out. “So what can I do for you?” he asked congenially.
Clearly, he was the blithe spirit of the group. The engineer had always appreciated people like that.
“What I want to see,” Geordi explained, “is how your teleportation ability works. For instance, if it’s anything like our transporters.”
“And how do they work?” asked Nightcrawler.
“Basically,” said the engineer, “they convert matter to energy, then send it from one place to another along a sort of guide beam. When the energy reaches the second location, it’s converted back into matter.”
The mutant dismissed the idea with a wave of his three-fingered hand. “My teleportation ability works nothing like that.”
“How do you know?” Geordi asked.
“Professor Xavier has explained it to me.”
The engineer looked at him. “And he would be … ?”
“The mutant who saved my life from an angry mob,” said Nightcrawler, “and recruited me into the X-Men. A brilliant geneticist and perhaps the most powerful telepath on Earth.”
Geordi nodded. “Okay. And what did Professor Xavier tell you about your teleportation talent?”
“What happens,” the mutant replied, “is I enter an entirely separate dimension. Somehow, though I have no awareness of it, I travel through that other dimension. Then I come out again in my own dimension, an equivalent distance from where I started.”
The engineer smiled. “An intriguing theory. Still, I’d like to check it out for myself … if you have no objections.”
“None,” the mutant told him.
Geordi finished calibrating his tricorder. “This’ll just take a second …”
“Just say the word,” Nightcrawler advised him.
Finally, he looked up. “All set.”
A moment later, there was a soft pop, and the teleporter was gone. In his place, there was