Planet X - Michael Jan Friedman [35]
“Recently,” the mutant continued, “it turned out the techno-organics were some kind of shell—a way to protect my real wings until they could grow back. But if you ask me what Apocalypse gained by amputating my wings and then helping them grow again … I’d have a tough time giving you an answer.”
“But as far as you know,” the doctor said, “the techno-organics in your system are dormant … harmless.”
“As far as I know,” he confirmed.
Crusher would have felt better if she had more to go on—more about this Apocalypse character, especially. However, her patient seemed to be telling the truth, ifhis biosigns were any indication. As far as he could tell, the techno-organics in his blood posed no threat to anyone.
“All right,” she said. “I think we’ve learned all we’re going to learn about you.”
Archangel looked at her. “Then I’m free to go?”
He made being there sound like a stint in a penal colony. “Not yet,” the doctor told him. “All you’re free to do right now is join Commander La Forge on the other side of the room.”
He frowned. “Whatever you say.”
Crusher could feel the tension inside him—the hatred of being pinned down. But the mutant seemed able to cope with it.
Sitting up, he swung his legs over the side of the biobed. Then, with a flurry of his wings, be propelled himself across sickbay and alighted in front of a very surprised Geordi La Forge.
The doctor grunted. Show-off she thought.
Then she saw Wolverine enter the room, and she prepared the biobed for her next patient.
Geordi closed the door to his office in engineering. Then he sat down in his chair, leaned back, and pondered what he had learned from his studies of the X-Men.
To his regret, very little of it seemed useful.
Not that every one of the examinations hadn’t been interesting in its own way. Colossus, for instance, actually seemed to increase his mass when he converted his body tissues into an amazingly tough, metallic substance. Unfortunately, the engineer hadn’t been able to determine where that extra mass came from.
Shadowcat, on the other hand, appeared to have control over the very atoms in her body—to the extent that she could move them through the atoms in an object or even another person, faciliating a phasing effect. Years earlier, Geordi and one of his colleagues had experienced a similar effect related to chroniton build-ups—but, as his instruments showed, the X-Man’s abilities had nothing to do with chronitons.
And then there were the techno-organics both he and Doctor Crusher had discovered in Archangel. Again, an intriguing discovery, but it shed no light on the X-Men’s appearance in the Enterprise’s twenty-fourth century.
Only one of the exams had turned up anything potentially valuable in that regard—and that was the one to which he had subjected Nightcrawler. The verterons he had found on the mutant still stuck in his engineer’s mind, suggesting a solution he couldn’t quite latch on to.
Without question, the proximity of verteron particles could have caused a malfunction in the X-Men’s timehooks. Heck, it might have kept them from working at all, though that obviously hadn’t happened.
But why had the mutants been whipped into Geordi’s milieu, of all places? If their appearance there was just a coincidence, it was a staggeringly unlikely one.
After all, there were an infinite number of points in timespace—an infinite number of destinations. The X-Men could have wound up at the dawn of time or in the fifty-fourth century … on Risa or Rura Penthe … in a reality with bipedal humanoids or without them.
However, they hadn’t done any of those things. They had materialized in a frame of reference not far removed from their own—in which, as luck would have it, they actually had some friends they could call on.
The engineer grunted. Staggering, all right.
But if they were drawn to the Enterprise’s twenty-fourth century, why not to the Enterprise itself? What was it about Starbase 88 that had pulled the mutants to it like a magnet?
And why