Planet X - Michael Jan Friedman [79]
It alarmed and annoyed the counselor to see it. But as she found out, Colossus was more than annoyed … he was livid.
As the mutant had told her, he had seen crowds react this way against his kind before. It was no wonder he was full of anger and resentment at seeing it now.
Suddenly, his outrage rose to a crescendo. “No!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs.
And with unmitigated disgust for those who would persecute society’s outcasts, the mutant raced down the street. His fury was so great, so terrible, Troi was rooted to the ground.
But only for a second. Then she went after him, not knowing whether she should fire her phaser at the Xhaldians or at Colossus.
With his long strides, the mutant reached the intersection before the mob had completely passed through it. By then, he had drawn the attention of the city guards, who pointed their weapons at him and ordered him to stop.
They might as well have asked a sun not to blaze. Condemning the Xhaldians for their narrow-minded stupidity, Colossus plowed into their midst.
Grabbing the barrel of a weapon, he ripped it from a guard’s grasp and hurled it down the street. Then he grabbed another weapon and did the same with it.
Some of the Xhaldians tried to batter him or bear him to the ground, but the mutant took hold of them and tossed them away. Before long, five or six of them lay in the street, stunned and disarmed.
“That’s enough!” Troi cried as she arrived on the scene, worried that someone might get killed in the melee.
Of course, the transformed had been running that risk at the hands of the guards all along, but she had to face one problem at a time.
Suddenly, she saw the transformed who had fled the guards before. But they weren’t running away anymore. They were rushing into the guards’ midst.
As if for … protection? Troi thought.
More confusing yet, the guards were still firing their weapons. But, as the counselor realized in the next instant, they weren’t aiming at the transformed. They were aiming past them—at a squadron of Draa’kon.
The invaders were their targets all along, Troi told herself. The transformed had only been caught between the mob and its adversaries.
“Colossus!” she cried, seeing him wrench yet another weapon from its owner’s grasp. “Stop and look around—they’re not the enemy!”
Hearing the counselor’s voice cut through the din, the mutant turned and saw her point to something. Following her gesture, he caught sight of the Draa’kon just in time to avoid a bright green energy bolt.
It wasn’t the only one, either. The invaders were unleashing a barrage calculated to bring the Xhaldians to their knees.
Colossus was open-mouthed with surprise and embarrassment, but he wasn’t the type to give up so easily—and neither was Troi. As she leveled blast after blast at the Draa’kon, the mutant picked up one of the guards’ weapons and squeezed off an energy burst of his own.
The guards untouched by Colossus continued to fire as well. But one after the other, they went down, unconscious, under the weight of the invaders’ attack. The tide was turning against the retreating Xhaldians—in part because of the mutant’s costly blunder.
In effect, the counselor thought, Colossus was guilty of the same kind of rash judgment he had always detested in others. It was an irony he seemed destined to regret.
However, just as it appeared the Draa’kon would overrun them, a phaser barrage struck the aliens from behind. Two of them went down, then two more.
Before the Draa’kon could whirl and return fire, a blue and yellow dervish was among them, kicking and striking and slicing with long, sharp claws. Ignoring the Xhaldians, they attended to this new threat.
But attending to Wolverine and stopping him were two different things.
The mutant displayed none of the bluster that had gotten him in trouble at Starbase 88. He conducted himself like a warrior, as devastatingly