Planet X - Michael Jan Friedman [81]
Indeed, the heat was getting unbearable. And it wasn’t likely to get any better when the captain tried to slow the missile’s descent.
A moment later, the red blips on his screen converged. Picard looked out his observation port and glimpsed the cluster through ragged layers of high clouds. The device wasn’t more than a hundred meters away.
He decelerated to match its speed. Then, confirming that he had dropped below the altitude of Xhaldia’s energy bands, he reached for another set of controls.
“I’m extending tractor beams,” he said, wiping heavy drops of perspiration from his eyes.
It was hotter in the pod than the hottest desert the captain had ever known. But in his youth, he had been a marathon runner. He could stand it, he told himself. He would stand it.
With infinite care, he locked the tractors onto the cluster. Then, when he was certain the connection was secure, he began to apply reverse thrusters—not in the hopes of stopping the missile altogether, but to diminish its surface temperature so the mutant could handle it.
Immediately, Picard felt a jolt—an indication of the extra load imposed on his thrusters. The cabin temperature began to climb at a terrifying rate.
However, both the missile and the pod were slowing down. Glancing at his monitors, the captain saw the change in their rate of descent. Four hundred kilometers per hour … three hundred and fifty … three hundred …
“Go,” he rasped, fighting to keep from succumbing to the heat.
“I’m gone,” Archangel responded.
Picard touched a pad on his panel and opened the hatch, exposing the pod’s interior to a blast of frigid wind. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the mutant spread his wings and corkscrew his way out of the cabin.
Godspeed, the captain thought. Then he pushed the pad again and saw the hatch slide closed.
Chapter Twenty-nine
RIKER KNELT BESIDE the Draa’kon.
The invader was covered with earth and fragments of pavement, one of which had caved his skull in. His eyes were staring, a rivulet of green blood drying in the corner of his wide, lipless mouth.
The first officer looked up at his companion. Storm’s hair lifted in the breeze as she gazed at the other Draa’kon in the vicinity. All of them were dead, all partially buried beneath a shattered landscape of dirt and rubble that stretched for a hundred meters in either direction.
“If we dig around,” she said bleakly, “we will no doubt find a great many more of them.”
“That may be,” Riker allowed. He got to his feet. “The question is … who did this?”
The mutant looked at him pointedly. “Who do you think?”
“You’re going to tell me it was the transformed?” he asked.
“Who else could it have been, Commander? The city guards? Do they have weapons capable of creating such upheavals?” With a gesture, she indicated the buildings on either side of the street. “Can they wreak this kind of havoc without breaking a single fragile window?”
The first officer shook his head. He had seen the X-Men in action. He knew people like them could have unusual abilities. But to ascribe such monumental destruction to beings who had barely come to know what talents they possessed …
Then he recalled what it was like when Q endowed him with virtual omnipotence, and his perspective changed. He had been in control of his powers from the get-go. Suddenly, it didn’t seem quite so far-fetched for even a neophyte to tear up a street.
He was about to admit that Storm might have been right when he heard a series of distant cries, followed by a rumbling and an unsettling vibration beneath their feet. Riker’s instincts told him an earthquake was underway, but his mind insisted otherwise.
Storm shot into the air, her garments fluttering in a wind that appeared to have come from nowhere. She seemed bent on tracking the thunder in the earth to its source.
“Hey!” he shouted at her. “What about me?”
Glancing back at him over her shoulder, the mutant weighed his question for a moment. Then she executed a tight turn