Planet X - Michael Jan Friedman [96]
The mutant nodded. “I am grateful.”
Picard glanced at his officers. “If I may, I would like to have a word with our guest.”
Alone, was the implied ending of his request.
Riker and Troi looked at one another.
“Of course,” said the counselor, taking her colleague’s arm and walking away with him.
Storm regarded him. “Yes, Captain?”
“Good luck,” he said. “Not that you will need it.”
“Everyone needs it,” Storm replied. She touched his face with her fingertips. “Goodbye, Captain of the Enterprise.”
Then, tearing her eyes away from him, she turned to go.
“Ororo,” said Picard.
The mutant looked back. “Yes?”
“My name,” the captain told her, “is Jean-Luc.”
She smiled the smile of a delighted child—one who had found a friend to help her stave off the darkness. Then she rejoined her teammates in the center of the cargo bay.
A moment later, Riker and Troi returned. Neither of them said a word to Picard. They just stood with him and watched the X-Men gather into a knot around Shadowcat.
There was no flash of light, nothing at all to warn the captain of the mutants’ departure. One moment, they were there; the next, they weren’t. It was that simple.
Still, Picard felt richer for having known them—and one of them in particular. One might even say he felt … transformed.
Epilogue
WARREN BLINKED AND realized he was somewhere else. Not in a cargo bay on the Enterprise, but in a meadow surrounded by fragrant pine trees, where birds sang and flitted from branch to branch.
He recognized the place. It was on the grounds of the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning—the exact same spot where he and his fellow X-Men had arrived after they left the Enterprise the last time.
At the time, they had believed themselves home. Then they had been bathed in a bright, blinding light—and the next thing they knew, they had turned up on Starbase 88, in another reality entirely.
Warren looked at Ororo, who was standing beside him. The two of them were afraid to say anything. They were waiting for the other shoe to drop.
But it didn’t. There was no bright light. They stayed right where they were, apparently fixed in time and space.
Finally, it was Colossus who broke the silence. “Unless I am mistaken,” he said, “it seems we are home.”
“So it does,” Banshee agreed.
“Back in Salem Center,” Nightcrawler declared.
“Where we belong,” Shadowcat added.
Home, thought Warren. What a nice place to be.
Filled with a sudden rush of exhilaration, he spread his great, white wings and soared straight up into the heavens. And he didn’t stop for a long, long time.
Hidden behind a stand of closely grown pine trees, the omnipotent entity known as Q removed his sunglasses to watch Archangel ascend into the vibrant summer sky. Replacing his glasses, he folded one leg over the other, sat back in his lawn chair and sipped his pina colada.
“You see?” he said to the gigantic personage standing beside him. “I told you it would work just fine.”
The Watcher, eons-old scion of an immortal race, shook his massive, hairless head and adjusted his majestic robes.
“I have seen one being after another tamper with the integrity of Time and Space,” the Watcher replied in his expansive, echoing voice, “Kang being a prime example. Yet none of them ever seemed to obtain the results he desired.”
Q grinned. “That’s because none of them were me, Watcher old bean. A yank here, a tug there, and the Enterprise’s timehook—which was in storage on Starbase 88—wound up saturated with verteron particles. That, in turn, drew the X-Men to the Enterprise’s universe, where they were eminently available to help solve the mutant crisis on Xhaldia. What could be simpler?”
“The Xhaldians called them transformed, “the Watcher reminded him. “Not mutants.”
“They’re all the same to me,” said Q. “The point is the X-men were in the right place at the right time, and Xhaldia’s all the better for it.”
“And why do you care so much about Xhaldia?” the Watcher inquired.
Q cast a sidelong look at him. “I thought you people just