Free Sanctuary by Christopher Golden Page A

turbines on a jet airplane. Those were the hyperburners, she knew, the Starjammer 's main propulsion system. With them out of commission, they were forced to rely on warp drive. She guessed that, with it fixed, they could warp into an appropriate navigational pattern, come out of warp just above Earth's atmosphere, shut down the ship and let momentum take over.
    If they could get the warp drive fixed.
    Raza and Ch'od worked at the burnt and shattered casing of the warp system, further up on the starboard leg from where Rogue and Cyclops labored. While she and Ch'od spoke, Raza continued to work, a greenish glow from the broken casing reflected off the force field that covered his face.
    "I got a major breach here, and I gotta patch it," she repeated.
    "That certainly is a problem," Ch'od answered. "I'll have a look."
    Ch'od pushed away from the ship in a movement calculated to bring him directly to where Rogue clung to the ship's hull. As she watched him, her peripheral vision picked up movement beyond him. Raza's head snapped back in a defensive motion as sparks flew from the drive system, alighting on his suit. He shook his head, obviously annoyed, and brushed them away. Rogue almost looked back at Ch'od then, her mind consumed with the need to finish with their repairs and get back inside the ship, to see if they could get home.
    She didn't turn away, however. Instead, she saw Raza lower his head once more over the shattered casing, only to draw it back again, more slowly this time.
    "Sharra and Ky'thri," Raza's astonished voice whispered in Rogue's ears.
    "Raza?" Ch'od began, turning toward his friend clumsily, losing the careful control of his motion. "What is—"
    The warp system seemed to explode in Raza's face, blasting him backward as his tether snapped like a whip and slammed him against the ship's hull. Simultaneously, blue flames shot from the engine well just behind Rogue and the ship began to spin with extraordinary speed. The misfiring of one half of the warp drive lasted only a moment, but it set the Starjammer moving like a maniac top, trailing Ch'od, Cyclops, and Rogue behind it—

    —directly into the trail of the engine blast. Their tethers were incinerated immediately, and had they been wearing anything other than the Shi'ar pressure suits Corsair had given them, their bodies would have fared no better.
    With a burst of power, Rogue lashed out with her left arm at a silver flash of hull that whipped past her peripheral vision. She snagged the ship and, with her extraordinary strength, dug in to the Starjammer's hull, hanging on for dear life as the ship continued to spin. It was already slowing, but it was all Rogue could do to keep from vomiting inside her helmet.
    When she regained her equilibrium, though the ship still moved, she began to look around for the others. Raza was still tethered to the Starjammer , but his unmoving form was being towed along behind the ship as it turned. Rogue assumed the force of the explosion had knocked him unconscious. Anything else was unthinkable.
    But what of Cyclops and Ch'od? As the ship's rotation slowed further, nearing a stop, Rogue frantically searched for some sign of them. Her last image of them was that of the moment the warp engine blasted all three of them, destroying their lifelines. She had been lucky enough to grab hold of the vessel to keep from being shot out into space.
    Now there was no sign of either of the others. Ch'od and Cyclops were, quite simply, gone.

Chapter 4

    "B race yourselves, people," Bishop said from the cockpit of the Blackbird . "We've just crossed into Manhattan."
    There were no more words. There didn't have to be. The five X-Men on board the plane went on immediate alert. The Sentinels were supposed to guard the city's perimeter, but Magneto had claimed all mutants would be allowed entry into this new "sanctuary" he had carved out of one of North America's largest cities.
    Question was, did that hospitality extend to the X-Men,