Beyond Evolution

04:57. Dawn. Light was only just beginning to creep into the sky when the fighting finally stopped.

Some of those that had been fighting off the mutants simply sat down where they ended up, checking themselves over and catching their breath. Others frantically searched the rubble or the grounds for their family, their friends. If they had a handheld they tried it but the network was glitching out badly and most of the school had lost their units in various skirmishes, explosions or escapes.

To say that the school was a mess would be to sugarcoat what they were looking at. Rooms had been destroyed, there was fire and water damage in hallways and classrooms, odd places for fires to break out when mutants weren’t in the mix but here it made perfect sense. There were gouges in the lawn, floorboards and sections of wall missing inside the mansion itself. Then there were the bodies. Not just of those that had attacked the school where those trying to defend themselves had been given no choice but to put their attacker down fully, but bodies of those that had called this place home.

Worse than the damage to the walls, worse than the ruined rugs and the smashed windows, the doors that had been ripped from their hinges or bodily smashed through, worse than the scorches running an arc up the side of the building, was the blood that soaked the grass and stained the wood. Worse than all that were the vacant eyes and rigid limbs. They had lost people. They had lost students and residents. They had lost family, loved ones, pieces of themselves. The attack had been relentless, lasted hours, the injured were everywhere, scattered and disorientated or else running on fumes trying to keep helping, keep saving what they could, and perhaps the full effects of the night wouldn’t be felt until the creeping sun had brought light to the scene around them or until a few days had passed, a few weeks, but there would surely not be a single soul that had not been touched by the ordeal, tainted by it.

Xavier’s might have regained some of their fallen friends under these terrible circumstances but they had lost others.

Ad eternum.

They wanted to get up the ship.

That was hilarious to her, honestly. Wanting to get anywhere near anything to do with the Skrulls was suicidal, she had avoided them at all costs when she had worked out there, for Webb. Everyone who had spent time in space knew better than to cross them or even to look in their direction if they wanted to keep their spine inside their skin, . When someone grabbed hold of her in the hallway, she had almost teleported herself, Aiden and Isaac who were with her, right out of the school, thinking that it was one of the aliens but it was Colossus appearing from a doorway to intercept them. Apparently he and the other X-Men had a plan: They wanted to get up to the ship, they wanted to get their people back and destroy the whole thing. Obviously they needed her for that.

A message had gone out on the network, a high priority alert, a call to arms for anyone that was able to see it and get to the rendezvous point; the cafeteria. By the time Lila got there with the brothers there was already a crowd in various states of readiness; some of them looked a bit bruised or dishevelled, they had already been fighting, but they were willing to push on, push harder, go that extra, massive leap and trust her to teleport them out into space, into the heart of the enemy’s ship.

“This is it?” Lila was a little breathless, she had bolted through the school as fast as she could.

Firestar nodded at her, her expression grim and her jaw tight, her red hair scraped back into a high ponytail; she had passed out comm units to everyone so they could stay in contact while they were on mission.

Lila looked around at the mutants gathered with her; these were the people she was going to ferry into space to save the people that had been kidnapped, to get them back. Insane but so brave. She felt completely out of place among the kind of people that would go this far for those they cared about.

“Okay,” she said, swallowing a lump in her throat, wiping sweat off her face, pushing her fringe upwards in a mess. “All right.” It had been a very long time since she had teleported such a large number of people. It wasn’t that it would be tricky, it wouldn’t even feel any different to the way teleporting normally felt, she didn’t have a maximum weight or number capacity that she knew about, the only thing restricting her was how close the objects or people were to her, she needed them nearby. It just made her a bit nervous to see all these people around her, wanting to get up there to that mothership and get their people back. Relying on her to help them do it. Lila didn’t like people relying on her, it made her anxious. “Okay,” she said again, more decisively, sliding into some focused mentality she had forgotten she even had, something that was left over from her days stealing, smuggling and other illegal galactic activities. “Everyone stay close, it’s gonna feel a bit weird. Give yourself a second to adjust to it when we get up there.”

They bounced up to the Dyson Sphere (Lila held Aiden’s hand, when she got there she grabbed a holster from a cache of emergency items she kept dotted around the place) but in just a fraction of a heartbeat they teleported again in a searing white light and they were dropped into the cargo hold of the mothership. Lila let everyone take a second to get used to the slightly altered gravity, the stale tasting air. The alarms hadn’t gone off yet, the skrulls didn’t know they were there. She cast her eyes around; they needed schematics, a deck-by-deck guide to follow so they could find what they were looking for; the ship was miles wide and if they went running off just hoping they were going to stumble on the captives then they were going to be obliterated. Skrulls were disciplined, they were warriors to their core and a group of fleshy mutant careening around were something they would cut through like butter if they didn’t have a plan.

There was a schematic on the bulkhead and she crossed over to it, examining it carefully, some of the others following her. Lila buckled the gun holster around her hips as she moved, the Phalanx pistol nestled in against her thigh. That felt better. Cypher was looking over the top of her head at the map, reading it, she realised. “Here,” he said, putting his finger on the map. Nanite was leaning in to scrutinise it, too. “It says containment, is that it?”

Lila nodded. “Yeah, I think so. Every ship’s a bit different.” She traced her finger over the map, following a few hard to understand lines, putting her unique expertise to good use; she had spent a good portion of her life growing up in ships, she knew what she was looking for. “We’re down here, we’ve got to get up through these decks to get there. They’ll shut down the maintenance hatches, flood them with poison, most likely, if we try to use those. Best to just stick together, move as a force, protect our front and back. We can overwhelm them, they won’t know we’re here yet. This is the reactor,” she added, “If we want to take the ship out of commission someone needs to get down here and overload it,” she looked at the mutants around her, the little group that had formed up. “It’s on the engineering deck, any cyberpaths we’ve got should get down there and commandeer it. Scramble their internal sensors, keep them from tracking us too closely. If you can seal some bulkheads along the way, that’d give us some breathing room. I’ll come to containment, you’ll need a tour guide. We--”

Everything plunged into darkness, red lights flashed and an alarm started to wail, cutting her off mid-sentence. There went their element of surprise.

Galactica cast her eyes over the mutants with her, black in the gloom. This was it. It was really happening. They could all be about to die horribly or they could triumph. She hoped it was the latter. “Meet back here, I’ll teleport us back out when we have everyone.”

Firestar spoke next, “I’ll take a team to containment, Windshear you’re with me. Cypher, you take Bedlam, Blackhand and a squad of combatants to take the computer systems in engineering, we’ll need to control that if we’re going to do this. Agilis, you watch their six.” Steel-blue eyes moved over the group: “Overcharge, you stay here with a team and hold the cargo bay. Adolebit, back him up. We’ll need it clear for egress. Do not let them take it. Fight them back. When we have our people we’re taking this ship to pieces. Be ready.”

The teams splintered off into three groups, rolling out through the blast doors to the cargo bay.