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shielded zip-squeal transmission to base, and a few moments later the surviving members of Black Team 51 had their new orders.
    “It’s over. Shut him down.”
    Slowly the blurring of possibility faded, leaving Phoenix alone in her own mind once more. And with the lessening
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    of that psychic din, the sound of other minds that was a normal part of Jean Grey’s daily existence became audible once more.
    The sense of deadly purpose from the craft hovering above her was unmistakable.
    She looked upward through the trees, and instinctively stepped away from David Ferris. When she used her powers against the helicopter, she didn’t want him fried by the backlash.
    “Shut him down. ” She shook her head at the weird doubling effect of hearing the words and hearing someone hear them. Where were Scott and the others?
    Then the helicopter fired, and she had her answer.
    The bolt was as instantaneous as light and as colorless as air: a carbon-dioxide laser, enabled for only one shot. Not really that powerful—it wouldn’t even have slowed Rogue down—but powerful enough. There wasn’t even time for a scream.
    As an X-Man, Phoenix had seen death too many times to count, but murder never lost its power to horrify her with its very casualness. At the same moment that the laser pulse reduced David Ferris and all his spectrum of possibility to a smear of greasy ash, Phoenix launched herself skyward. Intent on the copter and its cargo, she barely registered the reappearance of the other X-Men or the reestablishment of the psychic rapport that allowed her to brief them in the space of a heartbeat on what she’d gleaned from David Ferris’s mind.
    It seemed wrong that it was still afternoon, still summer. To live so many different lives should have taken more time than this. But that didn’t matter now. She was nearly there.
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    The skin of the helicopter was so close that her outstretched fingertips almost skimmed it, and Iceman and Archangel were only a second or so behind her. She’d tear the helicopter apart; they could catch the passengers. A maneuver the teams had rehearsed a thousand times in every possible combination of heroes.
    But Ashton and Keithley—and their faceless masters— had other ideas, and the black budget toys to implement them.
    The ultrasonic whine of the warp-gate enabling skirled up past the range that bats and dogs could hear, crossed the threshold of pain, and vanished into the hydrogen song of space. The skin of the black copter began to crackle with heat as its fusion generator ran flat-out, powering up for Jump. The amount of energy that had to be wasted into the environment when space-time was folded made the warp-gate of very little use except as a last resort.
    Or a weapon.
    She felt the radiant heat of the helicopter’s skin on her hands and face, and intuition deep as instinct made Phoenix recoil. It’s a trap! she cried mentally, just as the chase copter gave up its local space-time referents in an incandescent pulse of energy.
    The shock wave gathered Phoenix into its superheated embrace and flung her backward. Protected from physical harm by her telekinesis, she nonetheless crashed through Bobby’s already-melting ice bridge, sending him flying as
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    well. Disoriented, she couldn’t see where her teammates were, or even be sure in which direction the ground lay.
    But Phoenix had shielded Archangel from the brunt of the explosion. With less than five seconds to intercept both his teammates before they hit the ground, Warren spread his wings wide, angling each pinion for maximum drag as he surfed the wave of sweltering air, and reached out to snatch Iceman’s falling body out of the sky.
    One.
    Reaching out with the blind instinct of a seasoned aer-ialist, Bobby grabbed Warren’s reaching hand.
    Two.
    Muscles and wings both creaked with the strain of absorbing the momentum of Bobby’s helpless plunge, and in a moment more both men