Chapter II. Waikiki.

  Kitty strolled down the sidewalk with the tourists, pretending to be interested in the contents of the shop windows. And she actually was, to an extent. They had some nice stuff.

  However, she wasn’t here to shop, so she looked at the swimsuits and such on the fly. She checked her direction finder watch and confirmed she was headed the right way. Since this was a surveillance mission, she had changed into street clothes before being dropped on top of one of the Waikiki hotels. This sure was nicer than slogging around in the bowels of those fucking pyramids.

  Forge had created the tracking equipment for the professor. It used the Avenger comm satellites to coordinate with Cerebro back at the mansion. The sats were designed by Reed Richards, built by Stark Enterprises, and launched by SHIELD. The Avengers allowed the X-Men a percentage of the bandwidth, for official business only.

  Every five minutes, Kitty’s watch would send off an inquiry to Cerebro via the sats, asking for the last known position of the target mutant. The watch would then compare that with Kitty’s own position and give her a heading, in the form of an arrow. Scott, Jean, and Mr. Logan, who had all started from different points, were also converging on the target from different directions.

  It wasn’t foolproof, because Cerebro could not detect the mutant unless he was using his powers. However, Kitty had changed direction a couple of times, indicating that he was doing so sporadically.

  The other piece of Forge-supplied hardware was in her ear, a high-gain comm link. The Avenger sat was providing the repeater capability.

  And of course Jean’s telepathy was an additional comm path, though it was a star configuration, and all traffic had to relay through her. The hardware comm was point to point, so Jean was a backup.

  Kitty heard Mr. Logan’s voice. “Position report.”

  The Blackbird computer responded with the coordinates of all five mutants, the target and the X-Men who were tracking him. After that the team members themselves reported in. She waited for her turn. “Shadowcat. Position confirmed. On track.”

  The mutant they were tracking was Piotr Nikolaievitch Rasputin, AKA Peter AKA Colossus. For a Magneto stooge, he wasn’t really that bad a guy. Not like that vicious fucker Sabretooth. Or that smug bastard Gambit. Or the psycho Pyro.

  He wasn’t really evil at all. Kitty had spent some time with him down in the pyramid and when they weren’t dodging those huge killer mechanical statues, he had told her that he worked for Magneto only because of extortion. Basically his family was held hostage.

  The team really wasn’t after him, but was trying to get a line on Magneto. Helmet Boy himself couldn’t be tracked by Cerebro so they had no choice but to go after the Acolytes, hoping they would provide leads. You’d think that Magneto would have learned his lesson after the Apocalypse thing, but he was apparently up to his old shit.

  Kitty noticed that the street was starting to veer off in the wrong direction, away from Colossus. And it was a long way to the next block. She considered just heading directly toward the target in a straight line, ignoring all obstacles, but she decided that a public display of mutant powers would not be in keeping with a surveillance mission.

  She headed on toward the corner, picking up the pace. But after a short distance she came across an alley, and it seem to be going in a good direction. The way the street was curving, the cross street might take her off on a tangent.

  She hesitated for a few seconds. The alley went straight a short distance, then curved off. The curve was in a good direction, but she could not see what the alley contained, or who it contained, or whether it was went on through to the next street. If it was a dead end she would have to phase after all. Read the rest of this entry »