Villain Sentinels

Once upon a time, in the wide desert lands of New Mexico, something terrible rose from the horizon.

It was purple and enormous — as tall as a five-story building — and it walked on legs the size of redwood trees, each step making the ground tremble. Then another appeared. Then a third.

They were called Sentinels.

A man named Bolivar Trask had built them. Trask was afraid of mutants — people whose bodies could do things ordinary bodies could not. He believed they were dangerous. His fear had grown very large and gone untended, and he had taken it to engineers and scientists and said, "Build me machines to stop them." And so the Sentinels were born: thirty feet of armor plating and orange scanning beams and one single terrible purpose. Find mutants. Contain them.

Hank McCoy stood in the desert sand with his teammates — Scott Summers, Jean Grey, Bobby Drake, and Warren Worthington — and looked up at those machines. He felt something move through him, quiet and a little sad. Someone had made these things specifically to hunt people like him. People like all of them. Just for being what they were born to be.

But there was no time to sit with that feeling. The Sentinels were moving.

Scott raised his visor — ZZZAP — and hit the nearest Sentinel's knee joint with a precise red beam, making it stagger. Bobby laid down a wall of ice across the sand — CRAAACK — hoping to slow the second one's heavy feet. Warren swept through the sky above, drawing the Sentinels' scanning beams away from his friends on the ground.

But the third Sentinel had locked onto Jean Grey's mutant energy signature and was turning toward her, its orange eyes brightening.

Hank ran.

He covered the desert in long bounding strides — WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP — and launched himself off a boulder jutting from the sand. For one suspended moment he was completely in the air, the desert spread below, the enormous robot filling his whole view.

He landed on the Sentinel's shoulder.

Thirty feet above the desert floor. The wind from the Sentinel's movement pulled at him. Below, the battle continued in swirls of dust and light.

Crouching high above the ground, Hank studied the machine beneath his hands. He ran them over the surface, fast and methodical, reading the machine the way he read a book — looking for the important parts. He found the seam where neck armor joined the head module: thin, slightly loose, the weakest point in the entire design. He wedged his fingers into the gap.

He pulled.

The sensor array tore free with a great crashing sound, and the Sentinel lurched sideways, its targeting lights flickering and dark. For thirty precious seconds it could not locate a single mutant energy signature anywhere.

Jean Grey raised her hands. Every stone and scrap of metal within a hundred yards rose into the air around her, slowly at first, then all at once, and she brought it all forward into the Sentinel's chest.

BOOM. The machine fell. The desert shook. A long silence followed, full of drifting sand.

The third Sentinel turned and walked away, already transmitting everything it had recorded back to Trask's laboratory.

Hank climbed down from the wreckage and crouched in the sand. He picked up a curved piece of the broken Sentinel's purple armor plating and turned it over in his large hands, studying the metal, the alloy, the manufacturing marks.

"They'll make more," Scott said.

"They will," Hank agreed. He tucked the piece of armor carefully into his pack. "So we had better understand these machines better than the people who built them do."

He stood up and looked out across the desert, where the last Sentinel's footprints still steamed faintly in the afternoon heat.

He felt the sadness still — quiet in his chest. Someone had built a machine to hunt him. That was true, and it was not fair, and it hurt.

But Hank McCoy had also just torn that machine apart with his own hands, using nothing but courage and cleverness.

That was also true.

He took a slow breath of clean desert air. He looked at his teammates — tired and dusty and safe — and he smiled his very wide smile.

"Come on," he said. "Let's go home."

Together, the X-Men walked through the long golden light of the New Mexico afternoon.