Sentinels

Once upon a time, on an ordinary grey Tuesday morning at the Xavier Institute, the birds were singing and the dew was still on the grass, and Kurt Wagner was in the courtyard practicing with his rapier.

SWISH. Parry. SWISH. Lunge. He had been working through the same combination for thirty minutes, starting over each time until every motion was clean and certain. Kurt believed that any skill worth having was worth practicing until it felt like breathing — until the body knew the movement before the mind had finished deciding. The rapier Margali had given him caught the grey morning light with each pass.

He did not notice the shadows above the treetops until they were very close.

Three shadows. Enormous. Moving.

He looked up — and stopped the rapier mid-swing.

Sentinels — three robots as tall as buildings, their bodies painted in shades of purple and pink, their footsteps shaking the ground with each enormous stride. Their flat, featureless faces swept cold white scanner beams back and forth across the school grounds, searching with terrible mechanical patience. A scientist named Bolivar Trask had designed them with one purpose: to find mutants and catch them. He had worked very hard on this design for a very long time, and the Sentinels were, as a result, very good at it.

One beam swept across the courtyard and stopped on Kurt.

"MUTANT DETECTED. ACQUIRING TARGET."

BAMF — he was gone in a puff of purple-grey smoke, landing crouched on the boathouse roof forty meters away. He pressed behind the chimney and listened to the enormous footsteps shaking the ground below.

All through the school, the X-Men were coming. Storm appeared in an upstairs window, her white hair spreading wide, and a thick wall of fog rolled in from the north so dense and cold that the scanner beams couldn't cut through it. Wolverine burst from the side door and hit the nearest Sentinel's ankle joint at full speed, his adamantium claws throwing orange sparks in the fog.

And from every angle came the sound: BAMF. BAMF. BAMF.

That was Kurt — moving like a thought, appearing on the biggest Sentinel's head, vanishing before the enormous hands could close on him, appearing again half a second later from a completely different direction. The robot turned and swatted at empty air. It turned again. It found nothing but brimstone smoke.

Then Kurt spotted his moment. A ventilation seam at the base of the Sentinel's neck — a thin gap in the armor plates just wide enough for his rapier. He appeared behind the giant's skull, drove the blade into the seam, twisted, and pulled free with a fistful of sensor wires. The Sentinel's head swung uselessly in both directions, scanner beams spinning into the fog.

"Now, Colossus!"

Piotr Rasputin was already running, his body transformed to bright gleaming steel, and he hit the Sentinel's knee joint with both fists and everything he had. The machine leaned, tipped, and fell with a crash that rattled every window in the school.

Across the grounds, Storm raised her hands carefully, feeling the electricity humming above the fog, and she gathered it into one needle-thin bolt and sent it precisely into the second Sentinel's central processor. Every light on the machine went dark. It stood perfectly still, mid-step, like a very large and embarrassing statue.

The third Sentinel looked at its two fallen companions. Then it rose into the air and flew away into the clouds.

Kurt watched it disappear into the cloud bank above Salem Center. He felt something uncomfortable in his chest — not quite worry, not quite sadness, but something between the two. More would come. Bolivar Trask had built many Sentinels and he had not stopped being afraid, and afraid people with resources tended to keep building.

That evening, Professor Xavier gathered the team in the common room. He did not seem triumphant. He said: "What Trask fears, he built machines to fight. But a machine cannot teach him not to be afraid. Our work is not only to stop Sentinels. It is to show the world something worth trusting."

The room was very quiet.

Kurt turned his rapier slowly in his three-fingered hands, thinking about the mob in Stuttgart and the school that had opened its doors to him, and every person who had chosen not to be afraid.

There were more good ones than frightened ones. He was sure of it.

He just had to keep proving it. BAMF. Back on patrol.