They are homo sapien superior - men and women whose genetic structure has gifted them with extraordinary abilities. Gathered together by Professor Charles Xavier, the X-Men have been instructed in the use of their powers for the betterment of mankind. Shunned by society at large, these outlaw mutants  fight an endless battle to bridge the ever-widening gulf between humanity and mutantkind by protecting a world that fears and hates them.

The man with the red eyes looked over his monitors. Things were going according to plan.

In Washington, everything had happened perfectly. In Australia, as well. Hong Kong had almost failed, but his goal was still achieved. Muir Isle was only one mutant away from being a complete success.

Everything was going according to plan.

Scott Summers had not one gray hair on his head, but at this rate, he'd go as bald as the Professor. "Let's run this one through, people. What do we know?"

The room was a large one, a study, furnished and decorated as befit a man of the wealth and prestige of Professor Charles Xavier. Perhaps the decorator he'd hired might have done things differently if he had known that the room would also be used as a meeting place for the band of outlaw mutants called the X-Men.

Cyclops looked out at the assembled crowd - all the X-Men that weren't dead, missing in action, or otherwise engaged. Himself. His wife, Jean Grey-Summers, aka Phoenix, currently suffering from the aftereffects of injuries that kept her from using her formidibale psychic powers. His brother, Alex Summers, or Havok. Kitty "Don't Call Me Shadowcat or Sprite or Ariel" Pryde. Rogue, real name unknown. Her would-be lover, Remy LeBeau, aka Gambit. Pietro Maximoff, or Quicksilver - son of Magneto, the X-Men's greatest foe. Piotor "Peter" Rasputin, the armored Colossus. Kurt Wagner, the Nightcrawler.

And that was it.

Wolverine, Polaris, Storm, Archangel, and so many others... gone.

Dead? Perhaps.

But if not... well, Cyclops was the leader of the sole remaining team of X-Men... and it was his job to see them safely home. All of them.

"We got two Sinisters, in two diff'rent places, an' dey both get killed by two diff'rent sets of Marauders." Gambit's Cajun drawl was the first voice to be raised, but he paused to light a cigarette - much to the dismay of Cyclops. However, attempts to keep Remy from smoking in the mansion had proved about as successful as attempts to keep Wolverine from drinking beer - that is to say, futile.

"So what's dis mean, hey? We know Sinister likes usin' clones... must be cloned Marauders. Or cloned Sinisters. Or both."

"Yeah, but the Marauders worked for Sinister." Havok was still real jumpy after the apparent death of his own team. "Why kill him?"

"What I would like to know is, why go after us." Nightcrawler's own team was lost as well, but the difference was, he had been there, narrowly escaping thanks to use of his teleportation powers, and Gateway's intervention. "I applaud the war between Sinister and his pawns, but why bring us into it?"

It was then that Quicksilver spoke up. "Alex... you're not going to like hearing this, but... when I did my recon of the Australia base, I discovered a strange bluish puddle of goo in one of the sub-levels. I didn't pay much attention to it until... well, you saw the tape, of Essex getting killed in Washington. That melted corpse looked a lot like this one."

"So you're saying there was another Sinister, hiding under the Australia base?" Scott's heart beat a little faster - even without her powers, his wife had a sharp mind... and it didn't hurt that she was the loveliest woman he'd ever seen.

"I think so, Jean. In fact, given the reports of the odd activities of the computers there, and the other bizarre phenomena from the X-Men's first stay there... it makes perfect sense."

Colossus recalled those days - from back before the X-Men went through the Siege Perilous, fleeing the Reavers. How long ago it all seemed now. "We took that base from the Reavers, though, Pietro. I hope this doesn't mean that Sinister was manipulating Pierce and his cyborgs, as well..."

Quicksilver shrugged. "I don't know, Colossus. I only know what I saw."

Southern belles are usually thought of as having having impeccable manners and a fiery temper. Rogue, apparently, was half of a belle. She slammed her fist on the table. "This ain't gettin' us nowhere. Two outta three teams are missin', an' we're sittin' around talkin'!"

Finally the Professor voiced his own opinion. "Neither will charging off into battle when we cannot see the enemy, Rogue." He steepled his fingers before his face and glanced down at his crippled legs. "We have to find Sinister before we can do anything else." He looked at Gambit. "You knew of a Marauder base before, Remy. Might you know of another?"

The mutant thief from New Orleans blushed and looked away. "Nope."

"They said you were one, Gambit." Pietro was fact, but not terribly tactful.

Remy slapped the table with an open palm. "Dat was a long time ago! An' I know what you're thinkin', an' de answer is no. I didn't have nothin' to do wit' the bit in de Morlock tunnels. I left way 'fore den."

Scott cleared his throat. "Remy, no one's accusing you of..."

At the sound of the explosion, all nine X-Men stood, instantly prepared for combat.

Unfortunately, the Marauders - dropping through the ceiling of the mansion - were equally well-prepared.

Charles Xavier could do nothing but watch his X-Men fight. He tried to reach out with the power of his mind, using the telepathy that made him one of the most powerful human beings on the planet... and failed.

A question to be answered later, perhaps. For now, all Xavier could do was command his hoverchair to get him to safety.

Rogue may have lost the powers of flight, invulnerability, and super-strength that she received from Ms. Marvel, but she was still a formidable combatant. It was Harpoon that she was closest to, the Inuit Marauder with the power to charge his harpoons with explosive energy.

"Nice power, sugah. Mind if I borrow it?" A diving roll brought her between the heavyset Eskimo's legs, and quick as lightning she stood, brushing her bare hand along the back of Harpoon's neck.

Sure enough, the Inuit fell, and Rogue's mind was filled with... memories...

So much killing... death... clones! They're killing Sinister... on Sinister's orders!

"Cyke!" The petite brunette was a bit wider, her hair a bit redder, her cheeks a bit plumper. "Ah know what they're up to!"

Scalphunter and Gambit traded blasts - the latter using kinetically charged playing cards, the former a rather large gun.

"Traitor! After what Sinister did for you, you should be on our side!"

"Well, maybe dis Cajun don' wan' hang out wit' someone smells bad as you, Scalp...."

Riptide unleashed a barrage of shuriken, the deadly hail of metal unerringly seeking X-Men. Cyclops opened his visor all the way, letting loose with a wide-angle optic blast to protect himself and Jean, while Colossus' armored form was unaffected. Nightcrawler wasn't so lucky.

The blue-skinned "fuzzy elf" had been badly hurt by Riptide's shuriken recently, when the Marauders attacked Muir Isle, and had sustained injuries while fighting in Hong Kong, as well. Kurt Wagner tried to teleport behind Riptide, but could not summon the strength. He slumped to the ground, unconscious.

"Kurt!" Kitty Pryde had been frightened of Nightcrawler when first she joined the X-Men, but now she recognized him as one of her dearest friends, and his fall incensed her. In her intangible form, Riptide couldn't harm her, and she knew this - which is why she ran at him, snarling.

Kitty's phasing power allowed her to disrupt electrical devices... and what is the human brain but an organic computer? Passing her phased hand through Riptide's skull dropped him instantly. The Marauder drooled insensately.

Kitty dropped to her knees, panting for breath. Using her powers that way... it took a lot out of her... and besides, it made her feel... wrong. But there hadn't been any choice, had there...

Prism looked confident. Foolishly so. As Havok watched, the Marauder merely stood and laughed. "You cannot harm me, fools!"

Havok snorted. "Hey, Prism. Too bad you don't remember what I did to you in Hong Kong." Concentric circles began to form around his hands.

"Hong Kong? What?"

Prism screamed as Havok's plasma beam melted his crystalline body. It was exactly the same scream as last time.

Havok rather liked it.

Scrambler made a beeline for Cyclops. If I can take out the leader, he reasoned, their morale will drop, and we can take them all out.

He couldn't see Quicksilver.

The son of Magneto moved at superspeed, landing a roundhouse punch to the back of Scrambler's head before the Marauder even registered that he had moved.

Four down. Two to go.

Arclight barely had time to register her situation as she hit the ground.

She landed altogether too close to Colossus.

Piotor Rasputin was, normally, a gentle man. An artist. But he recalled all too well the injuries given him by the Marauders in the Morlock Massacre. He remembered Kurt teleporting in blindly, bleeding from a dozen deep cuts. He remembered the dead body of Gateway, the silent, enigmatic Aborigine who had helped them so often in the past.

This, he felt, was not a time to be gentle.

Arclight never had a chance.

Explosions rocked the mansion as Scalphunter tried in vain to hit the nimble Gambit. As the cajun thief ducked, rolled, and dodged, he smiled to himself. Another few minutes and...

There!

Scalphunter was a deadly foe, but a predictable one. Remy knew, from his days in the Marauders - gonna have t'face up t'that one a' dese days, Remy, 'less you want Rogue all pouty an' mad - that Scalphunter had a tendency to aim low on his targets - he wanted to leave their head undamaged. Claimed he liked to see the look on a man's face when he died.

A shot at the kinetic mutant's gut gave him enough room to leap up, at just the right angle to plant a kinetically-charged playing card right into Scalphunter's chest.

Needless to say, the Marauders were down.

"Talk, you punk! Or I'll slag you just like I did your pal Prism!"

"Alex! Alex! Calm down!" Not that Scott was really worried that his brother was going to incinerate Riptide, regardless of the fact that Havok's free hand - the one not holding the Marauder's uniform - was glowing brightly with Havok's power signature.

"No way, Scott! This guy knows where my team is, and he's going to tell me!"

Riptide just smiled... and melted.

"What?" Across the room, all of the captured, wounded Marauders were melting into brightly-colored puddles of goo, which promptly turned to mist and blew away on the breeze. "Man... even Hand ninjas at least leave their uniforms behind..."

"X-Men! On the roof!"

Jean's cry of surprise brought the battle-weary team back to full readiness - even the exhausted and wounded Nightcrawler was prepared. Rogue, though, uncertain of how effective she could be without her stolen Ms. Marvel powers, looked for the one beacon of support she knew she had...

"Gambit?"

"Up here, chere."

The hot-tempered Southern Belle looked up to see her love on the roof - and behind him, a pack of... of...

"Bozhe moi." Colossus and the others saw it too.

Dozens of Gambits, on the roof.

And behind them... Sinister.

"Greetings, X-Men. Shall we... chat?"

Gambit screamed in agony.

Ever since Sinister saved him... right after he'd left the Thieves Guild, and the Assassins were tracking him down... Sinister used him... made clones... the process hurt...

Especially when he had to speed it up, to make an army... an army of Gambits... what a laugh, non?

Sinister was destroying more and more of the clones these days... muttering something about replication errors... what did that mean?

Gambit screamed in agony.

He'd been taken by Sinister, he knew... after leaving the Thieves Guild. Sinister had cloned him... then vivisected the original...

He wondered what number of clone he was. When he could keep from screaming, that is.

Gambit screamed in agony.

That turncoat Sinister had helped him escape from the Assassins Guild, but afterwards, he had cut him loose, told Gambit he was worthless. So the thief wandered the country for a time, until he was caught by a man who called himself... the Shadow King.

"Where is Storm?" The King had asked.

"Storm? Look out de window, frien' - ain' no storm comin' tru here."

The Shadow King hadn't been pleased. It had ransacked his mind, leaving him a drooling hulk, only to turn away and mutter about ruses.

From there the mutant had been taken to a mental hospital, to be examined for the benefit of future generations, and the like. Not that he cared, anymore.

Gambit screamed as the failsafe device in his chest was activated by remote control. The device sent out a signal to several nanotechnological devices in his bloodstream, which promptly exploded, leaving Gambit... well, something of a mess.

"Listen to me, X-Men!" Sinister had quite the booming speaking voice when it suited him, to be certain. "For once, there will be no ruses, no games, no hidden agendas." Those thin black lips compressed in a smile at the shocked looks of the mutants who had opposed him for so long. "Surprised? Ah, I see - you are thinking Gambit has been my tool from the beginning... a clone, perhaps."

"Actually, Sinister, I was thinking how much I'd love to wipe that arrogant smirk off your face."

"Temper, temper, dearest Alex... you always were a bit headstrong. Not at all as responsible and noble as Scott."

Havok flared at the verbal jab, reminding him that in all the comparisons to Scott - as children, as heroes, as X-Men - he had always come in second place... but he kept his temper as Sinister continued on with his spiel.

"While I must confess that I have been misleading with you in the past... I can assure you that 'your' Remy LeBeau is the original. He was a Marauder, true... but a poor one. Your heart never was in your work, was it, Remy?"

Gambit - the one closest to Sinister - growled. "You cloned me. You son of a..."

"Temper, temper, young thief. I saved your life, after all. And I'm about to save it again... as well as the lives of all the X-Men."

The X-Men - wanting nothing more than to strike Sinister down where he stood - listened to the enigmatic mutant speak.

"There was a time when the balance of power between Apocalypse and myself was not so even as it is now. He was much more powerful than I, and I feared for my safety. To ensure that I would continue on against him, I cloned myself. Now is the time to eliminate those clones. Your earlier supposition was correct, Quicksilver - that was, indeed, a clone of myself under the Australian base. Indeed, when you X-Men first encountered me, that was a clone as well - replication errors are what made it so vulnerable to your optic blasts, Cyclops. But between my Marauders and you X-Men, there is only one copy left... and he has your comrades-in-arms."

"So why is this other Sinister kidnapping X-Men, then?"

"Easily answered, Scott. My clone wishes to force you to defeat me, at which point it will promise to let the others go. It won't, of course, but so be it. I, on the other hand, come to you in good faith... and to prove it..."

Sinister withdrew a small metal device from some pocket or another, and pressed a single button - and all the Gambits, save one, fell to their knees and began writhing in agony.

"These are all of my Gambit clones. I know I know, you have no proof of this, you cannot trust me, et cetera. But this once, X-Men, I promise you - I speak the truth."

The Gambits did not scream. They just... disintegrated.

Small crescent-shaped welts began appearing on their skin, which abruptly ruptured. Cut from the inside out by dozens of thousands of nanotech sawblades, the clones became nothing more than a fine red mist.

Gambit - the real one, the only one still alive - fell to his knees and retched.

Cyclops resisted the urge to do the same. "That's sick, Sinister - a disgusting display."

Sinister just smiled. "Perhaps so. But if you want to see your comrades again... get yourselves to Washington D.C. And do it quickly."

The enigmatic mutant geneticist vanished... along with any sense of security that the X-Men might have had.

Things just got a lot less simple.

The man with the red eyes looked over his monitors and smiled.

His "double"'s visit to the X-Men had gone perfectly... everything was going according to plan. 

AUTHOR'S NOTES

Wow... writing this took me longer than I expected.

Part of that, I must admit, is the fact that I'm picking up a plotline that I didn't start with. Normally I'd bristle at that, if it wasn't such a good plotline. Randy Lander is the man.

But part of it....

I read two comics consistently, growing up. Iron Man, and X-Men. And Iron Man was taken. But there's a special place in my heart for Marvel's mutants - even though I hate the way their stories are going, of late. These characters, these concepts... they're special to me.

This is going to be a labor of love.

As with all labors of love, mind, you guys might not like it as much as I do. If that's so, let me know! Of all the things I've written for MV1, this is the one that makes me the most nervous. As such, I desperately want feedback.

Randy set the bar pretty high... let's see if I can beat it, yeh?

-Shawn-