Jack of Harts

“All ships, break and attack in three…two…one…now,” Jack counted down and felt his Avenger’s systems come alive around him. T&J shifted into the drumbeats of war, and he slammed the throttle forward to send them accelerating towards the Shang. Avengers, Hellcats, and Blackhawks accelerated all around him, diving towards the Shang en masse. The warships came to life behind him, destroyers and frigates accelerating with the two heavy cruisers and a single light carrier.

The combined cybernetic intelligences of an entire small fleet went to work and he watched the plot come alive with targeting plans refined by lashing the Shang with full-powered sensor sweeps. A blind man could have felt them coming in his teeth, and the Shang were not blind at all.

They recognized the trap they’d flown into in an instant and reacted the only way they could. They turned from Thunderer and her battlegroup and began accelerating straight towards Jack’s tiny fleet. Betty brought their new path up on the plot and Jack recognized the slingshot maneuver that would spin them out the other side of New Earth’s Red Line long before his force could come around and chase them down. They had exactly one good shot at this.

Thunderer and her ships spun to fire full salvos into the Shang’s flanks. Deflection grids flickered and armor buckled, but the Shang had far too much acceleration for the British battleship to keep them in range for long. But it was bringing the Shang and Jack’s little force directly into each other’s best firing range.

“Oh Lord, for what we are about to receive may we be eternally grateful,” Jack whispered and flexed his fingers.

“Amen,” a chorus of voices said from the communications display.

***

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Smashwords

“Break,” Jack ordered and pulled the controls to the left. Thrusters flared and the formation of Avengers exploded into a chaotic mess of individually maneuvering fighters. Or so the complicated maneuver was designed to look to outside eyes. In reality it was a complex plan designed by the collective intellect of seven cybernetic intelligences, randomized by six Marine fighter pilots, and thrown into the teeth of the enemy missiles by seventy-two Avenger-class starfighters. The AIs inhabiting the Shang missiles never saw it coming.

The Avengers scattered, spinning to sweep over two hundred gravitic cannons across the missile swarm. Over a hundred missile batteries spat their vengeance as fast as they could reload and over five hundred lasers sent coherent beams of deadly light through the exhaust gases filling space. Missiles died by the scores, by the hundreds, but nothing could stop the missile swarm from engulfing them.

Everywhere Jack looked he saw and felt missiles, exhaust, explosions, and death. There was no safe place to be but he let his mind go blank and just moved whenever he got the urge to move. He had a lot of urges to move and his hands twitched on the stick and throttle. Missiles exploded all around them and a warning light alerted him to the near hits clawing at their deflection grid. Another display came up, showing armor damage on the port wing. An Avenger ahead of him exploded and another missile flew by close enough he could have stepped onto it if he’d wanted to.

***

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In the year 2000, something happened that revolutionized the film industry. A major studio assembled several major blockbusters actors together into an assemble film about mutants and played it straight. Big effects and a big serious story, given blockbuster previews and press. And X-Men became a blockbuster that showed to the world that superhero movies could be done big and straight and be successful.

It revolutionized the film industry and brought about a new generation of big budget superhero films. X-Men would go on to spawn two direct sequels, several indirect sequels, and several more prequels set in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But there was one limitation that Fox could never break in their X-Men films. They couldn’t go to space. Other franchises like Fantastic Four tried it and failed to live up to their promise. So X-Men stayed rooted to the terrestrial to the point that the Dark Phoenix saga in X-Men 3 completely cut out the space-based center of that story in the comics.

But the X-Men films did revolutionize the film industry, and it did allow other film companies to bring their best foot forward with films of their own. Including Marvel with Iron Man 8 years later. Which started off the Marvel Cinematic Universe that DID go into space. First with Thor a little bit and then for real in Guardians of the Galaxy. They went into space all the way and melded it with superhero films in a way that totally worked. The MCU proved you could meld the two together and make a blockbuster.

Which allowed the X-Men to come home in the end. Dark Phoenix follows generations of X-Men stories and goes straight into space. No half measures. No slight of hand. It opens with the X-Men going into space to rescue the space shuttle Endeavor that is spinning out of control after having its systems affected by some kind of solar flare or something. Or something.

Enter The Phoenix and the movie comes back down to Earth with a truly interstellar crash landing that gains momentum all the way to the end of the movie. There are aliens. There are government hunter-capture teams and Deadpool-style anti-mutant collars. There are X-Men 3 style red trenchcoats. There are crowning moments of awesome by numerous mutants in a row from Storm to Magneto to Cyclops and many others.

Of the X-Men films, Dark Phoenix feels like it’s the most big spectacle of them all. Where individual mutants got to strut their stuff in previous movies, this one allowed all of them to show off at once in some truly amazing ways. Is it the best story I’ve ever seen? No. Was it a bit darker than I like my movies? Yes. But the X-Men films have all been a bit dour in their way. So it’s a fitting conclusion to the X-Men story.

And yes, this is a conclusion. This is the last of the X-Men films as we’ve known them for the last two decades. Dark Phoenix is the swan song of the series. And it fills the role well.

I enjoyed seeing the characters I’ve gotten to know in one more story, and that’s enough for me in the end.