Major Scottie Ambrams looked behind him as a bedraggled soldier dashed into his tent recklessly. Breathing heavily, the private managed to salute weakly before pitching forward to his knees. 

The major ran to his side. "Private Morsely! What happened out there?" 

"No time," the private whispered harshly. "I have to tell you... the information... you asked for." 

"No, Morsely, we need to get you to a doctor. Just lie down." Major Ambrams was holding the young man up now in a soft cradle-like position. "You just relax. Doc'll be here in a heartbeat." 

"No... fading fast... have to tell you that... the X-Men and... related characters belong...to Marvel... and are being used without permission..." 

"Go slow, Jim. Eric, d'you get all that?" 

Another soldier at the makeshift desk behind them gave a quick thumbs-up. "Noted and logged, Major." 

"And... Major... any other characters... belong to Matt... Bowyer... ohhhhhh..." the soldier moaned, looking as if he would go at any moment. 

"Hang in there, Private," the major said reassuringly. Aside, he said, "I don't think he'll last much longer, Eric." 

The other soldier ran over. "Jim, ye've got t'give us the rest o' the infermation! We can't win the war without it! Ye've got t'do it fer us, Jim!" he said in his odd blend of accents picked up by being in so many places recently. 

"O-okay... No money is being made from this... and... and..." 

"And what, Jim?" the Major asked, bending low. 

The last part was nothing more than a harsh whisper. "Requests... praise... *sputter*... thanks... threats... and... *cough cough*... any other comments can be sent [email protected]..." 

After nothing else followed, the major leaned down further. "Is there anything more, Jim?" 

"Tell my wife... and kids... that I love them... very... much..." His head lolled to one side. 

The major, still cradling the now-lifeless body of the heroic private, looked up at Eric, who had solemnly removed his hat. "Damn this war," he growled. 

It's Who You Know

Part One of the X Chronicles by Smoot 

Chapter 1 The night is kind to thieves. The darkness conceals their movements, the moon the only light they will ever need to operate by. The moon also is a perfect backdrop for the thief who prefers to leave high-rise apartments by leaping the gap form building to building, leaving his silhouetted form etched in the minds of those were happened to look up towards the sky during one of the thief's flashy exits, not quite knowing what they were looking for. 

One particularly notable thief, Remy LeBeau was crouched down quietly behind a dumpster, staying completely motionless. 

Gambit was a former member of the X-Men, a group of mutants persecuted by the very same society they fought to preserve. Left by the wayside, Gambit was now reacting to that persecution in a different way. 

The dumpster was out in the back yard of a large mansion in South Carolina, one of the old plantations, recently restored. Its owner was a exceptionally wealthy man who dealt with the underground a tad too often. 

Rumors of illegal contributions surrounded the man, but Remy wanted a little more on the situation than that. He wanted proof, one way or another, of the one rumor he had heard that really caught his interest. That this millionaire was supplying the Assassins Guild with weapons unlike anything the Thieves Guild could even begin to fathom, let alone prepare to deal with. 

That was not something that Remy approved of. 

Anything that tipped the balance of power between the New Orleans Guilds could spell disaster for the economy of the Big Easy, among other things as well. Remy couldn't let that happen if there was a way for him to stop it. He had sat down, thought it all out, and then set out for trouble. 

And he found himself crouching behind a dumpster, completely motionless, even his breath silent. 

His senses were at their strongest, aware of everything from the almost undetectable brush of the wind to the smell of ballpark hot dogs from the minor league baseball stadium a ways down the road to, most importantly, the tapping of an impatient guard's foot as he waited by the slate gray door leading inside the mansion. 

Remy reached out with his spatial awareness and closed his eyes, "seeing" the guard's every move and twitch. He let himself relax a little bit. The guard was obviously about to go off duty. That accounted for the anxiousness. The uneasiness could be explained easily enough. Anyone standing guard at one-thirty had to be more than a little wary, no matter what you were standing guard over. All he had to do was wait. 

For the next hour, all he did was wait. Quite patiently, in fact. In the end, his patience won out. With a sigh of relief, the guard checked his watch for the final time and then disappeared into the mansion. 

Remy let a sigh of relief escape his lips as well. Too long... losin' m' touch, he scolded himself. 

In three seconds, he was at the door. Five seconds to pick it cleanly, and then he was on the move again. A set of "borrowed" and memorized blueprints to the mansion had given him the perfect route for what he needed to look for. 

He took the stairs three at a time, wasting as little time as possible in his rush. It wasn't that he didn't still get a thrill out of being a thief. It was just the fact that he wanted no part of this entire thing. But being the relatively moral and faithful person that he was, he was doing it. And no guard was going to stop him, either. 

He paused along the way only to throw a kinetically-charged screw at a security camera. The tiny explosion wouldn't bring any wary guards, and it kept him from being spotted. It wouldn't take long before someone would notice that the camera in this section of the stairwell wasn't responding, but he intended to be long gone by then. 

The door to the third floor was left slightly open, so the lockpicking wouldn't be necessary. He carefully eased it slightly open, just enough where he could look around, and looked up and to the left, and then to the right. 

There. Directly above him. Security camera. Swiveling back and forth, not aimed at him, but rather at the opposite side of the room. Gambit carefully reached up, placed two gloved fingers on the camera, keeping in place, and then reached into his coat pocket with the other hand and pulled out a tiny knife. He reached up, charged the knife, and carefully slit the bottom of the camera open, catching the cut slab of metal before it fell. 

Inside the camera were, among other things, three wires. Remy disconnected one, reached back into his pocket, and then took out a long yellow wire and plugged it into the slots where the wire he disconnected had been. He didn't replace the cover of the camera's case quite yet. He had other things to do. 

He took a moment to look around the room. It was somebody's study. Bookshelves lined the walls, and a desk sat in front of one of them, a plush burgundy chair behind it. A portrait of a gray-haired man smoking a pipe was sitting over top of the desk, framed on either side by the bookshelves. 

Gambit walked over to the bookshelf on the right of the desk, quickly removed all the books off one of the shelves, revealing a safe in the process. Opening the safe wasn't too hard for him, and the papers he pulled out were what he had come for. 

He shuffled through the stack of manila folders, waiting to see if something caught his eye. Tax forms, court statement, inventory, charity contributions, divorce settlement papers, company address book... 

He paused for a second, thinking. Then he flipped back to the one labeled "charity contributions" and sat in on the desk. The others were stacked on the shelf next to the open safe door. 

Turning back, he opened the folder and withdrew some of the sheets of slightly dog-eared papers. A few of them had headings referring to local charity organizations he knew about, but the fourth one had something to do with a militia. 

Reading the list of items on down that particular page, his red-on-black eyes narrowed in anger. His suspicions had been correct. Bella had been up here, picking up a shipment. Thought I recognized dat woman, he thought to himself, searching the interior of his coat for something. 

He pulled out a digital scanner and ran it down the front of the page, a thin red laser beam tracing down with it, doing a visual download of the words on the paper. When he finished that, it only took about twenty seconds to replace everything in the safe and a little longer than that to reload the shelf, taking special precautions to be sure that the books were put on in the same order he removed them in. 

Before he left, he removed his wire from the camera and replaced it with the one he took off, using a special adhesive to secure the torn bit of metal onto the camera so this room would look untouched. From there, it would be simple to walk down the steps and out of this place. 

He backed out the open door, careful to stay out of sight of the camera. Just as he started to close the door behind him to complete the escape, something large, strong, and cottony in texture hit his back. He realized at that second that he was concentrating so much on completing the job without a hitch that his mind hadn't registered the screaming of his spatial awareness. 

He spun, whipping out a larger knife form his outer coat pocket and bringing it to bear in front of him. He was a little surprised when he saw that what had hit him was a person, and was even more surprised when they came face to face. 

The kid couldn't have been more than seventeen years old. His blond hair hung down over blue eyes that were locked on Remy's. What surprised and impressed Remy was the fact that even though there was a knife pressed to this kid's neck threatening to slice an artery if he so much as flinched, there was also a knife pressed against Remy's neck as well. 

Remy glanced at his knife, the handle of the kid's knife, and then grinned. "Dis be a real int'restin' situation, oui?" 

"Who're you?" the kid snapped, pressing the flat of his blade a little more firmly against Remy's neck. 

Remy opened his mouth to respond with something along the lines of a wisecrack when an alarm cut through the stale air. The kid looked around, dismayed. "Aw, crap! Now look at what's done and gone down! Man, if I had any less honor than I do, I'd --" 

Remy took that moment, when the teenager was distracted, to send his closed fist into the forearm of the young man, disarming him and sending the knife sailing down the stairs, out of harm's way. A moment later, the kid's back was to the wall, Remy's hand forcefully around his throat. "If you any honor at all, y' wouldn' be breakin' into a man's home f'r no reason," he said in a low, challenging voice. 

The kid squirmed. "Like you have a reason," he fired back. "What the hell are you doin', breakin' an' enterin', anyway?" 

Remy looked around. The alarm was still sounding. It wouldn't be long at all before guards made their way up to where he was. It was time to leave. "Look, I don' know what in de world you doin' up here, but 'less you wanna stay in get y'self t'rown in jail, it be time t'leave." He released the kid's throat. "Le's go." 

The kid paused to regain his breath, and then knelt down and pressed his ear to the ground as Remy took off for the stairs. Then he looked up. "Won't do you any good to go that way. That's where the alarm is concentrated, not up here." 

"Pardon?" Remy asked, pausing at the top of the steps. 

"We didn't set off an alarm. It's comin' from down there. Our best bet is to find a way out from up here." 

"We're t'ree floors up, in case ya forgot," Remy spat. 

"I know that, I know that. Shut up, Cajun, and let me work." The kid crossed the room, not even bothering to rig the camera, stepping out in front of it nonchalantly. Remy started to say something, but didn't. Let 'im get killed, he thought himself. See what I care.

The kid crossed to the left side of the room, opened the window, and looked down. Remy walked over cautiously and peered down as well. A window was about seven feet down and to the right of where they stood. The kid pushed it open more, climbed out onto the ledge, sat on it for a second, and then grabbed Remy by the coat. 

"De hell?" Remy shouted, grabbing onto the window frame to keep from flying out of the window himself. "What are y' doin'?!" 

The kid was light enough to use the edge of the trenchcoat as a rope to swing himself over towards the window. At the last second, he let go, tucked his legs in front of him, and crashed through the window below Remy in a shower of glass. 

Remy yanked his coat back up to him, checking the interior of the fabric. A few of the seams had been torn. It made him quite angry. He had that trench coat for almost ten years. If that idiot kid damaged this coat beyond repair, he would make Wolverine's biggest temper tantrum look like child's play... 

Wolverine. The X-Men. Almost another lifetime, it seemed. 

"Hey!" 

The shout snapped Remy out of his trance. "What?" he shouted back. 

The kid was leaning out of the window, staring up at him. "You comin' or not?" he yelled, waving at Remy to come on. 

Gambit looked around him. It was either this or give the police a perfect description of himself as he fought his way down the stairs. A bit reluctantly, he eased himself out onto the ledge, looked back one last time, and then jumped. He kept one hand on the ledge and let his arc center on that arm, carrying him towards the window. He let go, and a second later he sailed cleanly through the frame, the edges of his coat and shirt catching slightly on the broken shards of glass still lining the frame of the window. 

The kid helped Remy to his feet. "That door," he said, gesturing behind him, "is the only out of this room, but I think we can slip out during the confusion if we time it right. Up to it?" 

Remy glanced at him for a second. "You come here often?" he asked. 

The kid grinned. "This'd be 'bout my thirtieth time here, yeah," he acknowledged. "I know my way around here. C'mon, we gotta move." 

He ran to the door, pressed his ear against it, and then threw it open, revealing an empty stairwell. "Good, they're already up to the top floor. I give us about fifteen seconds before they piece everything together. That isn't a lot of time, so we had better get a move on." 

They had no sooner run out onto the stairs when a shout from above them alerted them to the presence of others. Remy looked up and saw about five or six men, all wearing the same kind of uniform. He looked back at the kid. "I believe y' were sayin' somet'in' funny, mon ami?" he said dryly. 

"Run now, insult later," the kid responded, leaping down the steps six at a time. Remy did the same, a few bullets flying past him as he did so. 

They made the escape easily enough, without any more shots fired at them. The guards could not make up that much difference in speed or advantage. When they ran outside into the brisk night air, the Cajun thief and the young teenager were nowhere to be found. 

One of them scratched his head, peering out into the blackness. "Man, wonder who that Bailey kid got workin' with 'im now?" he asked aloud. 

Another guard merely shrugged before they headed back in, displeased that they had failed to stop the thieves. 

On to Chapter 2