Australia.

"Cordy?"

"Oh!" Spinning around, Cordelia Frost found herself face-to-face with a wiry boy whose snow white hair stuck out over a blank white mask. The boy held up his hands and took a step back.

"Easy! I didn't mean to startle you."

Cordelia exhaled slowly. "I'm sorry. I don't know what's gotten into me. I'm just jumpy, I guess."

"No need to apologise. You weren't expectin' anyone else up here, were you?" The boy spread his arms, taking in the scene before them. The two of them stood alone, atop the roof of their underground complex. The roof had been disguised as a sand-blasted boulder, and there was nothing to stop them from falling over the edge, into the dull red canyon below.

Cordelia shook her head. "Do you come up here often...? Um.." She had forgotten his name. She blushed in embarrassment.

"Ricochet." the boy filled in, "At your service." He proclaimed, mockingly bowing down before her. He then walked over to her side, and sat down on the edge of the boulder. Uneasily, Cordelia eyed his legs swinging over the chasm.

"Yeah, I visit this spot sometimes to enjoy the landscape." Ricochet continued, before peering over the edge. "So, how was your first night in our clandestine, top-secret, hi-tech X-Men headquarters?"

"I couldn't sleep at all." Cordelia sighed, "It's just so...different. And with that woman running off --"

"Deathbird?" Ricochet grinned.

"See, that's what I mean about different! Your babysitter and the rest of the X-Men gone - maybe never to return - and you all can do is smile!"

"We're used to fendin' for ourselves, Cordy." Ricochet shrugged nonchalantly, peering down the face if the chasm once again. "But anyway, on to more sunny subjects, eh? How're the other kids treatin' ya?"

"Um, well, it's not like I had a chance to really talk with them, but --" Taking a deep breath, Cordelia started over, "To be honest, they either ignored me completely or were downright rude to me last night! It's like they've never heard of manners. What? What's so funny?"

"Oh, nothing," Ricochet chuckled, "Just that half of 'em probably wouldn't know a good manner if it bit 'em on the ass. You see, most of us have rather...unsavoury pasts. Take Synch, for example. He threatened you, didn't he?"

Cordelia shivered. "He blasted the wall right behind me last night, then said it was an accident. But his eyes told the truth."

"That's no surprise. Synch's spent most of his life dodgin' prelates and other mutants on the streets. He's had to kill or be killed all his life. That's how he got his pyrokinetic powers. From synchin' up with a mutant as he murdered her over in California. Maybe that excuses him, maybe it doesn't. But at least now you know why he acts like that."

"I-I had no idea. And the others are just like Synch?"

"Well, that's an overstatement, but I guess all the Gen-Xers are problem kids. I mean, Husk's lost most of her family and is trapped in her admantium skin, Dragonwing's little sister is a prelate, Hope has to wear a bio-suit or cover the entire planet in transmode, and Artie's...well, Artie's simply some little pink kid we don't know that much about. Add to that the fact that nobody can stand anybody else, and Gen-X is a bomb just waitin' to go off."

Cordelia furrowed her brow. "And what about you, Ricochet? Are you a 'problem kid?'"

"Good question," Ricochet said as he looked off into the distance, the morning breeze ruffling his snowy hair. A moment passed before he spoke. "Too bad I don't know the answer."

An awkward silence descended upon the two. Not knowing what to do, Cordelia followed Ricochet's gaze out to the rust-coloured horizon. She was wondering how Deathbird would survive out in that near-inhospitable land when she noticed a black silhouette rising over the horizon.

"Ricochet, what's that?" Cordelia asked as the shadow grew in size, "The Shi'Ar skimmer?"

Ricochet squinted through his opaque yellow eye coverings. "No. It's..."

The shape had grown close enough for them to see that it was a small jet with purple and red markings across its ebony black surface. The markings of Onslaught.

"Prelates!"

A brilliant red laser beam lanced out from the belly of the jet to etch a deep crack into the face of the boulder-roof. Cordelia found herself thrown back by the blast while Ricochet flipped away from the impact and her.

"Cordy, go alert the others! I'll keep them at bay!" Cordelia was about to protest, but Ricochet was already pulling the golden discs from the sleeves of his dark jacket, their razor-sharp edges glinting in the morning light. "Well, what are you waitin' for? You can't do anythin' here!"

Realising he was right, Cordelia turned and fled through the trapdoor. She ran a few yards down the stairwell before she remembered that there was a better way to do this.

Closing her eyes, Cordelia took a deep breath and reached deep within herself, to the place where her mutant power resided. When Adrienne Frost was alive, she used to affectionately call Cordelia her little muse as she stood over the her sister's shoulder while she typed. Neither of them had known how true this would turn out to be.

Cordelia found the place within her and, gathering all of her concentration, she pulled. She felt a tingle, and then a great rushing of emptiness as her consciousness peeled itself away from her body. Suddenly she was floating above her real body, which was lying half-dead on the stairs. Quickly Cordelia dove down, slipping effortlessly through the solid metal stairs and concrete floors as if she was merely an insubstantial ghost, no more real than a mythical muse. In a way, she was.

But she had gone only two flights before she ran into Husk, who simply barrelled straight through Cordelia's incorporeal form before continuing up the stairs. The rest of the Gen-Xers, with the exception of Artie, was right behind. As they stormed past her, Cordelia stammered, "H-How--"

"We have alarms, you know," Hope snapped as she ran through Cordelia, "Now try to be actually useful and scare a prelate or something."

Then she and the others were thundering around a corner, leaving Cordelia on the steps speechless. After a minute, she sighed and floated back up. Reaching the trapdoor, she noted with some satisfaction that her body was in the same spot she had left it and that the hatch was securely closed. As long as the Gen-Xers kept the battle outside, she would be safe. Taking a deep breath, Cordelia poked her ghostly head out of the trapdoor.

Pandemonium greeted her. Cordelia could barely tell her own team-mates apart from Onslaught's prelates - none of whom she recognised - in the maelstrom of bodies and energy blasts and other various manifestations of mutant powers.

*ZZZZAP!!!*

Webs of electricity raced across the surface of the rock, and Cordelia's ethereal atoms actually tingled from the contact with negative ions. To avoid another shock and to get a better view of the battle, she rose into the air.

Glancing around, she saw on the right side of the roof a dark-haired boy wrapped in a nimbus of electricity. He didn't notice her, though, and was trying without much success to blast Husk. The electricity simply danced over her admantium shell while she wrestled with a mutant whose grey form kept shifting into new shapes.

Cordelia let her gaze wander. In the middle of the rooftop Synch and Hope stood back to back. The African-American had copied his partner's powers, and the two were using transmode barriers to crush entire legions of -- Cordelia rubbed her eyes in disbelief -- dwarf-sized Death figures, complete with black hoods and evil-looking scythes. At the edge of the ghoulish army stood a red-haired girl. She seemed to be controlling the monsters, but before Cordelia could be sure, a cry from Ricochet distracted her.

The shock-boy had given up on Husk and was focusing on Ricochet and Dragonwing. But something wasn't right. The two Gen-Xers were desperately trying to react to the bolts, but they were moving slowly as if they were stuck in a vat of molasses. Cordelia scanned the battlefield, trying to find the cause of the two boys' predicament. Nothing.

Then she glanced up at the enemy jet, hovering in the air with its underside panels open like some mechanical angel of death. Poised at one edge of the opening, her dark skin nearly disappearing into the interior shadows, was a teenage girl in the garb of a prelate. She was looking at Ricochet and Dragonwing with fierce concentration. Cordelia swore that she could see the air between her and the boys bend and warp as if it was in a different time field. Then she realised that it had to be a time field that was slowing down Ricochet and Dragonwing.

Before she was aware of what she was doing, Cordelia was flying straight at the prelate. Startled by an apparent ghost literally in her face, the girl stumbled backwards. Far behind down, a distant roar of triumph from Dragonwing told Cordelia that she had succeeded in breaking the time-warp.

But her elation vanished a second later as she realised that she now was inside enemy territory. Already the prelate, seeing that Cordelia hadn't done anything else, was getting back to her feet. She pointed at Cordelia, who was wondering if ghosts were affected by time-warps.

"What's going on, Tempo?"

Both flinched at the voice, which sounded to Cordelia like silk and the subzero vacuum of space and death itself. It was a voice that had seen and done everything.

The prelate hurriedly knelt as the speaker stepped through a door. Cordelia found herself wholly unable to move as the black-clad girl stood before her. This prelate was barely older than Cordelia herself and even had a shaggy mop of hot pink hair, but her eyes were merciless. Deathbird's glare was warm compared to it. Looking into the pink-haired girl's unfathomable eyes, Cordelia felt as if her entire soul was being inspected. Maybe she was.

"Gaia," Tempo said respectfully, "This mutant came out of nowhere and tried to attack me. She must be of Gen-X, although her profile isn't in the files."

"She is the enemy," Gaia said without emotion, "but she's no threat. Still, she should yield useful information during interrogation." Her expression didn't change -- she hadn't even blinked during the entire meeting -- but Cordelia felt the atoms in the air around her close in and begin to suffocate her.

Cordelia's mind protested -- she was incorporeal, she was untouchable! -- but Gaia was without question and effortlessly strangling her. Cordelia must have been delirious from lack of oxygen, for she began to see a dark cloud coiling maliciously around the powerful prelate's head. The mist was thickest at her throat, which was bound with a black choker. There was some kind of locket on the silk ribbon, but who cared? Cordelia was sliding into nothingness, sweet obliv--

A cold, vibrant wave of force blasted Cordelia back to consciousness. As the glowing sheet of hyper-energised atoms rolled through her, she saw around her the prelates being pushed outwards and away from the base by the barrier. Gaia just managed to yank them into the jet telekinetically before the plane blasted forward to avoid being hit by the bubble of energy. Surprise flashed briefly across Gaia's face, and then she was gone over the horizon, along with the prelates and the jet.

Shaken, Cordelia descended to the roof where the Gen-Xers were standing in a huddle. Nose and ears bleeding profusely, Ricochet asked, "You okay, Cordy?"

Cordelia slowly nodded. "I-I think so. What just happened?"

"Artie finally got the force fields online," Husk said, "They keep out anything that doesn't have its DNA entered in Cerebro's databanks. We're safe...for now. But the force fields have to shut down every twenty hours to recharge. You can bet your life the prelates'll grab that five-minute window. We'll just have to prepare for that."

"And just what did you think you were doing, entering Onslaught's jet? If you'd been captured, they would've drained every scrap of info outta your mind and Gen-X would be screwed." Scowled Hope, the de facto leader of Gen-X in Deathbird's absence.

"I was just trying to help Ri--"

"Know what?" Hope interrupted, "We don't need help, especially from an useless good-for-nothing like you."

"But I broke Tempo's time-warp! It was only when Gaia showed up that--"

"Gaia?" Husk looked at her sharply, her clear blue eyes glittering brilliantly out of the lifeless admantium surrounding them. "Did you just say Gaia?"

Cordelia nodded, amazed by the massive change in mood. Fear had appeared on everyone's faces, and even Hope's snooty smirk was gone. "Why?"

Husk took a deep breath. "Okay. Everybody, we're spending tonight in the Danger Room. We'll keep watch in shifts." The others were already halfway to the trapdoor. Husk turned to follow them.

"But...But I thought you said we were safe for twenty hours."

Husk stopped and turned to look at Cordelia. There was a shadow of anguished helplessness in her metallic face.

"That was before I knew Gaia was here."

Then Husk disappeared through the trapdoor, leaving Cordelia standing alone under the harsh Australian sun. She didn't feel it.

(See Age of Onslaught: Alpha to get the whole story)

"You what?"

Gaia sighed in irritation. "Yes, master, our first mission was unsuccessful."

In the middle of the crowded cockpit the flickering hologram of Astra, founder of the Tomorrow Elite Squad, shook her head. "I don't believe it. What am I going to tell Onslaught? After all the time and effort I put into this team, you couldn't even break into an abandoned base."

"That's because the base wasn't abandoned, Mistress. Gen-X were there. They managed to surprise us and held off our attack until their force fields powered up."

"Damn." The hologram paused. "You might as well as kill yourselves now. Onslaught won't let you live, and I'm not going to stop him. I have nothing else to say to you except that may your deaths be quick and painless. Over and out." With that, Astra flickered out of existence.

Pursuing her lips, Gaia turned to her team-mates. Bolt, a dark-haired boy who could generate and control amazing amounts of electricity. Tempo, in whose hands time turned into putty. Random, who could mould his grey figure into any shape imaginable. Witchfire, a mutant sorceress with the power to manifest and make real any of her arcane spells -- including the hooded figure of Death.

Next to Witchfire was another red-haired girl wearing silver in-line skates, which gave her subsonic speed and the ability to defy gravity. In the fluorescent glare of the plane lights, the skates glowed eerily.

The redhead put her hands on her hips and said indignantly, "That's it? We get used and thrown away like an old shoe, and we're gonna do nothin' about it?"

Gaia smiled. "If you say that again, Spoilsport, I will kill you myself for insubordination and libel." Dragonwing's little sister took a step back as Gaia continued, "Because nobody, I repeat, nobody uses me. In twenty-four hours, Onslaught will be welcoming the Tomorrow Elite Squad back with fanfare and red carpet. For I still have plan B..."

Gaia looked over her shoulder at the door leading into the cockpit. It opened, and a blonde boy clad in full Neo wargear stepped out. Crimson blood adorned his face in the traditional style of his people. For, although he had been one of the first Neo to betray their tribe and join Onslaught, he has still clung to his people's ways.

With the exception of Gaia, the prelates drew back uneasily from the lone Neo. They had heard too many horror stories about how he, with Gaia's aid, walked through men's dreams and turned them into nightmares. Nightmares that were real.

". . . and its name is Tartarus."

(For more on the Neo, check out X-Man #2)