X-men User in space?!?

The hangar bay beneath Krakoa's northern shore hummed with an urgency that felt wrong for a place usually so quiet.

Sage stood at the terminal bank, her techno-organic implants pulsing faint blue as she cross-referenced trajectory data faster than any human analyst could. Numbers scrolled across her vision, feeding directly into the augmented cortex she'd built from Cerebro's old architecture.

"The impact window is closing," she said, not looking up. "Forty-one hours. Maybe less if the gravitational drag from the outer moons speeds it up."

Hank McCoy paced behind her, lab coat traded for a thicker flight jacket, his claws clicking against a data-slate. He'd been awake for two days straight, running simulations, and it showed in the wild static of his fur. "The composition readings are the real problem. Nickel-iron core, but there's something else laced through it. Something that isn't giving me a clean spectral signature."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning I don't like surprises, and neither should you." Hank finally glanced up, gold eyes sharp despite the exhaustion. "Which is why the suit matters more than usual. If that meteor's carrying something exotic, standard shielding won't cut it."

He'd spent the better part of the last day fitting the suit personally, adjusting seals, calibrating the rebreather to a physiology nobody else on Krakoa shared. Omega-level status came with strange gifts, and stranger complications. The suit was proof of that, a one-of-one, built for a force of one.

Sage finally turned from her terminal, arms crossed. "Krakoa doesn't have a fleet. It has you." There was no warmth in the way she said it, only fact, the way she said most things. "That's not pressure. That's just the shape of the problem."

Hank made a small, frustrated sound in his throat. "It should be pressure. It's an absurd amount of responsibility for one person, omega-level or not."

"It's the situation we have." Sage moved to the reinforced case near the loading ramp and popped the seals. Inside, the helmet caught the hangar lights, its visor dark and waiting. "Xavier and Magneto both signed off on the flight plan. Storm's keeping the skies clear on this end. Krakoa's islands are already being warned, quietly, so there's no panic."

"And if quiet warnings aren't enough?" Hank asked.

"Then it won't matter whether people panicked or not." Sage's voice didn't change pitch, didn't rise or fall, and somehow that made the words land harder.

The ship's engines cycled through their pre-flight sequence somewhere behind them, a low mechanical groan that vibrated up through the hangar floor. Hank set down his data-slate and exhaled. "Comms channel is locked to Krakoan frequency and a backup satellite relay, in case the primary array gets knocked out by debris. Sage will be feeding you real-time trajectory updates the entire way out."

"And correcting them," Sage added. "The math will drift the closer you get. Gravitational interference, solar wind, your own thrust vectors. I'll be adjusting constantly."

Hank managed something like a smile, tired but genuine. "For what it's worth, I built that suit to bring you back in one piece. Not just to survive vacuum. To survive whatever's in that rock."

Sage lifted the helmet from its case. The material seemed to drink in the light rather than reflect it, sleek and matte black except for the faint amber glow where the visor would come alive. She held it out.

"Try not to make Hank's engineering look bad, he’s already egotistical as it is" she said.

And she placed the helmet into your hands.

Stars streamed past the viewport in long, silent smears, the ship's hull ticking faintly as it adjusted to the cold of open space. Sage sat at the secondary console, her techno-organic implants pulsing faint blue as she cross-referenced the trajectory in real time.

"Holding steady," she said. "Four hundred thousand kilometers out and closing."

Hank was braced behind her chair, claws tapping restlessly against the console's edge, eyes fixed on the shifting readouts. "Life support and suit integrity are both green." He said it more to himself than anyone else, the way he always did when he needed to hear it out loud. "Keep it that way."

The cabin lights dimmed automatically as the forward sensors adjusted for the growing dark, compensating for a light source that hadn't fully resolved itself yet. Somewhere ahead, past the reach of the naked eye, the meteor was still just a smudge on the scopes, a suggestion of danger rather than the thing itself.

"Sage, give me an updated mass estimate," Hank said, leaning closer to the display. "The last one felt off."

She didn't answer right away. Her eyes had gone slightly unfocused, the way they did when she was routing more of her attention inward than outward. "Recalculating now. Comparing against the gravitational drag readings from the last hour."

The console pinged softly as new data streamed in, numbers scrolling in Sage's characteristic shorthand. Outside, the black seemed to thicken, though that was only the mind's trick of anticipation.

"That can't be right," Sage said.

Hank straightened immediately. "Define 'can't be right.'"

"The mass estimate just increased by a factor of six, whatever material was on it messed with our scanners." Her fingers moved fast over the console, rerunning the numbers herself before trusting them. "I'm re-running it."

Long seconds passed. The ship crept closer, and with every kilometer, the shape ahead stopped being a smudge and started being a silhouette, vast and slow-turning against the starfield, wrong in a way that had nothing to do with instruments.

"Confirmed," Sage said, quieter now.

Hank stared at the viewport, jaw tight. "That's not a meteor. That's a moon."

"It was never going to hit Krakoa the way we modeled it," Sage said. "It was always going to hit like this."

Neither of them said anything else for a moment, the silence on the bridge heavier than the static ever could have been.

"We were wrong," Hank finally said. "It's far larger than we realized, this is a planetary threat."

As the ship got close enough, the size of the asteroid... no. the moon came into view.