X-Force: X-Force Only Comm

Good to hear that no one died in that total fiasco. And since I haven't heard otherwise and there isn't a roommate sharing my hospital bed, I'm assuming that the only serious injury was me.

Pete, I'm out of the field for the next six weeks or so. The infection from my kidney has been cleaned up. but I nearly got my sciatic shot through, and I'm stuck hobbling around while it heals. So I'm going to be back on the stick for the near future.

For the rest of you, what we ran into in Uganda is something called a 'psionic tag'. It's basically a little psychic subroutine that gets planted in your head and constantly broadcasts, so any psychic in the range can pick you up and track you down no matter what you do. I've run into them in my Gambit days. Uncommon, very elegant, and unless you've got some serious mental shields or have run across them before, totally undetectable. When they found out that we were in the building, the likely tagged the whole area and just sorted their people out. However, it only lasts a couple of days, so we'll all be clear of it now.

The 'taggers' where not Uganda troops, and not standard British agency types. Pete, something about this feels like those people that went after your sister last year. Same kind of low key operatives, well trained, and certainly psionically active. We might have stumbled into a connection here.

That being said, excellent work everyone. That was a bad plan, a bad situation, and it looks like everyone came through at least in one piece, which is remarkable to say the very least. We might as well see what we can learn from this. Marie-Ange, can you put together an analysis of how each group got clear, and work up as many other approaches as you can? Both Pete and I have been training more for solo operatives up until now, because that's what we known best. I want some larger group exit plans that we can consider for the future. Mark, Doug, put your heads together for some kind of secondary communications options? Cheap, disposible and anonymous are the only limitations you need to stay within.

Amanda, I'm going into research mode once I get out for the next while. Can you pull those records Doug got from the laptop last year, and my updates on the Essex file? Might as well get up to date.

I have bad news and I have even worse news.

One of Xavier's prodigals, Illyana Rasputin, managed to get herself arrested in a military document depot in eastern Russia. Obviously, Russia takes about the same hardline as the US with theft of their military secrets, and now she's got a death sentance hanging over her head in Rodina.

Thanks to the fact that Vazhin is exactly the kind of bastard to make best use of this, I've arranged to have her life spared in exchange for a whole lot of conditions that none of us are going to like. The most immediate is hitting a British lab setup in Africa and stealing some top secret research. It's a pretty big mess to clean up.

Look, this is a bad situation all around. Operating in Africa is dangerous at best, and the location is in an area where we have little resources and the time frame is very short. It's kind of a perfect storm of operational nightmares. That means I'm not going to try and order anyone to come. I might be able to wiggle through this with Illyana's abilities in tandem. If you want to join me, just remember that this isn't like some of our others, where we had time to plan and prepare. It's going to be bad, and there's no reason why anyone else should feel they have to go.

We're going to be flying out at noon. If you want to join us, be at the airport by then.

Pete, we're going to need to have a long talk about this after.