Biography - Page 6
Although Shaw had lost the title of Lord Imperial just days after obtaining it, he was not ready to give up on the Hellfire Club. He continued maneuvering his way back into the club even after M-Day depowered all but a few hundred of the world’s mutants. Shaw, like many of the X-Men, was fortunate enough to keep his mutant powers. Most mutants who remained cherished their powers and their continued survival. When any of them died, it drastically reduced their overall numbers by a relatively larger margin than before, giving almost all mutants an added sense of value for the lives of other mutants. [House of M crossover] Although Shaw was among those who saw this additional value, his desire to get revenge on his treacherous son Shinobi overshadowed it. Never one to entrust the most important tasks to the abilities of others, Shaw, at some undisclosed point in time, personally murdered Shinobi, undoubtedly taking cathartic pleasure in the act.
When a young mutant boy whom he didn’t personally know perished in a traffic accident, Shaw decided to attend the boy’s funeral to pay his respects. To avoid media attention, however, he attended the funeral using an image-inducer that disguised him as an old man. His thoughts during the ceremony wandered to the problem he was having with Roberto da Costa at the Hellfire Club, and his plan to either vote him out or stage yet another coup. At that point, however, Shaw sensed Professor X reading his thoughts and activated his psi-shields. Xavier confronted Shaw after the funeral and asked him about his suspicious behavior. Shaw explained the neutrality of his motives and defended his right to anonymity. As he left, he told Xavier to give his regards to Emma. [X-Men: Endangered Species #1]
Meanwhile, back at the Hellfire Club, things were not going so well for Shaw. His former protégé Roberto da Costa had ascended to the Lord Imperial position of the Lords Cardinal, a role he had taken to quite comfortably. Shaw was not used to having to answer to anyone, let alone someone younger than his own son. He took added insult at the condescending manner in which Sunspot addressed him.
Shortly after the death of Mr. Sinister, Shaw’s enigmatic Cronus machine went haywire and fried the minds of two Hellfire guards. This angered the acting Lord Imperial so much that he personally scolded Shaw in front of the rest of the Inner Circle. Shaw took additional umbrage at Roberto’s command that he investigate the machine further. Upon viewing the damage caused by the enigmatic old machine, Shaw patiently told his servant to seal the room, remove the bodies, and bring him his file marked “Project Cronus.” He determined that an energy wave had struck the machine, finally activating its defenses. He began to investigate the matter. [Messiah CompleX crossover, X-Men: Legacy (1st series) #210-11]
Shaw learned the wave was repeating itself every 23 hours, and that the most recent wave had killed the depowered mutant Carter Ryking, the son of one of his father’s contacts from his days at the Alamagordo facility. Shaw traveled to Las Cruces, New Mexico—where Carter died—to learn more. While there, he happened to spot Gambit and Professor X in the same hospital. Considering it unlikely to be a coincidence, Shaw decided to follow them and tailed them as they traveled through the desert toward Alamagordo. When he saw them get ambushed by hit men, his curiosity compelled him to intervene and save Gambit’s life. However, he failed to prevent the assassins from abducting Professor X. When he learned from Gambit that they had found a hit list with Shaw’s name on it, Shaw—realizing things had just become personal—decided to collaborate with Gambit on the investigation. The two of them stormed the Alamagordo facility and confronted Xavier’s captor, Amanda Mueller, a decrepit mutant woman who had also worked at the facility with Mr. Sinister in the past. Prior to their arrival, however, Mueller had shot Professor X several times in the torso. As a result, and to everyone’s surprise, the wounded Xavier began exhibiting Mr. Sinister’s personality and powers.
Upon seeing Professor X channeling Mr. Sinister, Shaw finally grasped the true purpose of Project Cronus: to activate a genetic backup of Mr. Sinister in the event of his death. The device Shaw’s father bequeathed to him, however, had protected him from the activation wave, just as the other subjects of the experiment had their own forms of protection as well. 
What no one had anticipated was that Amanda Mueller, who wanted to become the next Sinister, had performed the Cronus modification on herself, and was now trying to assassinate all the men who stood before her in the hierarchy. While Amanda was busy dealing with the possessed Xavier, Shaw and Gambit attacked the Cronus device. Individually, their powers were not strong enough to destroy the machine, but they overcame this obstacle by synergistically combining their abilities: Gambit charged Shaw with kinetic energy, which Shaw then unleashed on the machine, obliterating it. They destroyed the machine moments before Xavier purged Sinister’s essence from his body. With the Cronus device gone and his host having rejected him, Sinister’s essence dissipated; he was finally dead. Professor X thanked Shaw for his help with the crisis. Shaw cordially rejected his thanks by pointing out that his reasons for helping were fueled not by altruism, but, as always, by rational self-interest and egoism. He parted ways with Professor X and Gambit on peaceful terms, furthering a tradition of mutual respect between him and the X-Men. [X-Men: Legacy (1st series) #212-214]
Surprisingly, the incident with the Cronus device failed to deter Shaw from exploiting the power of mutant genetics or engaging in affairs that might lead to conflicts with the X-Men. In fact, it seemed to pique Shaw’s interest in harnessing the power of Mr. Sinister’s genes. He sought out a different backup project of the mad geneticist’s. It seemed that, later in his life as his technology advanced, Mr. Sinister had learned to create clones of himself. One such clone was a female human named Claudine Renko. Shaw met with Claudine and offered to make an alliance to serve as his Black Queen. Claudine accepted the offer, opting to call herself not the Black Queen, but Miss Sinister. [X-Men: Legacy (1st series) #214]
Incidentally, Shaw’s problem with Sunspot in the Hellfire Club resolved itself, as the acting Lord Imperial decided to resign from the Hellfire Club. Unbeknownst to him, Shaw had his old enemy Donald Pierce to thank for this, as it was his attempt to rid himself of some old foes that catalyzed Sunspot’s change of heart about his position in the Inner Circle. With Sunspot gone, Shaw met with the rest of the Inner Circle to discuss the vacant position. Tensions ran high during the meeting and, by the time it ended, one Inner Circle member had murdered another in retaliation for an assassination attempt. It became clear to Shaw that he would have to compete with his power-hungry colleagues for the vacant role of Lord Imperial. [X-Men: Legacy (1st series) #215]
Shaw decided to eliminate some of the more ambitious members of the Inner Circle who stood in his path to ascension. Unfortunately, his desired plan meant once again meddling in the affairs of the X-Men, with whom he had forged a fragile peace. Regardless, he intended to brainwash Wolverine’s amnesiac son Daken into becoming his personal assassin. Using his new pet telepath, Miss Sinister, he found Daken and had Miss Sinister lure him in by promising they could restore his memories. Because Shaw knew Wolverine would try to locate the missing Daken, he planted a Hellfire Club mask at the scene of his disappearance with the hopes that Wolverine would attack the club and slay his rivals. He and Miss Sinister then took Daken to a villa in Panama where she began her psychic seduction. She soon discovered deep within his mind a psychic trap that threatened to lobotomize any telepath who tried to breach it. Realizing they could not proceed any further with the conditioning, Shaw and Miss Sinister decided to trick some other telepath into setting off the booby-trap—and settled on Xavier.
Meanwhile, Wolverine and Professor X raided the Hellfire Club and got into a fight with three members of the Inner Circle, who incorrectly pegged Wolverine as Shaw’s assassin. Two of the Hellfire Club members died in the fight, but not before Professor X telepathically gleaned from them that Shaw had taken Daken to Panama. They traveled to Panama and raided Shaw’s villa. 
During the ambush, Shaw battled Wolverine to a standstill while Professor X proceeded to fall into the trap within Daken’s mind. Unfortunately for Shaw, triggering the psychic trap restored Daken’s lost memories, who then proceeded to get revenge on Miss Sinister by stabbing her in the gut. Daken was about to kill Professor X when Wolverine intervened and pacified his feral son with the truth. Shaw arrived just as Daken’s allegiances changed, and was stabbed in the stomach and kicked out of the window into the ocean. [Original Sin crossover]
Shaw must have prepared a contingency plan with an escape route, as both he and Miss Sinister survived Daken’s backlash. Escape did him little good, however, as it was only shortly afterward that Shaw faced his comeuppance for the atrocities his Sentinels committed against the mutants of the world. It all started with a surprise call from Emma Frost.
Shaw was delighted—aroused, even—to hear from Emma again, and agreed to meet her for a visit, perhaps in spite of his better instincts. Shortly after he arrived, Emma telepathically removed his ability to see, speak, or move. She then proceeded to telepathically convince her other surprise guest, Namor of Atlantis, that she was executing Shaw. After Namor left, sufficiently convinced that Emma had beheaded Shaw for this past crimes against the citizens of Atlantis, Emma lifted the veil over Shaw. 
Predictably, he was furious. Emma explained to him that she needed a favor from Namor and had to offer Shaw’s life as bounty. Because her affiliation with the X-Men meant she had to at least appear to uphold their loose rules against killing, she couldn’t responsibly execute Shaw. Shaw vowed to make her pay, and was enraged even further when Emma brushed off his threats and informed him he was to be her prisoner—indefinitely. [Uncanny X-Men Annual (2nd series) #2]
Upon capture, Shaw found himself imprisoned in the brig at the X-Men’s headquarters in San Francisco, trapped in a power-dampening cage behind a glass window. Emma visited him and told him he was there not only to pay for his myriad crimes against humanity, but for his crimes against mutants—specifically those related to his involvement with the Sentinel program. She reminded him that it was his creations that laid waste to Genosha and the 16 million mutants who lived there. Although it was his actions against Atlantis that incited his imprisonment, it was the 16 million mutant victims for which Emma wanted him to pay penance. She telepathically imbued him with the memories of all the people he’d killed, dooming him to remember nothing but their lives and their deaths for the duration of his captivity. [Uncanny X-Men (1st series) #507]
Shaw’s imprisonment, while itself illegal and perhaps unethical, was not undeserved. It was certainly less of a punishment than he dished out on those who failed him, or even on those who had nothing to do with him, but found themselves victims of the externalities his activities imposed on third-parties. Shaw may have believed that the Sentinel program was inevitable, therefore justifying to himself the profits he made from it, but he never considered the possibility that the program only reached the lethal heights it did because of his own unique brand of involvement. A brilliant businessman, Shaw’s talent for raising capital and making targeted investments likely enhanced the destructive output of the Sentinels beyond what they would have achieved otherwise. His desire to build an empire he could sell to the U.S. Department of Defense put some of the world’s deadliest weapons into the hands of both his enemies and the enemies of all mutants. By the time he was forced to consider the damage his crony-corporatist instincts had wrought, the death toll had reached into the millions.