In the amazing
city of Sharzhad, Red Hulk and Machine Man (X-51) have been captured by
Dagan Shah, the Sultan Magus, and they are slowly being encased in crystal, like the
earlier captive Arabian Knight. Shah reads Hulk’s mind and discovers there is
no ulterior motive, he really is there to seek retribution for the death of
this friend Will Krugaler. Shah is notified of the arrival of the Mideastern
delegates to Cairo and he flies to address them, leaving the prisoners in
charge of his henchmen, Haya and Scorpion, to complete crystallization. After
he is gone, X-51 pops his head off, sending it flying through the air; Scorpion
(a human scorpion) chases him and accidentally stings Haya (a snake-woman) to
death; X-51 then kills Scorpion and frees Rulk and Arabian Knight, who remains
comatose from his bad treatment. X-51 detects possible warheads underground so
Rulk smashes his way down….
In
Cairo, Dagan Shah grows into a giant, terrifying the conference delegates and reinforcing
the idea that Sharzhad will be a major force in the region, shutting down the
city grid to force them to acknowledge his supremacy….
Rulk
and Machine Man plunge ten miles below the surface before their fall slows down
and they come to a lighted area, discovering an enormous “microcosm of a
different cosmos.” Rulk hears a recorded message that the pod contains the
“compressed knowledge of Rigel,” available for the Colonizers when they arrived
on Earth in the form of thousands of blastocysts. But primitive man ate the
blastocysts, ending direct colonization. After an interval of thousands of
years, the pod moved on to its secondary objective, spreading Rigellian
culture. It was then that Dagan Shah, fleeing his captors (at the beginning of
issue #42), was made aware of the pod and so it captured his mind but the
object failed: Shah retained the power and knowledge of Rigellian technology
implanted but his personality was not overwritten to make him a Rigellian,
allowing him to terraform the desert and build his city. Rulk knows that the
overwriting failed because Shah’s mind and personality were so strong, forged
by his struggles. Rulk decides that they already have a Latveria in Europe and
don’t need another one in the Mideast so he intends to destroy Dagan Shah. But
Dagan Shah arrives with power and smashes Machine Man in half….