Synopsis
Invincible Iron Man #13 synopsis by
Rob Johnson
Rating:
The robot bounty hunter Death's Head pays in his reward for capturing Iron Man for Rigellian Recorder #451. While he's at the galactic mercenaries' bank he inquires if there's a bounty for any Rigellian Recorder, and discovers there's an enormous one outstanding for a few centuries for 451. Apparently he downloaded the whole Rigellian database, destroyed all backups and deleted chunks of it to cover-up what he was interested in.
451 and Iron Man approach a Dyson sphere (an artificial sphere completely enclosing a star). It was built by the Aspirants, a race who we learned last issue challenged the Celestials cosmic ages ago. The Recorder says that they almost won. Before the war decimated them the Celestials were as numerous as the stars.
On a planet inside the sphere stands the Aspirants' final weapon, the giant armour called the Godkiller. Recorder found the Godkiller in the Rigellian database, and in the centuries since he's been hunting missing components. The last one was the Heart of the Voldi that he acquired in #8. And when he modified Tony Stark before his birth (in the last 3 issues) he made him into a pilot for the weapon.
The Rigellian robot intends to put the Godkiller on Earth as a deterrent to stop aliens crushing humanity. He sees Earth and humanity as the source of a future empire to bring universal peace. (Yeah, history says that's a likely outcome!)
451 controls the Iron Man armour via its PEPPER AI, and makes Tony put the Voldi Heart in place within the Godkiller. He activates the armoured giant, which immediately blasts off into space, wrecking the world and the Dyson sphere. It needs a pilot to reign it in.
The Recorder explains that the Aspirants designed the Godkiller to prevent its pilot from using it against them. I think this also involves some of the genetic tampering 451 did to Tony the foetus. But even if Stark overcomes all that and uses the Godkiller to kill 451, another genetic tweak should ensure that Tony will carry out the Rigellian's plan anyway, because it makes sense to him.
But before 451 can give Iron Man control of the really big giant, the much-smaller giant Death's Head enters to 'arrest' the Recorder. 451 uses PEPPER to defend himself with Iron Man's weapons, until Stark tells Death's Head to blast him out of the room with his big gun.
With Iron Man out of reach 451 has to fight Death's Head his own way. He dodges the bounty hunter's blasts as he mentally tries to defeat his hacking defences. Eventually he gets through and freezes Death's Head in his tracks.
Meanwhile PEPPER is helping Stark, as long as it doesn't contravene the prohibitions imposed on her by 451. He can't attack 451 or the Godkiller, or attempt to leave. So instead (I think) they search for a place where they will be shielded from his direct control.