Synopsis / Summary / Plot
Last issue Iron Patriot saw Iron Man use up his last energy to take an incoming missile far out to sea before it exploded. Now after the explosion James Rhodes can't detect the Iron Man armour anywhere. But at last he does, and then finds that Tony Stark is alive and well. Stark explains that he'd used the heat from the explosion to re-energise his armour enough to restart his life-support and set up a repulsor field to shield him from the blast.
Now Tony gives Rhodey access to his QUILL network of satellites so the military and the Avengers can watch out for more missiles from space. Meanwhile IP takes the weakened IM to his auxiliary garage where he can build a new armour.
That 'garage' turns out to be a satellite, Stark Orbital. This is where he developed the deep-space armour he's wearing now. But that is designed to travel either at planetary speeds or at warp speed to get to the stars. What he needs now is an intermediate speed to get him fairly quickly to the Moon where the missile came from.
So he creates the Saturn V armour. An ordinary suit inside a bulky job with 2 large repulsor batteries on the back, powering boot jets that will take him to the Moon in 3 hours, and enough juice to get back again with 40% to spare. To save power he's not taking his armour's AI PEPPER, but he will keep in radio contact with Rhodes.
Meanwhile in crater in the Mare Frigoris we see the large cannon that fired the missile at Hollywood. There we find a Soviet (we can tell by the hammer and sickle emblem on his chest) robot. He might be talking to a giant stone(?) head. But the robot has 2 faces so he could be talking to himself. (The face we see at the moment also has a hammer and sickle on its brow. Later we will see the hammer and the sickle on separate brows, indicating 2 different personalities.) But his reference to 'brothers' might mean he's addressing a host of metallic spider-helpers.
The robot holds a glowing tube of what it calls Moon-metal. He is angry at being abandoned on the Moon long ago, but he seems conflicted. On the 1 hand he seems to want the power of Moon-metal to bring humans back to the Moon. On the other hand he won't forgive them for abandoning him, and has declared war on Earth.
Iron Man is on his way to the source of the missile. As he approaches he detects energy signatures like the core of last issue's missile - energy more powerful than anything he'd seen before. Then he detects big guns magically appearing in the crater and firing at him. Without PEPPER he has trouble handling the multiple plasma 'bullets', and the ones he does hit explode violently in reaction to his repulsor blasts.
Stark decides to take the battle to the enemy. With a temporary force-field up to keep the plasma away he fires a uni-beam blast that destroys 1(?) of the guns. But that was a very wasteful use of energy, and he's on a budget. So he tries an even bolder strategy. He expels the repulsor battery he's almost used up and drops it on the crater. The resulting explosion takes out the other guns, except 2 which survive or self-repair. Repulsor blasts shot down their barrels just as they fire their plasma deals with them.
Throughout the battle Tony has heard a voice blaming humans for leaving him alone on the Moon. Now he persuades that voice to parley. He notices that there is no wreckage from the guns, but the Moon dust now gathers together and builds itself (with help from the spiders) into a large head with sickle on its forehead. It announces itself as Udarnik, and it tells its story.
Back during the Cold War era of the Moon-race Soviet scientist Dr Kuznetsov created a robot called Udarnik, meaning Shockworker. The Russians wanted him to build robot soldiers in Project: Crimson Dynamo. But his vision was of worker bots who would build a base on the Moon (and be soldiery enough to defend it). He secretly diverted the project funds to send his Udarnik to the Moon. For which he was shot.
Udarnik wants to know why no-one came back to the Moon. Tony tries to be diplomatic, but his reply that "I guess we thought we had better things to do" causes the head to revolve revealing the hammer face and the more martial personality. The oversize robot rises out of the ground. The spiders leap to his arms forming into guns, and Udarnik attacks.
Iron Man holds off the weapons with a force shield. Then he drops it and fires his uni-beam. But Udarnik dodges and attacks with a battery of plasma launchers that sprout from his back. The force shield is back up and stops the plasma shots, but now Iron Man doesn't have enough power to get back home. He drops the shield and then realises that there's 1 plasma bullet left, and it hits his remaining repulsor battery.
Tony gets off a last message to Rhodey as the battery explodes.