Iron Man #8

#8
April 2001

Beset by Betrayal
by Black Condor

This issue takes place after Spider-Man #11.

The Iron Man robot soared off into the black night of New York. The lights that could be seen in the city below were mostly started by rioters or by the hundreds who had taken advantage of the blackout to go on a looting spree. New York was in chaos, due to the general blackout and the ensuing rioting. Now was the perfect time for the Manhunters to step in and take control. But its next mission was not to assist in the New York takeover. The Manhunter High Commander had assigned the Iron Man robot a different task.

The Iron Man's robot new prime directive was to follow the Manhunters' will, as it had been for the entire two weeks since it had been taken by the Manhunters from its place at Stark Enterprises.

Two weeks before, the Iron Man robot had sat motionless in Tony Stark's workshop in the California office of Stark Enterprises. Radiation burns still covered the outside of the suit from the last time the robot had seen action, during the attack on Stark Enterprises by the Demolishers.* It had been deactivated till such time as Tony had time to work on upgrading it.

*(Iron Man #2)

Even though the robot had been left behind by Stark, it was still a magnificent machine. And, around midnight one night when Stark was away in Kunlong, a lone figure used her authorized access card to open the laboratory. Once inside, she proceeded directly to the Iron Man suit.

The rather pudgy woman pulled an amazingly sophisticated device from a small bag she was carrying. She pressed a series of key combinations and the device suddenly acted as a remote control for the robot, overriding the command directives Stark had programmed into it. The robot would now follow the commands of the Manhunters. Her work concluded, the intruder slipped away as quietly as she arrived.

One night, while no one was watching its particular part of the Stark Enterprises compound, the Iron Man robot switched itself on, got up, made its way past the security system that was designed to keep people from stealing it, and flew off into the sky. It joined a group of Manhunters who had gathered on the outskirts of New York City.

Now it was bound for Colorado, where it was going to help the Manhunters in an attack on NORAD, which had been planned by a Manhunter mole that had been working for the Defense Department for years. No one knew of his mission, and Iron Man's hero status would help the robot gain access to areas of the facility that no one else could.

In the Stark Enterprise offices in California, Tony Stark sat behind his desk and called Pamela LaPlante in to see him.

"Hello . . . Mr. Stark," Pamela said in a breathy voice. "You wanted to see me?"

Tony tried as hard as he could to maintain a professional tone. With the feelings that the two of them had shared, it was a leap backward to act like Pamela's boss again, instead of someone who loved her. It would hurt him deeply to have to have a verbal confrontation with one for whom he had such deep feelings.

"Pamela, you have been a great help to me these past weeks . . . the way that you helped save us both when we were with the Mandarin was truly commendable. The way that we have gotten to know each other is so special . . . "

Pamela was trying to remember to act like a lovelorn fool, but Tony was getting pretty corny. Even with her hatred of men, Pamela was becoming somewhat fond of him, and the things she was secretly doing to ruin Stark Enterprises hurt her too, just a little.

"But I have one concern. I received an e-mail the other day from a temporary who works in Accounting and . . . "

Tony had found out what she was doing, and earlier than Pamela had wanted to. Perhaps she could kill him with one of the plant-based toxins she carried around. A delayed-action toxin could be communicated via a passionate kiss, and would be enough to put him in the hospital and keep him off her trail. Pamela put her hand on her poison lipstick, and readied herself to use a spare moment to put it on.

Suddenly, Mrs. Arbogast, one of Stark's assistants, burst into the office.

"Mr. Stark! I'm sorry to interrupt, but there's something on the television that you should see!"

When Tony Stark saw the scene that an amateur cameraman had captured of an Iron Man-like robot fighting a bug-eyed hero, his jaw dropped. His company did not need this. In fact, it was not just an Iron Man robot, it was the one that Tony designed to replace him, the one that had been damaged in the fight with the Demolishers. Who had taken control of it?

It was too late to care now who had done it now, though. The damage was already done.

A few minutes later, Tony was trying to collect himself in his office. He did not know when there had ever been a time that so many things were going wrong at once.

Maybe if he sold Stark Enterprises right now to one of his fellow captains of industry, they could get things back in order, and Tony could get some of the pieces of his life back together. He knew of a few good people who could run the company almost as well as he could . . . as long as it wasn't Lex Luthor.

At that moment, the chiming sound rang that heralded a new e-mail message on Tony's laptop. He halfheartedly looked at the screen, and saw that Oracle was trying to contact him. Maybe Jim . . . maybe Oracle knew what was going on with the Iron Man robot.

Oracle requested that Iron Man join Batman and a new hero called Spider-Man in Gotham, a borough of New York City. Both of them had information on a new threat, the Manhunters, and Spider-Man had information about the Iron Man robot.

Perhaps some time in the Iron Man robot would help clear my head, Tony thought. He was into the armor and up in the sky in a matter of moments.

In a highly secure sub-basement in Lexcorp's New York City offices, Lex Luthor received a call on his cellular phone. Except for a slight drop in temperature, and the lack of windows, this basement office was just as plush as the ones upstairs. Tess, Luthor's secretary, sat at a mahogany desk in the corner of the office, working on a report that Luthor had assigned to her.

"Miss Isley. What a pleasure to hear from you, especially in light of the current disastrous blackout we are having." Luthor's expression changed to one of shock. "He what? He knows what? Are you sure that he knows?"

Luthor thought for a moment. The effort to discredit Tony Stark was in full force, and the Manhunters' use of the Iron Man robot was one of the final nails in the coffin. He just had to temporarily distract Tony Stark until things got worse, and then make his final move.

An agent that Luthor had not hired before, named Hawkeye, would probably do the trick. Along with Pamela's last act of sabotage, Hawkeye would help put Tony Stark in the exact position for Luthor to bring him down.

And he was already bringing Tony down further than he ever had been. Luthor just knew it, and this thought comforted him as he waited out the blackout in his underground hideout. He had to stifle what would have been an evil laugh. A chuckle at the fate of Tony Stark would have to do . . . for now.

On a rooftop in Gotham, an armored figure kicked in the landing program for his suit and joined two other costumed crimefighters. One of them, even through his spider-like costume, was obviously younger than the others.

He was a little on edge at the arrival of Iron Man.

"I'll have to ignore my Spider-Sense," the hero said. "I just fought somebody who looked just like you, but turned out to be a robot."

"I can vouch for him, Iron Man," said the other hero, Batman. Batman and Iron Man had worked together extensively in their superheroic identities, and had been friends long before either of them had become superheroes. Iron Man trusted Batman implicitly.

"I heard about someone parading around disguised as me," Iron Man stated. Iron Man had to think about whether or not he wanted to tell the other two heroes about the robot duplicate of Iron Man that Tony Stark had built, and decided to wait until he and Batman were alone before he would mention it.

Batman looked a little worse for wear. He had just finished helping to defeat Powerman, the rogue Super-Unit Policeman who had revealed himself as a Manhunter and had attacked his comrades. It had taken the combined forces of Batman, Batwoman, the entire Super-Unit Police, and the new hero Black Lightning, to defeat the robot. Batman pulled something from beneath his cloak.

"This belongs to the robot that attacked the Super-Unit Police in Chinatown tonight. Spider-Man was able to pick up a few fragments of the Iron Man robot that attacked him. If we put the pieces we have through a technical analysis, we might find some answers."

Batman looked out over the city. "I don't want to take too long, though. Batwoman, a new superheroine, is handling some of the riot control for me, but I don't like seeing my city in darkness and rioting."

"I don't think any of us do, Batman," Spider-Man replied.

"My Bat-Cave probably has the best laboratory we are going to be able to find around here. Let's hurry there, so we can figure this out."

Iron Man took off into the night, as Batman and Spider-Man made their way to the Batplane, which was waiting on the rooftop. The Batplane was capable of vertical take-off and landing. After the heroes strapped themselves in and put on helmets, Batman lifted the plane off into the sky.

When they arrived, Spider-Man was astounded at the computers and gadgets present in the Bat-Cave.

"Wow. I'm glad we didn't decide to go to my place. Look at all this stuff!" Spider-Man felt like a kid in a candy store.

"Don't touch anything," Batman advised in a fatherly tone.

Iron Man had placed the two fragments side-by-side in a lighted lab area. He held up the fragment from the Powerman Manhunter robot and analyzed it, both with the photoreceptors in his helmet and with the tactile receptors in his glove.

"Even without a component analysis, I can tell that this one was not designed anywhere on this Earth," Iron Man noted. "The level of robotics here is almost at the level of exact humanoid duplication, but with all-metal construction."

Iron Man held up the fragment that Spider-Man brought. "This . . . I built this . . . I mean Tony Stark built this."

"How do you know?" asked Spider-Man. Batman stood at the ready to interrupt Spider-Man should the younger hero try to compromise Iron Man's secret identity further.

"I know because I saw Tony Stark build this robot, and I've seen the technical diagrams. This robot attacked you?"

Spider-Man nodded his head, and Iron Man said nothing. Even behind his iron visage, Batman and Spider-Man both thought they saw Iron Man getting angrier and angrier.

Upon deeper analysis, the three heroes discovered that the similarity between the two scraps of robots was the overarching program that made them tick. Both of them had the same directive . . . that no man escapes the Manhunters!

"They took my boss's robot, and used him to make my company look even worse than it already does!"

Iron Man was about to smash a control panel, but he remembered that he was in his friend's lab that he was standing.

"Sorry . . . you know how I get when my technology is misused."

"We might have to bring in the entire Avengers League on this one," Batman said, with a touch of regret. "We need to shut the Manhunters down fast, and restore order to the city, before they take advantage of the distraction. J'Onn knows a lot about them, and their history . . . maybe he can help us."

In a series of caverns not far away from Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, a group of Manhunters were preparing to go into low-power mode, awaiting the moment the next morning when they would be called to action. The time for hiding was almost done; their agent inside the NORAD facility would take care of giving them access to the top-secret facility. One figure had just entered the cavern, and was using the heating circuits in his armor to melt the snow off. Two Manhunters had been assigned to guard the cavern entrance, and they greeted the newcomer.

"Greetings, 'Iron Man'," one of them said. "You are ready to play your part in our plan?"

"Yes, I am. No man escapes the Manhunters!"

"This unit refers to himself as 'I'," the other Manhunter commented. "Perhaps the programming was not entirely successful!"

"There is no time to reprogram him now. We must resume our powered-down mode, so that we will be at peak performance tomorrow!"

As the Manhunters went back into their suspend mode to conserve their energy for the midnight attack on NORAD, the Iron Man robot stepped into an alcove.

The Manhunter programming was dominant in the robot's memory, but it had not totally overridden the artificial intelligence that Tony Stark had programmed into it. Certain reactions to danger, to humans in danger, and to the presence of evil, were programmed to generate automatic reactions.

Chief amongst these reactions was an absolute loyalty to Tony Stark. This loyalty was something that not even the Manhunter programming could override, even with its alien complexity.

The Iron Man robot casually tripped a small, almost imperceptible signal that only Tony Stark's Iron Man armor could receive. The Iron Man robot then joined his powered-down comrades, with the tiny signal still transmitting.

At the Hall of Justice, the Avengers League Priority Alert came through. Quasar was manning the monitors, and quickly answered the call.

"Avengers League! This is Henry Gyrich! We need you to get your rear ends out to Colorado. We've received news from an unknown source that there's going to be an attack on NORAD!"

Batman and Iron Man had just arrived at the Hall of Justice. "We heard that," Batman said.

"And I have an idea who sent the message, though I can hardly believe who it is!" Iron Man added. "We've got to call the other members together and get out to Colorado!"

Continued in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. #11 and Batman #13 . . .
Next issue: Hawkeye vs. Iron Man! Lex Luthor's final maneuver!