A costumed man with an eye-patch is very worried about a task someone is performing for him.
A bunch of kids at the alternate X-school (
Benjamin Deeds,
Goldballs (
Fabio Medina),
Tempus (
Eva Bell) and
Triage (
Chris Muse)) are watching a video of the original
New Mutants, including
Magik in her sunnier days. The current darker Magik fends off their questions.
Cyclops calls the 4 students for flight training, where they're joined by the 3 (surviving)
Stepford Cuckoos. Chris tries to find out about the New Mutants from Cuckoo
Irma. When they're in the air Cyclops hands control of the plane to Fabio. But suddenly they are attacked, and
Scott has to do a forced landing.
3 mercenaries, leader the robot bounty hunter
Death's Head, step out of a strange craft. The telepathic Cuckoos can't tell what they want, so Cyclops exits the plane and hits the mercs with his optic blast. The cyborg pair respond with heavy fire. Cyclops responds by getting Goldballs to fire lots of his solid golden balls at them, and tells Triage to call Magik and
Emma Frost for help.
But the mercenaries break in through the roof of the plane, so the students flee through the door. Cyclops fights a rearguard action, but is captured by Death's Head with a helmet projectile that latches on to his head and smothers his optic blasts. The trio make their escape with him in their spaceship, and Magik teleports in too late to stop them.
Death's Head and friends take Cyclops to eye-patch guy, and it turns out there's been a misunderstanding. He really wanted
Havok, and didn't know there were 2
Summers brothers. ("3 actually" points out Death's Head.)
DH refuses to go up against the
Avengers to get Havok, at least not for the money he's been promised. E-p guy refuses to pay for Cyclops. But the mercenaries just take the money anyway.
Emma Frost and Magik interrogate the 4 non-Stepford students, but don't get anymore than the Cuckoos were able to show Emma telepathically. She doesn't recognise the abductors, and decides to send Benjamin and 1 of the Cuckoos to infiltrate
SWORD, to use their database to identify them.
Benjamin Deeds and Cuckoo
Mindee get SWORD uniforms and IDs from somewhere, enter the SWORD ground base and get on a shuttle to the orbiting
Peak satellite along with several real young recruits. Ben excuses himself during their induction claiming to need a restroom, but really to find a computer terminal.
Along the way he
does run across a bathroom, currently occupied by a gelatinous alien. But eventually he locates a terminal in an empty room and searches the database until he finds a description match for Death's Head.
(Un)fortunately
Iron Man happens by at that very moment and recognises the face of the robot bounty hunter. Benjamin's chameleon power kicks in (he can't completely control it) which makes him look like
Tony Stark - but
Shellhead doesn't recognise his
own face.
Ben's mutant pheromones help make Stark believe that he's a real SWORD agent. And Tony offers to help him track DH down, because he knows his usual haunts. Benjamin accepts, much to the disgust of Mindee who's been following events telepathically.
The story continues in
IRON MAN SPECIAL #1.
Give that special marvelite a timely gift