Wolverine and Spider-Man Team Up to Fight Sentinels in Space

Wolverine is the best there is at what he does — but in this week’s Wolverine #40, he realizes he doesn’t have to do it alone. Ever since Orchis slaughtered the X-Men and forced most mutants off-world at this year’s Hellfire Gala, a lone Logan has spent months operating in the shadows. Orchis has threatened to kill ten humans for every X-Man they catch on Earth, so Wolverine has gone undercover, striking at the anti-mutant organization with help from his superhero friends. He hunted down his feral Wolverine clones with the Hulk, thwarted an auction of stolen mutant goods with Captain America, and then stole Orchis tech after interrupting a plot to mine Wakandan ore with Black Panther.

Outside Oscorp in New York, Wolverine recruits Peter Parker to help him infiltrate Orchis systems. He stole Jun Wei’s jet and plans to to pilot it to the Orchis space station, sneak aboard, breach their firewall, cut off their security channels, hack their systems, offload their data… and then, as Wolverine puts it, “Blow their station the @#$% up.” Star Wars-style.

Spider-Man opposes blowing anybody up, but agrees to use his high-tech Oscorp Spider-Man suit to link to the Orchis system, download the data, and uplink it to his suit’s mainframe. The plan almost works, until Orchis dispatches two Stark Sentinels. His cover blown, Wolverine navigates the jet as it comes under fire from the Sentinels and Orchis ships. Spider-Man’s webs seal the ship’s cracked hull, but they’ll only hold against the negative 450 degrees temperature of space for so long. And time is running out.

A science-minded Spider-Man figures out how to cling to an Orchis jet in space as Wolverine’s hijacked jet comes under fire. “Most of my life, I believed everybody was better off without me,” Wolverine thinks. “Alone’s where I belonged. But for all my hesitations about Krakoa, now that it’s been torn away from me… I’ve spent every minute fighting my way back to it. To them. I don’t want to be the last mutant standing.” Sentinels destroy the jet, sending Wolverine plunging into the cold, dark nothingness of space. As his adamantium-laced skeleton frosts over, a single blast from Orchis forces would shatter his body into a thousand pieces… ending him for good.

He’s rescued by Spider-Man, piloting a second stolen Orchis jet. The wall-crawler activates the autopilot and programs the ship to head to a desolate cornfield in the middle of Iowa, sending Orchis on a wild-goose chase while they jump ship back in New York. An Orchis Wolverine robot and Stark Sentinel follow the heroes back to Earth, but Wolverine and Spider-Man work together to dispatch the killer robots without any casualties. In the end, Wolverine realizes that he’s “nothing but a death machine without thestructure and support of others.”

“Nobody’s the best alone. If you’re not fighting for others… then what’s the fighting for?” Wolverine asks himself. His team-ups with Bruce Banner, Steve Rogers, T’Challa, Peter Parker — he’s been trying to recreate what he lost. A team.

Another ally, CIA Agent Jeff Bannister, transmits an encrypted message: Wolverine isn’t the last mutant standing. “There’s plenty of others hiding here among us,” Bannister writes, including members of X-Force. People matching the descriptions of Sage and Domino have been spotted. On the final page, Sage’s web-trawling algorithims pick up visuals of Wolverine in New York. And with that, Sage and Tom Cassidy are off to reunite Wolverine and X-Force.

Up next: Sabretooth War.