Land of the Morning Calm, my foot, Iron Man thought. Nearly a hundred feet below him, motorists screamed in terror as the suspension bridge they were trapped on swayed violently. Perched atop a stanchion at the bridge's center, Iron Man had a snapped support cable twisted in both of his scarlet gauntlets. Inside the red-and-gold Iron Man armor, an automated puff of cool air dried the bead of sweat threatening to roll into Tony Stark's eye. A laser beam inside the helmet fired a system status report onto his retina, and the news contained therein wasn't good. At the moment, he was the only thing holding this bridge spanning South Korea's Han River together, and the cars down there didn't seem to understand that he couldn't do it forever. Or maybe they were frozen in fear. In any case, they weren't moving fast enough. He estimated he could hold it together for another three and a half minutes before his servos called it quits, took their toys, and went home.

He blinked four times in rapid succession and the laser beam projected a list of options. The major systems in the armor were controlled cybernetically-he thought a command and the armor did it-but he had found it beneficial over the years to save CPU space by shunting the lesser used systems to the manual and voice command databases. In any event, he'd been wearing the armor for so long, knew the commands so well, that having to blink his way through a menu didn't slow him down at all.

Iron Man keyed the volume on his voice transmitters, and when he spoke, his digitally altered voice boomed up and down the length of the bridge: "Please move your vehicles off the bridge! Please move your vehicles off the bridge! I cannot hold it for long! Please move your vehicles!"

The words were barely out of his mouth before he realized his mistake. If he'd had a hand free he would have smacked himself in the forehead. He was in South Korea, and no matter that English was taught in the schools here, there were going to be plenty of people who couldn't understand him. He wracked his brains for any Korean he may have picked up over his years of industrial globe-trotting, and came up with one word that would probably do the trick.

"Kahrah!" he shouted. Go!

The curious and the stunned took notice of that. Slowly-painfully slow in Iron Man's estimation-they started to move. Most of them abandoned their vehicles, since traffic was backed up solid all up and down the length of the bridge. Iron Man watched them go, studying the new fault line that ran across the bridge's roadway and trying to figure out exactly what was going to happen to the structure when he let go. Tony Stark was one of the most brilliant men alive and engineering was his field. It didn't take him long to imagine a scenario. He saw everything: the way the roadway would cant downriver just before splitting in two like the pieces of a child's Hot Wheels track. Fully a quarter of this bridge was going into the river then, and Iron Man, for all his power and technology, could do nothing about it. He could only delay the inevitable.

Tony strained. The armor did what he did, so he had to pull with all of his might to get it to do the same. Tony was in good physical condition-twelve years running on Cosmopolitan's Top Ten Most Eligible Bachelors list had made that clear-but he wasn't sure he could sustain the effort for even the two minutes his servos had left.

He looked down. The sections of roadway he'd estimated were going into the drink were, remarkably, almost clear of civilians. There were still a lot of empty cars on the roadway, but frankly he didn't care much about that at the moment.

The whup-whup-whup of helicopter blades drew his attention to the sky. A fire fighter chopper hovered overhead. He'd been so absorbed in the effort of holding the bridge together that he hadn't even heard it approach. A firefighter was hanging out the side of the chopper, shouting something through a megaphone at him.

"Back off!" Iron Man shouted. "I can't guarantee your safety! Kahr-"

The sound of a whip cracking filtered through his aural receptors, and the cable in his hands-which had snapped at the bottom where it held the bridge together-rocketed up at the speed of sound. As Iron Man, Tony could move faster than that, but his reaction speed was still no more than that of a strong man in his early thirties. The snapped end of the cable struck him in the chestplate with the force of a crashing airplane, knocking him straight up into the air.

The world flipped for Tony Stark. The readout on his retina informed him that the impact had knocked the wind out of him, as if he couldn't have figured it out. The helicopter buzzed by on his left as he soared past it, and he was coherent enough to be grateful he hadn't knocked it out of the air in his uncontrolled ascent.

The blow had caught him off-guard, but Tony Stark was master of the machine he wore, and it took him only a second to roll into an upright position. He fired the jets in his boots and, in one graceful arc, swooped down toward the bridge. People were screaming again. Terror sounded the same in any language.

He had been right about the way the bridge would take itself apart. By the time he got under it, it had begun its tilt downriver, and the fault down its middle had started to grow. He angled under the roadway and positioned himself directly under the most extreme edge of the split. Placing a hand on either side of the crack, he routed all power to his boot jets and fired them straight upward. Every system he had complained at this rude treatment. The Iron Man armor was the most sophisticated machine on the planet, and its wearer became one of the most powerful beings in a world that boasted superheroes and demigods, but its jets were being asked to provide thousands of tons of lift, and as Tony watched, system upon system blinked out under the demands he was putting on them.

Surely the people had to be evacuated by now.

The firefighter chopper appeared. Maybe they couldn't communicate orally, but the Korean man hanging out of the aircraft's side knew the universal sign for "just a minute more". He stuck one finger out, keeping his eyes on the bridge above Iron Man's head.

"Come on, damn it," Tony said. Now sweat was getting in his eyes-he had routed the power for the air conditioner to his jets.

Above him, the bridge groaned. He thought he could hear his armor doing the same.

A final light flashed out in his helmet, and suddenly Tony Stark was plummeting with his armor several hundred feet to the river below. He heard the bridge crack asunder above him, but barely registered it as he blinked and thought his way through a series of commands to spread the little remaining power throughout his systems again. His jets flared to life fifty feet above the water, and he just managed to arrow out from under the chunk of roadway that was following him down. The tidal wave generated by its impact with the water was sufficient to knock him for a loop again, but he got enough of a glimpse before it hit to feel confident no one had been left on the collapsed roadway.

Then he heard the scream.

He looked up at the severed edge of the bridge and saw a single car teetering at the brink of the chasm. There were people still inside, people who, for some insane reason, had not escaped. In the moment it took him to digest this, the car toppled and plunged over the side.

Tony had no idea whether his systems could handle any additional strain-he was getting condition reds across the board just keeping his own weight aloft-but he shot off at an intercept trajectory. His gyros were off, and he had to keep compensating for the way his armor was tilting in its flight path. In the window of the plummeting car, he could see the freeze-frame terror on the occupants' faces.

He wasn't sure he was going to make it.

The gyros knocked him off course again and he corrected with a growl of frustration. The car was still falling, unsurprisingly. If he made it at all, he was only going to get one pass.

He put nearly every erg of power the armor had left into one final blast of afterburner.

And reached out...

"Tony!"

Tony Stark turned, grinning at the young man running up to join him. Johnny Ko was two or three years younger than Tony, and nearly half a head shorter. As he reached Tony's side at the top of the viewing stand, he took a moment to catch his breath, then returned Tony's luminous grin watt for watt.

"This is it."

"Sure is. You nervous?"

Johnny Ko scoffed, "Not at all. I have the utmost faith in our designs."

Tony stroked his goatee thoughtfully and peered across the mile or so of land separating the viewing stand from the launch pad. From here he could easily make out the Ju Che rocket, thrusting proudly into the sky. The tests they had run should have been more than sufficient to detect any bugs, but Johnny's nervousness must have been rubbing off on him: he was fidgety, almost expecting something to go wrong with the launch.

That wouldn't be so bad for Tony--as president of the Stark Solutions consulting firm, he was fairly certain his skill and expertise would always be in demand--but it might be crippling for South Korea, which had poured billions into the development of the Ju Che Satellite perched atop the rocket. Aboard the satellite was stowed some of the most sophisticated telescopic and sensory equipment ever put into orbit, most of it designed by the young Korean man at Tony's side, and the project had paid off in lots of media exposure for the economically ailing country. Experts had drawn direct relationships between the success of the Ju Che launch and the health and prosperity of South Korea's economy. It was a heavy burden to have to carry, and Tony knew that Johnny felt the pressure even more than he did.

"By the way," Johnny muttered at his side, "I heard your bodyguard had an exciting morning."

"You could say that," Tony replied. As far as the world was concerned, Iron Man was Tony Stark's bodyguard and nothing more. Few people knew the truth--that Tony was actually the one wearing the armor--and he wasn't about to disabuse Johnny of his belief.

"No telling how many people would have died if he hadn't been there," Johnny went on. "From what I hear, he managed to save everybody, even a car full of people that toppled over the edge when the bridge collapsed."

"From what he told me, that one was close," Tony elaborated. In the distance, a loudspeaker began to blast the countdown across the field. Tony looked away from the rocket and glanced around the platform. There were maybe two dozen people up here with them. The press and other interested parties had been kept off of the field until the launch was over.

"Is your father here?" Tony asked.

"No, but he sends his regards and his prayers of success."

Tony grunted. Johnny's father, Ko Yung Kil, had provided the startup money for the Ju Che project through his company, Morning Calm Inc., and had managed to coerce the strapped South Korean government into coughing up nearly a billion of its own money. Tony had been in-country for two weeks, modifying the rocket design and building radiation shielding for the delicate telescopic equipment aboard the satellite, and he had yet to meet the man.

There was a bustle behind them, and Tony and Johnny turned to see a Korean woman trying to mount the platform and being restricted by the guards posted at the top of the stairs, who she was dressing down violently in her own language.

"Who is that?" Tony asked. Whoever she was, she was beautiful--a shapely figure in an emerald gown, one side of her face covered by her velvety black hair. She glanced in Tony's direction as he watched her, looked him up and down, then turned dismissively back toward the guard blocking her path.

"My sister," Johnny laughed. "Pardon me a moment." He shouted something in Korean at the guards keeping the woman at bay. They looked around at him, then nodded and stood aside to let her pass. The woman finished mounting the stairs and stormed across the platform. When she reached Johnny, she threw her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek.

"Tony, you haven't met my sister, Meiko, have you? She works for my father at Morning Calm's corporate headquarters. She's a shameless vixen who never has time to call her baby brother."

"Well, maybe if you came out of the lab once in a while and let the sun shine on your face," Meiko said, not unkindly. She extended a hand to Tony, looking him up and down immodestly. "Mr. Stark, it's a pleasure."

"The pleasure's mine," Tony replied, taking her hand and kissing it. Over the years, he'd found the old lines and mannerisms were sometimes the best way to go.

"Well," Johnny said, severing the flowering romantic tension. "Here we go."

The countdown had reached its climax, and as Tony turned, a flare of orange fire ignited beneath the rocket. Slowly at first, then increasing in speed as it climbed, the Ju Che Rocket flew into the sky, arcing off to the west as it went. A short climb into the ionosphere, and the rocket would drop the satellite off in geostationary orbit. They had done it!

Cheers rocked the crowded platform. Johnny was embracing him and Meiko was showering kisses on her brother. Across the field in the opposite direction from the launch pad, Tony could see vehicles roaring toward them, probably full of reporters from two dozen different countries. Bring them on, he thought. Tony Stark was the media's darling, and right now, he felt ready to take on the world.

He spared one more glance for the disappearing rocket and its trail, then turned to face the approaching representatives of the fourth estate.

"The launch went as planned?"

"Yes, sir. The rocket performed beautifully. No unforeseen variations in its trajectory or flight speed."

"Excellent. The designs will serve us nicely then. Continue to monitor its flight until it detaches from the satellite module. Then I want a full analysis of its performance."

"Yes sir."

"And then... then we'll see if Tony Stark's technology can truly help us change the world."

Next Issue: "Morning Calm," Part 2