Uncanny X-Men #98-100: Creating Sentinels Never Ends Well For You Personally

It's Christmas-time and the team is all having fun together in Manhattan, then split up to go do their own things (Kurt with Piotr, Scott with Jean, Ororo with Sean and Moira, and Wolverine bah humbugging off on his own).

While seperated, the Sentinels arrive! We finally learn what Project Armageddon was. Another attempt to use Sentinels to murder all mutants, starting with the X-Men. Lang is apparently a Trask fanboy, who also thinks both of the previous Sentinel scientific heads were killed by Mutants rather than dying to protect the world from the Sentinels. When will they ever learn?

Anyway, Jean, Banshee and Wolverine are kidnapped, while the rest of the team escapes harm. Additionally, while on vacation fishing out on the ocean with his friend Peter Corbeau, a guy who has to do with StarCore (a space station), and telling him about his dreams, Xavier is also attacked by Sentinels and captured.

As the captured trio try to make their escape, Cyclops is figuring out from Corbeau why he can't use Cerebro to find them on Earth: They aren't on Earth, they are in space! (this is said right as the trio break through the outer wall... oops.)

Corbeau uses his connections to get them a space flight up, they attack the base, Cyclops splits off while the rest of the team rescue Wolverine and Banshee. Then the new team finds themselves fighting... the Old X-Men team, including Cyclops! Except it really isn't and Wolverine sniffs it out, literally. They are machines imitating them.

There is a bunch of struggle, Lang ends up dying, and they move to escape. Except there is a hole in the side of the shuttle and the autopilot is out. Jean knocks out Cyclops and then has everyone locked in the shielded compartment in the back as she flies down during a solar flare while holding the radiation out with her TK.

As the shuttle is coming down and she is struggling, the comic ends...

X-tra Notes: I know technically the next comic concludes this arc, but it also starts the next one, so I'm including it in the next set. This is a great read. My boys the Sentinels are back (though not as powerful, it's even pointed out in the story by Cyclops, with Lang also saying he didn't get all the notes right), another maniacally fanatic anti-Mutant human villain in Lang, Old team vs New team (sort of) and the beginning of one of the most classic arcs in all of X-Men having its roots planted in this ending.