Hawk_Hand of the Machine Read online

  His objective was Lord Darwyn Merlion, chief advisor to Ludon Kail, the planetary governor of Scandana. By the purest chance, an encrypted transmission from Merlion had been intercepted by the Machine and decoded. Its contents were shocking: Merlion was providing ultra-sensitive technical and defense data to some outside entity. For whom the data was meant, no one could say—nor could they say if the governor himself was involved. But it was obvious beyond any doubt that Merlion at least had come into the service of a foreign power.

  Because Merlion had control of both the planetary military and defense network and the quite formidable defenses of the royal palace, and in order to cause as little damage and disruption as necessary to the people and the infrastructure of Scandana, the Machine had ordered Eagle to launch a small, surgical raid on the palace—one that would result in Merlion being captured alive for interrogation.

  Eagle had agreed and, given the wounds he had suffered in their recent operation on the planet Cassimo, had ordered Hawk to carry out the operation in his stead. Hawk was delighted by the assignment; it sounded to him both challenging and fun.

  “You have a very strange notion of ‘fun,’” Falcon had replied when Hawk had confided his enthusiasm for the mission. In return, Hawk had just shrugged.

  Now he raced across the stone rooftop, only steps away from the doorway that let into the palace.

  That was when the murderous crossfire nearly cut him in half.

  Thousands of miles above Scandana, the flagship Talon orbited in full stealth mode.

  “He’s down,” Falcon reported a few moments earlier. “On the roof. So far, so good.”

  Eagle said nothing. Gazing at the holo display floating before him, he might as well have been a statue—a dark-blue-clad statue of a particularly wrathful deity of some ancient warrior-race.

  For several seconds neither spoke, and the only sound was the soft murmur of the other dozen or so crew members moving about as nondescriptly as possible. Seasoned professionals all, they did their jobs in near-silence and otherwise stayed out of the way of the mighty Hands they served.

  Then Falcon cleared his throat and emitted the faintest, “Hmm.” Frowning, he leaned closer to the display screen in front of him.

  “What is it?” Eagle asked, his voice soft, his expression unchanged.

  “Starting to detect some kind of electronic interference around the palace,” the man in red reported.

  “Jamming? By the governor’s people?”

  “Maybe. Can’t tell yet.”

  Eagle nodded slowly. “Keep an eye on it.”

  “Right.” Falcon touched a series of controls and send a string of mental commands through the Aether into the system, flagging key indicators. Then he sat back in a heavy, reinforced swivel-chair and slowly turned to face his commander. “So,” he said, pursing his lips, “this is all good, then, isn’t it?”

  Eagle turned his head slightly and regarded Falcon, waiting.

  “This kind of mission, I mean,” he continued. “Being proactive. Going after potential problems—or potential traitors—before they can cause even bigger problems.”

  Still Eagle remained silent, merely looking at him.

  Falcon shrugged. “Guess I’m just glad to see the Machine being a little more aggressive in enforcement and intervention.” He watched Eagle for the space of a few more seconds before turning back to the displays.

  “You don’t feel we are violating the rights of Governor Kail,” Eagle rumbled then, unexpectedly, “by staging this covert insertion into his palace?”

  “No.” A pause, during which time it was obvious Falcon had more to say on the subject. Then, “Maybe.” He snorted, glancing back over at his commander, and settled on, “I don’t know.” He allowed a slight smile to cross his lips. “And don’t much care, really. Just want to root out the bad guys.” Now he did smile. “And happy to see the great Machine that gives us our orders feels the same way.”

  Eagle took this in and appeared to consider it for the briefest of moments. Then he turned back to the holo projection, his eyes narrowing to the point that the blue was almost entirely obscured.

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  The word hung there between them for all of two seconds before the entire conversation became forgotten: Hawk was signaling them.

  “I’ve run into a little bit of trouble,” he said, his voice distorted with static. “Nothing I can’t handle, though. Stand by.”

  Falcon regarded Eagle, a slight degree of concern evident on his features.

  Eagle remained stone-faced.

  Together they waited.

  Hawk had dropped and rolled the moment the energy-weapon fire had lashed out at him, scoring still-smoking streaks along the hard rooftop surface. Coming up quickly, he snapped his head around, surveying the entire field before him in only an instant. Then he rolled again, scrambling behind a piece of equipment that might have been some sort of air conditioner unit.

  He’d seen nothing. His attackers had not been visible.

  Now that, he knew, could mean any number of things, some of them worse than others. Were the people who were shooting at him simply very-well concealed… or were they actually invisible?

  He needed to know the answer to that question, immediately.

  “Okay, guys,” he called. “Let’s all take a breath here. I’m a Hawk—a Hand of the Machine. Duly authorized under all interstellar treaties and agreements to be here and—”

  Another barrage of blasts came his way, this time nearly taking off his left ear. He drew back, out of this new line of fire, cursing under his breath because he still hadn’t seen whoever was shooting at him.

  “Okay, fine—I get the sense that you people aren’t too big on the niceties of interstellar law. That’s fine. Just allow me to return to my ship, up there in orbit, and we can send down the lawyers to—”

  More blasts, drawing even closer to him. Hawk growled deep in his chest and drew his pistol. After a quick and mostly cursory check of the barrel that fired bolts of pure energy, he switched to the underneath one—the barrel that fired projectiles. He wasn’t generally as fond of that part of the weapon, but he had to admit that, on occasion, it had its uses.

  Switching out the ordnance that was loaded into it for something that he believed might prove a bit more useful at the moment, he snapped the weapon closed again and, taking a deep breath, leapt out of concealment.

  The shots just missed over his head as he rolled.

  He came up, instantly assuming a shooter’s low stance, and fired. From the projectile barrel, he fired—over and over.

  A woosh. Another woosh. Another and another.

  A smack. Another smack.

  Two human shapes stood partly revealed now, directly in front of him, covered across their torsos in bright yellow paint. They both were looking down in surprise—if not outright astonishment—that they had both been hit and yet neither had been hurt.

  “The paint’s not what gets you,” Hawk informed them—just before he leveled his pistol again and fired two very quick and deadly energy blasts directly into each of them.

  Falcon looked up from his musings as the speaker linked to the Aether connection crackled to life.

  “Okay, I’m inside,” came the nearly-garbled transmission from Hawk on the top of the palace. “The locks on the door were a joke. Entering the main level now.” He paused. “Aside from the two guards on the roof, so far, I haven’t seen anyone.”

  Falcon frowned at this. He shot a quick look at Eagle, whose face indicated incomprehension as well.

  “Say again, Hawk,” Falcon transmitted. “You say you haven’t seen anyone? Anyone who?”

  “Anyone,” Hawk replied simply. “Anyone at all.”

  Hawk raced across the broad antechamber just outside the governor’s main receiving hall. Marble columns towered overhead, beneath a high, ornately carved, arching ceiling all of cream and gold. Centuries of history looked down upon him as he traversed the chamber.
Vulnerable as he was, exposed like this, he just hoped that was all that was looking down on him at the moment.

  The two huge, golden doors sealing off the main hall were unguarded. Hawk found this to be the most troubling development yet. Guards should be manning that post at all hours of the day and night.

  He walked up to the doors, then paused and looked around again. A cry sounded from the distance, somewhere behind him, causing him to whirl about.

  A woman was racing his way down one of the long side-corridors. She wore the white jumpsuit uniform of a member of the palace staff—probably a maid or kitchen worker. As she stumbled up to Hawk, he reached out and grasped her by the arms. He saw then that they were bloody, as from dozens or hundreds of cuts that covered them. Her eyes, when they flashed his way, were bloodshot and wild.

  “What’s the matter?” he demanded. “What’s happened to you? What’s going on here?”

  She gaped at him as if he were the devil himself, recoiled backwards and tried to pull away.

  “It’s okay,” he almost shouted at her as she fought him. “I’m a Hand. A Hand of the Machine. See?” Mentally he triggered the transformation of his uniform from its stealth black-and-gray to its standard metallic blue-and-red.

  The only effect was that she shrieked again, even louder, and tore herself free. Spinning about, she dashed away in the direction of the main entrance.

  Hawk watched her go. He could think of no good reason to try to restrain her, to tackle her—and clearly that’s what it would have taken to stop her mad flight.

  The woman had been hysterical, verging on insane. That much had been quite clear. And something here—some unknown force acting in this palace—had caused that, he knew.

  Turning back in the direction he had been moving, he reached up and pushed at the partially-open double-doors. Cunningly balanced, they swung easily open. The huge hall lay before him. He walked inside.

  The room was shaped like the nave of an old Earth cathedral, and at least as huge—at least fifty yards wide and twice that long. Brightly-colored banners and tapestries covered the walls. The arched ceiling soared far overhead.

  Hawk strode down the center aisle, his boots making an unexpected crackling sound on the cream-colored marble tile. Puzzled, he gazed at the floor, wondering what he was stepping on. Then, frowning, he pulled the glove from his right hand and bent down. His fingertips brushed the cold surface.

  Ice. The tile was covered over by a thin layer of ice.

  He realized then that the temperature in the hall had dropped noticeably even in the short time since he had entered. His uniform was easily compensating, warming him, but the trend was continuing—the air was becoming frosty as he breathed.

  Standing, he gazed toward the far end of the room, and there he could make out various multicolored shapes lying on the floor all around the raised dais that held the planetary governor’s seat. His eye implants adjusted quickly, zooming in, and revealed to him that the shapes were actually people—men and women—lying motionless on the cold floor.

  Were they all dead? Could that be? And—why?

  He sprinted the remaining distance and then stared about in horror.

  “Eagle. Falcon,” he sent mentally over his Aether link, even as his eyes swept the horrific scene before him. “Do you read?”

  No response.

  “Hawk to the Talon,” he repeated, more insistently. “Eagle. Falcon. Please reply.”

  Nothing.

  He ordered the micro-relays in his uniform to switch momentarily to standard radio wave and route the signal to the tiny audio implant in his left ear, but was punished for this action by a blast of static that would have nearly deafened him if his own internal processor interface hadn’t instantly kicked in with a firewall block.

  Switching back over to the Aether, he routed extra power to the signal. The only result was that he could mentally “hear” a low hissing and popping; a sort of thought-wave static. He cursed. Either both his Aether connection and his radio link were malfunctioning, which was almost unheard-of, or everyone aboard the flagship was napping all at once.

  Of course, a third possibility existed as well. Someone could be deliberately jamming him.

  But how could such a thing be possible? Radio waves were one thing, but the Aether link used by the Hands of the Machine operated by briefly routing a hyperwave signal into the Above, both expediting its speed and boosting its strength. Who could be able to jam something like that?

  And yet no one aboard the Talon was answering.

  He shoved that problem to one side of his mind and returned his attention to the scene around him. The sight of it still caused him to stagger backward a step and nearly fall.

  The bodies that filled this entire end of the governor’s hall—dozens of bodies, male and female, slumped over their seats limply or lying sprawled on the tile—were most assuredly dead. Every one of them. That much was obvious.

  Hawk made no effort to assist any of them. Clearly there was no point. For there was something else about them—something far more disturbing than the simple fact that they were dead.

  “By the stars,” he whispered.

  Their heads were missing. Every single person in the room had been decapitated.

  He stared all around.

  “How could this have happened?”

  He shook his head slowly in astonishment. He felt as if he needed to sit down, but his instinct for duty was too strong. He stood there a moment longer, looking all about, taking it all in, trying to process what he was seeing. Then he was in motion again, walking around, through, and past the bodies.

  There was no blood. It was as if something had cauterized the cuts instantly. Somehow, for Hawk, this made the grim tableau even more disturbing and horrific.

  He reached the dais, all the headless bodies behind him now, and hurried up the low steps. The governor’s chair, as much a throne as anything, stood before him. Thankfully, it was empty.

  Broad and grim and black as though wrought from pig iron, the chair recalled the grimmest of monarchical seats on old Earth. Its back towered some twenty feet high and its interior surface was covered with lush and vibrant red cushions. Hawk ignored it entirely, for something else had caught his attention now: a slight crackling in the air; a very localized disturbance in the electromagnetic spectrum. He had no idea what to make of that, but then he noticed that his Aether connection buzzed just slightly louder as he moved into the area of the disturbance. Following it as if it were a homing beacon, he walked around the throne and behind it to where the dais met the rear of the room. The wall it touched was of smooth gray stone, with no doorways visible. Hawk knew how these facilities were generally designed, though. He switched his visual implants to scanning mode and quickly located the hidden seams that indicated a doorway. Reaching out, he ran a hand along the line. When his fingers touched the right spot, the door soundlessly slid aside and revealed a dark opening in the wall. The light of the hall served only to illuminate the first few steps of a stairway winding down into a sudden and overwhelming blackness. The buzzing and crackling in his ears and his implanted senses grew louder.

  “Falcon? Eagle? In case I’m getting through to you somehow—I’m going into a hidden chamber beneath the governor’s receiving hall.”

  Still nothing in response. Frowning, Hawk glanced back one last time at the headless bodies littering the room. Then he stepped forward into the darkness.

  A few minutes earlier, aboard the Talon, Eagle had stalked over to the nearest communications officer and barked, “Why are we no longer receiving his signal?”

  “Some kind of interference, sir,” the blonde woman answered, not cowed by the sheer brutal force of Eagle’s frustration made manifest.

  “Interference—of the Aether connection?” Eagle scoffed. “How can that be?”

  “Is such a thing even possible?” Falcon asked, looking up at his primarch from one of the forward tactical stations he was currently occupying. “I�
�ve never heard of it happening.”

  “Nor have I.”

  Falcon strode to the communications station and leaned in close to the officer there.

  “You will continue trying to contact Hawk, and will alert us the moment the connection is restored.”

  “Of course, sir,” the woman replied.

  “In fact, patch the Aether frequency into the bridge audio. Let’s actually hear what we’re receiving.”

  She did so. Immediately a soft hum filled the bridge. It matched what they had been able to detect over their mental Aether interface with the ship.

  “That’s all we’re receiving, sir,” she told Falcon.

  “Continue working at it,” he said. “And in the mean time,” he added, “you will invent such technology as necessary to penetrate this blasted interference.”

  She looked up at him, eyes wide, only to encounter a half smile and a twinkle in the bald warrior’s eye. Suppressing her own smile in return, she nodded. “I will do that, sir, yes.” Then she returned her attention to her console, redoubling her efforts.

  Eagle clasped his hands behind his back and moved to the center of the bridge. His massive chin angled slightly upward, he gazed out at the blackness that filled the viewport, then down at the brown-white landscape far below. The Talon was in geosynchronous orbit so that they would remain stationary relative to the capital city and the governor’s palace complex; even so, it was scarcely visible from so far away.

  “I don’t like this,” he rumbled at last.

  “Nor I,” Falcon agreed. “It has to be for a reason. Someone is covering something up.”

  Eagle pursed his lips at this, but offered no comment either way.

  Long seconds passed. The communications officer worked at her station. Only low static continued to flow from the bridge speakers.