Hawk_Hand of the Machine Read online

  Raven somersaulted and struck with her sword, relieving two soldiers of their arms; they stumbled back, gurgling, blood spraying.

  One soldier had his sidearm out and started to fire. Shrike struck out with the flat of her hand, catching her man at the elbow. He cried out in pain and dropped the gun.

  “Alive,” she shouted to the surviving troopers. “I told you all—alive!”

  A heavily armored figure trotted up then, charging straight at Raven. Darts flew from guns built into his arms. Raven executed a ballet-like sequence of moves that resulted in every projectile missing her.

  The armored man shrugged off two blasts from her pistol, then extended his left arm. Raven lopped it off above the elbow.

  To his credit, he did not cry out; he charged again, three more soldiers coming up fast behind him.

  At that same moment, Shrike leapt from the floor up at an angle so that her feet touched the side of Raven’s ship. She sprang away from it, her momentum carrying her through the air such that she would pass just over Raven’s head, a pistol-like weapon appearing in her hand as she did so. She pulled the trigger but, instead of beams or projectiles emerging, a cloud of gas sprayed out.

  Raven swung her sword upward even as Shrike twisted in midair, the result being that she only sliced off a portion of Shrike’s pale blonde ponytail as she passed.

  That same instant, the bulky armored man struck again with his remaining arm.

  Raven sliced it off and took the heads of two more of the soldiers before the jets of gas from Shrike’s weapon at last caught her and sent her into oblivion.

  6: Hawk

  Hawk sat in a thick but worn cushioned chair and stared at his companion in puzzlement.

  Falcon had been standing there, just inside the doorway to Hawk’s compartment, for several minutes now, not moving a muscle. For his part, Hawk was reluctant to say anything—he wasn’t sure how much he could trust this Condor, and he wasn’t entirely sure how much Falcon trusted the guy, either—though it was clear that Falcon didn’t really trust anyone very much.

  Come to think of it, Hawk realized that he didn’t know where his own true loyalties lay now. At first, upon hearing from his ship about the purpose of the Machine and about his own role as a servant of that entity and a sort of policeman for the galaxy, Hawk had felt he could resume that job with no objections. But then he’d met Falcon, and the big cyborg had planted enough questions in Hawk’s mind with regard to more recent history that now Hawk was thoroughly confused.

  So, for now, he was playing it all by ear, doing what he felt was right from moment to moment and striving to gain a fuller grasp on where his loyalties and obligations should lie.

  Under the system of rank among the Hands, from what little he’d been able to gather so far, he understood that Condor outranked both Falcon and Hawk. That meant he should divulge everything he knew to Condor, and follow that man’s instructions rather than relying on Falcon’s somewhat questionable judgment, as he’d been doing since they’d first encountered one another.

  But various things Condor had said, coupled with veiled commentary by Falcon since their arrival here, had Hawk questioning Condor’s legitimacy—or at least his true agenda. It had, after all, been at least a thousand years since the Shattering; enough time for anyone to change who they were and what they believed in—and what they were willing to fight for.

  And so, all in all, discretion seemed the better part of valor, at least for now.

  With his ultimate boss, the Machine, no longer speaking to any of the Hands and apparently dormant for centuries, he felt justified in this approach. If the Machine came back online and demanded answers, he could simply explain that he had done the best he could, given his own lack of memories and the strange and uncertain loyalties of the Hands he had encountered since his awakening.

  Would the Machine believe him? Would that argument succeed, or would it get him killed and his model, the Hawks, eliminated again? Why had a Hawk been awakened in the first place, if the model was so bad—responsible for the worst betrayal in human history?

  So many questions yet remained, and they gave Hawk a terrible headache.

  And because of that, he saw no need to be in any hurry for his ship to regain contact with the Machine. In hindsight, Falcon had probably done the right thing by ripping the circuitry out.

  He looked over at Falcon again. The man still stood there, not moving. It was growing annoying, and Hawk started to say something. But then he realized that he was wrong—the man was not entirely still. There were movements—tiny, almost imperceptible movements—here and there. An eyelid flickering. A finger just barely twitching. A nostril flaring slightly. Almost as if it were all deliberate—as if it was some sort of code, or—

  …ever going to catch on, ever going to remember, you twit? How long do I have to stand here and do this, before you…

  Hawk almost, almost, reacted with a verbal exclamation as he suddenly discovered that he could understand what Falcon was “saying.”

  …figure it out? You are not only useless, but potentially a huge liability, apt to get us both killed, either by fanatical followers of the Machine or by this alleged Condor or…

  It all clicked. The portion of his mental “programming” that included physical motion codes snapped back into place all at once, and he found that he could easily understand what Falcon was trying to communicate to him.

  …by someone else. By the Above and the Below, you are so useless—

  Is that so? Useless? Would you rather still be facing the Inquisition on that planet where I found you?

  Ah! At last. Well—that only took three forevers.

  My apologies.

  Yeah. Anyway, here we are now. Okay. Several observations.

  You don’t trust Condor. You’re not even certain he is a Condor. And you know he’s not remotely loyal to the Machine, whether he is who he says he is or not.

  …Right. How did you know that?

  I’m not as stupid and useless as you think.

  Point to the Hawk. Next. I—

  You want to see what this big weapon artifact thing is, before we make any moves.

  Another point. You surprise me, Hawk.

  Thank you.

  Falcon considered for a moment, his tiny gestures ceasing. Then they started back up again, and Hawk could read, Clearly we aren’t going to do the bidding of this guy, just because of our old ranks with respect to the Machine. I don’t think of myself as working for it anymore, and I don’t think you do, either.

  Another issue for another time. But—no, I don’t see any reason why we should obey this man’s orders, whoever he is, and whether the Machine is still around or not, or whether its old military hierarchy still applies to us or not.

  Falcon allowed himself a slight smile at that news.

  Good.

  But, Hawk added, from what I’m remembering now, Condors are pretty powerful. If this guy truly is a Condor, or simply has access to all of a real Condor’s weapons and powers, I’m not sure we can stop him or resist him. Plus—you saw when we arrived—he has an army at his disposal, and a great big ship, and—you get my point, right?

  Unfortunately, yeah. Falcon snorted softly. But it’s two against one, so he’s screwed.

  Hawk suppressed a laugh.

  Okay, then, he sent by the code. You and I remain allies, at least for now. And neither of us cares for this Condor, so—Machine’s hierarchy to blazes—if we don’t like what he’s up to, we take him down. Permanently.

  I believe there’s hope for you yet, Brother Hawk, Falcon replied. Then he nodded once, turned on his heel, and exited the room.

  Hawk lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, knowing that he needed to get as much sleep as he could whenever such an opportunity presented itself—though he seriously suspected sleep would not be quick in coming now. There was just too much going on in his head—and a great deal of it seemed beyond his control. Even so, he knew he needed to rest. Thi
ngs had been interesting enough for him since he’d been brought into this life, and he had a sense now that they were about to get infinitely more interesting.

  Who’d have ever thought, he mused, that fighting eight-foot-tall insects with disintegrators for arms would represent the easy part of my first day?

  Then he closed his eyes, and sleep did finally claim him.

  And as soon as it did, another blocked memory broke free and floated to the surface. It came fully-formed to Hawk’s mind all at once, and he remembered—remembered that it had happened roughly two weeks prior to his solo mission to the governor’s palace on Scandana. Two weeks before the events that caused him to be labeled a traitor.

  He remembered very clearly. The planet was Cassimo; the objective, the imposing granite Fortress of St. Julian.

  And here is what he saw…

  PART SIX

  Before the Shattering:

  The Seventeenth Millennium

  —

  Cassimo

  1: HAWK

  Hawk stepped out of the still-steaming assault pod and gazed up at the towering granite edifice at whose foot he had landed. Shaking his head at the sheer size of his forces’ objective, he turned back and motioned for the soldiers behind him to climb out.

  As the Iron Raptors division, resplendent in their gray and black armor, moved around him and took up their carefully-planned assault positions, the assault pods of the Sky Lords began to land. So far, so good, he thought.

  “Falcon,” he called over the Aether connection. “Where are you, buddy?”

  “Coming in for a landing now,” replied the gruff voice of the demolitions expert.

  An uncomfortably short distance away, a pod crashed to the ground and its hatch popped open. The first figure to climb out was Falcon, his massive sidearm at the ready.

  Hawk watched him, expecting him to immediately begin sizing up the challenge that had been presented to him by the St. Julian Fortress. He did not do this. Instead, he turned in a slow circle, taking in the entire scope of the world he had just set foot upon, seemingly appreciating the planet he was about to wreak severe havoc upon. As Hawk watched him, he realized he himself had failed to do this.

  Have I become so accustomed to military campaigns on one planet after another that I no longer even spare a moment to look at the place? To see what color the sky is? What the air smells like? What the plants look like?

  Hawk put these thoughts aside, promising himself he’d think more along those lines later, and jogged over to Falcon’s pod.

  “What’ve we got?” the big man asked. “I’m assuming you’ve already scoped things out a bit,” he added, offering his friend a flat smile as armored troopers climbed out from the pod behind him.

  “A little,” Hawk replied. “It’s a granite fortress, five hundred meters tall. Built right up out of the natural rock of this plain.” He gestured around, taking the opportunity to actually pay a little attention to what it all looked like, as well as to the tactical situation. “They’ve got a force field surrounding the whole thing. Not just a dome where you can blast the generators from underneath, like on Rheinstadt.”

  Falcon nodded, and Hawk could see that he was already starting to focus more on the objective at hand, his shrewd engineer’s mind doubtlessly considering ways to remove that force field from their path—as well as whatever enemy soldiers might be within it—without overly harming the fortress.

  They had come here, to the distant world of Cassimo, on the very fringes of human-occupied space, in response to a frantic call from the planet’s colonial office—a call that was cut off midway through.

  It seemed the planet had been overrun by alien forces unknown in composition and in origin. Those aliens had somehow gotten through the defensive fields of the two main cities and occupied them without doing any visible harm, and then—even more surprisingly—had penetrated the defenses of the ancient stone fortress of St. Julian that towered above them now. Humans hadn’t built St. Julian; it had been there for a very long time when the first colonial ships had arrived a few centuries earlier. They had simply elaborated upon it, transforming it from a sort of plain-looking granite hive protruding from the otherwise flat local landscape to a gothic structure of power and personality, its battlements towering over the plains. In the process, they’d also vastly increased its defensive capabilities with the most modern of technology.

  It would be a tough nut to crack.

  Why the legions of the Machine were there to attempt to crack it at all was a convoluted story that had more to do with the invaders—whoever they were—than with the planet itself.

  Cassimo hadn’t been part of any human empire long enough to have established much of a population or even to have elected or otherwise chosen a planetary governor, but it was nonetheless considered valuable in future terms by the Machine. It was also seen as something of a test of humanity’s will: if Cassimo were allowed to fall to invaders without a fight, the chances that humans would defend any of the dozens of other frontier worlds along the fringe became less likely, and thus all of them would become potential targets to any nearby alien powers wishing to expand in their neighborhoods.

  Failure on Cassimo, in other words, could open humanity up to a whole new wave of warfare along the edge of its expanding sphere of influence.

  And so here we are, Hawk thought. About to fight for a planet that’s not really worth fighting for, against enemies unknown to us, who even now sit securely inside one of the most defensible positions in the galaxy.

  Hooray for us.

  “Looks like we’re going to have to do this the hard way,” Falcon was saying, a ’scope held up to his two hazel eyes. Carefully he studied the texture and form of the energy field that stood between them and the fortress. Then he looked beyond to what could be seen of the granite edifice itself. “I don’t see any other way.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that,” Hawk said.

  Falcon lowered the device and looked at his friend and colleague.

  “I’ll get the breachers set up. You ready the troops.”

  Hawk nodded.

  “Will do.”

  A short time later, Falcon called over the Aether connection to report that the field-breachers were in position.

  Hawk, having strapped on a lift-pack, popped the wings out and shot into the sky, taking a quick visual measure of the state of deployment of his forces. He was pleased with what he saw. To his right, rank upon rank of Iron Raptors awaited the signal to advance. To his left, the Sky Lords had finished donning their own lifters and were quickly deploying into their prearranged positions.

  “All set,” Hawk reported to Falcon. “Ready when you are.”

  Falcon’s only response was to activate all three field-breachers at once.

  The overcast midday of Cassimo erupted with bright blue light as the machines he had set right up against the defensive field came to life, each of them spewing out energies at a frequency and wavelength perfectly tuned to counter the field.

  In each of the three spots where the breachers now operated, holes some thirty meters across opened in the enemy force field.

  “Go!” shouted Hawk. “Advance!”

  The Iron Raptors rushed forward as quickly as their armored bodies could allow, their first ranks moving through one of the points of entry and into enemy territory. The Sky Lords lofted into the air and zoomed through the hole nearest to them, spreading out quickly on the other side.

  Bright, blinding energy weapon discharge erupted immediately, signaling that the attackers were meeting stiff resistance already.

  Hawk decided to remain in his current position a little longer, so that he could see the full scope of the engagement and determine if adjustments needed to be made.

  Several minutes passed and most of their forces had passed through the breaches in the field. Advancement slowed across the short expanse of plain that lay beneath the outer walls of the fortress as enemy resistance increased. Hawk was consid
ering his options and about to contact Falcon for a report when a deep, rumbling voice came to him from below.

  “I would say you have things well in hand.”

  Hawk started and looked down.

  “I assume you’re about to join the festivities yourself,” the voice added.

  Hawk grinned and lowered himself gently down onto the plain alongside the newcomer.

  “That’s where I was headed, yes,” he said. “Come to join us and get your hands dirty?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” replied Eagle.

  The blond-haired commander of the Machine’s forces grinned back at his comrade and raised a massive quad-barrel blaster strapped to his left arm.

  “And I brought party favors, too.”

  Hawk laughed. “Those are always welcome.” He gestured toward the nearest entry hole. “After you, sir.”

  Eagle’s grin was now almost predatory. “Thank you, good Hawk.”

  He took two steps forward and then froze.

  Hawk, striding across the smooth and damp soil surface, realized quickly that his commander was not with him. Turning back, he saw the big man in dark blue standing still, his gaze directed upward and distant. Puzzled, Hawk started to ask if something was wrong. Then he realized the man was having a conversation—and an urgent one, no doubt—via the Aether connection.

  “You coming?” Falcon called over Hawk’s own connection. “The water’s fine.”

  “One moment,” Hawk replied. He was growing a bit concerned. For one thing, the conversation was going on far longer than most of Eagle’s usual communications, which tended to consist of him issuing orders in direct and succinct fashion. For another, the commander’s expression had darkened considerably—and Hawk didn’t like to think about things that could trouble the mighty Eagle.

  “Hawk? Everything okay?”

  “Apologies, Falcon,” Hawk transmitted. “The big guy is here. Give me another minute.”