HAWK:
HAND OF THE MACHINE
A Shattered Galaxy Novel
Van Allen Plexico
Copyright 2012 by Van Allen Plexico
White Rocket Books
www.whiterocketbooks.com
This one’s for Leesa
Portions of this book, in slightly altered form, previously appeared in Pro Se Presents in February and March of 2012.
Cover art by Rowell Roque and Atlantis Studios
They are not legends, my brothers. They are very real.
Or, at least, they were.
Once, ages ago, before the coming of the Adversary and before the Shattering, the galaxy was filled to overflowing with life—with multitudes of sentient races occupying every nook and cranny, from the depths of the core to the farthest-flung spiral arms.
That was the time of the Hands.
They were a part of humanity, born of original Earth stock, yet ever they stood above it. They strode among the stars like giants. Like the gods themselves.
Valiant Hawk. Rugged Falcon. Brilliant Condor. Fierce Shrike. Cunning Raven. And so many others.
And above them all, the lord commander of the Hands, mighty Eagle. A born leader, a master strategist, and an imposing physical specimen. He could outthink them all, except perhaps Condor; he could outfight them all, except perhaps Falcon; and he could out-plot them all, except perhaps Raven.
They served the great Machine that watched over and protected the galaxy. In that way, they served us all.
We loved them for it. Yes, and we feared them, too.
They were great and powerful, awesome in their majesty. And when their wrath was aroused, they could strike down upon their foes with a terrible, unrelenting fury.
They were the protectors of the galaxy. They were the Hands of the Machine. And they could do no wrong.
Or so we believed.
Even after the Shattering, when the Adversary was defeated and what remained of the galaxy at last knew peace again, some few of the Hands still lived, patrolling the depths of space.
And then something happened, and most of them went away.
But with the great Adversary defeated, what cared we that the Hands were vanishing? Our worlds were now safe. We had no further need for such powerful, mercurial, capricious guardians.
Or so we believed.
And so now, centuries later, as hints creep in from every corner of the galaxy that something—something dark and disturbing—is returning, we cry out for help. But our protectors, our legends, our gods—the Hands of the Machine—do not answer. We can only conclude that they are no longer there to hear our entreaties. We declare that they are all extinct—or else never existed at all.
Or so we believe…
PART ONE
After the Shattering:
The Nineteenth Millennium
1: Hawk
Hawk awoke naked and screaming in the heart of a shattered galaxy.
He sat up. Instantly a wave of sensations flooded his mind, threatening to drown him—to sweep him away into gibbering insanity.
As he rocked back and forth, moaning, he brought his hands to his head. Something dangled from his arms, he saw: tubes, thin and fluid-filled, attached by needles to his flesh, his veins. Eyes focusing slowly, he grasped them and ripped them out.
He wasn’t screaming any longer. In the few seconds since he’d awoken, he’d begun to sort through the layers of sensory overload and separate the various kinds of input he was receiving—light, sound, touch, taste, smell. The last two were strongest at the moment; a smell of smoke, thin but growing, in the air, and the taste of blood and metal in his mouth.
Warning, his instincts screamed at him silently. Be prepared to move!
The next sensation to penetrate his mind came via touch: the feeling of something cold beneath him. He realized he was sitting on the edge of a metal table of some kind. And that he was naked.
The world spun around him as he tried to look out at his surroundings. A sense of nausea crept up from the depths of his stomach, causing him to grip the cold table’s edge tightly with both hands.
Where was he? For that matter, who was he?
As his consciousness slowly emerged from the long dark in which it had lain, submerged, for so long, he found far more questions than answers waiting for him.
On top of everything now, though, was one single overriding sensation—the skin-prickling feeling of danger. Danger all around; danger everywhere. Even the sounds in the room—
Sounds. Yes. His hearing came back, filling his head with deafening sounds. What is that noise? Alarms, he knew then. Yes. Followed by, No more delays—move!
He pulled himself off the table’s edge and his bare feet smacked the floor. Unsteady at first, he wobbled, bracing himself by gripping the tabletop again. With his free hand, he rubbed at his sticky, itchy eyes.
His vision cleared then, and he immediately wished it hadn’t.
The room was filled with the mind-jarring swirl of flashing and pulsing lights; lights of every color imaginable. They washed the room in their painful glare.
Shading his eyes and squinting against the visual assault, he could just make out his surroundings. He stood at the center of a small, round room, surrounded by consoles and computers and medical equipment that would have seemed quite disturbing, if he’d had his wits about him.
Flashing lights, wailing alarms. Clearly something was terribly wrong here—wherever here was. But what was it that was wrong? Was it him?
Possibly, he understood.
Time to move.
His hands moved involuntarily to his chest and he pulled at the wires and tubes attached to him there. Then he looked around for something to wear, but found nothing that would serve.
Shrugging, he padded cautiously out of the room, into a broad corridor that was also washed in red glare. At the far end, a sliding door stood half-ajar. He ran for it.
Halfway down the hall, a new sensation came fully to his mind. It had been there all along, of course, but he hadn’t quite been able to process it. Now, its intensity ratcheting upward exponentially, it moved itself firmly to the forefront of his consciousness and made itself known beyond any doubt.
It was pain. Searing, blinding pain.
It sliced into his brain like a flaming brand and drove him to his knees. He clutched his head between his hands as he fell, wailing, his voice lost in the cacophony of alarms.
Within the pain, though, something was forming amid his jumbled thoughts; a tiny bit of rationality and order in the sea of agony and discord. As the pain at last receded, that which it had left behind emerged in its wake.
A memory?
Yes. A memory.
The pain had nearly vanished now and he found that he could focus. He turned his attention to this new thought that had risen into his awareness.
Part of the memory was a name, the other part a visual image.
The name rang clear and true in his head: Hawk. He allowed himself to taste it; to roll it around in his mouth along with the blood and the metal and say it softly aloud. Yes. It felt right. It was true. His name indeed was Hawk.
The image clarified into the outline of a vehicle—a spacecraft. He knew then with absolute certainty that a spacecraft was docked somewhere in the facility, waiting for him. Where?
He thought about that quickly, and it came to him that he possessed that knowledge, too—that he knew where to find it.
But why should he wish to? Was he supposed to go somewhere? Or—was this place simply too dangerous now? Had it been compromised by…by his enemies, whoever they might be?
The details, he decided, didn’t matter at the moment. All he truly knew—knew without
a doubt—was that he had to get out. For a number of reasons, none of them terribly clear to him at the moment, he knew had to get away from this place and get away now.
What he had until then taken for his own shaking, he now understood to be the floor itself vibrating violently. He ran.
As he sprinted through darkened, vacant corridors, Hawk allowed himself to wonder what kind of ship it would be, and how he would be able to fly it. For some reason, this thought didn’t bother him. He felt certain he would know how, when the time came.
The other questions—the much larger questions—lurked just out of reach, awaiting his full attention. They were the same ones he’d first considered when he’d awoken: Who was he? Where was he? What was going on?
Some mostly-submerged memory told him he had no time to spend dwelling on such impractical points; at least, not yet. Get clear, get away from this—from wherever this was, and from whatever was happening—and then worry about the big picture.
The floor under his feet vibrated again, shaking more violently than before. The walls, most of them seemingly carved from stone, were actually beginning to crack. The bundles of thick wires and cables and tubes that were bracketed to them at chest-height bounced up and down with enough force to rip some of them free and leave them dangling and swaying. Sparks sprayed out intermittently from junction boxes as he passed them.
On he ran, not encountering any other living beings along the way. By this time he felt as if he’d run more than a mile through the darkened maze, and all with no conscious understanding of where he was going. He trusted his instincts the entire way.
Instincts, as it turned out, would not be enough.
Rounding a corner, he ran nearly headlong into two figures—big, hideous, nightmarish figures—that had been coming the other way. As he brought himself to an abrupt halt and the two creatures did likewise, his eyes flashed across them, instantly registering the details of their appearance.
They were insectoid, tall and slender, with jet-black chitinous exoskeletons. Their heads, long and narrow and triangular in shape, shone with a scattering of blood-red eyes across the middle portion that seemed to glow. As they moved on their two sets of back legs, their bodies appeared to flow like a liquid, rearing up to a height of more than eight feet. Each of them raised its two front appendages in menacing fashion. One “arm” was rounded off at the tip into a sort of cylinder with an open end, and Hawk instinctively understood this to be a weapon. The other “arm” ended with a curved segment that angled to a sharp point; obviously a vicious slashing and cutting weapon that needed no further interpretation.
These were the enemy. As deadly and dangerous an enemy as could be imagined. This too Hawk knew not consciously but viscerally, as a gazelle knows a lion.
But Hawk was no gazelle. He didn’t run. Instead, he lashed out.
Moving with blinding speed and catlike agility, Hawk dropped into a crouch even as one of the figures was just beginning to raise its cylinder arm. Sweeping out with his feet, he took the legs out from under that one, then sprung upward and brought his fists into the midsection of the other.
A sharp pain bit into his left shoulder.
Leaping backwards, he saw that the first invader had managed to stab him with the tip of its dagger-like arm segment. Now it charged towards him, rising up to an even greater height, its deadly arm plunging forward.
Hawk ducked and lunged, the slashing appendage missing him by less than an inch as it plunged down. He grasped that rock-hard arm just above the bladed portion and twisted hard.
The creature emitted an awful cry and scuttled sideways, just as Hawk’s foot came up in a powerful kick. The triangular head snapped back and the creature dropped, stunned.
Still holding the dagger-arm just above the bladed portion, he spun about and drove the incredibly sharp tip into the chest of the other invader as it sought to rise.
Two savage chops with the flat of his hands and Hawk had sent both of the insectoids to the floor, severely injured if not dying. He found he somehow knew exactly where to hit them.
Hawk stepped back from them, not feeling the pain from his shoulder and only absently wiping at the blood running down his side. His heartbeat remained steady; he hadn’t so much as worked up a sweat.
Standing over the hideous creatures, he gazed down at them impassively, studying their long, sharp mandibles and glowing red eyes. He frowned. Somewhere deep within the mists that obscured his memories, a warning was sounding—had been sounding since he’d first seen them. Yes, he definitely knew these creatures, and he instinctively knew how to fight them.
And he hated them.
Why? Who were they?
A sudden fear sweeping through him, he brought his hands to his face. He moved them rapidly over the surface—inadvertently leaving streaks of blood across it—feeling the features, reassuring himself that he looked nothing like this grotesque creature. No—he was…human? That sounded right. Human.
Forcing his eyes away from the invaders and looking around, Hawk saw that he stood at an intersection of four wide corridors. The lights still pulsed and flashed in no discernible rhythm, creating a bizarre, funhouse atmosphere. He knew that he had to keep moving, but he found that for the first time he was unsure of which way to go.
Before he could decide, the clatter of approaching feet echoed toward him.
“There he is!”
Hawk looked up to see a trio of white-lab-coated medical/scientist types rushing towards him. They were humans like him, he noticed—even as he wondered why this would be an issue. Older, they were, and short in comparison to Hawk. Two were female. They halted in their tracks and gawked at him, startled by the streaks of blood across his face and down his chest. Then they looked down at his two insectoid victims.
Hawk remembered again that he was naked, but the three scientists seemed unconcerned about that fact. They looked back up at him.
“You did this?” the male scientist asked, his pale eyes shifting restlessly. He rubbed at his bald head and his thick mustache.
Hawk nodded. He was tense, his every sense heightened, his breathing low and smooth.
“Good. Your programming progressed that far, at least.”
“I told you a Hawk was the best choice, regardless of the…other issues,” one of the female scientists stated, her expression smug.
“It’s not as if we had many other choices available in the genetic vault,” the bald man snapped at her. “A Cardinal would scarcely have been of any real use now.”
“He’s been injured,” the other female pointed out needlessly. Her dark features were pinched into a frown and her white hair was tied up in a bun.
“Escort us to the escape pods,” the first female said, pointing with a fair-skinned if wrinkled hand, “and then we can tend to your wounds.”
“And upload the rest of your data when we reach the other base,” the dark-skinned female added.
None of this made any sense to Hawk. “What are those things?” he demanded, pointing at the insectoids he had fought.
“Skrazzi. Servants of the Adversary, of course,” the male scientist replied, frowning. “They have returned—they are attacking our base.” Meanwhile the two women exchanged worried glances, the meaning obvious: He doesn’t know.
“We must get you to the other base,” the man went on. “The attack disrupted your awakening process. There are probably numerous gaps in your—”
The floor shook violently, causing all three scientists to stumble against the nearest wall. A low rumbling sound echoed all around.
Hawk easily balanced himself on the balls of his feet and rode the quake out.
“They’ve blasted into the reactor system,” the fair-skinned female growled, her green eyes darting back and forth.
“More of them are coming,” the male scientist declared, studying the screen of a tiny device he clutched in one trembling hand. “We have to go. Now!”
“To the life pods,” the dark-skinned female cr
ied, pointing down one corridor.
“No,” Hawk found himself replying sharply. Then, before any of the three scientists could act, Hawk shoved his way past them and dashed down a different corridor, his bare feet slapping the smooth stone floor.
“Wait!” cried one of them—the man. “You are not ready! You have not yet been prepared for—”
The voice faded away and vanished into the distance, amidst the din of alarms and explosions. Hawk was not interested in the little scientist people or in what they had to say. One look at them and he’d known they were enemies to him—enemies almost as insidious as the black-clad raiders he’d dispatched. Besides, he now knew exactly where he needed to go, and it was not with them or to their “escape pods,” which promised no escape, only death in the void.
Why he needed to go there, he wasn’t sure. But the thought had come to him in a flash of insight, and he knew it was right.
Passing another broad intersection and continuing on a short distance, he reached the end of the corridor at last. There he confronted a dull gray metal door. A set of what looked to be controls for it were set into the wall to the right. No sooner had he begun to study them, however, than the sound of agonized screams echoed towards him down the long corridors. Screams that very abruptly stopped.
The scientists, he thought. I don’t believe they made it to their precious pods.
And now he could also hear the clattering of many hard feet on the smooth metal floor, coming from the cross-cutting corridor behind him.
He whirled and looked about. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.
Quickly he returned his attention to the door mechanism. Rows of colorful buttons and lights. He frowned; no instant solution was leaping from his fog-enshrouded brain this time.
The sounds of feet clattering on the hard floor were growing closer—much closer.
He leaned back into the wall as far as he could, out of direct line of sight of the approaching enemy, making himself as flat as possible.
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