He was on his feet and moving even before the glint of light off weapons barrels shone through the opening doorway. He didn’t rush to confront them—not at all. Instead he moved quickly toward the rear of the bar, aiming for the kitchen doorway and escape out the back.
His pursuers had anticipated this, of course. Men with guns were filing in through that door, too.
He stopped, standing stock-still, as soldiers came at him from both directions and formed a broad circle around him.
They were local Church troops, he could tell; probably the best the Inquisition could pull together on such short notice. They wore brown fatigues marked heavily with the flame-within-a-circle symbol of the Church and the Inquisition. They carried a variety of small arms.
Falcon waited, standing there at the center of the room. The other customers realized quickly what was happening—what was about to happen—and fled, many of them leaving their personal belongings behind in their haste to scramble past the soldiers and out the front doorway.
The troops had eyes only for Falcon. They ignored the departing throng and glowered as one at him, guns in hand. There had to be more than dozen of them; perhaps twenty in all.
“Surrender, heretic,” one of the Church soldiers demanded then. “There are many of us, and you are unarmed. Come with us. Now.”
Falcon’s natural eye glinted in the pale light. He slowly and deliberately moved both of his arms away from his sides, hands open, and peered back at the man who had spoken.
“You’ve been misinformed,” he told the soldier. “Who ever said I was unarmed?”
Two gunmetal gray pistols dropped from the sleeves of his brown robes into his waiting hands. He leveled each of the weapons at the same instant—one pointed forward, the other behind him—and opened fire. Even as he did so, he lurched forward, falling beneath the level of the table at which he’d sat.
In the first split-second, four Church soldiers were struck by slugs from his pistols and began to crumble to the floor. In the next, the remaining soldiers opened fire. Unfortunately for them, they had not been sufficiently trained in combat within such close quarters, with friendly forces directly in their line of fire. Each side managed to take out half of the other side before their commander, screaming maniacally over the weapons discharges and cries of pain, managed to get them all to hold their fire.
By that point, Falcon had slipped past the battalion in front of him and leapt through the open front door, out into the street.
He started to his feet again quickly, guns at the ready. The surviving soldiers inside the cantina were still in the process of extricating themselves from one another and had not yet exited in pursuit. But before he could fully stand, a blow struck him hard to the side of the head—the more human side—and he tumbled over with a grunt.
“He is here!” called the voice of the one who had struck. “Here!”
Falcon rolled over and gazed up.
The Inquisitor stood over him, robes flaring, a malevolent expression on his face. In his right hand he clutched a sort of golden scepter—clearly, the object he’d used to strike Falcon. He was waving his other hand at the soldiers, who were now filing out of the cantina in pursuit.
“Heretic! Fraud! This will be your end! My men will slaughter you!”
Falcon leapt to his feet in a move remarkably nimble for such a big, bulky figure.
“Let them try,” he growled. And with a shove he sent the slender man to the ground, then raced down the street.
Bullets and energy blasts zipped around and past Falcon like angry bees. He ignored them as he directed one pistol back behind him and fired two quick shots. The two nearest soldiers of the Inquisition dropped, dead. Reholstering his gun, he came to the building he had been seeking and dashed through its open front door.
The Inquisitor was back on his feet and screaming at his soldiers to pursue. They appeared to be increasingly reluctant to do so, however; more than a dozen of them lay dead now, and the survivors were having clear second thoughts about hurrying to confront this foe. But after a barrage of threats and warnings, the remaining dozen or so troopers in their brown uniforms rushed through the doorway into the building Falcon had entered.
The Inquisitor stood there in the middle of the street, waiting.
He did not have to wait for long.
A mere moment after the last of the soldiers crowded through the door, the building exploded in a conflagration of fire and sound. The Inquisitor was swept from his feet and hurled backward across the street, impacting the wall of the building behind him. Flames gutted out in every direction as the building collapsed and disintegrated, destroying everything and everyone that had been inside it along with it.
For nearly a minute, the Inquisitor couldn’t move, couldn’t think. He lay there, head spinning, staring up at the sky. Then a voice rumbled down to him. It was jumbled and incoherent to him, seeing as how his head was still ringing, but it gave him something to focus on. Shaking his head to clear it, he sat up and looked for the source of the words.
Falcon stood over him. His brown robe had been cast aside, revealing the red and blue uniform beneath it. Bionic implants shone through in a number of places. Pistols hung in holsters at his side. The red light of an artificial eye flickered. In his hand he held a small device—the detonator for the bombs he had planted earlier.
“You…you are…a Hand,” the Inquisitor gasped, taking in just what he was seeing. “Truly you are!”
Ignoring him, Falcon reached down with a rough, calloused hand. The Inquisitor flinched, but instead of assaulting him, Falcon grasped the golden scepter the Inquisitor had carried. He lifted it, studied it momentarily, and then almost casually he brought it down across his bent knee, snapping it in half.
“Relax,” he intoned, his eyes moving from the stunned Church man to the blazing ruins across the street. “I’ve about had my fill of this planet. I’ll be moving on now.”
He tossed the two broken pieces of the scepter down onto the slender, scowling man.
“And leaving you in peace.”
He gazed one last time at the fire roaring nearby—a fire that had consumed the remaining half of the Inquisitor’s troops. Then he turned and walked slowly in the opposite direction.
“Which is more than can ever be said for me,” he muttered softly to himself.
5: HAWK
Hawk sat back in the flight seat and inspected his newly-located pistol, while listening as his ship filled him in somewhat on his own life story.
He was already feeling more confident, more in control of his mind and his body. He still deferred to the ship for information and advice, but his natural tendency as a Hand was asserting itself—he was the master here, and the vessel merely his mechanical assistant. Now that he knew this, he felt he had his feet under himself at last.
And indeed he was a Hand, he understood now. A Hand of the Machine—the great artificial intelligence which had been built ages ago in some secret and long-forgotten location by the most advanced faction of the human race. In the years before the Adversary had attacked with his vast hordes, the Machine and its corps of Hands and other officers and specialists had commanded mighty fleets and armies that kept the peace across the galaxy, working in concert with some forces, against others, but always in the interests of law and order and justice.
Then came the Adversary, and everything had changed.
As the enemy’s mighty forces had advanced from star system to star system, enslaving and destroying all before them, the Machine had kept up the fight, continuing the war even after all the vast star empires were swept from the skies by the black hordes of the Adversary.
The apocalyptic battle had finally come, the ship had explained. Wave after wave of enemy ships had struck the defenses of the great races. In numbers uncounted and uncountable they came, and the clash went on and on for months, for years—perhaps for centuries. And at the end the great enemy had been defeated, or at least driven utterly away. The hostile alien races in
his thrall were mostly crushed, their holdings reduced to isolated little star empires. He himself had vanished. But at such a cost: the great star empires that had resisted him were forever smashed, broken, their starfleets annihilated, their planets and suns exploded and left as burned out cinders wandering blindly and erratically through the dark and icy void. And their galaxy itself was shattered; to its core, it was shattered. It was naught now but the corpse of a formerly thriving organism, slowly dying, its dead suns and broken worlds tumbling into darkness.
But within that corpse life still clung, still endured.
Some of the younger races, having failed because of their much less advanced technology to draw the full attention of the Adversary during the war, matured within that shattered galaxy and moved further out into space, creating their own fledgling spheres of influence. Others slowly recovered what they had lost, and began to assert their dominance again.
Humanity was chief among those, and its surviving colony worlds had grown into a number of squabbling and competing empires scattered across the remains of the galaxy, in the spots where life was still possible.
Clashes among the colonies were inevitable over time, as were wars with the other races that humans encountered. Chaos and catastrophe reappeared within the galaxy, and spread—now entirely the work of its own sentient beings, with no outside provocations necessary.
The Machine had gazed outward at the wreckage of so many civilizations, and had seen the violence and bloodshed that the native inhabitants of the galaxy were creating among themselves. And it found such a thing unacceptable.
It attempted at first to maintain what little order was possible in that environment, dispatching its few surviving Hands as lone agents and enforcers of the law. Without the vast armies they had once commanded, however, they were nowhere near as effective.
For all its might and all its intelligence, the Machine could not move, could not reach out and put things right. Once, before and even during the war, it had possessed many outside resources, but all of them had been destroyed by the time of the end of that conflict. As one after another of the remaining Hands perished in combat and conflicts across the disk of the Milky Way, the Machine could do nothing but watch.
Finally, the mighty intelligence itself had fallen silent, its few remaining agents left on their own.
“And you are such an agent—a Hand of the Machine,” the ship had told him. “You are a Hawk. Your job is to patrol the galaxy, enforcing the Machine’s law and the Machine’s peace—even if the Machine itself no longer answers our calls.”
“And there are other Hands who have survived?”
“…Yes, it is believed that some few remain, scattered here and there across the human worlds. No one knows just how many.”
Hawk considered this, then nodded.
“Can we not travel to the Machine itself and discover what has caused its silence?”
“That is impossible,” the ship replied.
“Why?”
“Because no one knows the location of the Machine. Its location has remained one of the great mysteries of the galaxy for nearly two thousand years.”
Hawk absorbed this information.
“Where do we go for resupply, repair, and the like?” he asked after a moment.
“The Machine scattered bases for its Hands across the galaxy, for just such contingencies, as well as for the creation of new Hands,” the ship said. “The base where you were awoken—somewhat prematurely, due to the attack—has been lost to us, obviously. But I have found the nearest, and we approach it now.”
“Good.”
Hawk studied his pistol closely for perhaps the sixth time since the ship had told him where to retrieve it from storage. It was apparently his back-up weapon, his primary gun now lost somewhere aboard the base he’d fled earlier. Even so, he found it endlessly fascinating—and wondered if he had been genetically programmed to feel that way about the tools of his trade.
He held the weapon up, allowing the cabin’s light to play over its gleaming, blue-silver surface. For all its high-tech façade, it was a grim and obviously deadly piece of equipment. Two cylindrical barrels, one over the other, ran its length; one fired bursts of concentrated energy, the other metal slugs. Both a small battery pack and a clip of ammunition were plugged into the body just ahead of the trigger guard. He found he looked forward to getting to test-fire it soon.
For that matter, he was looking forward to getting to do just about anything. He found himself restless, anxious to stretch his legs a bit, in a space less confined than the interior of the ship. The time stuck inside the medical casket had only increased his claustrophobia and his desire for freedom. He hopped up and stalked around the cabin, nervous, though at least relieved to have a greater understanding of just who he was and why he existed. A certain amount of peace seemed to flow from that, though a degree of anxiety, as well—though for what reason he could not presently guess.
“Closing in on the base now,” the ship intoned.
Hawk forced himself to sit down again and wait, his eyes locked on the flashing blue circle in the holo display. Then he shifted his attention to the window itself, and realized that he could now see the base growing larger with his naked eyes.
Not an asteroid as the previous one had been, this was an actual space station, manufactured from metal and crystal parts. It formed a great wheel, slowly spinning, with a dozen spokes all leading inward to a central hub. It was toward this hub that the ship traveled now, and Hawk could do nothing but watch and wait.
He saw them before the ship’s sensors detected them—before it could identify the energy spikes that flared on the far side of the station. Strange, organic-looking vessels moved into view from where they had lurked behind the station. Their dark hulls, half-melted in appearance and streaked with red and orange, appeared to shimmer in the darkness. He knew without asking whom they belonged to.
“Ship—!”
Their forward momentum halted instantly as the ship reacted to what it was now detecting ahead.
“The Adversary! His servants have arrived here ahead of us!”
“It doesn’t take a computer mind to grasp that,” Hawk growled. “Get us out of here!”
The blue-silver, triangular ship spun about on its axis and accelerated, hyperdrive engine kicking in.
“They are firing upon us,” the ship reported.
“I guessed that much. Can they hurt us?”
“Oh yes,” the ship replied, “without a doubt. Their weaponry is quite formidable. But,” it continued, as the acceleration seemed to increase, even through the distorting effects of artificial gravity, “they have to hit us to hurt us.”
The enemy vessels raced forward in the display, the distance between them and Hawk’s ship narrowing.
“Can’t you go faster?”
“Speed within normal space is irrelevant,” the ship answered him in an emotionless voice. “We will escape into the Above as soon as the engines can cycle up again. Only a few seconds.”
The ship shook violently as fire from the enemy vessels struck it. It shook again, harder.
“We may not have seconds, ship,” Hawk shouted, angry at being unable to directly influence events around him. “Go faster!”
“Yes—I see your point,” the ship said.
It lurched again, though whether from weapons impact or from sudden acceleration Hawk could not be sure. Then the tactical display blurred and the hyper-realm engulfed them.
“Can they not attack us here?” Hawk asked after a few seconds, his eyes sliding across the bizarre, shimmering waves that represented in the visible light spectrum the hyperspace travel effect.
“We are in what some have called the Above,” the ship answered, “and relative distances here are meaningless. Even if the enemy ships entered just behind us, they might as well be on the far side of the galaxy while we are here.”
Hawk took this in, finding that somehow he seemed to understand it better than h
e felt he should. Again that odd, nagging sense of being in control of only half his faculties—though half represented a sizeable gain on his condition a short while earlier.
“What about when we emerge into normal space again?” he asked.
The ship hesitated for a moment.
“The theoretical possibility does exist that they could emerge just behind us, yes,” it said then. “But that would require them to know exactly where we are going. And since even I do not know where we are going, nor have you given me orders to that effect…”
“Right,” Hawk replied. He sat there a moment, considering, and the ship said nothing. The hyper-realm of the Above continued to flow past the window. Then, “So…where should we be going?”
The ship was silent for several seconds before coming back with, “That is the larger question we confront, is it not?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that, under normal circumstances, and given that the Machine is now silent, you as a Hand would have the authority to determine our agenda and our mission.”
“Ah,” Hawk said, understanding. “But since I don’t really have all of my memories available…”
“Precisely. Because you lack the knowledge and capacity to make such decisions for us, and without the Machine to guide us, we are what you might refer to as… loose ends.”
Hawk considered this. The ship sounded almost…afraid…of having no one in authority to guide and direct it. He, on the contrary, felt somewhat relieved that a vast, mechanical mind was not issuing commands to him.
And yet the Machine had for all intents and purposes created him, and had given him this amazing, sentient vessel to carry him here and there across the galaxy… It made perfect sense that he should be obligated to obey its instructions, carry out its orders—was that not why he existed in the first place?—and perhaps even find out what had become of it. He would be extremely ungrateful to behave otherwise, he felt.
And besides—based on what the ship had told him about the current state of the galaxy, he was truly needed out there. A Hand was needed. And, like it or not, that’s who and what he was.
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