After nearly a minute of walking she didn’t feel as if she’d made any real progress. Just as frustration was setting in, however, the faint light she had been moving toward split into two points, each point rising and then fading away. A second later, two more points appeared near ground level and did likewise.
This puzzled Raven. She picked up her pace, not quite running across the bumpy, uneven ground.
At last the lights appeared to be growing brighter and closer. She couldn’t move as quickly as she would have liked, because of the limited visibility, but she hurried nonetheless, almost jogging now. She cried out, “Hello? Who’s there?”
Something formed to her right—a big, fast-moving shape, emerging from the mists. It was a horse and rider, at nearly a full gallop. Raven leapt aside to avoid being trampled. As she spun away, she thought she could make out a figure in black and silver in the saddle, hunched forward, cloak flying behind it. Then it was gone, speeding away, lost in the fog.
Her heart beating rapidly, Raven took a moment to breathe and to re-orient herself. The lights were still there, brighter still now, and she hurried toward them.
She burst through one final wave of mists and the lights were all around her and she found that she stood on another hilltop. And there, just in front of her, sat a blond man in a brown uniform, his appearance all too familiar to her. He sat on the ground, legs crossed before him. His hair was tousled and dirty-looking, and his eyes were closed, as if he were meditating. Bright spheres of blue-white light were forming around his outstretched hands and drifting up into the air before sparkling and evaporating.
As she moved closer to him, his eyes opened and he gazed up at her with what seemed to be little recognition. He frowned slightly but didn’t say anything.
“Condor?” she asked, her dislike for false Hands temporarily set aside. “Are you alright? What are you doing?”
His frown deepened as he stared back at her. Then he blinked.
“Raven?”
Eyes wide, she nodded. “Yeah, it’s me. What’s going on?”
“Where have you been?”
“What?”
Condor inhaled deeply, then waved both hands as though putting out matches. The shimmering spheres of light faded away. Instead, only a faint glow came from his right hand, which he held out in her direction, to more clearly see her.
“Where have you been?” he repeated. “It’s been so long.”
Now it was Raven’s turn to frown.
“Um, no,” she said, “I was right behind you, and I just got here.”
“What? No, no—that’s not right.”
Rising to his feet slowly, tiredly, Condor shook his head.
“I stepped through the terminal on the Ring...” He hesitated, calculating. “…It must have been two days ago.”
“No,” Raven replied, shaking her head. “That was barely half an hour ago.”
Condor laughed—though there was no humor contained in the sound, or in his expression. He gestured down at himself, holding his glowing hand in such a position that she could clearly see his state.
“Do I look like I just got here a half-hour ago?”
Raven studied him more closely. In addition to his generally unkempt appearance, she now could see several jaggedly-torn places in his brown uniform—and the flesh revealed by those tears was scabbed over, as though he had been raked by claws.
“What happened?” she asked, startled.
“Creatures of some sort,” Condor answered. “I don’t know. I barely got away from them.” He shook his head. “My quantum energy implants aren’t working properly. The lights I was generating are about the best I can do right now.” He turned and gestured vaguely at the fog-filled world around them. “I have no idea where we are. This isn’t any part of the Above I’ve ever heard of.”
Raven was puzzling through what he was saying. Then it clicked.
“We’re not in the Above,” she whispered.
A howling sound echoed across the pale earth. The distance of its source from them was impossible to judge. A moment later there came a second, and then a third.
Her eyes widening, Raven held her sword at the ready again and began moving in a slow circle, her eyes peering out at the fog that enshrouded them.
“What are you talking about?” Condor asked. “Of course we are. That’s where the terminals passed through, when they connected with one another. Without a second terminal to bring us back out, that’s where we are.” He sighed. “Where we’re stuck.”
The howls came again, much closer now.
“Oh, we’re stuck, alright,” Raven agreed, her grip tight on her katana, “but not in the Above.”
“Then where—?” Condor stopped himself in mid-reply and his expression darkened. “Oh—oh no. You’re saying—”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Raven snapped back at him. “Opticals aren’t functioning as well as they should; your energy implants aren’t working correctly; a much longer period of time passed for you, here, than for me, before I followed you through the terminal.” She nodded to herself. “Low power and fast-moving time. The evidence is pretty clear.”
Howls sounded all around them now, loud and terrifying. Shapes could at last be seen moving through the fog, drawing closer, closer.
“We’re in the Below,” Raven said, finishing her thought. “Down with the demons at the bottom of the universe.”
“No,” Condor breathed. “No—that can’t be…”
“It is,” Raven said. She raised her sword high. “Now get ready!”
The shapes around them rushed forward, revealed by Condor’s light, their savage claws flashing.
9: HAWK
It didn’t take Hawk and Falcon very long after their emergence into the foggy world on the other side of the portal to suspect that they were in the Below. A big clue was that Falcon’s cybernetic implants malfunctioned immediately, forcing him to shut many of the mechanical portions of his body down. With the slightly different physics of the Below, nothing technological worked particularly well there—and, the more sophisticated the technology, the less reliable it became.
Falcon quickly explained that the Below could be extremely dangerous. They had two priorities: find their missing comrades and find a way out, back into their own universe.
How they would go about accomplishing either task remained an unspoken mystery.
There were no signs of the two who had passed through ahead of them. Falcon pointed out that a considerable amount of time could have passed for them, while only moments went by for Hawk and himself back on the Ring. They could have wandered away from the spot where they emerged—if they had even emerged in the same location. And there was no way to tell if that had been the case.
After a quick discussion Hawk and Falcon decided not to venture too far away from their current spot. There was no good way to mark it, in case they needed to find their way back, and no way to see it if they traveled only a short distance away.
So now Falcon settled into a hunched position, thinking, while Hawk ambled about in a slow orbit around him, trying unsuccessfully to peer through the clouds of fog. For nearly an hour they remained thus, neither saying a word, Falcon sitting and Hawk walking.
“Thought of anything clever yet?” Hawk asked at last. “Because I’m counting on you to come up with a brilliant solution that gets all of us out of this.”
“I’ll let you know the moment I do,” Falcon replied. “Trust me on that.”
Hawk thought for a few seconds, then asked, “From the data that was loaded into my head when I awoke, I understood that the Below was just a sort of subspace realm where some long-range communications passed—and where the old cryo-ships used to travel, before the development of hyper-travel via the Above.” He motioned to indicate their surroundings. “Yet here we are, standing on solid ground, feeling gravity, breathing air…” He shook his head in puzzlement. “I just don’t get it.”
Falcon snorted.
“It’s a waste of time to try to make sense of the Below—or of the Above,” he replied. He tapped his half-metal skull. “I’ve always assumed most of what you experience in either location was mostly up in here.”
“This is all an illusion, then?”
Falcon shrugged. “That’s a word for it, maybe,” he said, his voice now slightly fainter and more distant to Hawk’s ears. “It’s more of a manifestation, so to speak. A physical manifestation of an abstract dimension. A very abstract dimension,” he added with a chuckle.
Hawk considered what Falcon was saying and decided to just accept it. He certainly had no alternative explanation. Another indeterminate period of time passed, and then he said, “I can see why Condor and Raven would have moved away from this spot, if they’d been waiting here as long as you say they must have. There’s just nothing here.”
“But where else would you go?” Falcon countered, his voice growing even fainter.
Hawk had no answer to that. Indeed, having moved only a short distance away from Falcon’s position was making him slightly nervous. He was concerned that he was spiraling further and further outwards without meaning to; it was so hard to be sure exactly where one was going in this environment.
“Hey,” he called, “give me a shout so I can find my way back to you.”
Falcon hollered something in response, but the sound was indistinct, echoing from different directions all at once, and then gone entirely.
“Falcon! Where are you?”
Nothing.
Hawk suppressed a curse. He couldn’t quite believe it. He hadn’t ventured far away from their point of arrival, or so he believed. And yet, in this pea soup fog, he’d already managed to get lost.
“Falcon!”
Still nothing.
He turned about in a slow circle, trying his best to see. If anything, the fog had grown thicker.
“Falcon!”
“That is not my name.”
Hawk started, whirling about to face the voice that had come to him from behind.
“Who—?”
Standing there only a short distance from him was a tall, slender figure covered entirely in tattered brown robes. A hood covered his head, so that only the hint of a pale nose could be seen within.
“Who are you?” Hawk demanded, drawing his pistol even though he suspected it wouldn’t work in this strange realm with its stranger laws of physics. “Where did you come from?”
The robed and hooded figure seemed to regard him for several long seconds. Then its voice came again, hollow and creaking yet carrying some faint hints of depth and power.
“Those are interesting questions,” it said. “Who am I?” The figure shrugged. “I cannot answer that. My identity was lost to me ages ago. Now I am but a wanderer, condemned to this hell, this purgatory, for eternity.”
Hawk stared back, disturbed by the strange being and by its words.
“Your other question—where I come from—is equally hard. I come from somewhere else; of that I am fairly certain.” The figure spread its long arms to indicate the foggy world around them. “Surely I couldn’t have been born here.” It shook its head. “But I no longer remember where I came from, and I find that, after all these ages that I have wandered here, I scarcely care.”
Hawk took this in, absorbing it as best he could. He holstered his pistol and started to speak, but the figure turned away from him and moved back into the fog.
“Wait!” he called.
The robed man halted and turned back to him.
“Yes?”
Hawk dithered for a moment, then managed, “My friend—the one who came here with me. Falcon. Have you seen him? Do you know where he is—how I can find him again?”
“Falcon?” That word seemed to give the robed man pause. “Yes. I saw him, though he did not see me.” The long arm came up and pointed to the right. “He is there.”
“Would you come with me? I’m sure he would like to meet you, to talk with you, too.”
The figure appeared to consider this for a moment, then nodded once.
Together they made their way through the fog, walking for what seemed to Hawk to be much too far. He was about to protest that they surely must have overshot Falcon’s position when, moments later, they emerged into a circle of space clear of the mists. At the center stood Falcon, his expression changing quickly from near-panic to relief as he saw Hawk approaching.
“There you are. You idiot. We agreed we wouldn’t wander off.”
The big cyborg started to say more, but then halted before he could as he became aware of the robed figure emerging from the clouds behind Hawk.
“Um—who’s your new friend, there?” Falcon asked, his one eyebrow raising and his hand instinctively reaching for where his weapon normally would be stored.
“Not sure,” Hawk replied. “We’ve only just met. But he helped me to find you.”
“Oh?” Falcon continued to study the brown-cloaked man with his human eye; his mechanical eye was mostly useless at the moment. “You have our thanks, then, friend.” He paused, then, “May I ask—how were you able to find me?”
The tall figure shrugged. “When one has spent as much time in this environment as I have, it becomes slightly easier to find one’s way around.” Then it was the newcomer’s turn to pause, followed by, “You seem somehow familiar to me.” He turned to Hawk. “As do you. Your appearances tickle some ancient, hidden memory, perhaps.” He crossed his long arms before his chest. “You asked me how I came to be here, and I told you that I no longer remember. But—I would ask the same of you. How did you come to be here, when I have not encountered you before in all the ages that I have wandered here?”
Hawk started to reply but Falcon cut him off with a quick, “It’s a long story, friend. Say—I don’t suppose you also know of a way out of here?”
“Out?” The robed figure appeared puzzled by this question, this concept. “A way out of—where? This world? To go somewhere else? To some other world?” He hesitated; when he continued, his voice had grown stronger, deeper. “There are other worlds than these?”
Falcon moved closer to the newcomer.
“You seem familiar to me, too,” Falcon stated. “Very familiar.” He reached out and, as Hawk looked on, grasped the man’s hood and jerked it back.
Hawk nearly stumbled back in surprise. Falcon merely grunted, his hand dropping away from the hood. Both men stared.
“It can’t be,” Falcon muttered finally. “It can’t be. But…it is.”
The entire face of the man in the robes was now revealed. He had long, wavy blond hair that trailed past his shoulders. His eyes were a piercing blue, though the flesh around them sagged somewhat. His nose was prominent and angular. Despite the obvious changes, both men knew him instantly.
Falcon reached out again, this time slowly and almost gingerly, touching his chest, his face, as if to make certain he was solid, he was real. When he spoke, his voice caught in his throat.
“Eagle. Good heavens. It’s you.”
10: FALCON
“You two seem very familiar to me,” the robed man who might once have been Eagle was saying, his voice a low rumble. “But I have no memories of the things you have mentioned thus far.”
He sat cross-legged on the rough soil as the mists closed in around them once more. Hawk sat opposite him while Falcon paced restlessly a very short distance to his right. The big cyborg had learned from Hawk’s example not to venture too far away.
“The Machine, you were saying,” intoned the tall figure. “A computer mind that directed us in our missions—issued orders to the three of us and to others in our service.” He frowned, stroking his chin with long, slender fingers. “Perhaps…”
“That was some time ago,” Hawk stated. “You’ve been missing for quite a while.”
“Over a thousand years,” Falcon noted, “though, down here in the Below, that could have been ten thousand. Or more.”
“The Below,” the man said, gazing up
at Falcon. “That is what you call this place?”
“It’s an alternate layer of reality,” Falcon explained. “You could say it’s one level down from the reality we all are from.”
“And you came here looking for me?”
“We had no idea you were here,” Hawk answered quickly. “We were escaping an attack on the facility of—a friend—and this is where we ended up.”
The tall man considered this and nodded. Then his bright blue eyes flickered and locked onto Hawk’s own, staring at him with a sudden blazing intensity.
“You are Hawk. Yes—that does mean something to me. I remember…I remember that someone called Hawk did something that was very important, very significant…”
Falcon was growing alarmed. He cast a veiled but powerful look at Hawk as the robed man looked away. He recalled clearly that it had been a message from Eagle himself that had named the original Hawk the traitor on Scandana. If this really was Eagle, and he remembered all of that now, things could turn ugly very quickly.
“So,” Falcon said aloud, moving back into the man’s field of vision, “is there a way out of here, then?”
The robed man blinked and looked at Falcon, slowly focusing on him. “Out?” The concept seemed to sink in at last. “No. Not that I have ever found,” he said. “And I have been wandering this land for a long time. A very long time.”
“How about some food, at least? Or shelter?” Falcon indicated the ocean of fog that surrounded them. “Is it like this all the time? Is there anything else out there?” He shook his head. “What do you eat?”
“Eat?” The man reacted to that word as if it were the strangest he’d ever heard. Then he seemed to remember the concept and revealed the tiniest of smiles. “You will find in time that very little physical sustenance is needed here.” He joined Falcon in gazing out into the endless fog. “You will not need food. You will not need sleep. Here, you simply…are.”
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