Hawk and Falcon stumbled to a halt, locked in place. Eagle somehow resisted just enough to fall forward into Goraddon, knocking him aside. The man in black cried out wordlessly as he crashed into a bank of electronic components. Before he could extricate himself from the machinery, one of Eagle’s massive hands grasped him by the neck and yanked him back, hurling him head-first into a tall stack of crates.
As the Adversary struggled to rise, Eagle spoke three strange-sounding words in a language alien to all who were present. In response, a golden sword—the one he had once carried as commander of the Hands of the Machine—shimmered into view in midair, just before him.
Eagle grasped the sword and swung it all in one smooth motion. Gasping, shocked beyond reckoning, the Adversary barely managed to lunge out of the way.
The distraction served to free the other two Hands again and, this time, they were able to rush to Eagle’s side and assist him. Hawk drew his pistol and prepared to fire but Falcon flashed past him, his quickness belying his bulky frame, and brought his metallic cyborg fist around into the dark man’s face with three powerful punches in quick succession.
Goraddon was reeling now, his face bloody, and the others felt for the first time that they had gained something of the upper hand.
As the other two Hands circled around to the left and right, Eagle rushed straight forward, sword held high and ready to come about in a mighty swing. Goraddon saw him approaching and raised one hand, directing it at the big man. Almost frantically, he barked a sharp, “Halt!”
The psychic force behind the command struck Eagle like a physical blow and he stumbled, crashing to the floor, the sword clattering off to the side, directly into Hawk’s path.
Before anyone could react, Hawk snatched up the golden weapon and attacked.
The Adversary was caught flat-footed and couldn’t evade or project a mental command in time. Hawk’s swing sliced him across the ribs on the left side and he cried out in agony.
Hawk pressed his advantage, attacking again. The big weapon felt strange in his hands—as a Hawk, he’d never much used a bladed weapon; certainly not to the extent that Eagle and Raven had. But in some odd way it felt almost natural. As he lunged at Goraddon again, he hoped that would be enough.
Unfortunately, it was not.
The man in black, down on his haunches, had been able to scramble backwards far enough to recover his senses, and now he screamed, “Enough!” The sheer force of his psychic willpower was sufficient to actually cause Falcon and Eagle to spill over backwards, as though a massive ocean wave had crashed into them. Still clutching the sword, Hawk somehow stood firm against the assault but couldn’t advance in the face of it.
Goraddon was on his feet again, eyes glowing brighter than they had up until now. He extricated himself from the bent and broken components into whose midst he had fallen and strode out into the open again, near the center of the room, brushing his jacket off as he moved. The power of his telepathic hold on the other three was fully in effect again, holding each of them firmly in place, locking them down. Calming himself, he reached out and simply took the golden sword from Hawk’s grasp. He frowned at it for a moment, as if not recognizing it. Then he smiled.
“Ah,” he said, gazing at the glorious weapon. “The Sword of Baranak.” His dark eyes flicked from the blade to Eagle, where he stood frozen a short distance away. “If only you’d had this with you in the Below, Agrippa. Your stay could have been significantly shorter.” He laughed. “You were aware, I am assuming, that this particular weapon—an object of the gods themselves—can quite easily cut through the walls separating layers of the Above and the Below.” Then he shrugged. “Of course, because it is an object of such enormous power, you cannot carry it through an artificially-created portal such as this one.” He gestured at the black framework of machinery that created the dimensional gateway. "Doing so would result in a massive overload and an explosion that would destroy the machinery, this room, and quite likely the entire palace.” He set the sword down on the deck of one computer console. “So let’s just keep it safe and sound, way over here, eh?”
“That was… a nice effort… Hawk,” Falcon managed to say. “You… almost… got him.”
“Yes,” Eagle replied, even as the Adversary’s willpower shoved him and the others down onto their knees. “Thank…you. Both of…you.”
“Silence!” shouted Goraddon, angered by their continued defiance. He moved toward the gateway terminal, which was still lit up with sparkling and flashing points all along its perimeter. “I have had quite enough of all of you.” He stood directly before the device and touched one final control. A swirl of white light formed at its center, then grew out toward the edges and seemed to solidify. “I will throw all three of you into the Below—into a layer so far down that there are no doorways back out. You will wander for the rest of eternity in that limbo realm, beset by demons and tortured always by the knowledge of what I am doing to your own worlds, your own universe.” He laughed then, long and deep, and then turned to reach for one last control.
Something emerged from the open portal at that instant, followed by something else. Two shapes, moving quickly.
“What is this?” the Adversary shouted, whirling about. “Who—?”
Hawk recognized the first figure to come through. He was a blond man, not quite as big as Eagle, wearing a brown uniform.
“Condor!”
“Condor?” Goraddon echoed, puzzled. “What? Impossible!”
The false Hand gained his bearings quickly and looked to Hawk and the others where they knelt. “What’s going on here, gentlemen?”
“The Adversary!” all three of the Hands shouted in near-perfect unison.
Condor took a half-second to register what they were saying. Then, his eyes widening in surprise, he spun about.
The man in black was moving toward him, arms raised, eyes glowing pure white.
Condor raised his right hand and let loose with one of his quantum-energy blasts, powered by the internal circuitry he’d paid a fortune to have installed years earlier. The blinding beam of force impacted Goraddon and knocked him backwards a step or two—mainly because it caught him by surprise.
“Well, well. Interesting,” the Adversary stated, recovering quickly. “But it is plain to see that you are no real Hand.” He mentally spoiled Condor’s aim and caused the second blast to miss wide to the right.
Hawk struggled harder against the mental force that held him, hoping that, if nothing else, Condor’s attack would distract the man enough to weaken the bonds. This was not the case, however—they held just as tightly as ever.
Cursing his own helplessness, he watched the events happening across the domed chamber. Condor looked to be realizing just how formidable the Adversary was. He backed away, trying another quantum-blast that again failed to connect as the enemy directed his aim to the side.
Hawk came close to despair as he looked on. The ending of this skirmish was just as obvious and just as inevitable as had been the battle he and the other two had waged with the man in black mere moments earlier. The Adversary was simply too powerful for any of them to defeat—or even to rattle—without some kind of very strong distraction to cause him to weaken his psychic hold on them. Only Eagle had been able to do that, and even then only for a few seconds.
Then Hawk frowned, puzzled, as it occurred to him that he had seen two figures emerge from the terminal when the Adversary had activated it. So—who was the other one and, more importantly, perhaps—where had they gone?
And that was precisely the moment when that final actor in the drama made her presence known.
A slender, lithe, and almost tiny female figure sprang from the shadows just as the Adversary was about to deliver the coup de grace to Condor. Black at first, the attacker’s outfit morphed to bright blue and red as she sailed through the air. She landed on Goraddon’s back and a shining silver blade flashed.
“Raven!” Hawk shouted, stunned by what he was see
ing.
The dark-haired female Hand slashed viciously with her katana and the Adversary screamed in shock and pain. Then he whirled about, reached frantically for her, grasped her with one hand and hurled her from his back. She landed hard on the stone floor and instantly slid head-over-heels on the thin layer of ice, while her sword bounced away in the other direction with a clatter.
Goraddon staggered back, his movements jerky and his expression one of utter shock. Hawk and the others could see now that Raven had slashed his neck deeply, nearly decapitating him. Something like blood, but sparkling with raw energies, ran down over his chest. The man in black gasped and screamed incoherent sounds as he brought his hands to his throat. His eyes were wide but the white light that emanated from them was fading quickly.
The invisible restraints holding the Hands dissolved again. This time they were ready for that to happen. They instantly rushed to the attack, advancing on the wounded enemy from three directions.
Goraddon couldn’t seem to focus. The white glow had vanished entirely from his eyes. He looked around frantically and saw Raven’s sword where it had fallen nearby. He dived for it, getting there just ahead of Raven and snatching it up. She narrowly dodged his wild swings, dancing nimbly out of the way. Then he sensed someone approaching from behind him and he whirled about, driving the gleaming blade forward hard.
Condor gasped and looked down, seeing the katana spearing through his chest.
The Adversary grinned and, still grasping the hilt, drew the blade out—doing much more damage as it came free—and then brought it around in a wide swing, slashing Condor again.
The false Hand collapsed to the floor, blood pooling quickly around him.
“A nice effort, Hands,” Goraddon gasped out, his throat still issuing a fair amount of what in him passed for blood, “but not even the five of you together could stop me.” His eyes slowly began to reacquire the white glow. “And now—” He paused, thinking. “Now, perhaps I won’t hurl all of you through the portal. You, Falcon, and you, Hawk—you will serve as the vanguard of my new legions, as I bring this entire galaxy under my control!”
The Hands understood this was likely their last chance. Together they rushed forward in one final assault, before their free will was stolen away for good.
“Fools!” the Adversary cried, his hands coming up to amplify and direct the psychic assault he was about to unleash. “How many times must I smash you all down before you accept the inevitable?”
Hawk and Falcon and Raven all found their forward momentum taken away, robbed by the Adversary’s indomitable will and overwhelming psychic power.
But Eagle did not stop.
His own will, shaped by years as commander of the greatest military force in history and then tempered by millennia of wandering alone in the demon-infested depths, had now been honed to a single, rock-hard desire: to defeat the Adversary.
He stalked forward, the still-recovering psychic energies that held the others in place almost melting away in the face of his sheer determination.
Goraddon’s face betrayed his sudden fear.
“You will stop,” he ordered Eagle. “You will kneel before me! Kneel!”
Eagle smashed into the man and hurled him to the floor.
The others practically cheered. Before they could act, however, Eagle snatched up the golden sword and tossed it to Hawk.
Catching it, Hawk stared back at his old commander, puzzled.
“Make sure the others get out of here,” the blond man ordered, sounding almost entirely like his old self again. “And then throw that in after us.”
“What are you talking about?”
Eagle bent down and grabbed the woozy and half-conscious Goraddon and lifted him up.
“I believe one thing this guy has said,” Eagle barked. “If we simply smash him down, he’ll just keep coming back.”
Goraddon’s eyes weren’t focused. He mumbled a few unintelligible sounds.
Eagle’s own eyes moved from Hawk to Goraddon.
“Therefore, he has to be removed from this reality—permanently—so that he can’t do any more harm.”
Coming to, Goraddon quickly grasped the situation and he panicked, struggling to free himself from the big man’s hold. He must have suspected in that last instant what his old foe had in mind—but his power was still at a low ebb because of his wounds, and Eagle was much more resistant to his psychic power than he had been before, and—in any case—it was simply too late.
Eagle marched toward the cosmic doorway, black-clad enemy held firmly in his grasp.
“Stop!” commanded the Adversary. “You will stop! You will release me! Now!”
“The very bottom of the Below, you said,” Eagle barked at his foe, his sheer determination seemingly overriding the Adversary’s psychic power. “No doorways—no way back out. Not even this one. That suits me, if it suits you!”
“No!”
Eagle carried the man at almost a dead run now. The gateway terminal, its center a swirl of light, stood just ahead.
“Do as I said, Hawk. Get them out of here,” Eagle shouted back. “I’ll find the sword—someday, somehow—and return. I promise.”
The cosmic doorway loomed directly in front of them.
“Farewell, my friends!”
The Adversary screamed.
The two figures passed through the portal, the gateway to the depths of the Below, and vanished.
Hawk stared after them for a long second. Then he whirled about, facing Raven and Falcon, who were likewise transfixed by what they had just witnessed.
“You heard the man,” he cried. “Out of the palace—now! Go!”
They went.
Hawk looked down at the golden sword, cradled in his hands. He looked up at the swirling brightness of the dimensional portal.
“Good luck, Agrippa,” he whispered.
He tossed it in and ran.
Lightning blasted out of the portal and danced all across the machinery as the Sword of Baranak overwhelmed and overloaded the circuitry. Bolts of raw energy seared his back a dozen times before he at last dashed clear of the palace and emerged into the wooded grounds surrounding it.
Behind him, the huge stone edifice crumbled from within as the doorway to Hell exploded.
2: HAWK, FALCON, AND RAVEN
“He ended it as he began,” Falcon said. “As a hero. The best of us all.”
The others nodded.
They sat around a blazing campfire under the cold stars of the Scandana night sky, on the edge of a forest that grew right up to the edge of the palace grounds. The grave of the man who had called himself Condor lay a short distance away; Falcon had managed to carry his body out and they had laid him to rest with care and respect. But his fate was not the subject any of them dwelt upon now.
As he stared into the flickering flames, Hawk’s thoughts were of Eagle—all he’d thought he’d known about the man before, and all he had learned about him recently.
“I still can’t quite accept the idea that he was the traitor all along,” Falcon stated flatly. “It seems so…impossible.”
“He more than made up for any of his past sins,” Hawk said. Then he laughed humorlessly. “Even killing me, I suppose.”
Raven looked up at Hawk.
“He killed me, too, you know,” she said. “Or, at least, he had it done.”
Hawk and Falcon both reacted with surprise.
“What?” Hawk asked. “But you were still alive after he vanished—after the Adversary first threw him into the Below.”
“Why would he kill you?” Falcon added. “You weren’t a part of what happened on Scandana. You weren’t even here.”
Raven shrugged.
“What’s my job, gentlemen?” She smiled at their puzzlement. “I’m Internal Affairs. One of my tasks was always to investigate the rest of you—to make sure you were all behaving like proper Hands of the Machine.” She shifted her gaze back to the fire. “After the incident here—the death of
the original Hawk, and the disappearance of Eagle—I of course started an investigation. But Eagle would have known beforehand that I would do so, and so he—at the Adversary’s orders, I suppose—left instructions with some of his personally loyal forces to have me murdered and then my model of Hand discontinued. They didn’t want what was happening to come to light too soon, and I would have probably figured at least some of it out and blown the whistle before the Adversary was fully ready to move. At least, I’d like to think I would have.” She sighed. “They apparently thought so, too.”
The others considered this. The picture was filling itself in for them now.
“Oh,” Hawk asked then. “I’ve been wondering—how did you and Condor get out of the Below?”
Raven frowned at that.
“You know,” she said, “I must be mellowing. Once, I would have objected to you referring to that man as ‘Condor,’ because clearly he was no such thing—just a charlatan, using the uniform and the technology to further his own ends.” She paused then and glanced over at the grave the three of them had dug and filled in only a short time earlier. “But, having fought alongside him and having seen the effort he gave on behalf of all of us—and the entire galaxy…” She shrugged. “I guess he wasn’t so bad.” She snickered then. “A better man than the real Condor was, in some ways.”
The other two couldn’t help but chuckle at this.
“You’re very generous in your praise, as always, Raven,” Falcon said with a wry smile.
“But,” Hawk said, “about how you got out of the Below—?”
Raven spread her hands wide.
“It was luck, I suppose. We’d seen lights in the fog that led us to a sort of doorway, just standing there in the middle of all that nothing, and we were trying to figure out what it was and if it could be of any use to us. And then it started to glow—a glow that looked an awful lot like the effects those terminals of Condor’s made. So we took a chance and stepped through it—and the next thing I knew, there we were in the basement of this palace.” She smiled. “So I followed my standard operating procedure and went all stealth-mode the instant we came through, just in case something bad was happening.” She favored them with a rare smile. “I’d say it worked out.”
Hawk: Hand of the Machine (Shattered Galaxy Book 1) Page 33