Hawk_Hand of the Machine

by Van Allen Plexico

  Hawk involuntarily flashed back to his first moments of life—finding himself lying naked and screaming on a metal table.

  “Not pleasant, no.”

  “And now I know why they’d awaken a new Hawk,” Falcon added.

  “Why?”

  “They—the inhabitants of your base—were under attack by apparently overwhelming forces. They must’ve thought they were all about to die anyway. ‘Might as well awaken a Hawk and see if he can save us,’ they probably thought.”

  Hawk remembered the scientists begging him for help. He shoved the memories away.

  “What about you?” he asked the cyborg. “If every other Hand would try to kill me, because we’re all slaves to the Machine and have to follow its orders, why are you sitting here, having this pleasant little conversation instead?”

  “Oh, a couple of reasons.”

  “Yes?”

  “For one, we were always friends.”

  “Is that so?”

  Falcon shrugged. “For my part, sure.”

  Hawk considered this and nodded.

  “Okay,” he said, “but beyond just our great old friendship—what else is keeping you from trying to toss me through the hatch? Did the Machine not leave sort of standing orders to that effect before it went away?”

  “Oh, it definitely did,” Falcon replied. “Terminate on sight orders, sure. But—unlike other Hands—I have a choice about obeying it or not.”

  Hawk perked up. “And how is that?”

  Falcon grinned and, reaching up with his right hand, tapped the largest patch of silver metal visible on his face. It looked to Hawk as if nearly half the man’s skull was metal.

  “Did you think every Falcon looks like this?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “They don’t.”

  Hawk’s brows furrowed.

  “Then what—?”

  “I was on a mission—this was just after the Machine went silent, when those of us that were left were still trying to make a go of being Hands, even without the Machine to coordinate for us.” He sighed and shook his head in remembered frustration. “That didn’t work out too well.” He snorted. “So anyway, I was checking out an old mining site I’d heard had been overrun by outlaws. They spotted me. Half the nearby town must have come out to fight me. There was a battle. Go figure.” He shook his head wearily. “And an explosion. I got trapped—buried under a ton of rocks. Half a mountain came down on me, it seemed like.”

  “You seem to make a habit of taking on entire cities, all by yourself,” Hawk observed.

  “Figuring out how to take down a city was always something I was good at,” Falcon replied, rubbing thoughtfully at his chin. “It’s the ‘by myself’ part that hasn’t worked out so well.”

  Hawk couldn’t help but smile crookedly at this.

  “So how did you escape?” he asked after a second.

  “The townspeople dug me out. And they fixed me up—or, at least, they fixed me up the best way they knew how. The best they could, given their somewhat limited level of technology.” He raised one partly mechanical arm and pointed at the shiny half of his head. “They used salvaged industrial parts.”

  Hawk took this in, eyes widening.

  Falcon shrugged.

  “It kept me alive, so I guess I should be grateful. I’m nearly half metal and plastic now, though. But the good thing—or the bad thing, depending on how you look at it, and on who’s doing the looking—is that I no longer felt the compulsion to obey the Machine. Talk with it, yeah,” he added, “but not do exactly what it says.” He rubbed at his temples. “Even so, the compulsion to try to talk to the thing is awful, especially since it never answers. Some days I suspect it’s driving me insane. Other days I’m pretty sure that’s true.”

  Hawk nodded, but now he was looking away, off to the side, considering other implications.

  “The thing I still don’t understand,” he told the big cyborg at last, “is why you seem glad to be free of the Machine’s commands. Are we not its Hands? Should we not be happy to serve that which created us? And, from what I have gathered, does it not send us out on missions that are of grave and vital importance to the safety and security of the galaxy?”

  Falcon stared back at him, head tilted slightly to one side. He inhaled and exhaled slowly, then looked down at the deck and laughed softly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said after a few seconds. “It’s just that I never imagined I’d be having this conversation—not with a Hawk!”

  Hawk looked on, studying the man, waiting.

  “In fact, at this point, the only interaction I thought I’d ever be having with a fellow Hand was dodging a Raven’s sword and blaster, if the Machine came back online and decided to wake one up to send after me.”

  “A Raven?” Hawk spoke the name slowly, considering the ramifications of it. “So there are other Hands besides our types.”

  “Oh, there are a few. Not sure why the Machine went with the whole ‘bird’ motif, but it’s been that way for what seems like forever, so…” He shrugged. “Raven’s not around anymore—her line was terminated, just like yours.”

  “Why is that?”

  He shook his head.

  “Not sure, really. The line was put on ice, back during the big war.” He grinned unexpectedly then. “But she was something to see, before that.” He snorted. “She even made me nervous.”

  “What was her purpose?”

  Falcon exhaled slowly, thinking back. “Raven was a pretty decent spy and infiltrator. Clandestine operations—that kind of thing. But she was also the police of the police, so to speak. Sort of an ‘internal affairs’ agent. Meaning, if one of us got out of line, the Machine would dispatch Raven after us, to straighten us out. And by ‘straighten us out,’ well, you can imagine…”

  Hawk was surprised at the look of respect Falcon displayed while speaking of this person.

  “Then she was tough enough, powerful enough,” he asked, “to take down a Hawk or Falcon?”

  “In her own way, yeah,” Falcon said. “She was good at surprise and sneaky stuff. A Raven’s not gonna just run up and launch a frontal assault at you or anything. But let her get the drop on you, and she’ll cut your head off before you know what’s happened.”

  Hawk absorbed this and filed it away, nodding. Then, “Ravens are always women, then?”

  “Poor Hawk, you really are a blank slate, aren’t you?” Falcon chortled. “Oh yeah. Raven was a ‘she,’ for sure. The Machine used a separate genetic template for each of us. A really old set of templates, I think,” he added. “So all Falcons would look like me—or like I used to look, at least—and all Hawks like you. There are a few others, too, or at least there were.” He pursed his lips, thinking. “Oh—and there’s only one of each Hand in service at a given time. Or that’s the way the rules used to work, anyway, though nowadays, who knows?” He shrugged again. “So don’t think to be running into any more Hawks anywhere in the galaxy. Not legitimate ones, anyway. Or any more Falcons—unless the Machine decided at some point to write me off as a loss and move on. Which, come to think of it, could have happened a long time ago.” He laughed. “Which is why I was so surprised to see you coming to rescue me and not ‘retire’ me.”

  Hawk rubbed his smooth chin, considering all that he’d been told. He stood.

  “All right,” he said. “Thanks for the history lesson.” He walked to the cockpit and eyed the square that would bring his ship back into the conversation. “Though you still haven’t told me why the Machine is a thing to be shunned—why you consider it a good thing that you and I don’t have to obey it.”

  “Well, the whole idea of ‘freedom’ aside,” he snorted, “I think that, somewhere along the way, the Machine became insane.” He met Hawk’s startled expression with one of amusement. “How’s that for a reason not to obey it?”

  “Insane?” Hawk stared back, puzzled. “But—it’s…a machine! A computer mind, right? Is that even possible?” He scratched at
his chin distractedly. “How could that be possible?”

  Falcon shook his head.

  “How should I know? But it’s true.” He rubbed his massive, scarred hands together. “There’s no question it once did good things—great things, like defending the galaxy from the Adversary—but those days are long gone. Toward the end, the orders it issued made no sense at all. Then it finally just fell silent.” He sighed. “The last few Hands I talked with, way back then when it was happening, thought someone had finally located the Machine and damaged it or destroyed it. Maybe that’s true.” He snorted. “I just think it finally broke down—lost its mind, so to speak. And when all you are is a giant mechanical brain, that’s a mighty big loss. So it figure it just sort of fell dormant.”

  Hawk’s mouth was slightly open. He shook his head back and forth slowly, as if not quite able to conceive such a thing. Everything his ship had told him thus far—and everything that was coming back to him from his interrupted programming—argued that the Machine was perfect, that it was infallible. And yet… And yet everything Falcon had said so far had seemed entirely believable, once he’d considered it. He gazed down at his hands, then back up at the big man.

  “And you know this—you believe this—because—?”

  Falcon gave him a wry look and tapped his metal skull again.

  “Because, in the days before it fell completely silent, I had to listen to its lunatic ravings almost every moment of every day. Some days I thought it was making me almost as crazy as it was.” He laughed coldly. “And then, one day, it just stopped talking at all.”

  With that, Falcon fell silent. Hawk sat back, his fingers steepled in front of his chin, calmly regarding him, going over everything the big man had told him. He found this information far more disturbing on an emotional level than he ever would have expected. Clearly the Machine had implanted deep conditioning within its Hands—perhaps down at the genetic level, even—that caused them to want to obey the Machine, and to be concerned for its welfare.

  Hawk found himself extremely ambivalent about the entire concept. So he changed the subject.

  “Your type of Hand is a demolitions expert, then?” he asked after almost a full minute had passed.

  “Among other specialties, yeah,” Falcon said.

  Hawk gestured toward the pieces of circuitry littering the floor. “You demonstrated that very effectively on my ship.”

  The big man stared back at him for a few seconds and then grinned.

  “I like you,” he said. “You’re a lot like Marcus. But of course you would be.”

  “Marcus?”

  “Your template. The first Hawk.” He hesitated. “My friend.”

  Hawk stroked his chin. “Your friend. Really.”

  Falcon shrugged.

  “When I saw a Hawk swooping down to save me,” the cyborg rumbled after a moment, “I figured you were living on borrowed time. But now I think maybe I was wrong.” He smiled. “Maybe you have a future after all.”

  Hawk couldn’t help smiling in return. “I’m happy to hear that.”

  The silence that hung between them lasted for all of three seconds before an alarm wailed.

  Hawk leapt to his feet and an instant later was seated in the cockpit area, bringing up the holographic tactical display. Falcon leaned in the doorway beside him.

  “Two ships,” Hawk reported, his partially-implanted memories once again serving him without his even realizing it. “Big ones.”

  Falcon nodded. “Switch to visual. Zoom in.”

  Hawk gave the order and the three-dimensional image before them shifted to the panoply of space, with the two tactical markers now replaced by the images of two rust-colored vessels rapidly approaching. Big and boxy and covered in what had to be weaponry, they looked extremely dangerous. Hawk said as much.

  “There’s something else,” Falcon noted. He jabbed a thick finger at the side of one of the ships, just visible given their angle of approach. “Guess who it is.”

  Hawk studied the marking the cyborg was indicating. It was a stylized flame surrounded by a smooth circle. He blinked, feeling he should recognize it.

  “You just saw this, down on the planet where you picked me up,” Falcon growled. “Access your visual records.”

  Hawk frowned. “Yeah—I’m not really sure how to do that.”

  Falcon shook his head. “You’re pretty messed up, alright.” He pointed at the emblem on the ships again. “Flame within a circle. The seal of the Inquisition.”

  Hawk’s eyes widened.

  “Those guys? They have ships? Ships like these?”

  “Apparently so. And I must have really ticked them off, because they’ve brought in some major reinforcements. And now they’ve found me. Which is no big deal, probably,” he added with a shrug. “Their compatriots down on the surface wouldn’t listen to me, but surely they will. I am, after all, telling the truth—I am a Hand.”

  Hawk nodded, his eyes locked on the rapidly closing warships.

  “No,” Falcon continued, “their finding me is no big deal. Finding you, however—well, that’s going to be a major problem.”

  Hawk looked at him.

  “I think you need to tell me why.”

  “Probably, yeah…”

  The ship shuddered violently.

  “…But at the moment, you need to concentrate on getting us out of here.”

  “Ship!” Hawk called. “Answer me!”

  Nothing.

  “You ordered it not to listen to you,” Falcon pointed out. “Remember?”

  “Oh…”

  Hawk thought for a second, then leaned forward and touched a control. Instantly the voice of the ship rang out: “Attack! We are under attack! Tractor beams locking onto us!”

  “Get us out of here,” Hawk shouted back. “Jump! Go anywhere!”

  “Too late,” the ship answered. “Engines are being overridden. Tractor beams are locked onto us. We are trapped.”

  Hawk’s face was a mask of frown lines. He looked to Falcon as if some magical answer would be forthcoming.

  One of the Inquisition ships moved alongside them and opened a docking bay; Hawk’s ship was slowly drawn inside.

  Falcon dropped back into his seat, seeming almost relaxed, and examined his weapon. He looked back up at Hawk.

  “This should be entertaining, anyway,” he said.

  8: FALCON

  Falcon clicked off the safety on his massive firearm and rose to his feet like a wrathful god. He crossed the cabin in four big strides and took up position one side of the hatch, waiting, gun at the ready.

  Hawk moved to the other side and crouched down, pistol aimed ahead. “What sort of strategy do you suggest?” he asked.

  “Try to reason with them first,” Falcon said. “After all, they’re supposed to be on the same general side as us.” He snorted. “And when that fails, kill them all.”

  Hawk took this in, considered it, and nodded. “Got it.”

  Falcon spared him a quick glance and a quicker smile. “Good.”

  For several seconds, nothing happened. Then the hull clanged around them, the sound like that of a bell ringing—if Hawk’s ship were the bell. Hawk looked up, frowning, then resettled himself and aimed ahead.

  “They’ll override the ship’s systems and force the hatch to open,” Falcon stated. “It won’t take long. Be ready.”

  Before Hawk could reply, the lights flickered off and back on. A whining sound came from just outside the ship. Then the hatch snapped open.

  Hawk recoiled as energy blasts erupted through the opening. Falcon was already firing back into the darkness, his huge weapon on full auto as it spat blazing death back the other direction.

  “I take it the ‘try to reason with them’ part has already passed,” Hawk shouted at him.

  Falcon ignored him and lurched out of cover, trudging forward. His massive autocannon sliced through the attacking ranks of crimson-clad Inquisition soldiers, carving out an avenue for his advance. S
hrugging, Hawk followed along, his own pistol blasting.

  They had made it nearly five meters inside the Inquisition ship before Falcon heard his new ally shouting a question: “What exactly are we trying to do here?”

  “I told you—we kill them all.”

  “But… we just want to get away, right?”

  Falcon didn’t answer for a second as he gunned down four more attackers. Then, “Okay—we kill enough to persuade them to let us go… or enough that they aren’t able to hold us anymore. How’s that?”

  Before Hawk could offer any sort of response, Falcon waved sharply at him and halted in mid-step. The soldiers ahead of them were pulling back suddenly, and that did not generally bode well. Then he spotted the wall panels sliding open just ahead and recognized the tiny speakers that were being uncovered. At Hawk’s query he yelled back, “Sonics! Activate your countermeasures!”

  Falcon had no idea if Hawk even knew what he was talking about, let alone if he was able to access that part of his uniform’s capabilities. Fortunately, it seemed he was; when the sonics blared out, neither of them collapsed to the floor in agony.

  When it hit, there was one singular instant of sound—a sound so loud, so piercing, that it felt as if it were drilling straight through his head—and then nothing. Utter silence. Falcon always found it weird when his super-high-tech uniform cancelled out the sound around him; when he really was hearing literally nothing—his uniform was emitting a sort of white noise that blanketed the hypersonic attack, along with every other sound in the ship’s corridor. Falcon felt as if he stood within a bubble of soundlessness; as if his ears had ceased functioning entirely.

  Doubting that Hawk could understand their military hand-signal language—at least, not this quickly, without ever having used it before—he simply motioned forward, leading his new acquaintance on the attack again.