“Lopping off the arms and heads of my soldiers didn’t help,” Shrike stated after a few moments.
“Perhaps I went a bit far with that.” Raven attempted to look chagrined.
Shrike was almost, almost close enough now. Raven bent her tongue around, probing the rear of her mouth, finding the right tooth…
“Well, now. Should I trust this sudden new spirit of cooperation from you?” Shrike asked. “I don’t know.”
Raven nearly had the artificial tooth worked loose now. Meanwhile, her right hand had found the tiny stiletto blade hidden in the cuff of her sleeve and managed by the hardest to draw it out.
Shrike took one more step toward her. Raven had the tooth loose, ready.
A sudden shrill noise blasted through the chamber.
Shrike whirled, moving away quickly.
Raven cursed. So close!
Then someone from behind her grasped her by the hair and pulled her head up. A hand reached around and applied a large piece of tape across her mouth.
She fumed now. But at least she had the blade loose.
As the others hurried away, Raven managed to lean up enough to see where they were going. She could just see at the far end of the big, white-walled room a particular concentration of the very alien-looking equipment in a sort of geometric configuration: two big pieces of…something…covered in wires and crystal circuitry sat on the floor, while two identical pieces depended from the ceiling. The distance between each piece appeared to be the same, forming the four corners of a square.
As Raven looked on, the four pieces of equipment began to glow and shimmer with eerie green light. After a few seconds of this, the empty space at the exact center of the square also shimmered and wavered, like the visual heat effect just above the ground in a desert.
A little while more and the space inside the square was glowing a brilliant, blinding green that grew whiter as the seconds ticked by.
Shrike and her soldiers waited in a semicircle a few steps back from the strange phenomenon. They stood at attention.
The light faded and now Raven could see three new figures standing before Shrike. Her eyes had been dazzled by the display and she blinked furiously, seeking to clear her vision.
At last the fireworks across her retinas settled down and she could, to a degree, make out who had emerged from the bizarre effect that simply had to be a subspace portal. At first she was elated, but then as she looked on she came to realize that developments here were perhaps not as positive as she had first imagined.
For the figures that had emerged were all very well known to her—at least in general terms. But they were definitely not behaving correctly. As far as she could tell, none of them were.
What in the Above and the Below, she wondered half-out loud, is going on here? And, perhaps more importantly, just how many people am I going to have to kill now?
3: Hawk
Hawk and Falcon emerged from the hyperspace portal just behind Condor, walking into a high-ceilinged room with white walls and a glowing ceiling. The rippling spacetime distortion effect had been overwhelming during transit, but now reality had readjusted itself to normal around them and Hawk no longer felt as if his body and his mind were being twisted inside-out.
“Amazing, yes?” Condor asked as he turned back to face them.
“Quite,” Hawk replied.
“Depending on how far we traveled just now,” Falcon added.
“Would you believe a third of the way across the galaxy?”
Falcon’s eyes widened. “Then ‘amazing’ it is.” He turned back around to take a look at the equipment—two units on the floor, two more hanging from the ceiling of the big room.
Condor cursed then. “I liked that ship,” he groused.
“At least your crew made it out,” Falcon noted, as a stream of brown-uniformed men and women emerged from the portal and filed past.
Condor responded with ambivalence. He looked back to see the last of his crewmembers emerging from the portal before it snapped closed, the ship at the other end of the hyperspace tunnel now obliterated.
Hawk meanwhile was studying the small group of figures that stood a few feet away, apparently having been waiting for his party to emerge. A half a dozen men in identical, dark green uniforms with silver helmets stood at attention in a semicircle, partly surrounding a tall, slender, blonde woman in a tight, brighter green jumpsuit. As Hawk looked at her, it dawned on him that she could be Condor’s sister.
“So that thing punches a hole right into the Above, and back out,” Falcon noted, still looking back at the portal machine. “Can it take you anywhere?”
“It punches into the Above or into the Below,” Condor replied somewhat impatiently, “but it’s based on pre-Shattering tech that my agents do not fully understand. And so, unfortunately, the two terminals only connected with one another—the one here, and the one on my spacecraft.” He frowned. “And now, I fear, only this terminal remains, and so now it goes nowhere.”
Falcon turned back around, taking in as much of the new environment as he could, and saw the small crowd of people waiting. He started to ask the next logical question, but Hawk beat him to it.
“Where exactly is ‘here?’”
“I will reveal all to you in just a moment,” Condor said. He gestured towards the woman in green. “Allow me to introduce my second-in-command, Shrike.”
Hawk nodded respectfully to her, but Falcon only frowned.
“Shrike?” he repeated. “But—”
“You did not think there were any more Shrikes, naturally,” the woman stated, anticipating his question. “But as the presence of so many of us here proves,” she went on, her eyes moving from Hawk to Condor and back to Falcon, “one can never be certain about Hands.”
“Very true,” Condor agreed with a tight smile.
Falcon grunted, a sound that could be taken to mean whatever one wished it to mean.
“If you would come this way, gentlemen,” Condor said, gesturing to his right where a doorway stood open, “all will become clear to you, I believe.”
Falcon strode past the blonde woman, not sparing her a second look, and moved through the open doorway. Hawk followed, hesitating for only a moment as something caught his eye at the far end of the long room.
Was that a person—tied up and lying on the floor? A woman?
He’d only gotten a glimpse and couldn’t make out much about her. Then they were out of the room, Shrike and her soldiers at the rear, the door sliding silently closed behind them.
They emerged into bright sunlight. They stood on what seemed to be a long, broad expanse of white plastic. In fact, looking back, Hawk saw that the building they had just exited looked to have been extruded directly from this plastic “ground.” Then he gazed upward and struggled to make sense of what he was seeing.
“Do you understand yet?” Condor was asking them. “Can you fathom just where we are?”
Clearly Hawk could tell that they were now outdoors, on a planet of some kind. It had to be a planet, because they were walking around in fresh air, with no ceiling, and a shining sun far up in the sky. In fact, it appeared to be exactly noon, because the sun was directly overhead. The only thing that gave him pause was the “planet’s” surface on which they walked: In every direction that he looked, Hawk could see other buildings that had been extruded out of the white plastic material.
So—was it a world made entirely of plastic?
And then a second detail came to his attention. An arch—or at least the lower portions, with one leg towering up in the far distance to his left, and the other reaching up equally high from his right, both disappearing ultimately in the glare of the noontime sun.
How far away are the legs of that arch? he wondered. The more he looked, the farther away they seemed to be.
He looked back down and saw Condor watching him and smiling.
“It is hard at first to conceive of the dimensions of this place, is it not?” the blond man asked.
“When I tell them to you, they will shock you.”
“It’s some kind of planet,” Hawk stated quietly. “And yet—”
“And yet there are things that don’t quite add up, correct?”
Hawk nodded.
“I think I get it,” Falcon said then, “even though it’s utterly insane.” He met Condor’s eyes. “It’s a ring.”
“A ring?” Hawk’s voice conveyed puzzlement, while Condor and Shrike looked on with amusement.
“Think about it,” Falcon continued. “Put a ring all the way around a sun, at an orbital distance that’s conducive to life. Not too warm, not too cold. Spin it for gravity, right? And I guess you’d have to raise walls on either edge of the inner surface to keep the air from spilling out the sides. But that’s pretty much all there is to it.”
Hawk’s eyes widened as he considered the scale of such a construct, of such an undertaking.
“Ah, you are truly a Falcon,” Condor noted with appreciation. “Always the engineer at heart. Even as mighty a construct as this could not confound you for long.” He laughed. “And probably already dreaming up ways of destroying it.”
“You didn’t build this,” Falcon growled. His tone left no room for argument.
“Certainly not. But I found it.”
“Inhabited?”
“Completely empty—at least in terms of sentient life forms. But with room for…” He shrugged. “…trillions.”
Falcon looked to be doing some math in his head. Then he nodded. “Yeah, trillions. At least.”
“Was there ever anyone here?” Hawk asked. “Where did they go?”
“There must have been inhabitants, long ago,” Condor said. “Well before the Shattering.” He considered. “I’m not certain if the battles of the Shattering even extended out this far. We’ve not found much in the way of wreckage in this solar system or nearby.”
Hawk considered this. His injected older memories had slowly been returning to him; coupled with what his ship had filled him in on, he had a decent understanding of broad galactic history now.
“So this corner of the galaxy may have somehow escaped the notice of the Adversary during the war,” he said. “Maybe that’s why the ring was built here.”
“Or maybe the ring itself kept the enemy away,” Falcon suggested.
“How could that be possible?” asked Hawk. “This design seems to me incredibly vulnerable. Just shoot a hole in the floor and watch as all the air drains right out into space.”
“That is true, to a point,” Condor agreed. “If the hole is big enough, and if no one repairs it within a period of perhaps months or years. And, of course, if the enemy can approach close enough to blast a hole in the first place.”
Falcon turned to Condor. “You did say something about having a formidable weapon.”
“Oh, indeed,” Condor replied, grinning again.
“Where is it?” Falcon asked.
“You are standing on it.”
Hawk and Falcon exchanged glances. They even looked down, but saw only the unending plain of white plastic under their boots.
“You mean the ring itself,” Hawk said then.
Condor nodded. “As you said—without it, we would be incredibly vulnerable here. But with it, we are untouchable.”
Hawk considered all of this.
“With a weapon as powerful as that, perhaps we could actually defeat the Adversary—destroy the enemy forces now, before—”
“No, no,” Condor cut him off, shaking his head. “The weapon will not reach far beyond this solar system, and the ring does not move. We are tied to our star.”
“Could it serve as a sort of galactic lifeboat?” Hawk speculated then. “We somehow bring all the surviving inhabitants of the galaxy here, to this ring—there would be room for most of them, I think, as hard as that is to imagine—and then use the weapon to defend them from the Adversary’s forces.”
“Even imagining that something of that logistical complexity could be done,” Falcon said, staring at him, incredulous, “you would surrender all of the rest of the galaxy to the enemy and squeeze everyone onto this ring?”
“It would not be my first choice, no,” Hawk answered. “Probably my last choice, in fact. But if we have no other choice—if the galaxy is about to fall to the Adversary…”
Falcon gave him a sour look and turned away.
“If we are to face the old Adversary again,” the cyborg growled, “I mean to defeat him, not appease him.”
Hawk started to object, then shook his head and said nothing.
“Such a thing would be extremely difficult,” Condor stated. “Our encounter a few moments ago provided all the proof I needed in that regard. We faced only a handful of their ships and I lost my flagship! If not for the ancient portal technology, we would all be dead now.” He swore. “Our best course may be to simply hold out and wait for the Adversary to lose interest in this galaxy and move on once again. And I don’t mean bring everyone else here—or even a fraction of them. That would only attract the enemy’s attention. But if we were simply to lay low here—”
Hawk whirled on the man.
“You mean to protect ourselves, and to abandon the surviving trillions and trillions of sentient beings in this galaxy to the Adversary? To slaughter?”
“I am but one man,” Condor replied.
“You have an army. And incredible weapons, such as this ring.”
“Hawk is right,” Falcon said. “With technology like this, perhaps victory is not impossible after all.”
“All the armies and all the super-weapons of the ancient races were only able to drive the Adversary away, during the Shattering,” Condor pointed out, a hint of anger creeping into his voice. “And that at the cost of utterly destroying their civilizations, not to mention obliterating the Empires of Man.” He scoffed. “Compared to that, what are my meager resources?”
“They are a start,” Hawk answered.
Condor sighed and looked away. For several seconds no one said anything.
“I’ve been giving this a great deal of thought,” Falcon said at last, breaking the silence, “since Hawk first brought it to my attention only recently.” He paused, as if not entirely willing to say what he needed to say. Pursing his lips, he continued. “I think I know the answer. Or, at least, the beginnings of an answer.”
The others all turned to look at him.
“If the Adversary truly has returned, and in anything like his strength of old, and if we really are going to lead a campaign against him and his forces, then what we need,” the big cyborg stated flatly, “is the Machine.”
“What?” –this from both Hawk and Condor.
“Not the Machine as it existed during the first few centuries after the Shattering, of course,” Falcon said, “but as it once was, before that. In its prime it commanded vast armies and nearly unlimited resources and its reach was unmatched. It defended this galaxy from all threats for a very long while prior to the Shattering. Only after that great war ended, when it was left only with a scattered few Hands to serve as its enforcers, did it begin to exhibit signs of…madness, yes. Insanity. And then, ultimately, it fell silent.”
“You want to repair it? To restore it?” Hawk stared back at him, astonished. “Would such a thing be possible?”
Now Condor looked extremely uncomfortable. He waved a hand to cut off the discussion.
“We have all had a rough time. These are questions too big to be decided so quickly. I suggest we get some rest and resume this conversation later.”
Hawk reluctantly agreed. Falcon shrugged.
Condor signaled to Shrike and a detachment of her troops approached. “They will lead you to the quarters that have been prepared for you,” he told the two Hands.
Hawk and Falcon nodded and followed the soldiers back inside the main building.
As they walked away, Falcon glanced back over his shoulder at Condor, seeing the regal figure engaging in animated but hushed conversation with Shrike.
“I don’t much like this,” the cyborg told his companion in a hushed tone. “I trusted our new friend there a lot more when it was just him. But with this alleged Shrike alongside…” He shook his head. “I suggest we sleep with one eye open.”
Hawk chuckled. “Is that even possible for you?”
Falcon tapped the metal side of his skull and snorted. “Are you kidding? I only have one. Makes it easy.”
4: FALCON
Indeed, Falcon proved to be a prophet only a short two hours later.
The troopers had shown him to a somewhat small room that looked to have been used only for storage previously. They’d set up some kind of big cot for him—fortunately, they had hastily reinforced it in order to hold up his considerable weight, given that a large proportion of his body was now made of metal.
Lying back on the makeshift bed, he’d taken a quick look around in order to familiarize himself with his surroundings. There really wasn’t much to see. The room was a light gray in color, with walls and floor seemingly made from the same plastic-looking stuff as the rest of the building. Two metal folding chairs sat nearby, along with a small table positioned to serve as a night stand. Otherwise, the room was empty.
That suited Falcon just fine. He wanted to nap.
Unfortunately, though his weary cyborg body lay still and unmoving on the bed, his mind remained as active as ever. He felt antsy. All sorts of concerns were gnawing at him. He knew it would be some time before he was able to sleep, and indeed that fact was what saved him.
The attack came as he was finally thinking through what he knew and what he had learned in the past couple of days. Much as he wasn’t a terribly introspective or deliberative person, he knew he needed to sort out the whole situation as best he could, because he had the distinct feeling that some kind of resolution was fast approaching.
Had the great Adversary—architect of the Shattering of their galaxy and the destruction of most of the advanced races therein—truly returned? Falcon was not entirely convinced. It depended upon what one meant by “the Adversary.” If one meant that at least one or two of the races that had originally and prominently served as part of the massive forces that had assaulted the galaxy was back in action and up to mischief again, then yes, Falcon could now testify from his own experience that such a thing was true.
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