Falcon nodded. “Come on, Hawk,” he grumbled. “This wild door chase isn’t doing us any good.”
Hawk glanced over at his friend and nodded, but couldn’t quite pull himself away from the door. He touched it again, his brown glove passing smoothly over its hard surface. Something about the door was calling out to him; there was almost a kind of magnetism to it—one the other two men didn’t seem to feel. On a whim he reached down and pulled the glove off of his right hand, then reached out to touch the door again.
“What,” Falcon growled, “you didn’t believe me when I said it was cold?”
“It’s not cold,” Hawk replied, his bare fingers moving across it. “It’s actually warm.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Falcon said. “Well, our differences in opinion about temperature notwithstanding, we need to get out of here.”
The robed man was already disappearing into the fog. Falcon himself was now only half-visible.
Hawk still didn’t move. He couldn’t. He didn’t want to. He continued to touch the door and could feel its surface growing warmer still—though not so hot as to be uncomfortable.
Then the door itself began to glow.
“What in the world?” Falcon muttered. He moved back into view, staring as the door took on a sort of phosphorescent hue. A nimbus of light radiated out from it all around.
The robed man emerged from the fog behind Falcon and gazed in wonder at what was happening as well.
Falcon looked back at him. “Has it ever done this before?”
“Never,” the man answered. His blue eyes were wide and his mouth open.
The door now appeared to be composed not of wood or metal but of pure light, almost painful to look at. As it grew brighter and brighter, the fog all around them parted and dissolved. Within moments they found themselves standing at the center of a broad circle of open space.
Falcon shielded his good eye with his left hand. “Hey,” he called to his friend then. “Try the knob now!”
Hawk, standing transfixed before the rectangle of light, blinked at Falcon’s words. Then he nodded and reached for the knob, which had been transformed into a small sphere of light. He touched it.
The bright, white rectangle of the door leapt outward and swallowed them all.
12: FALCON
The white light was everywhere and everything. It was, for the briefest of instants, their entire world—their entire universe. And then it faded and they blinked their eyes and looked around and found themselves to be somewhere else entirely.
“What just happened?” Hawk asked.
“We jumped,” Falcon said, sounding surprised, “through some kind of wormhole. That much is obvious. We left the level of the Below we were stuck in.” He glanced at Hawk with an odd combination of appreciation and suspicion. “How we did it, though—why the door activated when you touched it—is a mystery, at least to me.”
Hawk was oblivious to whatever Falcon was insinuating. “We found a way out,” he marveled. He started to smile.
The third man, standing just behind them, gazed at their new surroundings. “Out?” he repeated, as if it was the most alien word imaginable. “Out…”
“Yeah,” Falcon agreed after a moment. “We found a way out.” The concern etched on the human part of his face faded a bit. “But there’s a more important question to consider.” He rubbed at his square jaw as he looked around. “Did we move up—or further down?”
Falcon took two steps forward and looked around, happy to note that his mechanical eye had begun to function properly again. That was a good sign.
“What do you make of this place?” he asked the others.
“No clue,” Hawk said.
“It seems familiar somehow,” the robed man answered. He was turning slowly about, staring at the room and its contents. “Very familiar…”
The room they found themselves in now was a circular, dimly lit space about fifty meters in diameter. The floor, the walls, and the domelike roof that curved high above were all of solid gray stone, giving it the feel of a cave—though its smooth and regular shape suggested it had been carved out intentionally rather than being a natural phenomenon. The air was stale, and a fine layer of dust covered the stacks of computerized equipment that littered much of the floor.
“It’s like when the old Earth explorers would open an ancient Egyptian tomb,” Falcon said after a few moments of taking it all in. “Like no one has been in here in ages.”
“It’s like a tomb,” Hawk suggested.
Falcon nodded slowly at that. “Yeah. It is.” He faced back in the direction they had come from. “Hey, look at this,” he said.
The others turned back to see.
A mechanical rectangle some four meters tall and two wide stood in the spot where they had just emerged.
“This remind you of anything?” Falcon asked Hawk.
Hawk nodded slowly. “The terminal in the Ring command center,” he said, “and the one aboard Condor’s ship. Its design is very much like them.”
“It’s another terminal, I think,” Falcon said, agreeing. “That door linked to it somehow.” He scratched at his chin. “It’s sort of like I was telling you before,” he said. “Things in the Below aren’t always what they seem. That door must have been a sort of visual metaphor. It was really some kind of gateway terminal. We came through that. Or emerged from it, I suppose.”
“Condor?” the robed man asked, ignoring the rest of their conversation. “I remember a Condor.”
“It would be great if we actually knew where we are,” Hawk said, looking around at the dim gray room and the banks of equipment.
Falcon nodded. “I’m going to try to access the Aether—if there’s any sort of connection available here, wherever we are.” He shook his head. “It’s patchy all over the galaxy, these days, if it’s available at all. But you never know.” He stood still for a moment, his good eye still keeping a close watch on the robed man all the while. He wasn’t sure he liked how antsy the big guy had gotten in the short time since they’d emerged through the doorway.
“Okay, got something,” Falcon said a few seconds later. “A connection—but local area only. Hmm. We’re on a planet now—Scandana.”
“Scandana?” the big man in the brown robes repeated, looking up.
“Yeah,” Falcon said, nodding, half his attention still held by the Aether connection within his mind. “It’s within the bounds of the Hanrilite Empire, and we know those guys…so I’m happy to report we’re back in the right universe, at least.” He frowned. “Not much going on, transmission-wise, around here. I’ve accessed their node of the galactic clock and it looks like we were actually away from this universe for only a few minutes, relatively speaking.” He laughed. “The one good thing about the Below: time moves a lot faster there. You can spend a year there and only a few minutes pass back here.”
Hawk nodded absently, his own attention now divided between his new surroundings and the man who might be Eagle, looming just ahead of him. The robed man was muttering things to himself, and Hawk had heard him say “Condor” again, plus “Machine” and “traitor” and “Adversary.”
“Oh,” Falcon said then. “There’s another local network here, just in this room. I think it monitors the gateway terminal and the other equipment—which is why the thing was operable even with no one here, and after however many years it’s been since anything in here was used.” A pause, and then, “Huh. There’s a message pod floating around in there. And—it has the seal of a Hand of the Machine.”
Hawk gave Falcon his full attention now.
“You’re saying there’s a message in the local network,” he asked his cyborg companion, “from one of us?”
“Looks like it, yeah. I’m checking the authentication code against what I have stored in my cybernetic memory now. Huh. It’s an old one. Really old.”
Hawk was frowning. The third man had turned his attention their way now, as well.
“Who is it fr
om?” Hawk asked.
Falcon chewed his lip as he worked the ancient decryption program that would open it. Then his human eye widened and he gasped.
“I’m not quite sure I believe this,” he said. “Let me double-check the time stamp.”
Hawk grew increasingly anxious. He glanced over at the robed man, who had stopped mumbling and was now entirely focused on Falcon. “Well?”
The cyborg was still staring off into space as cognitive routines ran within the computer portion of his brain.
“This message,” he said at last, his voice thin and distant, “is from a thousand years ago.”
“Yes?”
Falcon looked up at Hawk then, meeting his eyes, and laughed humorlessly. “And it’s from you.”
13: HAWK
“Not the me that’s standing here now,” Hawk said to Falcon after taking in what the man was saying and thinking about it for a second. “You mean the other me—the original Hawk. He left the message.”
“Right, yeah,” Falcon said, nodding. “He left it—a thousand years ago.” He shook his head in wonder. “It’s bounced around inside the local network for a millennium, waiting on one of us to come along and find it.”
“Hawk?” asked the man in the brown robes. “Hawk left a message here?”
Falcon gave the man a quick and perfunctory nod, then turned his attention back to Hawk.
“That’s what it seems to be, anyway.” He frowned. “I suppose it could be a virus—a mind-bomb, or something, designed to fry the synapses of anyone who opens it.”
“Ah,” Hawk said, nodding slowly. “Well, don’t take any chances,” he said. “Maybe you should just leave it alone.”
“Are you kidding?” Falcon asked, a wry smile on his face now. “I’ve got to know what it is—what it says.”
Hawk frowned at this but didn’t say anything.
“Huh,” Falcon snorted a moment later. He was continuing to analyze the message with his computer mind, doing everything short of actually attempting to open it. “It’s a full-blown holo file—images and sound, recorded directly from the other Hawk’s consciousness.”
And then Falcon’s human eye bugged out and he nearly stumbled backward. His mouth opened and closed and he turned in a slow circle, looking around at the room as if seeing it for the first time all over again.
“What?” Hawk demanded. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“This planet,” Falcon said, his voice low but intense. “It’s been so long, I had forgotten—didn’t make the connection.” His eyes met Hawk’s again. “This is Scandana. Scandana!”
Hawk understood then. He started to speak, but the third man beat him to it.
“The betrayal,” said the man in the brown robes. “The betrayal to the Adversary. That happened here. On Scandana. In this very room.”
Hawk and Falcon exchanged very surprised looks.
“You know about that?” Falcon asked, wary.
“I was there,” the man stated firmly, his voice deep and full now. “I was there, at the betrayal—of everything.”
Hawk felt his stomach sink. Maybe it’s true, he thought. Maybe this man really is Eagle—and he saw what I did. Maybe I really did betray the entire galaxy to the Adversary. His legs felt weak and he sat down on an old piece of equipment, steadying himself.
“Can I see the message?” Hawk asked.
Falcon was unsteady, his human eye darting from the robed man to Hawk, back and forth. He gathered himself and nodded.
“I can’t send it directly to you, since you’re unable to access the Aether,” Falcon replied. “But I can project it, such that you—and our friend here—can experience it mentally, as I play it back.”
“You can do that?”
Falcon tapped his cyborg eye.
“This thing can do a few tricks. That’s one.”
Hawk nodded. “Okay. Do it.”
“You’re sure you—?”
“Show it,” Hawk repeated.
“…Alright.”
Falcon closed his human eye for a moment, then reopened it. The other eye—the red mechanical one—flared brightly. For everyone present, it suddenly became as if they stood elsewhere—in the location where the recording had been made. They could see and hear everything experienced by the person who had made it.
As it happened, the scene that was revealed had occurred in the very room the currently occupied, and they were seeing it from Hawk’s point of view. It began with a bit of conversation that Hawk and Falcon had already witnessed a recording of, somewhat recently, when presented it by the Inquisition: Hawk confronting Governor Kail, and the governor making the infamous assertion:
“You may drop the pretense, Hawk. We both know why you are here. And let me add that you have done a marvelous job.” The governor smiled broadly. “I doubt that anyone even suspects that you are the traitor in the ranks of the Hands.”
And then, unlike with the previous recording, the conversation continued…
PART EIGHT
Before the Shattering:
The Seventeenth Millennium
—
Scandana
1: HAWK
“Traitor?” Hawk demanded, utterly shocked. “Me? What in the name of the Machine are you talking about?”
“There is no need for pretense, I assure you,” the governor said. His head was shaved smooth and creases crisscrossed his forehead, above bushy black eyebrows. He attempted a weak smile. “We are on the same side, you and I.”
“I strongly doubt that,” Hawk growled. “Because I don’t know whose side you think you’re on. But I am no traitor.”
“I—I—” Kail stammered, suddenly not quite so sure of himself and of the situation. He looked about abruptly, then turned back to Hawk. “Perhaps there has been an unfortunate misunderstanding,” he managed after a few seconds. Seeming to pull himself together a bit, his voice took on some of the commanding timbre Hawk would have expected from an aristocratic planetary leader. “May I ask what you are doing here? On my world? In my home?”
Hawk wasn’t wrong-footed by this in the slightest. He remembered that the original discussions aboard the Talon before the operation began had included the option of bombardment of the palace from space. The Machine rarely objected to collateral damage if an important objective was being met in the process. Even if nothing remotely illegal or dangerous was going on here, having one lone Hand wandering through the palace without authorization seemed much preferable to that. And clearly something both illegal and dangerous was going on here, to put it mildly.
“Given what I’ve just seen in the upper levels of your palace and in the adjoining rooms, Governor Kail,” Hawk replied, keeping his pistol leveled at the man, “I think you’re the one who needs to be providing answers here. And quickly.” He gestured around at the darkened chamber, the candles, and the strange rectangle draped in cables and wires that stood vertically on one end, across the room, amid other banks of odd machinery. “Just what is all of this?”
“It’s something you shouldn’t have seen,” came a voice from behind. Hawk whirled about, just as a foot lashed out and struck his wrist at just the right spot—and with just the right force—to knock his pistol away. It clattered across the stone floor.
Hawk never hesitated. He leapt to his left, tucking and rolling, moving out of the way of any additional attacks, and came up quickly, his night-vision implants scanning the darkness for any signs of his foe. At the same time, he again accessed the Aether and attempted to contact the Talon in orbit. The interference was greater than ever, though, and he couldn’t make the connection.
“Stop!” shouted the governor. He ran in between Hawk and the attacker, waving his arms frantically. “I won’t have this, Merlion! This man is a Hand! He is far too important—too potentially valuable—to simply kill!”
“Merlion?” Hawk breathed, rising to a tense crouch and locating his gun where it lay some distance away.
The attacker stepped out of the
darkness and stood revealed. Hawk knew the face. He was Lord Darwyn Merlion, the very man he had been sent into the palace to capture or kill, on suspicion of traitorous activities. He wore another of the ubiquitous black robes and held a blast pistol in his left hand.
“Just what in the name of the holy Machine is happening here?” Hawk demanded, his eyes flicking from Kail to Merlion and back.
“Something marvelous,” the governor answered, his mouth splitting into a broad smile. “Something that will transform the galaxy itself.”
Merlion simply stood there, immobile, watching and listening. Governor Kail took a step forward and began to speak, all of his attention on Hawk now.
“There is a new power entering our galaxy,” Kail said, his voice bubbling over with excitement. “It will transform everything—all that we know will change. All will become better, greater.” He grinned. “Those who assist it will reap great rewards. Those who oppose it…” His grin faded, and he shrugged. “They will not be around to enjoy the new Golden Age, I’m afraid.”
Frowning, Hawk found himself listening in spite of himself. All this talk of a Golden Age and some new force entering the galaxy—that meant nothing to him. Hawk was a foot soldier, a policeman, a servant of the Machine that brought law and order to the many and diverse empires—both human and alien—of the galaxy. He had no interest in or use for some new force, and certainly no desire to betray his commander, Eagle, or his brother and sister Hands. Even so, something about the governor’s voice—the cadence, the tone—was making his limbs sluggish, preventing him from turning away and rejecting the man entirely. He did, however, manage a sour expression on his face.
“You’re wasting your time,” Merlion muttered. “It won’t work.”
“No,” the governor barked. “You have to listen to me, Hawk. Hear me out.”
Hawk still couldn’t move. Now he found he couldn’t speak, either. Something—some strange force surrounding him, here in this strange cavern of a room—was holding him in place. Or rather it was causing him to hold himself in place. Gritting his teeth, he fought it.
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