Silent Order_Fire Hand by Jonathan Moeller

Author:Jonathan Moeller [Moeller, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Azure Flame Media, LLC
Published: 2017-10-22T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6: Past and Present

March fell through the blackness endlessly.

And in the blackness, he saw his past.

He dreamed of Calixtus, the world where he had grown up. Calixtus had been conquered by the Machinists before his birth, and the Final Consciousness had shattered the planet’s civilization. Most of the population lived in labor camps, watched unceasingly by Machinist soldiers and collaborators, with death the punishment for any infractions. Those who could survive the joining process to the Final Consciousness were taken.

His mother had died of illness and malnutrition. March had taken to stealing to survive. One day he had been caught. He should have been executed, but the security forces had tested him for compatibility to join the Final Consciousness.

March had passed.

So they had taken him and cut him apart.

He had been awake for every excruciating moment of the surgery as they cut off his left arm and replaced it with cybernetics, as they sliced open his torso and skull and added implants. The pain almost drove him mad, but the Final Consciousness had no patience for weakness, and as his hive implant came online, the thundering will of the Final Consciousness filled him, purging away all weakness and compassion and doubt and fear.

March had become an Iron Hand.

There had been the training, brutal and relentless, the punishments harsh. March had excelled, learning the arts of hand-to-hand combat, sabotage, infiltration, assassination, and all the other skills the Final Consciousness required of its Iron Hands, its elite assassins and operatives. March had gone on countless missions for the Final Consciousness, killing and killing and killing. He had been among the best, and he had known neither doubt nor fear. The Final Consciousness’s certainty filled him, drowning any doubt he might have known.

Then had come Martel’s World.

March had thought he would die from his injuries, but one of the families living in the slums had taken him in and tended him. When he had been well enough, he had left and rejoined the Machinist forces retreating from the system in the face of the Kingdom of Calaskar’s offensive.

And then the Machinists had bombed the world to deny it to the Royal Calaskaran Navy.

Billions of people burned to ashes in a moment.

Including the family that had taken him in.

When he had asked why they had helped him, they had said that just as the Good Samaritan had taken in wounded man in the Bible, so too would they follow Christ’s teaching and help March.

And the Machinists had killed them for no reason. Martel’s World was strategically useless, lacking the advanced industries and scientific farming to support an interstellar war economy. There had been no reason, no reason at all, for the Final Consciousness to destroy Martel’s World, save for spite.

And March had discovered something stronger than the thunderous certainty of the Final Consciousness.

Rage.

He had escaped, and Censor had found him. The Silent Order gave him surgery to remove most of his implants (he had gotten to go under this time), and the Iron Hand became Captain Jack March, Alpha Operative of the Silent Order.

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