Hammer and Crucible

by Cameron Cooper

  “Who is he?” My own heart was thudding once more.

  Dalton’s jaw worked. He swore softly. “Noam’s reporting officer in the Shield.” He turned away and stalked over to the railing at the edge of the dock and leaned on it. The dock actually creaked under his feet, as if it really was a genuine plank structure resting on a lakebed. “You shouldn’t have that name. There’s no way you could. I’ve never told anyone.” He was speaking to the water.

  “You were keeping it,” I said. “The ace up your sleeve.”

  Dalton turned and rested his butt on the railing and crossed his arms. “Where did you get the name?” he demanded. “The man who gave it to me is dead.”

  I built up an instant lie, about contacts inside the Shield. Only it wouldn’t hold. Dalton was a master of networking and favors, and he likely didn’t have a contact inside the Shield. No one did. They’re a shield for a reason. They’re impervious to the entire empire.

  Dalton waited me out.

  I shrugged. “Noam told me.”

  His eyes narrowed. “If you knew all along, then why chase after me at all? Why not go straight for Moroder?”

  “I found out, just now.”

  Dalton’s arms loosened. Then he said carefully, “Noam told you…just now?”

  I realized I had crossed my own arms. I deliberately lowered them. “I know how it sounds. But is that any weirder than this?” I lifted my hand up toward the mountains. “Is it any stranger than a ship plucking you out of the depths of a stellar city and spiriting you to a remote station where I just happen to show up?”

  Dalton rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay, point made. So…Noam just…what? Sent you a message?”

  “I don’t know how it works,” I admitted. “I have…” Damn it, I couldn’t hold back now. “I have waking seizures and when I do, I see and hear Noam. I thought it was my brain getting scrambled by the seizure, showing me what I wanted to see.”

  Dalton tilted his head. “I can understand that.” His tone was calmer.

  “Only, just now, Noam gave me a name I’ve never heard in my life. You just confirmed it is a real name, and someone connected to the Shield.”

  Dalton grew very still. “You’re sure you’ve never heard the name?”

  “Never. Not with the three names in there, like that. Maybe there are dozens of Michael Moroders running around the Empire and I just happened to dredge up the name of one of them from seeing it on a roster or who knows anywhere? But this Moroder? Out of all of them?”

  “Yeah, it’s a stretch,” Dalton admitted. “So, if you didn’t come up with the name yourself, who gave it to you?”

  “At the moment, all I know is that Noam did. As it’s a legitimate lead, we have to follow it, Dalton. We have to find where Moroder is now and go talk to him. Face-to-face, no data across the array for the Empire to pick up. Anyone mixed up in this will have been tagged by the Empire. They’ll be alerted if anyone reaches out to them.”

  Dalton shook his head. “We should be reaching out to Cygnus Intergenera.”

  “Cygnus?” I let out the shocked breath I’d sucked in. “Why the fuck would we talk to them? If we can even find anyone to talk to in the first place? We’d get the corporate runaround. Appointments, meetings, lackies—they’ll never say no, but they’ll tie us up in red tape for years and never give us what we want.”

  “Only if you try to use the official channels,” Dalton said dismissively. “The war Noam was in, the battle he blasted out of existence, was the Empire against Cygnus. You and I and Juliyana—even Lyth—are being nudged into digging through what happened, and if we survive long enough to go public with what we find, Cygnus stands to gain the most out of that.”

  I considered it. “You think the Emperor is behind this, too.”

  “I think someone really high up in the Shield is behind it,” Dalton replied. “The Emperor doesn’t control their every movement. Although legally, the Shield and the Emperor are the same thing. If we prove the Shield were involved in a massive coverup for whatever reason, Cygnus will then sue the Emperor’s ass and get back control of the array, then happily return to squeezing the Empire with trade tariffs and gate fees.”

  “It’s an interesting theory,” I admitted. “Aren’t you at all interested in what they’re covering up?”

  “No,” Dalton said flatly. “I couldn’t give a flying fuck. This isn’t my passion project, Danny. I just want my life back. Demonstrating to anyone who cares to listen that the Imperial Shield deceived the entire galaxy is enough to do that.”

  “What they’re hiding is the reason you lost your life in the first place.”

  “I still don’t care. I stopped caring a long time ago.”

  I let him keep the lie intact, and shifted ground. “Moroder is an easier lead to follow.”

  “You think?” His tone was withering. “He’s Imperial Shield. We’re better off heading directly for Rozsa Chang.”

  “The CEO of Cygnus?” I shook my head. “I admire the scale of your thinking, Dalton, but we would never get near her. She’s as armor-plated as the Emperor.”

  “You think she wouldn’t take a call from Danny Andela if we could put your name in front of her? You think she would refuse a call from anyone called Andela?” He paused. “We’re heading for Sh’Klea Sine. That just happens to be where the Cygnus board meets.”

  I considered the logistics, juggling factors. “That’s the problem with you, Dalton,” I said, letting my irritation show. “You grasp at lateral issues and pull everything off course. You always have.”

  “We’ll be right there.” His voice was low. Intense.

  “You take short-cuts. I doubt the regulation has been written that you haven’t tried to break in one way or another. You get perverse delight out of it.”

  “You made your disapproval of me well known on Annatarr,” Dalton shot back. “And that’s irrelevant—”

  “It proves my point. Running full tilt at Cygnus is the wrong move.”

  “Why?” he demanded. “You can’t force me to follow your orders now, Colonel. Explain yourself. If you can get beyond ‘because I say so’, I’ll be the most shocked man on the fucking ship.”

  “I am the captain!” I shot back.

  “And you just proved my point.” He shook his head.

  I drew in a ragged breath. Damn it, he was getting to me. “We can’t afford to steer by committee,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and reasonable.

  “And I can’t afford to follow you without question. It’s my life, Danny. Don’t you get that?”

  That was the old Gabriel showing. I recalled in a flash an occasion when he had questioned my orders, justifying it with the one reason I had a hard time arguing against. “It’s my men, Colonel,” he’d ground out.

  Dalton’s men had always been stupidly loyal to him—well beyond the regard other Rangers had for their CO. The way Dalton challenged everything was part of the reason why. “The source who tipped you off, who told you to run and keep running…they were under your command, once, weren’t they?”

  Dalton’s cheeks hollowed out. His jaw flexed.

  I nodded. “You guarded their backs. Now they have yours. Still.”

  “Not now,” he murmured. “Not anymore.”

  “Because they think you deserted,” I breathed, as the pattern shifted and dropped into place. “We can do both at once,” I told him. “Chang and Moroder. We have to figure out where the hell they are after forty years and how to reach them. Lyth should be able to help with that. Whoever’s location we find first, that’s who we tackle first.”

  Dalton looked surprised. Then he grinned. “You realize that Chang’s schedule is public property? Lyth will find her in seconds. Hell, he’s probably listening and has already pulled up this month’s public agenda.”

  “He promised he wouldn’t listen.”

  “You believed him?”

  “I believe he is terrified we won’t like him and decide to leave.”


  Dalton’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, I know something about that feeling,” he said softly.

  I floundered for a response, startled by the confession.

  Then Dalton got to his feet. “Thirty seconds talking to you cures me right away,” he added. “Maybe you should have a heart to heart with Lyth. Fix him right up.”

  I outlined the task for Lyth and asked him to find a way to reach out to both people—Chang and Moroder—then report back.

  Then I went to find Juliyana, who wasn’t in her room. I got lost in the back end of the ship, which was a labyrinth of utility rooms and corridors, and two other sub-levels that I didn’t go near. Finally, I said impatiently to the air over my head, “Lyth, where the fuck is Juliyana?”

  Lyth did not assemble himself behind me, as he had before. Instead, the ship spoke in his voice. “Follow the mouse. It’ll take you to her.”

  A fist-sized lump grew on the floor two meters ahead of me, then turned into the universe’s most indestructible rodent and scurried ahead, tail up. I followed it back through the maze, recognizing points I’d already passed, then into a new section. I put my hand against the wall on my left. Cold. The walls in my room were not hot to touch, but they weren’t cold, or even cool. “This is the exterior portside hull, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Lyth admitted.

  The mouse ran over to a door in the interior wall and melted back into the floor and disappeared. The door opened…onto the void of space and a star field.

  “Come in, Danny,” Lyth called, from inside the void.

  I saw his silhouette…and Juliyana’s. They stood on an observation deck, staring up at the starfield. That was why he had not personally escorted me to this place. He didn’t want to leave her side.

  I tabled that discussion for another time and went over to them. “What are you doing?”

  “Mapping out scenarios,” Juliyana murmured. “We’re jumping randomly around the empire and have been for weeks. I thought it might be prudent to take a breath and actually plan where we go next.”

  “That’s what I’ve been doing,” I said. “What’s that blinking star?”

  “Sh’Klea Sine, our destination,” Lyth said.

  I frowned. “The scale is too small. Can we scale up and get an overview?”

  The stars receded, as if they had been sucked down a tunnel, to be replaced with even more stars.

  “It doesn’t help,” Juliyana said, her tone apologetic. “The starfield is fractal. You can drill down and still be overwhelmed.”

  “Then kill the starfield and create a representation. Lyth, clear the view, and show only the Sine system, and Sh’Klea itself.”

  The stars disappeared. A green and blue world appeared. Over it, considerably scaled in size, hung a geo-stationary, sprawling city of domes and towers winking in an out-of-view sun. Also not visible was the gate, where we would emerge in less than three hours.

  “Is this from your archives?” I asked Lyth curiously, for the detail was amazing.

  “It is as the city appears right now,” Lyth said.

  “You mean, this is the view from the gate?”

  “Correct.”

  “How do you do that, Lyth?” Juliyana asked him. “I’ve never known a ship that could do that before. Your data is always updating, too.”

  “I don’t know how,” Lyth said reluctantly, as if the confession pained him. “I just can.”

  “More of Wedekind’s brilliance, perhaps,” I said. I turned back to examine Sh’Klea Sine. “The docks are internal. We can’t see who is there.”

  The view was overlaid by a bulleted list that scrolled slowly. “The current list of registrations of ships berthed at Sh’Klea Sine,” Lyth said.

  “You are still working on finding Chang and Moroder, aren’t you?” I asked him.

  “Absolutely,” he assured me. Then he added, “You’ve noticed the Imperial registrations in the list, yes?”

  I turned back to the list of ship names hanging in the air in front of us, over the twinkling city. “None of them are familiar to me, but it’s been a while. Pick them out for me and tell me their classifications.”

  Four names were highlighted. “They’re all falcon class,” Lyth said.

  “Dreadnoughts,” Juliyana concluded, with a heavy sigh. “Waiting for us?”

  “Sh’Klea Sine is the financial and banking capital of the empire. It’s unlikely four dreadnoughts would pull up beside it for shore leave, not all at once,” I said. “They don’t know we can see ahead to our exit,” I added.

  “They’re waiting for us,” Juliyana said.

  “Lyth,” I said. “What regiment do the dreadnoughts belong to?”

  “The seventh.”

  Law enforcement. “It’s a good bet they’re there for us,” I said. “Only how they know we’re coming…” That was another impossible problem for another time. “We can’t linger when we arrive,” I added. “No matter how much Dalton wants us to. We’re going to have to turn on a molecule and dive right back into another hole.”

  “Dalton can’t handle that sort of flying,” Lyth said. “Not yet.”

  “Then we pack him in a shell until we’re back in the hole.”

  “He won’t like that,” Juliyana said.

  “He won’t like not being in a shell more,” I replied. “I’ll break it to him,” I added.

  16

  We were both right. Dalton complained and bellyached even when he was in the shell Lyth had prepared for him on the bridge. It wasn’t the captain’s shell in front of the windows, but one just off to the side. Combat shells let the soldier remain upright and on their feet until gravity itself pushed them into the shell and cushioned the force. Most of the time, I had forgotten that the cushioned wall at my back was actually an inertia shell, ready to take over and shield me when needed. In all my years of active ship duties, I had never once had to use the shell. The crush juice had been up to the task.

  “Sixty seconds,” Lythion warned from overhead as Lyth set the controls on the shell.

  “At the most, you’ll feel ten percent above one gee,” Lyth told Dalton. “The shell won’t automatically render you unconscious.”

  “Thank the fuck for that,” Dalton said heavily and relaxed into the shell.

  I thought I understood his frustration. He’d been relying on his own resources for a long time. Now he had to let go and let us get him out of trouble.

  “Don’t fuss, Dalton,” I told him, keeping my voice airy and unconcerned. “This is a basic maneuver. We’ll be back in the hole so fast, you won’t have time to take a breath.”

  “Actually, it will take forty-seven seconds to—”

  “Not now.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Dalton scowled even harder.

  “Emerging,” Lyth warned.

  I rested my shoulders against the cushion behind me, bracing myself. From the corner of my eye, I could see Juliyana settling against the shell by the console I had designated as the weapons console.

  The blank nothingness of the hole was replaced by a starfield and a blinding white sun, before the screen polarized and the sun become an orange disk. Dazzled, I blinked my eyes. “Around and back in, Lyth. As tight as you can.”

  The reaction engines made the ship vibrate under my feet. With the full navigation grid online, the ship was shivering with eagerness to move. The sun slid to our left, moving out of sight, as the ship turned in a tight arc.

  I could feel my body trying to move to the left, too. I braced my feet and ignored it.

  Sine III came into view, a bright jewel of a planet with a deadly atmosphere. Sh’Klea Sine hung above it.

  “Any movement from the landing bays?” I called.

  “All four bay doors are on alert,” Lyth said. He stood next to Dalton’s shell, his gaze ahead. Then he snapped upright.

  “Incoming traffic!” Lythion said, his tone urgent.

  “Hold on!” Lyth added.

  Incoming meant a ship was emergi
ng from the gate behind us. Normally it wouldn’t be an issue. Normal ships emerged, then raced at best speed toward the city. We had looped around, though, and were very nearly facing back the way we’d come. In a few seconds, we would see the gate we had just emerged from…which put us directly in the path of the ship which had just emerged.

  “Swing under it!” I shouted. “Then up into the gate behind it! Move it!”

  The twin noses of the ship dipped—I saw brighter stars rise above them. The Lythion maintained the hard circle, even as it dipped.

  Three seconds later, the ship we were dodging came into view, the massive gate behind it. Matte black, sleek and deadly.

  “It’s a carrier!” Dalton shouted.

  “Their cannon is adjusting,” Juliyana added, her tone calm. She slid her fingers over the console, preparing.

  “Do not fire,” I said urgently. “Do not provoke them.” We could still slide under them. We were so close we had the element of surprise on our side. The carrier would think we were attacking, right until we ducked under them. It was too large to turn as fast and tight as we were. We’d be back in the hole before they figured out what we were doing.

  “Ten seconds until we pass under them,” Lyth warned.

  The cannon was pointing directly at us now, a black, deadly snout. Nothing showed in the black throat, yet.

  Even to me, it seemed as though we would ram the carrier. My breath caught and held. I griped the edge of my shell, wondering if Lyth had miscalculated. At the very last second, we grazed under the carrier. If we had been in atmosphere, the wake of our passage would have rocked the bigger ship and tossed around everyone inside it.

  The gate loomed and appeared to be leaning away from us because of the angle of our approach.

  “Capacitor ready,” Lyth said softly.

  The gate glowed, the center aqua blue and peaceful, beckoning us.

  “Entering,” Lyth added, as we drove through the pond and into the blankness of the wormhole behind it.

  I blew out my breath and relaxed.

  Juliyana met my gaze. “The carrier. Was it following us?”