Hammer and Crucible

by Cameron Cooper

“Through null-space? I would have said that was impossible, two days ago.” I grimaced. “One more thing we have to figure out,” I added.

  I went over to Dalton’s shell. It was completely closed. “Lyth, open it, please. Wake him gently.”

  “Inertia was too high, at the end, there,” Lyth began as he started the wake cycle on the side of the shell.

  “You did fine, Lyth,” I told him.

  The shell gave a soft popping sound then retracted on either side. The protective gel which had covered Dalton completely pulled aside with it. Dalton looked like he was asleep. The shell stole one’s consciousness, which I think Dalton would be relieved about, as he was already mildly claustrophobic. He wouldn’t have liked the sensation of being smothered which a fully closed shell imparted.

  He drew in a deep breath and opened his eyes.

  I gave him my warmest and most reassuring smile. “We’re safely in the hole.” I held out my hand. “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink.”

  He took my hand and stepped out of the shell and shuddered. “Make that two.”

  We all headed for the diner. There was no discussion. We just gravitated there like electrons.

  We slid into the same booth we had used that morning.

  The waitress came over with her tray and placed heavy-bottomed glasses in front of us. Each had five centimeters of liquid in it. “I figured you could use a belt,” she told us and winked and went away.

  Dalton was the first to knock back his shot. He hissed and placed the glass very carefully back on the table.

  We followed suit. Even Lyth made a show of gulping his whisky, drawing the air over his tongue like a true aficionado of grain alcohols did.

  Juliyana held her empty glass up to the waitress, tapped it, and held up four fingers. Then she turned back to us. “They’re tracking us. Somehow.”

  “Not possible,” Lyth said.

  “A lot of impossible things have happened lately,” I said. “Best not make that argument unless you can back it up.”

  “I can back it up,” Lyth said. “It is impossible for anyone to track us inside a wormhole, because we’re not in proper space. I could prove that with mathematics, but I doubt you’d understand it.”

  Dalton snorted and patted Lyth on the shoulder. “Way to make us all feel inadequate.”

  Lyth looked alarmed. “But you really wouldn’t understand…” he said quickly.

  “I’m sure we wouldn’t. Relax, Lyth. We’ll take it as a base fact for now that we can’t be tracked inside the array. So how did they know we were coming?”

  Juliyana pressed her fingers to her temples. “The data…” she said.

  We all looked at her and waited.

  Juliyana sat up again. “Look, we’ve been making queries for hours and hours, all of it sensitive data, right? We didn’t stop to question how the Lythion could suck up live data like we were in ordinary space. We just used it because it was very, very convenient. So all these delicate questions were put out there into the data stream.”

  Dalton wiped his finger around the bottom of his glass, picking up the last of the excellent whisky. “And we’ve already agreed that anyone involved in the Drakas disaster asking about anyone else involved in it would ring alarms across the empire.” He looked up. “We must have rung every alarm out there.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t explain how they knew where we would emerge,” Juliyana said, in a tone that said she was working it out, arranging pieces.

  “It’s a wormhole,” I said. “Lyth doesn’t know how he gets the data, but we’re in a hole with two ends—the data must come through one of them.”

  “The arrival gate,” Lyth said. “The hole collapses behind us.”

  I stared at him.

  “That’s something I could have lived without knowing,” Dalton growled.

  Juliyana pointed at Lyth. “That’s how they figured out where we were going to emerge—or maybe they figured we were already in normal space, because they don’t know we can get data in the hole. They tracked the origin of the query and it led them to the gate at Sh’Klea Sine. So they raced there. Any ships on the other side of the galaxy would have got there before us, ready to greet us.”

  I turned to Lyth. “You have to stop pulling in live data,” I told him. “Right now.”

  “It could already be too late,” Juliyana pointed out.

  “Right now, Lyth,” I insisted.

  He nodded. “Done.” Then his brow smoothed out. “By the way, there is something else you should know.” His tone was grave.

  Lyth took us to the room/space where he and Juliyana had been peering up at the starfield, which showed an interesting tendency toward conservation of energy. He could have simply shifted the diner around to show us his findings. Or perhaps he was sensitive enough to understand that my preference for my room to remain frozen extended to other spaces, too.

  The representation of Sh’Klea Sine was gone. In its place was another station—one of the vertical ones with a fat belly and hundreds of levels—a bit like the Umb Judeste. An ochre rock of a planet hung above it, with the light from a red sun bathing both.

  “Wow…” Dalton breathed, clutching his whisky glass to his chest, his chin up.

  “That’s our destination?” Juliyana asked. “I don’t recognize it.”

  “I said to stop pulling data, Lyth,” I snapped. “What part of that did you not understand?”

  “I’m not pulling data,” Lyth replied. “This is an archival file of Polyxene. You’ll notice it isn’t moving? We also won’t have updates on who is there to greet us, either.”

  Was that a touch of grumpiness in his tone?

  “Small joint,” Dalton said, with the air of recall. “But they still have seven bars on the main concourse.”

  “Also, you should know that when we arrive, we can’t swing around and dive back through the gate,” Lyth said. “We must dock. The fuel cells will be close to depletion by the time we arrive.”

  I absorbed that and nodded, telling myself it was just another mission parameter. “So, what did you want to show us?”

  A dozen documents and images laid themselves out over the top of the display of Polyxene, their corners covering others, layer after layer.

  “You might want to slow down a bit, Lyth,” Juliyana said with a diplomatic tone. “We don’t read that fast.”

  “There is no need to read any of them,” Lyth said. “I have already done so and have collated the data.”

  Dalton pointed. “That’s Rozsa Chang’s public itinerary,” he said, as the blizzard of documents ceased.

  “This month’s, yes,” Lyth said. “That was my starting point.”

  “You found where she will be,” I said.

  “That will be impossible, captain, as the public documents are fabrications.”

  We all looked at him.

  “You mean, all the little Cygnets drooling to glimpse the president check these documents, hurry to where she’s going to be…and she doesn’t turn up?” Dalton’s tone was incredulous. “And no one bitches about that?”

  Lyth shook his head. “The closer to the actual date, the more accurate the documents are—that’s quite normal, really. Humans are woeful at predicting what they will be doing and more inaccurate the farther ahead in time they are predicting. But in this case, I believe the inaccuracy is deliberate misdirection.”

  “Why do you think that?” I demanded.

  “Because for any one day of President Chang’s real agenda, only one or two events actually happen. Often, they are public events where Dalton’s Cygnets can see her—and those events are scheduled at the very last minute, sometimes with only hours of warning.”

  “Security,” Juliyana murmured.

  “Security…and something else,” Lyth said.

  The documents hanging in the air in front of us moved around, showing pages with tables. They flipped in a mesmerizing cascade. “I could only draw that conclusion by comparing where President Chang had actua
lly been against her public agenda.”

  “You tracked her real movements?” I asked.

  “I didn’t track her movements, but the traces those movements left behind. She uses three different identities to move around anonymously. The correlation with her known movements gave me the names, and I tracked them back.”

  More documents popped up. Landing bay fees. Gate fees. Bioscans. A dozen different stations, stellar cities and commercial hubs. The last document showed Sh’Klea Sine, which lay directly behind us. “Passenger Sprita Niessner passed through bio scanning every second month. Those dates coincide with the Cygnus board meetings, but Niessner is not a board member.” A list of board members overlaid the bio scan list.

  “Lemme guess,” Dalton said. “Chang has never been documented arriving at Sh’Klea Sine, but the board meeting minutes says she was there.”

  “Correct,” Lyth said.

  I looked at Dalton. “You were saying it would be easy to find out where she’ll be, I recall?”

  He scowled. “You’re telling us all this to explain why you can’t figure it out, Lyth?”

  “Oh, I can predict where she will be with a degree of accuracy, and the closer in time that location is to us, the more confident I can be about the prediction. Which means you may have to sit and wait for her to come to a location near you. But that isn’t why I wanted you to see this.”

  The documents shifted again.

  “I was curious,” Lyth said. “So I went back forty years and put together Chang’s real movements, as best as the documentation allows. I draw your attention to these dates and locations.”

  This time, dozens of documents arrayed themselves so they were readable, with highlighted lines of dates and locations, and durations of stay.

  “This is Chang?” I asked, for the name was not hers.

  “This is an identity she was using in that decade,” Lyth said. “I verified it the same way I verified the Neissner ID. Then I cross checked all other people of interest surrounding Noam Andela’s death and established that some of them also regularly used false IDs.”

  “Shit, and we spent days trying to find just Dalton,” Juliyana murmured.

  The original dozen documents ranged across the air shifted, so that similar documents were paired with each one, also with highlights.

  We examined them for a moment. “The dates, times and locations match,” I concluded.

  “Who is Addilyn Blanchard, Lyth?” I demanded, for that was the name of the ID that matched Chang’s movements.

  Lyth’s gaze was steady. “Ramaker III, First of the Tanique Dynasty.”

  Dalton and Juliyana stared at Lyth, their jaws slack.

  I felt the same freezing shock, but it was a superficial layer floating over a sense of inevitability. “The Emperor was meeting with her. Almost weekly.”

  Juliyana bent and put her hands on her knees. “The stars in their firmament… Everything I dug up said there was a connection, but I kept dismissing it. I didn’t think…I thought it was impossible, that I was being paranoid.” She gave a strained laugh and pressed her hand to her mouth.

  Dalton drained his whisky, set the glass on the floor and turned to study the documents once more. “Lyth, focus on that one.” He pointed.

  The document zoomed larger. Lyth helpfully pulled the corresponding document’s highlighted line over to this one and floated it just beneath the first.

  “Thanks, but it’s the letterhead that interests me,” Dalton told him. “Napoli Incorporated.” He turned to face us. “It’s not widely known, but the information is out there. Lyth can confirm. Napoli is the parent corporation that owns and controls Fantasy Inc.”

  Lyth intoned, “Fantasy Inc. Pleasure Resort is controlled by a consortium of business interests. Napoli Incorporated holds a majority share and has administered the resort for the last one hundred and three years.”

  I felt my mouth turning down. My gut was joining it. “Chang and the Emperor were having an affair…”

  Juliyana kept breathing deeply, still bent over. Her breath grew shorter.

  Dalton looked around. “Lyth, I need a drink. Now.”

  The walls of the room were disguised by the optical display, but a spotlight picked out a section of one wall, which was blank. As we watched, the surface of the wall shifted, and a printer outlet appeared, as if it was rising up to the surface of a pool. Which, in a way, it was. The construction nanobots had flowed across the printer’s façade, making way for it.

  Dalton tossed his glass into the recycle maw and picked up the fresh drink that formed on the print tray. He took a big mouthful and swallowed hard and turned to face us. “The fucking Emperor and Chang arranged the whole Drakas thing…” His voice was hoarse.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” I pointed out. “Lyth, how long do these two identities parallel each other?”

  “For three years after Drakas,” Lyth replied. “There are no other identities that I can conclude belong to either President Chang or the Emperor that follow the same pattern.”

  “They used each other up, then parted,” Juliyana said. She drew upright with a heavy inhalation. “They both got what they wanted.” Her tone was bitter.

  “Got what though?” I asked. “Cygnus lost face, lost lives, lost most of their military, and control of the array into the bargain…Chang wouldn’t have arranged that loss.”

  “Wait,” Dalton said. “Wait just a moment. Aren’t we falling into confirmation bias here? We wanted to find something, and Lyth found it, because he was looking for it.”

  “I didn’t tell Lyth to go back into the past,” I said. “I only asked him to find Chang now. Confirmation bias helped Lyth find it, that’s all. We were looking for it and no one else is—they don’t even suspect this connection exists.”

  “So they were fucking. So what?” Dalton said, his tone angry. “It doesn’t mean what you think.”

  “No?” My tone came out cooler than I had intended. “The most powerful man in the empire and the most powerful businesswoman in bed together…you really think they restricted themselves to conversations about sweet nothings?”

  “Why are you pissed about it, Dalton?” Juliyana said, her tone curious.

  His answer was to drain the glass. He tossed it at the recycle maw, a powerful overarm throw. The glass tinkled, then was evaporated out of existence.

  “I think we’re all reacting to the indigestible fact,” I said. “The Emperor and Chang were not the enemies we thought they were. Not then, and probably not now, either, despite lawsuits, wars and constant outbreaks of hostilities. That puts everything about Noam’s death and the Drakas thing into a different category.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Juliyana said firmly. “It merely confirms what we suspected and didn’t want to believe—that people were working against our interests and those of the public and covering them up. We just can’t cope with the fact that it was the Emperor himself doing the deed.”

  “Shit, I said almost the same thing to Danny, a few hours ago,” Dalton said, crossing his arms. “Imperial Shield, maybe. The Emperor, no way.” His shook his head.

  “It might be the same game, but the stakes have changed,” I said. “They’re bigger now.”

  “They were always this big,” Lyth said. “Now, though, you are aware of their magnitude. That is a good thing. It is information you can work with.”

  I drew in a breath. “How long until we reach Polyxene?”

  Lyth grimaced. “Twenty-seven hours. I picked the closest location, so our time in the hole was longest.”

  “It will serve,” I decided. “It will give us time to sort out our next step.”

  “You can’t seriously be thinking about tackling the Emperor himself?” Dalton said, his voice strained.

  “Directly? No.” I kept my gaze on his face. Dalton was the doubter, the questioner, and I needed him working with me, now. “We thought we were chasing two different things, Dalton. Chang and Moroder. Now they’re indirectly
connected. Chang is a dead end. We could put lasers under her fingernails and she wouldn’t hand over her connection with Ramaker. It would destroy her career and any life she values. She’s too hard a nut to crack. So we go after Moroder and we see where it takes us.”

  “Then you are going after the Emperor…indirectly,” Juliyana said.

  I could feel some of the energy and tingling restlessness returning to me, now I’d got over the shock of it. “Lyth just pointed out that nothing has changed, except now we know the scale of what we’re dealing with. My reasons haven’t changed…have yours?”

  Juliyana considered. “I think knowing this has just set them in reinforced plasteel.”

  I looked at Dalton. He nodded. “You know why I’m in this. It hasn’t changed.

  “Good,” I said. “Because yes, I am going after the fucking Emperor.”

  “Which he literally is,” Dalton added.

  Of the four of us, it was Lyth who laughed the loudest.

  17

  One can only work so long before mental fatigue sets in. I lasted thirteen hours more before I found myself dithering over which screen I should look at next and finding it an impossible decision.

  I dismissed all the screens I had arrayed and rubbed my scalp, feeling the exhaustion register. My face bones ached. But I was too wired to sleep, yet, even though the bed was right behind me. I could fall backwards where I stood and I was sure the bed would move to catch me. But I also knew my own body. I needed downtime, first.

  I moved around to the portside of the ship and the room where the stars had been arrayed. “Lythion,” I said, as I walked. “During the next set of daylight hours, have this stellar room moved closer to the front of the ship, please.”

  “Noted, Captain,” Lythion murmured back from the overhead speakers.

  I was adjusting with disgusting speed to the luxurious possibilities of moving rooms and walls and furniture.

  “Oh, and arrange the starfield in the room for me, will you? Any starfield.”

  “The room is already in use, Captain.”

  The door opened and I could see a heavy starfield beckoning. Reluctantly, I went in.