Hammer and Crucible by Cameron Cooper (easy books to read txt) 📗

closely. “That’s because I never approved such a transfer.”

“Or you did, and you’ve forgotten about it since?” she asked. “It was forty-three years ago…and you didn’t remember I was a private, just now.”

“Fair point. Only, being busted back to private is minor—”

“Not to me.” She scowled.

“—while giving up a single Ranger to the Imperial Shield is a blow any colonel would remember. Son, or not,” I added. Work with good soldiers long enough and they all become difficult to transfer out. “Basic cross checking would tell you I wasn’t his CO at the time. It wouldn’t have been me who approved the order.”

“L. Andela, Colonel…it was your chop, Danny.”

“Signatures can be faked.”

She dug in her sack, pulled out a pad and tapped it on, turned it around and shoved it at me.

I peered at the screen. The text was blurry. I waited for my focus to properly kick in and scanned the document. It looked authentic. Only, fakes weren’t useful unless they did look authentic. “What can I say? Someone is jerking you around.” I handed the pad back.

“Doesn’t that bother you, either?” she asked. She scrolled through the pad.

“Truth? No, it doesn’t,” I said tiredly. “What else have you got?”

Juliyana lifted a brow. “Isn’t that enough? Dad was Imperial Shield, on special assignment, when he died—”

“When he went mad, shot up a ship, rammed it into another, and fired nukes at all the others,” I amended. “Then he killed himself. Precision, Private.”

Juliyana swallowed, the furrow returning to her brow. “What if he didn’t go mad at all?”

“I saw the footage,” I told her gently.

That made her pause. She rallied. “What if he was doing exactly what he was supposed to do? What if he was following orders?”

I was too tired to laugh. The poor girl was grasping because living with the stain Noam left behind was hard. So I gave her a bit more rope to tug on. “Why would anyone give such orders?”

She sat forward. “The Imperial fleet was facing down Cygnus Intergenera. No one ever stops to consider that fact when they talk about what Dad did. Cygnus never accepted the Emperor taking control of the gates array at the end of the Crazy Years. The Drakas suit is still in the courts.”

“So?” Although I could already see where she was going with this—the earlier babble had primed me.

“So, by ordering Dad to make it seem like he’d gone mad, the Emperor dealt with Cygnus in a way that didn’t point at him. They had to appeal to the Imperial court after that—they’d been defeated in battle, and the Emperor wasn’t to blame. He made it look good by stripping Dad of all his medals and honors and removing his name from the Ranger roll.” Her voice grew strained.

I cleared my throat. I’d been there for that, after all. “And you think I set my own son up for something like that?” I asked mildly.

Her gaze was steady. “He was working for the Shield,” she insisted. “And you were…well, you weren’t yourself, toward the end. Everyone says so.”

“I didn’t handle Noam’s death very well,” I said in agreement. Now I was the one with the croaky voice. “That was after he died, though.” I rubbed at my temples. Another headache was setting in. “I don’t know why someone would prime you this way, Juli. It doesn’t matter, because I won’t take the bait. I didn’t sign that order. And it was forty-three years ago.”

“And I’ve been stuck in the bowels of drone ships and barges, doing shitwork, ever since!” she cried, leaping to her feet. “When do I get my life back, Danny? When do people forget what he did?”

She was crying again.

I got to my feet. Everything ached. I moved over to the bedshelf and opened it. “It’s late,” I told her. “You need to adjust to local time. Take the bed.” The sun was setting over the sea, turning it pink, while birds dove for their supper.

Juliyana got to her feet, a good soldier obeying orders, although I could see she wanted to argue the point. As she moved past me, I held out my hand. “Give me the pad. I’ll take a look.”

Her face lit up.

So bad at hiding what she was thinking!

She shoved the pad into my hand, rolled onto the cot and sealed it.

I sighed and got to work. I built a table and two chairs, which took up most of the space left in the sitting room. Then I settled at it with a full jug of blue tea. I was going to need it, for the pad was stuffed full of documents and Juli’s notes.

I scanned them, building a rough outline in my mind of what was there. I girded myself and returned to the one document which would dismantle this entire conspiracy she had built in her mind; The orders over my signature.

And yeah, there was a part of me which wondered if I really had forgotten signing those orders. In the last ten years I’ve overlooked and plain missed a lot of things, more of them each year. Andrain says it’s part of the aging process—according to the documentation. For him, I’m a walking experiment. Geriatrics is an almost forgotten realm of medicine.

For me, it’s no experiment. So I put off checking the orders until I thought I was ready to face them. Half a jug of tea was gone by then.

I’m not an archivist. I worked in the combat battalions, not support, but I’ve picked up tricks over the years. I cracked open the underbelly of the document and worked my way through the coding.

Clean and clear. Not a digit or line out of place. It had all the hallmarks of an Imperial document—heavy on code, with shielding, redundancies and fallbacks to preserve the integrity.

I sat back and stared at the moon rising over the sea, sending a white path toward the beach, and considered. I would remember something of this magnitude, surely? Or had I conveniently