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

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