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

a bonded warranty made out in the name of the Imperial Shield, Special Operations Branch.

I scrolled back through it all, line by line, nodding.

“Sorry, Danny,” Dalton said.

“Call Juliyana here,” I said.

“I have,” Lyth said, as softly as Dalton.

I handed the pad back to Dalton. “Thank you for showing me.”

He studied me. “You’re not as upset as I thought you’d be.”

“A part of me couldn’t believe he was alive, despite everything pointing to that conclusion. After all this time, he would have found a way to reach out to us, and he didn’t. It means we interpreted the data incorrectly.” I drew in a breath, let it out, and with it the last tiny seed of hope. I gave Dalton an effortful smile. “And now, another highly convenient coincidence.” I pointed at the pad. “Proof of Noam’s death, just as we were settling upon the idea that he might be alive.”

“Yeah,” Dalton said heavily.

“It’s almost as if someone was listening in on us…” I frowned.

Lyth didn’t move. His gaze slid to me.

“Not you,” I told him. “You’ve been fooled, just like all of us, Lyth.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but I do not understand,” Lyth said.

“Don’t feel badly,” Dalton said. “I’m more lost than you.”

“There’s a comfort,” Lyth replied.

Juliyana arrived. Right behind her was Sauli, wiping his hands on a cleaning cloth.

“You asked to see me?” Juliyana said.

Dalton turned and held the pad out to her.

She took it and read.

I looked at Lyth. “We can’t do this here. Can you open a door to the stellar room? And make it daylight in there?”

Lyth stepped back out of the way and waved his hand toward the wall. A door appeared, and slid aside.

“Holy cow!” Sauli breathed, his eyes bugging out as the door assembled out of what appeared to be solid wall.

Through the doorway, I saw bright daylight and clear blue skies. I stepped through.

The mountainside lookout now featured a solid table made of hewn tree trunks the thickness of my torso. Stools made from smaller trunks ranged along both sides of the table. A chair with arms and a high back stood at the end.

I strode over to the chair and tried to move it. It didn’t budge. Then it slid out from the table, giving me room to settle on it. An invisible hand pushed it back under me as I sat. “Thank you,” I murmured, knowing Lyth/Lythion would hear it.

The others sat around the table. Juliyana blotted her wet cheeks with her sleeve, and dabbed her eyes dry, as she pushed the pad across the table to Dalton, who sat on my left. Sauli and Lyth sat on the remaining two stools, Lyth next to Juliyana and Sauli next to Dalton.

They all looked at me with understandable curiosity.

“I could ask Lyth the seal the room, but there wouldn’t be any point,” I told them. “We’ve been an open sieve since we stepped on board. I thought—” I glanced at Juliyana. “We thought Noam was using the feeds to reach us. The feeds, my implants, anything available to him. We thought he was arranging events to bring us to him. Now we know that isn’t true, the question that remains is who is manipulating us—and they are manipulating us. All of us, except perhaps Sauli, and I don’t want to discount that coincidence, yet, because the one expertise all of us don’t have between us is engineering skills.”

Sauli frowned. “I was just doing my job,” he pointed out. “I’m supposed to scan secondary engines for exhaust compliance.”

“Which someone might have counted upon,” Dalton told him.

Sauli sat back, looking thoughtful and unhappy and more than a little confused.

“It’s not Lyth,” I said. “It isn’t the AI driving him, either. Lythion knows what Lyth knows. Lyth says he’s not using live feeds and I believe him because we parked at Polyxene without alarms going off—therefore, they didn’t know we were coming. We didn’t flag our destination with electronic traces.”

I turned to Lyth. “The human who gave you your orders, Lyth. You said you didn’t know who they were.”

“Every possible element I could use to trace the origin of the message was deleted or masked or false. I couldn’t make any sense of it.” He paused. “But the message did give me what I wanted, so I followed the instructions, anyway.” He looked acutely uncomfortable.

I nodded. “Yes, we’ve all been guilty of that, lately, Lyth. That’s how manipulation works. You’re offered what you truly want, even if you didn’t know that was what you wanted.” I thought of my useless self denial. Forty years of it. I sighed. “Lyth, the human that gave you the orders—can you talk back to them?”

Lyth hesitated. “That would be…rude.”

Dalton snorted. “You talk back to us all the time.”

“That is expected,” Lyth said primly. “You accept the human interaction as normal.”

Juliyana rubbed her temples. “So you have to ask to talk to them?”

“The ship AI has to be introduced,” Sauli said, unexpectedly. “It’s the equivalent of logging in. It can’t talk to other computers and networks without an initial handshake and recognition pattern. It can’t talk to humans without first being introduced.”

Lyth looked uncomfortable. If he had been capable of it, I think he might even have blushed.

We all looked at Sauli, surprised.

He gave a tiny smile. “I topped up on computer engineering while I was studying.”

“How…convenient,” Juliyana said dryly.

“Sauli, were you originally assigned to scan our ship?” I asked suspiciously.

“No assignments,” he said. “You arrived without booking a bay. We just get assigned randomly as the day goes on.”

“So, a computer assigns the ships to you?”

“A new one, when we’ve finished the old one,” Sauli said. He frowned.

“Do the other engineers at the station have the same degree of computer engineering knowledge you do?” Dalton asked, proving he was following along, too.

“Nah. My courses were all optional. I just liked…” Sauli trailed off. “Whoever this dude is, he picked me?” He was highly offended…but there was a glimmer in his eyes of awe…and excitement.

Lyth