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

“Doesn’t matter,” Dalton shot back. “The grunts will be watching their screens—they want to see the parade of the fleet, too. They’ll see you, Lyth. And they’re not stupid, even if they are grunts.”

“As you were a grunt once,” Juliyana replied, “I wouldn’t rely on grunts being that smart.”

Dalton rolled his eyes.

I left them to their bickering and went to my room to snatch a couple of hours of sleep, for my brain was fried.

Sauli jogged after me and caught up with me in the starboard gallery. “Captain…sir.”

I stopped.

He crossed his arms, then seemed to realize it looked belligerent, and dropped them. His hands twitched by his side. “Is there anything I can do to help, sir?”

“You’re supposed to be locked in your room, remember?”

“You said I had to earn my food and accommodation.”

“Cleaning engine parts. This…what we’re about to face…it’s not what I had in mind.”

“But if the ship gets destroyed, I do, too,” Sauli replied. “It seems to me I should be doing what I can to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“I thought you didn’t want to be a criminal?”

“I don’t think you want to be one, either.” He shifted nervously. “Captain,” he added awkwardly. “Anyway, you’re trying to fix it, right?”

“We have good intentions, Sauli, but we really have broken laws. It’s a choice we made in the beginning, to break smaller laws, to prevent someone—the Emperor—from breaking larger ones. And now things are so complicated, we just have to keep going forward. You can still back out, Sauli. Don’t step over that line without thinking about it.”

He didn’t look very comfortable with that.

“I want you to do a full check of the navigation grid thrusters. I have a feeling we’re going to need them when we do emerge over the Crystal City,” I told him.

Sauli went off to think and to check the navigation thrusters.

When I arrived in the galley a few hours later, both Juliyana and Lyth were sitting at the usual booth, opposite each other, their heads together.

Interesting.

I said nothing but stood by the table until one of them thought to shift over and make room for me. I slid in next to Juliyana and picked up the menu. “No sign of Dalton?”

“He’s brooding in his room,” Juliyana said.

“Still no idea how to emerge in full view of the Imperial fleet, then?” I punched in eggs—I had no capacity for creative thought about anything but how to reach the Emperor.

“There must be some way I can help,” Lyth said, with a tone that implied it wasn’t the first time he had said it. “I don’t like the idea of emerging into the middle of the Imperial fleet much, but I like it even less knowing I’m taking you with me.” His gaze flickered toward Juliyana.

“Maybe you should give yourself a non-reflective suit like Dalton’s,” I suggested lightly. I really didn’t want to dig back into our current headache until after at least two cups of coffee.

Lyth’s mouth opened. Nothing came out.

Juliyana sat up. “Why couldn’t he do that? He resurfaced himself when he came out of the junk park.”

Lyth shook his head. “It took days. We don’t have days.”

“We have three days,” I said, for I was as aware of passing time as Lyth, with his atomic clock core, was.

Juliyana nodded energetically. “Could you resurface in three days, Lyth? Surely, if you focused on nothing else...”

“Like, say, not bothering with life support?” he said gently. “Gravity?”

Juliyana waved it off. “Essentials remain. But everything else that takes you away from the work should go. I don’t even know what that would involve, but—”

“There would be no living quarters,” Lyth said. “No beds.”

“Food, though, for the printers are not nanobot constructions.” I turned it over and over. “Not a single alarm went up over Dalton walking around the base on Acean,” I added. “If you were covered in the same non-reflective surface, Lyth, that would stop the Imperial fleet from spotting you on their scans, and on viewscreens, too—you would blend into the star scape.”

“Noam would make sure none of the usual notifications are sent from the gate to the imperial city traffic control,” Juliyana added. “You said you can mask your ID, so even if they catch a glimpse of you from the corner of their eye, their scanners won’t show them anything but blank space, so they won’t be able to confirm you’re you.” She was growing more excited by the second. “He should do it, Danny.” She turned to me.

“Should I ask Noam to mute the gate?” Lyth added.

My gut said slow down, consider every angle. Then I shook my head. “We can deal with snags as we go along. We don’t have time to nail it all down now. Go ahead, Lyth—start the coating process. Take whatever resources and energy you need, short of water and air for the O2 breathers. We can live without food for a couple of days if we have to.”

Juliyana laughed. “Glad I just ate, then.”

“But wait until I’ve had my coffee,” I told Lyth, “or you will not like the results.”

As soon as the waitress brought my coffee, I told Lyth to put everything into action, with a delay of five minutes.

Then I hurried to Dalton’s room and paged for entry.

The door slid open. It was nighttime on the lake, and the moon reflected on rippling water. I could barely see my way forward.

“Over here,” Dalton said from the direction where the hammock had been last time I visited. He didn’t sound sleepy.

I shuffled forward, stubbed my toe and swore.

“Lights,” Dalton said.

The lights came up, not very high, but enough for me to see my way forward. “No mosquitos to add to the ambience?” I asked.

“Shostavich doesn’t have ‘em,” Dalton said.

“Lucky you. I wanted to come and warn you…well, you’d better stand up,” I added.

He stood and ran his fingers through his hair. “Okay, why?”

I explained about Lyth and the impervious coating he would add to his exterior surfaces.

“That will