Hammer and Crucible

by Cameron Cooper

  Dalton ran his thumb over the steering gyro, and the ship curved, pulling us against the high sides of our chairs. Dalton groaned.

  Then the arc eased. We were heading directly for the red sun.

  “Don’t slow down,” Lyth said. “I’ll come over the top of you.”

  On the screen in front of me, the Lythion turned side on and slid through space.

  For three minutes, we listened to the muffled roar of the engines and our heartbeats.

  “Directly over you,” Lyth said. “Don’t twitch.”

  Dalton swallowed. I switched the view to directly above the ship and we both watched the spindly-looking derrick structure that was the drop-ship’s cradle move into place over us. Through the struts, I could see more stars. The struts were no longer rusty, but a dull silver that gleamed in the sunlight.

  The cradle connected with a thud that boomed like a bell inside the drop ship. Then the secondary thud of the permanent docking passage connected.

  “Punch it, Lyth!” Dalton said.

  “Not until you’re in a shell,” Lyth replied. The Lythion was already moving around in a gracefully and painfully slow arc, the sun moving down the screen and sideways.

  “Forget about me!” Dalton cried, struggling to get out of the pilot’s chair.

  I pulled him out and ducked under his arm and hauled him toward the door. The gee forces were mounting even though Lyth was being gentle. We waded into the corridor. Dalton tried to help and I didn’t tell him to stop struggling so I could carry him.

  Juliyana met us halfway down the passage. She carried a small box. “Here,” she said, striding around Dalton. She put the box against the back of his Imperial uniform and it swarmed frantically.

  “What the hell?” he breathed as the liquid-looking nanobots climbed up his neck and over his chin.

  “Sorry,” Juliyana said softly, as the layer rose up over his face. “But this will save you.”

  Dalton’s figure froze and Juliyana caught at his shoulder as he rocked, about to topple.

  “Go, Lyth!” she shouted.

  The ship surged.

  “I’ve got Dalton,” Juliyana said. “Go help Lyth.”

  I ran—well, slow walked and breathed hard, which felt like an all-out sprint to my laboring heart. This was why there were age restrictions on crush juice. Older hearts couldn’t stand the strain.

  Lyth stood at the view windows, as rigidly still as Dalton had been. I moved up to the captain’s shell and gratefully put my back to it and felt the cushioning give way a little beneath me. “Plan?” I asked breathlessly.

  “Over them, in a arc just out of range of their guns,” Lyth said. “Then into the gate—it will be a very sharp angle.”

  I leaned forward to spot the black ships below us, and much further beneath them, the Acean moon we’d just left. “They’ll try to intercept.”

  “I’ve calculated their trajectory and speed. That’s why the sharp angle—I’m compensating.” His tone was clipped. He was busy processing.

  I let him be. All I could do was wait.

  It was a very long twenty-three minutes before I saw the blue of the live gate from the very top of the window—we were diving into the gate upside-down relative to me—which was the only reference point I had. “Capacitor ready,” I murmured, seeing the notification on the panel.

  Lyth didn’t acknowledge. His gaze was distant.

  The ship shivered as we dived.

  Immediately, the pressure against me eased. The rumble from the reaction engines disappeared.

  Silence.

  Lyth turned to me. “Now what?”

  Good question.

  “Danny, get here right now!” Juliyana yelled through the intercom.

  I didn’t ask for an explanation. Her tone said not to. I ran, Lyth pounding after me.

  19

  Juliyana had carried Dalton all the way to the primary corridor, a pretty impressive feat under the pressure of high gee inertial forces. There, though, she had put him on the floor, his body still rigid beneath the nanobot shell. She’d needed both hands, because the long barrel antique shriver pointed at her required lifting them high in the air.

  I came to a skidding halt beside her and raised my hands, too. The boy holding the shriver looked more terrified than either of us. He was shaking as he sighted along the barrel, both arms akimbo. Even though there were no markers telling how many rejuvenations an adult had gone through, I guessed this boy was still in his first cycle and yet to face growing old.

  He was just under two meters tall, but skinny, his face gaunt, with high cheek bones and a spray of freckles over his face that didn’t help impart any sense of maturity. His hair was shorn short with complete lack of regard to styling. His black-eyed gaze shifted from me to Juliyana and back to me, then he took in Lyth, to my right. The shriver moved from one to the other of us.

  “Where the hell did you come from?” I demanded.

  “I already asked that,” Juliyana said, with a patient tone.

  “Just shut up!” the boy screamed, waving the muzzle of the shriver. His voice was that of an older man—I shoved his age up into the middle of his second decade, maybe a bit more, but not much. He wore the working coveralls of a laborer of some sort, filthy with grease, stained beyond cleaning, and spacer boots. The boots told me he was a dock worker of some type, which gave me a hint how he’d ended up on board.

  Lyth took a half step sideways, so that his heel rested up against Dalton. The nanobots over Dalton squirmed and flowed, running off him like water.

  “What are you doing?” the boy screamed.

  “You came on board at Keeler, didn’t you?” I looked at Lyth. “You didn’t notice?”

  “I was watching for security alerts,” Lyth reminded me. “No one came aboard. They’d have to ask me, first. No one asked.”

  The boy shifted his aim from Lyth to me as we spoke. “I wound the access hatch open,” he said. “That’s my job,” he added. “You people abducted me!”

  I put it together and sighed. “We took off too fast for you to get off.”

  “You’re an engineer?” Juliyana asked, lowering her hands.

  Dalton stirred and groaned, and the boy’s shriver dipped down toward him, then jerked back up to move across the three of us. Juliyana raised her hands once more as it swung toward her.

  “You might want to put that down,” I told him. “You’ll get exhausted trying to keep up.”

  “You have to take me back,” he said. “Right now.”

  “You’re an engineer,” I said. “You know that’s impossible. We’re in the hole. You’re just going to have to be patient. We can get you back to Keeler eventually, but it’s going to take time.”

  “The Rangers will come for you,” he said, his voice high with tension. “You can’t keep me here.”

  “Shit, we’re kidnappers now?” Dalton said, from the floor.

  I looked at Lyth. “We are the priority here. He’s pointing a gun at us.”

  Lyth nodded.

  And melted into the floor.

  The boy sucked in a terrified breath. “Where did he go?” His voice was even higher.

  Lyth rose from the floor, right behind him. He reached around the boy and plucked the shriver out of his hands. The boy squealed and staggered away from Lyth, his hands up.

  If he had been wandering around this ship long enough to find a locker full of old weapons and see walls move and the floor to grow animated objects, it was little wonder he was terrified. Everything about the Lythion was well out of his few years of experience.

  Juliyana stepped forward and hooked an arm around his neck, her other hand gripping her wrist. A choke hold she could use to control him.

  He gave a little shriek. He was hyperventilating.

  As terrified as he was, he’d still had the sense to find a weapon and confront us. That took guts. I moved in front of him and raised a finger to my lips. “Shh…”

  He stopped struggling and breat
hed heavily, staring at me with wide-open eyes.

  “What is your name?”

  He swallowed. “Sauli.”

  I nodded. “I’m Danny. Juliyana is behind you, and this is Lyth.”

  Lyth raised his hand. “Hello.”

  Sauli swallowed.

  “And Dalton is behind me,” I added.

  Sauli’s gaze shifted back to Dalton then sheered away and came back to my face.

  “Are you hungry, Sauli?”

  He mulishly didn’t answer.

  I nodded as if he had. “Juliyana will take you to the galley. You can ask for anything you want, but the door won’t open if you try to leave. Do you understand?” I shifted my gaze to Lyth, who nodded. He’d make the galley secure.

  “In a while, I’ll come and speak to you again, Sauli.” I gave him my best smile. “We will get you back home,” I promised him. “But right now, there’s a few things we have to take care of.”

  Sauli examined my face, looking for sincerity. Then he slumped in Juliyana’s arms, relief painting itself in his very young face. He nodded.

  Juliyana let go of his neck and took his arm in a more-or-less friendly grip. “Come on,” she murmured, tugging him down the corridor to the galley door. “Dalton, get some clothes on, will you?” she flung over her shoulder, irritation coloring her voice.

  I glanced at Dalton. He was already heading for his room, his bare shoulders rigid. He slapped the door controls and stepped in without looking back at us.

  Lyth stood with the stillness that I’d come to learn was him reaching across the ship, controlling and directing. “What is it?” I asked him and plucked the shriver out of his hand. It looked wrong on him.

  I flicked open the energy housing, to extract the energy pack.

  It was empty.

  I laughed out loud and shut the housing once more. Had Sauli known it was empty? He was an engineer. It was a good bet he had known. I shoved my grudging respect up a little higher.

  “There is a relay nexus missing from the secondary service engine,” Lyth said, his voice remote.

  I frowned. “What does it run?”

  “Among other things, the air scrubbers. The engine has been out of service for some hours.” His gaze shifted to me. “Although with so few humans aboard, you won’t run out of oxygen for many hours yet.”

  “But we will run out, eventually,” I said grimly. I gripped the stock of the shriver. “Right…” I turned and marched to the galley. Lyth considerately opened the door for me before I pummeled the keyplate.

  Juliyana and Sauli both sat at a booth—not our usual one, which pleased me. Sauli looked up as I entered, dropped the spoon of ice-cream he’d been lifting to his mouth, scrambled off the bench and ran. The fool ran straight past Juliyana, who calmly thrust out her boot.

  He tripped and measured his length on the linoleum floor and groaned.

  Juliyana wiped her mouth of ice cream, then hauled him to his feet and wrapped her elbow around his neck and squeezed.

  He turned red in the face.

  “What have you done?” she asked him.

  He tried to speak. A squeak came out.

  “Let him talk,” I said, coming up to them.

  Juliyana relaxed her grip a little.

  “Where is the relay nexus?” I demanded of him. “Or did you think we wouldn’t notice it was missing until we started gasping for air?”

  Sauli’s mouth clamped in a hard line. “You get it back when you take me home.”

  I shook my head. “You’ll die before that happens. We all will. When I said we can’t break off what we’re doing to get you back to where you belong, I fucking meant it. You’re stuck on this ship for days. When we suck in CO2, so do you. Get it?”

  Sauli didn’t cave.

  I considered him. “How big is the relay, Lyth?”

  “Twelve centimeters across, three deep, ten in width,” Lyth replied.

  “Juliyana, search his pockets.”

  Sauli sighed. Now he caved. I saw it in his eyes. I waited until Juliyana dug out the nexus and held it up.

  “Juliyana, Lyth will take you back to the secondary engine and tell you how to put the relay back in…” I looked at Lyth. “Or can you do it yourself?”

  He shook his head. “It requires a torque wrench and fifty pounds of effort to tighten the clamps around it so it properly seats.”

  “I’ll do it,” Juliyana said. She let go of Sauli. He rubbed his neck.

  I said to him, “You, sit there.” I pointed to the table where his ice cream was melting.

  “Should I ask Dalton to stop by?” Lyth asked at the door.

  “No. Now the shriver is loaded, I’ll be fine.” I watched Sauli’s eyes as I said it.

  His jaw rippled. Yeah, he’d known the shriver was empty. But he was just naïve enough to not consider that a bluff can work both ways.

  Although it didn’t really matter if he had. I could handle him if he forced me to it. He wouldn’t like it, but by that point, it wouldn’t matter what he thought of us.

  I wanted to avoid that downward spiral if I could. I sat where Juliyana had been sitting and rested the shriver in the corner of the bench and the wall, where I could snatch it up again if I needed it. It was also out of Sauli’s reach.

  The waitress came up, with a smile, as if nothing had happened. “Coffee, honey?”

  “Please.”

  She went away.

  Sauli watched her go. “What is this place, anyway?” he said.

  “Why don’t you eat your ice cream?”

  He pushed the bowl away.

  I calculated he’d been down in the engine compartments for twenty-four hours. He had to be starving. I sat back. “The chef here makes the best waffles I have ever tasted. They’re crisp on the outside and soft inside, and the maple syrup is warm, so when it pours into the squares, it soaks into the waffle. They serve cinnamon ice cream on the top, and that melts under the syrup, too.”

  Sauli’s gaze shifted to the melting bowl of ice cream.

  There was the sound of a flare up of flames from the direction where the kitchen would have been, and loud sizzling. “Oh, and bacon,” I added. “And hash browns that are perfectly fried.” I sniffed and damn if I didn’t smell cooking bacon. Was Lyth listening in and stage managing?

  Sauli’s stomach rumbled loudly.

  The waitress came back with a tray. She put my coffee in front of me, cream and sugar, and a small platter holding jams, honey, and warm syrup, which steamed gently.

  She winked at me and went away.

  I made a great show of pouring in the cream and sugar and stirring. Then I slurped noisily.

  “I know who you are,” Sauli said. His voice was strained.

  “You think you know,” I assured him.

  “You’re all over the news feeds. You’re wanted, all of you—except that freak thing. Her—Juli…juli…”

  “Juliyana.”

  He nodded. “And the other guy, the naked one. Him, too, but not for nearly as much as you two.”

  “They’ve got bounties on us already?” I asked, genuinely surprised. And for more than Dalton’s price—he would consider that an insult, I knew. I pushed the ice cream bowl back in front of Sauli. “Try it with syrup,” I coaxed.

  His hand curled into a fist on the table. He didn’t reach for the spoon. “I just want to go home,” he muttered.

  “Is Keeler your birthplace?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he muttered, his gaze moving to the ice cream once more.

  “Ball-bounder, hmm? But now you’re working in space. That’s enterprising of you.”

  The waitress appeared. “Your usual, Captain,” she said, and placed a loaded plate in front of me.

  As I didn’t have a “usual” order, this had to be more of Lyth’s manipulations. I looked down at the meal and tried to look enthusiastic. A large waffle, with ice cream and a big pat of melting butter. Golden hash browns, a stack of bacon that still sizzled. Scrambled eggs, toast
fresh out of the toaster. Sausage links.

  Everything an immature palate craved.

  I picked up one of the hash browns and crunched it between my teeth. Sauli watched my mouth work. I swallowed and smiled at him. “Want some?”

  He shook his head.

  Stubborn…

  I didn’t reach for the knife and fork. “Look, Sauli, I have to be frank. If you and I don’t come to some sort of arrangement, then my options for what to do with you get a lot shorter.”

  He looked startled. “You said you would take me home. Eventually,” he added bitterly.

  “Why did you decide to work in space?” I asked him.

  “What?” He frowned at the apparent change of subject.

  I shrugged, ate another hash brown, then pushed the plate away from me to make room for my coffee. “Most ball-born people tend to stay dirt-side. Living and working in space is a hard transition to make. Most people can’t adjust. It’s just too strange. There’s no cozy farmstead up here. No job security, no seasons. It’s hard to make a living and it’s high risk, too. After a few years, most earth-born go back to dirt-side.” I was exaggerating, but not by much. There wasn’t a lot of immigration up and down gravity wells. “It takes guts to make it up here among the stars,” I told him. “So you must have really wanted it. I’m wondering why.”

  Sauli cut his gaze away from me, to peer through the window at the antiquated street scene on display. As he looked, a ground vehicle pulled up on the other side of the street. It had a flatbed on the back, and a whole family climbed out of the cab, the mother and father helping little kids climb down. A dog jumped down from the flatbed—one of the old species with fur and tails and wagging tongues that I’d only read about in historical novels.

  I marveled at Lyth’s grasp of psychology.

  Sauli tore his gaze away from the view. He stared at the breakfast platter which was only inches away from his forearm, now. “I wanted to…to see what it was like up here.” He sounded stressed. I’m not sure he was aware that he had reached for the ice cream bowl and taken a spoonful.

  “You wanted to see beyond the curvature,” I added. “Find out how other people lived.”

  He nodded, still not looking at me and very carefully not looking out the window.