Hammer and Crucible

by Cameron Cooper

  I leaned toward Lyth. “Cross check Vives for any fake IDs, and his itinerary in the past.”

  Lyth nodded. “I began as soon as Noam spoke the name. On first, fast analysis, there may be multiple points of conjunction with Ramaker’s movements. I will compile and confirm that.”

  Juliyana chewed her thumbnail thoughtfully. “Could that be why the Emperor and Chang ended their affair? He was seduced by a better offer?”

  I raised my brows. “Something to consider, certainly. Lyth, add that to your search parameters. See if there’s a personal element to their interactions.”

  Lyth nodded.

  I turned back to Noam. “If the data stops running through the array, that will kill you?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Data is what gave me life. It seems fair to presume the absence of it will take that life away.” He grimaced. “I do not care to test it.”

  “No shit,” Dalton breathed. He glanced at me. “Facing down the Emperor…it won’t be easy.”

  “It won’t be easy,” I said, “but it is necessary. We, all of us, including Noam, must find a way out of this trouble we are in, if we are to have any future at all.”

  “I can help with that,” Noam said. “Lyth will be able to help you even more.”

  “But…” I looked at each of them in turn. “If we do not all agree to this, if even one of us doesn’t want to go ahead, then I will not do it.”

  Noam looked unhappy.

  “And do what instead?” Juliyana said. “Try to outrun the Rangers and the Shield, and every bounty hunter in the empire, for the rest of our lives?”

  “I’ve had forty years of it,” Dalton said. “I won’t survive another forty, let alone four hundred of them. I’m in.”

  “I’m in,” Juliyana said. “I always have been.”

  “Lyth, you get a say, too,” I told him. “Noam seems to think you have a role to play in what happens next. I’d prefer to think you’re helping us willingly, rather than obeying your coding.”

  Lyth gave a small smile. “Even if I say yes, it is still my coding making me say it. I cannot refuse you, Captain…not that I would want to. I would like to be free to emerge into normal space without Imperial ships bearing down on me. Their AIs are crude and obnoxious. I would rather not have to deal with them.”

  Sauli held up his hand. I raised my brow at him. “Our original agreement is still in place,” I assured him. “You don’t have to vote.”

  “It’s not that,” he said, his tone diffident. “It’s just…well…the Noam seems to feel that if you step in front of the Emperor that he’ll just slump and say ‘oh, well, of course I’ll stop years of planning and research and go back to inefficient data squirts, how stupid of me’.”

  I smiled. “He will need convincing, certainly.”

  “With what?” Sauli asked. “This is just one ship—as marvelous as it is, no offence,” he added quickly, glancing at Lyth, who just smiled. “The Emperor has thousands of ships in his fleet, and each of them could melt the Lythion into scrap metal ten times over. If you go anywhere near the Emperor, most of those ships will point their guns at Lyth. The Emperor just has to click his fingers and,” Sauli snapped his fingers.

  Lyth jumped.

  Noam looked amused.

  “You’re forgetting, Sauli, we have the array on our side now,” I pointed out. “If the Emperor needs convincing, Noam can provide an adequate demonstration.”

  Sauli looked at Noam and swallowed. “Blackout…” he breathed.

  “There is nothing more terrifying to the Emperor and the Empire in general than the loss of a way to travel from one end to the other of it quickly,” I added. “The closest habited stars in the Empire are…how far apart, Lyth?”

  “Thirty-three light years,” Lyth replied. “At the best sublight speeds currently available, it would take two hundred and seventy-four years to travel from one to the other.”

  “Compared to twenty-eight hours via the array,” I added.

  Sauli sat back, his expression thoughtful.

  “I think the Emperor will consider my request very carefully indeed,” I finished.

  “The real challenge will be reaching the Emperor and not being blown out of the sky before we can explain it to him,” Dalton added.

  Yeah, there was that.

  We made plans. Lots of them.

  Then scrapped them and made more.

  While we expended calories in heavy thinking, in our mountainside board room, Lyth directed himself to emerge from gates and dive back into them, on shorter and shorter hops. Between the two of us, we had mapped out a series of jumps which would keep us inside the array for the longest amount of time, so that the last jump would have us emerge over the Crystal City on the early morning of the Birthday Celebrations, hours before they were to formally begin, but not too soon—we couldn’t linger in Imperial headquarters territory while waiting for the Emperor to arrive at the palace.

  “Can’t he just stay in a wormhole?” Juliyana had asked, while we had been mapping the jumps at the navigation table. “Just not come out?”

  Lyth gave her a small smile. “Can you make a stone stop in the middle of a well, before it reaches the bottom?”

  “What’s a well?” Juliyana asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “The point is, once a ship is in a wormhole, it is no longer capable of doing anything but moving through to the end. The initial velocity is maintained. That’s why capacitors are used for the jump into the hole—not just to get into the hole, but to maximize velocity for the transition through it. There is no atmosphere. Reality doesn’t work in there, so braking thrusts don’t work, either. We have no choice about emerging at the end.” I looked at Noam, who was standing and listening. “Or can you change that?”

  Noam shook his head. “The wormholes are not part of me. They are outside my nature. The gates, the information…that is me.”

  Juliyana grimaced, looking at the complicated back and forth we had been laying out on the 3D map of the empire. “Better you than me, then.”

  How to emerge at the right time was simple mathematics.

  The bigger problem we had to resolve to make any plan work was how to emerge over the Crystal City and not get instantly vaporized.

  “There will be so many Imperial ships between the gates and the city that I could put on a suit and leap from hull to hull, from gate to city,” Dalton said, his tone withering. “It’s a public event, Emperor’s presence guaranteed. Every ship will have some poor grunt chained to the gun panel, his finger on the firing button, just waiting for enemy ships to turn up. And the Lythion looks nothing like any ship in the Emperor’s fleet.”

  “I can mask my ID,” Lyth said.

  “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 take energy,” Dalton observed.

  “That’s why we have to give up soft beds and hammocks. Just until he’s done. It has to be done in three days.”

  Dalton looked around, at the glowing snow-tipped peaks across the lake and the fireflies flitting nearby. He sighed heavily.

  “You’ll get it back,” I promised.

  “That’s if I come back here after.”

  “That’s why you’re in here? Contemplating your mortality?” I said it gently. Every soldier had to deal with death in their own way. More than a few were like Dalton—they needed to be away from everyone while they faced the possibility. Still others like to party hard, squeeze in as much life as possible. I had my own rituals, honed from decades of battles and wars.

  “Actually, I was lying here wondering why I didn’t set up a garden instead of the lake house.”

  “You like to garden…” Amazing.

  “I like the idea of a garden,” he shot back. “I never have stopped in one joint long enough to plant anything. Soil’s short on starships, anyhow. Only, the idea grabbed hold of me sometime in the last forty years and kinda stuck around.”

  “It took root?” I suggested.

  He didn’t roll his eyes at that groaner. “Every time I found myself hunched in the rusty guts of some clunker freighter, running away from yet another close call, the idea would resurface. A garden, peace. Planting things and watching them grow, then eating the harvest. No running…”

  “That’s why you didn’t build a garden out of Lyth’s nanobots. You’re still running.”

  He nodded. “That’s what I’d figured out when you busted in here.” He straightened and looked around. “So when does everything go zap?”

  “I think it’s already happening.” I pointed to the far distant peaks. They were growing indistinct, the colors running together. “It might take a few minutes,” I added.

  He turned and watched the mountains sink and disappear, then the lake water. “This is not going to end happily,” he murmured.

  I knew he wasn’t referring to the disappearing lake. I knew, too, that he had been facing his mortality, after all.

  When the walls and the rooms had all disappeared, there was nothing left but a yawning space a hundred meters long. Even the gallery corridors on either side were gone, for their interior walls had been nanobots, too.

  Juliyana stood where the galley had been. A printer sat on the floor, ten meters from her position.

  Lyth had gone. He would use the energy needed to generate his avatar for the work he faced.

  Between me and Juliyana, my sack sat on the floor. Bits and pieces from the sack were scattered around it, including my pad, which I had left on the bed.

  Dalton’s possessions, too, were spread around us. Five concierge panels squatted on the floor where each of our rooms had been, including Sauli’s new room, and the stellar room, too.

  I thought I might miss that mountaintop.

  From here, I could see the ramp up into the bridge, and the bridge itself. I turned. Behind us were the multiple
entries into the service compartments, including the stairs down to the engine rooms. Sauli would be down there, unaware of the changes, for the service compartments were made of solids.

  The lights came down to an early evening gloom.

  “Wow,” Juliyana breathed, and her voice echoed.

  “Suddenly, the bridge seems cozy and welcoming,” Dalton said.

  “Okay, then,” I said. “Let’s do this.”

  22

  The Imperial City was also known as the Crystal City. The city is listed on official star maps as The First City of Carina-Sagittarius, a name that no one bothers to use. Even Imperial documents refer to it as the Imperial City.

  The Crystal City hung in geo-stationary orbit over an unremarkable ball, Eugorian II, which had once held a breathable atmosphere and a fortune in rare ores and minerals that a hungry and expanding human diaspora desperately needed. As the resources were on a family-held ball, and not floating in rights-free ore belts where anyone could grab them, the family exploited the windfall with systematic deliberation.

  With their unsurpassed, unimaginable wealth, the family turned their attention to researching more efficient travel about the known worlds that didn’t require spending generations upon a city-sized ship moving at sub-light speeds.

  The family paid for the best research and development, pulling in talent and expertise from the known worlds. They developed the first working gate, then gifted a second gate to the nearest inhabited planet. It took seventy years to deliver that first gate, but the return journey back to the family seat took only seventeen hours.

  Traffic through the pair of gates became a thick, congested highway.

  When the other planets clamored for gates, the family franchised them and took a share of the profits from the taxes those planets charged for the use of the gates, in addition to their franchise fees.

  And thus was borne the fourth Carinad Empire.

  The present Emperor, Ramaker III, was the 76th. Ramaker had come to power by overthrowing his cousin, Karsci, in a bloodless coup. There were unofficial records and myths proposing that Ramaker had led the coup because he couldn’t stand Karsci’s imbecilic leadership. Ramaker became the 1st of the Tanique Dynasty, two hundred and ninety years ago, and had ruled with a stern and ruthless hand since then.