Hammer and Crucible Cameron Cooper (web ebook reader TXT) 📖

large spoonful of melting ice cream, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and got to his feet. “I just follow you, then?” he asked Lyth hesitantly.

“You know the way to the engine room,” Lyth said. He stood aside.

I watched Sauli leave. “Can you ask Dalton and Juliyana to come and speak to me, Lyth?”

He nodded and followed Sauli’s slender figure out of the galley.

20

While I was waiting, the waitress came and cleared the table. “Well, he made short work of that, didn’t he?” she said cheerfully. “You want something to eat, hun?”

“Sure,” I said. “A very hot bowl of hindebeast chili, lots of cayenne pepper, and corn bread.”

She raised her brow. “You got it.”

“And coffee!” I called out to her back.

“Gotcha!” she called back.

I had to figure that one out, and finally realized it was two words in one.

Dalton arrived before Juliyana. He wore new clothes I’d never seen before. I guessed he’d printed them just now. He slid onto the bench, read the menu and prodded it, ordering silently.

“Hungry?”

“Like a black hole.”

“Good.”

“Good?” His gaze met mine.

“I was going to ask how you felt. But if you’re hungry and irritable, then I know you’re fine.”

The corner of his mouth quirked and his mood lightened. “I’ve been thinking.”

“So have I. Wait for Juliyana,” I replied.

Juliyana arrived a few minutes later. Her trousers were stained with the black slimy smudge that engines seemed to produce the way humans exhaled carbon, but her hands were clean. She had stopped to wash them on the way to the galley.

She slid onto the bench next to Dalton, who moved over without complaining.

“You may as well eat,” I told her. “We are.”

“Lythion asked me what I wanted, on the way here. I’ve ordered,” Juliyana said. “I passed the newt on the way up here. He’s joined the crew now?”

“Not exactly.” I outlined the terms of Sauli’s stay onboard. “We can’t keep him locked up while we take care of this business. He’s too smart for that,” I finished. “I just had to bring him to a point where he thought it reasonable to not try to murder us while our backs were turned. We’ll offload him when we have time.”

“You really will send him home with money in his pocket?” Dalton asked.

“Yes. And he’ll consider the whole thing an adventure,” I replied. “Something to remember for years to come.”

“He’ll tell everyone what he sees,” Juliyana pointed out. “He won’t be able to resist boasting.”

“By the time we let him loose, it won’t matter if he does,” I replied. “Or he might consider keeping our bargain—tell everyone we kept him locked up and he saw nothing, and I get to perjure myself in trial if it comes to that.”

Our meals arrived. “Perfect timing,” Dalton murmured, reaching eagerly for his plate of fries and gravy and cheese curds.

Juliyana had a soup bowl which steamed with a fragrant aroma that made my mouth water much as the chili bowl did. For a few moments, we ate hungrily.

Then I stirred the chili with my spoon. “Have you noticed how many convenient coincidences we’ve experienced lately? The food turning up just as we move on in the conversation.”

“That’s just Lyth being considerate,” Juliyana pointed out.

“Dalton tripping over the Lythion in the first place, which delivered a superior ship right into our hands,” I added.

“And the ship coincidentally diving into a gate and popping me out at Badelt City, in time to see you,” Dalton added, a fry in his fingers dripping gravy back onto the plate. His eyes were narrowed.

I nodded.

Juliyana frowned. “We’ve had plenty of bad luck,” she pointed out. “As much as the good luck. So what?”

“The family dividends just happened to be sent to me—a clerical error after years of the dividends being sent to Farhan for dispersal, as they should be,” I said.

Dalton looked interested. “That’s how you came by the money. I thought you’d actually stolen it.”

“It’s a matter of degree. I just failed to give it back,” I said. “Although Farhan quite rightly still considers that theft, even though I do intend to give it back one day.”

“I can’t believe you’re complaining because you’d had a few lucky breaks,” Juliyana said.

“How did you come by the fake transfer orders, anyway?” I asked her. “You never did say.”

Even Dalton paused with another fry in his fingers to look at her, his brow lifted. Then he wolfed the fry down.

Juliyana looked suddenly coy. Her gaze dropped to the soup bowl and she blew on the stock.

“Juli?” I prompted.

“I just found it,” she said, sounding defensive.

“You faked it?” Dalton said, sounding both impressed and peeved.

“No,” she said quickly. “I didn’t fake it. I found it. I don’t know where it came from. It was just there in my files on Noam one day. It wasn’t there the last time I had worked in the files. I would have remembered it.”

“It was just there,” I repeated. I didn’t feel any surprise at all.

“Yes,” Juliyana said heavily, glaring at me, daring me to laugh at her.

I didn’t. “Then there are the dreams I used to have of Noam.”

“What of it?” Dalton said, puzzled.

“I used to have dreams. And my implants were killing me. Then I got new implants, and instead of dreams and seizures, I had waking seizures and saw Noam, who happened to tell me about Moroder, something I didn’t know, that no one but you knew about, Dalton. Which makes seeing Noam and talking to him something other than a mother’s desperate delusions.”

Juliyana sat back, her soup forgotten. “You never did retrieve his remains.”

Dalton squeezed his temples with one hand. “You think he’s still alive.”

I nodded. “Alive, and trying to reach out to me, to all of us, to guide us.”

“Why would he do that?” Dalton asked simply.

“Because he needs our help,” Juliyana said, her eyes shining.

“Help with what?” Dalton demanded. “If he is alive—and that’s a long shot, given the disaster he caused and that he was right in