My mouth opened. Nothing came out.
Dalton cleared his throat. “The roses are wrong, yes?”
“I…no, you know I love roses.” It was our little secret.
“I hedged my bet, anyway,” Dalton said. He put the roses in his other hand. Carefully, because he was also holding a bottle of scotch.
“Good hedge,” I told him, getting to my feet. “You’re back from Proya.” Someone had finally got around to naming the red dwarf where we’d found Mace.
“They finally decided that they’d learned as much as they could out there,” Dalton said. “I think they got sick of ship food, myself.”
“Even Jai and Marlow? Sauli’s ship has the good files.”
“They want to strategize, now we’ve learned what we can. And Fiori announced that they’re going to wake up the first of the Orions in a week or so. They think they’ve figured out how to do it. They’ll be our next source of information.”
“Our?”
“Humans. Us.” Dalton came over to the desk and put the bottle and the roses on it, then turned back to me. “I’m going to keep working for Jai and Marlow, Danny. They’re right in the middle of all this…whatever this is. Only…” He halted, his gaze roaming over my face. “I need a ship to do it. Turns out there are people who specialize in being chiefs of staff, and I’m…not.”
“You’re a get-things-done guy,” I agreed.
“Jai has things he wants me to do. Actually, he said he’d rather have you do it—”
“Of course.” I hid my sigh. I was still a hammer, just not an imperial one anymore.
“But he wants me to help you,” Dalton finished in a rush. “He practically ordered me to.”
I held still.
“But that’s not why I’m here,” Dalton added.
My heart jumped.
“Fact is, I quit,” Dalton said. “Then he started talking about if I was going to quit just to be with you then he could use a team like us, yaddah yaddah…” He let out his breath. “I can’t believe you waited for me, Danny. Nearly thirty years… “ He shook his head. “Am I too late?” he whispered.
“Thirty years late.”
“I fucked up,” he admitted.
“But you got Mace out of it.”
“And then I got him back, thanks to you.” Dalton took a breath. “Life has always been interesting, with you in it. I didn’t know until now that life just…works out, when you’re in it.”
“Using me as a metaphor for a curse is a shitty apology, Dalton.”
“I’ll get better at it,” Dalton promised, his mouth close to mine.
—40—
New Phoenicia, two weeks later.
I slipped into the darkened observation room of the medical suite and saw I was one of the last to arrive. The room was full of people I knew, all staring through the observation window at the therapy room on the other side and the man lying beneath a thermal cover.
One of the taller men in the room came over to me. “Late as usual, Danny,” Jai said softly.
“You and I have something to discuss when this is done,” I shot back. “You make a shitty cupid, by the way.”
He smiled. “Someone had to. You two have been circling around each other for way too long. Did it work?”
“Yes, damn your hide. Now shut up.”
The therapist in the room with the unconscious Orion worked the control panel next to the bed. “Raising core temperature, metabolism and cellular activity…” she murmured, for she knew of the great collection of observers crowded into the little room.
More medical aides hovered near the bed, ready to leap to assist as needed. No one knew what to expect, for this was the first Orion we had dared to resuscitate. We were braced for anything.
“Consciousness building,” the medic added.
The man very undramatically gave a sigh and opened his eyes. He lay blinking up at the ceiling, then turned his head to look at the medic and the aides. His eyes grew wider.
One of the aides stepped forward and spoke in the rasping language of the Orions and a translation appeared on the display over the observation window.
You are safe and well. You are no longer a prisoner of the others and no one will hurt you here.
The man tried to sit up, and the aides rushed to help him, while the bed sat itself up behind him. He studied everyone carefully, then spoke.
You are not muradar <?> The interpretation software flagged the odd word.
The aide replied. We are humans, from the Carina section of the galaxy. We think you are from the Orion section. Can you confirm that?
The man frowned, puzzled.
The aide tried again. Where are you from?
The man spoke, but this time, the software didn’t have to interpret it.
“Earth,” he croaked.
_____
The Next book in the Iron Hammer series is Stellar Storm
Danny and her crew expose a new enemy
Danny and her crew on the Supreme Lythion, and her friends and allies in the Carina worlds learn more about the Slavers and their appetite for war.
When slavers raid a Carina star station and snatch more of their people, Jai Van Veen directs Danny to return the favour—steal into Slaver territory and take their people back. Only the quasi-military venture reveals more about the threatening nature of their new enemy than anyone is braced for…
Stellar Storm is the second book in the Iron Hammer space opera science fiction series by award-winning SF author Cameron Cooper. The Iron Hammer series is a spin off from the acclaimed Imperial Hammer series, and features many of the characters and situations from that series.
Get your copy of Stellar Storm now!
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Space cities have been locked in war for centuries over the resources of an asteroid belt.
Humans pilot swarms of pod fighters to protect their city’s mining operations from other cities, risking everything and suffering multiple deaths and regenerations. Then Landry goes through a regeneration which introduces an error that will destroy the delicate
