The Knights of the Black Earth (32 page)

He nudged the
shuttle forward slowly, crept into the shuttle bay.

The other shuttle
was gone.

Rowan landed the
craft on the deck. The chief was not at her post in the control room. None of
the crew was around, at least that Rowan could see from the cockpit. No one to
shut the shuttle bay doors. He struggled into his vacuum suit.

Rowan exited the
shuttle and moved to the airlock, a 38-decawatt lasgun in his hand. Entering
the airlock, which separated the shuttle bay from the main portion of the ship,
he hit the button to cycle the atmosphere.

Nothing. A red
warning light flashed insistently. No air on the other side of the airlock.

Rowan pulled the
override handle and opened the door leading to the ship’s internal
compartments. The warning light had been right. No air. Finding a comm panel,
he tried to raise the bridge.

No response. He
hit the emergency button on the panel, setting off alarms all over the ship. He
could hear no sound in the vacuum, but the alert lights flashed red. This part
of the ship was in hard vacuum, and the emergency alarm had not been activated.
He kept going.

Entering the
shuttle bay control room, Rowan found someone— the crew chief. Dead. Her hands
were clasped to her throat, her eyes bulged, her lips were blue; she’d died of
asphyxiation.

Rowan shut the
shuttle bay doors and exited the control room. Moving down the corridor, he
found more bodies. Everyone was dead, all suffocated.

A terrible
accident? Possibly, but Rowan didn’t think so. Ships were equipped with all
kinds of fail-safe devices to prevent just this sort of tragedy from occurring.
Someone had overridden them, deliberately bled the air from the ship.

He entered the bridge.
The scene was almost the same—almost. Everyone was dead. But these people had
been shot to death, lasgun blasts to the chest and head.

Captain Bolton sat
in her command chair, a look of surprise frozen on her face. There was a hole
in her chest—a lasgun blast at short range. The blood had started to run, but
had frozen in midstream.

If there had been
any doubt in Rowan’s mind, he was convinced now. Murder and sabotage. Someone
wanted this operation to fail and had gone to terrible lengths to achieve that
goal.

And Xris and Ito
were on the ground, with no idea that they could be walking into a deadly trap.

Unless somehow
Armstrong had managed to warn them....

Rowan started to
hit the pad to open the door to the controller’s station, then stopped. A green
light on the panel indicated that there was atmosphere on the other side of the
door. He pushed the override button, held on fast to a nearby console with one
hand, his lasgun with the other.

The door slid
open. The rush of air nearly blew him off his feet. When he could move, he
darted inside, more than half expecting—or hoping—to find Armstrong’s bloody
body slumped over the control panel.

Armstrong wasn’t
there.

Rowan entered and
shut the door. Air immediately began to pump into the small room, restoring
pressure.

The controller’s
workstation was set to automatic mode. Rowan sat down at the computer,
attempted to bring up the communications log.

A message flashed
across the screen:
Access denied.

Again, all
high-level commands were frozen out.

Rowan slammed his
fist down hard. He didn’t have time for this! And then, as the air and the
pressure inside the room began to return to normal, he could hear Armstrong’s
voice.

“This is Sunray.
Proceed. Out.”

A recording. A
goddam recording!

Rowan ran back to
the bridge. Dragging a body from the chair, he sat down at the comm workstation
and pulled up the automatic communications log.

There it was.
Thank God! All the comm parameters had been stored in the ship’s log.

“Computer, restore
the last communications parameters set by the mission controller, and set up
transmitter two to use these same parameters.”

Rowan couldn’t
shut down the controller’s computer, but he could talk on the same frequency,
using the day’s codes.

“All Deltas! Joker’s
Wild! For God’s sake, get out of there! Joker’s Wild! Joker’s Wild!”

He waited to hear
Xris’s voice, demanding angrily to know what the hell was going on.

Silence. The
silence was sickening.

“Maybe they didn’t
hear,” he said to himself, and sent the message two more times. He was going to
send it a fourth when he forced himself to stop.

There was nothing
more that he could do. He sat in the chair, glaring at the orange gas
giant—floating serenely in space—in bitter frustration. They’d been betrayed,
and there was no question in Rowan’s mind who was responsible. The frustration
and his fear for Xris and Ito gnawed at him. He had to do something. He
activated the ship’s emergency distress signal, which would beam out into
space, requesting help from the nearest vessel. Then Rowan returned to the rear
of the ship.

Before entering
the shuttle bay, he stopped at the weapons storage locker, picked up a plasma
rifle with scope, and a box of thurmaplasma grenades. Stowing the weapons in
the cargo compartment of the shuttle, he flew the shuttle back out, again under
his own control.

Now, how to find
Xris and Ito?

Rowan accessed the
Vigilance
’s sensor computer, got a fix for the last transmission from the
surface of the moon, entered the coordinates into the nav computer. Then there
was nothing to do but wait. The shuttle trip this time was not a lot more
pleasant than his last. His own life wasn’t in danger, but apprehension and
fear twisted his insides, made the waiting unendurable.

He tried to tell
himself that everything would be all right. Maybe—please dear God!—Xris had
decided to flout the controller’s authority, go off on his own. Neither he nor
Ito would want to enter that factory without the third member of the team,
without Rowan.

“I’ll find Xris
hip-deep in some swamp, madder than hell, ready to take on the entire agency.
And Ito yammering about snakes. But I’ll find them,” Rowan repeated. “I’ll find
them alive.”

The flight took
two hours, seemed like two hundred. He reached the location, overflew it by
about one hundred meters. He didn’t immediately land.

There was no need.
He had his answer.

The factory was a
pile of twisted, smoldering steel. Fires still burned. As he watched, a small
blast took out a far corner. Thick smoke smudged the morning sky.

No fire trucks. No
one around to put out the blaze or rescue any casualties.

“Probably paid
off,” Rowan said bitterly. “Or called to the other side of town. Or maybe this
jerk-water place doesn’t even have a fire department.”

He landed the
shuttle inside the fence line, set off his own emergency beacon. He was going
to need help. He hoped like hell he was going to need help.

He was still
wearing the vacuum suit, which would protect him from the heat, though not from
falling beams, radiation leaks, or exploding ammunition. He put on the helmet,
took it back off, and detached the breathing apparatus. He would need to be
able to hear, if someone called for help.

He’d need to be
able to answer.

Strapping the
oxygen tank to his belt, he put the mask to his face, emerged from the shuttle,
and looked swiftly around.

He saw the hole in
the fence. He damn near cried in fury and frustration.

“They went in,” he
said softly. “They went in! And now you know it’s hopeless. Absolutely
hopeless. No one inside that place could have survived. And you
know
that Xris and Ito went inside.”

Dogged, refusing
to listen to himself, Rowan took a deep gulp of oxygen and plunged into the
inferno.

Forsake not an old
friend. . . .

Ecclesiastes, Chapter 9, Verse 19, Apocrypha

“I never did find
Ito,” Rowan said. She spoke quietly, telling the I story in monotone, never
once looking at Xris, but staring into the past with dark and pain-filled eyes.
Her face was pale, drawn, and haggard.

If she’s lying,
she’s doing a damn good job, Xris thought. But then, we were all of us trained
to lie.

“I found you,” she
continued, and for the first time since she’d started speaking, she shifted her
gaze to him. “I don’t know how. Those who believe in God would say an angel led
me.” She smiled that sad, lopsided smile.

Xris snorted. He’d
been sitting on the edge of the console during her narrative, and he was
startled to discover that his flesh-and-blood leg had gone to sleep. Grunting,
he stood up, tried to restore the circulation.

“You expect me to
believe that?”

“I guess not,” she
said, shrugging. “But it’s true. I
did
find you in that hellhole.
Accident. Coincidence. Logical reasoning. Angels. Who can say? Maybe they’re
all one and the same anyway.

“I was standing
somewhere near what had once been an outer wall, yelling for you, yelling for
Ito. I caught a glimpse of movement. It was your hand poking out of the rubble.
You were lying under some sort of heavy worktable. The table protected you from
the blast. It saved your life... . That was about all it saved.”

Rowan paused, grew
paler still. “My God, Xris. I’d never seen anything like it. Bones crushed, the
broken ends sticking through your flesh, blood ... so much blood... . One eye
.. . one side of your face ... gone. Just gone. But you were breathing. You
were still breathing.

“I didn’t know
what to do. There wasn’t anything I could do. I was afraid to move you. Some
ship would hear my distress signal. Someone would come. I kept telling myself
that. I told you that. And I told you then just what I’ve told you now. I told
you the whole story.

“ ‘We’ll get
Armstrong, you and I, Xris,’ I said to you over and over. ‘We’ll make him pay.’

“Maybe . .. some
part of you heard me?” She stared at him, pleading.

Xris didn’t
answer.

Rowan shrugged. “I
supposed not. I kept hoping .. .” She let the sentence hang, sighed. “Anyway,
that’s about it. The next thing I remember, a soldier was standing beside me,
yelling for a medic. Warlord DiLuna’s battle cruiser—the
Athena
—had
picked up the distress call. The medics worked on you for a long time on the
ground, then they transferred you back up to
Athena.
I went along, made
my report to the captain. She ordered
Vigilance
to be towed, sent out
her soldiers to search for Armstrong. He must have landed on TISor 13. The
shuttle was small—one of those ship-to-ground transports. It couldn’t have made
the trip to any of the other moons—”

“It could have
been picked up by another ship,” Xris said.

Rowan sat forward
eagerly, her eyes suddenly bright. A tinge of color stained her pale cheeks. “You
believe me!”

Xris shook his
head. “Just a reflex action. I suppose that there’d be some record of all this
coming and going in
Athena’s
logs?”

Rowan sank back
down, her shoulders slumped. Wearily, she leaned against the console. “I don’t
know. Maybe. Maybe not. You see,” she said quickly, forestalling Xris, “a day
after we’d been on board
Athena,
Amadi from the bureau arrived. He had a
closed-door session with the captain. He called me in, asked me what I’d seen,
what I’d heard. I told him and then I said I wanted one thing from him, one
thing only. I wanted Armstrong.

“Amadi said I
could have him. It would mean going undercover, infiltrating the Hung. I
agreed. You were in a coma, Xris. They’d amputated your left leg, your left
arm. They told me they could keep you alive, but you’d be more machine than
man. The decision would be up to Marjorie.

“I said good-bye
to you there, on
Athena,
and I left with Amadi. As we were leaving, I
saw the
Athena
hit
Vigilance
with a plasma fusion torpedo. The
ship was vaporized, nothing left. The families were told that the
Vigilance
had been struck by an asteroid. No survivors, bodies never recovered. That may
be on
Athena’s
log, but again it may not. The captain may have been told
to forget she’d ever seen
Vigilance,
you, or me. The bureau was a pretty
powerful force in those days.”

“All very
convenient for you, isn’t it, old friend?” Xris said, chewing on the end of a
twist. “Records expunged. Armstrong dead. I supposed that was your work?”

Slowly, she shook
her head. “I was a little too late. His own people took him out. He’d served
his purpose. They didn’t trust him. Once a traitor, always a traitor.”

“Tell me about it.”
Xris sneered.

Rowan flushed
deeply, the color returning to her face in a rush. She was on her feet,
confronting him. “Damn it, Xris, we were friends! Friends!
How
could you
think I’d betray you?”

Her angry voice
carried through the cargo plane. Harry and Jamil stopped talking. Quong, jolted
out of a sound sleep, peered around, muttered groggily.

“Everything all
right, Xris?” Jamil called.

“Sure, yeah, fine.”

Xris eyed Rowan. “So,
you go undercover, send a few of the Hung’s top boys to the gas mines on
Nogales 4, and then you pop out to buy a new wardrobe and a body to match.”

Rowan’s face was
now cold, pale. She no longer expected to be believed. Perhaps she no longer
cared. She continued to face him, her eyes level. “That job was hell, Xris. I
worked undercover for nine months and I knew every moment that passed was going
to be my last. I’m not asking for sympathy. I did good work. I broke them. But
in the process, something broke inside me.

“When I was
finished, I told the bureau I wanted out. The feeling was mutual. They wanted
rid of me, too. I knew the truth about Armstrong, you see. I’d become an
embarrassment. Amadi offered me a new identity, but I knew that changing my
name and shaving off my beard wasn’t going to be any kind of protection.”