The Knights of the Black Earth (9 page)

“You go first and
check the truck’s back doors. If they’re unlocked, open them a crack and scan
for movement inside the loading dock.”

Ito wormed his
upper body through the hole, ripped his gray fatigues on the jagged metal
edges. Pausing, he rotated onto his back to gain leverage, dragged his legs
through. He landed on the trailer floor and ran to the rear.

The doors were not
locked. Ito pushed one side slightly ajar. Taking out his night-vision goggles,
he peered into the darkness beyond. He motioned Xris to follow.

Xris was
considerably bigger than his partner and had difficulty squeezing through the
hole. He decided to go feet-first and was doing fine until he came to his chest
and shoulders. For a panicked moment, he thought he might be stuck permanently,
but a grunt and a heave bent the metal and propelled him forward, though he
left a large amount of fabric and skin on the jagged edges.

Ito waited for him
at the back end of the truck. “I figured I might have to leave you here, a
Utile present for the Hung. I was going to tie a red bow around your ankles.”

“Very funny,” Xris
muttered, wincing and rubbing his shoulders. “Shut up and move out.”

Inside the loading
dock, all was quiet. Maintenance lights cast a pale, sickly yellow glow over
the entire area. The two jumped out of the truck, ran for cover behind a row of
shipping pallets. Pausing, they looked around, matching their location to that
on the mental map each carried inside his head.

The dock was
filled with row after row of container pallets. To one side was a small office,
probably for the shipping supervisor. At the back of the area was a divider
wall, with several sets of double doors. The chemical storage room doors were
marked bright yellow, with black warning signs posted on them.

Ito studied his
scanner. “All clear.”

Xris keyed his
commlink.

“Sunray, this is
Delta One. We are inside. Over.”

“This is Sunray.
Proceed. Out.”

Ito took the lead.
They left the loading dock through the double doors, entered the chemical
storage room. It was completely dark. Only the red exit sign on the far side of
the room provided any light, and the two padded silently toward it. Xris lit
his nuke lamp, flashed it over a set of double doors fitted with electronic
sensors.

He glared at it. “Damnation!
This wasn’t in the plans. Might be some sort of newly installed alarm system.”

He could contact
the controller, but if it wasn’t in Armstrong’s original plans, he wasn’t
likely to know anything about it, either. Rowan would. He could tell from the
type of sensors used whether the door was rigged to alert someone on opening or
if it was just an ordinary automated door.

Xris whispered, “Okay,
Ito, my son, we bust through as fast as we can. You dive right and I’ll go
left. Got it? Let’s move.”

The two of them
ran. The door started opening. They both sprinted through, dove for cover. Ito
crouched behind a drilling machine, his lasgun arcing left and right. Xris was
under a table, doing the same.

They saw nothing
in the room but machinery gleaming in the yellow glow of the maintenance
lights. Ito stood up and started toward the office containing the main
computer.

Xris was just
sliding out from under the table when suddenly his ears buzzed with static.

He stood up,
tapped his comm. Ito was apparently experiencing the same thing, for he turned
around, looked at Xris with a puzzled expression on his face.

The static
dissipated; the channel went clear. A fear-distorted voice shouted,
“All
Deltas! Joker’s wild! For God’s sake, get out of there! Joker’s wild! Joker’s
wild!”

“The abort code!”
Xris yelled at Ito, who had heard the same and was already moving. “Get the
hell out of here!”

But it was too
late.

Behind them, in
the chemical storage room, a small detonator attached to a storage container
filled with refined high explosives triggered its charge.

The explosion
hurled Xris backward. He landed under a large table with a laser drill press on
it, just as the blast wave struck. The heavy table and machinery crashed down
on top of him.

Ito was caught out
in the open. The blast ripped him apart. He died instantly, never knowing what
hit him.

Xris wasn’t so
lucky.

He writhed in
agony. Blinding white agony . ..

Betrayed.

Fade to gray .. .

Rowan.

Black ...

We have to
distrust each other. It’s our only defense against betrayal.

Tennessee Williams,
Camino Real

“So that’s my
story,” Xris concluded, shifting his good leg into a more comfortable position.
He made a conscious effort to appear relaxed, keep his hand—his good hand—from
clenching, unclenching. That was his story, all right. Most of it—up to the
ending. He left out the part about Rowan’s betrayal. “Rowan arrived later in
the shuttle, saved my life. He must have. Someone pulled me out of that burning
factory—”

“But not Dalin Rowan,”
said Wiedermann.

Xris’s eyes
narrowed. The fingers of his good hand twitched.

“In this business,”
Wiedermann continued, “we are used to our clients lying to us. We expect it. We
don’t take offense. All part of the job. Dalin Rowan didn’t save your life,
because Dalin Rowan wasn’t there at the time the factory blew up. And the
reason Dalin Rowan wasn’t there was because he
knew
it was going to blow
up. Am I right?”

Xris took out
another twist, put it in his mouth. “Go on.”

“You spent a year
in the hospital having most of your body parts replaced by metal—a god-awful
year, if what I’ve heard about recovery from this sort of procedure is true.
When you were finally released, you went home to your wife, but that didn’t
last long.

Your marriage
couldn’t stand the strain. You walked out on your wife—”

“That has nothing
to do with anything,” Xris observed coolly.

“The next place
you went was FISA, the bureau.” Wiedermann either hadn’t heard or wasn’t
interested in the interruption. “They offered you your old job back. But you
didn’t take it. You turned them down flat. You began asking questions.
Questions about Dalin Rowan: Where was he? What had happened to him? What did
the bureau tell you?”

Xris hesitated,
then said, “According to Armstrong’s report, Rowan left in the shuttlecraft.
That was the last anyone heard from him. The next thing the bureau knows, one
of Warlord DiLuna’s ships reports that they received a distress call from
Vigilance
the day of the mission. The Warlord contacted the bureau, waited
until they arrived—standard procedure, due to all the classified stuff we
handled—then sent out a search-and-rescue team. They found the ship dead in
space.
Dead’s
the right word. The crew had been murdered. Most died from
asphyxiation—a deliberate air leak. The captain and bridge hands had been shot.

“Only Armstrong
was still alive. He was trapped in the control room. He’d been supposed to die
in the vacuum, but apparently the air leak triggered some sort of emergency
device that shut the blast doors, sealing him up inside. When that happened, he
guessed immediately what was going on and gave us the abort code. Too late. He
was trapped inside the control room until the search-and-rescue team found him,
about twenty-four hours later.

“It was easy to
figure out what took place. One of the shuttlecraft was missing. Logs indicated
Rowan took it. No one ever saw him again.”

“You didn’t get a
chance to talk to Armstrong personally, did you?”

“No. He was killed
shortly after that. Not surprising.” Xris grunted. “Those who deal with the
Hung have a habit of dying prematurely. But I read his report.”

“And you believed
it.”

“Why the hell
shouldn’t I?”

“Yes, why shouldn’t
you? The bureau told you that what you had long suspected was true. Rowan had
been on the take. The Hung had bought him. Dalin Rowan let you and your partner
walk into that factory, knowing it was going to blow up. He wanted you dead.
Why?” Wiedermann shrugged. “Probably figured you had caught on to him. You were
going to expose him. That’s the reason the bureau gave you, wasn’t it?”

Xris didn’t
respond.

“The bureau
claimed that they had been searching for Rowan all this time. No luck. They
said he was probably living on some tropical paradise, richer than Snaga Ohme.
You said you were going to track Dalin Rowan down if it took you the rest of
your life. The bureau was extremely helpful. Extremely. How long did you look
for Rowan?”

“A year,” Xris
answered, chewing on the twist. “Then I ran out of money.”

“Find any trace of
him?”

Xris shook his
head. “It was like he dropped off the edge of the universe.”

“In a way, he did,”
said Wiedermann softly.

Xris’s fist
clenched. “You
have
found him. Goddammit, you’ve
found
him!”

Wiedermann shifted
his gaze, regarded Xris speculatively, curious to see his reaction to his next
statement. “Yes, I found him. The bureau lied to you. They knew where he was
all along. They know where he is.”

Xris sat very
still. LED lights flashed, tiny beeps and clicks ran up and down his cybernetic
arm, indicating a systems check. One of the lights flared red instead of the
usual yellow and green. Xris made a minor adjustment without thinking about it.

“That doesn’t
surprise me,” he said after a moment. “For someone to disappear that
completely, he’d had to have had help. But if he was on the take—”

“All the better.
Gave the bureau leverage. Here’s what we were able to find out. About nine
months after the explosion, while you were in the hospital, the bureau cracked
a big case—one of their biggest ever. They broke up the Hung, the largest crime
syndicate in the inner part of the galaxy. One of their undercover agents had
infiltrated the Hung’s organization, raided their computers, probed their
files, discovered everything about them. Contacts, bribes to government
officials, tax evasion schemes, money laundering, phony corporations, dealings
with the Corasians—he found out everything. Not only did this infiltrator raid their
files, he made a few ‘adjustments,’ ruined them financially. That hurt the
organization worse than their leaders doing prison time.”

“Computers,” said
Xris. “Rowan.”

“Right. He spent
months patiently worming his way into the system, burrowing deeper and deeper,
crawling through layer after layer. He knew all their secrets, every one. And
he used those secrets to bring them down. He spent another couple of months on
the witness stand, laying those secrets bare. Two attempts on his life were
made during the trial. God knows how many others that were never made public.
When the trial was over, Dalin Rowan walked out of the courtroom and was never
seen again. The bureau gave him a new identity.”

Xris frowned,
thinking. “What about Armstrong?”

“Like you, he was
trying to track Rowan down. Obviously, he succeeded. He was probably the one
who led the agency to Rowan, who was already in bed with the Hung. Nice and
convenient.”

“And instead of
blowing the traitor’s head off, the bureau uses him!” Xris took the twist out
of his mouth, leaned forward. “What have you got? A name, a planet? That’s all
I need. Give that to me and we’ll call it a deal. I’ll take it from here.”

“Ah, this is where
I enter a moral and legal dilemma,” Wiedermann stated sonorously.

“Fuck it!” Xris
swore. “I’m paying you enough to get over your moral and legal dilemma. I want
to talk to him, that’s all.”

Wiedermann studied
Xris, gazed at him long and intently.

The cyborg could
see his own metal body reflected back to him in the detective’s pale and watery
green eyes.

“Having heard your
story, I would say that you are entitled to that much,” the detective conceded.
“If anything goes amiss—”

“You won’t be
involved.”

“Damn right, we
won’t be,” Wiedermann snapped. “I’ve already established that you lied to us.
Our lawyers have indicated to me that we’ll be in the clear—”

“Clear for what?
You worried about the bureau? Hell, this was almost nine years ago. We’ve gone
through a major change of government since then. FISA’s still around, of
course, but I doubt if anyone’s left in the department who remembers—”

“Not
the
bureau,” said Wiedermann shortly. “I’ll bring up the file.”

He swiveled in his
chair, rolled the chair over to one of the computers, and placed his hands on
the keyboard. Data and a blurred picture scrolled rapidly past Xris’s vision. A
printer whirred. Hard copy slid out into a tray, including—Xris could see from
his vantage point—a color photograph. Xris waited with ill-concealed impatience
while Wiedermann examined the documents, collated them, tapped them into neat
order on the desk, then handed them over to Xris.

The photograph was
on top.

Xris looked at it,
looked up at Wiedermann. “Who’s this?”

“Dalin Rowan. Not
his real name now, of course.”

Xris frowned, eyes
narrowed. “What is this? A joke?”

“I never joke.”

“Neither do I.”
Xris rose to his feet. Hinging the photo and the rest of the data onto the
desk, he leaned over it, leaned into Wiedermann’s face. “I paid you—paid you
damn well—to get information for me. As for what I do with that information,
that’s none of your goddam business! You—”

“Please, sit down,”
Wiedermann said.

“Not until you
give me my information! The real information!” Xris clamped his metal hand over
Wiedermann’s collar, bow tie and all, and twisted. The tie crumpled into a wad.
Wiedermann tilted his head back; his Adam’s apple bobbed up over Xris’s
fingers.