The Knights of the Black Earth (25 page)

“If it’s like
other military bases I’ve been on,” Jamil returned, “the answer’s no. Why
bother? If you’ve got clearance that far up, you’re not the type to go around
snooping through other people’s offices. My guess is the door won’t even be
locked.”

“I hope like hell
you’re right.” Xris switched comm channels. “Harry, I’ve located Rowan and I’m
going in.”

“Xris!” Harry was
whispering, sounded tense. “Security’s sending someone up—”

“Take it easy, Harry.
It’s under control. I only need five minutes. Out.”

Xris had to pause
a moment to stop shaking. The green
cca
-2
flared bright, blurred around the edges. He started walking and it seemed to
him that he had been making this walk, taking these steps, ever since that
moment when he first woke up in the hospital and knew that his life was over.

He checked the
needle in his thumb, made sure the mechanism was working. He reached the door,
hit the control.

It slid silently
open.

A woman sat in a
swivel chair at a desk. Her back was turned to Xris. All he could see was a
tumbled mass of shoulder-length curly brown hair. Above her swirled a
mathematical model. She was staring at it intently, using a computer
holographic pointer to make changes in the algorithm.

Xris cast a quick
glance around, searching for electronic eyes, security cams.

Nothing. The room
was essentially barren, devoid of life. No photographs of family, a lover, not
even a pet. No green plants to relieve the gray sterility of her surroundings. Nothing
except computer equipment. But all of it was impressive. Expensive
state-of-the-art machines, the very latest in technology.

A little warning
went off in Xris’s mind. This was some fancy setup for a mere clerk.

He stepped inside
the room. A touch of the control and the door slid shut behind him. The woman
never moved, didn’t appear to have noticed his entry.

The way she was
sitting, the tilt of the head, the very movement of the hand—all familiar. So
very familiar.

Tiny alarm beeps
went off in Xris’s arm. He ignored them.

“Rowan.” He tried
to say it twice, but his voice failed. The third time it came out strong. “Rowan.
Dalin Rowan.”

The hand holding
the pen froze in midair. The woman didn’t move for a long moment, the space of
a thudding heartbeat. Then, slowly, taking care to make no sudden motions, she
put the pen down on the desk.

“Hello, Xris,” she
said quietly, and turned around.

Her face contorted
in pain when she saw him. Xris kept tight control of his own face, determined
to show no emotion, not even the fury that was suddenly engulfing him like
white-hot flame.

He looked for
Dalin Rowan in the woman’s features and he found him. Rowan was there, although
it looked as if someone had taken an eraser and rubbed off all the sharp,
masculine edges, made them rounded, blurred. But the eyes were the same:
intelligent, a bit red from overuse, and—oddly—sad and resigned.

“You know me,”
Xris said and his voice grated harshly. “And I know you. So I guess we both
know why I’m here.”

Rowan nodded,
sighed. Her hands were folded calmly in her lap. “I’ve been expecting you. Or
them. The Hung.” She shrugged. “I didn’t know which would find me first.”

She smiled,
lopsided. “Ironic. All these years, I’ve listened for the footstep behind my
back. When it finally comes, I don’t hear it”

Rowan looked up at
him steadily. “I’m glad it was you, Xris. Glad and . . . strangely enough .. .
relieved.” She glanced around. “It’s all over at last.”

Xris was at a
loss. This was certainly not what he’d expected. He’d been imagining the fear.
The look of guilt. The frantic plea for understanding, for life—which he would
take grim pleasure in denying. He hadn’t expected resignation, sadness. It was
starting to unnerve him.

He brought up the
mental picture of Ito.

“You’re going to
die, Rowan.” Xris held up his metal hand, wiggled the thumb. “There’s a needle
here. When I touch you, it’ll inject poison into you. It’s a pity,” he added,
working himself back into his comfortable anger, “but you won’t feel any pain.
Not like Ito. Not like me. You’ll be unconscious for about an hour—long enough
for me to leave—and then you’ll die. Of unknown causes. This leaves no trace,
and there’s no antidote.”

Rowan listened to
all this gravely, as she once used to listen to Xris outlining a plan for a bust.
When Xris was finished, she sat motionless, looking up at him. She said
nothing, no word in her own defense.

Xris was becoming
exasperated. “Why? Just tell me why. If you needed money that bad, you could
have come to me. I didn’t have much, but what was mine was yours. You knew
that! Damn it, Rowan, we were friends! Why didn’t you talk to me?”

And now her gaze
lowered. Her hands trembled. She shook her head. The long brown hair fell
forward, hiding her features. Still, she said nothing.

“I see. Maybe you
needed more than we had. So you set me and Ito up.” Xris grunted. “I guess I
should be glad—”

“Xris!” It was
Harry’s voice. “Security’s in FCWing! They’re looking for you!”

“Hey! Olicien Pest
Control!” The shout came from outside the closed CCA-2 door. “Are you up inside
the ducts there? Come down here a minute.”

Xris didn’t bother
to respond. He was cold, brisk, efficient. He took a step toward Rowan, metal
hand reaching for the woman’s arm.

“You can scream
for help,” he said, “but it won’t do you a damn bit of good. Sorry it has to
end this way between us, Rowan—”

If she had
screamed, jumped up, rushed him, she would have been dead. Rowan remained
seated, watching him with those calm, sad eyes. She held perfectly still, and
that probably saved her.

That and her next
words.

“Joker’s wild,
Xris. For God’s sake, get out of there. Joker’s wild.”

He heard, once
again, a frantic and unrecognizable voice:

All Deltas!
Joker’s wild! For God’s sake, get out of there! Joker’s wild! Joker’s wild!

Xris paused, his hand
not four centimeters from the woman’s arm. “Yeah? The abort code for the
mission. What’s that supposed to prove. You knew it. Armstrong would have given
it to you.”

But Armstrong
wouldn’t have given Rowan that little added cry of panic that had echoed in
Xris’s mind during the terrible days of pain that followed. That wasn’t part of
the abort code.

For God’s sake
.. .

Rowan stood up,
moved nearer, courting death. “They told you I killed the crew, stole the
shuttle, left you and Ito to die. If I had betrayed you, why would I have
transmitted the abort code? And I was the one to transmit it that day.”

“Bug man!” The
voice outside the door was starting to sound impatient, suspicious. “Are you up
there? Harrison, go on up and check.”

Xris stared at
this woman who was Rowan and who wasn’t Rowan. Something inside him gave way—a
dam bursting, a seething cauldron boiling over, a festering sore draining. He
wanted to believe. Dear God, he wanted to believe!

But Rowan was
smart, creative. He—she’d had all these years to think up a clever lie.

“We have to talk,
Xris!” Rowan put her hand on his arm, the deadly arm. “You have to hear what I
found out. You have to let me explain!”

“He’s not up here,
Captain,” came the report from outside the door.

“Security!
Intruder alert. Unauthorized personnel at large in FCWing.”

Alarms sounded.

The cyborg’s metal
hand twitched. He moved it back, away from Rowan. Then he nodded once,
abruptly.

She touched the
control. The door slid open.

“Captain. Call off
the alert. The gentleman’s here—”

“Jamil!” Harry was
shouting into the comm. “I can’t raise Xris! All hell’s breaking loose! You
guys head for the plane. I’m going after him.”

“Harry, don’t—”
Xris began, then stopped.

All he could hear
over the commlink was Harry shouting, someone else swearing, glass breaking,
and lasgun fire.

And then Harry’s
coram went dead.

The prayer of the
chicken hawk does not get him the chicken.

Proverb, Swahili

Xris’s hand—his
good hand, flesh-and-blood—closed over Rowan’s arm. He jerked her back into the
room, hit the door controls. The door slid shut.

“Is there another
way out of here?”

“Yes,” Rowan
answered, short and sweet, not wasting time for explanations. Just like the old
days.

Could he trust
her—like the old days?

He’d soon find
out.

His leg
compartment flipped out. He pulled out his lasgun, fired, effectively soldered
the door control.

“Where’s the other
door?”

“At the opposite
end of the room, to your left.”

“I see it. Does it
lock?”

“Yes, but the
guards could override it.”

“I’m sure you
could fix it if you wanted to. And believe me, you want to.” Xris aimed his
lasgun at her.

Rowan smiled,
shrugged, and sat down at the computer. “There,” she said after a moment’s
work. “We can get out. No one else can get in. Not without plastic explosives,”
she added.

“Funny.” Xris
snorted.

Outside, he could
hear voices: “Security, I’ve found the intruder. He’s in FCWing, Major Mohini’s
office. The door controls have been frozen. We can’t get inside.”

A phone on Rowan’s
desk began to buzz insistently. She looked at Xris.

He picked it up.

“What we have now,”
Xris told whoever was on the other end, “is a hostage situation. I’ve captured
your major. I’m armed. One move to break in here and your major’s dead.”

He hung up, ripped
the phone off the desk, tossed it—wires dangling—into a corner. “Derek Sagan
was right,” Xris muttered to himself. “Shoot—don’t talk. I’d have saved myself
a hell of a lot of trouble if I’d just gone ahead and shot her!”

He heard the
captain repeatedly calling, “Security!”; then, “I can’t raise anyone. Something’s
wrong. One of you men go check central security ops.”

Harry must be
doing something constructive. Xris hoped his pilot was not getting himself
killed at the same time.

“Jamil.” Xris was
back on the comm. “What’s going on down there?”

“Xris!” Jamil
sounded relieved. “Where—”

“Answer the
question!” Xris snapped.

“We made it to the
spaceplane two jumps ahead of Commander Drake and a squad of Marines. We’re
okay, but they’re sure as hell not going to let us fly out of here.”

“Hang tight,” Xris
growled. “I’m working on it.”

Like hell he was.
Trapped inside a computer room with his onetime best friend who had maybe tried
to kill him, while half the Marines on the space station were lined up outside
waiting for him.

“I can help,”
Rowan offered. “Just tell me the setup.”

Xris hesitated,
studied her. Logic told him not to trust this woman; she was battling for her
life. But it was Rowan talking and they were together again, their backs
against it, outnumbered, everything going wrong that could go wrong. And in the
brown eyes that were Rowan’s eyes was the same bright excitement of long
ago—the delight in the challenge, the exhilaration of the adrenal rush, the fun
of beating the odds.

Besides, when it
came down to it, what choice did he—or his team—have?

“Remember this,”
said Xris, lifting his metal hand, wiggling the thumb with its deadly needle. “If
you let me down, so help me, I’ll—”

He didn’t finish.
It wasn’t necessary.

“I understand,”
Rowan said quietly.

“Here’s the deal.
I’ve got a man stuck in security. I’ve got three more men trapped inside our
spaceplane, which is located on loading dock 28L. None of my men is armed. They
have orders not to kill.”

Rowan raised her
eyebrows. “You’re kidding.”

All was quiet
outside the door—too quiet.

“No one dies,”
Xris said. “We’re in enough trouble already.”

“You bet you are,”
Rowan agreed. She was seated at the computer, fingers dancing across the
keyboard. “See if you can raise your man in security.”

“You’re coming
with me, you know,” Xris told her. “I want to hear that explanation of yours.”
Then he was back on the comm. “Harry, Harry, can you read me?”

Rowan paused,
looked earnestly at him. “Taking me would put you in one
hell
of a lot
of trouble, Xris. More than you could ever imagine.”

“You’re coming
with me,” Xris said with finality. “Either you come or I blow your cozy little
setup here sky-high. I’m sure the Navy would be real interested in knowing that
once upon a time you used to pee standing up.”

Rowan looked at
him a moment longer, then—unexpectedly— she chuckled, low in her throat. Still
laughing, she went back to work.

Xris was back on
the comm. “Harry! Harry, come in—”

“Harry here! Xris,
are you all right?”

“Never better,”
Xris answered wryly. “What the hell is going on down there?”

“Security had a
make on you. So I knocked ‘em out. Like you said.”

“Then what was all
that racket? The hypno-spray—”

“Hypno-spray?
Jeez, Xris. I forgot all about the damn hypno-spray. I just used my fists. Oh,
uh, and I’ve got a lasgun now. A couple of ‘em, in fact.”

“Damn it, Harry—”

“They’ll be okay,
Xris. When they come to.”

“Is that your man?”
Rowan interrupted.

“Unless someone
makes me a better offer,” Xris returned bitterly.

“Can he reach the
spaceplane from his location in three minutes?”

Xris relayed the
message, received an answer in the affirmative. “But they’ve probably got the
plane guarded,” Xris added.

“Maybe one or two
Marines posted outside the door to the loading dock.” Rowan shrugged. “After
all, they know you’re not going anywhere.”