The Knights of the Black Earth by Margaret Weis, Don Perrin

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 ...
     

Chapter 5
    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