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

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