“Computer, give me a time check every twenty seconds until hull degradation.”
He searched for, quickly located the access panel to the maintenance computer.
“One minute forty seconds until hull degradation.”
The bolts were hand-fasteners, meant to come off quickly in case of emergency—such as this. He yanked the panel free. The computer was a sealed unit, but it had a small display screen and test points, allowing access for repairs.
“One minute twenty seconds until hull degradation.”
Rowan opened the backpack and dumped its contents on the deck. Grabbing his small handheld computer, he attached leads to the test points, toggled the control switch from voice to keyboard access, typed in a command.
The maintenance computer remained blank for several seconds, then read: Manual mode. Enter command.
“One minute until hull degradation.”
Rowan took a few seconds to think. He had to assume that all high-level commands had been frozen out by the saboteur. It was unlikely, however, that his killer would have bothered—or maybe even thought about—freezing out low-level commands.
“Let’s try ‘self-test,’ “ Rowan said, typing in the commands.
The computer started running its diagnostics procedure—which could take far longer than Rowan had left to live. He stopped it.
“Reboot from backup,” he ordered.
The system hesitated, and then restarted.
“Forty seconds until hull degradation.”
The maintenance computer began loading its programming from stored backups.
Rowan cursed the time that it took. He switched the computer to voice mode.
“Maintenance computer, do you hear me?”
No response.
“Maintenance computer! Wake the hell up!”
He’d done all he could. A strange thought crossed his mind. Only a few days before, he had seriously thought about killing himself. Now he was fighting desperately to survive. It was as if God was teaching him a lesson.
“Twenty seconds until hull degradation.”
“Come on, damn it!” Rowan swore beneath his breath. Sweat poured off his body. It was hotter than hell in the shuttlecraft.
And then the maintenance computer’s display area lit up. “Successful reboot.”
Rowan could have kissed it. “Maintenance computer, respond!”
“Maintenance here. What’s the problem?” Even the voice was different from the voice of the flight computer. These shuttle designers thought of everything.
“Maintenance computer, the flight computer has malfunctioned. Pilot authorizes you to take over flight control now!”
“Maintenance computer here. I have now taken over flight control.”
Rowan sighed in relief. “Reduce shuttle speed to full stop and reduce rate of descent to ten meters per second!”
Main engines cut. Forward breaking thrusters fired. Inertial dampeners kicked in. Everything in the compartment lurched forward. Rowan and all of his equipment slid across the deck to the foot of the forward compartment bulkhead.
Bruised and battered, he regained his feet, staggered across the listing deck to the console.
The timer had stopped.
“Good work, maintenance,” Rowan said, hoping his thudding heartbeat would return to normal sometime soon. “Restore all onboard computers to their original backup programs and inform me when that is complete.”
Rowan switched to the comm. “Sunray, this is Javelin. Do you read? Over.”
No response.
He sat and thought. Someone had tried to kill him by locking him out of the computer. The chief said the computer was fine when she checked it on the ground. Which meant that the killer had tampered with the computer after the chief had checked it.
Which meant the killer was on board Vigilance. And either the killer had silenced Armstrong or else ...
Good God! Xris and Ito!
Whoever tried to kill me wouldn’t be likely to stop there, Rowan realized. The only reason to kill me is to halt this mission!
He had to warn them, tried the frequency he’d been given.
“Delta One, this is Javelin. Come in, Delta One.”
Nothing. No response.
Rowan tried again and again until at last he was trying only out of sheer frustration. Either he’d been given the wrong cipher—Xris and Ito wouldn’t respond to anything except the correct daily codes—or Rowan had been given the wrong coordinates. Or maybe both. It was all starting to fit together. .. .
“Pilot, navigation and flight computers have been restored.”
“Thank you, maintenance. Return control back to the primary computers and maintain surveillance of all computer activity. Tell me if any other nonstandard code shows up.”
The restart of the nav computer had wiped its short-term memory. The landing coordinates on TISor 13 were no longer displayed. The sensor array still held a fix on the mother ship, however. Rowan had two choices. He go could on—not being certain where to land or what to do after he landed. Or he could return to Vigilance. From there, he could obtain the correct frequencies and check the cipher codes, get in touch with Xris.
And, hopefully, find the bastard who’d done this. He headed back to the ship—as fast as the shuttle would fly.
Vigilance came into view, silhouetted against TISor’s sun. Lights were on, everything looked normal.
“Shuttlecraft to Vigilance. Come in, Vigilance.”
No response from the bridge.
Why wasn’t he surprised? His heart rate had slowed; now it was sinking.
The shuttle bay was open, but no friendly tractor beams reached out to guide him inside.
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.
Chapter 21
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 shutt
le 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.
The Knights of the Black Earth Page 24