The Third Claw of God

by Adam-Troy Castro

  “Third,” I said.

  This was the part that never worked. The first thing any investigator learns is that everybody lies, even if they don’t have to, even if their lies are innocent, even if their lies have nothing to do with the crime. There were always things people were ashamed of, things they thought harmless to hide, things that interest the investigator not at all but that, when hidden, hide the truth behind a thicket of false leads. It was useless to even try to prevent that with a mere warning. But I had to try. “I haven’t been shy about my lifelong assessment of the Bettelhine Corporation. I think it’s a criminal enterprise, run by blood-soaked dynasty with a bottomless capacity for evil. I have no illusions over my own ability to bring you down. I’m just one woman with problems of her own. But right now I’m not interested in bringing you down. I’m interested in solving this one crime, and only this one crime. The time may come when you may find yourself faced with a choice between answering my questions and concealing other crimes filed under the category ‘Corporate Secrets.’ When that time comes, if you lie and I catch you in a lie, it will only give me more reason to consider you responsible for the Khaajiir’s death. If you tell the truth…well, I give you my word that nothing you tell me today will ever leave Xana.”

  Philip’s voice was a soft vessel releasing its venom in drips. “Except if you think it’s relevant to your case.”

  I showed teeth. “That’s the point, sir. I’m in your jurisdiction, not mine. Whatever happens, I won’t be involved in the prosecution except, if you wish, as a witness. The best I can do once I identify the culprit is present my evidence to you and let you pass it on to whatever passes for Bettelhine justice, even if that killer ultimately turns out to be a Bettelhine and the worst he gets is a scolding from Father.”

  “Now wait just one minute,” he began.

  I held up a finger. “Honestly, Mr. Bettelhine. I don’t give a damn. What happens to our unknown culprit is up to you. Either way, there’s absolutely no reason for my superiors to ever hear of it. My only interest in asking any question that leads to finding out who did this terrible thing is that it furthers all of our chances of ever getting off this vessel alive.”

  “You still don’t have the right to demand access to corporate secrets—”

  Jelaine cleared her throat. It was a gentle sound, less an interruption than the mere suggestion of one, but it had enough power to summon the attention of everybody in the room. “I think I can guarantee that Counselor Cort won’t abuse the situation.”

  “In God’s name,” he demanded. “How?”

  “She’s Father’s guest. His honored guest.”

  Once upon a time, Philip had been a child, throwing tantrums and stamping his foot when he did not get his way. I don’t know how well the elder Bettelhines disciplined their kids, so there was no way of telling whether his foot-stamping phase ended when he was two, ten, or thirty, but the contortions that twisted his face now established to my satisfaction what he must have looked like when he did it. “You’re still risking the family’s future on an outsider.”

  “Exactly,” Jason told him. “And that’s what Father would want.”

  The tenor of the room changed with those words. It was still thick with fear over our situation, shock over the death of the Khaajiir, and uncertainty over which one of us had turned the evening into an exercise in murder…but there was something else now: wonder. It was most visible in the eyes of the Pearlmans, who for the most of the evening could not have considered me anything more but some low-prestige offworld bureaucrat, and had now seen me not only seize control of the crisis but also get declared the personal project of Hans Bettelhine himself. They didn’t know whether to bow to me or run from me.

  In Dejah Shapiro’s case it seemed more like fascination. She could not have expected a moment like this in my future the last time we’d met, and now that she’d witnessed one here she just fingered her chin, titled her head, and contemplated me as if hoping furious thought would bring me into the proper focus.

  I remained on the wrong foot with Monday Brown. He looked like he was irritated by my very existence. Philip looked like he wanted to hit me. And I could not read Vernon Weathers at all.

  I had no idea what I could have done in my life to merit loyalty from Bettelhines. Any Bettelhines. If indeed loyalty was what this was.

  But if it gave me an advantage, right now, this was not the proper moment to question it.

  Or as one of my teachers once said: When you’re in over your head, swim.

  “Good,” I said. “Now that we’ve got that settled, I think there are two things we need to do. First, we need to confirm that nobody here’s hiding another Claw of God, or weapon of similar lethality, on his person. Oscin will stay here while you divest yourselves of everything you’re carrying, while Skye and I take the time to examine the Khaajiir’s body. Have you decided who gets to monitor us while we work?”

  All eyes turned to the stewards, Arturo, Colette, Loyal Jeck, and Paakth-Doy.

  The truth, as I’d known when I’d gone through the motions of allowing the Bettelhines to choose between those four, was that only two seemed safe to allow near the investigation: Jeck and Paakth-Doy, the only ones I couldn’t personally place within a meter of the Khaajiir at any point during the night.

  In the end, it was Jason who made the choice I’d wanted them to make. “Doy?”

  Paakth-Doy glanced at her co-workers, then stepped forward, with a shyness I hadn’t seen from her before.

  “It will be my honor,” she said.

  T he sounds of protest and offended dignity from the crowd over by the bar provided steady background music as Skye, Paakth-Doy, and I stood before the plush easy chair and regarded the wreckage of a sentient being.

  The Khaajiir sat with his feet planted on the floor, and the rest of him swallowed by a chair that would have engulfed a being twice his girth. The chair was so large that his spine failed to rest flush against the backrest, but rather leaned on it, in a position a living biped might have considered too uncomfortable to endure for long. He’d rested his staff across the two armrests, crossing in front of his now-sunken abdomen like the safety bar in a child’s high chair. His left palm, painted black by the goo that less than an hour before had been solid and functioning aside him, pinned the staff to the armrest on that side, both holding it in place and marking it with the stain of his death. A shiny crust had formed where his fingertips soaked the plush fabric. His right arm pinned the other end of the staff to the armrest on the other side, but more of his hand extended over it. Sometime in his last few minutes his fingertips had convulsed in some way, scratching at the fabric on that side to produce a series of three jagged lines, all identical: each consisting of three diagonals, leaning left and then right and then left again to produce zigzags. His unmoving fingertip still rested at the base of the zigzag farthest from the right. Enduring the stench, I leaned in close and saw a wisp of fiber from the chair lodged beneath that fingertip, fluttering in some unseen air current.

  “Note this,” I told Skye.

  “Noted,” she said.

  The Khaajiir’s features had gone slack, free of the contorted trauma that sometimes remains on the faces of those who perish by violent means. His eyes were closed, his lips curled in an expression that looked like a smile but was probably just the expression they assumed at rest. A thin trickle of saliva, without any visible blood content, had trickled from the corner of his mouth. The only sign that his fate had been anything but a natural one was a single bloodstain, the size of a fingertip, on the tip of his nose.

  I remembered the funeral of an elderly Bocaian neighbor who had died in his sleep when I was seven, about a year before so many others met deaths that had been much worse. All my Bocaian neighbors, and all of my human ones as well, had filed past the platform where the deceased lay in state, and whispered the same respectful phrase, Bocaian for Walk in Light, Where We Must Follow. I hadn’t thought of that for longer than I
now wanted to contemplate, but the words came to my lips again now. I spoke them under my breath, shook my head as I realized what I’d just done, and said, “That was the first Bocaian phrase I’ve spoken in decades.”

  Skye hovered close, protectively. “You said a few words earlier tonight.”

  “Really? I don’t remember.”

  “It is to be expected,” Paakth-Doy clucked. “I know at that times of stress I revert to my first tongue, Riirgaani.”

  I’d been around far too many dead bodies in my professional life, and had learned to face the cooling collections of meat as abstractions, more problems to be solved than truncated lives to be mourned. But being around another dead Bocaian, after all these years, was tearing the scabs off old wounds. For a few seconds I found myself eight years old again. I sniffed, rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand, and, unable to come up with any more relevant comments, murmured, “It must have been agony.”

  “I would not want to die in such a way,” Paakth-Doy said.

  “It’s not what you think,” Skye told us. “Based on my readings, when I worked with the species, the K’cenhowten were never torturers in the way you and I understand the term.”

  “How so?”

  “Torture means something else to the K’cenhowten. Their sense of pain is not acute by human standards. They know when horrific things are being done to their bodies, and they feel all the dismay you and I might expect when they see their persons ravaged, but there’s always been a certain upper limit to the agony they can feel, and it’s well within their ability to function. It’s a built-in limit that prevents them from being incapacitated by agony, and relieves them of our human tendency to faint or convulse or, for prisoners experiencing extended torture, mind-destroying shock.”

  “That’s one hell of a survival mechanism,” I said. “But would it work with a Claw of God?”

  “Especially with a Claw of God,” Skye said. “K’cenhowten’s age of darkness did feature several methods of execution unbearable by human standards, but the Claw itself fries most of the body’s internal pain receptors the same way it fries the rest of the organs. The point of the torture was not inflicting pain, but rather horror. Its victims were positioned in front of mirrors and forced to watch everything that made their lives possible drain from them, despite exoskeletons that remained intact. For a K’cenhowten, wrapped in its impervious shell, this would have upset their very perceptions of the world.”

  Paakth-Doy shuddered. “I’d imagined…agony.”

  “And you imagined correctly, Doy, but not the right kind. Imagine that you were a human prisoner in medieval times, slowly roasted over an open flame after first being provided a drug that incapacitated your ability to feel any pain whatsoever. Imagine you were able to watch your skin turn black, your fatty tissues bubble and run like water. Imagine that your agony was not great enough to drown out every other thought, or to give you the blessed escape of unconsciousness. Imagine instead having to dwell on what was happening to you, and its terrible permanence, at whatever length your captors decide it should last. Is that better? Or worse?”

  I cut off Skye’s gruesome recitation. “Still, you’re talking about a K’cenhowten’s nervous system. Would the Claw of God affect a Bocaian or a human being the same way?”

  “It could if calibrated,” Skye said. “What’s more, the device is designed to locate the heart and lungs—or, with minor adjustments, their alien equivalent—and shield them from the full effects of the pulse. The blow to those organs remains fatal, all by itself, but it’s the kind of fatal that would take several hours to kill. Meanwhile, they continue to feed the victim’s brain for several minutes, even as the rest of him turns to soup.”

  Paakth-Doy had turned green. “You are saying that he might not have been aware of the terrible thing happening to him.”

  “I’m saying that if he failed to notice the blood, he might have interpreted what he was feeling as fatigue.”

  I rubbed my chin. “Meaning that we cannot use his participation in conversations to isolate the moment the Claw was used on him. Anything he said, after being moved to this chair, could have been said after he was already dying.”

  Skye said, “He might have been dying even earlier, though that would have been cutting it very close for the killer, given how soon after the attack the Khaajiir would have started to…leak.”

  I nodded, the ugliness of the crime scene receding as its value as evidence moved to the forefront. Signaling for silence from the other two, and sparing a quick look at the crowd over by the bar, which seemed to be enduring the search about as well as could be expected, though the Pearlmans in particular were eyeing their own small pile of valuables with the glumness of people who suspected that their own paltry wealth an embarrassment in the eyes of the people who owned their very world. There was no point in calling to Oscin to ask how things were going. If he found anything of importance, Skye would alert me.

  So I folded my arms before my chest and circled the chair, examining it from all angles, sometimes leaning in close to appraise the scene from a fresh angle. As a place to obscure the fate of a sentient about to die from exsanguination, the chair could not have been better. Had the Khaajiir been sitting on one of the couches, the blood pooling beneath him would not have been hidden by raised armrests at either side. As he grew weak, he might have collapsed to one side, and drawn the attention of others who would have been able to isolate those who had been near him at the moment of the crime. Had he been sitting on one of the hard chairs beside the dinner table, the blood mixture would have spilled over the sides and formed a spreading puddle on the floor by his feet, where it could have been spotted by Mendez, Colette, or any diner who left the table for as long as thirty seconds.

  This chair, though? The seat tilted backward, forming a perfect reservoir for the accumulation of liquids. The cushions had absorbed some, too, slowing discovery of the murder even longer. The armrests, propping him up at either side, made him remain upright and thus seem healthy, if only dozing. In short, moving him here, before or after applying the Claw, virtually ensured that we would not be able to notice anything wrong for several minutes.

  But was that a sad happenstance, or a deliberate strategy on the part of the killer? If the latter, it had been Jason and Jelaine who had moved him here, and Jelaine who had stayed with him for several minutes. That made them prime suspects.

  On the other hand, Jason and Jelaine had enjoyed access to the Khaajiir for some time. Had they wanted him dead for some reason, they would not have needed to wait until they could commit the crime within a room filled with distinguished dinner guests.

  Monday Brown and Vernon Wethers had also checked on him. Colette had been in and out of the room several times, and Dejah Shapiro had passed right by the Khaajiir on her way to doing something in her own suite. I hadn’t seen the Pearlmans approach him after the emergency stop, but either of them could have clapped the Claw of God against the Khaajiir’s back when the lights went out. Anybody upstairs during the crime could have been the killer, and anybody downstairs could have provided material aid.

  All it would have taken was decisive action during a single moment when everybody else was distracted.

  And that’s all it would take again if the assassin was not finished, and I was right to expect a third Claw of God…

  I was still considering the foul implications of that when the people over at the bar started shouting.

  9

  MAGRISON’S WOMAN

  O scin had found an octagonal chip, about the size of pinky fingernail, and so well integrated with the skin it was imbedded in that it was impossible to discern a seam where flesh ended and metal began. I knew, without examining it further, that it would be only a few molecules thick, that it would resist any attempt to remove it, and that the thousands of infinitesmal filaments extruded on its subdermal side would be threaded throughout the wearer’s nervous system, forming a braid of sorts that would culminate in a seethi
ng terminus somewhere in the meat of the brain. Worse, though, was the pattern of raised dots, at its center, forming a letter that to my eyes had always resembled a pair of serpents swallowing each other whole. The letter, corresponding to the sharpest of the three consonants Mercantile devotes to the M sound, did not belong to the Mercantile alphabet at all, but rather to another, famous only as the birthplace of a destroyer not seen in civilized space for almost thirty years.

  The mere sight was enough to make my ears throb with trapped blood. I released the forearm bearing the hateful artifact, turned my back on the glaring figure it belonged to, and confronted the three Bettelhines, now huddled together in whitening silence. “Did you know about this?”

  Jason Bettelhine shook his head.

  Jelaine had paled in a manner that suggested blood loss on the scale of the Khaajiir’s. “I swear to you, Counselor. I had no idea.”

  Philip said nothing. But I noticed that Monday Brown had moved a little closer to him, like a mother cat attempting to comfort a kitten crying after a great fall.

  My fury colored my vision, like a red curtain turning everything behind it the color of blood. “You did know, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  Philip Bettelhine’s mouth had become a horizontal slash as white as a bloodless wound. “I would watch your tone of voice, Counselor. You’re on our ground.”

  “To hell with my tone of voice! Answer my question!”

  He rolled his eyes. “I knew. So did Father, if you’re wondering. And my grandfather before him.”

  “And you had no problem with that?”

  “Historical precedent. Whenever any great war ends, the victors imprison some of its leaders, execute others, release a few more, and recruit the remainder to serve their own cause. Your own Dip Corps employs some intelligence assets guilty of crimes as vile as anything this poor woman ever did. Hell, look at yourself. Are you in any position to complain about any system that puts war criminals to work?”