The Third Claw of God

by Adam-Troy Castro

  Fuck You, I told them, feeling a schoolgirl pleasure in the ability to curse out a despised teacher without that teacher ever knowing what I had said. The fact that I’d said worse to them, many times, when they were capable of hearing me, didn’t matter. That one belonged to me.

  Somehow, without knowing why, I had the sense it made me richer, far richer, than Arturo Mendez.

  M endez was relieved when I devoted the rest of my questions to the timeline of the last twenty-four hours. The give-and-take became a mere matter of accounting, bereft of emotional baggage. We went over the same ground several times, searching for holes in the outline, but within twenty minutes I had the basics, Paakth-Doy testifying to their essential accuracy.

  At the time the carriage was prepped, the staff had consisted of Mendez, Colette Wilson, and Loyal Jeck.

  Paakth-Doy arrived less than two hours before departure, a temporary replacement for a fourth steward taking a few days off to attend his sister’s wedding. She’d worked for distant Bettelhine cousins (nobody involved in Inner Family business, but still minor royalty by local standards), and the temporary promotion to the Royal Carriage had still required a month-long background check poring over every aspect of her entire life since birth. In the end, her spotless record and the testimonials of the lesser Bettelhines she’d served had gotten her the belowdecks assignment.

  “She has done a fine job,” Mendez allowed, “especially since the crisis began, but she still has much to learn about Inner Family protocol.”

  “I appreciate the praise,” Paakth-Doy said.

  I had the impression that it was unreserved approval coming from him, and gentle irony coming from her. Damned if I wasn’t starting to like her.

  Jason and Jelaine, their father, Hans, and the Khaajiir had arrived under heavy security, transferring from their private skimmer to a shielded walkway under a security shield that hid not only the identity of the Bettelhines embarking on this journey but also the presence of their venerable guest. The Khaajiir had remained invisible to public view throughout this operation, as he’d presumably been throughout his visit to Xana.

  “Was that typical?”

  Mendez said, “It is not unheard of. It depends on how public the Bettelhines wish to make any particular appearance. Sometimes they arrive with fanfare, with an honor guard of holo operators and neurec slingers capturing every moment for mass consumption. But this had been described as a ‘Classified Visit.’ Security was tight.”

  “How secret can it be? When the Royal Carriage goes up and down, it can’t take a genius to figure out the odds of a Bettelhine, or somebody very close to the Inner Family, being aboard.”

  “Yes,” Mendez said. “But who? Some minor relative hovering around the periphery of power, or Mr. Bettelhine himself? Besides, the Khaajiir was the one being kept secret. We were warned not to mention him, not even to Layabout security.”

  Hans had intended to ride up with them but had been called away, at the last minute, to deal with some minor management crisis at one of the company’s many research divisions.

  No, Mendez did not know what the problem had been; and no, he didn’t consider it his business. “Members of the Inner Family have to deal with crises all the time. Some crises necessitate abrupt changes in travel plans. It’s just something that has to be dealt with.”

  The siblings and their distinguished guest enjoyed an unremarkable ascent, asking little of the crew except for a couple of modest meals. Brother and sister had retired to separate suites and slept much of the way up. The Khaajiir had slept a little, too, but had emerged from his suite long before they did, to sit by himself in the lounge, enjoying the spectacle outside the window as the surface receded and the upper atmosphere gave way to space. Mendez had asked him if he needed anything, an offer that led to a few minutes of polite conversation.

  I asked Mendez what they’d talked about.

  “The view,” he said.

  Was that really all? The view?

  “The rich and the important are often at a loss for a basis of identification with those of my station. Few of my conversations with those I serve transcend banalities.”

  “That must be annoying.”

  “The alternative would be to talk about what they talk about with one another, and I daresay I’ve heard enough of that to know that I want no part of it.” He hesitated. “If you truly need to know, he regaled me with some trivia regarding my family name. Evidently it has homonyms in one of the lesser Tchi dialects. I suppose he was trying to be friendly. I feigned interest and then retreated belowdecks.”

  The one surprise on the way came courtesy of a call from Philip Bettelhine, who informed Mendez that the carriage would be picking up several additional guests during its stay at Layabout: among them himself, his assistant Vernon Wethers, and Mr. and Mrs. Pearlman.

  This was the latest in a series of surprises for Mendez, as he’d initially gathered the trip down to be the venue for an important and classified meeting between Hans Bettelhine, Jason, Jelaine, the Khaajiir, and my own party. He did not know the planned subject matter of that meeting, nor what it had to do with Dejah Shapiro, though she was also scheduled for pickup. He did know that when he informed Jason and Jelaine about Philip’s party-crashing, they seemed irritated, and led him to believe that the important business, whatever it was, would have to wait until the party could reconnect with Hans on the surface.

  No, this was not unusual, either. “Inner Family Bettelhines all operate their inner fiefdoms. Sometimes there’s pushing and shoving.”

  The oddest attendees, Mr. and Mr. Pearlman, had been flown up to Layabout by Vernon Wethers, in one of the Bettelhine Family transports, while the carriage was still in transit. Mendez did not know why. He had been told that they were being honored for exceptional efficiency in beating deadlines at the facility they ran. They would not have been the first low-level functionaries rewarded with the opportunity to hobnob with Inner Family members, either aboard the Royal Carriage or at one of the Family’s many estates. Usually, these occasions were provided more warning, but not always. Given Wethers’s involvement, the whim appeared to have been Philip Bettelhine’s. Either way, the Pearlmans boarded the carriage almost immediately upon its arrival at Layabout, oohing and aahing over all the luxury that was now, temporarily, theirs to enjoy.

  Monday Brown, who had also taken a Family transport from the surface, boarded next, specifying that he was there to meet Ms. Shapiro in his employer’s stead. He was, as I’d already learned, the last to arrive before word of the attempt on my life prompted the temporary evacuation of the Shuttle as a security measure. No, Jason and Jelaine had not expected him. No, Mendez did not know whether they’d been as annoyed by news of his arrival as they had seemed to be when learning about Philip’s party, as he had not been present for that conversation.

  Word came of my arrival and several minutes later of the attempt on my life. Jason and Jelaine had expressed great relief that I was all right before everybody but Mendez boarded the evacuation capsule, launched themselves offstation, and waited for Mr. Pescziuwicz to sound the all-clear. Mendez left the carriage too but remained aboard Layabout, making himself available in case Security needed him. The next update he received was when Mr. Pescziuwicz alerted him to join Station Security in escorting the Porrinyards and me to our suite.

  Mendez had just completed the grand tour when the evacuation capsule returned. Worried about my reaction to seeing another Bocaian in this context, Jason and Jelaine had asked the others to stay behind while they introduced me to the Khaajiir. Once that was over and done with, and I joined the Porrinyards in our suite, everybody else settled in.

  We were in our suite during Dejah’s arrival. She had actually docked with Layabout less than an hour after us, but her transport had been held up during the security shutdown, and she didn’t make her way across the Concourse until twenty minutes after the Porrinyards and I retired to our suite. Occupied as we were, we also missed the separate a
rrivals of Philip Bettelhine and Vernon Wethers, Philip Bettelhine taking a special flight from the surface to join us, Wethers arriving after a brief meeting at one of the company’s orbital manufacturing facilities.

  And that had been it, before the descent.

  I rubbed the tip of my nose with the edge of one knuckle. “I believe we can afford a break right now. Why don’t the two of you join the others outside? Skye and I will be out directly.”

  Paakth-Doy understood the situation completely. “You need privacy to talk about us behind our backs.”

  I gave her an unsmiling nod. “Thanks for understanding.”

  She remained unperturbed as she followed Mendez out the door.

  The second she was gone, I turned to Skye. “First things first. What’s going on with the others?”

  There was no transition from the Skye who had been present with me throughout the prior interviews and the one reporting events from Oscin’s viewpoint. “It’s been tense. Farley Pearlman’s been taking advantage of the bar service to work himself into a quiet, morose drunk. Dina’s been complaining about the smell, but not the same traumatized way she did before—it’s just an exercise in being unpleasant. The way she put it, the ‘Holy Man’ smells ‘even worse’ than he did when he was alive.”

  “How did Jason and Jelaine take that?”

  “About as well as can be expected. Jason invoked his father’s authority and ordered her to keep her, quote, ‘evil’ mouth shut. I think he was telling the truth before, about not knowing about her life before she reached Xana.”

  “So do I. What else?”

  “Philip’s ordered Mendez to set the air recyclers in the parlor to full power. They’re filtering out the worst of the odor out there, though you can still catch a whiff of the poor Khaajiir if you get too close. He’s also still holding out hope that the whatever-it-is, the Stanley, will be showing up any minute, and he’s pressed Jason for the reason we’re here—evidently, Dad didn’t bother to share it with him. Jason told him he’d find out in good time. He then took Jelaine aside, who said the same thing, word for word, at which point he got mad and said, ‘What’s the matter with you? We were never the closest brother and sister, but we used to be able to talk. Now you’re as bad as Jason.’”

  “Either he totally lost control of himself, or your male half’s been especially deft at eavesdropping.”

  “Both,” Skye said, without any special pride. “He did raise his voice, but the only reason I’m able to provide the full quote is that Oscin was able to come up behind Philip when he wasn’t looking. Jelaine saw Oscin but didn’t care. She seemed to relish the opportunity to share secrets with us. It’s like we’ve joined an old girl’s club without knowing it.”

  “How did he react when he realized you’d heard him?”

  “The same way, with an additional added helping of hurt. Make no mistake, Andrea. From what I can tell, there is love lost between Philip and his siblings. He believes they’ve turned their backs on him, and resents them for it.”

  All of this dovetailed with what we’d already figured out about Jason and Jelaine, though perhaps not what their father’s place among them. I said, “And how’s he reacting now that Mendez and Paakth-Doy have returned to the party?”

  “He’s a little upset that we’ve been left alone.” She hesitated. “Wait, he’s confronting Oscin, demanding to know just what we think we’re doing. Paakth-Doy’s telling him, ‘they’ve just established a timeline.’ He’s saying we had to have done more than that. She’s saying, ‘Yes, sir, they have, but I’m not permitted to share it with you.’”

  I felt another surge of respect for Paakth-Doy. “The lady has a backbone.”

  “That she does, and it doesn’t make Philip happy at all. And again, here come more spirited defenses of your reputation from Jason and Jelaine. I note that Dejah’s watching the two of them very carefully. She’s…Andrea, that’s a grin. That’s definitely a grin. I think she’s caught up.”

  I found that I could picture the look on Dejah’s face. “I wouldn’t put it past her. She’s sharp. When we worked together, she frightened me to death.”

  “She seems to like you well enough. That marks her as unusual right then and there.”

  I didn’t take offense. It happened to be true. “Especially when we met. I was an even bigger bitch then than I was when you met me, and I shut her down every time she tried to be friendly. But that’s not what scared me. She’s scary-smart. I was used to being a prodigy, but she made me look like a stammering idiot. And there’s something else about her, something you need to keep in mind.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She’s as wealthy as the Bettelhines. She’s as well known as they are and, in some circles, as hated as they are. We learned during dinner that she and the Bettelhines have had unpleasant, even murderous, past history. And yet, she arrived at Layabout without a security entourage of her own. I can tell you right here and now that she’s never had one. She goes everywhere alone, or paired with whoever happens to be her husband this year. By all rights—including, I should say, her well-known habit of picking treacherous bastards as those husbands, for reasons that frankly escape me—she should have been assassinated long ago. But she survives. She thrives. I promise you, love, if there’s anybody on the carriage we don’t want to be the murderer, or the money behind the murderer, it’s her. Because if it is her, we’ve already lost.”

  Skye considered that. “Do you think it’s her?”

  “I don’t have enough data to know.”

  “What do you think of what we learned from Mendez?”

  “About his life? It feeds some suspicions I’m already working on, suspicions that resonate with some of the things we’ve noticed about Brown and Wethers. About the timeline? It establishes something odd about our complement. The one man most credited for wanting me here, Hans, had to change his plans at the last minute. Conversely, five others, including Brown, Wethers, Philip, and the Pearlmans, were all added to the guest list with the same lack of warning. There’s even a sixth anomaly, if I count Paakth-Doy, though I may not, since her assignment here has been planned for more than a month and fails to meet the pattern. Still, even if we discount her and maybe one or two of those others as coincidences, we still have a vehicle overcrowded with people who all went to extraordinary lengths to board just as a meeting of unexplained importance was set to take place here.”

  “It looks to me,” Skye said, “like somebody doesn’t want that meeting to take place.”

  I could only agree. That was the basis of the epiphany I’d been fighting since the moment I found the Khaajiir dead.

  Discounting the Porrinyards, who had traveled here as my companions, only Dejah Shapiro and I had traveled to this system just to be here today.

  We were the original reasons for this gathering. Everything else, all the pomp and all the violence we’d endured, was just noise and distraction.

  But what would Hans Bettelhine have to say to either Dejah or me that any of the others would kill to prevent us from hearing?

  I was still considering that when the carriage trembled.

  11

  DEJAH’S VIEW

  H alf expecting to find another ravaged corpse among our fellow partygoers, I ran back into the parlor and instead discovered a cautious hope diluting the lingering shock of the Khaajiir’s death.

  Monday Brown was downright ebullient for him, which meant a slight upward turn at the corners of lips otherwise as straight as a slit. Vernon Wethers looked white, his eyes scanning the sculpted ceiling as if hoping for the sudden appearance of an escape ladder. Dina Pearlman, who had retreated to one of the lounges with a bottle, raised it in a mock toast, and Farley just looked tired, as if he’d accept any development as long as everybody just left him alone.

  “What’s going on?”

  Philip seemed to take cruel pleasure in telling me the good news. “Help’s arrived. That’s the sound of the Stanley from Layabout touching
down on our roof.”

  “Are you sure?”

  There was another shudder that tinkled glasses and jarred the balance of anybody not already seated. With an efficiency he didn’t seem to have to think about, Mendez rescued one glass before it toppled over the edge of the bar. “He knows what he’s talking about, Counselor. That’s a Stanley, making contact with the carriage. I know because I’ve been trained to recognize the sound.”

  “Then you know what to expect,” I said.

  “I’m afraid I don’t. In the simulations I experienced, the pilot always remained in contact with us throughout the rescue operation. He would have warned us to expect that jolt, for instance. But I don’t know what he’s going to do if we cannot communicate with him and assure him that we’re still alive.”

  “Don’t worry,” Oscin told everybody. “I don’t know the exact parameters of the local tech, but any low-orbit recovery vehicle would be useless without instruments capable of detecting movement, and therefore life, inside sealed compartments like this one. Now that we’re in direct contact, I suspect the crew of that thing is devoting as much effort to counting heartbeats and voices as they are to determining the nature of the malfunction. Am I right about that, Mr. Bettelhine?”

  “That’s the way I understand it,” said Philip.

  “That’s the way it is,” said Jason.

  Farley Pearlman looked away from his drink long enough to make a single, not very interested suggestion. “What about us? Should we all start yelling?”

  He was precisely the kind of criminal I’d never been able to speak to with any degree of professional detachment, but my answer was less for him than for anybody else who might consider his suggestion a good one. “If their instruments are capable of detecting heartbeats through bulkheads and heat shielding, and somebody’s listening, that’s the last thing we want to do. It would be like screaming hello into a stethoscope.”