The Third Claw of God

by Adam-Troy Castro

  He gave a sad happy little nod, as if it pleased him to be rendered an irrelevance yet again, and retreated back to his drink.

  “Could have been worse,” Mrs. Pearlman cracked. “He could have suggested a singalong.”

  Another rumble shook the carriage, this one harsh and metallic and moaning like a prehistoric beast calling for another of its kind.

  “They’re moving,” Jason said.

  I said, “Mr. Bettelhine? With those safety shields lowered, we’re effectively blind. Is there an exterior monitor of some kind that I can use to monitor its progress?”

  Philip regarded me with incredulity. “Why? You don’t claim to be an expert on that, too?”

  “Perhaps not,” I told him, “but given everything else that’s happened today, I think it’s best not to put too much trust in procedures operating within their expected parameters. If something goes wrong out there, or if this is just another manifestation of an attack on the people in the room, wouldn’t you like to know?”

  He searched my eyes for signs of duplicity, found none, and resisted a few seconds more out of sheer disinclination to cede me even that much ground.

  Jelaine said, “It wouldn’t hurt.”

  Philip slumped, expressing his surrender with a flip of one hand that did not surrender so much as grant me leave to slink from his presence.

  Jason’s expression was gnomic, but tinged with a satisfaction that under the circumstances seemed as ominous as another attack by Bocaian assassins might have been. Despite all logic I half expected him to whisper a confidence in his sister’s ear. He didn’t, but she wore much the same expression.

  Mendez said, “There’s a monitor station belowdecks, next to the cargo airlock. It provides a real-time holo feed of the carriage exterior from four perspectives.”

  “That’ll do. Give me a second, first.” I pulled Skye over to the wreckage of the dinner table and told her, “You, Mendez, and Paakth-Doy come with me. Oscin stays here with everybody else.”

  Skye kept her voice low. “You really are that sure this rescue’s nothing of the kind?”

  “Let’s just say I don’t trust easy outs when everything else in the course of the day seems to have been conspiring against us. Why? You think I’m just being paranoid?”

  She shook her head. “When you start acting paranoid, I start scanning the rooftops for snipers.”

  We returned to the others in the midst of another jarring shudder, the vibration subsiding only enough to become a low-frequency hum hard to hear but resonant enough to hurt my teeth.

  Dejah intercepted me before I could connect with Mendez and Paakth-Doy. “Andrea? I’m sick of just holding up the bar. I’m coming with you in case you need any help.”

  “It shouldn’t be necessary,” I said.

  “Maybe not, but it’s what I’m going to do.”

  I tried to think up reasons to object and came up short. Why not. It might give me the opportunity to ask her some questions.

  I might have expected Philip Bettelhine to raise some objections of his own, but he just grumbled. It was not a surrender so much as a tactical retreat, as he shepherded his energies for later battles.

  Just as we went I made eye contact with Vernon Wethers, who seemed downright disappointed that his boss was letting the matter go that easily. He had opened his mouth, prepared to concur with whatever Philip wanted, but now had to close it, his own unflagging support in flight but bereft of a place to land. I was reminded of a phrase I’d once heard in another context that fit him so well I suspected I’d always see it in connection to his name: not a man, but a spare part. I also wondered if, like Mendez, he’d ever had the potential to be anything else.

  It was the one thing that rankled most about my interview with Mendez. This world may have owed everything it had to the Bettelhines, but a suspicious percentage of those who worked closely with them seemed to have given them everything.

  I haven’t spent much time on luxury conveyances, but the couple of times I have I’ve found myself needing to explore the areas not meant for eyes for paying passengers. I’d found the polished veneer a thin one, which grew grub-bier and more reduced to the merely functional the farther I penetrated into servant territory. I was not surprised to find that the areas belowdecks on the Royal Carriage followed the same pattern. Once we descended two more decks, past the second level of passenger suites and into the level containing the crew’s quarters, all grandeur fled. There was no vast open area for entertaining here, no great display port overlooking the planet below, just narrow passageways equipped with vacuum doors and lined with sealed rooms labeled STORAGE A, STORAGE B, PANTRY, LAUNDRY, and EMERGENCY.

  Beyond that we found a grayer and even more cramped region not so much a place where people lived their own lives as one where they were stored when not in use. Only one of the four compartments in there, the one belonging to Mendez, was labeled with the name of its occupant, and then only in terms of his function: CHIEF STEWARD A. MENDEZ. The other room read CREW QUARTERS A and CREW QUARTERS B.

  Another spiral staircase at the end of this corridor led to the carriage’s lowest level, a gray area lined with crates and black machinery and blocked by a bulkhead with two air lock doors labeled CARGO 1 and CARGO 2.

  But it was the monitor between the two doors, a standard flatscreen with minimal holo capability that interested us now. It provided a monochromatic image of the carriage roof as seen from a vantage point near the junction between our supercarriage and the groove in the planetary cable. The sky in the background was a starless shade of black, with a dim glow rising from the bottom of the screen. The cable was at the periphery of the image, a straight line between us and its connection to Layabout.

  The carriage was now being straddled by an insectile vessel with a shiny obsidian head three-quarters the carriage’s diameter, and six serpentine segmented limbs. Two of those legs continued to clutch the cable. Two others stood braced against the carriage roof. The final two split into a dizzying array of smaller limbs that must have served the device as fingers. The vehicle sat motionless above the junction where the carriage clutched the cable’s anterior track, as if unsure how to proceed.

  The junction was a blackened smear, part of the housing that twisted away from the cable track and looked like it had melted before freezing back to solidity.

  Dejah, Paakth-Doy, Skye, and I all regarded the static picture with a silence that ended when I admitted, “I have no idea what I’m looking at. That big thing’s the Stanley, right?”

  Mendez nodded. “Yes, madam.”

  “I think I’ve asked this already, but why in Juje’s name would it be called a Stanley?”

  His shrug was a close cousin to an apology. “I have been told that it has something to do with the vehicle’s arachnid appearance, but further understanding has always eluded me. You might want to ask Jason and Jelaine, as they’ve always demonstrated a certain amusement at the word and the form that they’ve never seen fit to explain.” He shrugged, a close cousin to an apology. “I gather that it’s a private joke between them.”

  I wondered if the joke could prove relevant and decided that it probably wouldn’t, right now. “Why isn’t it moving?”

  “I don’t have any way of knowing. But in the absence of a critical life-and-death emergency requiring immediate action, the crew would diagnose the problem and confirm a course of action with the engineers at Layabout and Anchor Point. My supposition is that they’re still discussing the matter.”

  We watched for a few more seconds, waiting for the Stanley to do something, anything. It remained motionless.

  Dejah beat me to voicing suspicion. “Something’s wrong.”

  There was no panic or fear in her voice, just a dread, knowing certainty. “What’s your reason?”

  Dejah said, “I could understand them taking their time had they been in contact with us all along, but we’ve been cut off from all communication for a couple of hours now. Trust the word of somebody w
ho knows from personal experience the special kind of attentiveness expected by the filthy rich: given whose elevator car this is, the people in that vehicle should be shitting bricks. They should be desperate to get through and confirm that everybody’s all right.”

  I took another look at the image on the screen, finding an odd delicacy in the Stanley’s frozen posture. “Assuming Pescziuwicz told them everything they needed to know, I’m afraid it’s even more suspicious than that.”

  “How?”

  “When I spoke to him during dinner, he told me that Brown had informed him that a Bocaian was aboard. If the Stanley’s crew can hear our heartbeats, and they know that a Bocaian should be with us, then they can observe that all of the hearts still beating are human and determine that there’s already been at least one fatality…on a day when there’s already been one incident involving Bocaian assassins. Whatever the cause of our problem, they should consider this a life-or-death situation. They should be moving. At the very least, they should have someone rushing to an air lock to get medical workers in here.”

  Paakth-Doy said, “That goes along with everything I know about the emergency protocols.”

  Dejah bit her lip. “Either they can’t proceed, or they don’t dare.”

  I nodded. “That’s what it looks like to me.”

  We continued to watch the static image, waiting for any signs of life from the Stanley. It continued to hang in place, maintaining its position, betraying none of the dramas that may have been taking place inside.

  I imagined its crew slumped at their consoles, their seats stained with insides liquefied by the Claws of God adhering to their backs. It was illogical nonsense, but the motionless Stanley was precisely that ominous.

  Skye said, “Oscin just told the Bettelhines what you’ve been saying. Philip says we should get back up to the parlor and leave the professionals to their work, but he’s more frightened than he’s been letting on. Jason says we should give the Stanley a few more minutes before jumping to any conclusions. But he put special emphasis on the word ‘few.’ I think he concurs that this isn’t good.”

  I almost murmured something about not working for the Bettelhines and not requiring their input. “Arturo? Do we have any way of sending somebody up there?”

  Mendez said, “There’s an access ladder on the hull within reach of the air lock ascending to the elevator roof. If worse comes to worst I can suit up, but I wouldn’t want to be out there if either the carriage or that Stanley started moving again.”

  “What danger would that pose?”

  “The carriage? Nothing, as long as we remain above the atmosphere. That, given the proportions of most planetary atmospheres, wouldn’t happen until the last few minutes of our descent. As for the Stanley, I wouldn’t be in any real danger as long as its crew knew I was out there, but we cannot communicate with them and it would be genuinely unpleasant for me if those legs came scrambling over the side while I was still on the ladder and unable to signal them to avoid running over me. I’ll go if the Bettelhines order me to—it is, after all, my duty—but under these circumstances I’d consider it more prudent to wait a few minutes and make sure that there’s no other alternative.”

  As he began cycling through the other exterior vantage points in search of another that might indicate what was delaying action on the part of the Stanley and its crew, I noticed Dejah studying me. It was not an unfriendly look, but it was a measuring one, and as she straightened up and appraised Skye (who had moved closer to me at the moment she realized Dejah was paying such close attention), I wondered just how deep she was poring, just how much she could see. “What?”

  She glanced at Mendez, saw that he was engrossed in the view from the exterior monitors, and said, “You’ve changed.”

  Coming from somebody as incisive as her, the observation seemed ridiculously banal. “And?”

  “No, Counselor, I mean it. You used to strike me as one of the most damaged people I’d ever met. Your entire personality was one big scab. I could barely say anything to you without opening up one wound or another. But something’s changed with you, and entering a healthy if somewhat unusual relationship,” she indicated Skye, “isn’t enough to account for it. You haven’t just changed. You’ve changed.”

  I didn’t have the time or the inclination to discuss the subtle psychological surgery that the AIsource had performed upon me on One One One, or any of the other experiences I’d been through since the Dip Corps lost the deed to my life. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Not that long,” Dejah said, with absolute certainty. “Not for what I’ve been seeing.”

  Now she was leaving the realm of things I didn’t want to answer, and entering the realm of things I wasn’t sure I could answer. How much could my personality have shifted since I’d welcomed the AIsource into my head? Since they’d admitted a link between their rogue intelligences, the ones I called the Unseen Demons, and the madness that had overtaken my human and Bocaian families? Since I’d defected? Dejah had noticed that some of my wounds had healed, but could she tell that new ones had formed?

  I hesitated for so long that she must have felt she’d gone too far, because she placed a protective hand on my wrist. “You don’t have to explain it if you don’t want to. I know you have other people you can share things with. I’m just saying. I’ve noticed, and I’m impressed.”

  I didn’t speak again until after I reached for my collar and removed a small silver disk most people would have taken for ornamentation. It was in fact a favorite tool in my arsenal, a hiss screen of Tchi manufacture, invaluable for keeping private conversations private. The soft white noise it projected wouldn’t disturb me, Dejah, Paakth-Doy, or Skye, but would render our words indistinct to Mendez, who was still cycling between image angles of the Stanley at rest, searching for active proof that its crew intended to use the carriage as something more than a parking space. Once the hiss kicked in, I lowered my voice and asked Dejah, “All right. As long as we’re sharing confidences, have the Bettelhines provided you with any idea why you’re here?”

  If she felt disappointed that I’d reacted to her personal overture with a swift return to business, she didn’t show it. If anything, she seemed amused. “No, Counselor. I don’t think Philip knows, and the few times I managed to get the question out, Jason and Jelaine kept saying it was up to their father to say.”

  “That’s what I got from them as well.”

  She pursed her lips. “I’m not surprised.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, this does seem to center on you, me, and the Khaajiir, doesn’t it?”

  That was the impression I’d been forming. “If you didn’t know why Hans wanted to see you, what did they say to get you here?”

  She moved closer, making certain that she was within the screen’s most effective range, before lowering her voice still further. “You need to know this. Philip wasn’t kidding at dinner, when he said we’d been enemies.”

  “What caused that? A business dispute?”

  “Not at all. We’ve never been in competition, or even clients of one another. You could say we work opposite sides of the street, in that I engineer worlds and build custom ecosystems, making places for people to live, whereas they just develop bigger and better ways for people to blow each other up. If anything, they help my business by creating a need for my services whenever their clients damage inhabited worlds beyond repair. But that’s a sick, mercenary way of looking at it. The truth is, I’ve stepped in enough of their messes and seen enough of the suffering they’ve caused to despise everything they stand for. So from time to time, whenever the opportunity presented itself, I’ve used my considerable influence to…discourage the need for their services. I’ve done it so many times over the years that they’ve responded with open hostilities, sometimes bordering on violence.”

  “Any assassination attempts?” I asked.

  “Seven. One came close to killing my poor husband, Karl, but he survived thanks to the s
pecial providence that always protects innocents and fools.”

  Skye’s voice was colder than any I’d ever heard from the Porrinyards, either together or as individuals. “I notice you have no problem badmouthing him behind his back.”

  Dejah winced. “I do, don’t I?”

  Paakth-Doy said, “Forgive me, but that would be the third time in my hearing tonight.”

  Dejah looked down at the deck and then at me before finding words. “You’re right. Karl deserves more.”

  “Then why,” Skye demanded, “do you speak about him the way you do?”

  “I have to. I love the man, I wouldn’t share my life with anybody else, but I’m just forced by the high stakes I play for to be candid about his strengths and weaknesses. And the sad truth, despite his kindness and his generosity and everything else I adore about him, is that Karl is a limited creature intellectually, a fool in the classical sense. He’s the sort of person who stumbles over things and causes disasters even when he’s trying to make things better. It’s that which contributed to the criminal career that ended the very day we met. I left him home this trip, even though Hans Bettelhine’s invitation pledged safe passage for both of us, because his best intentions and the Bettelhine Corporation’s worst intentions are just too explosive a combination even for a meeting our hosts made to sound like an overture of peace.”

  Skye was still determined to make the irrelevant Karl an issue for some reason. “You’re still making him sound more like a pet than a husband.”

  “He’s a husband,” Dejah assured her, “but in matters of business, he cannot be a partner. There’s a difference.”

  Skye was about to protest again, when I held up a hand and said, “Enough,” cutting off further exploration of this tangent. To Dejah I said, “Even if they protested their good intentions, I would have expected you to insist on meeting Hans on neutral ground. Just in case his invitation was a setup for assassination attempt number eight.”

  She sighed. “Maybe a year or two ago, I would have. And as it is, I required months of entreaties before deciding to accept their offer. But I’ve been compiling intelligence that gives me reasons for special concern.”