“No, for the assassins recruited from Bocai, I was just a target of opportunity, one they went after because they were Bocaians who hated me; they were in fact positioned to go after someone else, someone whose assassination using that particular weapon would have muddied the waters almost as much.
“Was the Khaajiir the main target? That was my first thought, especially since he was indeed targeted later. And it seemed to make sense, since he’d courted controversy by advocating amnesty for crimes I once committed on Bocai.
“But then, as we’ve also established, there was no reason to believe that he’d ever be passing through Layabout on this particular day. Anybody who knew about him knew he was infirm and that he rarely left the immediate company of his hosts. Setting up an ambush for him on a concourse he would never enter makes no sense.
“My most educated guess?” I pointed at Dejah, who looked entirely unsurprised, and nodded in appreciation that we’d now passed a rubicon she’d already expected. “Dejah is a powerful and influential figure, whose presence here was courted for months before she finally said yes. There would have been more than enough time for a conspiracy based on Xana, and acting against the wishes of the Bettelhines who invited her here, to arrange for a public attack on her timed to occur on the day on her arrival, committed by fanatic members of a minor species using the fanatic weapons of yet another species. Had she walked by instead of me, murdering her with a Claw of God would have directed further investigation into pointless blind allies involving possible connections between her and the Khaajiir and thus obscured the much more reasonable point that the Bettelhines and their people considered her a dangerous enemy and had tried to assassinate her before.
“This theory is incidentally supported by the fact that she arrived at Layabout not long after I did, and circumstances already gone into suggest the assassins saw me as no more than a target of convenience.”
I threw up my hands. “Frankly, the identity of the primary target on Layabout remains a mystery to me. I don’t know if the killers were after Dejah and were distracted by me, or if they were after the Khaajiir and distracted by me. I don’t even know whether they always did expect me and were distracted by some other factor. It doesn’t matter, because any of those scenarios fit the available facts equally well.
“In the long run it’s likely that all three of us were targets.
“We were all anomalies.
“We had all been invited through their father’s auspices, by Jason and Jelaine, the two figures who have been most active in pursuing radical changes in corporate policy and whose success at consolidating power at Philip’s expense could not have made any sense to those who knew that Philip was supposed to be the one being groomed for leadership.
“Could the conspirators have known exactly what was up between Jason, Jelaine, and their father? I doubt it, but it doesn’t matter. Consider: the leader of a corporation devoted to the development of powerful weaponry develops an inexplicable and inseparable bond with an obscure alien academic. He spends the next year reversing the priorities of the corporation, eliminating profitable programs, and initiating others of no immediately obvious benefit. He bypasses the son being groomed for power and starts handing more and more decision-making ability to another son whose stability and loyalty are suspect due to years of absence in childhood. He even invites a long-time enemy, Dejah, to meet with him. At the same time he also invites a controversial prosecutor from the Confederacy.
“Seeing all of these events from the perspective of parties who cannot know why they’re taking place, whose loyalty is only to the corporation, how could you not understand their inevitable conclusion that Hans Bettelhine has been co-opted in some way? That all of this represents an obvious threat to the Family and to the corporation as a whole? And that it needs to be countered by any means possible?
“For what it’s worth, I’m at the center of it and I’m still lost. I don’t know why I’m here and I don’t know what Jason and Jelaine are up to. And I tend to believe Philip when he says he doesn’t know, either.
“But antibodies don’t need the entire taxonomy of any given bacterial invader to recognize an infection when they see one. Anybody invested in preserving the Bettelhine Corporation they knew would have taken action first and worried about ferreting out the precise explanations later.
“So our conspiracy decided that the important, unexplained figures around Jason and Jelaine had to go. The biggest wild card, the Khaajiir, would have been a prime target. The same thing with Dejah. I suspect that I was the last and least of the names.
“But it couldn’t be done out in the open. There were powerful Bettelhines, Jason and Jelaine, who could not be hurt. A web of obfuscation needed to be spun over the crimes. The nature of the threat to the Bettelhine power structure needed to be identified. And—this is the critical part—Jason and Jelaine needed to be isolated from all possible resources, and closely observed in the hopes that they would say or do something to explain just what the hell they were up to.” I smiled. “In short, I’m not the only person who’s been running an investigation here.”
“So that’s what this is all about. The next question is, of course, who.”
“On the surface, at least, Philip seems the most obvious suspect. He’s the one who has to be most frantic about what his brother and sister and father have done. He’s had only limited access to that father, at a time in his ascendancy to power when he should be working with the man almost every day. He’s seen his own influence slipping from him, and handed in part to an alliance that includes a brother of noted instability. And yes,” I said, directing my next words to Philip himself, “I’ll give him credit for this, he’s also been heartsick and unable to understand his own estrangement from his siblings. He may be a Bettelhine, but he’s still human.”
“Thank you,” Philip said.
“You’re welcome,” I told him. Facing the others, I continued, “In any event, it was because he was faced with these issues that Philip forced his way into this party, sans invitation, in the hopes of obtaining some answers. He even brought the Pearlmans along, to help him resolve some suspicions we discussed in the other room.
“But that’s precisely what I think clears him of any wrongdoing here. Were he just a rapacious corporate bastard intent on regaining his power by killing anybody between himself and the corporate throne, he has any number of underlings, including some present here today, willing to do the dirty work for him. He wouldn’t be here, on the Royal Carriage, this close to the murder and thus exposed to all the danger if he knew that any of this was going to happen.”
“No, as far as I’m concerned, crashing the party might have been an act of desperation on his part, but it was definitely a peaceful one. Possibly the last before he took more extreme measures. But still a peaceful one.
“He’s the first we can declare innocent.
“Who else? The crew?” I directed my next words to the stewards. “I’ve already told the Bettelhines that any of you, Arturo, Loyal, Doy, or Colette, could have provided our culprit with material aid, either individually or in combination. If I didn’t know who committed the actual murder, you would have all been excellent suspects. When we’re done here, it will only be your guilt or innocence as a collaboration that remains in question.”
“No. In the end, the issue finally comes down to personal power. Who in this room has the influence to enlist vast numbers of people, including the authorities at Layabout and the military forces surrounding us in a conspiracy of this magnitude? Even if only by manipulation of a few key people at the top?
“Frankly, only two of you.
“Monday Brown, the personal aide to Hans Bettelhine. And Vernon Wethers, personal aide to Philip Bettelhine. Please join me here.”
The two aides glanced at each other, then at their masters, who nodded and gestured toward me in mute confirmation that they were expected to comply. Brown turned several degrees sterner, and Wethers emitted an audible gul
p. But both left the Bettelhines behind, and came around the couch to join me at the center of the circle.
“I resent this,” Brown said.
“So do I,” Wethers said, with somewhat shakier authority. “After all the years I’ve spent—”
“Please,” I said, shutting both up. “Each one of you acts as representative, and frequently proxy, of the Bettelhine you serve. Each one of you is capable of flitting around this system at will, on agendas you don’t need to explain, putting together an operation on this scale. And each one of you can be forgiven for feeling so much identification with the Bettelhine Family that you’d be driven to desperate measures to protect their future.
I faced Brown. “Monday, you might have watched Hans steered into destructive policies and felt helpless to interfere any other way.” Then Wethers: “Vernon, you might have seen Philip shunted off to one side because of policies that could only hurt the Bettelhine business as you understand it.”
The two men started talking at the same time. Brown said, “This is…” Wethers said, “I don’t…”
Philip Bettelhine shut them both him with a single shouted, “QUIET!”
Both men stopped in mid-syllable.
I couldn’t tell whether it was his authority or their internal governors, but either way it worked. They both seemed to have lost the capacity for speech. Volumes of hatred still burned on their faces, but they would cooperate with everything that came after this. They had no choice.
Dina Pearlman smirked. Pride in her work? Or the mere pleasure that a woman like her would naturally feel at the sight of her superiors being humiliated?
I waited for the silence to accumulate a weight all its own, and continued. “Either one of you might have been moved to drastic measures. Either one of you could have set these events into motion.
“And not incidentally,” I said, raising my voice, “either one of you would have been able to provide the final ingredients you needed: the Claws of God, and the Fire Snake. We found out in the course of this investigation that just a few short years ago the corporation was trying to reverse-engineer the Claws, for use as a long-range orbital weapon…”
Dejah covered her eyes with her hand. “I wish that didn’t come as a surprise, with these people.”
I grinned at her. “Yes. The very idea is revolting. But that’s beside the point. The very fact that such a project took place suggests that the corporation had working Claws on hand or the capability to construct prototypes for testing, somewhere in one of its many research facilities. It doesn’t matter whether they were actual antiques or modern-day prototypes. The same follows for the Fire Snake, which would also be of immense interest to a munitions manufacturer raiding old technologies for ideas. But in the case of both weapons, would the corporation dispose of the models on hand or just put them on a shelf somewhere? What do you think?”
“I vote for shelf,” Dejah said. “No reason to waste a potentially valuable resource.”
“Exactly. And either way, one of you,” I said, indicating Brown and Wethers, “hit upon the idea of using them in this business. So you obtained them. Nobody would have said no to either one of you. After all, anybody trusted with the responsibility to keep an eye on such dangerous objects would have been conditioned to allow authorized personnel access. And who could possibly be more authorized?
“Were we not in our current situation, were we able to contact the surface and track down the facility where the Claws of God and the Fire Snake were stored, we could leave it at that. After all, it would be an easy matter to determine which one of you demanded access.
“We would also be able to determine which one of you used your influence to summon Hans Bettelhine just before the Royal Carriage left Anchor Point and thus ensure that he would not be aboard to be threatened by these events.
“Alas, we’re cut off from the outside world and can’t ask those questions now. But we will be able to do so, when building our case against you later.
“Either way, the prospect of a long elevator ride with everybody who worries you—Jason, Jelaine, Dejah, the Khaajiir, and me—presented your last, best opportunity to find us all together in the same place, and isolated from the power structure you were protecting. You couldn’t wait until we reached Xana. You had to determine what we wanted, and if necessary neutralize us before we got there. Hence the importance of arranging for the emergency stop, the communications shutdown, and whatever false intelligence is keeping the security forces from rescuing us. Hence your failure, in all of these hours since the Khaajiir’s death, to kill again. It’s not just that everybody’s been keeping an eye on one another. It’s the fact that questions are being asked, and you want answers just as much as we do. Had I not insisted on starting our own investigation, you would have made the same suggestion yourself.”
My next words emerged as gentler than I’d expected them to be, gentler by far than anything I’d said so far. I spoke to the people behind the rigid faces, the souls in cages driven to their crimes. “I feel sorry for you, really. In a way, you’re not responsible for what you’ve done. Driven by a loyalty that’s been imposed on you, you’ve served the Bettelhines as best you could, the only way you could, given your suspicions of an internal conspiracy that must have left you agonizing over who to trust.
“But you still murdered the Khaajiir.
“And you’re still a threat to the rest of us.
“And since we cannot determine your identity by communicating with Xana and determining which one of you obtained the Claws and gave the necessary orders, we might have been left with nothing and been stuck here until the air or food ran out.”
I took a deep breath.
“But fortunately we’ve been handed a little help.
“The Khaajiir himself told us who you are.”
T hat caused a commotion among everybody except the Porrinyards and Bettelhines, who knew where I was going: gasps of astonishment, frenzied conversation among those desperate to remember what the Khaajiir might have said and when he might have said it.
I gestured for silence and got it.
“This is what you need to keep in mind about the Khaajiir. He was a Bocaian, representative of a species that possesses little if any talent for the acquisition of new languages past adolescence. To counteract that limitation he used his staff as a personal translation system, without which he would have been unable to communicate with others.
“We also know something odd about him that flies in the face of this central fact: he admitted to a penchant for multilingual wordplay. When we met he regaled me with a secondary meaning of my name, Cort, and with additional interpretations of the names Oscin and Skye. He had additional information about the derivation of Porrinyard. In fact, he embraced his title, Khaajiir, a K’cenhowten construction, because of its coincidental similarities to his Bocaian name. We know he regaled Mr. Mendez with similar information. I’m sure he did the same to the rest of you. Am I correct?”
Paakth-Doy raised her hand. “When I served him on the way up, he told me about an extinct beast of burden known as the Paarkth by the ancient Riirgaans who domesticated it. Not quite my name, Paakth. But similar.”
Jason said, “And he was fond of telling me stories about an ancient mythological hero with my name. An Earthman, known for journeying.”
There was a hubbub. Colette had been told of another antiquated word, coquette. Jelaine had been apprised of certain words similar to Bettelhine among races I had never heard of. Oscin had been treated to a discourse on witty derivations of the planetary name Xana. I had known of none of these, but I wasn’t surprised at all. They all fit the childlike delight the monolingual Khaajiir felt for the infinite possibilities of cross-cultural vocabulary.
I waited for the moment of mass discovery to die down, then said, “Off-the-cuff observations like these did a lot to further the man’s erudite reputation, but a moment’s consideration will confirm that they likely had nothing to do with him. He cheated.”
Dejah got it first. “His staff.”
“That’s correct,” I said. “He was able to use the databases of extinct and extant languages in its translation program and construct wordplay at a moment’s notice.
“He fell into the habit because he enjoyed it, because it impressed people, and—in my case, and who knows how many others—because it aided small talk and helped to defuse hostile situations. Look at me. I hated him before he pulled that Cort/Court comparison. Afterward I wrote him off as chatty and harmless.”
“Don’t forget boring,” Dina said. “And what does any of that have to do with anything?”
I nodded at Skye, who immediately turned around and crossed to the easy chair still bearing the Khaajiir’s corpse. It was on a swivel, and as she turned it on its base many of those gathered here all gasped at the further deterioration of the corpse, which remained in the same essential position but had slumped still farther into the cushions as its internal structures drained away. As far as I could tell, he had been a friendly and well-meaning sentient, with animus toward none. But now he was just meat.
Neither Brown nor Wethers had made a sound. When I turned to them they were both stone-faced and waiting for the point.
“It’s a hideous death,” I said. “But not as painful a death as it appears. I’ve been told tonight that the Claw of God offers a small mercy all its own, in that it fries the pain receptors and thus leaves its victims largely unaware of the changes taking place inside them. The Khaajiir could have been sitting in this chair for several minutes, melting on the inside and growing steadily weaker as the hemorrhage continued. Because the seat cushion soaked up much of the blood, and the armrests prevented any from leaking out at his sides, the rest of us missed what was happening until it was too late. The Khaajiir, who felt no pain, almost missed it himself. But I noted this at the time. Skye?”
The Third Claw of God Page 30