The Third Claw of God

by Adam-Troy Castro

  Skye raised the Khaajiir’s left arm by the wrist, revealing a palm stained black with dried gore.

  “And this.”

  She pointed to the tiny little bloodstain at the tip of the Khaajiir’s nose.

  “Now put him back the way we found him.”

  She placed his left hand back on the armrest, positioning the palm on the stain it had left. Oscin, who had the Khaajiir’s staff, took it back to the chair and slipped it back where we had found it, resting across both armrests with his arms on top.

  Dejah got it first. “Oh, Juje. He knew.”

  “That’s right,” I told the others. “The placement of the bloodstains leaves no room for doubt.

  “Think back to the first few moments after the emergency stop. We’re all running around dealing with our own concerns, including several serious injuries, in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Jason and Jelaine escort the Khaajiir, the frailest and most vulnerable guest, to this chair, ascertaining that he’s all right before abandoning him to deal with other pressing injuries. Several others among us, including Mr. Brown and Mr. Wethers, also stop by the Khaajiir’s chair to check up on him. The application of the Claw of God may take place at any point during this interval. The Khaajiir may even feel a slight charge at the moment of contact, but he thinks nothing of it.

  “Long minutes pass. The rest of us ignore the Khaajiir because we have other things to worry about. The Khaajiir starts feeling weak. But he’s fragile and old and no doubt attributes what he’s feeling to the shock he’s experienced.

  “But then something happens.

  “Either because he feels the wetness pooling underneath him and suspects what has happened, or just from random happenstance, he drops his left hand to his side, into the blood pooling around him.

  “Golly. What’s this?

  “He pulls his hand out of the muck and finds it covered with blood.

  “He can’t believe what he’s seeing. He lifts his hand all the way to his nose, perhaps because he wants a closer look and perhaps because he’s begun to identify the smell we’ve all sensed by this time as coming from him. The act leaves a tiny bloodstain on the tip of his nose.

  “Remember again who he is. He’s an expert on the K’cenhowten reign of terror. He knows that a Claw of God, a weapon from the society he wrote about, turned up in an attack on me earlier in the day. It must occur to him at once that yet another Claw of God has been used on him in the last few minutes. What’s more, he remains coherent enough to backtrack and realize just which one of us did this terrible thing.

  “But he’s dying. He knows he’s dying. He feels himself losing consciousness. He can barely hold his head up even now. He certainly can’t raise his voice and shout out the name of the guilty party. And he may have only seconds to tell us what he knows.

  “He can use his fingernails to scratch a message into the weave of the armrest.

  “But time is fleeting. It will probably take more time and strength than he has to scratch out a complete word, especially if he uses the ornate Bocaian alphabet, which is likely the only written language he knows. Not that it matters. How can he have the time to scratch the complete name of a human being while using all those frills and flourishes?

  “But he’s fortunate, our ailing Khaajiir. Because he’s clever and he has his staff, the tool that has allowed him such hearty play at the game of words. He has his right hand on the interface and barely has to stir at all to think the name of his murderer, hoping to be provided with a translation he can use.

  “I don’t know how many possibilities it gave him in the next second or two. From his ease at using the translation system to impress people, there may have been several, including a number that may have been too hard to transcribe.

  “But he was provided with at least one he could use.

  “And so his last act before he lost consciousness was to draw three crude zigzags, side by side.”

  The Porrinyards indicated the three claw marks the Khaajiir had made in his dying moments, miming the zigzag pattern with their hands.

  I faced Brown and Wethers. “We know it was the last thing he did. As I noted at the time, one of the fibers he ripped from the armrest was still stuck under one of the fingernails he used.”

  Oscin pointed to the fingertip in question.

  “He must have died seconds later,” I said.

  The Porrinyards left the corpse behind, with its bloody walking stick, and returned to their previous positions at either side of me, waiting.

  Farley Pearlman was reaching into his jacket to scratch his ribs. “I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t feel too inadequate,” I told him. “You wouldn’t have had a clue unless you knew the specific language the Khaajiir was referencing. I had to consult the staff myself, to compare the many possible explanations for those three zigzags with their potential interpretations in other languages.

  “I didn’t get anywhere until after I realized that the message might have been meant for me, the one person here with a background in crime investigation…and remembered that when we’d spoken, he’d referenced an extinct human tongue known as English. Would it not make sense to concentrate on meanings I could access via that dialect?

  “After that it was just a question of figuring out what he might have drawn that could have been as familiar to a Bocaian as it would be to any human being. And realizing that it was much more likely to be a natural phenomenon found all over the universe than any symbol restricted to our respective cultures.”

  “Just say it,” Philip demanded.

  I mimed the three jagged lines again. “Three lightning bolts.”

  I spoke a single word familiar to all of us in the common tongue Hom.Sap Mercantile.

  Still, nobody got it.

  I hadn’t expected them to.

  But now I faced the murderer and spoke its damning translation in English.

  “Weathers.”

  We only thought we were prepared for what happened next.

  But there were two more murders in the next six seconds…

  18

  BLOODBATH

  F arley Pearlman had never struck me as a coiled spring.

  Before I’d learned what he was he’d struck me as an amiable mediocrity, desperate for appreciation from the boss. Afterward he’d struck me as a self-pitying predatory coward, sick and evil but even more pathetic. He had always been among the possible accessories, but had never seemed a credible threat.

  The Porrinyards, the Bettelhines, and I had expected the true threat to come from the stewards, who were so conditioned to obedience that they would have been the easiest to control.

  That’s the problem with being a creature of logic, like myself, or merchants of military hardware, like the Bettelhines. You think in straight lines.

  You forget that targets of opportunity can be useful too.

  You overlook that chaos for its own sake is a fine military objective.

  So this is what happened.

  One second.

  Farley, who had been idly scratching his ribs with his left hand, whipped it out and slammed a black disk into the base of Colette Wilson’s neck.

  She gasped, but not out of any special pain; the impact was not especially hard, and her reaction no more than the start anybody would have given after such an unexpected blow. By the time she looked down, still not comprehending what had been done to her, Farley had already leaped to his feet, the same Claw still in his hand as he tried to make me next.

  Two seconds.

  Several figures moved to intercept Farley, not just the Porrinyards but also Dejah and Brown and Mendez and Jeck.

  Colette realized what she’d been hit with and took a deep breath to fuel what was about to become an ear-splitting scream.

  Jeck reached Farley and grabbed him by the shoulders, pulling him back and away from me an instant before I would have been in range.

  Three seconds.

  Farley altered his swing and cla
pped the Claw of God against Jeck’s chest instead.

  Three sets of hands closed on Farley’s left wrist, seizing control of that arm even as his right remained free and swinging. His first punch smashed Brown’s nose.

  Jason and Jelaine, moving as one, rounded the ends of the couch.

  Six people screamed, all at the same moment. One was Colette, howling as she realized her life could now be measured in minutes. Another was Jeck, faster to the same realization. A third was Dina, who had risen to her feet and was, perhaps out of long habit, calling her nominal husband a bastard. Jason, Jelaine, and Paakth-Doy screamed my name because they were the only ones among us who saw that Farley had successfully distracted us all from what Vernon Wethers was doing.

  Four seconds.

  Brown crumpled.

  I whirled just in time to see Wethers swinging the Khaajiir’s staff like a club. Had I not moved at all, the blow might have crushed my skull. As it was I was not fast enough to avoid the impact. It may have been one of the two or three worst blows to the head I’ve ever taken. Something cracked in my jaw as I stumbled backward, blackness flickering at the edges of my vision.

  Five seconds.

  Wethers swung the Khaajiir’s staff to keep Paakth-Doy at a distance. Doy stayed out of range but did not retreat, Jason and Jelaine just a step behind her. I shook my head to banish the looming threat of unconsciousness and stumbled toward them, tasting blood. Dina Pearlman was still calling her husband an asshole.

  Six seconds.

  Wethers succeeded in clipping Paakth-Doy’s temple on his backswing, knocking her back against Jason and Jelaine. He spun on his heels and launched himself at the spiral staircase only ten paces away.

  Time accelerated as I put everything I had into speed.

  Wethers was not slowed down at the spiral staircase, as I’d hoped; instead he dropped the Khaajiir’s staff down the center of the stairwell and took the stairs four at a time, descending all the way to the galley level in six easy leaps. I reached the top of the stairs just in time to look down and catch a glimpse of him retrieving the staff from where it landed.

  He must have wanted it as more than just a cudgel. Now that he knew it contained the Khaajiir’s files, he would see it as the data he’d need to undo everything Jason and Jelaine had done.

  I tried to make my own descent as fast and as graceful as his and made it past the lower-suite deck without incident but then, handicapped by the dizziness left over from the blow I’d taken, hit one of the wedge-shaped descenders below that at the wrong angle. I tripped over my own stupid feet and took the rest of the distance at an ungainly head-over-heels tumble that I managed to deflect only when I grabbed for and lost the handrail. I don’t know how I avoided breaking my neck, but I landed with my back on the galley deck and my legs flat against the ascending stairs, the least desirable position for anybody looking up to see Vernon Wethers about to drive a big stick into her neck.

  Fuck that. I arched my back, brought my legs up and forward with all the strength in me, and struck some part of the bastard hard enough to knock him back. He hit a bulkhead with a grunted curse. I rolled again, stumbled, and managed to get up facing him just as he backed into the passageway leading to the galley and crew quarters.

  The advantage was all his here. The passageway was narrow and there was no way to maneuver around him. He was able to land hits on my chest and my neck as I tried to seize the staff from his hands.

  In a few seconds I heard pounding feet behind me, and Paakth-Doy crying, “We’re here, Counselor!”

  I found myself forced to back up a step to dodge a jab at my face. “What the hell took you so long?”

  “We could only go single file,” Paakth-Doy explained, “and I wasn’t willing to hurl myself down the way you did. I took them only two at a time like a normal person.”

  “Wonderful,” I muttered, as another jab struck home.

  I heard more pounding feet and the shared voices of Jason and Jelaine. “Vernon! Stop this at once! This is an Inner Family order!”

  Wethers didn’t drop the staff, but he did weep, his expression contorting in ways that suggested violent inner forces tearing him apart. “I can’t! Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for the Inner Family’s good!”

  Still behind me, Jason said, “Vernon. You’ve endangered three members of the family. You’ve killed one personal guest and attacked an honored one. You’ve sabotaged our infrastructure and subverted our military. You’ve interfered with policy decisions well above even your pay grade. The Inner Family is very angry with you. The Inner Family orders you to put that thing down and tell us everything we need to do to restore contact with the outside world.”

  Another jab from Wethers. “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t. Not if it means letting you destroy everything your great family has ever stood for. Not when it’s my duty to stop you.”

  Jelaine, now: “Our family stands for a lot of things, not all of them good. Just look what we’ve done to you, or Colette, or any of those others. You might have had a life once. We took that away.”

  Wethers backed up another step. “I have a life. Protecting the corporation.”

  “You’re not protecting anything,” Jason said. “Don’t you see, the company can’t go on forever if its only business is poisoning the well it drinks from? Maybe not in your lifetime, or even mine, but someday the human race is going to realize it has cancer and do whatever it needs to do to save itself. We need to be more than the tumor that has to be removed. We need to change, whatever it costs.”

  Did Wethers seem to be weakening? “Not the way you’ve done it.”

  Now Jelaine, again: “Do you think it’s going to get easier, Vernon? If you think we’ve had to make some moral compromises now, you won’t believe how much this surgery is likely to cost a century or two in the future. By then it may really require the destruction of the Family to save the rest of humanity. Do you really want that on your shoulders? Or do you want to save the Bettelhines while there are still Bettelhines left to save?”

  More running footsteps behind me. Philip and Dejah shouting. Wethers glanced over my shoulder, a critical loss of focus that gave me the chance to seize the end of the staff closest to me and drive his end into his chest. Do to him what he’d been doing to me. He tried to wrestle me for control, but I was able to add my weight to his thrust and drive the staff against a wall.

  Paakth-Doy seized our end and wrested it from his hands.

  Wethers ran.

  The skinny little bastard knew how to accelerate from a dead stop. By the time any of us were able to react, he was already five paces ahead and diving into the next compartment.

  He slammed the blowout switch on the other side of the hatchway before I was halfway to him. An ear-piercing shriek sliced the air, providing the standard one-second warning of airtight compartments about to shut. A gleaming metal door imprinted with the goddamned useless Bettelhine Family crest emerged from its housing in the wall and began to slide sideways across its track, cutting us off from the figure even now increasing the distance between us.

  One second too late and that door would cut me in half, but I didn’t have time to think about it and there were voices behind me screaming go-go-go and then all of a sudden changing that scream to no-no-no when it looked like I wasn’t going to make it. I had to slip through the door sideways, managing to pull my right foot through just before the advancing door would have amputated it. My available view of the compartment behind me was just a sliver by then, and I had less than a heartbeat left to see who I’d left there, but I caught glimpses of Jason, Jelaine, Paakth-Doy, and—a new arrival—Dejah, all arriving at this barrier too late to follow me.

  I turned my back on them and ran, past the crew quarters, past two more airtight doors Wethers was either too confident or too much in a hurry to activate, all the way to the spiral staircase descending to the cargo bay. I reached it just in time to see the top of his head disappearing below deck level. I didn’t bother to
take the stairs but instead vaulted over the railing at a trajectory that had me landing feet-first on his shoulders. This move sounds a hell of a lot more impressive than it was. Wethers grunted, slammed against the curved rail, and somehow avoided falling. I slid against the central pillar and then tumbled against his legs, sweeping them out from under him and dropping us both onto our sides in a kicking screaming flailing tangle of limbs. I kicked off a higher step and drove my knee into his crotch. He turned his hands into claws and went for my eyes. I found one of his fingers and bit down hard, drawing blood and a scream, prepared to keep grinding until I severed the digit at the bone.

  But the major problem with clamping down on somebody’s finger in a free-for-all like this is that while you have their finger, they have your head.

  He put all his strength into driving the back of my head into the steps. I gasped, releasing him. He shifted his bloody hands and went for my eyes with his thumbs. I seized his wrists and drove my aching head forward, crushing his nose with my forehead. He recoiled, overbalanced, and tumbled to the base of the stairs.

  It would have been so easy to just give up and let unconsciousness take me then.

  Instead I grabbed the railing and pulled myself to my feet, managing to stand just as Vernon Wethers did the same on the deck below.

  For a long shaky moment we just stared at each other, breathing hard.

  Then he straightened. He was no longer the hysteric he’d been when he had to face the Bettelhines with the fact of his own betrayal, but just another resigned functionary, facing an outsider who did not matter to him at all.

  “You’ve lost,” I told him.

  He shook his head. “No, I haven’t.”

  “You have. It won’t take long for the others to get past the door. They’ll be just a few minutes behind me. All I have to do is keep you busy until they get here.”

  He shook his head again. “That won’t be enough.”

  “Why? What have you won? The murder of one harmless academic and two service workers?”

  He seemed hurt by that. “You think I feel good about that? But J-J-Jason was more right than he knew when he said that this was about cancer. Only they’re the c-cancer, the pair of them. And cutting out cancer sometimes means cutting out the healthy tissue around it.”