The Third Claw of God

by Adam-Troy Castro

  “Like Philip,” I said.

  “He wasn’t supposed to be here, but he’s expendable. The Family can survive losing him, as long as I can n-neutralize them. If it’s the only way the Bettelhines can recover from the things they’ve done.”

  I descended a step. “It’s not up to you.”

  He reached inside his jacket with a certainty of purpose that halted me in midstep. “Oh, it’s up to me, all right. It’s my duty.”

  I imagined him pulling out another Claw and slamming it against my back or chest. I pictured the gentle, painless interval that would follow, rendered torture only by my own awareness of the changes taking place inside me. I’ve had to charge knives, clubs, energy weapons, and even explosives at various times in my eventful life, but I wasn’t sure I had whatever it took to face that.

  “At least tell me if I was right, about where you got the Claws.”

  He seemed amused by that. “Do you care?”

  “I need to know whether I was right.”

  “We had about fifty working models gathering dust on a shelf in one of our outer system factories. I’ve spent the last few months secreting about a dozen of them in various hiding places around the carriage and a few more around Xana, in case I had to take action planetside. Even a few other weapons, like that Fire Snake. But the carriage was always plan number one. It was the best place to isolate,” his voice caught again, “J-J-Juh-Jason and J-Jelaine, and the c-corrupt influences they were determined to bring to Xana, from all outside rescuers.”

  “Corrupt influences that included the Khaajiir, and Dejah, and me.”

  “There was no way of knowing who was corrupt and who was not. But I had to know what Jason and Jelaine were doing. It was my duty. All you accomplished, by asking all those questions, was to do my job for me.”

  I descended another step. “Then why stop my interrogation of Philip? Why activate that Fire Snake?”

  He backed up again, not so much a coiled predator prepared to strike as trapped prey prepared to kill to defend itself. “I stopped your interrogation of Philip because there are things about the Bettelhine power structure that are none of your business.”

  “Things like Dina Pearlman’s internal governor program?”

  He looked stricken.

  “You made Philip leave the room as soon as I pressed the issue. You threatened me with the wrath of the Bettelhine Corporation.”

  “That was my duty!”

  “And was it also your duty to activate the Fire Snake, you son of a bitch?”

  I went after him, watching the hand inside his jacket, ready to run like hell if it emerged with anything in it. There was no telling what a conspirator inside the Bettelhine Corporation, one capable of getting his hands on a Claw of God and a Fire Snake, could have been holding. He surprised me by producing nothing more virulent than a fist, swinging wide, aiming for the side of my face with a strength that could have put me down.

  It never struck me. I recoiled, seeing the swing as a flesh-colored blur centimeters before my eyes.

  His hand went back inside his jacket.

  Maybe he did have something in there. Something so awful that the thought of using it gave even him pause.

  We circled each other, the industrial floor of the loading dock reduced to arena.

  He babbled. “It wouldn’t have killed me—or you, for that matter. It was, like you said, a distraction. An extra variable, to make you look at anybody other than me. Something to keep you asking the questions I would have asked myself if I could.”

  “How did you hide it from our search?”

  “Are you kidding? You’d be surprised how many weapons I was able to get aboard, with the stewards ordered not to question me. I’ve been bringing them aboard and hiding them, in one alcove or another, for months. Including in this room…”

  He faked left, then went right, launching himself at an equipment array behind the stairwell. I might have been in serious trouble had I gone for his feint; when you’re dealing with an amateur, as Wethers was, there’s little possibility of being fooled by such a move as long as you dismiss the body and take all your cues from the eyes.

  We launched at the same time, both leaping for distance and both meeting in midair. The shared momentum did nothing for our aerodynamics. We hit far short of his intended destination, landing in a clump, kicking and snapping at each other like a pair of wild animals intent on ripping out each others’ throats.

  He had the advantage in weight and madness; I had the advantage of a little girl who’d survived the massacre on Bocai.

  He went for my throat.

  I closed my teeth on his nose and bit down until my mouth filled with blood.

  He screamed, released my throat, and went for my forehead, pushing my face away with both hands, a tactic that succeeded in gaining a little distance but did not quite manage to make me let go. A little twist and my teeth met something warm and bloody in my mouth. He rolled away, his scream wet, his hands clasped over a face turned to a fountain that gushed red between his fingers.

  He called me a bish.

  I coughed, spat out something pale, found myself snarling through teeth turned to fangs. I was going to go for him again but he was standing and I was not, and though he’d been gravely wounded he was still focused enough to see me as the threat I was, and kicked me hard enough to drive me to the floor gasping.

  I curled into a ball, and while I had an advantage over many human beings in that I would not have remained in that position long enough for the pain to go away, that advantage was erased to zero as he staggered over and kicked me again and again and again, not cursing as I would have expected but weeping and sobbing, which was worse. I moaned and damned the reflex that curled me further into a ball, trying to become the black hole all victims try to become when they attempt to shrink themselves too small to be noticed by the people hurting them. I know from experience that it’s not a tactic that works, and have trained myself against using it, but there’s a difference between knowing that and being able to defy what your body wants you to do at any given moment, and right now my body, my stupid stubborn body, just wanted to be smaller, even as I tried to scream my way past that suicidal instinct.

  Wethers hauled off and kicked me again, then circled the room, not just once but twice, snorking blood through his ruined nose as he worked up enough hate and resentment to kick me some more.

  He might have managed it if I hadn’t realized something as he came circling back for his second go. The reason he’d needed to circle the room twice.

  This isn’t him.

  This is not the kind of man he should have been.

  These are not the kind of things he would have done.

  This is what they made him.

  What they left him.

  When his foot came at me again I was able to reach out with both hands and grab it, heel and toe. The impact hurt my hands as much as I care for any part of me to be hurt, but threw him off balance and left him teetering with a look that was like a gene splice between dismay and amazement.

  I twisted his foot.

  He hit the ground hard. I grabbed for him, but he speed-crawled out of reach.

  This time the race between which one of us got up first was a slow and agonizing one. I could not quite manage to stand up straight. He did, but could barely breathe, choking from the blood bubbling at the ruins of his nose. We stared at each other from two meters apart, wary, gasping, knowing that another round was inevitable but not yet in any shape to start.

  There was an odd species of amazement in his eyes. “I’ve…been stupid.”

  “Why?”

  “Didn’t see what was in front of me. Didn’t see what I should have known.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, and I didn’t have the breath to waste on it. “What are you going to do?”

  He gasped another four or five or six times before spitting blood and then, oddly enough, smiling through bloody teeth. “I don’t…need to
do anything, Counselor. It would have been nice to live through this and get out of here with some evidence to show the uncompromised members of the Inner Family at an inquest, but I always knew that death was the most likely outcome. As it happens…I’ve established influence over key people in both command and intelligence, and they’re all under orders not to interfere with our situation unless they receive a shutdown signal from me. If they don’t get that within less time than you want to know, they’ll assume the situation an impasse and blow up the carriage, assuring the Inner Family th-that it was the only way to stop terrorists trying to smuggle a dangerous bioweapon into the ecosphere.” It was getting more and more difficult for him to speak as he discussed defying or planning the death of Bettelhines. “Everybody on Xana will be sad that three B-B-Bettelhines and their guests died, b-but the Inner Family and the c-c-corporation are both strong enough to survive it. It will have to be. The only other choice is letting J-J-Jason and J-Jelaine keep on doing what they’ve been doing, and I can’t allow that.”

  I held out my hands, in a hopeless attempt to placate him. “It’s not the only choice.”

  “I know. You think you can bring me back to Ph-Philip, or to J-J-J-Juh-Jason and J-Juh-Juh-Juh-Jelaine. You th-think my internal g-g-governors won’t allow me to r-r-res…to r-resist their strongest d-direct orders long enough to let the inevitable happen. And you’re right about that, even if the clock is ticking faster than you think. So I have to take the choice out of my own hands. I have to s-shhh-shut myself down, so the forces out there can do what they need to do, to save the F-F-F-FFF-Fuh-Family from the traitors among them.”

  His eyes flashed with sudden white light.

  I screamed and launched myself at him, but he was already falling, his limbs turned boneless beneath him as he performed a little half-spin and tumbled to the deck. The most I accomplished when I rushed to him was prevent him from smashing his head open on impact. When I turned him over his eyes were like marbles, his mind lost in whatever fractal image the teem emitters had used to overload him.

  I hoped the image was fucking unpleasant, whatever it was. But this was my own fault for hesitating. I’d held back, thinking the object under his jacket was another Claw of God, and not just a trigger for the teemers under his eyelids. He’d survive if the rest of us survived, but now he wouldn’t be able to answer questions for days. By then, the destruction he’d arranged for us would have come and gone, and we’d be atoms and other debris tumbling through space.

  What had he said?

  “‘Within less time than you want to know.’”

  Time enough to free everybody else, and begin another round of debates over our next move? Or less? Minutes? Seconds? Was somebody’s finger already pulling a trigger?

  To hell with that.

  I hate vacuum. I hate heights. I hate free-fall. I hate space-suits.

  I’d completed a grand total of three orbital EVAs in my entire life, and then only as part of safety drills required to maintain my Dip Corps certification. They’re not memories that keep me warm. People tell me that the trainer who tested me on those occasions still dines out about the comical, quivering wreck I’d been. I could counter that I wasn’t quite enough of a quivering wreck to accept the specific kind of comfort he wanted to offer, but that’s just a footnote. The stories aren’t exaggerated. I had indeed been hopeless.

  The Bettelhine gear I’d seen Arturo Mendez wear was a different configuration than Dip Corps standard, giving me a few bad moments as I found I couldn’t do whatever I needed to do in order to make the collar seal engage. On my fourth try it clicked, and the permaplastic knit. Good thing, too, because it demonstrated that I’d also failed to engage the most important of the connections at my wrists and ankles and gave me the clue I needed to start all over again and give myself a proper seal so I might be able to survive.

  I still wasn’t sure I’d done it right, and tried to tell myself that it would be best to go back and fetch one of the others, somebody who knew how to do this. But then I’d have to ask them to take the measures I was afraid I’d have to take, and I couldn’t ask that of anybody, especially since it would have probably ended up being a Porrinyard taking that final step instead of me.

  I might have fucked up a good thing with them. I wasn’t sure. But if I had I did not have the right to ask either one of them to die for me.

  I got everything I needed, entered the air lock, cycled to vacuum, and stood there expecting to die as I waited for the exterior door to open. The instant it did I regretted being where I was. The interior of the Royal Carriage might have been equipped with its own specific gravity, but that turned off inside the air lock the instant the chamber was exposed to vacuum. It was a spontaneous change, announcing itself as a sudden lurch in my belly just as sudden vertigo as my inner ear switched its sense of up and down to undecided.

  I hated this. I hated this. I hated this.

  Inching along the handholds that lined the air lock interior, I pulled myself out the hatchway and groped around until I found the access ladder leading up to the elevator roof. I didn’t need my legs to climb, of course. They trailed behind me like useless growths, every random twitch encouraging the tendency to swing outward and leave me hanging at a right angle to the elevator’s hull. Mendez had made this look easy; I was a clumsy amateur and my various attempts at overcompensation kept me slamming against the hull or hanging perpendicular again. If all the armed forces arrayed around us were monitoring my progress, they had to be laughing their asses off.

  Midgard, the continent that housed Anchor Point, was a brilliant green landscape shining up at me, the cable itself receding into invisibility long before it plunged into a canopy of clouds. I didn’t want to know how many thousands of kilometers still separated me from the atmosphere, let alone the ground I’d never reach even if my body drifted long enough to begin reentry. So naturally I dwelled on it and found part of my mind doing the math. My breath, inside the echo-chamber helmet, began to take on the sound of panting.

  I didn’t climb all the way to the roof, just far enough to twist the air lock and twist the exterior toggle forcing the hatch to slide shut. It might save the others a few seconds, if they had to evacuate.

  Then I performed the series of clumsy, amateur shifts necessary to turn myself around so I could hang on the ladder with my back to the carriage and face the constellation of Bettelhine forces surrounding us.

  They all had to be watching me. They all had to be wondering what I was doing.

  Wethers’s instructions had eliminated any chance of them coming to rescue us.

  So I had to go to them.

  The only problem with that, aside from the strong possibility that somebody would see fit to blast me out of the sky, was that I had no attitude jets, no means of propulsion, no way of braking or altering my course once I performed this all-or-nothing leap. There might have been something for that purpose aboard the carriage, but I didn’t know where it was kept and would have been useless at operating it anyway. The time constraints reduced me to basics.

  So I pressed the soles of my boots against the carriage hull, told myself that I was, by Juje, going to do this in the next five seconds—one, two, three, four, five—somehow found myself still hanging on, called myself a coward, and counted one, two, three, four, five again.

  Kick!

  I don’t know how quickly I left the carriage behind, but it wasn’t fast. The cruisers and skimmers and fighters and battalions still remained ahead of me, watching my approach with a stolid, uncaring silence. The lights of their occasional course corrections flashed like reflected sunlight on a rippled sea. Three or four of the space-suited figures ahead of me burned brighter and longer, moving to new positions: not to intercept me, I saw, but to stay out of my way. As long as I didn’t fire at them or go for a weapon they’d just let me drift by on a course that would keep me going long after my air ran out.

  I flipped the transmit toggle on the suit hytex connection. “Please
! This is Counselor Andrea Cort of the Confederate Diplomatic Corps! I am drifting and in desperate need of assistance! Please help me!”

  No answer.

  Either Wethers had been thorough enough to disable to suit’s communications, or the forces he’d corrupted were sticking by their instructions to stand down.

  I tried again. “Please! This is Counselor Andrea Cort! I’m an honored guest of Hans Bettelhine! You are to give me the rank of Inner Family member for as long as I remain within your space! I’m ordering you to rescue me!”

  Again, nothing.

  I must have been less than thirty meters from the nearest Bettelhine soldiers, all of whom were turning to follow my progress, but otherwise remained impassive and unmoving as I drifted toward the hole in their ranks.

  Seconds left before I passed them.

  Shit. I’d really hoped I wouldn’t have to do this next part.

  I reached for the hook, midway up my right arm, where I’d clipped a certain artifact I’d been carrying since my arrival at Layabout. Disguised as one of the ornaments on my black suit, It was instead one of the many small items of contraband I made a habit of carrying with me whenever away from New London. But it wasn’t exactly high-tech. Had I left this in my suite and been unable to get to it from the cargo bay, the chamber had contained any number of other tools that would have done just as well.

  All I really needed in this situation was a sufficiently sharp object.

  And I’d already tested this one, a Dip Corps insignia capable of extruding a four-centimeter cutting edge, on one of the spare suits in the cargo bay, so I knew it would work.

  I removed it from its hook, popped the blade, and in a single determined jab, punched a hole through my suit.

  Actually, it was not just my suit. I got some flesh as well. The air venting through the puncture was not only glistening with clear ice crystals born of my own respiration, but with red ice crystals as well. I yelled as loud as I could, which turned out to be not very loud, and felt something tugging at the air leaving my mouth.