Read The Third Claw of God Online

Authors: Adam-Troy Castro

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Fantasy, #Mystery

The Third Claw of God (2 page)

BOOK: The Third Claw of God
13.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

This one began to pick up speed as Oscin and I passed by, still lost in our ridiculous argument. His path paralleled ours, but there was still no obvious reason to think that suspicious in a bustling place like Layabout.

Even as he stuck his hand into his jacket pocket and retrieved a featureless disk backed with a metallic loop designed to bind it to the palm of his hand, there was no reason to suspect him of murderous intent. Not even as he came up from behind and reached for the back of my neck. Traveling by myself, I would have been dead.

But that’s why I always have one Porrinyard walk ten paces behind me in public. Oscin said, “Oh, dear.”

By the time I turned to question him he had already pivoted on his heels and seized the Bocaian by the forearm.

Oscin wasn’t the one who’d seen the Bocaian’s approach. Skye had. But he was privy to everything she was privy to, and so he was ready the instant she was.

She caught up a second later, her smaller hands seizing the Bocaian farther down his arm. Her grip and Oscin’s was enough to halt the Bocaian’s lunge before the disk came anywhere near my skin. All of this happened before I completed my turn.

Next to the Porrinyards I’m a turtle on neural dampeners.

The first I actually saw of the fight, when my pivot was completed, was Oscin and Skye using the Bocaian’s own struggles to force him to his knees.

Then I heard a familiar cold voice in my head.Counselor: Five o’ clock. I whirled again and caught a glimpse of another hate-filled Bocaian face, as its owner charged me from the opposite side of the walkway.

This one was older and taller than the first: a full head taller than I, with a reach that put me at a disadvantage. He must have been watching his friend’s attempt from cover before using the confusion caused by the first charge to initiate his own.

I didn’t see a weapon. But I didn’t have a weapon, either. My satchel had several interesting items that only somebody with Diplomatic credentials can get through customs, but I didn’t have the time or the space to access anything that could possibly be of use now.

That was all right.

There was a bulkhead some ten paces behind me.

I grabbed the second Bocaian by his shoulders and spun, adding my own momentum to his. We ran the last meter or so together. I tripped him at the point of no return. There was a very satisfying crunch as he hit the bulkhead face-first. Before he could fall, and possibly rise again, I drove my knee into the small of his back, a place every bit as vulnerable on a Bocaian as it is on a human being. He managed to turn and wrap his arms around my legs, as much to support himself as to maintain hold of his hated enemy. A keening moan, halfway to a howl, exploded from him, carrying with it a level of pain he might have borne his entire life. I shoved him away. He fell back and curled into a ball, his low moan continuing. Bocaians do not have tear ducts and do not cry as human beings do, but that sound transcended species. I knew. I’d made sounds very much like it myself, on the world that had given me both life and reputation. On Bocai.

I asked him, “What’s your name?”

He coughed out a word, along with a pair of tooth fragments.

It was not one I knew. “Are you alone?”

He gasped, and then something happened to his eyes: they strobed, bright enough to leave purple afterimages on my retinas. By the time I blinked away the blindness, his expression had gone blank. Crap.

There were microteemers behind his eyelids. The flash, triggered by him or some confederate I couldn’t see, was a packed visual impulse capable of overloading his brain with a single preprogrammed image, intense enough to occupy every neural function but the autonomic. Yelling at him, or shaking him, or trying to wake him up in any way would do no good. He’d be catatonic for days. I’d been teemed a few times myself, most recently as one of dozens put down by New London police, when I’d chosen the wrong moment to try to get to the other side of a political demonstration turned riot. The next thing I knew it was five days later and my head was cottony from clearing away the fractals. I looked for the Porrinyards and was not surprised to see that the Bocaian they’d disarmed and cuffed had also gone limp. I didn’t bother asking if they were all right. Of course they were all right. They were the Porrinyards. “Did that bastard just teem himself?”

“Yes,” they said in perfect unison. “And wet himself too. I’m going to need a washroom.”

“What was that weapon?”

“Something interesting. I suggest that wait until after we’re debriefed by Security.”

I scanned the concourse and, behind all the startled human faces and sometimes unreadable alien ones, saw a dozen armed security officers running toward us. Even from a distance I could tell that they were armed with all the usual weapons approved for orbital environments including widespread teem emitters of their very own. A half dozen minicams, insectile in both size and maneuverability, already circled us, assessing the situation and transmitting it to the tactical forces still too far away to risk taking out the innocent in the crossfire.

Given the calibre of the materiel the Bettelhine Munitions Corporation willingly sold to the festering offworld conflicts that were the Family’s chief clientele, there was no way of telling what obscenities they reserved for use on their own territory.

Even if teemers were the extent of it, I did not want to spend the next few days wearing a vacant look at my face while drones fed me and wiped my ass. Nor did I want to see whatever all-consuming image they’d chosen to imprint upon my consciousness. Given a choice, security forces rarely shackle your mind to anything pleasant.

I fell to my knees, placed my hands against the back of my head, and allowed the guards to surround me. The Porrinyards did the same.

So far I wasn’t enjoying Xana very much at all.

Reading my expression, the Porrinyards counseled, “You know what they say, Andrea. Never judge a world by its spaceport…”

My full name is Andrea Cort.

My official job title, following a recent surprise promotion that my superiors in the Dip Corps had nothing to do with, is Prosecutor-at-Large, Judge Advocate’s Office, Diplomatic Corps, Hom.Sap Confederacy.

It’s a good thing I don’t always have to say that whole thing with teemers pointed at my head. I might stumble somewhere around the sixth or seventh syllable.

The Prosecutor-at-Large part means that nobody, up to and including the President of the Confederacy, ever tells me where to go. I make my own agenda, enjoying an access known only to internal heads of state.

The promotion came as a great surprise to an upper management that had, up to that point, considered me the most disposable of all their fully owned commodities.

Back home in New London, the corridors of power still boiled with speculation over what strings I’d pulled to finagle myself such independence.

The truth was that the orders, issued to them and as far as they knew from among them, were in fact excellent forgeries provided by another civilization entirely. They were creations of the ancient software intelligences known as the AIsource, who had enlisted my help in their civil war with their own internal enemies, known to the AIsource as the Rogue Intelligences and to myself, for personal reasons, as Unseen Demons.

My secret defection amounted to exchanging one set of masters for another, but I’d not yet worked out just what my increased autonomy within Hom.Sap circles was going to cost. The ground beneath my feet was still less than solid. But my credentials were, and they mollified the local cannon fodder and swept us past the third and second levels of management to the office of Layabout’s Chief of Intelligence, one Colonel Antresc Pescziuwicz.

Pescziuwicz affected a shaved head, monocle, and a mustache of sufficient bushiness to render both upper and lower lips a matter of conjecture. His office was a construct of polished dark wood and ancient edged weapons displayed complete with the flags of the nations that had used them to spill entrails onto battlefield earth. It was the kind of display only an asshole, a historian, or a warrior could have felt at home in; not that those had ever been, or now were, incompatible subsets. By the time the witnesses confirmed that we’d acted in self-defense, the colonel’s mustache bristles were foaming. He dismissed the guards and stared at me through eyes that roundly damned me for bringing such a nightmare into his working day. “You know, I’m not all that fond of Confederate types. I consider you a bunch of arrogant, self-righteous, and impotent frauds.”

I refused to be baited. “It’s not the most inaccurate assessment I’ve ever heard.”

He continued: “Under normal circumstances I’d lock the three of you up on general principles and damn the diplomatic shitstorm. But I see that you’re an honored guest and that I’m obliged to extend you every possible courtesy.”

“I must say, you’re doing an excellent job so far.”

A grunt. “I can’t interrogate those wogs we’re holding, because my teem specialists say that they’ll both be drooling and incontinent for a week. But I have you. Is there any reason they’d be so all-fired anxious to paint a target on your back?”

I came within one firing neuron of telling him to just go look it up, but the Porrinyards had been working on improving my own basic courtesy. “Their race considers me a war criminal.”

He didn’t blink. “Do they have a case?”

There was no point in being shy. “When I was eight years old, Mercantile, my family lived in an experimental utopian community with Bocaians as neighbors.”

His eyebrows knit. “And what was the bloody point of that?”

“That the two races could live together in peace.”

“Was there ever war between humans and Bocaians?”

“No.”

“Even any serious disputes?”

“No.”

“Then why would anybody think that an argument worth making?”

I coughed. “I never said it was aradical Utopian community.”

The truth, as far as I know it, was simply that my parents and their friends liked Bocaians, and considered them a fine people to live with. Until I was eight, I believed the same thing. Still do, for what that’s worth, even if I’m now under a death sentence there.

He asked, “So what happened?”

It took a while to tell, but this was the sense of it. After years of living together in peace, sharing each others’ possessions, and helping to raise each others’ children, the Bocaians and human beings of our little community had gone after one another without any discernable provocation, tearing each other to pieces with weapons that included their bare hands and bared teeth. Most reasonable authorities believe the mass insanity to have been some kind of environmental influence, and explain me in particular by saying that I was too young to exercise restraint when nobody else was. But the incident’s become a political issue among some of the alien races who would use it to attack human interests. Bocaians, in particular, seized on a famous news holo taken of the evacuees, which focused on me as a traumatized little girl covered with blood, and elected me the symbolic face of the atrocity. They were not happy when I turned up, many years later, working for the Dip Corps. I concluded the story with, “There’s a bounty on my head.”

Pescziuwicz ran his fingertip along his mustache. “How much?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t checked the exchange rates lately.”

“I have,” the Porrinyards said.

Of course they had. “Going up or down?”

“Up,” they said.

I gave them an irritated look.

They grinned identical grins. “We’re not tempted.”

Pescziuwicz winced at them. “Do me a favor, you two? I don’t care what kind of unnatural procedure you had, to make you talk at the same time like that, but please take turns. For as long as you’re in my office. You’re driving me crazy.”

“As you wish,” Skye said alone.

Pescziuwicz fiddled with some virtual interface visible only to him and called up a holo of the Bocaian I’d taken down. “First pair of these wogs I’ve ever seen on this station.”

“They don’t like to travel,” I said.

“Stay-at-home types, huh?”

“Not just stay-at-home, but stay-by-themselves. They have little interest in interspecies diplomacy. Most never even learn to speak Mercantile. The ones we lived with were considered peculiar for wanting to settle alongside human beings, and even they had trouble learning a tongue other than their own. The race doesn’t retain the ability to learn additional languages much past puberty, and are pretty bad at learning offworld languages at any age. If you ever get around to interrogating these two, you might need to find yourself a translator.”

“Annnnh, that’s going to be a headache.” He tented his fingertips. “But the point is, these two weren’t just random tourists just passing through this station who saw the famous war criminal by chance and decided, on the spur of the moment, to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime coincidence and do the patriotic thing.”

“I would assume not.”

“They were waiting for you.”

“Looks that way.”

He let the moment linger. “I don’t like you, Counselor.”

I shrugged. “I don’t particularly care.”

He glanced at the disk the Porrinyards had taken off the first Bocaian, which was now floating in a levitation field, safe from any clumsy hands capable of accidentally activating it. “Got any idea what this is?”

Oscin spoke alone. “It’s called a” (insert noise that sounded like a pair of Tchi suffering from joint digestive disturbance). “Mercantile translation: Claw of God. It’s a K’cenhowten weapon invented almost sixteen millennia ago. The oppressive theocracy in power at the time used it for the ceremonial execution of heretics. I wouldn’t have recognized it myself, were it not for a short tour of duty to our embassy at a K’cenhowten holding where one was kept on display. Prior to this I would have assumed no working models existed outside of museums and private collections.”

For some reason the Porrinyards assigned the punchline to Skye. “They’re very valuable.”

“That’s good to hear,” I said. “The day I’m successfully assassinated, I don’t want anybody to say I cost pennies.”

BOOK: The Third Claw of God
13.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

By the Blood of Heroes by Joseph Nassise
The Barrytown Trilogy by Roddy Doyle
Elite Metal-ARE-epub by Jennifer Kacey
I Will Always Love You by Ziegesar, Cecily von
Live and Let Love by Gina Robinson
Witch Is The New Black by Dakota Cassidy
The Weaver Fish by Robert Edeson
The Angel of Highgate by Vaughn Entwistle
VC03 - Mortal Grace by Edward Stewart