The Third Claw of God (23 page)

And that had been it, before the descent.

I rubbed the tip of my nose with the edge of one knuckle. “I believe we can afford a break right now. Why don’t the two of you join the others outside? Skye and I will be out directly.”

Paakth-Doy understood the situation completely. “You need privacy to talk about us behind our backs.”

I gave her an unsmiling nod. “Thanks for understanding.”

She remained unperturbed as she followed Mendez out the door.

The second she was gone, I turned to Skye. “First things first. What’s going on with the others?”

There was no transition from the Skye who had been present with me throughout the prior interviews and the one reporting events from Oscin’s viewpoint. “It’s been tense. Farley Pearlman’s been taking advantage of the bar service to work himself into a quiet, morose drunk. Dina’s been complaining about the smell, but not the same traumatized way she did before—it’s just an exercise in being unpleasant. The way she put it, the‘Holy Man’ smells‘even worse’ than he did when he was alive.”

“How did Jason and Jelaine take that?”

“About as well as can be expected. Jason invoked his father’s authority and ordered her to keep her, quote,‘evil’ mouth shut. I think he was telling the truth before, about not knowing about her life before she reached Xana.”

“So do I. What else?”

“Philip’s ordered Mendez to set the air recyclers in the parlor to full power. They’re filtering out the worst of the odor out there, though you can still catch a whiff of the poor Khaajiir if you get too close. He’s also still holding out hope that the whatever-it-is, the Stanley, will be showing up any minute, and he’s pressed Jason for the reason we’re here—evidently, Dad didn’t bother to share it with him. Jason told him he’d find out in good time. He then took Jelaine aside, who said the same thing, word for word, at which point he got mad and said,‘What’s the matter with you? We were never the closest brother and sister, but we used to be able to talk. Now you’re as bad as Jason.’”

“Either he totally lost control of himself, or your male half’s been especially deft at eavesdropping.”

“Both,” Skye said, without any special pride. “He did raise his voice, but the only reason I’m able to provide the full quote is that Oscin was able to come up behind Philip when he wasn’t looking. Jelaine saw Oscin but didn’t care. She seemed to relish the opportunity to share secrets with us. It’s like we’ve joined an old girl’s club without knowing it.”

“How did he react when he realized you’d heard him?”

“The same way, with an additional added helping of hurt. Make no mistake, Andrea. From what I can tell, thereis love lost between Philip and his siblings. He believes they’ve turned their backs on him, and resents them for it.”

All of this dovetailed with what we’d already figured out about Jason and Jelaine, though perhaps not what their father’s place among them. I said, “And how’s he reacting now that Mendez and Paakth-Doy have returned to the party?”

“He’s a little upset that we’ve been left alone.” She hesitated. “Wait, he’s confronting Oscin, demanding to know just what we think we’re doing. Paakth-Doy’s telling him, ‘they’ve just established a timeline.’

He’s saying we had to have done more than that. She’s saying, ‘Yes, sir, they have, but I’m not permitted to share it with you.’”

I felt another surge of respect for Paakth-Doy. “The lady has a backbone.”

“That she does, and it doesn’t make Philip happy at all. And again, here come more spirited defenses of your reputation from Jason and Jelaine. I note that Dejah’s watching the two of them very carefully. She’s…Andrea, that’s a grin. That’s definitely a grin. I think she’s caught up.”

I found that I could picture the look on Dejah’s face. “I wouldn’t put it past her. She’s sharp. When we worked together, she frightened me to death.”

“She seems to like you well enough. That marks her as unusual right then and there.”

I didn’t take offense. It happened to be true. “Especially when we met. I was an even bigger bitch then than I was when you met me, and I shut her down every time she tried to be friendly. But that’s not what scared me. She’s scary-smart. I was used to being a prodigy, but she made me look like a stammering idiot. And there’s something else about her, something you need to keep in mind.”

“What’s that?”

“She’s as wealthy as the Bettelhines. She’s as well known as they are and, in some circles, as hated as they are. We learned during dinner that she and the Bettelhines have had unpleasant, even murderous, past history. And yet, she arrived at Layabout without a security entourage of her own. I can tell you right here and now that she’s never had one. She goes everywhere alone, or paired with whoever happens to be her husband this year. By all rights—including, I should say, her well-known habit of picking treacherous bastards as those husbands, for reasons that frankly escape me—she should have been assassinated long ago. But she survives. She thrives. I promise you, love, if there’s anybody on the carriage we don’t want to be the murderer, or the money behind the murderer, it’s her. Because if it is her, we’ve already lost.”

Skye considered that. “Do you think it’s her?”

“I don’t have enough data to know.”

“What do you think of what we learned from Mendez?”

“About his life? It feeds some suspicions I’m already working on, suspicions that resonate with some of the things we’ve noticed about Brown and Wethers. About the timeline? It establishes something odd about our complement. The one man most credited for wanting me here, Hans, had to change his plans at the last minute. Conversely, five others, including Brown, Wethers, Philip, and the Pearlmans, were all added to the guest list with the same lack of warning. There’s even a sixth anomaly, if I count Paakth-Doy, though I may not, since her assignment here has been planned for more than a month and fails to meet the pattern. Still, even if we discount her and maybe one or two of those others as coincidences, we still have a vehicle overcrowded with people who all went to extraordinary lengths to board just as a meeting of unexplained importance was set to take place here.”

“It looks to me,” Skye said, “like somebody doesn’t want that meeting to take place.”

I could only agree. That was the basis of the epiphany I’d been fighting since the moment I found the Khaajiir dead.

Discounting the Porrinyards, who had traveled here as my companions, only Dejah Shapiro and I had traveled to this system just to be here today.

We were the original reasons for this gathering. Everything else, all the pomp and all the violence we’d endured, was just noise and distraction.

But what would Hans Bettelhine have to say to either Dejah or me that any of the others would kill to prevent us from hearing?

I was still considering that when the carriage trembled.

11

DEJAH’S VIEW

Half expecting to find another ravaged corpse among our fellow partygoers, I ran back into the parlor and instead discovered a cautious hope diluting the lingering shock of the Khaajiir’s death. Monday Brown was downright ebullient for him, which meant a slight upward turn at the corners of lips otherwise as straight as a slit. Vernon Wethers looked white, his eyes scanning the sculpted ceiling as if hoping for the sudden appearance of an escape ladder. Dina Pearlman, who had retreated to one of the lounges with a bottle, raised it in a mock toast, and Farley just looked tired, as if he’d accept any development as long as everybody just left him alone.

“What’s going on?”

Philip seemed to take cruel pleasure in telling me the good news. “Help’s arrived. That’s the sound of the Stanley from Layabout touching down on our roof.”

“Are you sure?”

There was another shudder that tinkled glasses and jarred the balance of anybody not already seated. With an efficiency he didn’t seem to have to think about, Mendez rescued one glass before it toppled over the edge of the bar. “He knows what he’s talking about, Counselor. That’s a Stanley, making contact with the carriage. I know because I’ve been trained to recognize the sound.”

“Then you know what to expect,” I said.

“I’m afraid I don’t. In the simulations I experienced, the pilot always remained in contact with us throughout the rescue operation. He would have warned us to expect that jolt, for instance. But I don’t know what he’s going to do if we cannot communicate with him and assure him that we’re still alive.”

“Don’t worry,” Oscin told everybody. “I don’t know the exact parameters of the local tech, but any low-orbit recovery vehicle would be useless without instruments capable of detecting movement, and therefore life, inside sealed compartments like this one. Now that we’re in direct contact, I suspect the crew of that thing is devoting as much effort to counting heartbeats and voices as they are to determining the nature of the malfunction. Am I right about that, Mr. Bettelhine?”

“That’s the way I understand it,” said Philip.

“That’s the way it is,” said Jason.

Farley Pearlman looked away from his drink long enough to make a single, not very interested suggestion. “What about us? Should we all start yelling?”

He was precisely the kind of criminal I’d never been able to speak to with any degree of professional detachment, but my answer was less for him than for anybody else who might consider his suggestion a good one. “If their instruments are capable of detecting heartbeats through bulkheads and heat shielding, and somebody’s listening, that’s the last thing we want to do. It would be like screaming hello into a stethoscope.”

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.

Ihaven’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 labeledSTORAGE A, STORAGE B, PANTRY, LAUNDRY , andEMERGENCY.