The Third Claw of God (39 page)

“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

Farley 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 clapped 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.”

“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.”