The Third Claw of God Read online

  The Third Claw of God

  An Andrea Cort Novel

  Adam-Troy Castro

  For the Ellison Nine,

  who had an adventure of their very own

  aboard another elevator entirely

  Contents

  The Cast

  Prologue

  1

  Assassins

  2

  Royal Carriage

  3

  The Khaajiir

  4

  Porrinyards

  5

  The Big Lie

  6

  Full Stop

  7

  The First Death

  8

  Post-Mortem

  9

  Magrison’s Woman

  10

  Mendez

  11

  Dejah’s View

  12

  Philip, Excluded

  13

  Stranglehold

  14

  The Fourth Bettelhine

  15

  First the Corpse, then the Bartender

  16

  Jason and Jelaine

  17

  The Khaajiir’s Testament

  18

  Bloodbath

  19

  Xana

  20

  Bettelhine Family Business

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Adam-Troy Castro

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE CAST

  Not all of these people appear onstage in the pages that follow; in fact, many of them don’t. But all are mentioned at least once. They are all given equal status here to avoid giving away the identities of any who might make unexpected entrances. To further inhibit spoilage, one is a fraud with no relevance to anything that happens in this novel, even in passing. You may assume that this personage was off somewhere, minding his or her own business or solving some other crime among the idle rich, while Andrea did her thing.

  ANDREA CORT AND ASSOCIATES

  ARTIS BRINGEN: Andrea Cort’s long-time Dip Corps superior, no longer her boss but still a handy information source; back home at the wheelworld New London.

  ANDREA CORT: Infamous child war criminal, now all grown up; Prosecutor-at-Large for the Diplomatic Corps of the Hom.Sap Confederacy, and secret defector to the alliance of software intelligences known as the AIsource, now honored guest of Hans Bettelhine.

  BERNARD CORT: Andrea’s father. (Deceased.)

  VERONICA CORT: Andrea’s mother. (Deceased.)

  OSCIN PORRINYARD: Andrea’s bodyguard and lover, the male half of a cylinked pair, sharing the same enhanced mind and personality.

  SKYE PORRINYARD: Andrea’s bodyguard and lover, the female half; like Oscin, is not to be considered a separate person but rather a separate avatar of the same composite intelligence.

  THE TWO KNOWN AISOURCE FACTIONS

  AISOURCE: Conglomeration of software intelligences, originating from several ancient civilizations predating the dawn of Mankind; secret employers of Andrea Cort and her companions, Oscin and Skye Porrinyard; tired of their immortal existence, they’re seeking their own mass extinction, and have hired Andrea Cort to help them tie the noose.

  UNSEEN DEMONS: Otherwise known as the rogue intelligences; the minority faction among the AIsource collective that wants to live, and is willing to commit any number of crimes to avoid the march to extinction; responsible, in some as-yet unspecified manner, for the outbreak of madness on the planet Bocai that led to the deaths of Andrea Cort’s family.

  KNOWN MEMBERS OF THE BETTELHINE FAMILY

  CAROLE (BETTELHINE): Estranged wife of Philip Bettelhine.

  CONRAD (BETTELHINE): Younger brother of Kurt Bettelhine. (Deceased.)

  HANS BETTELHINE: Current patriarch of the Bettelhine Munitions Corporation.

  JASON BETTELHINE: Son of Hans Bettelhine; full brother to Jelaine, half brother to Philip.

  JELAINE BETTELHINE: Daughter of Hans Bettelhine; full sister to Jason, half sister to Philip.

  KURT BETTELHINE: Father of Hans Bettelhine. (Deceased.)

  LILLIAN JANE BETTELHINE: Sister of Hans Bettelhine. (Deceased.)

  MAGNUS BETTELHINE: Younger brother of Hans Bettelhine.

  MELINDA BETTELHINE: Bettelhine cousin. (Unknown lineage and current status.)

  PHILIP BETTELHINE: Son of Hans Bettelhine; half brother to Jason and Jelaine.

  KNOWN BETTELHINE CORPORATION EMPLOYEES

  MONDAY BROWN: Personal aide to Hans Bettelhine.

  ERIK DESCANSEN: Bettelhine employee; fiancé to Colette Wilson.

  JOY (LAST NAME UNKNOWN): Bettelhine employee; “best friend.”

  DINA PEARLMAN: Bettelhine employee; wife to Farley.

  FARLEY PEARLMAN: Bettelhine employee; husband to Dina.

  ANTREC PESCZIUWICZ: Security Chief of Layabout, the orbital terminal of Xana’s space elevator.

  VERNON WETHERS: Personal aide to Philip Bettelhine.

  THE CREW OF THE BETTELHINE ROYAL CARRIAGE

  LOYAL JECK: Steward aboard the Bettelhine Royal Carriage.

  ARTURO MENDEZ: Chief Steward aboard the Bettelhine Royal Carriage.

  PAAKTH-DOY: Human woman raised by alien race, the Riirgaans; currently temporary steward aboard the Bettelhine Royal Carriage.

  COLETTE WILSON: Bartender aboard the Bettelhine Royal Carriage.

  KNOWN CRIMINALS

  PETER MAGRISON: “The Beast Magrison,” infamous terrorist, wanted for crimes against humanity.

  VEYS NAAIAA: Bocaian assassin.

  KARL NIMMITZ: Retired thief; current husband of Dejah Shapiro.

  SHAARPAS THARR: Bocaian assassin.

  ERNST VOSSOFF: Multiple convictions; ex-husband of Dejah Shapiro.

  MISCELLANEOUS

  BARD DAIKEN: Debt Arbitration Specialist, Dip Corps, missing in action.

  JANE ELLERY: Determined amateur.

  HARILLE (last name unknown): Homeless runaway.

  THE KHAAJIIR: Bocaian scholar; personal guest of Hans Bettelhine.

  NEKI ROM: Bursteeni tourist.

  DEJAH SHAPIRO: Long-time enemy of the Bettelhines; tycoon with vast fortune based on sound investments and habitat construction; personal guest of Hans Bettelhine; wife to Karl Nimmitz.

  PROLOGUE

  L ater, much later, after I died, I tried to remember why.

  There was all the death and pain I’d come from: neighbors turned to savages, tearing their one-time friends to pieces with bare hands and bared teeth. I’d seen my mother murdered, seen my friends torn apart; seen my own hands red and glistening from the lifeblood of a sentient I’d loved as much as my own father. I’d been eight then, but however many years I placed between myself and those horrors, however many steps I took toward a redemption I was not sure I deserved, that long night had always remained with me, and was always an eloquent argument in favor of the worst anybody could ever decide to do to me.

  But that was not why I’d died.

  It was cold where I was. My throat burned, but not with thirst. It felt raw, like I’d swallowed fire. It was agony, but I welcomed it, because it was the only part of me that felt anything except the vague impression that I deserved much worse. I’d done so many bad things. I’d killed in anger. I’d sold my loyalty to forces inimical to humanity. I’d shown my true face to the only person since my parents who had ever cared for me, revealing before one of my love’s two beautiful faces a potential for cruelty that had transformed everything s/he felt for me to pity and revulsion.

  But even that was not why I’d died. It was why I’d deserved to die.

  I remembered a corpse stewing in b
lood and worse, a monster even more terrible than myself telling me she’d seen in me a kindred spirit, another mind so damaged by the forces that had twisted it beyond recognition that it was left with no other choice but murder.

  But even those were not the reasons I’d died. Those were just the things I’d seen in the hours before death.

  How had I died?

  I remembered drifting in airless space, high above a beautiful blue-green world. I was in a space suit, but my heart was pounding and my breath was arriving in ragged gasps. I’d seen several people die tonight, but they were behind me; now I was alone but for the hundreds of guns leveled against me on all sides, and a course that could either carry me deeper into the vacuum or down into the fiery embrace of reentry. I’d screamed and received no answer; begged and received no pity.

  There was no possibility of rescue. Orders had been given, and they were orders that could not be questioned or defied.

  A stabbing pain in my chest, followed by another and another, and my air exploded outward. My blood crystallized and boiled, even as I watched, drifting away like scarlet, smoky confetti. My throat and my lungs burned. I tried to scream but there was no air to scream with, nobody to scream for.

  That’s how and where and when I died.

  But I could not remember why…

  1

  ASSASSINS

  H ans Bettelhine may have been an infamous merchant of death, whose munitions empire was even now fueling slaughter on a hundred human worlds, but I had to be fair: it was for precisely that reason that I wouldn’t blame him for today’s attempt on my life.

  Bettelhine would not have invited me all the way to his home system just to have a couple of incompetent assassins ambush me in his spaceport. Had he wanted me dead all that badly he knew my address, and could have nuked it on a whim or, given the preference for a more surgical strike, sent semi-intelligent flechette drones into New London to hunt me down and vivisect me in my sleep. Juje alone knew that he was supposed to have done stuff like that before.

  Still, there was no denying that his headquarters world, Xana, set an entirely new record for the shortest interval between my arrival at a place I’ve never been and the very first attempt on my life there.

  I’m talking about minutes. Minutes.

  It happened before I took my first step onto its planetary soil, even before Bettelhine should have known that my transport had arrived at its main orbital terminal, Layabout.

  The Porrinyards and I were walking through the concourse off Layabout’s main docking facilities, an array of liquor stores, restaurants, boutiques, gift shops, and even brothel booths where bored execs waiting for their passages offworld could spend a few minutes being brought to multiple orgasms by pulsed sonics. Strolling to the elevator dock, where we’d been assured a berth on the private car normally reserved for Bettelhine use, I counted four sentient species, not counting human beings, among the travelers waiting for their ride to the planetary surface or for their transports to other systems. There was at least one I didn’t recognize, who to my eyes looked a little like a terrestrial donkey—after that donkey had been burned with a blowtorch and then explosively decompressed. All of this would have provided more than enough distraction, after all those weeks in Intersleep, were I not also arguing politics with the Porrinyards, an exercise that amounts to being outnumbered even when only one of them is talking.

  A pair of striking physical paragons, one male and one female, each with wise eyes, kind smiles, and stubbly silvery hair, Oscin and Skye Porrinyard have one supersized composite mind between them and often champion ridiculous points just to twist me into rhetorical knots.

  The first of the assassins stood up the second that Oscin and I came into view at the far end of the concourse, but there was still no reason to believe that his aimless stroll away from the seats and into the area of greatest foot traffic was intended to end with me bleeding my life out onto the cold permaplastic of the terminal floor. He was even easy to mistake as human. Bocaians made many of the same evolutionary choices as human beings. You wouldn’t ever mistake a member of one race for the other on close examination, but their basic outlines are almost identical, the most prominent difference when clothed being the bumpy Bocaian ear and the oversized Bocaian eyes. Any Bocaian dedicated to killing me, as most Bocaians are, can therefore get well within striking distance before being recognized for what he is.

  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, trigg
ered 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.