The Third Claw of God

10 MENDEZ

We did not have to send for him. Oscin, who was still outside with the others, knew we needed Mendez the instant Skye did. This time, as per the head steward’s lowly status in the scheme of things, Philip raised no tiresome fuss about including Bettelhine Family counsel in the discussion. Mendez entered alone, his head a little bowed and his lips a little pursed, but his deferential, formal manner otherwise undisturbed by our mutual encounter with violent death. Had he been affected at all by the bloody turn our journey had taken, it manifested only as the thin layer of perspiration turning his forehead into yet another reflective surface, glowing in the presence of Bettelhine riches.

He came in, sealed the door after him, then made his way to the place Dina Pearlman had just vacated, all without urgency, trepidation, or any sense that his mission here might entail more than serving drinks or wiping up spills. He stood beside the ottoman, declining to sit. “Counselor. How may I help you?”

“You can begin by taking a seat.”

“That’s very kind of you, but I’m on duty, and I fear I’d find it improper. Indeed,” he said, his voice rising a decibel or two as he directed withering criticism toward Paakth-Doy, who had been sitting all along, “it is improper for her as well.”

Paakth-Doy turned red and began to stand.

I snapped, “Sit your ass down, Doy!”

Caught in the very act of rising, Paakth-Doy froze. There was no way of determining the specific arguments raised in the resulting internal debate, but gravity may been the tie-breaker. She collapsed back in her seat, wearing the special misery of any human being caught between competing faux pas.

I kept my voice steady. “Tonight’s etiquette violations include murder, sir. With that on that table I could not care less about who stands, who sits, and who uses the wrong goddamned fork while eating their goddamned pretentious inedible entrée. Tonight, Paakth-Doy’s working for me, and tonight she’ll sit if she’s fucking comfortable that way, or if I fucking want her to sit. Is that clear?”

Mendez didn’t show even the slightest sign of anger, behind his placid, butlerian exterior. “Whatever Counselor wishes. Am I to sit as well?”

“No, you may do whatever makes you most comfortable.”

“Then I’ll stand.”

“All right.” A second passed before I damned myself for my shortsightedness in giving him a choice. Now, for as long as I remained seated myself, I’d have to spend the entire interview looking up at him.

Suppressing a sigh, I rose, cracked my spine, paced a half dozen steps away and turned to face him across a level playing field. The most difficult part was ignoring the gentle grin on Skye’s face.

“Mr. Mendez, your primary purpose here is to provide a timeline. But I’d like to know a little bit about you first.”

“Is that necessary?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I must confess I wonder why.”

It wasn’t the first time in my experience that a suspect in a major crime had objected to personal questions, or even the first time a witness had expressed confusion over their relevance. But that had usually been a sign I was striking too close to home. This may have been the first time, ever, that one had questioned the relevance of a basic profile. I stared at him for a moment, expecting insolence, but found none: just a bland, academic curiosity. “I find it helpful to develop a general sense of the person first. Why? Do you think it impinges on your privacy?”

“No, Counselor. I recognize the importance of what you’re doing. I just don’t know why anything in my life would be considered of special interest.”

Meaning that it very well could be. “Well, we’ll just let me be the judge of that. How old are you, sir?”

“Forty-seven, Mercantile Standard.”

“Have you lived on Xana all your life?”

“No. I came here as a young adult.”

“From where?”

“I was born on a planet named Greeve, and lived there until I was seven.”

“Greeve?” I had never heard of the place.

“Yes, Counselor.” He spelled it for me.

It still rang no bells, which was far from unusual, given the number of worlds that maintained a human presence, large or small. “Is it part of the Confederacy?”

“Yes,” he said, betraying some amusement for the first time. “If only just.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s no jewel in the crown. It has a tiny population, no industry, no exports to speak of, no corporate debt, and a lifestyle so simple that the local economy is only a few steps removed from barter. It’s signed with the Confederacy, but contributes almost nothing to it except for its name on the registry, and takes nothing in return except for occasional imported staples, which are considered relief. I’m certain that you’ve heard of places that aren’t even dots on the map? Greeve is a dot compared to even those places.”

I’ve been to worlds that fit that description. A number were dysfunctional hellholes, inhabited only because the people there were too stubborn or too mean to just pack up and let the hostile local conditions win. The few who left formed a large percentage of the indentured population in the Dip Corps. But he hadn’t said the name with the revulsion I’d heard from so many refugees. “What’s it like?”

A slight smile pulled at his lips. “Something like ninety-nine percent ocean. The seas are deep enough to submerge almost all the land to an average depth of about seven kilometers. There’s a small spaceport carved into the northern ice cap, but the bulk of the human population, a grand total of some seven thousand people the last time I checked, lives on a chain of some three hundred tropical islands. There are only two islands big enough to support populations of more than five hundred. The rest of the people live in island villages or on houseboats.”

It sounded horrid to me but, then, I’d spent most of my life in enclosed orbital environments and had never been able to reclaim my childhood appreciation for natural ecosystems. “Would you call it a pleasant place?”

“It’s a paradise if you like sun, sand, friendly people, and gentle ocean breezes.”

“You didn’t?”

“I was a child.”

“You liked it.”

A tinge of regret shone through this rock-rigid demeanor. “It was the happiest time of my life.”

“But you left when you were seven.”

“My parents thought they could do better.”

“Why?”

He hesitated, as if even that much personal information was too much to impart. “Our island, Needlefish, was home to two extended families with a total population of about forty people. We saw the same faces every day and faced the same challenges every day. If my parents wanted a big night out they had to make their way to another island, about twenty kilometers north, where she had cousins and my father had old school friends. Maybe once or twice a year, on the only island in our region large enough to accommodate it, there were socials, where the residents of some eighty villages got together to catch up on old gossip and introduce the young people to potential spouses farther removed than first and second cousins. But that’s about as exciting as our lives ever got. It wasn’t that there was no money. Nobody on Greeve ever needed any money. But my parents felt that lives had gotten to be a little…I suppose you would say, arid. When I was six they arranged passage on the next freighter offworld.”

“Which happened when you were seven.”

“Yes. Ships only came to Greeve when asked to.”

I wondered how many places like that remained in the Confederacy: worlds of little interest to anybody except those who lived there, whether they wanted off or preferred to stay for the rest of their lives. “Where were you headed?”

“I don’t remember. Wherever it was, we never got there. The ship suffered some kind of disaster between systems. My parents, my sister, and some two-thirds of the vessel’s complement never came out of bluegel alive.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Paakth-Doy told him.

“As am I,” said Skye.

He gave them a slight nod. “Thank you.”

I asked, “How did you survive?”

“I don’t know,” he said, with the terseness of a man who had long ago decided that the precise details had no further relevance for him. “I was revived, alongside the remaining survivors, aboard a Tchi transport that answered the distress beacon. I wanted to go back to Greeve, where I still had friends and relatives, but I had no money and no documentation, and neither the Tchi nor the Dip Corps were willing to pay for my passage back to a place where there were no scheduled transports. So I became a ward of the Dip Corps and found myself spending the rest of my childhood in a Confederate vocational school, being trained in hospitality.”

I’d been a ward of the Dip Corps too. Had I not been a dangerous anomaly under close observation until the day my keepers decided that my intelligence merited higher education, would I have also received training only for the most menial positions available? Feeling somewhat more sympathy for the man now than I’d managed at the beginning, I pressed on. “And were the Bettelhines your first employers?”

“No. I spent my late teens and early twenties working in-system cruises, in and around the Lesothic wheelworlds. But I sent resumes to the company for years.”

“Why?”

“Xana has some luxury resorts famous in the industry. Some are in the subtropics. I hoped to work at one.”

“Because that was the kind of environment you’d left on Greeve.”

“Not quite,” he said, with a knowing smile that poked fun at my naïveté. “Greeve evolved; Xana was engineered. Greeve has species like the tube-tree, the flopfish, and the glowswarm, and delicacies like cosweed wine. Xana’s ecosystem has none of those things. The places even possess different smells. I would never mistake one for the other, even with my eyes closed. But Xana’s tropics have cool ocean water, a warm sun, and beaches to walk on. It may not be Greeve, but it’s not bad.”

I asked him, “Why didn’t you ever just go back to Greeve?”

He stared straight ahead and answered in a voice that betrayed none of what must have been years of frustration and regret. “It’s not like there was ever direct passage to such an obscure place, from any of the hubs where I worked. I would have had to zigzag across systems, bankrupting myself for each leg of my journey, then once again earn enough for the next hop until I reached a place where I could wait for a freighter that happened to be heading where I wanted to go. And even then I would have had to earn my passage again, and wait a long time for a berth to be available. There were times when it seemed remotely possible. But most of the time, it was out of the question.”

“But you did manage to find a position on Xana.”

He gave a slight nod. “Eventually, yes.”

“Did it pay well?”

“Yes.”

“What about your off hours? Was it like being on Greeve?”

“There was no way to return to Greeve so I made do.”

“Were you happy?”

“I had friends. Women. The prospect of family. A place as close to home as I was ever likely to know.”

He described the heartaches of his life with about as much emotion as I would have devoted to listing the contents of my spartan quarters back on New London, a place that for most of my life had been less home than clean place to sleep.

I realized that Skye was studying me. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was the sheer length of time I had devoted to the background of this one minor figure, who had not been upstairs with us during the emergency stop and could not have been the culprit responsible for the murder of the Khaajiir. Maybe she thought I’d gotten lost in the minutiae of a life with some sad parallels to my own. Or maybe she sensed what I sensed about this story that seemed no more than a digression: the ghost of a question larger than any of the answers Mendez had provided so far.

I didn’t know what was nagging at me. The man’s situation was far from unusual, after all. Even before we’d left the homeworld, Mankind’s history had always been a long parade of expats and refugees, people who through no fault of their own had become trapped on strange shores and who were forced to make do while keeping an eye on the distant, possibly mythical, pleasures of the homes they’d lost. Hell, if you wanted to go that far, I was one of them. The few tidbits the Porrinyards had fed me about their past as individuals marked them as two others.

But there was something else going on with Mendez. Something that verged on the monstrous.

I found myself pacing furiously, my arms crossed before me, my thoughts racing so fast that they almost drowned out the pounding of my heart. “How did you wind up as head steward of the Royal Carriage? That strikes me as a pretty plum position around here.”

The further we got from his tales of Greeve, the more he seemed to relax. “About fourteen years ago I served two months as personal valet to Mr. Conrad Bettelhine, youngest brother of Kurt, when he spent an extended vacation at one of the resorts where I worked. He was a lonely man who required little of me beyond conversation and companionship. But he was touched by my story, and offered to bring me aboard as junior steward. When the senior retired, I moved up.”

“What’s your work schedule like?”

“I live aboard the carriage, year-round, serving between five and ten complements of passengers per month.”

“How much time off do you get?”

“Thirty days a year.”

“Consecutive or intermittent?”

“Intermittent. Whenever this carriage is unoccupied or down for maintenance.”

“Do you spend all those days enjoying the sun down on Xana?”

“No. Much of the time, when I’m not needed, we’re docked at Layabout.”

“How much of your down time is spent at Layabout?”

“Maybe two days out of three.”

Another piece of the big picture snapped into focus. “So you get maybe ten days a year, intermittent, to spend, if you can, in the sunny island environments you prefer.”

“Yes. Sometimes more.”

“But sometimes less.”

“Yes.”

“Did you understand that those were the terms before you took the position?”

“Yes.”

“Then why did you accept?”

His expression, impassive for much of the prior interrogation, even during the discussions of the losses he’d known, now changed for the first time, with a subtle knit of his eyebrows. “I don’t understand the question.”

“Look around you. I don’t see any white beaches or turquoise ocean waters. This is not the past you miss, the present you settled for, or the future you would have liked to have. Why is this your life, and why aren’t you climbing the walls?”

His eyebrows remained knit, but now the cords in his neck had become visible, straining with a tension that he still managed to keep out of his voice. “This is Xana, madam. Here, one’s professional worth is gauged according to one’s proximity to the Bettelhine Inner Family. One does not turn down such opportunities.”

“How is this an opportunity? Will you ever advance any higher than chief steward?”

He stood a little taller. “I might, some day, be privileged to work for the Inner Family, at one of the Bettelhine estates.”

“Like,” I said, making a big show of searching for appropriate names as I circled him like a skimmer, looking from an appropriate place to land, “Mr. Brown and Mr. Wethers.”

His posture was proud, but stiff. “I do not have their management background, but yes.”

Skye had paled, as if suffering jabs of pain from some unknown upset inside her. Paakth-Doy looked just as disturbed, but in a different way; there was actual fear in it, fear that may have had something to do with seeing Mendez as a future version of herself.

I circled Mendez two more times. “What’s the greatest future you can imagine for yourself? After retirement, I mean?”

He did not look at me but stared straight ahead, his posture reflecting a controlled fury. “I suppose I will buy a modest home on one of the islands I spoke about.”

I allowed my voice to become a little dreamy. “A breezy island hideaway, where you can sit cross-legged on the sand, enjoying a cocktail and listening to colorful native music while the scarlet sun sinks beneath an unclouded horizon?”

“I am not a poet, madam.”

I let something occur to me. “But would this be an island on Greeve or an island on Xana?”

“On Xana, of course.”

“Why of course? Even if you haven’t saved enough, after all this time, to return home in style, the Bettelhines must appreciate all your years of service enough to send you where you’ve always wanted to go. For you, they’d consider the expense pocket change.”

That fine sheen on his forehead had become a torrent, leaking rivulets down both cheeks. “Madam, I have done nothing to deserve your mockery.”

“I was not aware that a simple question constituted mockery.”

“I have been privy to some of the most private tactical conversations of some of the wealthiest and most powerful human beings alive. They know they can count on my discretion, but they still cannot afford to have everything I know out of their control, and thus in potential danger of exploitation by their competitors and enemies. When I took this position, I agreed that my future would remain on Xana.”

I showed surprise. “So you work under the same terms that govern Mr. Pescziuwicz?”

“Yes.”

“Are these the same terms that govern anybody who works on classified projects or alongside the Inner Family?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Mendez, I have no doubt that you make more money, or whatever the local economy uses for money, aboard this carriage than you would have made had you continued to work Xana’s resorts. But I need a basis for comparison. Had you remained dirtside, would you have been able to earn passage back to Greeve?”

“Yes.”

“How old would you have been by the time you made it back?”

“I don’t know. Maybe sixty, if I’d wanted to arrive penniless.”

“Not much of an issue, considering that you say that people on Greeve don’t have much use for money. When do you think you’ll retire now?”

“When I’m fifty-five.”

“So you saved yourself at most five years of bowing and scraping for people who consider you a handy household appliance at the price of denying yourself everything else that gave your life meaning. You threw away what you wanted and secured a default future that will be at absolute best an imperfect imitation of the one you would have chosen for yourself if you could. Am I unfair, sir, in considering this dollar wise and pound foolish?”

Mendez said nothing. I somehow knew, without asking, that any repetition of the question would lead to the same stone wall. Either he didn’t know the answer himself, or facing it was more than he could stand.

Either way, I was less interested in his silence than in Paakth-Doy’s. She looked white, her impassive features trembling with enough tension to qualify as pain. It some ways it may have felt like I was questioning her too. Or, at the very least, questioning some potential future version of her. When she looked at Mendez, did she see a man whose happy life had been twisted by circumstances beyond his control, or one who represented the face she might find herself wearing, another twenty years down the road?

I excused myself and went to the washroom, running water over my hands and splashing some on my face. While I was in there, I tried to contact the AIsource again, and again received no reply. The blue room remained inaccessible to me.

Fuck You, I told them, feeling a schoolgirl pleasure in the ability to curse out a despised teacher without that teacher ever knowing what I had said. The fact that I’d said worse to them, many times, when they were capable of hearing me, didn’t matter. That one belonged to me.

Somehow, without knowing why, I had the sense it made me richer, far richer, than Arturo Mendez.

Mendez was relieved when I devoted the rest of my questions to the timeline of the last twenty-four hours. The give-and-take became a mere matter of accounting, bereft of emotional baggage. We went over the same ground several times, searching for holes in the outline, but within twenty minutes I had the basics, Paakth-Doy testifying to their essential accuracy.

At the time the carriage was prepped, the staff had consisted of Mendez, Colette Wilson, and Loyal Jeck.

Paakth-Doy arrived less than two hours before departure, a temporary replacement for a fourth steward taking a few days off to attend his sister’s wedding. She’d worked for distant Bettelhine cousins (nobody involved in Inner Family business, but still minor royalty by local standards), and the temporary promotion to the Royal Carriage had still required a month-long background check poring over every aspect of her entire life since birth. In the end, her spotless record and the testimonials of the lesser Bettelhines she’d served had gotten her the belowdecks assignment.

“She has done a fine job,” Mendez allowed, “especially since the crisis began, but she still has much to learn about Inner Family protocol.”

“I appreciate the praise,” Paakth-Doy said.

I had the impression that it was unreserved approval coming from him, and gentle irony coming from her. Damned if I wasn’t starting to like her.

Jason and Jelaine, their father, Hans, and the Khaajiir had arrived under heavy security, transferring from their private skimmer to a shielded walkway under a security shield that hid not only the identity of the Bettelhines embarking on this journey but also the presence of their venerable guest. The Khaajiir had remained invisible to public view throughout this operation, as he’d presumably been throughout his visit to Xana.

“Was that typical?”

Mendez said, “It is not unheard of. It depends on how public the Bettelhines wish to make any particular appearance. Sometimes they arrive with fanfare, with an honor guard of holo operators and neurec slingers capturing every moment for mass consumption. But this had been described as a ‘Classified Visit.’ Security was tight.”

“How secret can it be? When the Royal Carriage goes up and down, it can’t take a genius to figure out the odds of a Bettelhine, or somebody very close to the Inner Family, being aboard.”

“Yes,” Mendez said. “But who? Some minor relative hovering around the periphery of power, or Mr. Bettelhine himself? Besides, the Khaajiir was the one being kept secret. We were warned not to mention him, not even to Layabout security.”

Hans had intended to ride up with them but had been called away, at the last minute, to deal with some minor management crisis at one of the company’s many research divisions.

No, Mendez did not know what the problem had been; and no, he didn’t consider it his business. “Members of the Inner Family have to deal with crises all the time. Some crises necessitate abrupt changes in travel plans. It’s just something that has to be dealt with.”

The siblings and their distinguished guest enjoyed an unremarkable ascent, asking little of the crew except for a couple of modest meals. Brother and sister had retired to separate suites and slept much of the way up. The Khaajiir had slept a little, too, but had emerged from his suite long before they did, to sit by himself in the lounge, enjoying the spectacle outside the window as the surface receded and the upper atmosphere gave way to space. Mendez had asked him if he needed anything, an offer that led to a few minutes of polite conversation.

I asked Mendez what they’d talked about.

“The view,” he said.

Was that really all? The view?

“The rich and the important are often at a loss for a basis of identification with those of my station. Few of my conversations with those I serve transcend banalities.”

“That must be annoying.”

“The alternative would be to talk about what they talk about with one another, and I daresay I’ve heard enough of that to know that I want no part of it.” He hesitated. “If you truly need to know, he regaled me with some trivia regarding my family name. Evidently it has homonyms in one of the lesser Tchi dialects. I suppose he was trying to be friendly. I feigned interest and then retreated belowdecks.”

The one surprise on the way came courtesy of a call from Philip Bettelhine, who informed Mendez that the carriage would be picking up several additional guests during its stay at Layabout: among them himself, his assistant Vernon Wethers, and Mr. and Mrs. Pearlman.

This was the latest in a series of surprises for Mendez, as he’d initially gathered the trip down to be the venue for an important and classified meeting between Hans Bettelhine, Jason, Jelaine, the Khaajiir, and my own party. He did not know the planned subject matter of that meeting, nor what it had to do with Dejah Shapiro, though she was also scheduled for pickup. He did know that when he informed Jason and Jelaine about Philip’s party-crashing, they seemed irritated, and led him to believe that the important business, whatever it was, would have to wait until the party could reconnect with Hans on the surface.

No, this was not unusual, either. “Inner Family Bettelhines all operate their inner fiefdoms. Sometimes there’s pushing and shoving.”

The oddest attendees, Mr. and Mr. Pearlman, had been flown up to Layabout by Vernon Wethers, in one of the Bettelhine Family transports, while the carriage was still in transit. Mendez did not know why. He had been told that they were being honored for exceptional efficiency in beating deadlines at the facility they ran. They would not have been the first low-level functionaries rewarded with the opportunity to hobnob with Inner Family members, either aboard the Royal Carriage or at one of the Family’s many estates. Usually, these occasions were provided more warning, but not always. Given Wethers’s involvement, the whim appeared to have been Philip Bettelhine’s. Either way, the Pearlmans boarded the carriage almost immediately upon its arrival at Layabout, oohing and aahing over all the luxury that was now, temporarily, theirs to enjoy.

Monday Brown, who had also taken a Family transport from the surface, boarded next, specifying that he was there to meet Ms. Shapiro in his employer’s stead. He was, as I’d already learned, the last to arrive before word of the attempt on my life prompted the temporary evacuation of the Shuttle as a security measure. No, Jason and Jelaine had not expected him. No, Mendez did not know whether they’d been as annoyed by news of his arrival as they had seemed to be when learning about Philip’s party, as he had not been present for that conversation.

Word came of my arrival and several minutes later of the attempt on my life. Jason and Jelaine had expressed great relief that I was all right before everybody but Mendez boarded the evacuation capsule, launched themselves offstation, and waited for Mr. Pescziuwicz to sound the all-clear. Mendez left the carriage too but remained aboard Layabout, making himself available in case Security needed him. The next update he received was when Mr. Pescziuwicz alerted him to join Station Security in escorting the Porrinyards and me to our suite.

Mendez had just completed the grand tour when the evacuation capsule returned. Worried about my reaction to seeing another Bocaian in this context, Jason and Jelaine had asked the others to stay behind while they introduced me to the Khaajiir. Once that was over and done with, and I joined the Porrinyards in our suite, everybody else settled in.

We were in our suite during Dejah’s arrival. She had actually docked with Layabout less than an hour after us, but her transport had been held up during the security shutdown, and she didn’t make her way across the Concourse until twenty minutes after the Porrinyards and I retired to our suite. Occupied as we were, we also missed the separate arrivals of Philip Bettelhine and Vernon Wethers, Philip Bettelhine taking a special flight from the surface to join us, Wethers arriving after a brief meeting at one of the company’s orbital manufacturing facilities.

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, there is 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.