The Third Claw of God

PROLOGUE

Later, 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 blood 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…