The Third Claw of God

1 ASSASSINS

Hans 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, triggered 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.

Even if teemers were the extent of it, I did not want to spend the next few days wearing a vacant look at my face while drones fed me and wiped my ass. Nor did I want to see whatever all-consuming image they’d chosen to imprint upon my consciousness. Given a choice, security forces rarely shackle your mind to anything pleasant.

I fell to my knees, placed my hands against the back of my head, and allowed the guards to surround me. The Porrinyards did the same.

So far I wasn’t enjoying Xana very much at all.

Reading my expression, the Porrinyards counseled, “You know what they say, Andrea. Never judge a world by its spaceport…”

My full name is Andrea Cort.

My official job title, following a recent surprise promotion that my superiors in the Dip Corps had nothing to do with, is Prosecutor-at-Large, Judge Advocate’s Office, Diplomatic Corps, Hom.Sap Confederacy.

It’s a good thing I don’t always have to say that whole thing with teemers pointed at my head. I might stumble somewhere around the sixth or seventh syllable.

The Prosecutor-at-Large part means that nobody, up to and including the President of the Confederacy, ever tells me where to go. I make my own agenda, enjoying an access known only to internal heads of state.

The promotion came as a great surprise to an upper management that had, up to that point, considered me the most disposable of all their fully owned commodities.

Back home in New London, the corridors of power still boiled with speculation over what strings I’d pulled to finagle myself such independence.

The truth was that the orders, issued to them and as far as they knew from among them, were in fact excellent forgeries provided by another civilization entirely. They were creations of the ancient software intelligences known as the AIsource, who had enlisted my help in their civil war with their own internal enemies, known to the AIsource as the Rogue Intelligences and to myself, for personal reasons, as Unseen Demons.

My secret defection amounted to exchanging one set of masters for another, but I’d not yet worked out just what my increased autonomy within Hom.Sap circles was going to cost. The ground beneath my feet was still less than solid. But my credentials were, and they mollified the local cannon fodder and swept us past the third and second levels of management to the office of Layabout’s Chief of Intelligence, one Colonel Antresc Pescziuwicz.

Pescziuwicz affected a shaved head, monocle, and a mustache of sufficient bushiness to render both upper and lower lips a matter of conjecture. His office was a construct of polished dark wood and ancient edged weapons displayed complete with the flags of the nations that had used them to spill entrails onto battlefield earth. It was the kind of display only an asshole, a historian, or a warrior could have felt at home in; not that those had ever been, or now were, incompatible subsets.

By the time the witnesses confirmed that we’d acted in self-defense, the colonel’s mustache bristles were foaming. He dismissed the guards and stared at me through eyes that roundly damned me for bringing such a nightmare into his working day. “You know, I’m not all that fond of Confederate types. I consider you a bunch of arrogant, self-righteous, and impotent frauds.”

I refused to be baited. “It’s not the most inaccurate assessment I’ve ever heard.”

He continued: “Under normal circumstances I’d lock the three of you up on general principles and damn the diplomatic shitstorm. But I see that you’re an honored guest and that I’m obliged to extend you every possible courtesy.”

“I must say, you’re doing an excellent job so far.”

A grunt. “I can’t interrogate those wogs we’re holding, because my teem specialists say that they’ll both be drooling and incontinent for a week. But I have you. Is there any reason they’d be so all-fired anxious to paint a target on your back?”

I came within one firing neuron of telling him to just go look it up, but the Porrinyards had been working on improving my own basic courtesy. “Their race considers me a war criminal.”

He didn’t blink. “Do they have a case?”

There was no point in being shy. “When I was eight years old, Mercantile, my family lived in an experimental utopian community with Bocaians as neighbors.”

His eyebrows knit. “And what was the bloody point of that?”

“That the two races could live together in peace.”

“Was there ever war between humans and Bocaians?”

“No.”

“Even any serious disputes?”

“No.”

“Then why would anybody think that an argument worth making?”

I coughed. “I never said it was a radical Utopian community.”

The truth, as far as I know it, was simply that my parents and their friends liked Bocaians, and considered them a fine people to live with. Until I was eight, I believed the same thing. Still do, for what that’s worth, even if I’m now under a death sentence there.

He asked, “So what happened?”

It took a while to tell, but this was the sense of it. After years of living together in peace, sharing each others’ possessions, and helping to raise each others’ children, the Bocaians and human beings of our little community had gone after one another without any discernable provocation, tearing each other to pieces with weapons that included their bare hands and bared teeth. Most reasonable authorities believe the mass insanity to have been some kind of environmental influence, and explain me in particular by saying that I was too young to exercise restraint when nobody else was. But the incident’s become a political issue among some of the alien races who would use it to attack human interests. Bocaians, in particular, seized on a famous news holo taken of the evacuees, which focused on me as a traumatized little girl covered with blood, and elected me the symbolic face of the atrocity.

They were not happy when I turned up, many years later, working for the Dip Corps.

I concluded the story with, “There’s a bounty on my head.”

Pescziuwicz ran his fingertip along his mustache. “How much?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t checked the exchange rates lately.”

“I have,” the Porrinyards said.

Of course they had. “Going up or down?”

“Up,” they said.

I gave them an irritated look.

They grinned identical grins. “We’re not tempted.”

Pescziuwicz winced at them. “Do me a favor, you two? I don’t care what kind of unnatural procedure you had, to make you talk at the same time like that, but please take turns. For as long as you’re in my office. You’re driving me crazy.”

“As you wish,” Skye said alone.

Pescziuwicz fiddled with some virtual interface visible only to him and called up a holo of the Bocaian I’d taken down. “First pair of these wogs I’ve ever seen on this station.”

“They don’t like to travel,” I said.

“Stay-at-home types, huh?”

“Not just stay-at-home, but stay-by-themselves. They have little interest in interspecies diplomacy. Most never even learn to speak Mercantile. The ones we lived with were considered peculiar for wanting to settle alongside human beings, and even they had trouble learning a tongue other than their own. The race doesn’t retain the ability to learn additional languages much past puberty, and are pretty bad at learning offworld languages at any age. If you ever get around to interrogating these two, you might need to find yourself a translator.”

“Annnnh, that’s going to be a headache.” He tented his fingertips. “But the point is, these two weren’t just random tourists just passing through this station who saw the famous war criminal by chance and decided, on the spur of the moment, to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime coincidence and do the patriotic thing.”

“I would assume not.”

“They were waiting for you.”

“Looks that way.”

He let the moment linger. “I don’t like you, Counselor.”

I shrugged. “I don’t particularly care.”

He glanced at the disk the Porrinyards had taken off the first Bocaian, which was now floating in a levitation field, safe from any clumsy hands capable of accidentally activating it. “Got any idea what this is?”

Oscin spoke alone. “It’s called a” (insert noise that sounded like a pair of Tchi suffering from joint digestive disturbance). “Mercantile translation: Claw of God. It’s a K’cenhowten weapon invented almost sixteen millennia ago. The oppressive theocracy in power at the time used it for the ceremonial execution of heretics. I wouldn’t have recognized it myself, were it not for a short tour of duty to our embassy at a K’cenhowten holding where one was kept on display. Prior to this I would have assumed no working models existed outside of museums and private collections.”

For some reason the Porrinyards assigned the punchline to Skye. “They’re very valuable.”

“That’s good to hear,” I said. “The day I’m successfully assassinated, I don’t want anybody to say I cost pennies.”

Skye said, “Little chance of that here. There were never more than a hundred Claws of God in existence. There are supposed to be less than twenty still extant. I suppose we’ll need to contact the experts and get the precise numbers, to see if we can trace this one’s provenance.”

“Is that even necessary?” Pescziuwicz asked. “It’s just a machine, like any other machine. My bosses could figure out the basic specs in half an hour. What’s to stop anybody from building one today?”

Oscin took over. “In practical terms, nothing. But determining the authenticity of this one seems a natural first step.”

“Why?”

“If a genuine antiquity, it’s worth considerably more than the bounty on Counselor’s head. The sponsors of these assassins would be losing money on the deal. If a contemporary artifact, then somebody’s gone to an equal amount of trouble duplicating an obscure weapon for, we can assume, symbolic reasons. Either way, determining its age would help us determine what the assassins were thinking…or what kind of resources their employers, if any, brought to the table.”

Under the circumstances, I knew I’d regret asking the next question. “What would it have done to me?”

Skye’s softer voice matched Oscin’s measured cadence. “Once activated in close quarters, it produces an intense localized harmonic capable of liquefying an enemy’s organs without disturbing the skin. Your brain would have remained functional over the next four minutes or so, or however long it took your entire digestive system to seep out your bladder and anus.”

This was nasty even by the standards of our present hosts. Bettelhine factories had produced poisons and bombs and energy weapons capable of sterilizing entire planetary hemispheres, but the Claw was horror on a smaller scale, nasty even to the employees of an enterprise whose products had so often set new standards of genocidal efficiency. The Claw did not sound like something they would have built. It was too…intimate.

The room fell silent long enough for me and Pescziuwicz to enjoy all the appetizing sights and sounds conjured by our respective imaginations.

I said, “It does sound like an efficient way to lose weight.”

Pescziuwicz’s head swiveled. “Am I supposed to be amused?”

“No, sir.”

“Let me count the reasons I’m not.” Pescziuwicz ticked off points on his fingertips. “First, a Dip Corps priority transport arrives at my station without any advance word. Which is fine; the Big Man has his fingers in a lot of pies, and he’s under no obligation to keep me apprised of everything. It’s just one of the many things that keeps my job interesting. But second, the dignitary aboard turns out to carry her own personal set of concentric red circles tattooed on her back. That’s a little bit less than fine. Not that drawing moral judgments is within my job description, but I would have liked to know that there could be safety concerns aboard my station. Still, I’ll let that one pass. I’ll also overlook this pair of mynah birds you have working for you; I don’t even wanna know what their story is. We get to third. You’re an honored guest, which means this little errand of yours is bigger than I even wanna think about, and nobody ever got around to tell me that it came with her own personal security issue. Fourth. These suckers who don’t travel were here waiting for you, at the precise time of your arrival, armed with some obscure K’cenhowten gizmo from sixteen thousand years ago, a weapon that’s almost impossible to obtain, a weapon that even if new indicates that somebody’s gone fanatic somewhere. That’s so far from Fine that it leaves Fine back home with the goldfish, because any reasonable respect for the logistics of this particular assassination attempt assures that the not-inconsiderable process of getting all of those pieces into position had to be well under way by the time you three even boarded your transport back on New London. Put that all together, in one portable package with a pretty red bow, and I can only note that we’ve just seen a security breach of pretty fucking historical proportions.”

I remained calm. “Yes, but whose?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“My Dip Corps liaison, Artis Bringen, passed Mr. Bettelhine’s invitation on to me within an hour of receiving it himself. My associates and I departed New London within twelve hours of that. We’ve spent most of the months since then in bluegel, with our drive set to full acceleration. Any conspiracy against my life originating from a security breach at New London, or from anywhere else outside this system, would have had to find out about my itinerary, made its own travel arrangements, depart, and then somehow beat me here in time to spring the trap with Claw of God in hand, an accomplishment that depends on so many nested miracles that we can assume the security breach, and the provision of that Claw, took place here, at some point between Mr. Bettelhine’s decision to invite me and that invitation being sent to my associates back home.”

That shut him down. “That’s it? Good night and good luck?”

“I’m afraid it has to be, sir. My companions and I are here for a specific purpose, involving the interests of your employer, Hans Bettelhine. We have traveled a great distance to be here, at his personal request, and we need to hurry down to Xana and begin addressing his issues right away. We do not have the time, or the resources, to devote full attention to the investigation into this matter. But your own duties do include working with Bettelhine and Confederate law enforcement to gather data on the activities of individuals who would engage in criminal activity aboard this station. So we might as well get out of your way so you can get started.”

Pescziuwicz’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened, then closed. He appealed to Oscin. “Is she always like this?”

“No,” Oscin mourned. “She’s being concise today.”

Pescziuwicz might have exploded then, were it not for the interruption: a signal, unseen and unheard by us that nevertheless commanded his full attention as he warned us to silence with a single index finger, held upright. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, reflecting his own subvocalized responses. His manner grew heated, then disbelieving. He glanced at me, then closed his eyes, substantial tension visible in the throb of his temple and the set of his jaw. “That was the boss. The big boss.”

Hans Bettelhine. Might as well say Genghis Khan or Vlad Dracul or Adolf Hitler or Peter Magrison. Any characterization of myself as a monster had him as instant rebuttal: You think I’m bad? Look at him. “Yes.”

“It’s his planet. His laws. I can’t help it if he wants you released into his custody.”

“But,” I provided.

He folded his arms. “A cautionary tale. A few years ago, your corps sent an unfortunate young man named Bard Daiken to appeal the terms of a debt incurred by a world we don’t need to talk about right now. The member of the Bettelhine Inner Family handling the negotiation is a reasonable man and had no problem negotiating an equitable settlement, but Daiken imagined himself a ball of fire and wanted total debt forgiveness. He wanted to do even better than the terms his superiors had set for him, better in fact than the terms any self-respecting person could be expected to accept. Even then, Mr. Daiken was safe. An agreement could have been reached, eventually, but Daiken exerted certain pressures on Mr. Bettelhine’s negotiators that Mr. Bettelhine considered criminal.”

“Were they criminal, Mr. Pescziuwicz?”

“Just asking the question proves you miss the point. Xana may do business with the Confederacy, but we’ve never been a member world. This is an independent fiefdom, a kingdom unto itself. The Bettelhine Family determines what is criminal here, and it determines how to prosecute those who think they can challenge their law.” He shifted position in his chair and went on. “Ninety-nine point nine nine whatever nine percent of the time, this is not a problem, for us or for our visitors. But then we run into that fraction of one percent, usually in the person of arrogant visiting dignitaries who think they can do or say anything and still trust in their own diplomatic immunity to protect them. I’ve had enough exposure to your personality to warn you that attitude alone didn’t help Daiken.”

Even asking the next question was a sign of weakness, but I could afford it. “What did you do? Torture him? Kill him?”

Pescziuwicz showed teeth. “Local fashions go in and out of style. But if you ask me, what happened to him was worse than both those options—This was a warning, Counselor. Not a threat. I hope you have a productive stay.”

Not a nice stay, I noted. I nodded and rose to my feet, aware without looking that the Porrinyards had also risen behind me, reading my mood with an accuracy that could not have been improved even if my mind had become a third, wired into theirs. Then I hesitated. “You need to issue an alert. There’s a third assassin still at large.”

His spine turned to iron. “Oh, really.”

“Yes, sir. I don’t know if he’s still on Layabout, but if you move quickly and shut down the elevators, you might be able to catch him before he escapes.”

“Did you see this individual? Or are you just guessing?”

Behind me, the Porrinyards moaned as one, either forgetting or ignoring Pescziuwicz’s distaste for simultaneous speech. “Please. Don’t ever accuse her of guessing.”

I merely turned my trademark chill a couple of degrees colder. “I never guess.”

Pescziuwicz was not impressed. “Go ahead.”

“Equipping two conspirators with one handheld weapon amounts to the waste of a perfectly good assassin. Under normal circumstances, one would expect the other to carry something of equivalent lethality. Empty hands suggest a certain imbecilic quality of planning that I would not credit to anybody capable of obtaining this Claw of God thing.”

He regarded me with a certain wary respect. “Agreed.”

“Even assuming for some reason that they could only obtain one weapon of that kind, why would the assassin without the exotic weapon be without any kind of weapon? By any measurement, it’s just poor planning.”

Pescziuwicz’s smile, now broad enough to escape the cover of his mustache, was much easier to read as pure appreciation. “What are we missing, Counselor?”

“The safest course is to assume that they planned better than we believe, that there were weapons on both sides of that concourse, and that the other one was no longer available by the time I showed up. We must further assume that it became unavailable only a short time before my arrival, as there had not been enough time to replace it. My guess? He’d needed to get rid of it in a hurry. And there are a couple of possible explanations for this, chief among them the fear on his part that he’d somehow revealed himself to your Security forces and therefore needed to discard the evidence. But since none of your security people have reported giving these two any special attention, we’re forced to another explanation.

“That’s where the third assassin comes in.

“Imagine a spotter, not involved in the planned attack. The only possible reason one of these two would put a weapon in his hands, and leave himself empty-handed, would be the sudden appearance of a target they hadn’t expected to see, somebody they wanted dead even more than they wanted me dead, somebody this third party needed to start chasing.

“I suspect that you’re running out of time to save whomever he wants to kill.”

Silence filled the air between us.

I saw Pescziuwicz trying to find some flaw in my reasoning, and perceived the moment of resignation when he knew that he could not. His throat muscles moved as he commenced subvocalizing again.

The corridor outside his office began to shake with the sound of pounding feet.