The Third Claw of God (16 page)

As for me?

All the uncertainty over why I was here, all the strain of dealing with the masters of a corporate empire, all the pressure of being owned outright by beings whose intentions toward me were shaky at best, all the shock of being targeted for death myself, all the horror of learning that a key assumption of my past had been a lie all along, and all the terror of the additional weight of the fresh challenge the AIsource had placed on my back, all went away, subsumed by something larger, something I had been carrying with me for most of the life.

For the first time since my arrival at Layabout, I was at home.

I knew why I was here and I knew what I was meant to do.

At the first moment of relative silence, I said it. “Someone in this room is a murderer.”

I had to give Philip Bettelhine credit. He gave as good as he got.

He croaked, “You mean, somebodyother than you?”

8

POST-MORTEM

There was another flurry of yells, with the Pearlmans and the stewards demanding to know what Philip had meant by that, Jason trying to tell them that it didn’t matter right now, Jelaine telling everybody to talk one at a time, and the Porrinyards trying to calm them all down so we could move on. Dejah Shapiro seized control, by slamming her palm against the bar just once, the impact a thunderclap. She waited for the chaos to collapse in the face of the order she had demanded, then spoke with repressed fury. “Yes. For those of you who didn’t already know, Counselor Cort and the Bocaian people have had a violent prior history. Yes, the story’s a long and unpleasant one and is not new intelligence to myself, or to our hosts. Yes, if you want details, I assume you’ll hear them real soon. But this isnot the moment. ” She stared down every face in the room, before glancing at me. “Andrea? You were saying?”

Any of the Bettelhines would have made an appropriate target for my next words, but Philip seemed to be my opposition here, so I went for him. “Sir. We need to organize a full investigation.”

He looked like a man who had just bitten into something foul. “Now?”

“Well, you can wait until we don’t have a murder victim, but that would make no sense.”

He spared another nauseated glance at the Khaajiir. “Don’t we have more pressing concerns right now?

Like survival?”

“None,” I said, “within our current powers to address.”

“Yes.” Philip admitted. “But whoever did this…horrible thing…is stuck in here like the rest of us.”

“And damn you,” Jason muttered. “Whoever you are.”

Jelaine didn’t offer that much restraint. “Oh, he’s damned all right. “The Khaajiir was our friend. He was a personal guest of our father. His blood isour blood.Whoever did this… will never be able to run far enough.”

I took their personal grief as very much beside the point, and answered Philip. “The corollary, sir, is that we’re stuck in here with him. Orthem .”

His eyes narrowed. “Just how many killers do you think there are?”

“I have no idea, sir. But the possibility of more than one is worth considering, given that Mr. Pescziuwicz already has two in custody up at Layabout, and the existence of a conspiracy always suggests an unknown number of collaborators.”

“You still don’t have any reason to believe that’s true here.”

“Nor do I have any reason to rule it out. I once heard of a famous murder case, aboard another stranded vessel, where it was essentially every passenger on board. Right now we don’t know anything except that we all remain in danger until we know who’s guilty and who’s not.”

Philip gave me a disgusted look. “Yes, but of all the people in this room, you’re the only one known to have murdered Bocaians before. Why should we trust you?”

“Sir. I don’t consider myself above suspicion. I may know I’m innocent, and have faith that my associates are innocent, but I also know that I’m not about to persuade you of either proposition until I demonstrate to your satisfaction just who committed the crime. Similarly, I know that your family has killed any number of people over the years, even if the preponderance of those victims were slaughtered by proxy via the weapons you design, mass-produce, and sell. You’re all part of that enterprise yourselves, and so neither you, nor your employees, all the way down to the stewards, escape suspicion, either as the Khaajiir’s principal murderer or as fellow conspirators. Even the sole person here unaffiliated with either the Bettelhine organization, or myself—that would be Mrs. Shapiro—is a suspect. As you established earlier, she’s been an enemy of your family for years, and we all know she has financial resources that equal your own, and thus provide her with more than enough influence to arrange this. So we’re all under suspicion, and can cease taking that fact personally. The fact remains that, right now, we’re all the prisoners of somebody who can not only smuggle a deadly weapon on board, but also has the capacity to isolate us by arranging the complete communications shutdown after this so-called emergency stop.”

He licked his lips. “You can’t know those was arranged too.”

I raised my voice to a near shout. “Show of hands! Who within the sound of my voice is confident that the emergency stop, the loss of communications, and the murder of the Khaajiir all have nothing to do with one another?” Silence. “Don’t be shy, people! If you believe that, stand up for it!”

The silence, broken only by scattered sobs from Dina Pearlman, persisted. Jelaine murmured something inaudible to Dejah, who whispered something back. Skye, who was beside them, twitched her lips in appreciation. Something to ask her about, when I had a chance.

“There’s something else that needs to be established,” I said, turning away from Philip and sweeping my gaze from one set of frightened eyes to another. “We have not yet confirmed that help is coming. If it is coming, we don’t know how long it will take to get here. We don’t know if the people at Layabout or at Anchor Point have any bigger problems to deal with. We don’t know whether the damage already done to this cabin poses any additional threat to our lives. We don’t know if the killer, or killers, is satisfied with the one corpse or if there are any remaining targets. And finally, we don’t know whether the answers to any of these questions will wait until help can arrive and take over the investigation…or whether we must race the clock if we hope to get out of here alive. The only thing weknow is that we’ve been left with no other immediate possibility of helping ourselves.This is something we can do .”

Philip coughed. “And…I suppose…you want to run the investigation, yes?”

“Please, sir. I know I have no jurisdiction here. I don’t mean to overstep my bounds. Were your man Mr. Pescziuwicz or some other authority you trusted available, I’d shut up and defer to him. But who in this room, aside from my associates and myself, has had experience running criminal investigations?

You?”

To my surprise, Dejah Shapiro raised her hand. “Ummm…I’ve had to do it, several times.”

There was silence as I gaped at her, my precious momentum derailed. I was not alone in that, either; just about everybody forgot our current predicament long enough to gather from her expression that she was entirely serious.

Of all of us, it was Jelaine who ventured, “Really?”

“Really.” For a moment Dejah just looked tired, less like a woman who had spent much of her life cocooned by extreme wealth than one who had known more than her share of struggle and heartbreak. It aged her, but only for a moment, and then the vitality came rushing back in. “Some of you already know that I once found myself saddled with a sociopathic ferret of a husband, one Ernst Vossoff, whose messes needed to be cleaned up on a regular basis. There were occasions, in places cut off from my usual resources, where…well, where I was the only one available to connect the dots.” She turned to me. “Just providing a footnote, Counselor. I’m not claiming my experience adds up to anything as distinguished as my own.”

“Appreciated,” I said. “Maybe it will prove helpful anyway.”

Philip glanced at his brother and sister, neither of whom had raised any objections to me taking command of the situation. They just met his gaze, giving him nothing. After a moment, he ventured, “Since you do admit you’re a suspect, how do you suggest we work this, so we can trust each other?”

Oscin stood beside the Khaajiir’s body, awaiting further instructions. Skye was still with Dejah and Jelaine. Neither had spoken a word, or made a move to interrupt the confrontation between Philip and me since the moment Dejah silenced the party. But I didn’t need to know them as well as I did to know that their shared mind was racing.

I said, “I’ll need to step aside, for a moment, and confer with my associates. I’ll leave one here and take the other. But even the two of us who walk away will still be in sight every second. Watch us and make sure of it. In the meantime,nobody leaves this room .”

Ileft it up to the Porrinyards to decide which one joined me. The volunteer turned out to be Oscin. He accompanied me to the other side of the capsized dinner table, at one point steadying my arm as I stepped over the place where an upended bowl oozed yellow cream into a carpet already spotted with damp. We didn’t stop until we were up against the bulkhead, until recently a scenic view of Xana, now a claustrophobic closeup of emergency shutters, shutting out everything else in the universe. My left shoe made a noise as it pulled free of something sticky. “What a mess.”

Oscin kept his voice low. “Which one are you talking about?”

“The whole thing, of course. The murder. The politics. Even the family relationships, here. You did pick up that Philip’s the odd man out in this particular collection of Bettelhine siblings?”

He nodded. “It’s all over their body language, and the way they speak to one another. And you saw that he’s not happy about that?”

I spared a look at Philip, who had stepped aside with Jason and Jelaine, the three of them already engaged in intense conversation. Philip looked angry, Jason upset but placatory. Jelaine stood between them, watching both their faces, not participating for the moment but very much prepared to step in, as either peacemaker or manipulator. “I won’t say they hate him, or that he hates them, but there’s definitely some powerful tension going on. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it goes back years. Maybe even before Jason’s disappearance.”

Oscin followed my gaze. “Oscin the single had the same kind of strained relationship with his older brother. They didn’t want to fight, but by the time they reached their teens, they always approached each other with excessive delicacy, rather than risk tugging at some emotional tripwire and setting off the explosion neither wanted. As a result, nothing ever got said. This feels…something like that.”

“Maybe Philip never forgave Jason for going away.”

“Maybe,” Oscin said. “Maybe it has to do with wherever he went.”

“We’ve been given an explanation for that.” I left out the drama and, over the next few minutes, summarized the story Jelaine had told me before dinner, concluding with: “It could all be bullshit, of course. Have you ever heard of this place, this Deriflys?”

“No,” he admitted. “But if the story’s true, and Jason did have to live like an animal to survive, it could very easily explain why Philip would resent him for it. He’s the type who would consider it a stain on the family honor, or something—more so if Jason was a favorite who remained a favorite even after he came back, sullied but forgiven. A jealous sibling, of the kind who always obeyed the rules without question, and always lived up to everything his parents expected, might even come to hate the one who involved the family in scandal but was still granted the rewards of a favorite son.”

He went distant for a moment, perhaps weighing the information we had, perhaps giving his full attention to whatever Skye was hearing. Then he said, “What about the AIsource? Have you attempted to contact them again?”

“On and off since we stopped. They’re not answering. I’m not even getting the buzz I get when they’re receiving but not in the mood to acknowledge. Either they’re cut off by whatever’s shut down all the Bettelhine hytex links, or they’re determined for us to handle this ourselves.”

“I suspected as much,” he said. “It’s a pain in the ass, though. I can deal with being trapped here, but it would be nice to know what’s going on outside, if help is coming or not.”

“It’s coming. With Bettelhines aboard, it’s coming. But the silence so far gives me the impression it’s going to be a long wait. Something’s interfering.”

He nodded without surprise. “Unseen Demons?”

“I don’t know. Could be. Not enough data to know.” Once upon a time I’d had the habit of nibbling my fingernails at moments of intense concentration. My fingers had looked raw much of the time, but it had been something to do, some way to postpone speaking while I chose the right thought of the many possibilities clamoring for my attention. Sometimes, like now, I missed it. “There’s something else I want to ask about. Earlier, as Skye, you told me you’d picked up an implication you didn’t consider any of my business.”

“That was before this became a murder investigation and it became important data. Do you need me to tell you now?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve already figured out what you must have been talking about. I think I’d already sensed it for a while, but it wasn’t until after the emergency stop that I went back over everything else I’d been seeing and knew for sure. You can rest your conscience and consider this secret spilled without your help.”

His relief was palpable. “Should we let on that we know?”

“We might as well pretend that we’re still out of the loop, watch what happens, and reserve the big reveal in case we find ourselves needing to spring it during questioning.”

“Good plan. What else?”

“Jelaine and Dejah exchanged some words during my confrontation with Philip. Skye was present. What did they say?”

He surprised me by breaking into a rueful grin. “It’s not important, but you should know. It was right after you made Philip back down. Jelaine said, ‘Wow.’ And Dejah said, ‘That’s my girl.’”

I don’t know what I’d expected. Certainly not a whispered confidence between two conspirators cackling that their evil machinations were all proceeding according to plan. But the answer sandbagged me. It was a moment before I could answer. “Really?”