Adam-Troy Castro: The Third Claw of God

“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.