The Third Claw of God

15 FIRST THE CORPSE, THEN THE BARTENDER

The Porrinyards had learned early in our relationship that there were times when they could comfort or reason or shame me out a black mood, and other times when I was just plain unapproachable and best left alone. The difference between the two was a subtle one and they were, as a pair, just about the only person I’d ever known with a gift for discerning one from the other.

It was hardest to ride the worst of my rages when we were working and I needed them to function as assistants and not in their other roles as friends and lovers. They were stuck with me, then, and weathering the storm was an exercise in remaining silent and speaking only when it was necessary to volunteer information or provide brief answers to direct questions. I knew this was goddamned unfair to them, but it seemed to be too central a part of my personality to fix—one reason why a major attribute of their shared function as my only real friends has always been that damnable adjective “only.”

Skye, who was better at riding the storms, if only because she was slighter and smaller (and Oscin’s great wall of a chest provided too tempting a target when I needed something to pound with rage), remained silent as she accompanied me back to the parlor and stood aside as I glared at the cadaver of the being from the world that most wanted me dead.

The corpse had settled farther into the cushions, but its general attitude and position remained the same as the one I’d noted and examined just a few short hours before. But for the stench and the sheer aura of death he might have been any other aged academic, fallen asleep in a favorite easy chair.

I walked around the body a few times, then went to Skye and took the staff, returning to regard the crime scene from every angle. I murmured to myself. I nodded. Then I returned the staff to Skye, went to the bar, poured myself another of Colette’s intoxicating blue drinks, and marched back into our suite, sitting on the edge of the bed while Skye stood in the doorway, silently waiting for me.

“This is evil,” I said.

“Murder always is,” she replied.

I spat venom. “Juje, but that’s just fucking banal. You have two heads between you, you should do better than that. This—what’s pissing me off—isn’t about the murder. The murder’s just today. I’m pissed about what passes for business as usual among these gargoyles. Tell me you don’t see it. Tell me you don’t have any idea why I want fissionables to bombard this world from orbit.”

Skye remained calm. “If it’s not because of the wars they foment and the weapons they sell and all the people dead or living as refugees because of their family business, I’m afraid I don’t know. But those reasons will do. What’s yours?”

I’m afraid I came close to railing at her for being blind and stupid. But as before, her measured tone and unwavering gaze brought me up short. I bit back all the awfulness at the tip of my tongue. “You’ll see when we get Colette up here. It’s…everything I hate.”

“Not including the murder,” she reminded me.

“Yes. That’s another problem.”

“And the problem we happen to be faced with, right now. As I told you before, I have some of the information Jason wanted us to look up in the Khaajiir’s files. Would you like to see it now, or would you prefer to wait until after you’re done with Colette?”

She—no, they; I still had to keep reminding myself, Oscin was part of this even if he wasn’t physically present—they were handling me. I hated being handled, hated that I was so easy to manipulate, hated that they were so goddamned good at it, hated that they had every right because their skill at handling me was one of the things I most needed them for. “When we’re done with Colette, I’ll be too mad for anything but chewing on Bettelhine ass.”

“Then we have our priorities settled, don’t we?”

There was the other source of irritation, raising its ugly head again. Whenever they talk to me like that I feel the invisible hand of the AIsource manipulating them to manipulate me. Again, it was the AIsource that linked them, the AIsource that brought us together, the AIsource that gave us our marching orders. I said, “I know we’ve already had this conversation once tonight, and I apologize for bringing it up again. Are you withholding anything from me? I’m not talking personal stuff. Are our employers using you to control what I know and when I know it?”

She sighed, shifted the staff’s weight in her hands, and said, “You know, Andrea: there’s going to be an upper limit to the number of times you can ask that question without inflicting permanent damage on our relationship.”

“I still need an answer.”

“It’s true. I’m an AIsource agent. It’s part of the deal made by the single-minds Oscin and Skye once were, when they asked for their souls to be linked. It’s part of the deal made by any pair the AIsource enhances in that manner. I’m also loyal to you. It’s part of the deal I made when I became your friend and lover. I have never been asked to pit one loyalty against the other. If I ever withhold anything from you it’s either because, by my considered judgment, it’s none of your business or nothing you need to know. I’ve told you this. You need to accept that it’s no poor reflection on my feelings for you.”

Just a few short hours ago, when she’d last made a speech like that, I’d backed off in shame. This time I held my ground. “None of that affects the essential question, love…especially since you’ve admitted that what you withheld from me earlier was a key realization about Jason and Jelaine.”

“You didn’t need it then!”

“No, I did not. And, true, I’ve since figured it out for myself. But we’re approaching the endgame now. So I need to know. Have you found it necessary to withhold anything else since then? Anything you’ve observed about the guests? Anything you’ve found in the Khaajiir’s database?”

She hesitated. Just a moment. But she hesitated.

Then she said, “Yes.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve absorbed entire volumes of information, Andrea. I’ve only boiled it down to the highlights because it eliminated anything that would distract you from the problems at hand.”

“Why would it distract me? Because it’s irrelevant or because it would disturb the AIsource agenda?”

It was rare for the Porrinyards to retreat from anything, but they retreated now; Skye just looked away, and refused to meet my eyes. “Because it would upset you.”

There was nothing I could say to that.

She went on. “Trust me, Andrea. Keeping you on track is not the same thing as betraying you. The way I feel, the way I’ve always felt, if it ever comes down to a choice, I’ll tell the AIsource to go to hell.”

I studied her for a long time. There was nothing especially earnest in her expression. But there were times, like now, when the presence of one Porrinyard did not just indicate, but also evoke, the presence of the other, when their faces seemed superimposed like a pair of images linked in deliberate montage. “You really would.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

Have you ever noticed that conversations convey more emotional information when they don’t include any words?

After a while, I said, “I think we better get back to work.”

“As you wish.” Showing palpable relief, she crossed the room to hand over the Khaajiir’s staff, retaining her hold even as I claimed my own grip below hers.

It wasn’t necessary, but we both said, “Decch-taanil blaach nil Al-Vaafir.”

“This,” she said, from a million miles away, “is everything I found out about the failed Bettelhine project, Mjolnir.”

Technical stats and progress reports, hundreds of pages long, flipped through my mind, too fast to read. I caught a diagram in which two lines emanating from a satellite in orbit enveloped an entire planetary hemisphere in an area shaded to show effective range. I saw other tables labeled with titles like atmospheric diffusion and ideal surface densities, before the raw data became too much and the volumes of information backed off in favor of Skye’s thumbnail summary.

It turned out to be a typically disgusting sample of Bettelhine hubris, with a minor but potentially interesting connection to the K’cenhowten Claws of God: a misbegotten attempt by a previous Bettelhine administration to amplify the technology involved into an orbital cannon capable of taking out entire regions. The focus requirements had proved harder to overcome than any moral objections the Bettelhines of the era might have had to producing weaponry capable of making every man, woman, and child in range suffer the same fate as the religious heretics the K’cenhowten had once sentenced to death by torture. The project had been abandoned not because it was morally and physically revolting—I almost retched at the thought of billions suddenly pausing in their tracks as everything inside them gushed from their orifices—but because the Bettelhines had lost a fortune trying to get it to work.

I moaned. “Are you sure they gave this up? I don’t even want to live in a universe where they can put something like this on the open market.” Nor one where this was the means of the genocide I’d been warned about.

“Then I won’t make you feel worse that this is no more severe, in terms of its destructive potential, than several items the Family’s been selling for some time. I don’t even want to know about all the projects the Bettelhines must have completed but withheld for fear of their destabilizing impact on the economy. But in this case, I understand enough of what I’ve read to confirm that the project managers ultimately judged the technical difficulties insoluble.”

This established little beyond confirmation that the Bettelhines, or at least past generations of the family, were not unfamiliar with the Claws of God, a disturbing but wholly unsurprising revelation given that reverse engineering the innovations of others would have to be part of their business model.

It also underlined everything I’d always believed about what pricks they were. But Skye was right. It established only that the Claws of God used today might have been Bettelhine re-creations, a possibility already considered that was, at best, a small piece of the puzzle. I filed the data away and told her to move on.

The Khaajiir’s writings on the subject of K’cenhowten’s Enlightenment turned out to be just one of several volumes dealing with the bloody histories of multiple species, from the Third Millennial Self-Immolation of the Cid to the Nazi Holocaust of humanity’s homeworld. He seemed fascinated by the subject, returning again and again to a special thesis: the often just-as-bloody periods of adjustment that tended to follow any extended period of tyranny and injustice. I had not yet picked up the knack of pulling the relevant facts from the explosion of information that overwhelmed me when I tried to read part of one of those theses for myself, but as it had taken the Porrinyards mere minutes to speed-read the specific volume dealing with K’cenhowten’s Age of Enlightenment, Skye was able to point me to the point she found most central.

“The Khaajiirel are the key,” Skye said. “The late professor—I’ll call him that for the time being, to avoid confusion—noted that tyrannies and dictatorships are often so successful at repressing their peoples that chaos, borne from the various grudges and hatreds kept at bay for so long, often follows when the source of that repression is removed. He listed a number of historical strongmen who upon being overthrown or persuaded by liberalizing forces to loosen the chains on their respective societies, were replaced with even more ruinous anarchies. In short, the conquerors and despots ease up and the societies left behind chew off their own legs, reacting with auto-genocides and civil wars that end only when history provides a new order just as bad as the old one. He wrote, ‘A people hip-deep in fire will not stop burning just because would-be reformers decide that fire can be ordered to become water.’ End quote.”

I nodded. “But that didn’t happen to the K’cenhowten. They had the Khaajiirel.”

Skye left me holding the staff and started to pace. “True. Utopian idealists who preached peace and, instead of having their words twisted over the years and centuries to a new dogma capable of prompting inquisitions just as bad as the Age of Terror, actually got what they wanted: the tyrants overthrown, the hatred felt against their kind forgotten after only a few years. It’s not unheard of for peacemakers on any world to accomplish such a thing, but most often that occurs only when the emancipation arrives after a handful of generations. According to our professor, that’s a far cry from sudden changes of regime that have stood for centuries or longer. They possess a historical momentum almost impossible to stop without a disastrous crash. To put it another way, you can sit the various factions down at tables and tell them to play nice, but they’ll still start arguing over crimes the privileged committed against the not-so-privileged among their great-great grandparents. Again, if I can quote: ‘Claiming that the Khaajiirel accomplished otherwise, with just the force of their own ideals, is to embrace a naïveté stunning in its idiocy. The miracle claimed of them would have required a despotism dedicated to benevolence, one that forced their world’s first free generation to also become its first generation unpolluted by past evils. It was not a despotism they could have had the power to create in secret, not without leaving yet another black stain on their history. And yet they did what they did, burying all memory of their own brand of tyranny as they had buried the reign of terror that had made it necessary.’ End quote.”

I found myself seized by a chill. “Does he specify how he thinks the historical Khaajiirel managed it?”

“No. It’s just a vague suggestion, nothing more. But that’s the theory of historical momentum that Jason referenced when you pressured him for more information.”

I said, “I’m not sure I like the idea of Bettelhines, any Bettelhines, reading that paragraph. Let alone idealist Bettelhines like Jason and Jelaine.”

“Neither do I. Nor am I encouraged by the idea of Hans Bettelhine, who has never been an idealist, and who would no doubt prefer for his family to continue doing business as usual, suddenly deciding he wants to spend a year in our professor’s presence. It makes no sense.” She hesitated. “If it helps, I’ve determined the reason the Khaajiir’s such a hated, controversial figure on Bocai. Why some factions would like to assassinate him.”

“What is it?”

“He made light of their hatred for you.”

My heart thumped. “What?”

“He stood up in front of a large crowd at his university and said, ‘The phenomenon that led to the massacre is not, as so many of us would have it, solely a human one. We know better than that. Nor is it confined to Bocaians, even if so many Bocaians trapped in that community on that day committed crimes just as brutal as those committed by the Hom.Saps among them. Harping on that terrible day, urging the never-ending hatred of those who participated on one side, while ignoring the universality of the community-wide spasm, ignoring the clear evidence that this was not a tragedy of clashing cultures and moralities but of unknown other factors that would have affected any sentient creature present on that day, is the equivalent of allowing the terrible anomaly to make our decisions for us. And it is especially tragic that, betraying everything that is great about our people, we focus the impulse to demonize the people present on that day on the face of the most innocent, whose subsequent lives have been the most blighted.’” She looked up at me and concluded, “Then he said, ‘If we are ever to achieve understanding, we need to do what the historical Khaajiirel would have done. We need to stand up as one and forgive the massacre’s most maligned innocent, the human Andrea Cort…’”

I had seen the last line coming for more than half of her recitation; indeed, I’d suspected something like that since the Khaajiir first treated me with genuine warmth. But the words hit like a hammerblow anyway. I tried to say something, but found myself obliged to excuse myself and spend the next several minutes locked in my suite’s bathroom, thinking of the siblings I’d seen murdered and of the weight of a night I’d already carried with me for too many years. This was something I’d rarely admitted to myself: not only that I’d loved Bocai as much as I’d loved my family, but that I still felt the same way after so many years of being demonized as the girl who plucked out the eyes of a Bocaian neighbor and used them as playthings. It would have meant a lot to me to hear forgiveness from a Bocaian’s lips.

After a few minutes the immediate emotional tsunami subsided, and I was able to return to Skye with dry eyes and more troubling questions. “But why would the Bettelhines give a royal shit one way or another? They’ve never been a part of my life and I’ve never been a part of theirs. Are they commencing new careers as angels of compassion, forcing feuding peoples to shake hands and play nice? Was I invited here as an honored guest just to scratch the Khaajiir’s moral itch?”

“I have no contribution at this time, Andrea.”

“Even if they did decide it was important to give their pet Bocaian professor a present, what difference would it make? He’s just one Bocaian, not even a decision-maker. The majority would still hate me. He’d tell me he was sorry about the way things are between his people and me, I’d say I appreciated the gesture, and we’d have nothing else to say to one another. That’s one hell of a stupid reason to drag a total stranger from her home with minimal notice.”

Skye bit her lip. The Porrinyards must have wanted to take the nobler view of things, but they were also prevented from doing so by their very common sense, and it hurt them to give up on the happy ending. “I suppose it’s possible.”

“No, it’s not possible. Not with the Bettelhines involved. Not with everything else I know about them, not with what I intend to demonstrate to you when we finally get that sparkly slut of a bartender in here. There’s not an atom of instinctive benevolence in them. There must be something else, maybe in some of the other materials Jason suggested.”

“I’m sure there is. Alas, it took some time to get past the Khaajiir’s history, and I’ve yet to find any galvanizing connection.”

“What about this Lillian Jane Bettelhine Jason mentioned?”

Skye took the staff from my hands and walked away, spinning it absently as she contemplated the best route into whatever followed. “I think she may be one of those wastes of time I mentioned.”

“That bad?”

“That dull. She appears to have been one of the reform-minded relatives Dejah talked about; she caught the pacifism bug early and argued that the family needed to become a more positive force in human civilization. Her sentiments, as far as I can tell, were just standard Utopianism: not far from the Khaajiir’s in tone, but far inferior in depth.”

“Give me a sample,” I said.

“From an essay she wrote at nineteen, one that could not have gone over well with her private tutors: ‘I can’t look at the way we do business without seeing that our affect on the rest of the human species is toxic. We spread like a sickness, our very presence poisoning the wells that others drink from, our trade inspiring entire worlds to turn upon themselves like starving rats chewing off their own limbs. It is not enough for me to declare that I won’t be part of the corruption myself, if I still live life sharing in the profit. I have to do more. I need to do more. I ache to be an anti-Bettelhine: if not in the sense of warring on my family, then at least in some smaller way, proving by example that we can replenish some of the hope we’ve stolen.’”

“That sounds like more than typical adolescent rebellion.”

“You would think so. In truth, she was always very careful to separate her love for her family as people from her rejection of everything they stood for. Unfortunately, she was as naïve as she was idealistic, and so it never occurred to her that her statement of principles, mild as it reads to us, could get her into trouble with Mom and Dad. Not long after she penned those words she was deemed a disruptive force, useless for all corporate purposes, and subjected to internal exile at one of several estates the Family maintains for that purpose—hardly, as Dejah indicated, the first or last time something of the sort had happened. I doubt she wanted for anything in her life but freedom.”

“What happened to her?”

“The Bettelhine genealogy lists her as deceased, not many years afterward. I don’t know whether she remained in Internal Exile or left Xana, but she was certainly never a corporate force.”

I refrained from scolding Skye, even in jest, for this gap in her intelligence. Allowing for all the extreme compression required of them, the Porrinyards must have already gleaned more data from the Khaajiir’s files than I could have found given weeks to work with. But Lillian Jane Bettelhine’s scandalous opinions didn’t fill in a missing piece of the jigsaw so much as establish the existence of an entirely new region of the puzzle. I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “There’s got to be a connection, love. Do you think Jason intends to model himself on his late aunt?”

“That would be a step back for him. He’s hooked up with his sister and consolidated a substantial power base that threatens Philip’s role as heir apparent. Lillian Jane said a few intemperate things before being shuffled off to some cozy family gulag where she wouldn’t disturb anybody by causing uncomfortable silences at parties. On a global level, there was nothing to emulate about her but for a few principled words.”

Skye’s determination to minimize Lillian Jane at any cost was beginning to get on my nerves. “Words have been known to move mountains.”

“And mountains,” Skye said, “are easier to move than empires. Trust me, Andrea. I understand the natural impulse to paint Lillian as a great visionary, but there’s no indication that she ever had any truly revolutionary ideas capable of affecting more than her own personal conduct. You can translate everything she wrote up to that point as the bland self-serving declaration I will be a good person, devoid of any additional context or detail. I don’t think she ever presented a real threat to the Bettelhine status quo, at least not as much as Jason and Jelaine seem to.”

I had noticed the careful use of the phrase up to that point. “And yet Jason said she’s important. How?”

Skye spun the Khaajiir’s staff in her hands, not so much plumbing its data as distracting herself with baton twirls. The lights it reflected spun around the walls like glowing coins. “Not to the problem at hand.”

I waited for her to offer something else.

But the answer to that question, if it existed, remained locked in the crystal staff.

Part of me wanted to continue looking. I could feel something tremendous lurking in that direction. But the Porrinyards were correct about one thing. Right now, all other questions paled against the identity of the individual who had placed the Claw of God against the Khaajiir’s back.

If Skye was so certain that the travails of Lillian Jane Bettelhine were irrelevant to that question, then it was time to leave her behind and start setting off bombs.

Especially since I was already juggling several that remained undetonated.

I could feel a special kind of anticipatory anger, the kind that would give me strength for the confrontations to come, welling up inside me as I told Skye, “All right, then. Have Oscin send that annoying little quiff up here.”

“I’m already bringing her,” Skye said, her voice deepening to indicate Oscin’s. Then, in her own softer tones: “I could tell you were ready from the look in your eyes.”

Colette Wilson sat, puzzled but as obliging as always, in the suite’s most comfortable chair, offering several attempts at a tentative half-smile that only grew broader as I obliged her with a kind, encouraging look of my own. Her spirit and vitality had been depleted not at all by the stress of the hours since the Khaajiir’s death; though she’d been willing to take the chair, she perched at its very edge, her back straight and her eyes round as she awaited her opportunity to answer any questions I might provide. At some point in the last hour she’d washed up and replenished her makeup, providing a thin touch of eyeliner to accentuate her bejeweled eyes and bring her gamine look back into sharp relief. Her electric hair remained inactive, thank Juje. Either she continued to find its display programs too grim for the occasion, or she knew that they rendered any undistracted conversation with her almost impossible.

Now that she was alone with us and away from the Bettelhines, she revealed a simmering fascination for Skye, asking her if she really remembered everything Oscin had said and done since the two had been apart.

Skye said, “You want to know what he’s doing right now?”

Colette colored, glanced at me, then hid her little grin with a fan of her fingertips. Not hidden at all, the fanning gesture as expressive as the grin itself had been. Like most people enjoying their first encounter with a linked pair, she could not help thinking about the erotic possibilities.

I sensed how easy it would have been to like her, if I allowed myself.

If I didn’t consider her obscene.

Skye wasn’t fooled by my gentle demeanor as I told Colette my questions would be no more than routine, and apologized again for snapping at her before dinner. But she remained silent, merely backing me up with smiles and nods and occasional leading questions that followed my leads.

What followed was, for most of its length, by design one of the dullest and least informative interrogations I’ve ever conducted.

Any pretense that I might have considered Colette an important witness faded as I exhausted substantive matters and steered toward fripperies, such as the important people she’d hosted in her years on the carriage, and her favorite places to spend her time off. She told a funny but respectful story about Arturo’s fussy behavior. I made a little scandalous joke about Philip Bettelhine. She tittered and found the nerve to ask how long the Porrinyards and I had been together. I told her, offering a cute and slightly risque detail for lagniappe. More laughter.

We had a great time. We became good friends.

By the time another twenty minutes had passed, it was all one great big fucking party.

At which point, I shook my head to deny the most recent burst of gentle laughter, shot a sharp glance at Skye, and repeated, “You know, I really do need to apologize again for the way I treated you during dinner. I was out of line and I apologize.”

She fanned her fingertips over her lips again. “You don’t have to keep doing that, Counselor. I understand. It’s not the first time I’ve ever had to deal with a stressed-out client.”

“Thank you,” I said, with dripping sincerity. “Because it’s really become important to me that we get along.”

“Thank you. I feel the same way.”

“That’s good, because you’ve impressed me so much with your vivacity that when—not if, but when—we reach Xana, I’d like you to take some time off and stay with my companions and me. We’d like you to be our personal valet.”

Never had eyes been so bright, or a smile so ingenuous. “I’d like that.”

Skye began to see it, realization just beginning to turn her own amiable expression into the beginnings of a scowl. “You do understand, this invitation means you’d be sharing our bed.”

Now Colette seemed incandescent with happiness. “Oh, of course.”

I said, “It also means that you’ll make yourself available whenever we wanted you. You know that this is important business we have with Mr. Bettelhine. There are times when we’d have to leave to tend to important company matters, and might not be back for weeks. You’d have to confine yourself to whatever quarters we’re assigned, occupying yourself however you can until we get around to making our way back. During this time you’d also have to refrain from any contact with your own friends or family. That is, if you have any friends and family. This situation might last, oh, I don’t know, a year or two. Maybe three. Do you have any problems with that, Colette? Any problems at all?”

She said, “Not as long as it was cleared with my Bettelhine sponsor.”

“Which Bettelhine is that?”

“Magnus.”

“We haven’t heard of that one.”

“He’s one of the uncles,” Colette explained. “He’s a much younger brother of Hans. Not much older than Philip really.”

“Uh-huh. And he’s the one who hired you?”

“Yes, Counselor. He’s the one who gave me this opportunity. I wouldn’t want to be unavailable for him if he needed me for a trip up to Layabout.”

“Yes,” I said, with a pleasant twinkle, “I’m beginning to understand how your orbital station got its name.”

Colette tittered, the fingertips fanning her lips again.

Skye, who was beginning to look ill, said, “Where did he find you?”

The bartender crossed her legs, arching her back to emphasize the curve of her breasts, her entire manner now more about flaunting her sensuality. Even her voice had become throatier, more of a seductive whisper. “I was one of the researchers at a Bettelhine facility in the outer system. We were charged with reverse-engineering an intelligent guidance system the Cid developed for the mass-driving planetary defense grid.”

“Sounds like tough work,” I said, shaking my head at the impossibly complex world of high-level weapons research. “It’s certainly over my head!”

The haunted Skye managed a version of my own impressed laughter, but there was no amusement in her eyes. “What level of education do you need to merit a position like that?”

Colette grinned. “I received my second doctorate when I was nineteen.”

“And when did Magnus meet you?”

“When I was twenty-five. I’ve always looked younger than I am, and he’s seen to it that I’ve had some rejuvenation treatments since I took this position.”

“How long ago was that?”

There was a moment’s hesitation, as Colette did the necessary arithmetic in her head. “Ten years.”

“Were you involved with anyone when he found you?”

“I was engaged to be married, Counselor.”

“What was the lucky guy’s name?”

“Erik Descansen. He was my lab partner.”

“Did you ever get married?”

“We stay in touch. He understands that this is an important assignment. He knows that we’ll see each other again someday.”

Skye was now covering her mouth with her hand. It was one of the occasional drawbacks of having two minds in one: twice as much empathy. Get past their horror filters and they feel it twice as much as anybody else.

I, on the other hand, pride myself in my ability to play cold bitch, and hadn’t allowed my predatory smile to waver a millimeter. “So let’s review, shall we? It’s been ten years since you voluntarily abandoned your education, your research career, your fiancé Erik, and your plans for your future to work full-time aboard the Royal Carriage as Magnus Bettelhine’s bartender and concubine, where you will if requested also make yourself physically available for the sexual entertainment of any other guest who wants you.”

“Yes.”

“Arturo Mendez was recruited from a beach resort, the closest thing to the homeworld he’d been missing his entire life, to serve as ‘companion’ to a ‘lonely,’ elderly Bettelhine named Conrad. Was making himself sexually available to Conrad among the terms of his employment?”

“Oh, yes. I remember Conrad. He was a kind and generous man. And he loved Arturo so much. He died a while back. Arturo still mourns him.”

“I seem to remember Arturo expressing a personal preference for women. Is he bisexual?”

“Not in his private life. But Conrad was Inner Family.”

I pressed further. “What about your fellow stewards, Paakth-Doy and Loyal Jeck? Are they also expected to perform a similar range of duties?”

“Loyal was once a favorite of a Bettelhine cousin Melinda. Melinda fell out of favor and hasn’t been aboard for a couple of years. He doesn’t talk much; I think she liked the silent type, and he misses her. I don’t know about Paakth-Doy. She’s an emergency replacement, and hasn’t attracted anybody’s attention yet.”

“But if she impresses somebody,” I said, “she’ll be given a permanent assignment?”

Skye muttered, “Not if I have a single fucking thing to say about it.”

Colette’s fixed smile wavered only a little as she turned her attention to the passenger who had just shown anger without warning. “Is there a problem?”

“Never mind,” I said. “Come here. There’s something I want to do.”

She stood and approached me, stopping when she was closer than she truly had to be. Sitting as I was, I found myself looking up at her breasts. They were firm, impressive, and likely, at least in part, artificial. From my position underneath those curves I could have slipped my arms around her, and pulled her toward me, had that been what I wanted. Instead, showing a sudden anger I did not need to work very hard to summon, I stood and slapped her cheek with a force that made Skye wince from sympathetic pain.

Colette’s reaction was more puzzlement than anger or hurt. “Why did you do that, Counselor?”

“In mathematical terms, I’m affirming the corollary to a proof. Aren’t you angry at me? Don’t you want to hit me back?”

She did the worst thing she could have done at that moment.

She tittered again.

“No. You’re an honored guest.”

“Oh,” I said, “in that case I forgive you.” And I slapped her again, this time harder than I intended, enough to feel the impact halfway up my arm. I could have hit her again and again, because I wanted to; the only thing that kept me from doing it was the knowledge, so deep inside me that my belly lurched from the weight of it, that if I started I wouldn’t stop until it became an out-and-out beating, more brutal by far than anybody but Bettelhines deserved. “That one’s because I felt like it. If you work for me, it will probably be the first in a very long series. I’m unpredictable that way. It’s what I enjoy. I especially like breaking bones. Will you come to enjoy that, and look forward to it, when we’re all together in our shared quarters, at Hans Bettelhine’s estate?”

Colette’s eyes had gone dreamy. “I’ve always wanted to visit the main estate. They say it’s beautiful.”

I slapped her again, but even that was not enough to dispel my disgust at what had been done to her, what she had allowed to be done to her, so I found myself casting about for a fresh outrage, something that would rob her of any dignity that still remained. I snapped, “Would you—”

Skye cried, “That’s enough!”

It was the angriest cry the Porrinyards had ever directed at me, either as individuals or as linked pair: a sharp burst of pure revulsion that forced me to see myself through their eyes and brought me back from the edge of the abyss.

I was left blinking, as disgusted by myself as she could have been from what she’d just seen in me.

When Skye stood, there was a coldness in her eyes I’d never seen there before. “I’m sorry, Andrea. But you’ve made your point.” Then she turned to Colette. “Please go back downstairs, miss. Tell the others we’ll be contacting them again in a few minutes.”

Colette seemed wholly unable to comprehend why the seduction she still perceived as friendly had just gone so awry. After a moment she said, “All right,” and went to the door, stopping just long enough to cast an eye over her shoulder and said, “It’s all good, Counselor. From where I sit, it’s good to feel happy.”

The door closed.

Skye and I stared at each other from across the elegantly appointed room. She opened her mouth as if to say something else, something that might have come out filled with venom. A second passed before she decided to put it off, her reticence more about keeping us both focused on the issue than dismissing the side of me she’d just seen.

I wanted to go to her, wrap her in my arms, and weep that I wasn’t part of this, that this was Bettelhine corruption, that I was still me. But there was no point, because it would have denied the nature of the problem.

I was who I’d always been.

And I had to be fair. Even if this did turn out to be their saturation point, the Porrinyards had already lasted far longer than anybody else could have ever imagined.

I said, “We’ll talk about this later.”

Skye nodded and looked away, not quite ready to answer.

I cleared my throat, and spoke in a voice unexpectedly thick. “In any event, we now know at least part of what Mrs. Pearlman does for them….”