Free The Third Claw of God by Adam-Troy Castro

the Claw was worse. The Claw was a way of telling nonbelievers:Your shell is nothing to us. We don’t even need to damage it to get to the meat of you.
    It was hard to believe that a regime that demented could fall after holding their power for that long, but it did, after a rebellion that ripped the ruling party from its throne. A countertyranny that lasted a century or so subjected many of the descendants of that first reign of terror to much the same treatment, for equally trivial reasons. Then the Khaajiirel, a word related to the K’cenhowten word foragriculture , arrived. There appeared to have been no single, messianic leader, just a determined consensus among many individuals capable of saying no when they believed enough was enough. They stopped the cycle, restoring K’cenhowten politics to something approaching sanity, within a mere generation. Sixteen thousand years later, enter our Professor Kassasir, a Bocaian academic of impeccable credentials known for his works in fields that corresponded to history, mathematics, exohistory, exoneurology, and exopsychology. Those latter specialties, devoted to the wiring and function of alien minds, were of sufficient disinterest to most Bocaians that his achievements in those fields had earned him little more than footnoted obscurity. But that was before his fascination with K’cenhowten’s reign of terror, a lurid subject that had brought him a low level of celebrity when his paper on the subject earned him more offworld attention than he’d ever received among his own people. That had changed things for him. He’d been the local boy who made good. He’d spent most of his time, in lectures, trying to explain how the Khaajiirel, who he called the “splendid miracle,” could have halted the fevered momentum of all the bloody history that came before them. Then he’d done something that had led his university to fire him for cause. And some time after that, he’d left Bocai, leaving no forwarding address.

    “That’s all very interesting,” I said, my tone establishing that it was not, “but what are the Bettelhines doing with him?”
    The three of us were still in bed, the Porrinyards bracketing me on both sides, the remaining moisture from the shower prickling as it dried on our bare skin. Skye had stopped rubbing my shoulder, and now rested her hand on my hip. I could only damn the dinner invitation. We’d have to get ready before too long.
    “I don’t know,” the Porrinyards said. “It could be anything. I know that rich people sometimes adopt artists like pets. There’s no reason to believe the Bettelhines wouldn’t do the same thing for obscure utopian alien academics.”
    “Jason called the Khaajiir’s presence a sensitive corporate secret.”
    “True. But there’s sensitive and there’s sensitive. The Bettelhines could be underwriting his historical research out of noblesse oblige, keeping his presence classified until they have something sufficiently glorious to merit a public unveiling. Or they could have found some practical application to some discovery he made in one of his other disciplines, something big enough to make them want to make him a personal guest. Right now we don’t have enough data to know.”
    Flailing for a pattern, knowing it useless, I ventured, “We have those assassins.”
    “True. And what do they prove, at this point?”
    I hated to admit it, but the answer was Nothing. Even if we could confirm that they’d been his target, we still didn’t know whether their reason for wanting him dead had anything to do with any work he might have been doing for Bettelhine. “We have me. We know it has something to do with me.”
    “We know it looks that way, because the Bettelhines have made such a point of withholding the information until we can connect with their father. But maybe he just considers it too sensitive to be left to the kids. And maybe he just wants you to tolerate a few hours in the Khaajiir’s presence