At the tenth second I said, “Very well. You’ve been warned.
“This explanation leaves out certain personal information about the lives of some of the Bettelhines among us, and about certain questionable security measures taken by the corporation that have already been discussed in private with Philip, Jason, and Jelaine.
“It also leaves out a host of questions that remain unanswered. I’ll be pointing out a few of these along the way, but you do not need to know any of this information or much of the data we gleaned from the Khaajiir’s personal records to follow the specific route that leads us to the Khaajiir’s murderer.”
I coughed, searched the faces of the arrayed suspects for signs that anybody was anticipating me, and moved on.
“So this is what you need to keep in mind about the crime itself.
“The Khaajiir was murdered with a K’cenhowten Claw of God, the same kind of weapon the Bocaian assassins on Layabout had previously attempted to use on me.
“There was, much later, an attempt on the life of Mr. Wethers, and my own, using another ancient weapon known as a Fire Snake.” A murmur of surprise rippled through the room. “I believe this to have been a distraction, intended to obscure the murderer’s true purposes, and mention it now only for the sake of thoroughness. We will put it aside for now, and focus on the use of the Claw of God.
“The first critical question: why use something so rare, so obscure, especially in such close proximity to a civilization based on the development of weaponry that might have provided access to any number of practical alternatives?
“It’s certainly not for religious reasons. The sect that first designed and used the device has been extinct for some sixteen millennia. There’s no evidence that it has ever found any popularity among Bocaians. The Khaajiir’s own interest in K’cenhowten history was academic and based less on the crimes committed during their dark age than with the great achievement of the historical Khaajiirel in preventing a violent aftermath in the years that followed. Committing the murder with a Claw of God might have some symbolic value, I suppose, but who but a historian would ever care?
“No. Killing the Khaajiir, or me, with a Claw of God has no purpose beyond sowing confusion among those who would later be obliged to investigate the crime by focusing attention on a period long past and implying a connection to the Khaajiir’s scholarly work.
“The same is true for any other murder committed around him. This would have been doubly true if the attack on me had ended with my death. Everybody would have said, Oh well, of course, the Bocaians hate her, almost as much as they hate the Khaajiir for wanting to forgive her. Using a weapon he wrote about to kill her is just poetic justice.
“And yet the symbolic weight of the attack on me is almost certainly a coincidence, since one of the first things we determined was that the timeline suggests a conspiracy well under way long before anybody could have known I was even heading for Xana.
“The Bocaians needed to be recruited. The Claws of God had to be obtained. Further events establish also that the technical challenges posed by the sabotage to the Royal Carriage needed to be overcome. Same thing for seizing control of the Bettelhine security forces.
“No, for the assassins recruited from Bocai, I was just a target of opportunity, one they went after because they were Bocaians who hated me; they were in fact positioned to go after someone else, someone whose assassination using that particular weapon would have muddied the waters almost as much.
“Was the Khaajiir the main target? That was my first thought, especially since he was indeed targeted later. And it seemed to make sense, since he’d courted controversy by advocating amnesty for crimes I once committed on Bocai.
“But then, as we’ve also established, there was no reason to believe that he’d ever be passing through Layabout on this particular day. Anybody who knew about him knew he was infirm and that he rarely left the immediate company of his hosts. Setting up an ambush for him on a concourse he would never enter makes no sense.
“My most educated guess?” I pointed at Dejah, who looked entirely unsurprised, and nodded in appreciation that we’d now passed a rubicon she’d already expected. “Dejah is a powerful and influential figure, whose presence here was courted for months before she finally said yes. There would have been more than enough time for a conspiracy based on Xana, and acting against the wishes of the Bettelhines who invited her here, to arrange for a public attack on her timed to occur on the day on her arrival, committed by fanatic members of a minor species using the fanatic weapons of yet another species. Had she walked by instead of me, murdering her with a Claw of God would have directed further investigation into pointless blind allies involving possible connections between her and the Khaajiir and thus obscured the much more reasonable point that the Bettelhines and their people considered her a dangerous enemy and had tried to assassinate her before.
“This theory is incidentally supported by the fact that she arrived at Layabout not long after I did, and circumstances already gone into suggest the assassins saw me as no more than a target of convenience.”
I threw up my hands. “Frankly, the identity of the primary target on Layabout remains a mystery to me. I don’t know if the killers were after Dejah and were distracted by me, or if they were after the Khaajiir and distracted by me. I don’t even know whether they always did expect me and were distracted by some other factor. It doesn’t matter, because any of those scenarios fit the available facts equally well.
“In the long run it’s likely that all three of us were targets.
“We were all anomalies.
“We had all been invited through their father’s auspices, by Jason and Jelaine, the two figures who have been most active in pursuing radical changes in corporate policy and whose success at consolidating power at Philip’s expense could not have made any sense to those who knew that Philip was supposed to be the one being groomed for leadership.
“Could the conspirators have known exactly what was up between Jason, Jelaine, and their father? I doubt it, but it doesn’t matter. Consider: the leader of a corporation devoted to the development of powerful weaponry develops an inexplicable and inseparable bond with an obscure alien academic. He spends the next year reversing the priorities of the corporation, eliminating profitable programs, and initiating others of no immediately obvious benefit. He bypasses the son being groomed for power and starts handing more and more decision-making ability to another son whose stability and loyalty are suspect due to years of absence in childhood. He even invites a long-time enemy, Dejah, to meet with him. At the same time he also invites a controversial prosecutor from the Confederacy.
“Seeing all of these events from the perspective of parties who cannot know why they’re taking place, whose loyalty is only to the corporation, how could you not understand their inevitable conclusion that Hans Bettelhine has been co-opted in some way? That all of this represents an obvious threat to the Family and to the corporation as a whole? And that it needs to be countered by any means possible?
“For what it’s worth, I’m at the center of it and I’m still lost. I don’t know why I’m here and I don’t know what Jason and Jelaine are up to. And I tend to believe Philip when he says he doesn’t know, either.
“But antibodies don’t need the entire taxonomy of any given bacterial invader to recognize an infection when they see one. Anybody invested in preserving the Bettelhine Corporation they knew would have taken action first and worried about ferreting out the precise explanations later.