Chapter Twenty

Jenks had been awake for fifteen minutes, but was dead alert all the same. He looked to the Security Chief for confirmation, and when she nodded and opened the door, he quickly stepped inside, and it closed behind him. It was dark inside the camera operator’s room, with only the dim light of the screens (flickering between locations in the station, the Observation Deck, Luna, the chamber, the offices…) spilling out onto the floor. There, hands tied above his head and to a wall where he couldn’t reach or damage any equipment, was Matthelm.

Not Matthelm, he remembered. But the similarity was more uncanny than he had been expecting. He was only a Private, but he had seen disguise before, and could usually identify techniques that operatives from opposing factions liked to use. But this was something else – this man was Matthelm, down to his bearing and his facial shape. The only difference, apart from the tears in his uniform, was a fierceness in his eyes. The real Speaker’s assistant was gentle and timid, a subservient. Not somebody Jenks had spent much time thinking about in the past, Matthelm nevertheless occupied a definition of “innocence” in his mind. This man was anything but.

Jenks had been woken and sent in as an expert on languages, and while he had only been told what he needed to know (he trusted the Colonels in that) there had clearly been some kind of attack. He also knew that the King was dead, and maybe even more people. He put that thought out of his mind and began to speak, trying code phrases in different code-languages. There was Irese, a partially signed language used by Nox Canister. There was Novan, although this man clearly wasn’t one of them. There was the tongue of Os Cavaliers, which had no specific name he knew. The man didn’t respond to any of them.

“What are you?” he said, more to himself. “Rekindled Flame? Augur’s Synclade? Clock?”

At that, the uncomprehending (or unwilling) man raised his head. He sucked in air between his teeth and clicked his tongue, then pouted slightly and clicked it against his alveolar ridge. Jenks didn’t know many languages that used those sounds, but when the man did it again, and built up a rhythm, he realised he was both confirming his guess and mocking him.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

“I see and understand you,” he said in Reian, the tongue of the Clock. “What is your name?”

The man’s eyes widened. Jenks didn’t know what he would have expected, but he was likely surprised to see someone with whom he shared a language. In a thin voice not entirely unlike Matthelm’s own, but still with a cruel edge, he replied: “Matthelm Shaw, of course.”

Jenks gave a thin smile. “We figured it out. Not as fast as you, I’ll grant. What luck that you had a clone sitting on the payroll.”

The man, hands still tied above his head, struggled to a seated position. “Luck, yes. We don’t know how it happened, but when we saw him on the footage…”

“It was easy enough to put a plan together.”

The man still regarded him with suspicion, and probably always would. But he had no idea if this was the conversation which would seal his fate, and Jenks could use that.

“Come on now,” he continued, “we’re just talking. I need to take something back to my people, and I’m sure you’d like to have a conversation. What, three months stowing away on board our shuttle? I’m surprised you were able to get on board in the first place. What did you do all that time?”

The man’s face twisted, and his eyes looked upward. “I kept time.”

Jenks noticed his hand twitching almost imperceptibly, at a perfect rate of one twitch per second.

“Ninety-one days. Eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds in a day. I counted them all. And I went over the plan.”

“And executed it to perfection,” Jenks said. “That’s one thing I’ve always admired about you Clock agents. You know how to execute.” He used the word as a pun, and to his surprise the man giggled. Jenks gave a faint smile in return. “Good, now we’re friends. I’m Jenks. Private Jenks, of Novus Ordo Seculorum.” He gestured to the shining letters NOS on his sleeve.

“You don’t get my name, Private,” the man said. “Do what you will with me because of it. I don’t care.”

“Because your mission is over?”

“My mission was over before it started,” he replied. “It was over when it was first set into motion, as a reaction to your own actions.”

Jenks knew he meant the faction rather than him personally, from the grammar of the language. Unless they were highly individualistic, most faction’s languages differentiated with pronouns for the collective and the singular. “So, nothing’s ever your fault. Got it. Which action exactly?”

“Five and a half years ago, you killed an operative named Owain. You had tricked him into believing you were Clock, like him. And you had him kill one of his own before leaving him to die at the hands of your brutal police. He died paranoid and alone because of you.”

The man’s disgust was obvious in the lines on his face and the way he spat out his words. Jenks only shrugged. “So?”

The man frowned. “So?”

“Yeah, so what?” Jenks said. “That’s the game. We trick one of yours, you kill eight of ours. We take out a President, you eliminate our Generals. We cede territory, and take it back a decade later. That’s how we do business – you know that. But now you come to deep space to get your revenge, and yet you don’t kill a single Novan in retribution. Instead you go after an innocent. An old man, as close as a non-combatant as we’ve ever seen. Someone who has never even heard of you; a man from another world entirely. Why?”

“He represents your insidious project aboard this station,” the Matthelm double said. “To turn the so-called innocents against us, to persuade them to fight us too.”

Jenks laughed in the man’s face. “You think that’s what we’re doing up here? Oh, privatti, you have the wrong idea. This is not a secret base to plot against you. These people up here don’t even know you exist – not by name, anyway. If you’d asked the King whether he’d heard of the Clock, he would have no idea what you were talking about. That’s the thing with you. Very good at the details – very good at predicting what any one person might do, not so much the big picture. Am I right?”

“It is irrelevant,” the man said. “The mission is complete.”

“Ha,” he said without actually turning it into a laugh. “I don’t believe you. You were caught in here trying to work the controls, to download the footage of the murder from the chamber cameras. You were going to do something with it – it wasn’t just for fun. And you weren’t going to take it with you, because you know there’s a decent chance you’re not getting off of this station alive.”

“You couldn’t kill me,” the man said. Now he used the personal pronoun – he was challenging Jenks specifically.

“Maybe not,” Jenks said. “But remember which faction you’re dealing with. We’re the ones who tricked your friend and left him to die. Cold blood runs through our veins and we don’t care what the rest of them say up here. You’re ours, whatever happens. But returning to my point. You were going to try and do something with this footage – broadcast it, would be my guess. Maybe you know how to do that from here, maybe not. Maybe you had to -“ he theatrically clutched his chest and gasped – “improvise!”

The man was no longer amused. Jenks noticed he was still keeping time, marking the seconds with a twitch of his hand, and wondered if he was even capable of stopping.

“Broadcast to who? Back to your own team, to confirm that you’d done it? No, you know that word would reach them one way or another. You wanted them to see it.”

“Have you seen it?” the man suddenly asked. The question caught Jenks off-guard.

“No,” he said. It was true.

“It’s quite gruesome. He keels over and falls from his big… ah… podium?” He switched to Novan for the last word. Apparently that concept was unavailable in Reian.

“So you do speak my tongue,” he said back.

“Only some. But he falls and crashes to the ground, and begins to bubble up and melt. A terrible fate, especially for a King.” He spat the last word, apparently believing as much in the King’s divine right to rule as Jenks did.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked, but the man didn’t reply. He thought it through. “If the death was so terrible…if you chose such a horrible death, then this was always the plan. You wanted to send it to everyone you could. You wanted the other Earths to see this leader toppled. You were sending a message.”

“They think they are safe. You all think you are safe. But you are not,” the man said.

Jenks understood now. “You want them to run. You want to scare the delegates – or the people back home – into recalling them. Ending the Parliament before it’s begun.”

“It’s like you say,” the man said before switching back to Novan, ““If we can’t have it…””

“…nobody can,” Jenks finished. The Clock’s plan made sense to him now, but only revealed them to be as myopic as he had always known. If they really knew their enemy as well as they always claimed, they would realise that Novus Ordo Seculorum wanted exactly the same thing.

He wasn’t about to tell this enemy that, of course. In fact, he felt he had enough information to deliver back to the Colonels. He stood again, indicating that he was done.

“Wait,” the man said. “What will they do with me?”

Did Jenks detect fear in his voice? Clock agents weren’t supposed to show fear. Then again, they weren’t known for their acting ability either. “I don’t know,” he said. “If it were up to me I’d be beating the life out of you now. So you can be thankful that it isn’t up to me, at least.” Without looking back at the man who looked so much like Matthelm, he turned away and rapped against the door. “Time to come out,” he said.

***

Morning cycle came. What was left of the body had been moved, and the Service had picked some poor souls to clean it. Lady Kouris had insisted on supervising the movement of the body, but the chamber was otherwise deserted. Everyone else was in their dormitories or milling around the corridors in a state of shock, trying to make sense of the disaster. The day’s business had naturally been cancelled, as had all speeches and votes for the foreseeable future.

In a secure conference room, a glimpse of the void spilling through a black window, Private Jenks finished giving his account of the meeting to the three Colonels of his faction and Mairin. They all looked at him, to see if there was more to tell. When he said nothing further, they turned to each other.

“We should have worked faster,” said Colonel Pine. “Then this might have never happened.”

“There’s no glory to be found in the might-haves”, said Colonel Eres, pushing his glasses up his prominent nose. He turned to Mairin. “Isn’t that right, Ms. Hanmer?”

Mairin started to agree but was interrupted by Colonel Wake. “Don’t ask her – she isn’t relevant to this. Especially now that the Carmen woman has developed her new multiverse theory.”

“She,” said Mairin, staring daggers at Colonels Pine, Eres, and Wake, “is still in the room, and would prefer to be addressed directly. As for Sofia Castillo… her theory changes nothing. If it’s true or not, or if the Clock developed a clone some other way, our philosophy guides us through. Hold fast, comrades.”

“Hold fast,” they murmured, one after the other. Jenks followed suit, but hoped they wouldn’t notice him speak. He was no longer strictly necessary for the meeting, and they could kick him out if they wanted. Luckily, they were too engrossed in the problems at hand.

“What do we do about the killer, then?” Pine asked Mairin. Colonel Pine was a pale-faced man whose real age was only given away by his occasional stiff movements to stand or lean over the table. When sitting and talking, he could be mistaken for being thirty years younger.

“We take him home and have him stand trial there. We have procedures for this, and magistrates to enforce it.”

“This son of a bitch,” muttered Wake. “If what he’s saying is accurate, this won’t be the last thing they try. We need to fund Audacity Security better, not to mention our own security back home. I mean, he stowed away for three damn months. Tell me that’s not cause for concern.”

“We’ll do it,” said Pine. “We won’t let this happen again.” Like most Garden delegates, Jenks enjoyed speculating on the power dynamics between the Colonels, who were ostensibly of equal rank. It seemed to him that Pine was trying to mollify the bitter and boisterous Colonel Wake.

“What about the plan?” asked Mairin. “Do we still try and leave the station?”

“Is Graves any closer to closing the rift?” Eres asked.

Wake shook his head. “I haven’t looked through all his notes, but the sense I get is that it won’t be as simple as building a machine. It might even be impossible.”

“And everyone knows what we want, now,” said Mairin. “Isi Zhukov made sure of that in the chamber. It’ll spread, and we’ll have to address it.”

“Colonels? Ms. Hanmer?” Jenks found himself saying. “If I might make a suggestion?”

They all turned to him. The idea had only occurred to him seconds before speaking, but then again, he was never particularly good at planning. What the hell, he thought.

“Go on,” said Colonel Wake.

With permission to speak, Private Jenks outlined his plan, half-forming it as he spoke. “It’s just something the Clock agent said to me in the interrogation. All this mess seems to be rooted in the idea that we are somehow turning the rest of the Earths against our enemies.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous,” said Pine. Jenks nodded.

“It is, naturally,” he said, at the last minute avoiding the word obviously. “But it is at least true that the people of Herald and all the rest are unaccustomed to war. Perhaps that’s why they are so curious about our own.”

“I’m going to prompt you to find an end point, Private,” said Mairin.

“Right,” he said. “Sorry. We can formally declare the other Earths as allies in our ongoing struggle against the other factions. If we do, they are entitled to certain provisions, and we can bypass some of the secrecy laws that are frustrating them. We can tell them about ourselves, as long as they agree.”

“Allies?” said Eres. “How long has it been since we’ve had a formal ally?”

“I can’t recall,” said Pine.

“And that’s saying something,” Wake muttered. “Is there legal precedent for this, Private?”

“I… I think so,” Jenks offered weakly. He hadn’t had the time nor the opportunity to check the legal argument, which was mostly conjured from a hazy memory of a law class eight years ago. “It’s not been used in decades, and never for groups of this size. But it exists, I’m sure of it.”

Lying to a superior officer was a punishable offence, and Jenks was anything but sure. But to his surprise, Wake and the others leant back in thought rather than dismiss him entirely.

“You say the prisoner gave you this idea?” asked Colonel Eris.

“In a way,” Jenks said. “The Clock already think of the other Earths as being on “our side”, so we’d be giving nothing up by making it official. And if we’re going to be stuck with this void open for some time, then maybe we’re supposed to do what we can to help those around us.” He looked to Mairin at this last point, who gave a single, slow, upward nod.

At this signal, the other Colonels nodded too. “What’s your name, Private?” asked Colonel Wake.

“Jenkins, sir.”

“Stay a while, Lieutenant Jenkins. We’ll need to draft a statement.”

It was a few seconds before Jenks realised he’d been promoted.