by Jo Zebedee
With a clatter of chairs, a number of officers rose to their feet. Rinharte, seated at the rear, smiled grimly. Now the barracking would begin…
“Why should we listen to you?” called out Captain Tanong of Lord Gimon. “The Admiral called us here.”
Ormuz waited until a hush had fallen. Everyone had understood the true thrust of the captain’s question. “You want to know who I am,” he said flatly.
“We’re here to honour Edkar’s Promise,” pointed out another officer, a lieutenant-commander. “You’re no member of the Imperial Family.”
“True,” admitted Ormuz. “But it is the Admiral to whom you owe your obligation. And she is obliged to me.”
Several cries of “Why?” and “Explain!” rang out. Several swords were pulled half-out of scabbards.
“Because…” Ormuz paused. “No, let me put it simply: I am Ahasz. I am your enemy.”
If Ormuz had expected his declaration to shock the assembly, he was disappointed.
“You’re not Ahasz!” shouted someone. “You’re not half his age!”
Ormuz held up both his hands for quiet. To Rinharte’s amazement, silence actually descended on the crowd. Those who were standing re-seated themselves.
“Some of you,” Ormuz said, “will have seen the clones on the upper deck. Twenty men sharing four faces. Captain Rinharte and Marine-Captain Kordelasz have met others who are identical. Not all survived those encounters, as Inspector Finesz will testify, should you think they are the same as those in the sarcophagi.” He paused, clasped his hands behind his back, and leaned forward a fraction. “I. Am. A. Clone. Of. Ahasz,” he told them.
For a long moment, no one spoke. A chair scraped loudly. Rinharte was not surprised to see Captain Sztanda rise to her feet. The destroyer captain glanced at those seated about her, then directed her attention at Ormuz. “You are a clone of our enemy?” she asked in ringing tones.
“I am,” confirmed Ormuz.
“I would be grateful for an explanation.”
Ormuz nodded regally. “Of course. Ahasz has an ability. It gives him a supreme advantage. The knights sinister secretly cloned Ahasz in order to discover what that ability actually was. I am no… product of the enemy.”
“You represent the knights sinister?” demanded Tanong. Rinharte marked him as another who could afford to be outspoken.
“No,” admitted Ormuz. “They left me to my own devices until they had need of me. And now that they do, I have no need of them.”
Again, Ormuz held up his hands. “You know all you need to know.”
“What is this ‘ability’?” called an officer of the Imperial Winter Rangers.
“I will explain that later. Not now.”
The “audience”—it still seemed the best word to Rinharte—broke up. Ormuz and his entourage stepped back from the edge of the barracks-block’s first floor, vanishing from sight. The assembled officers rose to their feet and immediately congregated in groups.
Rinharte remained seated, arms crossed, amused. She knew the Admiral would have her fleet. No one would refuse to fight, even after learning their leader was a clone of their enemy.
“A distant relation, eh?” remarked a voice, amused.
Rinharte twisted round. Captain Sztanda stood behind her, backed by a lieutenant-commander.
“Perhaps not even that,” Rinharte replied, smiling. “We suspect the Duke of Ahasz has himself been a clone for generations.”
“Indeed. Your young prince is… impressive. The Admiral would have had difficulty controlling this crowd but he had them in the palm of his hand.”
Rinharte nodded. She had felt the same. Of course, the Admiral had a history with many of those present, and it was not all pleasant. Some resented her rapid rise to post-captain, her political clout; others found her abrasive and arrogant. Which, Rinharte freely admitted, the Admiral was.
“I’m still not sure I understand why your princeling is in charge. He has no direct connection to the Throne he claims to be defending. The fact he is a younger version of Ahasz is… interesting. Perhaps even useful. But not germane, certainly not germane.”
Not enjoying having to look up to Sztanda, Rinharte rose to her feet. “You saw why Lord Ormuz leads this armada,” she said. “You said it yourself. Because you will do his bidding. Admit it, you’ve already accepted his leadership.”
Sztanda scowled. “That’s as may be. But what does he bring to the fight besides an ability to manage this crowd of quarter-deck admirals? Will he be dictating strategy? Has he skill in naval tactics? Will he lead the troops in battle?”
“Captain Sztanda, he didn’t lie: he is Ariman umar Vonshuan, Duke of Ahasz. He is so much our enemy, Ahasz cannot make a move for which we cannot be prepared. Would you have such a person put to one side and only called upon when we might feel the need? Lord Ormuz is in the only place he should be: above us all.”
There was a logical corollary to Rinharte’s statement, which she did not have the heart to voice: if Ormuz had shown himself such an exemplary leader, then what did that say of Ahasz?
Let Sztanda work it out for herself.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Ormuz gazed down at the clone in the sarcophagus. Yes, now that Rinharte had pointed it out he could see the resemblance to Lady Aszabella. He shuddered at the memory. Directing his attention to the control-panel at the head of the sarcophagus, he peered at the various dials and switches. The clone was alive, being fed and exercised by machinery, but was in all other respects a vegetable. Brain-dead.
“There are twenty?” Ormuz asked Rinharte.
“Yes, er, my lord.”
The term of address prompted a smile. “I’m still Casimir, Rizbeka,” he told her.
Rinharte gave an embarrassed smile in return and looked to Finesz for moral support. The inspector, however, was busy tracing the cables leading from the sarcophagus. Ormuz could see they vanished through a panel at floor-level on one bulkhead.
“They’re connected into the ship’s systems, Sliva,” Rinharte explained. “We’ve no way of removing them without shutting down the ship entirely.” She smiled ruefully. “We’d need a dry-dock for that.”
“How very peculiar,” said Finesz. “And there’s nothing actually wrong with the bodies?”
Rinharte shook her head. “My surgeon’s mates have examined them. The clones are in perfect health. No symptoms of any known disease.”
“And you think these crewed Tempest to Linna?” asked Varä.
“I don’t know,” Rinharte replied, “but it seems the most likely explanation. There are twenty of them: sufficient to crew this class of troop-transport. We’ve found no indications there were others aboard.”
“The real crew could have left,” suggested the marquess.
“But why leave these behind?” asked Ormuz. “Think, Varä. Rizbeka is right: it’s the most likely explanation.”
But what a strange explanation, he thought. A crew who could turn off their brains and sleep out the periods when they’re not required. Almost as if they were automatons. Not that the Empire had ever developed such devices. There was no need: the Empire had no shortage of cheap labour.
He turned from the sarcophagus and clasped his hands behind his back. Rinharte, Finesz and Varä looked at him expectantly. The Admiral was not present, still down on the troop-deck briefing her captains. No, his captains. They were the ones who would be taking the Admiral’s call to arms to those who had promised to support her.
“You’ve tried waking one of the clones?” he asked.
“No,” Rinharte said. “There seemed no point. They’re brain-dead: what could they tell us?”
“True, true.” Ormuz glanced back at the sarcophagus. Something about the clone’s condition was, he was sure, linked to the nomosphere. But the exact relationship eluded him. He did not believe the nomosphere could be accessed from normal space… Perhaps the clones’ minds had been in the nomosphere w
hen the troop-transport left the toposphere? But the sarcophagi suggested such an action had been deliberate. Were they hiding there? Minds ripped from their bodies as the links to their corporeal selves were sundered by the emergence into real space? Ormuz knew of only two others who could access the nomosphere beside himself: the Serpent and the mysterious blue figure who had helped him during his visits. He had his suspicions as to the latter person’s identity.
If these clones were capable of accessing the nomosphere, surely he would have met them there? And yet…
“What do you plan to do with them?” asked Finesz.
“Nothing,” he admitted. “Leave them as they are. Sooner or later, they will explain themselves.”
“Is that wise?” Varä scowled at the sarcophagus.
“They’re no danger in this condition,” Ormuz told him.
“But how long will that remain true?”
After Ormuz had completed his tour of the troop-transport, Rinharte left him in the wardroom with Varä and Finesz. She had business on the troop-deck: “I want to check on Romi,” she told them. Giving Ormuz a mysterious smile, she added, “I’ll introduce her to you later, Casimir.”
He gestured vaguely: if she insisted.
The door slid shut behind Rinharte. Ormuz crossed to the table and perched on its edge. He nodded at Finesz and she moved to block the door. Troop-Sergeant Assaun stood outside and there were a dozen marines within call. Should it prove necessary.
“Varä,” said Ormuz conversationally. He crossed his arms. “We need to talk.”
The marquess cocked his head and smiled faintly, confused. “We do, Casimir? About what?”
“About you.”
“Ah.”
“What were your orders from the Involute?”
“Ah,” Varä said a second time. He shuffled one foot against the deck. “Rumbled,” he said sheepishly.
“Indeed,” remarked Ormuz, regarding the marquess steadily.
“How long have you known?”
Ormuz frowned. “Known? Never for certain. But I have suspected since we were kidnapped by the knights sinister on Kapuluan.”
“That long? Oh.”
“You’ve not contacted anyone from your Order since we left that world. They must be wondering what is happening. Or is that part of the plan?”
“How do you know… Oh, you’ve been watching me. And I thought…” He trailed off and gave a sickly grin.
“Myself. And Sliva and Troop-Sergeant Assaun.”
Varä glanced back at Finesz over his shoulder, then returned his attention to Ormuz.
He seemed, Ormuz thought, remarkably unconcerned at being unmasked. This came as no real surprise: he had known Varä’s heart was no longer in his mission. The marquess’ loyalties had become confused, a deliberate result of the treatment Ormuz had meted out to him. He had drawn him close, knowing Varä’s emotions would cause him to change his allegiance. Oh, he liked Varä, liked him a lot. Ormuz could not have asked for a better companion.
“Omais,” Ormuz said, using the marquess’ given name for the first time, “I need to know what the Involute told you to do.”
“Nothing. Just watch you and report back when I could.”
“But you never reported back.”
“He knows I’m here. Sooner or later, I expected him to get word to me.”
“And then what would you have done, Omais?”
“I… don’t know.” Varä hung his head.
“You’re mine now, aren’t you, Omais?”
“Yes, Casimir,” the marquess said quietly.
“Do you know the knights sinister plan? How they planned to stop the Serpent? The role they had intended for me?”
“Yes… and no. I was never told everything. The Involutes only tell us what we need to know.”
“And what did you ‘need to know’?” Ormuz stood and dusted off his rear. “Some things I already know: the knights sinister cloned me secretly from Ahasz because they wanted to understand what mysterious ability he had that made his organisation so effective. Correct?”
Varä nodded. “We believed the ability manifested at puberty but we didn’t know what it was. All the other clones we grew were killed by the Serpent’s assassins before we could find out.”
“Other clones?” asked Ormuz, shocked. “How many were there?”
“I don’t know the exact figure. But we’ve been growing clones at intervals from a tissue culture we stole about sixty years ago. So, forty or fifty altogether, I think.”
Finesz let out a low hiss.
“Dear Lords,” said Ormuz. He felt a profound sadness. All those “brothers”, brought to life by the knights sinister and assassinated by the Serpent’s minions. He owed the Order of the Left Hand a blood-debt for those wasted lives, and he would see they paid.
“Continue,” he ordered.
“When you started… displaying more knowledge than your education or experience could account for, we knew you’d started to manifest your ability. Of course, we never imagined the existence of the nomosphere. We had all sorts of theories, but the most popular was that skills and knowledge had been encoded in your DNA.”
“Tell me what you know of the Serpent’s assassins,” ordered Ormuz. He had his own ideas and he wanted to see if they were close to what the Order of the Left Hand had discovered.
“The scorpions? We call them that for the tattoo on their hands. We know very little about them,” Varä admitted. “We’re not even sure where they came from. There’s three main hypotheses. Some people think they’re another order like the knights sinister, but their remit is to plot against the Throne to keep the rest of us vigilant. Personally, I think that’s silly. Why create enemies where none exist? Others think they might be the remnants of the Old Empire’s spy corps. They vanished into the woodwork when Edkar I took the Throne. We’ve no idea what happened to them. I prefer the idea they were formed by one of the Grey Princes, and they’re avenging their massacre.”
“In other words,” said Finesz, “these scorpions have been around since the Empire was formed 1,200 years ago.”
Varä nodded. “We think they assassinated Emperor Idmun I in 309 and disguised it as a hunting accident. And Emperor Leopul I in 625. We’re fairly sure they engineered the rebellion of the Duke of Kapinoida in 841.”
“And clones of Ahasz have been their leader in all that time?” asked Ormuz, shocked at the length of history encompassed by the events described by Varä.
“We think so. We didn’t identify him as the leader until the tenth century.”
“And in all the years since, you’ve never managed to bring him to justice?” scoffed Finesz.
“Oh, we scotched a few of the scorpions’ plans by killing versions of Ahasz. But no, we’ve never been able to gather enough evidence to indict Ahasz before the Electorate.” He shrugged. “The scorpions were just too effective. We cloned the Serpent because we wanted to know why.”
It all fit. Ormuz nodded slowly. He wasn’t sure which of the knights’ sinister three theories was the truth behind the scorpions but he had a feeling it was far stranger than they had imagined. The clones in their sarcophagi were proof of that. His own ability to access the nomosphere, in fact, pointed to more exotic an origin than an historical remnant of the Old Empire.
“So what happens now?” asked Varä, looking from Ormuz to Finesz and back.
“Nothing,” Ormuz replied absently. He was considering his own origin: not only was he a clone of DNA, he believed, to have remained unchanged since the early days of the Empire but he had also been grown from a tissue culture that was perhaps sixty years old. He was, in all respects, a man born into the wrong time. And yet, as the only person truly capable of stopping the Serpent, he could not have existed at any other time in the Empire’s history.
“Nothing?” parroted Varä, incredulous.
The marquess’s remark brought Ormuz back to the present. “Nothing,�
�� he assured him. “You are mine now. When you report to the Involutes—and you will at some point—you will tell them only what I want them to know.”
“Yes, Casimir,” Varä said meekly.
“However, I think it best that you remain aboard Tempest for the time-being. I will be shuttling across to Vengeful shortly.”
“But who will guard you?” protested Varä.
Ormuz smiled. “I will have no need of guards aboard Vengeful. You will stay here.”
“You can keep an eye on Commander Mubariz,” put in Finesz.
Ormuz looked at her. She had not mentioned this before. She grinned in embarrassment. “I won’t leave him on Linna. Sudnik has already made one try for him. The Admiral won’t let me have him aboard Vengeful but Rizbeka has finally agreed to keep him under guard on Tempest.”
“Very well,” said Ormuz.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
From the starboard wing of the captain’s gallery, Ormuz watched three destroyers leave orbit. As they slowly rotated to bring their keels to bear on Vengeful, it appeared to him they were folding away their complex superstructures, putting away their fearsome weaponry. Sharp edges and patches of brightness slid from view, leaving behind only hulls, ghostly smears of Linna’s nacreous green light across the star-speckled heavens. These too faded as the destroyers rode the invisible energies of their drive-tubes away from Vengeful and the planet.
A further two destroyers were scheduled to depart later in the day. They would spread the Admiral’s call to arms. But through face-to-face meetings only—Ormuz had impressed on the captains that no copy was to be made of their orders. The Serpent had access to the nomosphere, after all.
Each captain recruited to the Admiral’s fleet would be charged with passing the message on before making their way to Linna. Only through using such exponential enlistment could they hope to have a fleet formed in time to meet the Serpent’s forces at Geneza.
