The Impossible Cube: A Novel of the Clockwork Empire by Steven Harper Read Free Book Online Page B

can arrange it.”
    “Why, Glenda?” Simon asked. “What for?”
    “What do I have, Simon?” Glenda snarled. “The Third Ward is dead, by the Queen’s order. Once the final clockworker dies, we’ll have no reason to exist anyway. Maybe a few of us will hang about to guard the Doomsday Vault, but nothing more. And where will I go? I’m a
woman
, Simon. Shall I become a seamstress? A schoolteacher? A parlor maid? A wife? For nearly ten years I’ve been hunting clockworkers and keeping England safe and I brought Alice Michaels into the Ward because she was small and timid and I felt solidarity for my fellow woman. Now that bloody bitch destroyed the Ward and I have nothing. I’ll see her hang for treason, and I’ll piss on her grave.”
    “Oh,” was all Simon said.
    “You may sit down again, Glenda,” Phipps saidquietly, and Glenda reluctantly obeyed. “And I don’t answer to you, Simon,” she added.
    “Yes, ma’am.” He shifted uncomfortably on the bed. “But I… I just…”
    Phipps leveled a hard gaze at him. “Simon, I want the full truth from you, as a gentleman and an officer of the Third Ward.”
    He stiffened. “Ma’am.”
    “I brought you and Glenda on this assignment because you are my absolute best agents. I am not saying this as flattery or to puff you up. It’s simple truth. However, I am also fully aware of your… romantic proclivities and of your feelings toward your former partner. I don’t much care about the former, since you are an officer of the Ward, and as such, you have my complete loyalty and support. As for the latter, I assumed that your loyalty toward the Ward would be the overriding concern, but now I must ask, Agent d’Arco: Is your loyalty pure? Will your feelings for Gavin Ennock get in the way of our mission? Answer honestly. You will not be reprimanded, but I do need to know if I must send for someone else, someone who can be a fully capable man.”
    Simon got to his feet. His face was stony, but Phipps’s monocle told her that the heat in his body had shifted into a pattern she associated with anger, exactly the emotion her final remark had been calculated to engender. He stood at attention, unconsciously making himself stiff and hard as a fully capable man should be.
    “Lieutenant,” he barked, “I am willing and able to carry out any orders you give me, as my oath to the Third Ward dictates.”
    “Excellent, Agent d’Arco,” Phipps replied. “Your hard work will not go unnoticed. Dismissed.”
    Simon saluted. The door snapped shut behind him, and his footsteps faded down the hotel hallway as he went to his own room. Glenda coughed.
    “Fully capable man,” she said. “You know how to hit below the belt, Lieutenant.”
    “Hm,” Phipps said, and stared out the window, though now it was dark and there was nothing to see.
    “Just between us,” Glenda said, “and knowing that I’m perfectly happy to come along because I want to see Alice pay, why
are
you doing this? You did let them go, down in the Doomsday Vault.”
    Phipps chose her words carefully. “Simon persuaded me not to kill Alice, but only because she had stopped Edwina Michaels’s device from exploding and killing us all. Simon said I owed her, and he was right. That debt is paid, and now it’s time for Alice and Gavin to pay their other debt to us. To the Empire.”
    “That doesn’t quite answer my question,” Glenda said. “Why are you
here
? You never go into the field.”
    “I used to,” Phipps said. “It’s where I started. My father was a military man, and he was away quite a lot. But he always sent home money to make sure my mother and I had food and clothes. And his brother, my uncle, visited often to ensure there was a man about.”
    For a moment, the reflection in the window showed a Susan Phipps much younger, without the streaks of silver in her hair, and with the smooth features of a girl not yet twenty, but who still held the ramrod posture expected by her father, her