Unconquerable Sun

by Elliott, Kate

  He dials down the anger with a spurt of calm-alert psychotropics. “People talk more here than at home.”

  She gives a half laugh that could be amusement or contempt. “On-planet we have plenty of air for useless words. Anything else?”

  “The ruse to split up worked.”

  “I’m sorry to say it was the Honorable Persephone’s idea. She’s the one you tried to kill, so it’s a good job you didn’t manage it.” She starts walking.

  He’s so taken by surprise by this revelation that the two women get six steps ahead before he hustles after.

  “When did that happen? At the feast?”

  Tiana glances back in unfeigned surprise. “You don’t remember?”

  “All I remember is a flash that blinded me. Just like…” He breaks off.

  The Royal says, “What does it remind you of? Tell me.”

  He has to obey any lawful order when a Royal commands. This question is not unlawful.

  “It happened to me before. A flash of blinding light that interrupts my memory. The first time I don’t recall anything afterward until I woke up a prisoner on this planet.”

  “Where were you being held prisoner?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw anything but a large room and a hangar. I was transported by airship to the place where you and I met.”

  “Where did the flash happen the first time?”

  “When my squad was on patrol.”

  “Where was that?”

  “I’m not allowed to give out that information.”

  Tiana glances back as if expecting the Royal to angrily demand answers, but the Royal knows that no one who is bound into the banners will break the code.

  “Without revealing any classified information, can you speculate on what might have triggered the flash that first time?”

  “I don’t know what caused the flash any of the times.”

  “It happened to you twice at the Lee compound, right?”

  He squints, trying to knit together the shards that are all he can recollect after the airship landed. “Maybe three times.”

  “That’s right,” says Tiana. “Perse and I saw you being off-loaded at the service dock.”

  “I don’t remember seeing you,” he says apologetically. “I remember seeing a face, and then a flash.”

  The Royal nods. “On patrol, that first time, did you see a person right before the flash?”

  “Yes. The captain of the ship we were boarding to clear its manifest and make sure they weren’t smuggling—”

  He breaks off. Now he’s said too much, revealed a part of their orders and purpose that might give a hint as to where they were patrolling.

  “I won’t ask where you were or what orders you had. But tell me this: Did the captain of that ship resemble the Consort Manea or the Honorable Persephone?”

  He blinks, wanting to remember if remembering will help him solve the glitch.

  He was midway back along their arrow formation when the captain of the suspect vessel stepped into view holding a clipboard manifest. She was showing it to the squad leader when she’d glanced up and he’d seen her face full-on.

  “She was old.”

  “Old,” she says with a triumphant lilt to her tone.

  They continue in silence as Tiana picks up the pace. After turning a corner they emerge onto a long underground platform serving the Green Line. Clusters of people await the train. Some wear festival masks while others have the flat affect of people who have already thrown their minds ahead to their destinations. A pair of maintenance workers wearing gray coveralls are chatting at an open network box built into the wall. A flash winks in his peripheral vision. One of the maintenance workers is holding a hand mirror to surreptitiously surveil the crowd. A gust of wind signals an incoming train. The workers close the hatch on the network box.

  “We have to get on the right car,” says Tiana. “It’s got a broken camera on one end.”

  “How did Persephone have the patience to dig out all these tiny details?” the Royal demands with another of those odd laughs.

  Tiana smiles with a sphinx’s knowing. “We all have our obsessive qualities, don’t we, Your Gloriousness?”

  “You’re good.”

  “It’s how I graduated first in my class and got offered such a plum assignment.”

  The train pulls in, and the doors open. He waits until the last instant to get on. Ignoring the train, the maintenance workers each pick up a black toolbox and walk away.

  The door slides shut behind him. Tiana settles into a plush bench seat at the back of the last car. She takes the window side, her duffel crammed under the seat, and he takes the aisle side, fixing the Royal between them. There are twenty-nine other people in the car, half the seats unfilled.

  “It’s just five stops to Thunderous Surf Station,” says Tiana in a low voice as the train moves onward.

  He says, “Are we clear? May I take off the mask? It stinks.”

  “You may,” says the Royal.

  He strips off the wrinkled elephant face and, keeping the hood pulled low, takes in breaths of fresh air tinged with salt and humming with the motion of the train.

  From halfway down the car a voice exclaims, “Look at the feed! I told you we should have tried to stay for the concert! How can anyone be so adorable?”

  Virtual cubes have popped up in the aisles, playing visuals from the wedding feast side by side with the commotion in the Wheelhouse. Wasps zoom in on a tableau of the Handsome Alika handing bracelets made from ukulele string to the three girls they met on the train. He has the grandeur of a Royal gifting battle treasure to a common banner soldier. The girls are weeping and shining.

  Tiana murmurs hoarsely, “How does he do it?”

  The Royal stiffens. “Where’s Hetty?”

  Tiana leans forward to scan the virtual tableau. Besides the three girls, only the soldier with battle fans is now in attendance on the celebrity. “Ha! Perse and the Honorable Hestia have both skipped out while the attention stayed on him. She’s so clever, isn’t she, Your Appreciativeness?”

  “How far are you going to bait me?” asks the Royal with a glower.

  Zizou’s caution breaks because he misses the bantering jocularity of his kinfolk. He says to the Royal, “You like that she’s not afraid of you.”

  Both of the women shoot up eyebrows, as if surprised he can speak or annoyed that he’s stuck his foot into their byplay. Before either figures out a reply the people in the live feed start walking. Alika pulls on a monkey king mask as his soldier escort glances back toward the watching eye. From a flick of her wrist a fan shoots out from under her arm to smash into the wasp. The image tumbles, cracks on the ground, and goes dead.

  The Royal leans forward a fraction. The train pulls into the next station, and the cube feed stalls as the doors open and then close. When the cube snaps back on it’s to see a monkey king dressed in Alika’s still-wrinkled sherwani striding down a passageway amid a crowd of laughing celebrants. Zizou can see by height and posture that the monkey king isn’t Alika.

  “It won’t take them long to figure that out,” says the Royal.

  “It only needs to be long enough,” says Tiana.

  The train glides onward. The Royal taps a foot restlessly as blank walls and nondescript stations slide past, then braces as the train emerges into the light. The view astonishes him. Waves roll in from a deep-blue horizon, build amplitude, and crash over unseen obstacles into white foamy lines. It’s mesmerizing, each new wave rising and breaking in a different variation from the one before. A cloudless sky darkens at the horizon until he can’t distinguish any line between sky and ocean, and he wonders if they are inside a vast blue sphere.

  The train pulls into a seaside station. The doors open. Two people lugging duffels embark and take the seats opposite, bags crammed between the seats. The Royal jerks forward to grasp the hand of the person wearing a half mask rimmed with flames.

  “You’re here and safe,” she says in
a tight voice.

  The person named Hestia nods, her fingers tightening over Sun’s hands.

  In a murmur he can only hear because of his enhanced hearing, the Royal whispers, “I had to kill Navah. You see that, don’t you?”

  “D’you fear it’s you I’m mad at? It’s myself. I should have been more careful. I just chose the first kind, pleasant face with any skill and did not vet her as I should have done.”

  “You returned to me grief-stricken by your father’s death. Of course you hadn’t the energy to realize an unknown agent was being attached to you as a spy. It’s not your fault, and I won’t let you say it is.”

  Hetty’s color changes, darkening with a blush.

  These two love each other.

  “It’s nice to see you, too, and get out all these deep feelings, but we’re not safe yet, Princess,” says the one who must be the strategist, Persephone. She has the voice of an angry queen, molasses sweet at first brush and then stinging with slow acid. Her features are entirely concealed by a gauze mask painted with the features of a skeleton.

  “I see you found a bag to cover your face,” remarks the Royal. She nudges him with an elbow. “No voice trigger?”

  He’s figuring out what she means. “Are you Persephone? Did I attack you?”

  The skeletal face fixes on him. Disks like pearls screen her eyes. “You don’t remember?”

  “We can discuss that later,” says the Royal. “As long as you keep your face hidden so he doesn’t choke you to death. Where do we meet Alika?”

  A whistle blasts, but it’s the wrong key, not the warning chime for departure. Gendarmes rush onto the platform. The doors begin to close, stutter to a halt, then whoosh back open.

  “Stay seated! Nobody move!”

  The gendarmes rush into the car like heat-seeking missiles to a target.

  He gathers himself, reading their scatter pattern and positions, ready to move. Waiting for a command. The Royal says nothing as her lips press into a thin line.

  A gendarme with blazing captain’s stripes blocks the aisle. “Princess Sun, you are under arrest on the charge of sedition and attempt to assassinate Queen-Marshal Eirene. If you resist, we have orders to shoot to kill.”

  She stands, pulling the mask from her face. Her words ring out clearly. “Let the other riders disembark at once so no one is hurt.”

  “If you don’t resist, no one will be hurt.”

  She isn’t looking at the captain. She’s watching people leap up and shove their way out of the car, desperate to get out of the line of fire if it comes to that.

  Zizou can feel in every fiber of his neuro-enhanced being that it is going to come to that. He can sense it in the way shining Tiana rests a foot alongside a long clear tube looped along the length of her duffel to give it some external rigidity; in the way flame-capped Hestia has drawn her hands to her belly; in the way gaunt-masked Persephone leans forward just enough that she doesn’t startle the gendarmes but so her duffel is within easy striking distance.

  The Royal’s proclamation falls with the force of ancient truth. “I am heir to the throne of the Chaonian Republic. You have no authority to arrest me. Stand down, so you and your squad won’t be hurt.”

  One of the gendarmes guffaws. “Aren’t we supposed to just take ’em out?”

  Their captain says, “Shut it, you jenkins! Princess Sun, you are under arrest by order and authority of the Minister of Security.”

  “Lee House,” says the Royal with a glance at the skeleton’s face who is Persephone. “The order comes from Lee House, not from the palace.”

  “In the name of the queen-marshal,” adds the captain hastily and without conviction.

  A flash catches in Zizou’s peripheral vision. Out on the platform that same pair of maintenance workers push against the flow of people fleeing the stopped train. The pair are headed in their direction, each carrying a black toolbox. Behind them, the platform lights flicker and begin to go out one by one.

  Tiana whispers, “Your Highness, these gendarmes aren’t even wearing the emerald tree badge of official Lee House security. These are just facsimiles of gendarme uniforms.”

  Sun turns to him and speaks the ritual words that command the banners. “Let your actions not shame you and your banner. Strike.”

  21

  In Which the Wily Persephone Wonders If Treachery Has Sunk Her Beneath Notice

  The Gatoi erupts out of his seat so fast that by the time I register where he is four gendarmes, including the captain, are down. Sun calmly sights down the length of the car and pulses three quick shots from a stinger I didn’t know she was carrying. Three gendarmes collapse like they’ve been punched.

  I’ve grabbed the standard-issue combat knife tucked inside my duffel. Using the confusion to cover my action, I sweep up the duffel and heave it at a gendarme somehow still on his feet between the seats behind me. Its weight knocks the man backward over into the next set of benches. His head hits with a horrible thunk.

  “Surrender into my custody now and I’ll see you are not charged with insubordination,” says Sun. “Kneel to acknowledge my authority.”

  The jenkins who had laughed now shouts, “Let’s do this!” and leaps forward. The others, swearing, trigger their weapons.

  “Duck!” Ti holds a tube she’s detached from her duffel. With a flick of her wrist it fans open into a rigid parasol, which she shoves in front of the princess. A staccato rattle shakes the clear shield as riot bullets and ion fléchettes bounce off its hard surface.

  They really are aiming to kill. This has gone far beyond a drunken mother-daughter spat.

  Hetty is bent double, keeping herself out of the line of fire, which is all focused on Sun. She rips the decorative netting overskirt off her dress and rises in a whirl, flinging the fabric toward the nearest gendarme. The netting spreads like wings to tangle in his arms and legs. He pitches forward and falls face-first onto the captain.

  We’re not in the clear yet. Fléchettes ricochet from the parasol. Some hit the windows, which, instead of breaking them, bounce them back toward us. There’s a thunderous hail against the parasol, and then silence. I don’t see the Gatoi.

  “Four left.” Sun’s on one knee, not even breathing hard, left forearm braced on her right as she again takes aim with the stinger. “Ti, on my word, shift the shield to the left. Strike!”

  Of course the remaining gendarmes all sight on her and fire. Zizou rolls up from between the facing benches four down from us—how did he get that far that fast?—and in a blur of kicks and strikes hammers blows along their backs. The one I hit with my duffel lies crumpled between seats. I can’t tell if he is dead or just unconscious.

  My mind goes blank, and my skin goes cold.

  Zizou races down to the other end of the car and back up, making a sweep. The graceful way he moves shakes me out of my stupor; his confidence; the eerie and troubling beauty of the neural patterns that shine on his face.

  “The captain is dead, but the rest are still breathing. Do I kill them?” he asks Sun in a tone so ordinary it’s as if I’m hearing a different language, one I hope never to comprehend.

  “No. I don’t kill messengers.” Sun kneels beside the nearest, touching the uniform in the spot where there should be a badge. “You’re right, Tiana. They are counterfeit gendarmes.”

  “Ah!” Ti winces as she sets down the parasol and rubs a shoulder, her fingers coming away reddened with blood.

  “You’re injured!” I cry. “Let me see.”

  Sun grabs me by the collar. Reflexively I bring up the knife. Hetty pins my arm to the floor with both hands and her full weight. Sun tightens her grip until I start choking.

  “Who sent them? How did they track us?” I’m lucky Sun’s stare hasn’t killed me already.

  Ti’s pained gaze hardens with a horrible flash of suspicion, but then she shakes her head as if brushing away a disloyal thought. “There are wasps and cameras everywhere. There was no guarantee the plan would work—”<
br />
  “Incoming,” says the Gatoi. “Two squads, one from each end of the platform.”

  Sun releases me with a shove that slams my back into the seat, the pain of impact a red-hot blast along my spine. My eyes water. I gasp, “I don’t know. I swear it.”

  It’s too late. People are screaming and running toward the exits, while the gendarmes let them pass like so much chaff. Twenty-four are closing in on our car, a wall of death armed with stingers and fléchette rifles. I snap a quick set of images.

  The neural patterns on his face flare with a harsh gleam as he says, “Go out the emergency window to the track side, Royal. I will hold them off while you escape.”

  His little speech is so noble that momentarily I think I’m in a VR sim and this will end with Solomon laughing his head off when my body is punched through with a hundred ugly bleeding fléchette holes.

  Solomon.

  I grope in my pocket for the malasadas disc. It’s a wild chance. I tug off the skeleton mask and hold the disc up. I can see my eye reflected in the glossy surface. A tremor buzzes through the disc as if I’ve woken a sleeping creature.

  “Malasadas,” I say stupidly to the disc as if it can hear me.

  Sun slaps the disc out of my hand. “Curse you and your conniving relatives. To think I almost fell for your discarded daughter story.”

  The slap of running feet grows louder as the gendarmes close in.

  “Royal,” says the Gatoi urgently. “If you do not escape out the track side, then they will kill you.”

  My hand hurts, my back throbs, and my bruised throat has started to stiffen up so it’s painful even to turn my head. But turn my head I do, gritting my teeth, because when I look out the window I see a pair of maintenance workers in coveralls walking briskly toward us along a parallel track. One is a tall and generously built woman who looks vaguely familiar. She is staring at her left hand and glances up directly at our end of the car. Directly at me.

  Are these Lee House agents? My family will not use me for their schemes. I would rather die than have them extract me safely while Sun dies. I would rather die honorably than live with the disgrace. Just like Resh.