Unconquerable Sun

by Elliott, Kate

  Two more sacks came flying. The first smacked down short of the Phene, but the second was arcing toward the strut when a set of shots punched through the sack and it dissolved into a red-brown mist of powder that swirled down into the wreckage like a work of art being prepped for Channel Idol.

  To the cadets she said, “Use a full seal on your masks.”

  “That’s only five minutes of oxygen.”

  “That’s all we need. They’ve got their range. On my signal we advance.”

  She held up a hand and braced, ready to leap. Waited. Waited.

  Two more sacks, each shot down, were followed immediately by a barrage of sacks marked with the characters for black and red pepper.

  GO

  She leaped over debris scatter and charged across lumps of ore as sacks of pepper burst above the enemy defensive line. A gust of heat sizzled past from a Phene shot gone wide. It was followed by a series of loud sneezes.

  29

  In Which the Wily Persephone Reflects That No One Who Grew up in Chaonia Could Fail to Recognize Him

  “I can’t believe that worked,” I say to Solomon where he crouches beside me behind a barrier made by the last six remaining janitors. With their unit cohesion disrupted by the pepper attack, the Phene have retreated inside, while Sun’s sunburst has reached the gate. In a weird way it’s just like old times, me and Solomon cooperating for field exercises, only people are actually dying and he’s still a backstabber.

  “There’s something off about this, something we’re not reading right,” says the backstabber. “Even if the Phene are playing for time, where do they go now? Nothing in the playbook suggests Phene do suicide runs.”

  “That’s what they have the Gatoi for,” I say bitterly, thinking of Zizou. Wondering where Zizou is now, wandering alone out in the forest with only Sun’s mysteriously powerful ring network to track him … “Wait. You’re onto something. Why would a top-secret lab have a single entrance inside a heavily trafficked industrial zone? Dammit. How stupid could I be?”

  I flash on that moment when the Handsome Alika sneered at me. Stupider than I care to admit, but that doesn’t mean I don’t learn fast. I use the green tab to ping Sun.

  WE SHOULD BE LOOKING FOR A SECOND ENTRANCE.

  There’s a pause like a glitch in the system. Somehow I can feel Sun turning my remark over and over in her head. The ring lights up as she replies.

  I’M TAKING MY COHORT AND RETURNING TO THE CAPTURED GUNSHIP. THEY LANDED THERE BECAUSE THEY KNOW WHERE ANOTHER ENTRANCE IS, NOT BECAUSE THEY CRASHED. ALIKA, WITH ME. JAMES AND PERSE, BLOCKADE THE FACTORY BUILDING.

  “The Phene hit both entrances while we got suckered into following them here,” I say to Solomon as I scroll back through a record of the pings I missed.

  “Auwe!” He jumps up as he signals the squad forward. I think we’re going to create a standard siege pattern, but James pings me within seconds.

  I’M INSIDE. FACTORY FLOOR IS EMPTY. HEAD FOR THE STAIRS.

  “I had no idea the Honorable James was so reckless,” I remark to Solomon. “His older brother is a notorious hard-ass about proper procedure. Or so Resh always told me.”

  He gives me a look I can’t interpret.

  “I’m still mad at you,” I say quickly. “This is just lighthearted battlefield chatter, not forgiveness.”

  “It’s not like you to bring up your illustrious connections so casually. I guess you’re back in the circles where you really belong.”

  Abashed and annoyed, I snap, “Move it.”

  After directing most of our people to set a blockade, Solomon and I follow James’s squad inside across an eerily silent manufacturing floor. Line mechanicals have frozen in odd positions. A piece of cloth flutters, caught in a breeze. Solomon jolts sideways and clips it with a burst. It ignites and spins down all in fire.

  The big metal stairwell descends into darkness. The clank of running footsteps echoes up. I lean out to get a look down the well before Solomon hauls me back.

  “Good way to get yourself shot in the head.”

  He starts down at point, me at his back with my decidedly not-junk stinger on narrow focus. Ay has joined up with us by now. I send her with the rest of the squad up to the roof. I should stay behind to take charge of guarding this zone, but I can’t stop thinking about how the woman who took Zizou out of the lab was almost certainly my aunt Moira. If anyone can find evidence of Lee House perfidy I can, and I will.

  The base of the stairwell opens into a rectangular room that includes the two freight elevators. Opposite them, big insulated doors stand open, breathing cold from refrigerated storerooms. A third door hangs ajar, scorched and off its hinges. It looks into a control room with a bank of screens that would be relaying images and metadata from the factory floor if they weren’t melted and hissing. The only sign of life is an overturned cup with tea sprayed outward in a wet splatter whose shape oddly reminds me of Chaonia’s second-largest continent.

  Ikenna is trying to coax a signal out of the least damaged screen.

  “How’d you get here?” I exclaim.

  He offers a cocky grin and talks at his usual racing speed. “After my brief but exciting sojourn with the Handsome Alika, star of Idol Faire, I got rolled over into the squad of the Honorable James Samtarras. You know who the hells he is, right? Highest of high grade, son of Crane Marshal Zàofù of Samtarras House and brother of that perfect specimen of fancy officer the Honorable Captain Anas Samtarras—”

  Solomon makes a mocking raspberry in my direction.

  “Hey!” I snap.

  He winks at me and moves back into the foyer.

  I say to Ikenna, “Is this area clear?”

  Ikenna gives me his famous side-eye like I’d just suggested he date a girl. “Of course it’s clear. Would I be talking to you otherwise? Why does the Honorable James wear that stupid cap?”

  “Honorables are a mystery to us all.”

  “I guess you would know,” he says, with a little too much bite for my liking.

  A pop-pop-pop signals fighting in a distance muffled by passages, walls, and doors.

  From the foyer Solomon calls back, “The elevators stop here. There’s no level beneath this one.”

  Ikenna grunts, turning back to the fried console. “So the controls claim. I’m checking it out to make sure there are no floors hidden beneath, because there’s an echo. I think there might be concealed chambers below this level.”

  A flash of image tweaks the ghostly gray of the screen Ikenna is fiddling with: figures moving down a stairwell.

  “Ay’s up on the roof with a squad,” I say to Ikenna and leave him to it as I cautiously follow Solomon through the fourth door. It opens into a break room with couches and a galley. Four tables have been flipped sideways to form a barrier in front of a metal door marked with an emergency exit sign. The keypad lock has been blown out and a fifth table shoved into the gap to hold the sliding door open. A bloody handprint smears the tabletop. A tech in a lab coat sprawls there, a bloody eruption of fluids around their left eye where they were shot with deadly accuracy. Just a drill. Just a drill. This isn’t real. We can’t really die.

  “Cover me,” says Solomon.

  Ahead lies a featureless corridor. My imbed informs me that it runs twenty-three meters to a change room suitable for sterile labs. Both seals are jammed open with more overturned tables. I cover Solomon as he runs forward to crouch behind the first set of tables. When he’s in position I race up to join him. A cadet from a different barracks, whose name I don’t know, is braced in a corner of the change room and waves us forward. We ease past quarantine suits and emergency probes, and into a decon airlock.

  A second sentry places two fingers to her lips, then makes the hand signal for hostiles ahead.

  The door opens into a warehouse-sized space crowded with observation chambers, transparent cages, extensive lab benches, and ancillary furniture, including heavy-duty work tops fitted with restraints. Several big nets drape from a c
eiling catwalk like so much fanciful artwork. Most of the cages are blasted open. Several wall banks have been cut away to liberate consoles too big to carry, unless you have a lifepod to stow them in.

  We hear a hollow pop. As one, Solomon and I drop to the floor, rolling to get behind quarantine suits. A firefight breaks out, light flashing from stingers dialed to kill and a hail of old-fashioned bullets hitting bulkheads and smashing glass. The ring network is flatlined, blocked by powerful shielding within the lab.

  After a final burst all the noise stops. A second echoing pop shifts the air pressure. We brace, but nothing happens. Silence settles. I peek around the door and into the chamber.

  A lab bench is tipped over, tools and vials scattered over the floor. A pair of cadets lie behind it. One is twisted onto her side with the ragged fragment of metal sticking out of her neck. The blood has just begun trickling like a crack in a dam that’s about to start gushing. My mind goes blank, and my skin goes cold.

  “Cover me,” says Solomon.

  His voice cuts through my daze. As he darts forward I sweep the chamber with bursts from my stinger. There’s no answering fire. He flattens down beside the two cadets. The other cadet, also wounded, has opened an emergency hemostatic seal. Together they and Solomon pull out the fragment and pack in the agent. The injured cadet spasms, then relaxes—dead, or unconscious.

  My gaze catches on a flatcap lying on the floor beside a big console workbench placed ten point three meters farther into the chamber. In the thirty-eight-centimeter gap between console base and floor I sense the shifting of movement.

  I ping. JAMES? ARE YOU UNDER THE TABLE?

  The ring network is still blocked.

  Solomon signals me to advance to the console while he covers.

  I sprint forward, doubled over, and race past his position to throw myself down alongside the console. An overturned metal chair gives me a scrap of cover.

  “James?” I whisper.

  A faint scrape answers me. James is slid under the console trying to work a small rectangle free from underneath. Like a tumor, it has tendrils.

  He whispers in a remarkably calm voice, “Breaking a bomb lock.”

  The sour taste of bile surges up my throat. I want to bolt away, but I force myself to stay still. “Phene?”

  “A crude slap-on. They’ll trigger it remotely. Most of the raiding party were clearing out as we came in. An unknown number of hostiles got trapped in one of the side rooms—”

  A spear of heat hisses above my head. Return fire yammers from Solomon, followed by a thud. I peer between slats in the chair. A Phene soldier has collapsed in a doorway 23.4 meters farther down. My vision automatically telescopes in for detail. As I wince away from the splatter I see where the Phene soldier was headed: trying to cut across the big room to a lone passageway on the far wall. Fitted with a decon airlock, it must be the exit corridor leading to the second entrance. We have to close it.

  To our right, a cadet jumps up from behind a bullet-pocked console and races toward the airlock controls as Solomon bursts covering fire toward the door where the dead Phene lies. The nose of a weapon slides into view around the door. With a single shot an unseen trooper pegs the cadet in the back of the head.

  I look away. But Solomon thrusts up from his position and runs flat out toward another workbench. In the side door, the weapon shifts position, targeting him. Desperate, I fire frantic bursts with my stinger to keep the enemy’s head down.

  Solomon throws himself into a slide just in time as shots pass through where he was just running. He uses the momentum of the slide to roll up, and slaps the airlock controls to close the exit, then dives sideways as fire hammers the bulkhead.

  We are sealed in with the remaining hostiles.

  Solomon finds cover behind a workbench with a better angle on the side door. He catches my eye from all the way down the space and signals me to advance. A spiky voice worms into my head: What if he’s still working for my family? What if they’ve told him to kill me by any means necessary? What if he means to lure me out so the Phene can shoot me?

  Can I trust him? It’s time to choose.

  I dodge from the workbench to an overturned chair. Both Solomon and the injured cadet throw up covering fire that allows me to reach a workbench where I have a clear view at the Phene trooper. I pop off a shot, but it goes high. The trooper pulls back into the unseen room. Solomon scrambles forward, signaling me to join him beside the door. When I reach him, he crouches while I stand. Frigid air billows out from the chamber.

  We both swing our sights around. I get a swift impression of a storeroom fitted with empty mesh cages. One cage gaps open with a green-lit lifepod beside it. Two Phene troopers are using the cage and lifepod as cover. I’ve stuck my head out too far. A weapon winks into view as a trooper aims, but instead of dropping or shooting, I freeze. All I can see is that cadet getting shot in the back of the head.

  Solomon pops off a series of bursts that drives the troopers down. His shots slam into the lifepod’s ceramic casing. Light coruscates from the impacts out across its surface like a splintering web.

  I’m still standing there, mind blank, limbs numb, an easy target.

  Behind the two Phene, a nozzle in the wall peels soundlessly away to reveal an eyelid opening. A man wearing a flashy tunic steps neatly out of a shaft with a ladder leading to a hidden level beneath, just as Ikenna had suggested. A shadow like a monstrous snake made of inky smoke swells forward from the newcomer to engulf the Phene troopers.

  There’s a sound of crackling paper, then a rattle like beads shaken in a gourd. When the smoke dissipates, the two Phene lie unmoving. The man who came out of the wall peers at the lifepod controls, then presses its touch pad. The lifepod exhales as its shield cracks open.

  Solomon grabs hold of my arm and leads me into the storeroom. “Perse?”

  My legs give out. He lowers me against a bulkhead.

  “It’s all right,” I mumble. “I’m fine now.”

  “Fine now is dead one minute ago.” He shakes his damn head.

  In so many noble stories of young soldiers getting their first taste of war, people vomit after their first taste of death. Then I remember Octavian and Navah. This isn’t my first taste; it’s the second course. Why am I even thinking this? What’s wrong with me? My mind is a riot of thoughts wrestling across the floor in a death battle whose outcome I can’t predict. My hands convulse, and my right hand closes on a small bundle discarded on the deck: a pair of socks knitted in rainbow stripes. The soft fabric feels so humbly soothing that I can finally catch my breath and, after a moment, stand.

  “Lab is cleared of explosive devices,” James says from the doorway, tugging on his cap as he scans the chamber. Seeing the man in the flashy tunic, his eyes widen, and the cap comes off again. “Your Highness! So you did survive!”

  No one who grew up in Chaonia could fail to recognize Sun’s father, Prince João, a man known as the great indiscretion of Queen-Marshal Eirene. His exceptional looks and the Gatoi neural patterns pulsing beneath his skin mark him together with the way he stands like a mass of coiled energy barely held in check. All manner of decorative chains hang from his well-tailored coat in a pattern that ought to look chaotic but instead attracts the eye.

  To James he says, “Is my daughter here?”

  “Yes, Your Highness. She went to find the second entrance.”

  “It took long enough for someone to respond. Did Eirene not realize my messages had stopped arriving? That a rival clan attacked the lab and trapped me?”

  “I don’t know, Your Highness.”

  João addresses Solomon. “Cadet, Colonel Evans needs attention.”

  Solomon hurries forward to the lifepod. Seeing the person inside, he flinches, but then obediently helps a Gatoi soldier out of the lifepod’s cradle. Besides the usual neural patterns, she has a gleaming artificial jaw, rank markings glowing down her right arm, and a ceramic medical vest encasing her torso.

  She looks as
hen and anemic as she assays a trembling salute, hand to heart. “Your Highness.”

  “You did well, Colonel Evans.” The prince’s gaze falls upon me.

  I take a step away from the fierceness of that stare, deciding I don’t need to be in this room any longer.

  “Lee House betrayed us,” he says, and he shoots me.

  30

  What Is Done Cannot Be Undone

  However furious Sun was at herself for not taking into account the likelihood of a second entrance, that water had been spilled. So as she and her group raced on Foxes toward the captured ship, it was no surprise to see the fourth gunship finally appear, skimming impossibly low above the treetops. A rumble of thrusters shook through the ground as the ship set down nearby, out of sight

  She pinged Isis. STATUS

  FOUND IT. HOSTILES SET UP A PERIMETER AROUND A CONCEALED ELEVATOR SHAFT. WE’RE TAKING HEAVY FIRE. WE’VE GOT NO WEAPONS ABLE TO PENETRATE ITS HULL.

  Sun replied,

  HOLD YOUR GROUND. DON’T TARGET THE LIFEPODS.

  ?

  MY FATHER MIGHT BE IN ONE.

  Her squad sped past a unit of the perimeter guard Isis had set up. Its Wolverine had been torn apart by concentrated fire. Three wounded cadets huddled behind the wreckage amid fallen branches. Two corpses stared open-eyed at the shattered canopy.

  She took in the sight and set it aside for later, racing on.

  Isis had created a command post by concealing a pair of Foxes in the spread of a large flowering bush. She had inserted a tube through the leaves to get a view of the clearing, which she’d triangulated with images from Wing, perched in a tree overlooking the elevator opening. The elevator was a square shaft so overgrown with vines that only its door was visible. The door was open, revealing a metal freight elevator.

  The gunship had set down vertically. Its hatch was already popped to create a ramp. The Phene ground team was scrambling to guide lifepods on board, covered by absolute withering fire from the gunship’s emplacements. A Phene soldier stood at the top of the ramp as the last lifepod was wheeled up. She was an older woman with age lines easily visible on her pallid skin and a starburst scar on her chin. A clear, hard helmet covered her ears and neck.