Unconquerable Sun

by Elliott, Kate

  “Yes, ma’am.” He closes his hands to fists and sticks them behind his back obediently. The gesture also conceals the ring. Obedience is duty. Duty is obedience. Like the Ouroboros-class ship he grew up on, the wheel is simple and infinite.

  One of the soldiers—not the one who called him a beast—hops down from the chariot to fix a restraint around his wrists. He wonders: Should he thank the officer for rescuing him? Should he banter with the soldiers as he did with Colonel Evans and as he would with his own arrow? But at the training camp for Gatoi recruits, the Phene officers acted as distant, elevated figures. He can’t afford to make a mistake so he says nothing except to carefully crush the wasp under a heel so it won’t follow and be discovered.

  They hoist him onto the chariot. It rises with majestic ease. Once he’s above the canopy he gets a clear view. Smoke gusts from the ground habitat three klicks away where wrecked buildings burn. Then he loses sight of smoke and sky as they get sucked in through the hatch into an airlock, which they pass through into a cargo hold. The smell of cedar and pine is overtaken by the cold metal taste of a space-worthy ship. The chariot settles into a cradle. They gesture him off, letting him walk by himself, a courtesy he appreciates.

  Inside it is immediately apparent this is not a freighter and never was one. Six chariots sit in cradles, powered up and ready to go. A bank of empty wire cages spans one wall, enough to safely cushion and “coffin”—as the Phene say—an arrow of banner soldiers during a beacon drop. He’s been in a ship like this before, when his squad was transported to their patrol zone. It’s a specialized gunship made for in-system strikes: small, cramped, and loaded with weaponry.

  “Strip him, rinse him down, and give him fatigues,” orders the officer, then signals to the soldier who’d said “beasts.” “Not you. I personally have a one-strike policy. No rubbish sex talk like that in my unit.”

  “Prig,” the soldier mutters in an undertone that Zizou hears because of his enhanced aural capacities. Maybe the officer hears it too, but Zizou is already being led through a hatch into a passageway. He relaxes a little, comfortable within walls.

  Two soldiers take him to a bank of showers, where they free his wrists and give him 120 seconds of water, more than he’s used to from home. All this is accomplished while the ship is moving. He and the two soldiers steady themselves on the array of handhold bars, necessary for zero-g, that are standard in every gunship’s compartments and passages. Because nothing among the Phene is boringly utilitarian, even these humble bars are decorated, in this case embossed with symbols representing the elements. The chariots are painted with scenes from the long-lost Celestial Empire: serious ministers walking through gardens beneath parasols; laughing hunters riding velociraptors as they chase down a wounded griffin.

  A blast of air dries off his bare skin.

  The fatigues they give him are sized for a short Phene. The too-long torso bags over his hips until they hand him a belt. The sleeves reach his fingertips, and the two extra sleeves flap at his sides.

  A bell rings four times. The hull shivers like a vast creature caught in a blast of cold air.

  His minders hustle him back to the equipment hold and stow him in one of the wire cages, which is barely wider than his shoulders across and another head taller. He hasn’t even strapped himself in when the bell rings again and the ship upends. Were he not in the cage he’d fall; the Phene grab hold-bars with their four hands and kick out to anchor their feet on rungs as the ship lands.

  He gets an elevated view down the main floor of the equipment hold. A big hatch opens to create a ramp. A rush of air washes in, swirling with pine needles and chaff. The air stings with weapon fire. Leaves are burning and hot ash blown by the wind burns on his upper lip. Soldiers pile in with well-drilled discipline, securing lifepods in racks and getting out of the way. A last group scrambles in. As the ramp closes an officer wearing the clear helmet of highest rank walks in. She’s easily distinguishable because of a starburst scar on her chin. The bell rings, and she catches a hold-bar and pulls a mesh cushion around herself as the ship thrusts upward.

  After some time the acceleration eases and the ship pitches forward until the floor is almost horizontal again. Crew members worm out of mesh cushions and hustle about their tasks.

  The newcomer’s gaze snaps over to his cage. He’s not afraid of anything, not even death. Every child of Lady Chaos falls into the Gap in the end. But there’s something about her fixed look that disturbs him.

  She peels away the mesh cushion and heads straight for him. The way she walks has a slight hitch, as if there’s a transitory lag between thought and movement.

  As she approaches his cage he presses against the back as if to strain himself through the wire mesh and through the molecules of the bulkhead into the safety of an adjoining compartment. But of course he can’t do that—no human can—so there is no escape.

  The officer halts a handsbreadth from the cage. Her breath stirs the air. Her gaze traces the neural patterns on his face.

  “What have we here?” she asks.

  “Recruit. Wrathful Snakes Banner.” His voice remains steady.

  From behind the officer, a whispery voice speaks words he can’t catch. There’s no one else near them, no one else it could be.

  Not until the officer turns.

  She wears a different face on the back of her head, framed by the transparent helmet. It is a distinct face and yet eerily unformed, as if it wasn’t left for quite long enough in the oven of creation. All four arms, uppers and lowers in unison, reach out. In unison all four hands grip the mesh.

  “Come closer,” the Rider says in its whispery voice, gaze on his face.

  He hesitates. She clenches the wire mesh just out of reach, but even to consider leaning forward sends tiny charges of stimulation through his skin preparatory to a fight-or-flight response.

  “Let me touch you.” It is a command, not a request.

  He stiffens, but he obeys. His nose brushes the wire mesh. The fingers of her upper right hand probe his cheekbones, the corner of his eye, the bridge of his nose, the center of his forehead. Her skin against his feels dry, ordinary, and yet it takes every clenched fragment of his self-control to reveal by no flicker of movement the terror that hits like a blast storm.

  He chips off a sliver of a calming agent deep in his neural network so he won’t light up, a sure tell. In his head he prays with all the sincerity of his youngest days, when every trip to the temple of Lady Chaos was a walk into the maelstrom.

  For my transgressions, Lady, please forgive me. Be gracious. Shelter your child under your wings of peace.

  The Rider withdraws her hand, licks the fingers she touched him with, but does not otherwise move. Her gaze scans him like an imaging machine, top to bottom, side to side, in long sweeps first and then in shorter ones. When she finishes she takes a single step back, although her uncanny gaze never leaves him.

  There is a long pause. In the background, voices murmur, tools clink and clunk, interior hatches whir open and thunk closed. He doesn’t dare look away, so he stares at the curve of her head below the eyes. This face doesn’t really have a jaw or chin. It definitely has no starburst scar.

  “Look at me.”

  He tenses, then looks up. The eyes of her riding face have the depthless inexorability of a void. They see him, and that is the most terrifying part of all.

  If one Rider sees you, then all Riders can.

  She blinks three times, like a coded message.

  He knows Riders can’t read the minds of other people, and not even the minds of the people whose bodies and brains they ride. But he’s sure every thought he’s thinking, and the secret of his association with Princess Sun, must be as clear to the Rider as if the words are hanging like fire on the air.

  “Processing,” says the Rider. “Identify subject.”

  He takes in a breath, releases it slowly, emptying his lungs.

  The ship lurches left, then right, then pitches steepl
y. The Rider grabs hold of the mesh to steady herself. Everyone is slammed with g-force. The acceleration presses him back into the wire mesh. His lungs feel weighted with sand. Each breath is like raking through sludge. The Rider’s face goes as blank as if it’s been emptied.

  An impact hits the ship. An alarm blares.

  An intercom pings, and a voice says, “We are all destined for death. Let us honor our comrades who have given their lives for the mission.”

  They are still accelerating.

  He’s lost count of time, but as he opens his clock a glitch scrapes through his imbed system as its visual twists into an unreadable helix. The ship’s gravity drops out.

  Stunned, he realizes what’s about to happen. It’s impossible, of course. A gunship doesn’t have the size or energy capacity to accommodate the huge energy load of a beacon drive. But he sees what he overlooked amid the confusion: ligaments woven into the walls of the ship, in patterns and composition not unlike the neural system woven through the bodies of his people.

  This ship has been outfitted with a beacon drive.

  The Phene are the cleverest of people, and they are wealthy beyond compare, so if anyone could pay that energy cost, they could figure out how to do it.

  His thoughts fly back to Sun and the way she trusted him. To Tiana, who treated him kindly. To Hestia, who fed him. To Persephone Lee, who confuses him with her sharp words and the other story, the potent and beguiling story her body speaks when she’s close to him. He’d like to talk to her some more, but she’s been torn away, just like his squad, whom he had barely gotten to know.

  Torn away.

  Everything gets torn away.

  The universe goes black.

  They’ve dropped into the beacon.

  He can feel his body but not see any part of himself or the ship. He might as well be suspended in a formless, timeless abyss. Maybe he is. Maybe they all are.

  Wisps of light curl past. Shapes whisper out of the dark and get absorbed back into the living womb of Lady Chaos from which all life arises and dissipates. A voice is speaking, but he can’t hear the words and anyway they are a language long lost to human knowledge, or maybe they are just gibberish.

  The universe rings like a bell whose vibrations mark the ending and beginning of this cycle of time.

  Then he’s back on the ship, lights on, air still tinged with chaff and ash from the planet drifting as motes in zero-g.

  The intercom says: All hands. All hands. Battle stations.

  The Phene officer who captured him in the forest pulls herself over to where the Rider is hanging from a hold-bar. “There’s a battle in progress.”

  “Yes,” says the Rider in the clipped tone of a person who already knows and can’t figure out why you’re bothering to tell them. “Our raid was timed to coincide with the attack on Molossia so we would have a clear getaway. Your report?”

  “We retrieved twelve Gatoi prisoners, five researchers, and four consoles. All seventeen humans are alive and stable within the lifepods for now. But we have to get out of the battle zone before we can examine the subjects to see if we retrieved the specific individual you are looking for.”

  The Rider’s flat gaze shifts to fix on Zizou. “I have just now had it confirmed through the council. We have him … right here.”

  32

  All the Wily Persephone Lacks Is a Club in Her Hands

  We race away before the Hummingbirds of the quick reaction force land in the clearing. I’m still woozy from whatever Sun’s father shot me with. My mouth tastes sour, and my throat burns, although that might also be because of the debris cloud we’ve been breathing. Solomon sits crammed in beside me at the back of one of the Wolverines. It’s being driven by Ikenna, who has all the reckless panache I lack. We zig and zag through the forest, the wheels spitting up coniferous needles in our wake. Sun is driving the other Wolverine. When I look over toward where she’s speeding through the trees I get nauseated, so I close my eyes and hunker down.

  “Perse, you need to work on your reaction times,” says Solomon.

  “Fuck off,” I say, but the battle, the aftereffects of the jolt that felled me, and the memory of dead cadets whom I sat beside in class and ran beside in PT have scoured the heat right off my tone. To my ears, I just sound tired.

  “No, I mean it, Perse.”

  I almost tell him to fuck off again, a little more enthusiastically this time, but that thing in my mind that loves linking up transportation systems fires off, giving me pause. This is a puzzle that needs to be solved. “You were talking to a man. The same man every time?”

  “It was a male-coded voice, but it could have been disguised. I guarantee it wasn’t any of my uncles. You just thought it was. I never corrected you.”

  “Did they identify themselves as Lee House?”

  “Why would they identify themselves? They made the threat—”

  “What was the threat?”

  “That they had information on my family’s extralegal dealings and would turn them in to the gendarmes.”

  “Their silence being bought by reports about me. Anything else?”

  His turned-down mouth and haunted expression make him look as guilty as fuck. “Nothing else. I make an oath on it.”

  “Like that reassures me.”

  He tries a grin to soften me, not that it’s working. “Yeah, I get it. What’s weird is it was the most mundane stuff. The only normal thing they asked for was wanting to know if you ever contacted anyone outside the academy, like family, friends, moneylenders. But how was I to know that? And anyway, you never did. Did you?”

  “Like I’m going to tell you.”

  The Wolverine lurches hard to one side. Ay, who is clinging to the forward rail beside Ikenna, shrieks and cusses him out, but they’re both laughing hysterically. Maybe laughter is their outlet to burn off this shattering adrenaline rush. The vehicle bursts out from under the trees and into a view of the academy hazed by dust. For years I oriented my life by the sky-tower and the twin pagodas. The sight of the wreckage unmoors me.

  The Phene will pay for this.

  And their secret ally will pay too. Someone told them about the lab. Someone who doesn’t love Chaonia.

  Solomon’s last words finally penetrate the sludge of my mind. “Wait. The blackmailer wanted to know if I’d contacted my family?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But if it were someone from my family who put you onto me, then they’d already know I hadn’t contacted them.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Huh.”

  We speed along a cargo lane toward the still-smoking depot. The six surviving gulls, battered but not broken, have been parked off to one side. The academy shuttle is out on the tarmac, powered up, air shimmering around its sleek lines.

  Captain Vata is standing on the portable stairs face-to-face with someone inside the shuttle’s number 1 airlock. A security detail flanks him, people retired from the military in favor of a low-intensity job patrolling a peaceful settlement in the middle of a lightly inhabited continent.

  Sun’s Wolverine roars up to the shuttle. She jumps off and charges through the hapless security detail. Captain Vata holds his ground. I can’t hear what’s being said as Ikenna pulls a swerving stop that makes a painful squeal and almost throws me sideways onto the tarmac. But by the time Solomon, Ikenna, Ay, and I clamber down and run over, the captain has given way and Sun’s group is already up the ramp and onto the shuttle. The red airlock light is blinking as we dash in. It seals behind us.

  “Buckle in,” Sun orders, like we don’t already know what to do.

  The shuttle has a utilitarian cargo hold with banks of acceleration couches, padded cradles, and equipment lockers. Isis is tenderly settling Wing in a cradle. Is that blood on the pteranodon’s little body? It’s clicking in distress. In the last hour I’ve crawled and run past injured and dead cadets and kept going with grim resolve, but the sight of the wounded animal floods me with tears.

  My rack-mates have
already strapped in beside Alika. Five shock-faced cadets in facing seats must be the surviving pilots. James is building an information tower by pulling brightly colored code out of his open palm.

  I ping Minh on the academy network but get nothing back. I hope it’s just that she’s still out of range.

  I look around for the princess. Hetty stands in the open hatch that leads into the forward compartment and the cockpit. She has an arm out, braced across the door, blocking Sun, who is clearly trying to get to the cockpit.

  As I move toward them down the cargo hold I hear Hetty’s angry whisper, meant only for Sun. “Never disrespect me so again. You think to keep me safe, but all you do in sparing me the battle is to show all others that you think I am not fit.”

  “That’s not true!” Sun’s words are soft, but her body is tensed. I can’t tell if she’s upset, or mad, or just trying to get to the cockpit and annoyed that Hetty hasn’t given way and let her through.

  I don’t care about their argument, so I push between them.

  “And what about Naomi?” I ask Hetty, ignoring Sun.

  Sun takes in a sharp breath, like I’d meant her to, because it diverts her annoyance from Hetty to me. I don’t wait for her answer because the fate of Aunt Naomi is out of my hands. Instead I give Hetty a nod, meant to be sympathetic, and move through the forward compartment with its tactical tables and from there to the cockpit. I am absolutely stunned to find Tiana leaning on the navigator’s chair wearing a charming smile for the pilot.

  Jade fucking Kim.

  “What a hero you are,” Ti says with her most glittering smile. “You crashed your gull into one of the Phene ships. How did you manage to get out unharmed?”

  Jade slants a glance back, noticing me, then targets Ti with the lazy smile that roped me in the first time. “I’m just that good. What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t say.” Ti hooks me by the elbow and tugs me back as Sun strides in, followed by the ominous Prince João.

  Sun addresses Jade Kim. “I requested you specifically, Cadet Kim. That was a brilliant and perilous attack.”