For the first time ever in my acquaintance Jade Kim shifts uncomfortably, hands twitching on the console like an ordinary person would do if they were nervous. “Thank you, Your Highness. I figured it was the only way a gull could disable a Phene gunship.”
“How’d you guess they were gunships?”
Jade loses any trace of shyness when the subject turns to qualifications. “I took double honors in Pilot and Intelligence rating. I know my guns. Those were Phene guns. Disguising the exteriors as freighters had to be easy enough even if it hurts their aerodynamics. It’s also the only way they could sneak in-system for a raid. Pretty smart, if you ask me. And just like the Phene to change the exterior look, isn’t it? But they couldn’t disguise their guns.”
“My thinking exactly,” says Sun with an approving nod. To my disgust she slips off the ring once worn by dead Navah and offers it to Jade Kim. “I’m assigning you to me for the duration.”
Jade can’t resist a quicksilver smirk in my direction, knowing I’ve witnessed this triumph. I offer a two-finger gesture in rude reply. Ti taps my arm scoldingly like she’s the boss of my etiquette.
If Sun notices the exchange she ignores it. “We’re going after the gunship.”
Jade Kim slips on the ring and cocks a perfect eyebrow in my direction before smoothly addressing the princess. “Your Highness, with respect, this shuttle can’t catch a Phene gunship, as I am sure Your Highness must already know, so forgive me for mentioning it.”
“We’re headed to a Tulpar-class cruiser.”
A bell rings with an incoming priority signal. Jade glances at the console, eyes widening. “The queen-marshal is on approach. This shuttle is ordered to stand down and wait until the royal aircar has landed.”
Sun’s frown lowers like a wall of rain sweeping down on the wings of a storm.
Prince João taps his left cheek with his left forefinger. “Ah, so this is why you brought me. So I can handle Eirene.”
“Yes. In fact, I want you to take Persephone Lee with you.”
“What?” I take a belligerent step toward her, but she gives me a don’t-bother-me-with-this glance. She’s not one bit threatened by me physically. “But you said—”
“I did say, and I meant it. You are one of my Companions now. I won’t let your family take you. But you have access to Lee House. I need you to figure out if Lee House was involved in calling the Phene to the lab. If not, who is the traitor? Who is in league with the Phene?”
I’m honestly bludgeoned by surprise. Words slip soundlessly off my tongue, and when I finally speak, what I say isn’t what I intended. “How do you know you can trust me?”
“That’s right,” agrees Prince João. “How do you dare trust her?”
“Because I do dare,” says Sun without an iota of humor. Her gaze isn’t what the poets would call bright; it’s severe, even harsh.
She waits as my heart takes its measure. From this moment on, I will either dive into her gravity well or my family’s grip will tighten on me forever more.
I nod. “I’m in.”
“Get it done, Perse.” She indicates the door.
Tiana leaves the cockpit with me. Jade Kim doesn’t even notice Ti going, being so dazzled by the presence of Sun. As I cross through the forward compartment Hetty catches my eye.
In her low, melodious voice, she asks, “Who is that bold cadet and why are they so sure they’ll be the cynosure of eyes?”
“The asshole Jade Kim, you mean?”
Hetty hides a smile behind a hand as she taps my arm lightly with her knuckles. I’ve won a point.
Made reckless by this flash of sympathy, I forge on. “Top double honors, number one in the graduating class. All earned, I’m sorry to say. Relentlessly hardworking. Backstabber extraordinaire. Beware.”
She nods in acknowledgment of my vast wisdom. I nod back, then hurry on with Tiana into the cargo hold, following Prince João. Seeing my rack-mates, I hesitate.
“What hey?” says Ikenna, he and Ay looking first at Ti, of course, and then at me with wide questioning eyes as the airlock cycles open.
“You’re with me,” I say, because I am a Companion and I can have my own damn retinue. My mouth can’t quite bring itself to ask Solomon, so I give a quick jerk of my chin to the jerk. He sucks in a breath, unstraps, and leaps up to follow.
Chest tight, I ping Minh on the academy network to make sure she’s alive. She pings back immediately: On hospital duty. Got a gull pilot here, name of Candace, one of Princess Sun’s people. What hey there?
I got the rest of the rack with me. More later when I know more.
We hasten onto the tarmac behind Prince João and stand back as the shuttle taxis away. It lifts wheels up just as a military aircar painted with the sixteen-pointed sunburst of the queenship sets wheels down. For an instant, I think the royal aircar is going to chase the shuttle, but instead it roars to a halt.
Prince João smiles. “Now the day gets interesting.”
The ramp of the queenship drops. Eirene appears like lightning out of a thunderhead. She stamps down the ramp and bulls right up to him. He’s disheveled and flanked by the worse-for-the-wear Colonel Evans, not much of an honor guard to signal his glamorous importance. Yet somehow, as he presses a hand to heart as in greeting, she is the one whose cheeks color with emotion. Her artificial eye has gone full obsidian, charged with light deep within, but he calmly meets and holds the gaze of her organic eye, which is a limpid brown.
“Eirene,” he says, her name almost a purr from his lips, although the words that follow are spiked with the tang of a sweet poison. “I thought after what passed between us in private after our public parting in the command node that I’d never see you again.”
She slaps him, a solid smack.
Her anger makes him smile more broadly, which makes her cheeks flush even more. Her gaze fixes on us four cadets and Tiana, where we are standing a few steps back trying to be unobtrusive. We say nothing because there’s nothing to say.
Her attention snaps back to him. “Sun behaved with reckless disrespect and insulted our guests and hosts at a public banquet. Is that how you raised her?”
“Did you really not defend her from Moira Lee’s provoking insults? Did you really try to kill her in a drunken rage? Our daughter, Eirene? That capable young woman, on whom the future of Chaonia rests? You know she is your right and proper heir, even if she infuriates you at times. But you’ve been swayed by this unseemly obsession for Manea Lee, a girl half your age. What lies has Lee House been pouring into your ear, stoked by the passion that drives you, always drives you, so you just can’t ever quite keep it under rein?”
“Enough, João.” Even so, there’s a taste of arousal in the snap of her tongue. “You’re jealous.”
“Why would I not be jealous, knowing what you and I shared when first we met in the Temple of Furious Heaven?”
She laughs with a harshness that reminds me of Sun. “Fine. I’ll not argue that. So where in the hells is Sun going? I ordered her to stand down.”
“To track the Phene who raided the lab. This is serious business.”
“Of course it is serious! Why do you think I came myself?”
“Leaving the marriage bed? Indeed, a crisis.”
She gives him a look that makes me wonder if she is about to trigger the weapon in her artificial eye and obliterate him with a burst of contempt, but instead she shifts the uncomfortable glare of her attention to me.
“So. You are Persephone Lee. I haven’t seen you at court with your brother. I am sorry for your loss.”
“Your Highness,” I say with a bow, for although the queen-marshal is first among equals in the Core Houses and treated thus by her Companions and citizens, who have the right to speak freely in her presence, she is also mother of the republic and thus must be treated with the respect due to an elder.
Her gaze settles for just a little too long and lingeringly on Tiana before she returns to the prince. “João, I need you to s
hut down the lab. All news reports of its existence will be binned.”
“Censored by Lee House, I imagine. Lee House, who are directly responsible for the deaths of four of my banner soldiers and two Chaonian marines. What answer have you for that, Eirene? Will there be consequences? I presume it was nothing more than an ugly, petty power play to discredit me and Sun—”
“Sun spoke with great rudeness and a complete lack of restraint.”
“You think it was not a petty power play? Do you believe Lee House is in league with the Phene?”
She stares at him as if he has begun speaking the arcane and barbarous language of the Skuda, who live at the farthest boundaries of beacon space. “Of course Lee House isn’t in league with the Phene.”
“Moira Lee’s act has strengthened the hand of the Phene.”
“What’s done is done, João. Now we contain the damage. This conflict must not be allowed to interfere with or slow down our preparations for the Karnos offensive. You will erase all trace of the lab and stay out of sight until I contact you. In return I will not have Sun arrested for insubordination. She’s flouted my authority in public and pretended to set a killer on my bride. You try my patience too far with your defense of her. In the days of my great-grandparents, such a troublesome heir would have been dropped into a terminus prison and left to rot—”
“Like your nephew?”
“He’s not in prison. He lives in a perfectly comfortable villa on Pelasgia Terce for his own safety, as you know perfectly well. I was urged to execute him outright because of the treachery of his Hesjan mother. But enough! I don’t have time for your meddling. This is a pointless distraction from serious matters—”
She breaks off and holds up a hand, listening to something on her net. Her expression creases with a look of perplexity that shades rapidly to alarm. We all stiffen. I glance around, expecting a fresh attack to drop out of the clear blue sky.
She blinks back to us. “João, go now. We’ve a new emergency. Do as I say.”
“Sun left this Lee girl behind so you can restore her to her family.”
“Sun needs a Companion from Lee House.”
“Not this one,” he says so smoothly I’m not sure if he is baldly and effortlessly lying or if he has decided to undercut Sun’s decision.
The queen-marshal shrugs, uninterested in debating such a trivial issue, and gestures for me to embark onto the royal ship. I walk thirty-two paces before halting to address my rack-mates out of earshot of the queen-marshal.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen next. You three are probably better off staying here and taking your original postings.”
Ay gives me her hard-ass stare. “We might never get another chance like this. Princess Sun said we cadets will get special honors, and that’s nice and everything, but it’s that asshole Jade Kim who’s up swanning around with the heir. Sticking with you would be a leg up for us.”
“I know, and I will be back for you. If I survive what’s coming next.”
“The drama queen speaks,” says Ikenna. “Holy hells, Perse, I can’t believe you didn’t trust us and kept all this … fucking Lee House … a secret from us. Don’t try to push us back now.”
“We don’t even know if Princess Sun is going to survive the week,” I say. “Keep your heads down and get hold of Minh. Your actions won’t be forgotten. I promise.”
Solomon still hasn’t spoken. In fact he’s not even looking at us. He’s staring at something behind me, and to judge by his expression it must be a threat more horrifying than the Phene. I turn to see the half-ruined depot. A tall figure is striding across the tarmac toward us: Aunt Naomi. All she lacks is a club in her hands.
“Let me go with you, Perse,” he says in a breathless tone. “You need a bodyguard.”
“I’m her cee-cee,” says Ti with unexpected force.
Solomon counters, “If someone in Lee House is the one who hired me, then me showing up with you may shake loose their guilty ass. You know I’m right, Perse.”
“Shit,” I say, because Eirene is headed for the ramp. I’m headed into a skirmish without a club, too, and people might show me more respect with Solomon at my back. “All right.”
Ay and Ikenna offer ironic salutes. Solomon, Ti, and I jog for the royal ship, which we reach before the queen-marshal only to be halted by two soldiers standing at the base of the ramp. They wear the round silver shields of the queen-marshal’s elite ground forces.
“Let them on.” Eirene walks past us.
We hustle up in her wake. An adjutant waves us to acceleration couches to get us out of the way. The main cabin of the royal aircar isn’t nearly as fancy as Lee House’s personal aircars. It’s a soldier’s utilitarian tool kit, a mobile marshal’s platform stripped down to essentials and utterly without decoration.
Eirene settles into a chair fitted with a console and various enhanced projectors. The door into the cockpit remains open, but the queen-marshal doesn’t pilot; she conducts. The power flows through her, and she directs it to its destination.
“Take us back to Argos. Condition 1.”
She turns to address the three Companions who are traveling with her. “A courier just arrived in-system. It came from Aspera, via Troia and Molossia. The Phene have launched an overwhelming attack against our positions at Aspera Drift. By the time the courier dropped into the beacon, 20 percent of our forward fleet was already crippled.”
The others murmur in shock.
“I must take charge of the response. However, we can’t just let the Phene get away with an attack on Chaonian soil, so I’ve assigned my heir to track down and destroy the raiders. We’ll know her worth by the measure of her success. But even so, the raid is at best a coincidence and at worst a diversionary tactic meant to distract us from the real conflict. If the Phene want to accelerate this into immediate war, if they think to surprise us before we launch our own offensive, then they will find out Chaonia is more than ready.”
33
We Are But Insignificant Objects Surrounded by the Vastness of Space, All Except One
The shuttle docked in the bay of the Boukephalas. Sun left the cadets behind in the cruiser’s stateroom suite to sort out quarters under the command of Isis. She headed directly for the command center. Jade Kim blithely maneuvered ahead of the Companions in order to walk alongside her.
Cadet Kim had a smooth voice and a smooth presence and a smooth look, almost too smooth. “I thought the Boukephalas was doing its trials in Molossia System, Your Highness. I got my posting to this very ship.”
“Right out of CeDCA? That’s unusual, isn’t it?”
“I work hard for my family. All their hopes are pinned on me.” The statement managed an impressive blend of braggadocio made palatable by humble filial duty.
Sun glanced back. James had caught Alika’s gaze and mimed sticking a pin repeatedly into his own eye with a grimace. Hetty elbowed him, although not hard, and her normally complaisant mouth had developed a surly curl. Was she jealous of the undeniably attractive Jade Kim? Would Hetty, James, and Alika gang up on any new Companions if Sun brought a full complement of seven into her household as her parents wanted and custom allowed? Those three and Percy had been together a long time. They’d gotten comfortable, even complacent. Complacency stuck you where you were. The advent of Persephone Lee and the ripples her presence caused within the household made Sun think it was time to shake things up.
Crew members stood aside to let their little procession pass, giving their blood- and dirt-stained garments the once-over.
“Were you the ones who drove off the Phene down-planet?” an eager ensign asked, so dazzled by Jade Kim that he didn’t notice the quiet princess. Cadet Kim was smart enough not to speak for Sun.
James, however, gave a tug on his cap and his quirky grin as answer. A scattering of applause rushed like wind through boughs, punctuated by a single whooping cheer. Then everyone rushed onward to their duty stations.
The command center was a
high, open, circular compartment with a strategos dais in the middle where the captain kept an eye on space and ship. Eight consoles were set in curves around the raised dais like petals around a pistil. The compartment’s bulkheads projected a static virtual sphere so the crew could orient themselves within the complex realities of four-dimensional battlefields.
“Captain Tan, I’m commandeering this vessel again,” said Sun as she strode in. Every head turned to watch her approach the dais.
To earn the captaincy of a coveted Tulpar-class cruiser, any officer had certainly spent years commanding lesser ships and won renown in Eirene’s campaigns. The queen-marshal did not suffer fools and incompetents. Yet in the presence of the heir a captain must step aside. Senior Captain Tan, a quietly competent man who spoke only when needful, gave way without a word. The princess ascended two steps onto the strategos dais as he vacated it.
Alika said, “Hetty, take a step to the left. That gives me a better composition with Sun just a little off-center.”
“Tulpar-class battle cruisers are classified,” objected Hetty, ever the rules quoter. “You can’t film much less broadcast from here.”
“I’m not broadcasting.” His yet remained unspoken.
James found a backup console and plugged himself in.
For all Jade Kim’s cocky self-importance, the cadet had halted upon entering the command center with the look of a glassy-eyed innocent overwhelmed by the magnitude of the situation. Sun watched Hetty’s lips pinch with a glint of gratification as she noted how awkwardly the otherwise suave cadet was gawking.
Feeling Sun’s gaze, Hetty glanced at the princess, who gave her a nod of command. Hetty sighed infinitesimally, but she would never allow Sun to look bad for having one of her entourage in the way because they didn’t know where to go. So she directed Jade Kim over to an acceleration couch, then hesitated.
Sun could trace the course of Hetty’s thoughts in the slight upward roll of her eyes and the way she puffed out a breath through her lips. Imagine the manifold dangers of leaving inexperienced social climbers unsupervised on the deck of a Tulpar! After a moment’s consideration, and another sigh, Hetty strapped herself in beside Cadet Kim. Perfect.
Unconquerable Sun Page 33
