Unconquerable Sun

by Elliott, Kate

  “On second thought, we can’t get enough disruption in here. The space is too small. We’ll go out to the fountain plaza.”

  We pass through light showers of water interspersed with gauzy curtains rippling in a wind generated by a mechanism at the back of the grotto. The curved rim of the giant shell segues into steps that lead down onto a vast plaza. An eight-tiered fountain in a pagoda style stands at the center of the plaza. Its tip touches the high clear dome that seals in the air of Repose District. Bits of torn sky serenade us from beyond the dome’s curve, but mostly the light is yellowish and dim, occluded by gusts of dirt and sand that scrape across the outer surface of the dome. It’s quite tranquil here beneath the shelter of the dome. I think of Ti growing up out there, and me growing up always in here, or places like here.

  Alika heads across the plaza for the fountain. People stare at him because he’s still wearing his filter mask, here where no one needs that protection. There are so many people loitering on the plaza it’s impossible to tell who is here for an hour of free air and who is here to worship, make an offering, or seek the revelation of serenity.

  “Oi. Persephone. Pay attention!” We’ve reached the steps of the fountain. “I need you to do the recording. Focused on me, of course, but it’s crucial to get the background and the audience. You know how to record, right?”

  “Sure,” I lie, and immediately ping Ti.

  My ping gets shot back at once with a BUSY. CAN’T.

  Alika climbs up onto the rim of the fountain and strums the opening chords of a song he made famous last year. People standing nearby turn in eager surprise. When he pulls off his filter mask, it leaves a smear of grit around his perfect features, but the grime only enhances his presence because he’s got that kind of flair. People turn to gape as he launches into his interpretation of an ancient poem, his voice and the ukulele amplified by a means I don’t understand.

  “Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place.”

  Grown folks cry silent tears at the sight of Idol Faire’s most beloved performer standing among them, who are the least and the forgotten. Raggedly dressed children, faces ashine with innocent wonder, are lifted up onto adult shoulders so they can see. More people hurry into the plaza.

  I need to start recording. I launch into the net to open Channel Idol’s streaming Idol Faire coverage. A spike of commentary has already started building and soon will become towers of squee scratched down at intervals by the usual ranks of ironic too-cool-for-you critics. “Princess Sun and her Companions” has climbed to number six in the ranking on the strength of public feeds, and Alika has only just completed the first verse.

  I clumsily toggle through recording options as I scan the plaza with its many different architectural styles all crammed cheek by jowl, just as Ti said. For example, the campaspe shrine is built below the towering wall of a saints basilica identifiable by its flying buttresses and guardian gargoyles.

  That’s when I realize I have seen images of the basilica Kas painted. It’s the original basilica built on Anchor Prime by the first Phene rulers almost a thousand years ago, rebuilt and expanded several times over the centuries. We saw images of it in class, in third year, when we studied the history and culture of the empire, the better to know your enemy. What’s weird, though, is that every image I’ve ever seen of a basilica’s interior has sighted down the nave from the entry doors toward the apse. No one but Riders can enter the apse, so it’s unexpected that Kas has painted a basilica from a point within the apse looking back toward the entry doors.

  At that very moment I unexpectedly glimpse my father.

  He’s deftly maneuvering through the edge of the crowd. A scan of the menu reveals that the Iros hermitage lies off a nearby side street festooned with flags, but he walks past the side street and climbs the stairs to the portico of the saints basilica.

  I abandon the singing Alika, shove through the adoring crowd, and run toward the basilica on the trail of my father.

  43

  A Brief Handoff from One Body to Her Other Half

  Sun followed Tiana as the cee-cee led her, Hestia, Isis, and Solomon down a lane lined with souvenir shops displaying prayer flags and beads, silk-flower necklaces, and miniature henge pillars carved with inspirational sayings like “Go with all your heart” and “A tree starts with a seed.” They paused outside a shop displaying every size and shape of bell.

  Sun exchanged tote bags with Hetty.

  * * *

  Hetty hefted Sun’s bag, testing its weight. She hadn’t been certain Sun would assign her to this part of the operation, given its small numbers and big risk. That she’d never wielded a weapon except in training gave her pause, but Octavian’s tutelage of the young people in his charge had been thorough and exacting.

  Isis pinged through to James. CAN YOU GET US A MAP OF THE BUILDING?

  “There is no map, they keep the layout hidden,” said Hetty in a low voice before James could reply. “Since every seer is blind to visual light, so every hermitage must be laid out on the same plan with all the same proportions. I know the plan.”

  “How can you know, if it’s secret, Honored Hestia?” Tiana examined her with the skepticism of a person who may feel uneasy about trusting her life to hearsay. It was difficult not to feel intimidated by Tiana’s disciplined beauty and precisely measured elegance, and yet Hetty admired it as well.

  “My father was a seer. He is a seer. He fell in love and left the hermitage. He married. They had me. And all was well. Until my other father—”

  “Alika’s started to play,” Sun interrupted. “No time for talk.”

  Lambent notes rose alongside his distinctive voice. Around them, guests and visitors and loiterers browsing the stalls stopped what they were doing. People’s heads came up, their postures straightened with astonished excitement, and an aura of energy sparked in the air. A trio of wizened old folks sporting grimy filter masks pulled down to their chests whispered excitedly among themselves, then turned as one body and hastened toward the plaza. A customer set down a statue of thousand-armed Mercy as the shop’s merchant apologetically began rolling down his awning and security screen.

  “Idol Faire here, on our very own plaza! This might never happen again in my lifetime.”

  A ping dropped in from James: a map marked with the rectangular exterior outline of the hermitage’s footprint. The interior remained opaque except for a pinprick of light marking where Zizou’s ring was located.

  Tiana said, “The green door eleven stalls down, on the right, accesses a delivery entrance into the hermitage.”

  “How do you know that?” Isis murmured with a warning glance at Sun.

  Tiana shrugged. “Even seers of Iros on occasion request the private services of a campaspe. There’s an entry vestibule and two small receiving rooms. Beyond that I don’t know.”

  “There is no vault or cellar, just one floor.” Hetty sketched a rough drawing of an architectural plan into their shared ring network. She left two-thirds of the rectangle blank and concentrated on the layout of the back third of the compound which had branching corridors splitting around rooms of different sizes. “This portion is reserved for daily life. These cells for sleeping. Toilets. Laundry. Baths. The kitchen’s here, and a refectory. Here’s Zizou’s signal, in the infirmary hall. See here? It sits beside the medicinal garden.”

  “Are there any secret escape routes?”

  “If there is one my father never told me.”

  Sun studied the pattern of corridors and rooms. From the delivery entrance there was, curiously, no direct route to the kitchen or infirmary. “We’ll split up and take two approaches. Isis, with Hetty. Solomon, with me. Tiana, once we’ve entered you go back to the street. James?”

  HERE.

  “Are the marines in place?”

  AFFIRMATIVE. SEALING OFF THE SIDE STREETS AND ENTRY GATES AS WE SPEAK.

  “Await my signal.”

  The crowd roared from the plaza as Alika flourished through
the end of his initial offering and segued into a new song: “‘I went down to Saint James Infirmary, and saw my baby there. Stretched out on a long white table. So cold, so sweet, so fair.’”

  Sun pushed on down the souvenir lane against the tide of people flooding out toward the plaza. Hetty kept pace, determined to keep up, but while Sun had the presence of a missile loosed upon the field, Hetty had to work hard to tamp down her anxiety. She didn’t underplay the skills she had, but battle wasn’t her forte. She just didn’t want to mess things up when she was the one who had demanded not to be left behind.

  Sun glanced at her but said nothing: no encouragement, no warning. With Sun you were either there, or you weren’t there. You succeeded or you failed. Action and outcome ruled. Everything else was pointless chatter.

  For a thinker like Hetty, who lived so much in her mind, Sun’s focus was a heady brew. She could drink it down like sunlight and never be filled up.

  They reached the hermitage’s delivery door set into a windowless exterior wall. Its security had a retinal scanner and a comms lock to force visitors and supplicants to enter by the main vestibule at the hermitage’s public front entrance. Tiana’s Campaspe Guild key unlocked the comms unit as the others stood outside of visual scan. When the comms light blinked green the cee-cee spoke.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late,” she said in a throaty voice, all raw promise. “There’s a disturbance in the plaza, and I got caught in the crowd. I’ll make up the lost time.”

  The comms clicked over twice. Then a youthful voice said, unsteadily, “Who are you here for?”

  “Didn’t he leave my calling card? I was told…”

  Tiana heaved a sigh, like an actress in a serial, only it was different watching it in the flesh as she brushed a hand over the top of one breast. More visceral. More inviting and arousing, stirring heat in Hetty’s chest. But the doorkeeper had to be a seer, even if a novice, which meant he was blind to the visual spectrum. Either Tiana was using her voice to full effect or somehow manipulating her own body heat.

  She went on so breathily that Hetty had to stifle the impulse to laugh. “I need this job. The prime’s approval is so important.”

  “Prime Deo?”

  “Is there another prime in residence?”

  “N … No.”

  “It will garnish my campaspe rating. I could throw a quick something in for you, as thanks, or send another guild member around later if I’m not to your taste. I know novices can’t afford us otherwise. That seems so unfair. We all deserve pleasure.”

  Sun touched a finger to her brow, shaking her head as if to say that such a blatant ploy could not possibly work. But the doorkeeper’s voice suggested youth and inexperience. The seal popped. Attached on hinges, the door swung open just enough to offer space for a body to squeeze through.

  Tiana signaled for the others to be ready, then slipped inside and out of sight into darkness. “My thanks. Do you mind if I touch your shoulder so I don’t trip? I can’t see anything in here.”

  An indistinct reply was followed by an audibly excited inhalation.

  Solomon grabbed the door before it could close. Isis took out the doorkeeper with a single blow and moved on. Sun and Solomon stepped over his body, but Hetty paused. He was young, with a beardless face and hair cut short in the style of novices. Trusting and naïve—that’s how her Yele father had described himself to her once, remembering his youth in the order.

  Tiana said, “I’ll drag him into a receiving room so he doesn’t get hurt, poor kid.”

  “That’s good, but then you must get back outside,” Hetty said. “We can’t chance that you might be taken hostage.”

  “Got it.” Tiana’s expression was serious, even grim.

  Sun and Solomon vanished into the dark interior down the only available corridor. Hetty tugged on a stealth mask concealed in the tote bag and toggled her view to infrared. The shift in view was immediate and surprising. The lightless passage sprang to life with strips along the floorboards, energy bands visible with enhanced sight and thus making it easy to negotiate the windowless hermitage if you were a seer.

  Isis tapped her on the shoulder. They padded past symbols painted on closed doors, turned left, turned right. A long passage ended in a three-way junction. Sun and Solomon headed left. They would go through the kitchen, which had a door into the infirmary hall.

  Isis and Hetty turned right. There was a left-turning corner eight meters ahead. Isis crept toward the corner as if weightless and frictionless while Hetty felt each of her own footfalls as a thunder. A murmur of voices, speaking Phenish, drifted to them from around the corner. The people were arguing, if tone was anything to go by, and speaking too quickly and with too much choppiness for her translator to register more than individual words tossed up onto her net like verbal flotsam. Her palms felt greasy with sweat as she clutched her stinger.

  A final sharp command—“Guard this entrance” in Phenish—was followed by the sigh and snick of a door opening and closing.

  Isis pinged into her net rather than speaking. ON MY MARK.

  A foot scuffed ahead, someone approaching just out of sight around the corner.

  Isis hissed as softly as air escaping through a slit in an airlock’s skin. Hetty’s shoulder bumped into a wall. She felt Isis’s heat beside her; then the soldier catapulted away from her. A muted grunt of surprise was followed by a limp body being slung onto the floor.

  “Fff.” That was Isis making a noise between teeth and lip as a signal.

  Hetty found her calm place and slotted into it as if fixing gears gone out of true. Too late to turn back now. You were either there, or you weren’t there.

  She dropped flat and pushed around the corner to slide in beside Isis, who was using the prone body as cover. The individual had two arms.

  Twenty meters down a straight passage, a heat source stood by a closed door into the medicinal garden, the door they needed to get through. Isis rolled a small heat-seeker ball down the passage to distract the sentry. Hetty shot four times, missing three, hitting once. The figure slumped, then recovered, straightening to put their weapon into play. A hissing whine marked the enemy’s shot at the heat seeker. The glowing ball sparked and sputtered in a swift display of fireworks as it was taken out, but the distraction worked. Isis took down the sentry with a single shot.

  They ran forward. This individual also had two arms, so they hadn’t encountered any Phene yet. What if Sun’s theory was wrong and there were no Phene here? And yet why were the philosophically pacifist seers acting like soldiers?

  Isis eased open the door; all the doors in a hermitage had hinges. A line of sunlight from outdoors hit like an impact. Bent over, half-blinded as her eyes fought to adjust, Hetty slipped out the door and dodged behind the screen of a manicured hedgerow always grown in this location in hermitage medicinal gardens. Isis let the door close, staying inside while leaving Hetty on guard outside.

  HOLD YOUR POSITION. YOU’VE GOT THIS. I’M GOING TO THE KITCHEN TO JOIN SUN. GET A BEAD ON THE INFIRMARY DOOR. LET NO ONE OUT. MARINES INCOMING ON SUN’S ORDER.

  You’ve got this. Hetty took a few calming breaths as she scanned her surroundings. The garden was a glasshouse, sealed off from the outside world like the rest of the hermitage. Beyond its roof of ribbed glass she could see the high curve of the dome that sealed Repose District against the slow-killing atmosphere of Tjeker.

  Movement flashed to her left. One side of a double door at the far end of the hedgerow lane—the other door into the infirmary hall—cracked open. The barrel of a rail gun poked out, two arms holding the weapon, a third bracing the door open, the fourth resting on a holster: a Phene soldier making a quick sweep. She flattened herself below the prickly leaves. Her hesitation could have killed her, but the soldier was already turning back, answering a voice from inside the hall. The door closed.

  The Phene were truly here. Hetty was genuinely shocked at the idea that the seers of Iros were complicit with the Phene. Did her fath
er know? Surely not. He was the most apolitical of scholars, gentle and kind and vulnerable, so she ruthlessly spiked the thought.

  Hetty shifted position back to give herself an unobstructed shot down the narrow lane to the infirmary door. The door she’d entered through was a meter ahead of her, to her left, framed between a pair of dwarf cypress. Now she had to wait as Sun, Solomon, and Isis moved to the kitchen along the inner passageways. One minute, two, three ticked past.

  The passageway door clicked and eased open a finger’s breadth. Hetty held her position, and her breath. A man in seer’s robes leaned out. She shot him in the torso with a silent, nonlethal blast. He slumped sideways, caught by cypress branches, the door held ajar by his trailing legs.

  The door shifted. A figure half-seen against the darkness of the passage addressed her hesitatingly, speaking Imperial Phene with a slow clarity her imbed easily translated. “Pray, friend, do not shoot. We agreed between us—”

  Hetty released a pulse just as a second seer leaned into view. He toppled forward. To her horror he was an elderly man wearing the prime’s collar. The head of the hermitage was involved in the plot! His wispy hair, lined face, and air of fragility rattled her. She sucked in several tight breaths. Stay present. Don’t drift. Be in the moment.

  As if in answer, Sun pinged a command into the local military channel:

  GO

  Go meant Sun would be charging into the kitchen and from there into the infirmary hall. From inside the hall, right on schedule, shouts of surprise transformed into the noisy clamor of a vicious fight. The clatter of hailstorm guns. Cracking and splintering as objects got broken. A scream of pain. Hetty wanted to run to the infirmary door and charge in like a rescuing angel, but she held her position, following the plan.

  A flash popped overhead. The glass roof shattered. Soldiers outfitted in the sleek camo-armor of Chaonian ground troops smashed through, deploying short-range boot thrusters as they dropped to the ground amid shards of falling glass.