Unconquerable Sun

by Elliott, Kate

  44

  Its Oleaginous Contents

  Sun kicked open the door into the kitchen and charged in. James had full visuals through her helmet with its diadem of cameras giving a full surround view.

  SEVENTY-FIVE. TWO. He whispered in coordinates.

  A sweep from her stinger took down two Phene soldiers standing sentry by the far door into the infirmary, at a seventy-five-degree angle to her entry point. Solomon sprinted past her as she took down three seers to her left who were apparently cooking for the visitors. As he fell, one of the seers caught at the edge of a big kettle. His weight dragged it off the stove. With a crash, the kettle hit the floor and its slippery contents gushed out like a flood tide over the floor, cubed vegetables racing to catch her on a wave of creamy green-tinged liquid.

  Solomon had already crashed through a door set into the opposite wall and into the infirmary. By the time she reached its threshold he had kicked over two metal examination tables polished to a sheen. He crouched behind one. The other, lying crosswise to the first, reflected a blurry view of the infirmary hall.

  Surprise gave the attacker a brief advantage. Solomon got off a jackhammer of shots while the Phene dove for cover behind tables, cabinets, and the very lifepods and consoles Sun was determined to recover. A startled seer got hit in the first burst of return fire, falling with a scream as a Phene hailstorm tore through him. His body absorbed most of the chaff. The rest of the enemy burst peppered the two tables with a shattering sound that almost covered a splintering noise from outside.

  OUR MARINES INCOMING, James pinged.

  Isis pinged: I’M COMING THROUGH THE KITCHEN.

  Sun brushed away a flicker of annoyance that Isis had left Hetty alone to watch the other door. The battle was now. Zizou’s ring was straight ahead.

  Solomon laid down a stream of covering fire as she dashed forward to duck behind the nearest console. Isis came through the door shooting, pulling attention off Sun. The princess risked a glance toward the far end of the room, where stood two huge apothecary cabinets up against a wall. Poised between the cabinets, Zizou was holding a heavy wooden chair as a barrier in front of the Rider, who was crouched behind him against the wall.

  Zizou saw Sun.

  The secret of the banners was their Royals, whom all banner soldiers must obey according to the covenant. The Phene wouldn’t know what hit them.

  “Zizou!” she commanded. “Capture the Rider.”

  “Kill her,” said the Rider. A wand flashed in her hand. Zizou spasmed awkwardly, fighting whatever the Rider was pouring into his body. He lost the battle and leaped toward the console behind which Sun was crouched.

  He shouted, “Royal, I’m leashed by the Phene—”

  Isis hit him with a stinger blast that tumbled him sideways, not enough to keep him down for long but enough for Sun to dive to the shelter of a neighboring lifepod as the Phene soldiers opened fire. A flash of heat seared across Sun’s thigh, the worst of its burn siphoned off by the knit armor leggings she was wearing under the loose working-folk trousers Ti had disguised them in. She landed atop an unconscious Phene soldier in ship’s uniform who was bleeding from the neck. A hailstorm slammed into the lifepod with such a concussion of hits that the whole thing shuddered. Its power light winked from green to red, and its seal popped with an ugly gasp of defeat.

  A four-armed figure loomed up behind her. She spun and shot straight up into an enemy face, then kept turning as James fed her positions, kept shooting. Where was the Rider? Live capture was the goal, but dead was acceptable. No Chaonian had ever captured a Rider, alive or dead.

  The double doors to the medicinal garden blew open.

  “Don’t shoot the Gatoi!” Sun shouted as Chaonian marines flooded in.

  The surviving Phene used their own bodies and whatever furniture they could move to create a ring of protection around their precious Rider. Rolling smoothly up to his feet Zizou cast a helpless, angry glance at Sun. He knew her but he was under the Rider’s control, puppet to programming that overrode even a Royal’s command.

  A small painted door in one of the apothecary cabinets popped open to reveal the shockingly familiar face of Kiran Seth de Lee.

  Effulgent Heaven. Persephone had been right.

  In a cool, collected voice, as if they were entering a teahouse, Aisa Lee’s spouse said to the Rider, “This way, Your Eminence. They tracked you here, so one of your people must have a tracker on them.”

  He retreated back into the darkness.

  The Rider dropped to her knees by the cabinet door, making ready to crawl in. The unsettling glimpse of her riding face with its strange, half-formed features cast a pall over the infirmary as if, like a late-stage medusa, she could freeze people in their tracks. Every figure seemed to hesitate, wondering who to shoot first and who not to shoot.

  “The tracker must be on the Gatoi,” said the last remaining Phene officer, who crouched next to the cabinet with a weapon braced on a lower arm. “The ring.”

  The Rider tapped her wand against the cabinet and spoke in the soughing voice of her riding face. “Take off the ring.”

  Zizou doubled over as if he’d been slugged in the stomach. He stripped off the ring and let it fall, a soft clink onto the tile floor.

  “Follow me. The rest of you, destroy the evidence. We are all destined for death.”

  Because Sun had told the marines not to shoot him, Zizou was himself the shield the Rider and the officer used to escape into the cabinet, after which the young banner soldier followed them inside.

  The remaining Phene turned their weapons on the consoles and lifepods. In a rage at losing Zizou, losing her chance to rescue her father’s work, losing face to the perfidious Lee clan, Sun unleashed the full fury of her people on them. It took thirty seconds to kill them all, far too long.

  In the grim aftermath, smoke hissed from scorched lifepods and slagged consoles. Power monitors blinked warning orange or glowed red. Only three lifepods were still green. The kicker was the failure slamming her in the face. The fourteen lifepods and four consoles had been neatly stacked along one wall, awaiting pickup in an orderly fashion. It was her arrival that had skewed the plan and resulted in the deaths of her father’s researchers and subjects.

  “We need medics and engineers,” she barked at the nearest marine.

  The two apothecary cabinets were riddled with holes and striped with scorch marks. Fragments of leaves, roots, and powder lay scattered on the tile floor like an Idol Faire art project. Blood seeped from sprawled bodies to mingle with shredded brown leaves from a drawer labeled Tobacco.

  She picked up Zizou’s ring and slipped it on her left thumb before ducking down, meaning to crawl through the cabinet’s still-open door to wherever it led. She would catch up to the Rider and capture her if it was the last thing she did.

  Isis grabbed her arm and yanked her back.

  “Princess! Let me run a scan first. They’ll have triggered traps in their wake.”

  Sun was shaking, adrenaline coursing alongside wrath in her body, but she waited in a tense crouch as Isis rolled a heat seeker into the darkness. After three seconds it thudded into something, followed by a clunk, a leaden thump, and a hot puff of rancid air that blew back in their faces.

  “That could have been your head,” remarked Isis congenially.

  What if it had been Octavian beside her? He’d have said, “Breathe, Princess. Don’t let your temper control you.”

  She sat back on her heels. “We need a disposal technician.”

  “Sun! I captured the prime.” Hetty appeared from the garden, dragging behind her a stumbling, elderly man who did, indeed, wear the prime’s collar. He had a bruised forehead and a bloody nose.

  As soon as she saw the slagged lifepods Hetty stopped short, expression caught in a grimace. She grabbed the prime’s robe and shoved him around to face the red lights. “What monstrousness to kill that which is helpless.”

  The prime wouldn’t even look at the slagged li
fepods and their dead. Instead he scanned the broken drawers and their scattered contents as if detritus mattered more to him than human lives. Sun considered the ring on her left thumb. The Phene leash, the effects of the wand she’d just seen used on Zizou, was surely part of the answer to the mystery of mounting Gatoi “savagery” over the last thirty years. No wonder her father wanted to neutralize the neural control the Phene held over their Gatoi auxiliaries—so that they couldn’t be mere detritus left behind in the wreckage of battle.

  “Hetty, take charge of the lifepods and consoles. They must not be handed over to anyone except my father. The Phene fear what we will learn. As for what comes next, they’ll do what they must to save the Rider.”

  The dead Phene soldiers were testament to that. Their deaths gave her no gratification. She respected their loyalty.

  The prime was a different matter entirely. Hetty released him into Isis’s custody and rushed over to examine the lifepods as a pair of medics joined her.

  Sun gestured to Isis. “Bring him here.”

  Isis frog-marched him over.

  Even furious as she was, Sun addressed him with the deference due to elders. “Your Wisdom, why are you harboring Phene hostiles in your hermitage?”

  His look of alarm did not seem feigned, but how was she to know? “They came upon us suddenly.”

  “Yet here I find kidnapped people and stolen information neatly stacked, which means there was time to bring them inside in an orderly fashion. This room is prepared for illegal and criminal smuggling. You have a secret tunnel in your apothecary cabinet!”

  “I had nothing to do with it,” he said, breathing raggedly, sweating with fear. “The orders came in unexpectedly. I could not refuse them.”

  “From whom did the orders come?”

  “On an encrypted channel. I don’t know the source.”

  “You’ll show me the message.”

  “It was a code with a four-minute grace period before dissolving. There is no physical remainder.”

  “How convenient for you.”

  The wrath surged back. Criminals and spies deserved no consideration. She raised her stinger as if it were a club. He shrank back, falling to his knees like a coward who didn’t have enough honor to admit to deeds he’d knowingly chosen to commit.

  “Where does the passage lead? You have one answer. It had best be the truth.”

  He scooped up a vial from amid the blood-soaked tobacco. Before Sun could take a startled breath, just as Isis grabbed a broken drawer off the floor labeled with the ideograms for late bloomer, he broke its oleaginous contents into his mouth.

  45

  In Which the Wily Persephone Has to Make a Decision in Forty-Two Seconds

  It’s hard to get up the basilica steps because of the push of excited, chattering people flooding out, lured by the promise of seeing the Handsome Alika. I flatten myself against a pillar and wait impatiently, unable to make headway against such a determined tide. As it slackens I start up the steps, fretting. I’ve lost my father. Not that I ever had him in a meaningful way. Even the brief interaction I witnessed between Ti and her father carried with it a thousand times more heartfelt connection and emotion than all the years built up between me and the man who, in his cold, detached way, parented me.

  What business does a seer of Iros have in a saints basilica? Why would Zizou’s ring show up in the Iros hermitage? I’m obviously right about Kiran Seth de Lee having been an agent of the Yele all this time.

  Just as I reach the portico a second wave surges out, somber and silent and with a significant percentage of disgruntled-looking people. I allow the movement to carry me sideways until I’m pressed against one of the open doors. The basilica is emptying out even though temples never close but are always open for worshippers. The concept of sanctuary is one of the eight venerable traditions brought from the Celestial Empire.

  I work my way inside and slip into the first alcove to stay out of sight while I get my bearings. I’ve never physically been in a basilica before. It’s not part of the tradition I was raised in. While there are basilicas on Chaonia they are found in provisional districts, foreign population centers, and orbital habitats where trade and merchants cycle through. Of course at the academy our instructors discussed the history of beacon space, and of pre-beacon space whose histories are more fractured, and even earlier than these the oldest layer of archives, the broken memories of the Celestial Empire, these fragments that shore our ruins. The legacy of basilicas grew up in Phene territory. Scientists and laborers pieced together out of shattered archives their best scholarly re-creation of old beliefs and powerful saints from the Celestial Empire, the home territory out of which humanity fled millennia ago to escape the plague of corrupted blood that had overtaken the lands where humanity was born.

  This particular basilica was built by the Phene when they controlled Troia System. Its architecture is magnificat, the same as every basilica anywhere. There’s a long, lofty nave with a vaulted ceiling supported by towering pillars with an aisle on either side. Sixteen alcoves, eight per side, are set into the aisles. Each alcove is devoted to one of the sixteen saints to whom people dedicate themselves. They hope the saint’s specific qualities will aid them or burnish them or give them what they need in material or spiritual ways. The massive pillars glow with a soft golden light. Shining spheres float like peaceful bubbles above the entrance to each alcove. I’m suspended in a momentary sense of awe, of being transported into a plane higher and deeper than my meager self.

  One hundred and thirty meters away, at the far end of the nave, the basilica ends in a space called the apse. As I recall from lessons, the apse remains empty because it represents the official Phene policy that no god or whatever is described by the word god, no supernatural being of omnipotent and omnipresent existence and power, exists in the universe except insofar as human belief brings it into being. The saints are well enough; they are humble, they live close to the people; they serve a purpose.

  I don’t agree. No Chaonian would, since the ancestors who brought us forth still live in us and around us, insinuated into our lives and made present through our actions. But we are who we are, and they are who they are.

  Because the apse is a place of absence, no one may enter it. In fact, no one can enter it because it is separated from the rest of the basilica’s interior by a shimmering curtain of lethal energy, impossible to cross.

  As I peek out from where I’m hiding in the first alcove, I see four people standing just outside the shimmering curtain of lethal energy.

  One is Zizou. I have been acquainted with him for only a few days but would recognize him anywhere by the way he stands as if he might leap in the blink of an eye with spring-loaded steps.

  Two are Phene, both wearing the clear helmets that mark high-ranking Phene.

  The fourth is my father.

  I ping Sun: BASILICA NOW. ZIZOU HERE.

  Behind me, as by magic but more likely by a simple electronic mechanism, the entry doors close with a resounding thunk. My ears pop as if a seal has engaged. We are locked in.

  A stripe of white light snaps on in the apse and travels down the nave as an imaging resonance. When the stripe reaches me where I stand in the shadow of the altar dedicated to Saint Cygna, a sphere hanging over the alcove’s entrance flashes yellow.

  I don’t move. It’s better to see what they will do. As far as I can tell the basilica is empty except for them. And of course me.

  Sun pings back. ON OUR WAY. BEWARE. ZIZOU IS LEASHED BY PHENE TECH THAT OVERRIDES MY COMMAND.

  My father holds a wrist to his ear, then speaks to the others. He starts walking down the nave toward me. I’ll have to make a decision in forty-two seconds. Shooting him with my stinger won’t solve the problem, and I’m doubtful I can bring myself to shoot him anyway. He is my father.

  But my attention is wrenched away from his approach when the shorter of the two Phene steps sideways into the shimmering energy field. I brace myself, expecting t
he Phene to spasm and collapse from a fatal jolt. But they don’t.

  This Phene is a Rider. With a face looking in each direction, its gaze can be read by the energy field simultaneously on both sides. It’s a locking circuit.

  An unseen mechanism clicks. The shimmering curtain vanishes. The floor shifts, taking on a muted glow. A gleaming eight-sided cylinder rises out of the floor. When it reaches seven feet it halts. A section splits open like an orange segment to reveal a cavity within, containing what looks like two stasis couches of the kind used in lifepods. Injured soldiers get placed in stasis until they can be taken to a proper medical facility. Spacers whose ships have undergone catastrophic failure and who need to survive a long stint in space with minimal life support use stasis.

  I understand the rationale in an instant. Riders are the empire’s most precious resource because they are so rare, because the empire is built on their ability to communicate instantaneously across the vastest measures of space. Stuck on a hostile planet, any Rider must salvage the most important part of their mission, which is saving themselves. Basilicas are safety hatches, a last-ditch hiding hole, a place to survive for days, weeks, months, and perhaps even years.

  This Rider means to conceal herself right beneath our noses, in stasis, until she can be rescued.

  I ping Zizou on the ring network, but he doesn’t look around or even tense. When I check his status, the blue circle that identifies him in Sun’s ring network isn’t here in the basilica. It’s on the move, leaving the hermitage. Sun has his ring, and she’s headed our way, but she won’t get here in time.

  The Rider raises a wand. Zizou takes a rigid step forward toward the apse, then a second. He moves like an automaton whose joints are freezing up. He moves like a man being forced to walk against his will. She’s controlling him. He’s leashed.

  No wonder the Gatoi fight to the death. Their Phene masters don’t allow them to stop.

  Sun has lost him, and the Phene clearly want him alive.