Unconquerable Sun

by Elliott, Kate

  My father is two-thirds of the way down the nave as Zizou takes a third stiff, struggling step into the apse. In three more paces he’ll enter the opened cylinder, lie down in a stasis couch, and be sealed in. If I don’t do something now, I’ll lose him.

  I step out from the alcove into the nave. My father halts, scanning to make sure there is only one intruder. Because he is blind to visual light and I haven’t spoken and I’m not wearing anything that marks me to his vision as being part of Lee House, all he can see is the heat signature of an individual. I might be anyone. I might be Octavian instead of Sun. He raises a stinger, tuned red.

  I start walking toward him, speaking in a loud but calm tone. “Father, don’t shoot. It’s me, Persephone. You were right all along. I’m sorry I didn’t understand it before. Let me join you. I’ll come home. I’ll do whatever you ask of me.”

  Father hesitates. I’m surprised and honestly relieved that he seems to have a smidgeon of paternal feeling.

  Hearing my voice, the startled Phene glance my way. Whatever rats they expected to find slinking out from the dark aisles of the basilica, I wasn’t one.

  The Phene officer unholsters a small hailstorm gun, although why any Phene would spray off a round in this holy basilica I could not tell you.

  I keep walking, picking up my pace, needing to get closer. I will not let them take him. He doesn’t belong to them, or to Sun, or to me. He belongs to himself.

  “Zizou! It’s me.”

  Zizou looks over his shoulder.

  He sees me.

  He sees my face.

  46

  You Might Hear the Whispers of All That Had Been Lost

  The basilica doors were shut. Arriving on the exterior portico, Sun spared a glance for the plaza and the crowd that, packed together like so many vibrating molecules on the verge of exploding into gas, had gathered to watch Alika’s concert. He’d segued into an extended tale-telling song that demanded audience call-and-response, a good way to keep their attention on him and not on Sun stymied at the closed doors of a religious edifice meant to be always open for worship.

  “Is there a side way in?” Isis asked.

  Solomon said, “I’ll run a circuit of the exterior.”

  “Don’t bother.” Sun grabbed Isis’s restricted-grade weapon out of the cee-cee’s hands and blasted a red-hot hole through a beatific image painted on the door depicting Saint Cygna the Lifebringer and her loom of creation. She shoved the gun back to Isis and charged through the ragged gap, unholstering her favorite stinger.

  The gulf of the nave’s staggering height swam in half-light as her eyes took in the vault. She dropped and rolled just out of habit, rising to one knee in time to see Zizou slam headlong into Persephone Lee. His hands wrapped around the Lee girl’s throat.

  At the far end of the edifice, 130 meters away, the Rider stood inside the boundaries of the apse. But that was impossible.

  Then Sun realized the Rider was standing beside a blocky, cylindrical object risen out of the center of the apse where normally was only a floor mosaic. The cylinder was a large lifepod, set vertically into the floor and equipped with two stasis couches.

  Ah.

  A trick of acoustics threw words the length of the nave. The Rider said to the Phene officer, “Shoot the girl he’s attacking. When we get him back under control, he can take out the others.”

  Before the officer could raise her gun Sun shot her. The impact sent her stumbling, but her body armor splintered the pulse into shock waves. Isis and Solomon scrambled up behind Sun. A squad of marines swarmed into the basilica in their wake, sprinting for cover in the alcoves. The Phene officer ducked behind a pillar.

  Sun released a nonlethal pulse at the Rider. Staggered, the Rider dropped the wand she held, slumped backward, hit the edge of the lifepod, and collapsed backward onto a couch. With a pneumatic hiss, the couch sealed over her.

  The lifepod gave a loud click and shut. The cylinder sank into the floor. The curtain of lethal energy that enclosed the apse shimmered back to life.

  Sun’s glare had no effect on the process, could not stop it. The Rider’s presence had clearly triggered both the opening and the closure. Given Phene technology it would probably take a major bomb to jar it loose, one that would flatten all of Repose District.

  “Surrender,” Sun called to the officer, still out of sight behind a pillar. “Hand over your weapons. You will be treated humanely in detention and your wounds cared for until such time as hostilities cease or a treaty for exchange is sealed. Your Rider has abandoned you.”

  A silence followed this declaration, succeeded by scraping sounds, a pop, and a gasp.

  Sun shook her head. What a waste of a good soldier. She waved the marines forward to complete a sweep of the space.

  “Did we know about hidden lifepods in the apses of basilicas?” she asked Isis.

  “I never heard of such a thing.”

  While Sun’s attention had been on the Rider, Isis had thrown an altar cloth filched from the nearest alcove over Zizou’s face. He lay unconscious on the ground, face concealed by an image of Saint Chell surmounted by a banner on which the words FACTA, NON VERBA were written in the blocky alphabet used colloquially in the Phene empire.

  Persephone Lee was lying on her back on the floor, breathing raggedly. She tried to speak, coughed, groaned, and winced.

  “Let me help you up.” Sun grabbed her left wrist and dragged her into a sitting position. “That was smart and foolish at the same time. Which seems true to you, now that I’m finally getting to know you.”

  “Gah,” said Persephone, tentatively probing her neck. Her voice was hoarse and brutal. “My father…”

  “Your father?”

  “Yeah.” Persephone’s voice grated. “I positioned myself behind my father so Zizou would hit him on his way to me. Isn’t he here?”

  “Solomon, find him.”

  Solomon called over a squad of marines and started searching.

  “The Phene definitely have a leash on the Gatoi,” said Persephone.

  “I know. Call them banner soldiers from now on,” said Sun.

  “Oh fuck. I guess if he’d crushed my windpipe I wouldn’t be able to breathe.”

  “Wait beside him until he comes to.”

  “Me?”

  “He’ll listen to you. Just make sure he stays blindfolded.”

  “Whoa, thanks, Princess. I might have forgotten if you hadn’t reminded me.”

  Sun flashed Persephone an appreciative smile, then signaled Isis to walk with her down the length of the nave. The marines were searching all sixteen alcoves for the missing seer and apparently not finding him.

  “Look for a secret tunnel,” she called to Solomon, who was scratching his head and looking frustrated. “There should be a disposal tech at the hermitage by now. Once they clear the entrance of traps from that end we can trace his escape route. Once you’ve cleared the interior, do a perimeter sweep outside. Check for a concealed under-level.”

  She spared a moment to watch the cadet as he rounded up the marines and set them on their way. He had good skills.

  When she reached the far end of the nave, the energy curtain prevented her from entering the apse. The wand had rolled beyond the curtain, out of reach. It gleamed, still powered up. The floor had been restored to a pleasingly symmetrical floral pattern of tiles with no hint of a secret chamber hidden beneath.

  What had such hiding places been called in the Celestial Empire?

  “Priest holes,” she said aloud. “Safe rooms.”

  Isis paced the length of the curtain and back. “Seamless. Every basilica I’ve ever been in has this same energy curtain. The apse is meant to be empty as a symbol of the invisible reach of Phene power, or their belief in a godless universe, or just because they like it as a visual aesthetic. I had no idea it is really a fail-safe hiding place for Riders. Which do you think came first—the worship of the saints, or the Riders deciding to construct fallbacks that no one would g
uess were safeholds?”

  Sun turned to look down the length of the nave. The piers holding up the roof reminded her of the ribs of the Titan-class ships that had brought humanity away from the suffering of the fallen Celestial Empire to seek a new home, a safe haven. She felt at ease in the basilica, as if this edifice were a crack in the wall between the opaque world of the living and the secrets of the dead.

  “It’s safest never to insult gods and spiritual forces, however they manifest,” she said to skeptical Isis. “The ancestors speak to us through worship and ritual even if we often can’t understand what they are saying. The saints once lived in the Celestial Empire…”

  She trailed off as the angle of the view struck her.

  “Your Highness?”

  She signed for silence. Took a step back.

  “Careful!” Isis looked alarmed at how close Sun’s back was to the curtain.

  Sun stared down the length of the nave to the entry doors. “Does this angle look familiar to you?”

  “What angle, Your Highness?”

  “The view from here.”

  Isis shrugged. “Every basilica is arranged the same way, the alcoves in the same order, Saint Hrothgar the Near Dweller and Saint Cygna by the entry doors, Saint Arthas and the twins here by the apse, and the other twelve between always in the same order. The general architecture of entry, nave, aisles, and apse is the same. Sometimes there’s a transept, sometimes there isn’t. Just like the Honored Hestia said about the hermitages having the same layout. I guess it makes it easy for worshippers to know where to go.”

  Sun looked at her feet. The paving was stone, like the rest of the nave, expensive but durable, and laid out in a pattern of squares: regular and dull. Only in the apse did the pattern of the paving change to the elaborate circular mosaic that disguised the slot for the hidden cylindrical lifepod.

  “What are you seeing, Your Highness?”

  Sun dropped her voice to a whisper. “Bring Tiana here at once.”

  Isis gave her a surprised look but left.

  Sun pinged Hetty. FIND TIANA. YOU AND ISIS ESCORT HER TO ME.

  Then she pinged James by voice. “Has my father landed yet?”

  “Are you expecting him to land?”

  “Really, James?”

  “Oh. Of course he’s coming.” His silence ticked over like gears running an engine. “You sound out of sorts. Do you need medical assistance? Metrics say you’re wounded.”

  “Don’t be an ass,” she snapped. She glanced at her left thigh. The field bandage Solomon had slapped over it was containing the blood and the pain.

  “I’m not being an ass. You’re being an ass.”

  Her temper trembled on the edge of explosion, and then she laughed. “Never change, James. Has my father landed, as I already asked you once?”

  “Not yet. Orders?”

  “We remain on lockdown until this is resolved. No one can know what’s going on in here, not even the local military command. Make whatever excuse you need.”

  Last of all she pinged Alika. KEEP THEM FOCUSED ON YOU.

  LOCALLY WE ARE MOVING UP FAST. THAT WILL HELP OUR NUMBERS WHEN THE COURIERS TAKE THIS REPUBLIC WIDE. A FEW PROTESTS ARE BEING FLAGGED THROUGH OFFICIAL LAYERS, SAYING THE “SUN AND HER COMPANIONS” GROUPING DIDN’T REGISTER AS AN OFFICIAL IDOL FAIRE COMPETITOR BEFORE THE DEADLINE.

  She filed away the information for later and, feeling a twinge of pain in her leg, looked for a place to sit. An unpadded bench in the alcove of the twin saints gave her respite to mentally walk back through the attack. Was there any point she might have acted more decisively and thus not lost any of the lifepods? If only Octavian were here to question her down to the tiniest detail.

  Grief is a beast, and she would not feed it. She would honor him as he would have wished to be honored: by using the training he’d instilled in her.

  The sound of footsteps brought her head up.

  Hetty.

  Lit as by the vault of heaven, with the loft of the nave as her glimmering backdrop. Her dark hair in its braid: disheveled. Her chin smeared with a line of dirt and a stippling of dried blood. Her gaze lambent. Her mouth—that secret pleasure—was already moving with her usual pragmatic tug back to earth.

  “There are you, and here we are. Alone.” Hetty had a hand tucked into Tiana’s elbow in a gesture that might look sociable to the casual eye but which gave her leverage with which to steer the cee-cee.

  Being no fool, Tiana understood she was in informal custody. For once her sheen of perfection and poise had cracks. Her skittish gaze flashed all around the basilica as if she expected clowns to leap out and murder them. Sun did not rise nor did she invite Tiana to sit.

  “Attend me, Tiana,” she said.

  Hetty’s mouth made a little o of surprise. She released Tiana’s arm and took a step back, positioning herself so if the cee-cee broke and tried to run she could body block her. Sun examined Tiana, who looked first at her and then, nervously, at the lovingly painted life-sized statues of the twins, to whom the benighted might pray for relief from Anguish and Pain. In the opposite alcove, beneath an imposing status of Saint Arthas the Cursebearer, the marines who hadn’t gone with Solomon sealed a security webbing over the dead Phene officer. How fitting that the officer had died under Arthas’s gaze, for her homeland.

  Sun remained silent until the marines carried away the dead soldier. She wanted no witness for this.

  “Tiana Yáo Alaksu. What is your womb parent’s name and story?”

  Tiana flinched, not so much at the question Sun had asked but at the question not asked. “My womb parent was named Rose Tarawele Alaksu. She was a combat veteran who took her own life two months after I was born. I have made my peace with her memory because my father loved her. He says she must have been in a great deal of pain that she’d concealed from everyone around her. However, her family called her act shameful and wanted nothing to do with me. My father’s parents raised me in my early years on the kalo farm while he continued to fight with the Chaonian military. He lost an arm in the service of the republic, as you saw. The republic having no more use for a one-armed soldier, and him not having the money to replace the arm with a proper prosthetic, he was discarded.”

  “He could have gone home, but he chose to remain in Troia System. I know what you are hiding.”

  A tear slipped from the cee-cee’s left eye, but with impressive discipline she did not raise a hand to wipe it away nor by any other expression or gesture or movement further reveal her fear.

  “You have something to do with the Phene, do you not?” said Sun.

  Hetty slipped a hand up her sleeve where she kept a stinger strapped to her forearm. “Is she involved with this conspiracy, Sun?”

  “I’ve nothing to do with this!” cried Tiana in a burst of emotion, voice catching in the echoes of the nave.

  Down by the doors Persephone Lee sat cradling the unconscious Zizou’s head in her lap like a madonna in a maudlin teledrama. Hearing Tiana’s exclamation she looked up, stiffening.

  Sun pinged, STAND DOWN. SHE’S IN NO DANGER. DID SHE TELL YOU NOTHING OF HER SITUATION? WHY SHE NEEDS THE MONEY? TOOK SUCH A DANGEROUS JOB?

  YOU SAW THE REFUGEE CAMP.

  In other words, Persephone had no idea.

  The princess turned her attention back to Tiana. “You will be escorted to your home and bring your brother here immediately.”

  The cee-cee hid her face behind her hands and sobbed in a burst of sheer terror. Hetty gave Sun a critical look. Sun shook her head, and Hetty responded with a puzzled shrug, to show she was willing to wait it out even though she, too, had no idea what was going on.

  Tiana lowered her hands. People like her were still beautiful when they cried, and Sun didn’t think it was artifice, just chance.

  “Don’t do this, I beg you, Your Highness. They’ll come for him.”

  Sun rose. She wasn’t as tall as Tiana, but her presence always filled whatever shape she willed it into.

  �
��They will have to get through me. He’s too valuable for me to lose now that I know what he is. Do you understand me?”

  “Is that a threat, or a promise?” Tiana asked hoarsely, but with pride. “Just so I know where I stand.”

  “That depends on how you and your people decide to come to me.”

  Tiana touched a hand to her eyes, released a slow breath, and lowered the hand to reveal a cool, bland expression. She had recovered her composure out of the depths of her rigorous training at Vogue Academy.

  “How did you guess, Your Highness? We’ve been so careful.”

  “His paintings. The one of the basilica could only have been painted from a point of view at the back of the apse. I have discovered that Riders can enter the apse. What one Rider sees, all see. How is it possible you’ve kept him secret all this time?”

  “He wears the knit cap. If he must take it off we make sure there is no visual marker to give away his position, no background noise that would allow the Rider Council to trace us. Poor Kas. He never leaves the tent. It’s a terrible life for him. It’s why she ran. She didn’t want to give him up.”

  “Is Nanea kin Kavan truly Phene? She only has two arms.”

  “She’s a stunt. That’s what the Phene call people born with just two arms. But babies born with two faces can come from anywhere within the population of the descendants of the original founders of the triple alliance of Anchor, Auger, and Axiom. What they call the imperial Phene.”

  HIS NIBS INCOMING IN A FRESH OUTFIT, pinged James, flashing the tiara made of entangled gold snakes he used to represent Sun’s father.

  “Hetty, take Tiana with Isis. Only those two. Collect the family and return here. They may bring only what they can carry. They won’t be going back.”

  When she used that tone no one gainsaid her. Even Tiana gave her a hopeless, hopeful look before Hetty led her away.

  Sun wanted to sit—her leg pained her—but she remained standing as the minutes ticked past as she considered the basilica empty except for Persephone Lee, Zizou, and the Rider sealed in the hidden lifepod. Empty except for the intangible affirmations offered by the saints to those who begged them for strength and intercession. Dreams had power to breach great distances. How else could humanity have escaped the plague of corrupted blood that threatened to extinguish it? If a person listened hard enough, they might hear the whispers of all that had been lost across the millennia-long passage. So much of the road had been covered as with blown sand, obscuring the route and the landmarks. Just as entire sections of the beacon routes had been lost in the collapse of the Apsaras Convergence, so fragments were all that remained in human memory of the Celestial Empire. Some said it had never existed at all, that it was just a story. But plants grow from seeds, and humanity too had grown from roots germinated out of ancient kernels.