Unconquerable Sun

by Elliott, Kate

  Sun turned her attention back to the strategos platform. She settled the network’s webbing over her head. The mechanism allowed her to insert herself into a grid of sensors and satellites that spread across the system from the farthest tracking sensors at the heliopause to the big comm satellites that orbited the major planets and moons. But she didn’t need a system-wide view right now. She needed a tight focus on the receding planet of Chaonia Prime and its spiral beacon, military and civilian orbital stations, civilian ship lanes, and military patrols as they responded to the emergency.

  “Get me a track on the two gunships.” She pushed a visual toward a Lieutenant Ruiz at track control. She’d flagged the gunships’ initial trajectory as the enemy speeded away.

  “That can’t be right.” Lieutenant Ruiz beckoned the captain over to her console. “The two gunships are headed for the beacon. The Catubodua is moving to engage them.”

  “Lock down any Remora barges making ready to go through the beacon,” ordered Senior Captain Tan.

  Lieutenant Ruiz shook her head. “The last Remora caravan went through on schedule hours ago. There are no barges in the queue.”

  “It’s got a beacon drive,” said Sun.

  “With respect, Your Highness, that’s not possible,” said the captain. “Gunships can’t carry the energy load of a beacon drive. Helm. Accelerate. I want to cut in front.”

  “Captain!” the comms officer broke in. “The Phene just blew up one of their own ships right in the path of the Catubodua.”

  Lieutenant Ruiz’s voice tightened with the rush that accompanied action. “The explosion has forced the Catubodua to alter vector. They have some systems failures. We’ve got incoming debris.”

  The captain said, “Helm, steady as she goes. Shields front.”

  A chief wearing a CeDCA alumnus badge below his stripes flagged the captain. “Unscheduled beacon flash.”

  “Who is it?” said comms.

  The chief said in a shocked tone, “The gunship dropped into the Molossia beacon.”

  “Follow it through,” said Sun.

  Questions and data careened through her head that she battled to weave into a meaningful shape. Why fly a small, vulnerable gunship into a massively militarized solar system?

  But even that wasn’t the crucial question. For two hundred years the Phene Empire had controlled multiple sectors of beacon space, the common name for all the regions linked together by the Apsaras-built beacon network. The Phene had wealth to spare, resources abounding, and a population genengineered to fit various environments. But their rarest and most precious resource was the one thing no other confederacy or population possessed: instant communications between Riders.

  So why risk the Rider who was aboard that gunship?

  The captain scratched his head. “I don’t see how a single gunship thinks they can get through our sector reserve fleet, much less the Eighth Fleet.”

  She said, “Because we are headed straight into major action in Molossia System.”

  “But we just came from Molossia, with you, Your Highness,” said the captain. “Everything was on standard alert, no hostiles, all quiet.”

  “That was two days ago. A raid on Chaonia Prime is audacious but not beyond the capacity of Phene special forces. But the only reason—the only reason—you put a Rider on a vulnerable raid like this one is so you can coordinate multiple actions across the vastest of distances. The rest of us are limited to intersystem communication by courier ships via beacons. But Riders aren’t. I will bet my right lung the gunship expects to meet a Phene fleet in Molossia System.”

  The captain considered her words for five seconds. Then he signaled the boatswain’s mate of the watch. The klaxon began blaring.

  Comms crackled on. “General quarters. General quarters. All hands, man your battle stations. Set Condition 1.”

  The battle cruiser accelerated. Sun glanced over in time to see Hetty tightening her fingers over the straps with her usual pre-drop nerves.

  Jade Kim had recovered a cocky equilibrium because the cadet said something to Hetty accompanied by a condescending smile. Sun could use the ring network to eavesdrop, although she rarely did. She dropped into the ring she’d given to Jade Kim in time to hear that glib voice offer a reassuring lecture to the Honorable Hestia Hope.

  “You never dropped through a beacon before? It’s fine. Nothing to worry about. It just all goes black, and before you know it you’ve fallen into a new system.”

  Hetty did not consider herself a violent person, but by the way she gripped the straps even more tightly Sun expected she was about to slug the cadet’s handsome face for the obnoxious display of condescension.

  Hetty needed a job to do. Sun pinged her.

  GET ME AN UP-TO-DATE LIST OF ALL UNITS PRESENT IN MOLOSSIA SYSTEM

  The officer of the deck said, “Set beacon stations. Transition in ten minutes.”

  Sun stayed on the strategos dais, fastening the webbing that anchored her legs to the platform.

  “Five minutes.”

  Hetty began to route an organized list into Sun’s ring, neatly boxed off so it wouldn’t interfere with the other visuals and information the princess was processing.

  “Take all weigh off the ship.”

  People hooked their feet under stability rails. The gravity cut.

  The comms officer said, “A courier ship just came through from Molossia.”

  The transition bell rang. The ship rolled once, and everything went black.

  No sight. No sound. No breath of circulated air on her face.

  Only a void empty of sense and existence. Like a life without glory or success.

  * * *

  The instant they dropped out of the beacon Sun oriented herself, an insignificant object no larger than one of the passive sensors, surrounded by the shockingly vast distances of Molossia’s solar system:

  A G-type sun, a yellow dwarf. Six planets, five of which anchored a beacon.

  Molossia System had superseded Chaonia and Thesprotis as the center of the navy some fifty years ago. The main naval command orbital station orbited Pánlóngchéng, the fifth and only beaconless planet, with its metal-rich resources, while an auxiliary NCOS had been constructed in orbit around Yǎnshī by Great-Grandmother Metis to help retain control of Troia System.

  Èrlǐtóu and Èrlǐgǎng, the first and third planets, anchored beacons whose destinations had been lost in the beacon collapse eight hundred years ago. For this reason Èrlǐgǎng, with its deadly atmosphere and scattered domed outposts, had been given the munitions depot and orbital shipyards.

  The beacon to Thesprotis System was anchored to the sixth planet, a bit out of the way.

  The Chaonia beacon, the one they’d just come through, was anchored to the fourth planet, called Xièchí by the locals but officially designated Molossia Prime.

  The new Tulpar-class technology had a clarity the previous strategos grid had lacked. Even so, at such scale her eye was not fine-grained enough to pick up detail. She compressed the solar system around her, able to move fluidly wherever she wished, taking in telemetry at real time even as new telemetry was processed and slotted into the grid with the usual distance delays so information coming from the farthest edge of the system had happened hours before the movements of ships closer at hand. She searched for the gunship amid a jumble of shifting points. Her ring network was the most powerful tracker she knew, limited only by distance delays. Zizou’s blip blazed clear although the gunship was light-minutes ahead.

  She flagged the target for the captain.

  He said, in real time and close at hand, “Look at its acceleration. The thrust is undermining the hull’s integrity. It must have taken damage in Chaonia System.”

  Her gaze tracked back along the wake of the Phene gunship. Pieces of its outer hull were breaking loose only to puddle in the acceleration wave of the wake.

  The Boukephalas’s comm cut in.

  “Incoming debris. All hands brace for shock.”

>   A shudder jolted through the ship as it took an impact from a fragment of hull. The shields threw off the debris. Sun tracked back to the gunship. The sections coming off were revealing the real ship beneath with its distinctive double-helix torch drive and the flash of a beacon cone winking at the bow.

  How had the Phene solved the energy problem?

  No time for such questions now.

  “Captain, a Phene light cruiser is approaching the gunship,” Lieutenant Ruiz said. “She’s braking hard.”

  “A preplanned rendezvous, just as you’d guessed,” Senior Captain Tan said to Sun before turning back to his crew. “Give me max thrust. We’ll run down the light cruiser first and then reverse thrust to catch the gunship. Charge forward cannon batteries. Arm javelins.”

  Sun zoomed in and highlighted the contact. “I need the gunship’s cargo and personnel intact. Burn a hole through their propulsion system, match velocity, and send in a boarding crew. Can you manage that, Captain?”

  “My turret crews are the best in the republic, Your Highness,” the captain replied primly. Then he added, to his crew, “Have the aft starboard gun start working a fire-control solution for the gunship.”

  Sun left the captain and crew behind, expanding her field of vision back into the entire solar system. Sensor feeds poured into the strategos grid as the program identified and flagged all military targets. The first comm traffic hit, a bounce back from the signal node of the beacon they’d just passed through. A hundred signals voiced at once, smashing into each other. It took her a moment to filter out Channel Idol.

  Royal wedding updates! Color schemes for your block party!

  We’re getting hit by debris.

  Mayday. Mayday. We have incoming bogies and have lost contact with—

  Bake these Double Happiness cakes!

  No answer from the bogey. Can you secure a visual?

  Seeing anomaly in sector 3.05, Lanippe, can you confirm? Lanippe, do you read me?

  Every beacon had a control node attached to its outer coil. The node’s crew hailed the Boukephalas, cutting through the frantic background chatter.

  “Boukephalas, you are secure past the beacon aura. Are you the reinforcements? Where are the reinforcements?”

  “This is Captain Tan of the Boukephalas. What reinforcements?”

  “A Phene fleet has attacked Molossia System.”

  “Where did they come from?” the captain asked.

  Sun cut in. “Have you tracked back on the route of the Phene light cruiser? Its arrival had to be timed to rendezvous with the gunship.”

  The Boukephalas had dropped into the system via the beacon anchored to Molossia Prime. Sun spun out a tendril of attention toward the Troia beacon, anchored on the second planet, Yǎnshī. Measured on the plane of the ecliptic, Yǎnshī was currently at a ninety-degree angle from Molossia Prime, and nearly on the opposite side of the sun from the third planet, Èrlǐgǎng, with the munitions depot.

  There was no unexpected activity to be seen in the vicinity of Yǎnshī, although of course she was seeing it as it would have looked an hour or more earlier. That meant the Phene hadn’t entered Molossia’s space through the Troia beacon. But that scenario was unlikely anyway, since the palace on Chaonia Prime would already have heard via fast courier if a Phene fleet had hit Troia before dropping into Molossia.

  There was something else going on. Something entirely unexpected.

  She tracked back the comms traffic to the mention of Lanippe, and flung the name at Hetty, who replied immediately with a visual of a fast frigate called Lanippe, seconded to the Molossia reserve fleet.

  Sun ran the telemetry backward to find the point of generation: Where had that piece of chatter come from? How long ago?

  And there it was, utterly shocking and remarkably brilliant.

  A Phene fleet had entered Molossia System from beyond the heliopause, into sector 3.05 near the fifth planet and its naval command orbital station. Now the rest of the incoming information began to make sense.

  “Captain Tan! Let the gunship go for now. We can catch it later. We have bigger problems.”

  “Your Highness?”

  “A Phene fleet entered Molossia System in sector 3.05 and has attacked the NCOSP. Get hold of Crane Marshal Bahram, or any ship captain—”

  James said, “My brother Anas is with the Eighth Fleet, getting ready to ship out to Troia. He’s in command of the Melandria. He should be at the munitions depot.”

  “Captain! Hail the Melandria. Get me Raven Marshal Radomir at Èrlǐgǎng Depot.”

  “Sun,” Alika interrupted, “how can a Phene fleet have entered the system undetected?”

  “Because they didn’t come through a beacon. They’re using knnu drives.”

  “That would take months of travel from their nearest port of call.”

  “That’s right. Months of travel, out of sensor range, unseen, unexpected. All of it coordinated by Riders. That’s why there’s a Rider on that gunship. I don’t know how long ago the Phene learned about the lab’s existence. But I guarantee the raid on the lab was coordinated to rendezvous with an attack the Rider Council and the Phene military already knew was coming, because it had to have been launched months ago. That’s why they think they can get away with it.”

  She flung visuals toward the captain’s console, showing how a line of attack would allow a fleet to strike the fifth, third, and second planets efficiently and with relative quickness given the current orbital positions of the planets. Data piled up as readouts from hours ago piled into their system: a sudden call to alert, a scramble of call signs as ships tried to launch to meet the threat, frantic maydays, calls of distress cut off suddenly, ships and habitats silenced.

  The comms officer tried to patch a call through to Crane Marshal Bahram’s high-priority line at NCOSP, but no ping returned. In her heart Sun heard the roar of obliterating flames even though she knew the moment the atmosphere systems were breached all fire would have been sucked to nothing.

  “Your Highness, I have contact with a Commander Baber of the assault frigate Hábrók, stationed at NCOSP.”

  Breaking protocol, she grabbed the comms herself. “Hábrók, this is Princess Sun on the Boukephalas. Report in.” She went back to the strategos grid and sent out additional messages, seeking other survivors. Replies popped in according to distance delays.

  A steady comms voice said, “This is Hábrók. Roger. Wait. Out,” and a moment later a new voice came in. “This is Hábrók actual. Are you the reinforcements?” Commander Baber sounded out of breath. A klaxon sounded in counterpoint. “Secure that alarm, Ensign!”

  “Report in. How many Phene ships?”

  Again she waited. Every exchange became intertwined with other exchanges, a complex web more like leaving paper notes and picking up replies later.

  “Hundreds. They hit NCOSP with salvos of missiles and kinetics. There were over one hundred Chaonian naval ships moored there and at nearby orbital dry docks. All of us hammered.”

  “Are you still docked?”

  “No, but we were docked when it happened. The Phene hit with multiple strikes and accelerated on. Smash and run. Pure accident this ship survived.”

  Finally Sun got a fix on NCOSP with enough resolution to see how the situation had looked tens of hours ago—the wrecked orbital was venting atmosphere and slowly spinning in the wrong direction, soon to start a death spiral toward the planet. Ships drifted, powerless. Debris began inexorably turning into the gravity well.

  Ships were moving away from the wreckage, forming up into squadrons and tracking down lifeboats.

  “Commander, all ships able to fight immediately join up with the Boukephalas. We’ll send you our bearing.”

  “The hells!” exclaimed Senior Captain Tan as a new wave of information rolled in. “We found the Phene fleet. They’ve hit the munitions depot at Èrlǐgǎng. There have to be at least five hundred enemy ships.”

  James dragged his cap off his head and slapped it aga
inst his thigh. “Anas and his task force were taking on munitions at the depot.”

  “James, see if you can patch through a private comm to your brother. Captain Tan, try to get any comm open to the munitions depot or to any command ship…” She trailed off as a new telemetry shifted through the grid, giving her a telltale path.

  “The Phene fleet is slingshotting around Èrlǐgǎng to get extra speed toward Yǎnshī. Which means they intend to exit the system via the Troia beacon. And that means … that means…” Her mind sped through the ramifications, shuffling in and discarding information until the patterns started to make sense. “Why would they bottleneck themselves through Troia when they would know Troia will have warning by now? Unless … they’ve hit Troia already from either Kanesh or Aspera.”

  Hetty said, “We passed a courier ship on our way out.”

  “That’s right. It dropped into Chaonia just as we went out to Molossia. I want to see the message that was on that courier.”

  Seconds ticked past like hours before the classified message flashed up as a visual:

  FLASH FLASH FLASH ASPERA SYSTEM UNDER ASSAULT BY MAJOR PHENE FLEET. MARSHAL SARNAI IN RETREAT. SEND REINFORCEMENTS.

  The crew had taken the shocking circumstances in stride so far but broke out now into a hum of murmured exclamations and speculation. Sun was beyond being surprised. It all fell so neatly into place.

  “We must get to the Troia beacon before the Phene fleet here in Molossia reaches it. We will cut them off.” She assessed shifting ship movements on the grid, but there was too much to absorb with one pair of eyes. “Lieutenant Ruiz, get me an analysis of Phene fleet movements.”

  “The Phene fleet has taken damage at Èrlǐgǎng. It looks like they’re blowing up their damaged ships. Some of their light cruisers are falling behind to scoop up lifeboats from the abandoned ships. There’s a group of about eighty Chaonian ships ahead of them, running a fighting retreat from Èrlǐgǎng, headed toward Yǎnshī.”