Unconquerable Sun

by Kate Elliott

  A trio of clicks vibrates through the air. Hundreds of wasps clatter to the boardwalk in a patter like hail. Tiny splashes pepper the lagoon as more of the miniature cameras sink underwater.

  “What’s happening?” Ti asks. She’s on my left, Sun on my right.

  I unload the truth. “Lee House’s spy killers have wiped out all electronics. Channel Idol will be required to scrub the entire incident from its official broadcast, although Lee House will retain the incident in its files. Whatever happens to us out here right now will be seen by no one except Lee House’s security team and maybe the queen-marshal.”

  A detachment of eight Lee House sentinels emerges at the south end of the boardwalk. They’re escorting a windowless pod.

  I add, “That is a security-enhanced and watertight pod used to convey dangerous prisoners to the high-security cells carved into the seabed beneath the atoll. Eirene is healthy enough to live a long time, barring death in battle. So if Lee House can discredit you, or make you disappear, they have a path to putting Eirene’s child by Manea on the throne.”

  The sentinels ease closer. A second detachment hurries down the stairs that lead up to the outer ring wall’s guard walk and parapet.

  “Is there another way out?” Sun asks in a low voice.

  If Lee House is that ambitious—and of course they are—I’ve been deployed as a pawn in my family’s schemes, a spare to be used and discarded. Not me. Not now. Not ever.

  “I know all the entrances and exits in Lee House. Then it’s a matter of where we go afterward.”

  Her gaze goes distant as she checks her link. Her eyes narrow. “They’ve locked me out of the military grid. That didn’t take long!”

  “I can get us out of Argos. But leaving will set you at odds with the queen-marshal.”

  “So be it. She’ll regret our public dispute once her anger and pride cool.”

  What about your pride? I want to ask, but now is not the time.

  I blink open the schoolroom link to Kadmos using my personal icon.

   emergency unlock maintenance door at boardwalk

   recommend three jewels gambit

  I smile even though I have nothing to smile about. Kadmos has known all along there is something fishy about my recall. If I can’t trust him then I might as well get in the security pod.

   done. if you want to leave meet at three jewels

  The  blinks three times, then vanishes.

  “Start walking toward the other end of the boardwalk,” I say to Sun.

  She starts walking with her Companions and their cee-cees in train.

  At the security pod the attendant’s false smile turns to the frown of an interrogator whose time is up without having gotten the information their superiors demand. “Princess Sun! There’s no exit that way. I must insist you come with me.”

  “This is your last chance to surrender,” I murmur as we stride along.

  Sun snorts. “I don’t surrender.”

  We head straight toward the first detachment of sentinels. The Companions shift position, turning their formation into a spear with Sun as the tip. Because she strides without slowing down, the sentinels naturally hesitate. They’re used to people giving way.

  To Sun’s left, the girl with the fans flips them out from under her arms. The thap of battle fans snapping open is enough to cause half the sentinels to stop dead rather than move into range of razor-sharp leaves.

  Octavian lengthens his stride to surge out ahead of Sun. “Move aside for Her Heaven-Sent Highness, Princess Sun.”

  The sentinels step aside. House sentinels wearing identical uniforms and carrying shock staffs are no match for a former marine who walks like a jackhammer ready to break you down. We sweep past as a fast-moving storm.

  At the end of the boardwalk a service door slides open to reveal a ramp.

  “The ramp goes down to the service dock,” I say.

  Ti enters first as a sign of trust. The door whooshes shut behind us, cutting off the shouts from outside as the sentinels finally figure out what I’m up to. I invested a lot of time at CeDCA learning how to jam and unjam systems, so it’s easy for me to drop a short-term loop into the door that will keep it locked for ten minutes. Even better, my global net is still CeDCA-locked, so they can’t penetrate my communications feed. Because I’m working everything through the Lee House school net, they won’t be able to figure out what happened in here until they break the loop.

  “This way,” I say.

  The others glance at Sun, who nods. I hustle down the ramp to a dim chamber with a floating dock. Ten boats bump against moorings. They have open decks with utility lockers on either side of the helm and extendible platforms at the stern.

  “These are the maintenance boats for the atoll and reef,” I explain. “I need them all turned on and their shades, their retractable awnings, pulled out.”

  Sun gestures. Her people run for the boats, leaving the Gatoi on the ground. He’s so limp I might mistake him for a dead man if not for the slow rise and fall of his gleaming chest. I tear my gaze away. No time for distractions.

  Instead I slip my tuning fork from where I’ve strapped it under my jacket sleeve. It’s adjustable, perfect for a beacon technician.

  “Alika, how good is your ear?” I ask.

  “My ear is good.” The timbre of his voice is light, nothing like his powerful singing voice, but by the tightening of his jaw I can guess I’ve annoyed him.

  “That’s what I figured,” I say placatingly. I beckon him to the stern of the closest boat and indicate a tube, positioned at the stern of the boat, that submerges into the water. “This is what we call a screamer. Tune it to oscillate through the E-flat minor tonic triad.”

  “Okay.” He looks at Sun for permission. She nods. Of course he has a 440 Hz tuning fork tucked into his ukulele case. He taps it on his knee, presses it to the tube, and starts fiddling with the resonance.

  I clamber into the adjoining boat. Music is part of my study cluster not because I play an instrument but because for a lot of systems work I rely on my ear. Sound can give subtle information about the health of interlocking systems whether a body or any environment.

  Unexpectedly Hestia’s cee-cee speaks up from the boat moored next to mine. The cee-cee is petite and pretty, wearing her hair in braids beneath a decorative beaded cap. She looks more suited to administration than fighting, but you can never tell with a cee-cee because they are specifically trained to multitask.

  Her voice is strained. “I don’t understand why we’re doing this. We’re just causing more trouble. The queen-marshal’s anger always blows over. We should retire quietly with the sentinels, like they asked us to, and wait it out.”

  “Nah, what fun is there in that?” I pull back my lips in what my mother always disapprovingly called my snarl-grin. “Overreacting gets their attention. The bigger the tantrum, the better. Anyway, in case you didn’t notice, all electronic eyes went dead on the boardwalk, so everything that happened and will happen to us has become invisible. We could have been shot and our blood scrubbed off the ground and no one the wiser. Official story will become ‘retirement to the country’ with ‘an unfortunate accident hang gliding’ to follow in a month. Don’t you know how this works?”

  I’m shouting by now. How can people who live so close to power be so stubbornly ignorant about how it functions?

  “Princess Sun has been the queen-marshal’s understood heir for years.” Navah’s mirror-bright bracelets jangle as she flings an arm wide in a gesture that begs the others to support her objection. “No one wants to hurt her, especially not now with an assault on Karnos in the offing. We must all stand united against the enemy.”

  “That’s enough, Navah,” says Sun. “We’re going.”

  “Who can pilot a boat?” I call.

  Hestia, the cee-cee with the battle fans, and the jerk who wears the ridiculous flatcap all raise their hands. So does the jerk’s cee-cee, a woman of at least fifty who has the hard-core l
ook of a fighter you never, ever want to mess with, complete with a wicked scar under her left eye, a prosthetic multi-tool arm seamed on just below her left elbow, and a bright-eyed miniature pteranodon perched on her shoulder.

  “You four each take a boat and follow. I’ll remotely pilot the others.”

  “Wait,” Sun cuts in. “I’ll go with you, Persephone. Candace, James, and Hetty, you each take a boat. Isis, go with Hetty to guard the prisoner. Alika, with Candace. Navah and Octavian stay with me. Tiana…” For the first time she hesitates.

  “Sun, you can’t be so hard-hearted as to leave me alone,” says the jerk, sweeping his cap off his head and pressing it to his chest. “I will escort the beauty.”

  Ti looks at me and rolls her eyes. I’d laugh, but there isn’t time.

  “Go on,” I say to her.

  Sun doesn’t contradict me.

  Alika calls, “Done with the tuning.”

  As I finish tuning my screamer and tuck the tuning fork back under my sleeve, I can’t help but remember how Resh would goad us younger ones into following her into risky adventures like scylla screaming. She always claimed it was to prepare herself for the military command path she was in training for, the career that killed her, but in hindsight I understand she was preparing us to develop the skills needed to navigate war and politics.

  I link up the unpiloted vessels on a tight loop that chains back to my icon. My loop will only work as long as we’re within two hundred meters of the island, but that’s all the distance I need. Octavian stands right behind me like he expects me to betray Sun and intends to smash my head in the second I do.

  The water door lifts out of the way, revealing a sky with scattered clouds and a sea whipped by wind. We look like kids in fancy party outfits going for a drunken joyride, and I should know. Swiping my hands across a virtual screen I pilot our boats in a tight group out of the dock. As we enter the calm atoll waters that the reef encircles, I open up the motors so we race parallel to the island’s ring wall in a neat line like beads on a string. Our destination is Three Jewels pavilion, almost halfway around the island from where we are now.

  Light winks in my peripheral vision. Glancing back I see Navah, in the second boat, tipping an arm up against the glare of the sun. Its reflection scatters against her bracelets. For an instant my floating virtual screen sheers to white as it adjusts to the new light levels. An answering signal winks from the security walk on the ring wall.

  Something splashes hard in the water just off the port side of our boat.

  They’re shooting at us.

  Octavian shoves Sun down, shouting, “Get under the shade. Under the shade!”

  Sentinels are running atop the perimeter wall to keep pace. A shot pings hard off the metal strut that holds up the shade awning, and a hot hissing odor burns past my nose and makes my eyes water. Tear gas.

  Weapons pop out from beneath the sleeves and skirts of the Companions and cee-cees. They all have safety latches wreathed like vines around their retina-triggers; such latches are required to enter Lee House. The vines wither as if singed. A hum of charged weapons sings in my ears.

  “Hold your fire!” cries Navah. “They’re only using stun guns and beanbag projectiles. If you open fire, they’ll say you were the aggressors.”

  A second round of plops spatters the water around us. A projectile pings off the hull, spraying pellets into the water. Octavian drops like an invisible fist has slammed down out of the sky and nailed him.

  17

  There Is Nothing the Wily Persephone Can Do That Sun’s Companions Can’t Do Better

  Sun drops down beside Octavian, checking his pulse. There’s a red mark where his neck meets his shoulder, the impact site.

  “Do the beanbag projectiles used by Lee House contain invisible pellets?” she demands angrily. “He’s knocked out cold, but I can’t find the missile that hit him.”

  Fuck.

  We have to get out of here.

  “Get under the shade,” I snap as I increase our speed. “We have to take the risk of skimming the edge of the open ocean and hoping no big ones are feeding close to shore this morning.”

  “Make it so,” says Sun.

  “I wasn’t asking your permission. I was just informing you. Hold on!”

  I turn a sharp right by an underwater boulder painted orange. It marks a channel cut through the reef. Hestia follows. The rest of the flotilla alter course like a gaggle of ducklings. Waves slop against our hull. An incoming swell rocks us hard as we meet the open water. We skip over the big swells, prow crashing down over each wave. Someone shrieks in terror in one of the other boats, but I laugh.

  Octavian groans. Sun sticks her head out from under the shade and, scanning the sky, says, “Two aircars rising from the far end of the island.”

  “That’s the service landing area. Might be routine, might be coming after us. We’re almost there.”

  “Where are we going?” Sun asks as we bank left to continue parallel to the edge of the outer reef.

  “There.”

  The hexagonal pavilion called Three Jewels is a three-tiered golden pagoda. It sits atop three monstrously huge jade menhirs embedded into a submerged mound built atop the seafloor just beyond the edge of the reef. A red-roofed pedestrian bridge spans the wide reef, connecting the island to the pavilion. Sea churns around and between the bases of the gigantic standing gems. The gaps between the menhirs are big enough for a boat to pass through, but only thrill-seekers or the truly desperate would ever aim to thread such a needle in this kind of crazy wave action. Shouts of protest rise from the other boats as I cut control to their wheels and chain them to me. The boats slam across the choppy water, sending so much spray in our wake that we’re like a long fountain of celebration as I bring us in.

  As soon as we cross out of day and into the shadow of the pavilion’s floor—which is now our ceiling—I kick my boat around, back it up to a narrow dock, and secure us with a line. The dock provides an entry space to an elevator door and a service staircase built into one of the menhirs.

  Octavian sits up. “I can’t see,” he says, rubbing his eyes.

  “Because it’s dark or because your eyes aren’t working?” I ask.

  He grunts, shifts his neck as if making sure his spinal cord hasn’t been compromised, and blinks enough times I think he must be piecing through his net’s sub routines to make sure they’re online. “That was a good shot. Where are we?”

  “Escaping. Sun, open a stopwatch. Tell me when sixty-seven seconds are up.”

  The elevator door opens. Sun whirls into a crouch, a stinger steadied in both hands.

  Kadmos steps out, carrying two camo duffels. He looks haggard and he’s breathing hard, like he ran here, which he must have done. The elevator doors close behind him.

  “This is my tutor, Kadmos,” I say.

  Sun doesn’t lower the gun as I wave him forward.

  Octavian mutters a curse under his breath as he pushes up to his feet and blocks Kadmos’s entry onto our boat. The bodyguard is still trembling, but I don’t think it’s because he’s mad at Kadmos. I think he’s in incredible pain.

  Kadmos halts. “Honored Persephone, I brought your bag and that of Tiana. We don’t have much time.”

  Sun keeps the pistol aimed at Kadmos, but she speaks to me. “Explain.”

  I gesture to the other boats now bobbing on the pool beneath the pavilion. Ti waves at me to show she’s all right.

  “Here’s the plan. This elevator leads down to a service tunnel used to bring food and drink to this pavilion for festivals and parties. There’s an access stairwell from that tunnel to the supply train. The trains run in an undersea tunnel from the island to the mainland. You don’t think Lee House flies everything in, do you?”

  “We’re going by undersea train?”

  “No, we’re going to make them think we’re escaping in a cargo train. It’s the best I can do on short notice. Sort everyone into this boat and the boat Alika tuned. The
other boats remain empty. But keep the shades out to their full extension so aircars can’t easily see who is where or if the other boats are empty.”

  “Stand down, but search the bags,” Sun says to Octavian.

  He steps back, bracing himself on one of the awning struts. Kadmos swings the two bags onto the boat. I extend an arm for him so he can hold on and climb in, but he steps back instead.

  “I am still employed here, Honored Persephone.”

  “What if they notice the missing bags? Find our exchange on the school net and arrest you?”

  “I have my means of staying invisible. Is there anything else you need from me?”

  I glance at Octavian, who is running a sensor over each duffel. Even though it didn’t seem like he’d gotten hit that hard, he’s blinking too frequently, and his face twitches in quicksilver grimaces. He pauses twice to catch his breath.

  “Your sixty-seven seconds are up,” Sun says to me, then calls to the other boats. “Hetty, you take command of the second boat.”

  “Alika needs to stay with her in case he has to retune the screamer,” I say.

  “All right. Alika, Isis, Tiana, you stay with Hetty. You’ll also guard the prisoner.”

  “Hey!” I object. “Ti comes with me.”

  “Your cee-cee is hostage for your good behavior. James and Navah, with me. Candace too. I want you to check out Octavian.”

  Candace is the fan girl. James tips his chapeau at me with a cheeky grin that makes me want to pull the cap off his head and slap him with it.

  Navah clambers in last, nervously leaning away from where Octavian is braced against the railing. “Shouldn’t I be with the Honorable Hestia? Where are we going? Why are we still running? This isn’t a game.”

  “Gosh, seriously? You could have fooled me!” I retort.

  Sun catches my eye and shakes her head in such an odd way that I shut up.

  Kadmos steps back to the staircase. “Ready, Honored Persephone.”

  “Ready,” I answer. “Release the krakens.”

  He vanishes down the stairs before I remember that I should say goodbye.