The Immortal Empire - Episode 13: Protoplanet Facility
"Somehow, I don't think this is going to work," Jim announced.
"It won't if you keep talking like that," Gene warned.
Jim Hawking stood at the back of their five-person group, apparently the designated position for the shortest member of their traveling party. He was practically invisible within the long cue leading up to the civilian immigration checkpoint maintained by the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire. From what he could see, almost half of the people in line were Ctarl-Ctarl themselves, in what he saw were Terran or Earthling fashions, and were distinctly different than the Ctarl-Ctarl who actually worked the checkpoint. Or it had to do with the uniform regulations. The remainder were Terrans like himself.
"Just behave naturally," Bethany, now their handler, instructed. The muscular Ctarl-Ctarl woman was about the same height as Melfina, but stood at the front of their group, wearing a different undersized dark blue suit paired with a white blouse and matching tie. On the whole she looked very similar to how she had when they'd first met her at Moran-Go's offices at Midway Base. The same couldn't be said about them.
"And what does that mean, exactly?" he asked her.
"Like an Abrahamite." Jim frowned at the useless response.
Gene Starwind looked ridiculous. Moran-Go's cryptic question about their religious preferences had been directed at him for the most part: they'd dressed him in a tall black ankle-length garment called a "cassock" complete with a very religious-looking white collar. After a save and some basic instruction, Jim confessed he actually resemble some variety of a Roman Catholic priest, though he maintained that the look was completely absurd.
Twilight Suzuka and Melfina were also given costumes; instead of nuns, like Jim expected, they wore rather mundane-looking Japanese dress, white kimono jackets and bright red divided trousers. These oufits belonged to what were unfamiliarly called "miko" even though Jim had seen the style of dress before elsewhere. Predictable, Suzuka objected more to the change in wardrobe than Melfina did, who practically enjoyed herself.
Having been dressed last, Jim was bracing himself for what he was certain was going to be the role of an altar boy or something similarly humiliating in his mind, but was swiftly proven wrong. This was a favorite tactic of Moran-Go's company, but it seldom involved pre-adolescents, and no religious clothing was available in his size. What they did have was a particularly old-fashioned school uniform, a grey wool jacket and matching slacks and cap, and a matching bowtie.
"Jim, you look so smart!" Melfina repeated for the umpteenth time.
"Thanks Mel," he sighed. Gene contented himself by with an unconcealed snort but no comment.
Bethany snapped her fingers for their attention, then gestured forward. "This is just the first step: the immigration checkpoint at a planetary transit station. Arrivals are scanned and processed, then board shuttles for the Inner Periphery."
Gene nodded. "And at what point do we convince the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire it's completely normal for us to carry a suitcase load of gold bullion branded by the least popular human government in the universe?" he asked with a quiet hostility. On the spaceport trolley, atop their actual luggage, was the metal attaché case supplied by Springfield, Deputy Minister of Industry, on Vagrant III.
"I'd say at the end of this line," Bethany muttered softly, taking a step back and towards the luggage trolley. Immediately Gene reached over and took the attaché case, only to be surprised by its weight. Bethany waited by him, one hand extended.
"Explain," he demanded.
"I too am curious what you'll be doing here," Suzuka added.
"You think I'm going to take your gold and run? It's not even your gold, what do you care?" Bethany fired back, her usual apathy replaced with open hostility.
"We care because Starwind and Hawking has a reputation to worry about," Jim retorted. "And please, can we at least pretend to all get along here? In the line? In front of the immigration authorities?"
All the queues ran roughly parallel to a long line of partitions, behind which were visible Ctarl-Ctarl officials. Or at least Jim thought they were officials: most of them wore long blue overcoats with white belts and gloves that gave them police-ish look in general. None of them resembled Aisha, excluding a few of the women who had her particularly long hair.
"And if it's no big deal, why can't you tell us?"
Bethany's blond eyebrows narrowed in open hostility, and her thick, cord-like muscles visibly twitched under her taunt blazer sleeves. Jim couldn't help leaning away. "You are going to repeat your cover story if asked. I am going to take that case, and when it's our turn, I am going to open it and show the contents to the immigration personnel."
All four of them stared at her. "That's your plan? We could do that," Gene whispered loudly.
"Maybe there's some part of it we don't understand?" Melfina suggested. Suzuka said nothing, but she had a clear expression of malcontent now, at least.
"Why are we even dressed like this?" Gene asked.
"Because you want to enter the Empire. If you don't, get out of line, change your clothes, and I'll take the suitcase," she retorted.
"Like hell you…"
"Gene, she obviously didn't mean that literally!" Jim lectured him. "Now everyone just…stand quietly and line and try not to draw attention to yourselves!"
They did just that, with Gene grumbling under his breath and a tense Bethany standing at the head of their group. Jim watched her muscles continue to flex underneath that striped-blue business suit and imagined he could see gaps in the seams. She wasn't even a large woman by any standards, it was just her clothing. Doesn't she have clothes that fit?
Jim was staring at her thighs underneath the strained miniskirt when her posture shifted as though she was turning back to the group—instantly he snapped his vision from her to the end of the queue, past the immigration partition, at a massive rectangle of dark stone polished well enough to reflect the harsh lighting back at the arrivals, depending on the angle. Bethany didn't seem to notice him, though he continued studying the fixture, taking one step every few minutes with the rest of the queue.
It was rather massive, ten meters long at least, a very dark green with lustrous gold markings engraved into it—he eventually realized it was rather stylized Ctarl-Ctarl Imperial script: sharp, angular calligraphy that looked vaguely of a mixture of Korean and Arabic, but forcefully squared off in most of the corners with few circular characters. At the very least it was printed legibly, so he fished out a pocket translator, the kind that was supplied free to all arrivals at the station, and began flipping through the pages.
Gene noticed him and followed his line of sight. "What, you don't have a computer for that?" He asked, sounding mostly genuine in his curiosity.
"Shut up, Gene." His brow furrowed in concentration. "Ninyo…Koro…yo…Narl…is this last one a name? It's not 'Ctarl-Ctarl'."
He looked up at the marble fixture. "It is a name. The Immortal Empire of...Hashiyo-Hashiyo?"
"Holy or sacred," Bethany mumbled from ahead of them.
"Excuse me?"
"Ninyo means 'Holy'. Ninkō means 'Immortal'. They're related words," she explained without looking at them.
"And Hashiyo-Hashiyo is the ruling dynasty," Jim said, looking at his paperwork. "But it's still called the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire elsewhere." Unsurprisingly, there were more practical, temporary-looking placards set up on stands or fixed to walls printing in a variety of human languages: Imperio ctarl-ctarl; великой ктару-ктару империи; 卡他拉帝國.
"Some of these are better than others."
"Kind of a cocky move to name the country after yourself," Gene observed. "But I guess that's how monarchy works."
"Another thing you might want to keep to yourself, Gene," Suzuka reminded him, glancing towards the partitions.
Ignoring them, Jim continued staring at the script and comparing it with different pages in the chapter he was referencing. Obviously it's not Korean, but Ctarl-Ctarl definitely isn't easy to read. But at least they really like to use nouns. With nouns, all that was necessary was memorization, a specialty of his.
A muffled voice said something ahead of them, accompanied by a clear, sharp tone, and the line shifted forward substantially. It looked like they were next. Bethany shot Gene a sharp look and extended her hand, and with no little reluctance, he turned over the attaché case.
"What, you think she's just going to run through the checkpoint with a suitcase full of un-spendable gold ingots?" Jim taunted him.
"You saying so doesn't inspire courage," he replied. There had been some squabbling among the Terran couple ahead of them in line, traveling with their own luggage cart, which had finally come to an unsatisfying end as they took their passports back and stormed unhappily through the checkpoint.
The sharp tone sounded again and all five of them moved forward in unison, Bethany closest to the checkpoint. Their section of the partition was made up of a raised desk adjacent to an inspection counter—sitting behind the desk was a thin, distinctly older Ctarl-Ctarl man with a long nose and jaunt, defined cheekbones that Jim hadn't seen on a Ctarl-Ctarl. He was holding a pair of eyeglasses that he slipped into his coat. A portrait of the red-haired monarch was partially visible on the partition wall behind him. He and Bethany exchanged a tense look before he turned to Gene standing just behind her.
"Papers, please," the clerk asked in English, calmly and politely. As if on cue, all four of them fished out the travel permits and passports supplied by Moran-Go. Let's hope these fakes are as good as they claim they are. Jim forced a smile.
The clerk took the documents and passports and began checking them one by one against an out-of-view monitor behind his raised desk. As he did so, Bethany impatiently twitched in front of them. After four beeps from a nearby scanner, he returned the documents but kept their passports.
"Reason for travel?" he asked.
Bethany snapped something in Ctarl-Ctarl that almost made Gene jump. "We're attending a Terran Religious Conference in Ionibas, near the Capital System, in two weeks," he explained in an overly-friendly tone when she finished.
The clerk seemed satisfied. "Do you have anything to declare?"
"Yes, just this…" This time, Bethany cut him off more directly, taking the attaché case and dropping it on the inspection table, causing two much younger, more muscular immigration officials to come strolling up, hands touching their headsets. Gene groaned as Bethany manipulated the complex mechanical lock and opened it: sitting inside a foam groove, stacked three tall and twelve wide, were golds bars, shining under the inspection lights and stamped with the symbol of the Central Bank of the Novokhabarovsk Republic and other security features. It was the first any of them had seen of the case's contents without the benefit of powerful instrumentation.
The younger officials looked on with intense curiosity while Bethany crossed her arms over her large chest and cocked her head. One of them, wearing delicate white gloves, lifted one of the ingots—underneath was another layer of 36 bars.
"Have you ever seen more gold?" Melfina muttered.
"Only once," Suzuka answered candidly. "It's easy to forget that it's worth more than Dragonite…or at least when it's this pure." Jim nodded in agreement, as the officials, watched by the desk clerk, used instruments to analyze the different bars, seemingly at random. Bethany was talking sporadically at the clerk, short, harsh bursts faster than Jim could hope to understand.
"They're asking for documentation of the transaction this gold is part of," she told them with a jerk of her head. Without even waiting for a pause, she turned back to the clerk and growled something in response.
What documentation? Jim thought. Gene's face suggested the same. The two continued their discussion, the clerk looking less and less at the Terrans as it went on.
"What's she saying, Jim?" Gene mumbled through his teeth.
"Just shut up, bro, don't make a scene."
To their relief, the officials then replaced the ingots with the same care. One turned to the clerk and nodded before closing the attaché case—to their surprise, she handed it to Gene rather than Bethany, who was still talking to the clerk. She took some folded piece of paper out from the folds in her strained blazer and held it at him; he nodded in a disinterested, subdued manner; she shouted something else at him.
The clerk returned to his computer and they could hear his fingers tapping away at an unseen keyboard. After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, he stood back up, said something measured, calm and very un-Bethany-like at the at the officials, who circled around the inspection table and began grabbing their luggage.
"Wait…just hold on a minute here!" Gene interrupted.
The clerk turned to him, but Bethany answered in English. "They're just running everything through scanning. You'll be cleared for immigration once they finish," she told them, sounding bored.
Everything—including the attaché case—was run over by handheld scanners linked up with the officials' headsets. At one particular suitcase, this belonging to Jim, they paused and it looked as though they would physically inspect it, only to scan it once more and return it to the cart. The clerk was already marking their passports with an archaic, mechanical stamp.
"Per your documentation, your visas grant you thirty days stay in the Empire, excluding Kata-Kata Space. Upon arrival at your destination I strongly advise you inform the local consulate of the Terran Embassy, or the Terran Embassy on Home itself, of your arrival and your travel plans. Normal currency exchange of Wong into Imperial currency can be done at the convenience desks over there-" he pointed helpfully "-where you will also submit to a biomedical scan."
"We had one of those when we arrived," Melfina pointed out.
"You'll have a third one at your destination," he explained. "Please be mindful of your belongings, especially that." He pointed at the attaché case.
"No kidding," Jim and Gene said, almost in unison.
He tilted his head towards Bethany. "Your guide already has her entry permit sorted out. As such, you're free to go onwards. Welcome to the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire."
The officials returned their passports. Jim gave a nervous, overly loud laugh. "Thanks! Come on, we're holding up the line, aren't we?"
The clerk, his face devoid of any strong expression, watched them push through, now on the other side of the partition, joining the other travelers gradually passing through inspection. Bethany led the way once more, as though the helpful signage was missing and she'd made this trip before
"Okay, okay," Gene declared when he thought they were sufficient out of earshot of anyone in uniform. "I need to know, what did you tell them?"
Bethany gave him a scornful look. "Nothing interesting."
Gene was about to retort when she preempted him. "I told him you were transporting private assets from the Solar Church to go into the coffers of their chapters in the Inner Periphery, that these funds were clerical property and obviously not yours."
"And he bought that?" Jim asked skeptically.
"After I told him it was going to pay taxes owed by Terran churches to the government, yes."
Jim snickered. Gene frowned. "I guess he did, but why didn't you warn us earlier? None of us speak Ctarl-Ctarl, if he'd decided to verify your story with us we would've been screwed."
"Because I didn't know that was going to be my story," she said, lowering her voice.
"Wait, so you didn't tell us because you didn't know? You were just winging it?" he snapped.
"Just shut up and keep walking, Gene Starwind," she warned him, quickening her pace. Gene groaned again as he pushed harder on the luggage cart.
"If it turns out there's money in religion, damn, I got into the wrong line of work," he declared. Jim elbowed him as hard as he could manage.
"Why did it have to be pirates?"
Still wearing her formfitting flight suit, Kalin Clan-Clan lay on her stomach on a rocky outcropping overlooking a very rare sight: a pirate base inside the Outer Periphery of the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire. It'd been fashioned in an abandoned asteroid factory dug into a protoplanet, a speck in the enormous cloud of stellar material orbiting an uninhabited star.
A tap at her shoulder, and she looked over to see Aisha kneeling down to her, a long tether running back from her own suit to a derelict antenna mast reaching out of rocky surface.
"How are they even here?" she asked over short-range radio.
"Things are different since you left on your commission," she responded a little too quickly. Kalin rolled over onto her back to see Aisha staring at her, offended. "I'm joking. This…is definitely not normal. At all. They can't have been here that long either."
"Yeah, sure."
She held up her binoculars "No, look for yourself." She pulled the strap over her helmet and tossed it her cousin in the microgravity. Aisha awkwardly held them against her helmet. "Heading One-Ninety, about ten degrees down. See the borehole?"
Aisha nodded.
"And?"
"And what, it's a giant asteroid borehole."
Kalin sighed in her helmet. "You've gotten rusty, Aisha. Look at the far side, on the second tier."
Aisha grumbled but obeyed, adjusting the magnification. "Prefabricated building, docking site. And…some kind of powerplant. Looks like a naval reactor. Salvaged?"
"It's not one of ours, not a civilian model either. Probably from one of their ships."
Aisha lowered the binoculars. "So they haven't been here long. Maybe a few weeks."
"Navy probably ruled this whole system a risk for regular patrols, too much debris. And they're right, you'd have to be insane to actual set up shop here. I didn't even like it as a jump transit point."
Aisha stood up and, using the tether, more swiftly made her way back to the radio mast. Kalin held onto a strap on her suit and followed. "This is why people don't travel halfway across the country in a two-seater fighter trainer."
"Since when did you become an expert on travel?" Kalin asked her.
At the base of the antenna mast there was shelter: an airlock leading to an abandoned habitation block, part of the derelict mining facility and not something more recent. Power generation was gone: Kalin and Aisha took turns cranking an emergency generator built into the airlock system, which did the job of allowing them to egress, then using another crank, filled the airlock with stale but breathable atmosphere.
"Thank you, Imperial Resources Corporation," Kalin announced when she took of her helmet, two long tails of hair falling out after it.
Aisha pulled hers off with a loud pop, before having to straighten out her long, thick braid. "Aren't they supposed to destroy these facilities after they abandon them?"
"Someone got lazy."
"Oh got paid off," Aisha muttered harshly as she watched her cousin dig through her military kitbag, the one thing she'd taken with her when they'd abandoned her fighter. She produced a pair of ration bars, one in each either hand, and tossed one to Aisha, who took in both and eyed it appreciatively.
"So here's the plan: the power distribution system still runs along the most of this rock, kind of like a spine. It should give us a little cover. We'll follow that up to the far wing of the facility, to that abandoned life support section, and sneak in through the conduits. We find one of their patrols, kill them, and take their weapons. Then we just go back into the main hangar and get my fighter back," she explained, gesturing with her ration bar.
Aisha had already devoured her bar in a few swift bites, spitting out pieces of the wrapper onto the floor. "Weapons?" she asked, skeptically.
"What, too far beneath your dignity?" Kalin asked, patting the holstered sidearm on her waist.
Aisha shrugged before discarding what was left of the ration bar's wrapper. "If you think I'm out of practice, let me tell you Kalin—you couldn't be more wrong," she assured her, rotating her right arm at her shoulder in slow, circular motion. "What, the Navy Fighter Corps make you soft?" she taunted her.
Kalin just smiled, showing off her own canines. "All right then, let's see what two years with the Terrans did for you, little cousin Aisha."
Aisha snorted. "Oh, I'll show you. But first…what else do you have in that bag?"
After Aisha devoured three more servings of rations, they donned their helmets, exited back onto the surface, and followed an eight-kilometer-long power conduit lying in an old trench towards the main facility. Just as Kalin predicted, at the end was a dodecahedron-shaped structure partially concealed inside a deeper pit, with numerous tube-like pipes running out of the base at sharp angles, most big enough for a grown woman to pass through. The unconcealed part of the structure, however, had taken a serious beating: barely much more than the framework survived, the housing torn to shreds by what looked like millions of debris impacts and no attempt at shielding or maintenance.
"God, what a junkyard," Aisha declared as they slid through gaps in the housing into what was left of the structure. Her pace was slowed a little by the tight crevices of the structure's broken walls, but she was able to make it through the gaps. Kalin, by contrast, kept getting stuck on her chest after slipping her legs and hips through—after the second time, she growled and tore the offending wall out of its framework. Aisha held back her laughter, even after it happened again, while both Clan-Clan women we trying to slide along their backs to the bottom level, and Kalin came to an abrupt halt behind her, her flight suit wrenching and shifting awkwardly on her chest. With another growl, she slammed the wall in front of her away and dropped down.
"It's not even a hole in the ground," she grumbled. "It's a hole in what might become 'ground' in a few billion years. Only pirates would be stupid enough to use this as a base now." Pausing in front of one of the few surviving examples of industrial-scale atmospheric processing equipment, she turned back and surveyed her surroundings: through the open ceiling, the ingredients of planetary soup filled the sky, spinning a vast, cloudy disk.
"Or Outlaws."
"There's a difference?" Kalin questioned. Before Aisha could answer the circular section of piping she was leaning against cracked and then shattered, exposing the interior of circulation tube. Aisha promptly stood back up and shook her head, a little disoriented.
"Nice work, Aisha. That's our way in."
"How do you know it even goes to the right area?" Aisha asked, still holding a hand against her helmet.
Grinning, Kalin pointed at a small metal plaque fixed to the wall where it met the pipe. Written in Ctarl-Ctarl were several eye-catching points about workplace safety in bolt print, followed by a simplistic map of the entire life support network throughout the facility. Aisha nodded and looked into the pipe she'd fallen through.
"I hope you fit," she muttered, activating the torches built into her helmet. Kalin regarded her with a raised eyebrow and a hand against her hip. "Come on, before they strip your fighter for parts."
With some caution Aisha climbed into the pipe headfirst, her legs disappearing after her. Kalin followed her more slowly. "Are you joking? They'd sell my Type Two. The Terrans would pay them enough for twenty pirate fighters."
As both women expected, the pipe was a claustrophobically tight fit, particularly for Kalin, who couldn't even prop herself up on her arms like Aisha could as they descended into the confining darkness.
"How far is it?"
"About eight-hundred meters."
Aisha frowned at the thought of 800 meters crawling on her elbows and knees, then recalled it was worse for Kalin behind her, who had to slither and shift, almost like a snack, on her chest and hips. Jim would've been great for this. The thought entered her mind unexpectedly, and she laughed.
"What's so funny?"
"N-Nothing, just a weird thought."
She heard Kalin sigh over the radio. "Maybe the conduit was a bad idea. We could've just run along the outside."
"Yeah, right until a sniper blew off one of our heads," Aisha speculated. "That's not a hard shot in vacuum."
"You would know. You know, I don't remember you being this cautious before you left."
Aisha thought she'd be angry at the suggestion, but she wasn't. She was more cautious nowadays, wasn't she? "Two years with the Terrans will do that."
Kalin gave a grunt that managed to sound deferring. "Next you'll be saying we shouldn't have abandoned my fighter in the first place."
Aisha shook her head, her helmet banging against the conduit walls. She wouldn't have said that, and the reasons were clear in her mind: an Imperial Navy Type 2 fighter, while clearly superior to anything a pirate fighter force would have, was still just one spacecraft. It was made out of metal, hard metal, electronic circuits, a Newton reactor and a pair of Munchausen propulsion drives. It had finite amount of ammunition onboard. By itself, it wasn't a match for the force they'd encountered in the protoplanet, that just wasn't realistic. Of course, Kalin had realized it before she had, and Aisha was still sputtering with confusion when she barked at her to abandon ship.
She pulled herself deeper still into the pipe. "It's just a ship. It's made of parts, same as theirs. But two Immortal Ctarl-Ctarl? I prefer those odds."
Terms to Know:
Abrahamism – The Ctarl-Ctarl descriptor for the Earthling monotheistic religions sharing common Semitic origins, typically called Judaism, Christianity and Islam in human space. Though many Earthling religions have sought conversions among the Ctarl-Ctarl, some schools of Christianity are the most successful, though most Ctarl-Ctarl do not distinguish between different Earthling doctrines and theology.
- Abrahamites – Technically any Earthling observing an Abrahamic religion, but more specifically ordianed Earthling clergy (not necessarily of those faiths) in the Empire.
- Solar Church – A nonspecific term for the various religious faiths still headquartered on Earth (Sol III).
Gold – Atomic number 79, the lustrous yellow metal is still highly valued for the manufacture of jewelry, artwork, and industrial uses (as corrosion-resistant conductor) across habituated space. In T.S. 160, the average gold price per gram was between 60 and 70 wong, and many planets chose to issue locally-used "gold wong" coinage. A large portion of Earth's reparation payments to the Ctarl-Ctarl were made in gold bullion.
Miko (巫女) - A female shaman or priestess in the Japanese Shinto religion.
Imperial Protoplanetary Consolidated Resources Corporation – One of many state-owned enterprises in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire, with a natural monopoly over resource extraction on protoplanets through the empire.
- Protoplanet – By astronomic conventions, a planetary embryo formed from planetesimals in a debris disc that is sufficiently developed to experience internal melting.
