The Immoral Empire – Episode 14: The Imperial Theater

Visible from orbit, just above the protoplanet's equator, was a massive cavity, the product of industrial excavation with both thermonuclear explosives and direct-energy machinery on a scale hard to match by the IPCRC. In the center of that cavity was a cluster of prefabricated structures at the end of long, vein-like conduits that in turn circled a kilometer-wide borehole.

The most-intact building, a dodecahedron-shaped observation and transmission structure, was occupied by a squadron of pirates from the Black Hole Pathfinder Gang. Two of them, in roughly-matching burgundy-colored uniforms, were now enduring their worst nightmare: being torn apart by a pair of Ctarl-Ctarl.

A pirate holding a pair of combat rifles, one in either hand, screamed something at his compatriot through his cracked spacesuit helmet. She gave him a confused look. "What?"

He yanked off the damaged helmet, revealing a broken nose with blood trickling down over his mouth. "Bring up the artillery!" As the other pirate made a break for it down the hallway, he leveled both of the long barreled gas-operated pistols and fired one shot from each with surprising accuracy.

Both shots found their target in the svelte female down the corridor: one struck her precisely in the upper right thigh, the other glancing off the upper left arm of her space, punching two holes in her formfitting spacesuit. Neither gave her pause as she dashed along the wall in low gravity, arms apart until she was within pouncing distance. The pirate got another pair of shots off with his two semi-automatic rifles, these both in her chest, also to no effect, and was in process of swinging one of the rifles like a club when a powerful blow knocked him onto his back. The Ctarl-Ctarl then leapt on his chest, causing several ribs to audibly crack through his combat armor, before she brought down both fists, clenched together, onto his unprotected head.

The second pirate turned the corner at the end of the corridor, cradling a light anti-vehicle chain gun in her arms, just in time to see her compatriot's head explode into a fluid mess. Stilling herself, she raised the chain gun to eye level and pressed down on the electric firing mechanism: the ammunition belt over her shoulders streamed into the gun's feeder and the bullets shot out the long barrel at a tremendous rate, masking her vengeful screaming.

The other taller but shapelier Ctarl-Ctarl she was aiming at dropped to her knees just out of the way of the volley of fire that filled the space above her, bent her knees back, and threw herself at the gunner pirate like a missile. The blow against the doors at the end of the corridor along was enough to knock her out, but the Ctarl-Ctarl snapped her neck with a single twist before grabbing the weapon and the remaining ammunition belt.

"What's that antique?" Aisha Clan-Clan asked through her helmet.

"You're one to talk," Kalin Clan-Clan countered, gesturing at the short-stroke piston combat rifle she was holding, an unfolded bayonet fixed at the end.

Interrupting their short conversation was a close miss by a dumb-fire high-explosive rocket, passing between them before continuing down the corridor. By the time it had exploded, Kalin turned to its direction of origin and pressed down on the firing switch, filling a rack of aluminum tubing and a half-dozen pirates, including one with a shoulder-carried rocket launcher, with tungsten bullets. They were dispensed with by the time Aisha had sighted the rifle, but another pair of pirates sharing a scoped rifle up on a high perch caught her attention instead.

The sniper pirate and his assistant, even with the benefit of a powered scope, were not as competent shooters as an Imperial Navy-trained Ctarl-Ctarl, and a rifle bullet in the arm was enough to almost send him off the gantry. Kalin's chain gun did the rest.

Aisha was watching her cousin expend the remainder of the ammunition belt when her ears twitched twice and raised her free left hand.

"Do you hear that?"

Unceremoniously tossing the now-useless weapon away, Kalin turned to her. "What is that?"

"…get down!" Aisha ordered, dragging the taller woman to the floor between two more metal shelves. Where Kalin'd stood, a red-orange cascade of light and lightning poured through, cooking the shelving in the way. It dissipated a few seconds later, though not before Kalin saw its effects over Aisha's shoulders.

"That wasn't a rocket, what the hell was that?" she screeched.

"A number ten!" Aisha announced, jumping off the larger woman and sliding down the aisle. Just clearing the shelves, she spotted a large pirate in a better-looking space suit holding what looked like the cross between spear and an extremely long rifle. She sighted the semi-automatic rifle and fired at him where he stood, between ten and twenty meters away, and squeezed the trigger repeatedly, only to find the bullets seemed to shatter in the air a meter ahead of him.

"He's got a shield!" Kalin shouted.

"Yeah, I can see that now!" Aisha snapped back, looking at the empty box magazine in the rifle before throwing herself backwards. Another flashing burst of red energy almost cooked her, fired by the same pirate. "What do we do?"

By the time she'd asked, Kalin was flipping over a pirate's corpse to reveal a bulky grenade launcher with a revolver-style drum, along with a bandolier of spare grenades. She gave Aisha a look through the visor of her helmet, who groaned. She then slid her high-tensile combat whip across the floor to Kalin, slung the rifle over her shoulder and sprinted out from behind cover as loudly and noticeably as she could manage.

The shielded pirate noticed and raised his spear; Kalin popped out from behind a shelf and fired four grenades, all she'd been able to load into the grenade launcher's six-shot drum. As with Aisha's bullets, they exploded in the air a meter away from him, fire and gas revealing the bubble-like shape of the field before it finally collapsed under the strain of the explosions. He kept his spear trained on Aisha, Kalin struck with the whip, mauling his right leg and sending him to his knees. He was pointing the spear at her when his large body shuddered and relaxed, tumbling over and revealing the bayonet of Aisha's rifle plunged just right of his spine as Aisha leapt off him.

Tossing the grenade launcher aside, Kalin retracted the combat whip into its handle and held it towards Aisha. "What the hell was that?"

Aisha almost laughed, picking up the spear after fixing her whip back onto her spacesuit's belt. Closer inspection revealed it to be an even greater oddity: the long weapon with a spearhead extending from one end in the style of a bayonet, the other end a long, polished wooden rifle stock. Immediately ahead of the curving wood was a long, flat trigger, and head of that on the opposite facing was a finely-machined metal barrel with a visible breach for loading large-caliber ammunition at the end of a long metal barrel that extended up to the spearhead, with small, regularly-spaced drilled venting holes. With her free hand, Aisha pulled turned and pulled back the bolt, opening the breach.

"It's a caster gun. That's what Terrans call them, anyway, for firing shells full of weaponized mana." Propping the spear up with one hand, she knelt down and shifted the dead pirate, exposing one of the pouches on his side. After a short search, she produced what to Kalin looked like a small-caliber rifle grenade in a polished brass casing with curved, worn-out markings on it. Aisha stood back up and demonstrated her point by loading the shell into the open breach like a single-shot rifle. "And this, if I'm right, is a number ten caster shell."

Leaning away and towards Kalin, Aisha angled the weapon and squeezed the flat trigger with a mechanical clanking sound. Red light began to glow out of the breech and venting holes, along with the same strange-sounding hum, before the weapon shook violently in her hand and discharged a red burst of energy into the dodecahedron's ceiling above them. Aisha immediately dropped the still-glowing weapon.

"It's Terran Tao mysticism," she said authoritatively. "You wouldn't get it."

"And you would?" She glanced down at her shorter cousin. "You're hit."

Both hands now free, Aisha pattered her breast, shoulder and side where there were holes in her spacesuit. "Yes I am. Come to think of it, we really should've taken off our helmets," she remarked as she fished out small fragments of the shattered bullets still inside her suit.

"Or our whole spacesuits. Some repair tape should fix that."

"Well then, let's go get your precious fighter back," she said, tilting her head in the direction of the adjacent hangar.


"I didn't know you were a fan of the theater, Mr. Risley." The prime minister posed this as a joke, but Mr. Risley's expression didn't seem to suggest that it had landed as intended, so Koboro-Koboro cleared his throat. "Please, take a seat."

The two returned to small row of seats in the prime minister's private booth in the Imperial Central Opera House and Theater, one of a dozen such establishments simply called "the Imperial Theater" in the capital. Tradition required that the head of governnment's private booth, while still fairly lavish with its red felt lining and polished metal furniture, be suitable inferior to that of the head of state's, the private booth reserved for Her Imperial Majesty. The Empress's booth was at the same height, but more centered, compared to the prime minister's and general staff's booths. Koboro-Koboro found the distinctions mildly amusing, especially when he first explained them to his son.

"Uh…no, I'm not," he said with surprising forthrightness, falling into the seat. The prime minister took off his dinner jacket and relaxed in his seat, as Risley fished out the report from his leather attaché case.

"What's so urgent that I.I.B. didn't think it could wait until tomorrow morning?" he asked, taking the thick stack of documents and breaking the security tape that held the folder closed.

"The latest dispatches from their resident officers on Terra," he told him, causing him to look up. "I have some security clearance, you know," he insisted.

"I didn't mean to imply otherwise," he said, fingers over the now-open folder. Risley grimaced with some satisfaction as his superior's eyes lit up. "The Admiralty were discussing finances."

"I told you you'd want to see it," he said smugly before adding, "…sir."

"Actual numbers this time."

"Well, they're not that different than what the Terran press would've speculated. People have thrown out that 'thirty trillion wong' figure out for ten years now, not that they can confirm it."

The Terran governments themselves probably don't know exactly how much it was. No one ever will. Just some number that exists in the ether. "And almost half a billion wong for the 'Keyline Project'."

The prime minister smirked. "Not the best financial decision ever made either, though for 'only' half a billion, the Imperial Navy would've considered it a steal."

"If they found the Galactic Leyline." Koboro-Koboro matched Risley's look. "Well they must not have…right?"

"You'd better ask our brave comrades in the navy about that." The prime minister had made his opinion clear the year of his appointment: the Galactic Leyline did not exist, and if it did, it wouldn't remotely resemble what its pursuers had hoped for.

"The point is, this should be proof they didn't find it. If it existed. Which we don't know," Risley concluded with a sigh.

The prime minster flipped through the documents. "XGP-15A. Where have I read that before?" Risley had no idea, but fortunately he answered himself. "A cruiser in the navy reported a ship with that designation a few years ago, didn't they? The Orta Honehone, a Nipopopolas-class fast cruiser"

Risley just stared at him, confused.

"Dawid Clan-Clan's daughter, Aisha, served as the last ambassador when it was still a consular ship," he told him. "The one who's returning to the empire. I though the report was after her posting was ended though," he murmured.

"How would you remember that? There must be…at least a hundred cruisers of that class?"

"A hundred and eighty seven or so, between three sub-classes in the last twenty years." Had it not been for the postwar slowdown in naval engineering, the Nipopopolas-class would've been retired and its examples gradually retired from service.

Risley gave him the same disbelieving looking. "It's probably just a coincidence. Clan-Clan's name wasn't on the report that mentioned the XGP, at least, I don't remember it being."

He read further into the report. "The Keyline Project aside, this may give us the best picture of the size of the combined Terran economy we've had yet. Has this been compared with past intelligence on the subject?"

"It will be."

He nodded. "The War Bank Bailout was probably the closest anyone has ever come to understanding the actual size of the Terran economy since the Toward Stars era began. Ten thousand separate planetary economies, each one bound to the others in variable, hidden ways. We know the budget of the Space Forces, even the economic assets of the Great Pirate Guilds in vague terms, but not their whole species."

He adjusted his reading glasses and flipped the page. "Debt. It all comes down to debt."

"Well, there's no shortage of that, I'm sure," Risley said absently-mindedly.

"The Terran refusal to cooperate among themselves beyond the bare necessities for survival is a great strength."

"And a greater weakness?" Risley asked.

He gave an apologetic shrug and closed the report. "I want you to visit the Finance Ministry, tomorrow, after the official trade projections are released. The later the better. Find someone credible enough and see what you can get out of them for the ten-year predictions for growth in the Terran empires. Don't worry about how outlandish they might sound. You have my permission to spend money if need be."

Risley almost scoffed at the prime minister's generosity as he returned the file. "I'll have Rafe pay a visit to the I.I.B. with good news. Maybe a small budget bump for the next fiscal year. We'll see how they feel about this report."

"And the Galactic Leyline?"

Koboro-Koboro gave Risley such a look that the young official wondered if the prime minister had completely forgotten that earlier train of thought. "Well, why don't we ask Lieutenant-Captain Clan-Clan what she thinks of it when we return? I'm sure she'll have some thoughts to share."

"If you have the opportunity," Risley dared him, his eyebrows shifting up and down.

"Excuse me?" he asked, taking mild offense.

"Well, wherever this 'Galactic Leyline' was, it wasn't in the empire. Or we would've found it."

There's that fabled common sense again, Koboro-Koboro thought silently.

"That makes the exploration of it, the investigation of it, or even the discussion of it an Imperial affair. And unless Aisha Clan-Clan has become a civilian, that makes asking any interview with Aisha Clan-Clan an Imperial military affair. Which wouldn't be a problem, except…"

"Except…" he repeated.

"I'm almost sure the I.I.B. never declassified the…matter of…the Galactic Leyline. Neither did the military. Which means whatever the Clan-Clan girl knows relevant to its Galactic Leyline-ness remains under the purview of the State Military Secrets Act. And can only formally be shared with the authorization of the lowest-ranking military commander presiding over the matter in question or higher."

"This is why I surround myself with lawyers." He laughed. He was a lawyer himself, after all.

"Any idea who the uniformed officer in charge of the Galactic Leyline investigation was?"

Yes, but I'm not sharing such conjectures with you, Mr. Risley. "That's unnecessary, as I happen to have a direct line to the supreme commander of the whole of the armed forces."

"And you'll ask her directly?" Risley asked, grinning.

"It's a little more subtle than that, but it's legally possible." A favorite line of lawyers throughout the empire, legally possible.

By now Risley was laughing outright, hands over his eyes. Unbecoming as it was for such a gentlemen, Koboro-Koboro smirked at the nearby bodyguard and turned back to Risley, waiting for him to finish, which he did shortly before settling back down in too his seat.

"Are you done, Mr. Risley?" he asked, taking care to sound patronizing rather than angry.

A deep breath cleared the jolliness out of him. "You have the complete confidence of Her Imperial Highness," Risley repeated, like reciting an article of faith. "If anyone can convince her, it's you."

He rose from his seat, but paused. "Let us just hope I can make a convincing case compared to all her…friends."

It was the prime minister's turn to laugh, so he gave a soft chortle. Risley seemed almost offended. "Forgive me, sir. But…you can't consider yourself among the Sovereign's…'friends'…can you?" His ears twitched. "It's just…sir…well, were you 'friends' with the last sovereign?"


Terms to Know:

Caster – A weaponized variety of offensive Tao magic named after the mystically-trained "casters" who originally wielded it, a variety of caster weapons, all firing special numbered ammunition, appear through the original Outlaw Star series and have a particular reputation as antique arms among Terrans, and are almost unheard of anywhere else. Gene famously uses one through the length of the show.

- Caster Shells – The unique ammunition employed by caster weapons, available in at least twenty numbered varieties with different levels of effectiveness. They are most likely a form of mystic spells concentrated into convenient cartridges. Aisha survived a near-contact shot with a No. 12 shell, which rendered her unconscious.

Chain gun – A type of automatic cannon or machinegun that uses external power, usually electricity, to cycle the weapon (that drives a chain). Because of their high rate of fire, they are typically though not always felt by belts of ammunition—this is often incorrectly cited as the origin of the name.

Imperial Intelligence Bureau – A bureau-level organization under the Home Ministry, the State Intelligence Bureau is formally a civilian intelligence agency responsible for intelligence gathering, counterintelligence and counterterrorism, along with domestic investigations in parallel to the State Police Directorate. Commonly called the "Imperial Intelligence Bureau" to distinguish it from the actual Military Intelligence Directorate. In Outlaw Star, Aisha mentions that the I.I.B. is looking for the Galactic Leyline, and believes it to be an enormous cache of dragonite that could "buy an entire solar system."

Personal Shielding Devices – Also called "light shields" for their visual appearance, personnel-use shielding devices emulate the combined energy and force field shielding available to larger vehicles and spacecraft, but on the individual level. In Outlaw Star, Gene uses a personal shield at least once, projected from his hands.