The Immortal Empire – Episode 18: Airstrip 4

"What a mess," he remarked. Standing near the northern wall of one of the largest hangars in the massive, and clandestine, storage cache on an otherwise forgettable planet on the fringes of Ban Guild space. In fact, it wasn't so much a mess, when a clear effort at organization of hundreds of tonnes of salvaged military hardware, ordnance and supplies for inspection and then subsequent transport. The hangar wasn't much warmer inside than outdoors, but something—the numerous floodlights placed about, the hum of human activity—was making it warm enough to justify removing his winter coat.

"Mr. Ronald MacDougall!"

"Ron. Ron is fine," Ron MacDougall insisted calmly. Removing his gloves, he found feel himself rubbing his forehead with his right hand, though not at the man addressing him specifically; it'd just be a long day in general.

"Uh, sorry sir. Ron, I mean." A member of the installation's groundcrew, a technician by the looks of the tools he wore over his nondescript civilian working suit, ducked his head so he could clear the long, bent barrel of a forty-year-old, partially-melted combat Einhorn hovertank between them. Ron noted the technician couldn't have been older than twenty.

The youngster twitched nervously. "We're ready for you."

He tried to nod enthusiastically. "Lead the way, son."

An enormous amount of floor space in the expansive hangar was occupied with salvaged materiel, organized into seemingly meaningful stacks of stuff, each arranged on an appropriate sized canvas tarp. A few stacks had hastily-erected signs with information written on them, or were cordoned off by cable barriers indicated potentially unsafe to be touched. By now Ron was impressed by it, how much it reminded him of the military on its competent days.

"As you said, the best finds didn't come from Victoria II, but from the close orbit of Victoria B," he explained, referring to the dwarf star in Victoria's binary system.

"Well, I told Hoburn we shouldn't be looking where the Ctarl-Ctarl won. We should be looking where they lost," Ron repeated, trying to keep an excessive amount of superiority out of his voice. The groundcrew man seemed to take it in good humor. "So, what's the prize for this evening?"

A rows further into the hangar, the salvaged equipment took on a progressive more and more alien quality. The shapes became more defined, and instead of being mysterious blackish hulks, took on an olive-brown metallic hue with visible with uniform stripes and alien insignia: the symbols of the Ctarl-Ctarl Imperial Navy, Ron reminded himself. I've been at this too long. I could've sworn they looked different ten years ago. He shifted his sunglasses so he could more clearly see them more clearly over the rims: Ctarl-Ctarl naval torpedoes, in good enough condition to be worth something.

"This is the real big fish, literally," his guide explained, suppressing a chuckle at what was apparently a joke. "Unlike those dual-stage thermonuclear torpedoes you pulled from the Orta Korono on the edge of Smuggler's Way."

"How so?"

They came to a halt in front of one particular well-preserved artefact, a stout cylinder with six equidistantly-positioned fins running the length of the body from the base of the nosecone. There was some visible scoring and even scratches, but otherwise even the Ctarl-Ctarl printing on the weapon's housing could be clearly made out, were he able to read it. The whole assembly rested on display stand supplied by the groundcrew.

"I don't recognize this one," Ron confessed after frowning.

"These fins only extend after launch. Don't worry, sir, we've already tested it, it's perfectly safe. Those anti-ship torpedoes back there aren't that different from ship-to-ship weapons used by the Space Forces or even aboard the Shangri-La. This, on the other hand…" He crossed his arms over his chest and beamed.

"Well?" Ron beckoned him.

"This is different. Fighter-launched matter-antimatter reaction torpedoes," he said excitedly, as if enjoying each word. "The latest weapon developed by the Ctarl-Ctarl Navy in the last Freespace War."

"No kidding," Ron announced, impressed. "I heard about these."

"It's not what the Ctarl-Ctarl call them, I'm sure they have some sort of stupid name in their actual language but, still, the most lethal class of anti-ship ordnance in the known universe. Of course the Ctarl-Ctarl would put it into service first," he said, almost laughing.

Ron glanced at him out of the corner of his eye and gave a half-smile. "So, is this safe?"

"Oh, you mean the weapon itself?" The technician removed his cap. "It's not as bad as it sounds. The first antimatter weapons were fail-deadly weapons, sure, but this thing? It's sat floating in space for decades. The internal power supply is long dead. In fact…"

As a demonstration, the technician reached for the hammer hanging from his belt; Ron was already discreetly bracing himself for what he was going to do, but nonetheless he felt himself twitched when the technician cracked his hammer against the nosecone, leaving a visible dent. "…we couldn't even detonate this thing as it is even if we tried!"

Ron rolled his eyes. "I see. So the Ctarl-Ctarl have some sort of effective passively-functional containment for the exotic matter." The technician looked impressed. "I studied a little bit of antiparticle physics back in the day," Ron explained.

"The antimatter fuel—probably antihydrogen, if the Ctarl-Ctarl laboratories are anything like ours—is held in some of up passive Penning trap, which makes up more than ninety percent of the actual mass of this thing, given that there's barely a quarter-kilo of actual antimatter in here." He scratched his head under his cap. "That's the real technological breakthrough the Ctarl-Ctarl have over us."

"Hoburn could expect a profit selling this as a proof-of-concept instead of a weapon," Ron noted.

The two stood in silence, staring at the silent weapon, until the technician broke it. "My, uh, dad deserted from the navy during the really bad days. He said when these things first started turning up in the wild, people didn't know what they were. The actual core material scared the hell out of people, what're you gonna' do with a couple hundred grams of antimatter? So people salvaged the dragonite triggers."

"Dragonite?"

He nodded enthusiastically. "That's what they called them, but who knows. There's definitely a few kilograms of dragonite inside the core, potentially that's what makes up the confinement field, but that's the big military secret anyway? So everyone just assumes they're part of the triggering mechanism too."

"So, an outlaw or pirate gang runs into one of these things floating by its lonesome, detects the dragonite ether emission, and decides to make a quick profit," Ron offered.

"Not knowing where the real money is. Stable antimatter's worth a thousand times its mass in dragonite."

"And probably not what killed them in a multi-megaton antimatter reaction explosion," Ron laughed.

"It's not the safest line of work, no offense." Another young technician was approaching him from behind, getting his attention, and whispered something into his ear. "Of course, we'll have it looked at," he assured him, while Ron continued studying the weapon a little closer.

"I thought you'd want to see it in person, the fruits of your labor."

Ron mumbled something in agreement before turning to the groundcrew. "So, what's Hoburn going to do with this?"

The technician gave a nervous laugh. "Sorry, sir, I couldn't say."

Ron gave a knowing nod and turned back. "Well, what about this hunk of junk over here?"

The technician glanced in that direction. "Oh, that. Thought you might recognize that from your trip—that is a genuine Ctarl-Ctarl army field gun, in some caliber or another, let me take a look at that…"

Harry MacDougall saw his elder brother enter the bridge of the Shangri-La through the rear door, pulling off his coat and taking his seat in the pilot's workstation in front of his own with a sigh.

"How'd it go, Ron?" he asked, the teasing evident in his voice over the speakers.

Harry gestured with his left hand irreverently. "Turns out looking at a bunch of surplus Ctarl-Ctarl and Terran Space Forces military junk is exactly as boring as it sounds." He waited for Harry's laughing to finish over the speakers. "But if you're asking if Hoburn will be happy or not, I think he will be."

"Well, at least that's good."

"How did I end up like this, Harry? Ron MacDougall, battlefield salvage expert. God, it makes me sick," he said, grinning and putting his left hand over his eyes.

"Anything to make a living, right?" Harry offered.

Ron looked over the edge of his hand at the ceiling and forward viewports. "Ron, you remember—it would've been six years ago, you were still a kid—to help you get a grip for an aspect of the business, we took some easy work? So we were running guns and missiles for the 108 Stars?"

Harry took a moment to respond. "Really? When was that?"

Once again with his left hand, Ron made an irreverent gesture in the air above him. "Probably not long after Hild and I split for good. You would've been…fourteen? Fifteen?" From the cabin cameras lining the bridge's ceiling Harry could see Ron's eyes widen slightly. "Actually, you still had that terrible haircut, bangs swept over one of your eyes."

Inside his cylinder, Harry smirked. "What do you mean, Ron?"

"Nothing," Ron assured him. "Anyway, it just reminded me of an appreciation for the logistics that make this line of work possible."

He glanced over his shoulder at Harry. "So naturally, I promised myself I'd never do it again. And here I am, so many years later, aren't I?"

Electronic laughter played over the speakers and Ron shifted back into his seat, now resting his head on both hands. So his memory loss is increasing, no denying that now. He hadn't expected Harry to remember the details of his brother's sordid past with Hild, he'd made an effort to conceal that after all, but he should've remembered one of his first missions with Ron certainly.

He felt the urge to discuss information historical, not personal. "Hey, Harry, you've got that database right? How long ago was the Battle of Victoria? You know, the one whose wreckage we were sifting through."

Ron's response was much faster, and lacked its previous taunting jeer. "That was in the second to last year of the First Freespace War. Toward Stars 132, first half of April. Why?"

"So the Second Freespace War ran from Toward Stars 138 to late 139," Ron explained. Around the time you—or the original Harry—was born. He remembered it, in broad terms, from his own childhood: the few months of encouraging, optimistic headlines from the state and corporate-controlled press, followed by hopeful silence. After that, the deluge.

He sighed. "Hoburn's technical boys tried to pass off something they recovered from no earlier than the start of the Second Freespace War as having come from orbit around Victoria B. An exotic multi-stage antimatter weapon, a real supercarrier-killer."

"So what's the big deal? The Ctarl-Ctarl have had those forever, right?"

He held back laughter. Of course for Harry, even this fragment of Harry, anything twenty years ago was "forever." Still no sense of time, this one. He glanced over his shoulder again, smiling. "It probably isn't one. But you don't think it's odd that we're being hired to salvage weapons and materiel from battlefields and they go ahead and drop this in our lap and give us the credit?"

"Maybe they're making our job easier."

He smirked. "Maybe, Harry. Maybe," he said, not troubling himself to sound convincing or convinced.


"Gene, don't stare so much. It's weird."

Gene Starwind looked back down at the younger Jim Hawking, eyebrow raised, before turning right back. Jim gave a sigh. Gene was staring forward through the cabin of the Ctarl-Ctarl military commuter shuttle—a rather luxurious one at that—at the woman called Grand Admiral or more commonly Lady Clara Badono-Badono, sitting at the front of the cylindrical cabin. Though the cabin, with its rounded off walls and floors, was about the size of one of Fred Lou's dining rooms in his various urban estates, even if featured a massive standing aquarium framing the door to the flight deck ahead of them; Lady Clara herself sat at round siting table underneath a large plant arrangement suspended from the cabin ceiling, ignoring the vines that occasionally got in her way. On the opposite wall on the far end, the familiar portrait of the empire's large-chested redhead sovereign hung in a gilded frame. A military aide was saying something inaudible to the admiral, leaning over with an elbow propped against the table. Just barely visible behind them, a window with its shade lifted revealed they were entering the Ctarl-Ctarl homeworld's atmosphere, alternating flashes of glowing red and soft blue. It's a smoother ride than the Outlaw Star, Jim thought. Giliam wouldn't like that. I wonder what he's up to right now.

Clara wasn't much to look at, Gene had decided. Her features were older, more mature than the Ctarl-Ctarl women he'd grown accustom to, particularly with her longer nose and small, stern-looking eyes. Most obviously she was taller than Aisha, and not as curvaceous. Those breastplates really don't do anyone any favors, Gene concluded while giving Jim a very light punch in the shoulder for his excessively loud sighing.

Jim gave complaint, causing both Ctarl-Ctarl to look in their direction; despite his best effort, Gene slid further into armchair-like seat. The military aide said something, Lady Clara very indiscreetly laughed behind one gloved hand, almost certainly ridiculing them, and he strolled across the cabin to their party. Lady Clara brushed the bangs from her face and began reviewing a handful of documents on the table with exaggerated caution.

The Ctarl-Ctarl sat down in a seat opposite of Gene and Jim, removing his duty headset and setting it carefully on his armrest. "And you are…?" Gene asked impatiently.

"Artem. I'm Lady Clara's lawyer," he explained, easing into the chair, his body visibly shifting under his dark green military greatcoat.

Gene stared at him, cocking his head. I honestly can't tell if he's joking or not. Aisha never used to tell sarcastic jokes, on the contrary, she couldn't stand them. But Aisha was weird, probably even by the standards of her own people.

"Okay, Captain Lawyer…" Jim said, beckoning him to continue. He couldn't see Melfina behind him from where he sat, and out of the corner of his eye, Suzuka was either sleeping or meditating in her nearby seat.

"Keep your passports, visa documents, and entry permits on you at all times," Artem explained sternly. "And I mean 'all times', not 'some of the time'." The contents of the large aquarium at the end of the cabin began to vibrate with the rest of the spacecraft as they completed their reentry, to the distress of the aquatic life inside.

"Artem, tell them the thing." Jim looked up in surprise; the statement came from the admiral, still staring at her documents.

"Of course, ma'am." Artem looked back at them. "We'll arrange a government car when the meeting is scheduled. Plan your accommodations accordingly, unlike you Terrans, we value punctuality. You'll be meeting with the Deputy War Minister, Soban-Soban, along with the secretary for Terran Affairs from the Foreign Ministry and the liaison for the Ministries of Naval Industry and Trade. Three of them will need to preside over the exchange."

"At least three," the admiral declared with a grunt.

"And their lawyers," Artem added, as that were obvious.

"Yeah, yeah, we've done government work before," Jim said with some dismay, before his expression turned to surprise. "Wait, you're just going to let us…go? On our own?" After that whole thing with Bethany, he almost added.

"Well, we're expecting you to exercise discretion, even with legal representation present. These transactions aren't without controversy," Artem pointed out.

"Why do you think you were hired in the first place? Efficiency?" Lady Clara barked, still not looking up.

Gene leaned on his knees, bringing his head to the same level as Jim's and matching his bewildered expression.

"You were expecting differently?" Artem grinned at them. "That's not unreasonable. Time was, any visiting Terrans would've been kept under strict scrutiny and you would've been followed by at least authorized official from the Foreign Ministry as your official 'minder', but the situation has liberalized since the end of the Freespace Wars. Try and relax."

He grinned even wider. "See what an actual civilized planet is like."

"A very presumptuous statement," Suzuka countered coolly, not moving a muscle.

Artem smiled back at her, canines visible. A very Aisha-like smile, Jim noted. A tone sounded over the cabin speakers above them, indicating the shuttle was on its final descent before landing. Casual observation alone was enough to reveal that, unlike vertically-launch-and-landing spacecraft like the Outlaw Star, they were aboard a rocket-powered transorbital spaceplane of some kind, which the Ctarl-Ctarl seemed to favor when available. Turning to the window, Jim craned his head over to get his first close look at the surface of the Ctarl-Ctarl homeworld, and ideally the airstrip they would arrive in. Runway 3 at Airstrip 4, in the Ctarl-Ctarl planetary aviation system; somewhere there was an Airstrip 1, presumably even closer to the center of the military or the government as a whole.

The landing took less time than he expected; reddish-brown fields of grass had given way to a decidedly urban landscape, interlocking streets and pavement, even on the outskirts of what Jim assumed must've been the Imperial City he'd heard about in Terran descriptions of the world, where Airstrip 4 was located. To his disappointment, he still couldn't get a good look of the cityscape, which he assumed must've been behind them to the southwest. "Man, I was hoping for a good view," he muttered.

"I'm sure you'll get a chance, Jim," Melfina declared cheerfully as the shuttle's wheels made contact with the runway beneath them and they could feel themselves gradually coming to a halt over a distance of a few hundred meters. Some of the aircrew, in blue rather than green greatcoats, appeared, already carrying their luggage.

"We'll be in touch, Gene Starwind," Artem explained, rising from his seat and sticking his hand out at Gene, who awkwardly took it.

"How?"

"Oh, trust me, we will." He reached into the breast pocket of his greatcoat and produced a piece of paper, which Jim took while Gene was still staring; an airport transit route map, to his surprise.

"Man, we need to take a bus to our accommodations?" Jim groaned. "Wait, so you and…Admiral Clara Badono-Badono aren't getting off here?"

"No, Jim, I'm sure a high-ranking member of the Ctarl-Ctarl brass wants to be seen getting off a ship with a bunch of nobodies like us," Gene jeered at him as he blushed.

"More or less," Artem explained good-naturedly. "And welcome to Hokiyo, planetary capital of the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire."

Having already cleared customs in orbit, with even less ceremony the aircrew dropped them, and their luggage, at arrivals section in the main terminal, closing the nylon queuing barrier behind them. Jim watched their departing backs over the barrier, then turned back to face the array of automatic glass doors in front of them, and the large number of Ctarl-Ctarl—mostly young adults, mostly in great coats or bright-colored bodysuits, dragging their luggage—between them. Two shapeless Ctarl-Ctarl women dressed as Earthling nuns stood by the exits, apparently waiting for someone. More portraits of the chesty monarch, these larger but less ostentatious in their presentation.

"So it's just a spaceport. I wasn't sure what I expected," he confessed.

"That the Ctarl-Ctarl homeworld looks like a large spaceport?" Gene joked awkwardly, admiring the detail on the large portrait nearest to them. Melfina giggled.

"The whole planet isn't an airport, Jim," Suzuka assured him, breaking her self-imposed silence and strolling in the direction of the exits.

"Suzuka, wait, Suzuka!" Jim cried out.

"Don't worry yourselves, I'll check in over the comms," she called back, tapping her left ear with a finger twice.

"Come on!" Jim shouted. "How am I still surprised by her doing that?"

Forcing a smile off his face, Gene faked a cough into his right hand and put it, palm open, in front of Jim, where a single paper banknote was dropped in. "Seriously, after all these years?" Jim repeated.

Gene gave a useless shrug as Jim heaved a sigh. "Well, Suzuka knows all our radio frequencies. What I'm wondering is how the Ctarl-Ctarl government will do it when they didn't even tell us where we should be staying."

"Oh, I'm guessing their Imperial Intelligence Bureau will help with that," Gene replied, patting him on the back. "Which is a completely normal thing, after all, we came hundreds of lightyears to buy guns from the Ctarl-Ctarl."


Terms to Know:

Antimatter – Exotic matter composed of antiparticles, infrequently observed in the universe. In collision with its "partner" matter, collision between matter and antimatter results in mutual annihilation, releasing destruction gamma radiation and neutrinos. As the observable universe is composed almost entirely of ordinary matter, antimatter remains shrouded in mystery after hundreds of years.

- Matter-Antimatter Reaction Weapons – The first weaponized use of synthetically-generated antimatter, pioneered by the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire in their arms race with the Great Terran Empires. Antimatter is kept in stable containment, a type of Penning trap, then deliberately release when the weapon is fired. The resulting particle-antiparticle annihilation between the filling and its surrounding housing is both "clean" and extremely destructive: 0.5 kg of antimatter can produce a reaction equivalent to 20 megatons, or twenty million tonnes, of TNT, equivalent to a very large thermonuclear weapon. This efficiency of mass was the impetuous for developing these weapon, as it allowed the Ctarl-Ctarl to implement a very small but destructive warhead relative to the launch platform. Reaction weapons were first deployed during the Second Freespace War against the Terran navies.

Airstrip 4 – The air transport code given to one of the government-use airports outside the Ctarl-Ctarl Imperial City, though it also has a prefectural name. It features three spaceship-capable runways, identified by geographical heading.

Dragonite (龍眼) Not to be confused with the tropical fruit tree of the same name. A naturally-occurring (if not on Earth) mineral compound important to the plot of Outlaw Star, described as "the most valuable material in the universe" with a great deal of dramatic license. Most dragonite encountered by Gene Starwind's crew is, by mass, substantially less valuable than gold or other valuable metals in monetary terms, perhaps a reflection of its widely variable purity and density when present as glowing rocks with a violet hue. Dragonite's practical value is seemingly owed to its passive energy-emission properties related to "ether space", which enabled the commonly-used version of faster-than-light travel; dragonite may also be a potential mineral backing for the wong, like elemental gold.