The Immortal Empire – Episode 20: Red Dwarf
As part of the childhood experience growing up in the Capital Province, both Aisha and Kalin had visited the public portions the Imperial Palace. Portion was the operative word; to Aisha's confusion, the Imperial Palace was an entire complex of buildings, almost a small city, on the grounds of an ancient fortress left over from before the Tomoyo-Tomoyo Dynasty established their supremacy centuries earlier. The Autumn Palace, the Ken-Kyukyuteino, was just a portion of it, a long, rectangular two-story building with curved royal blue rooves and whitewashed walls, done in the classical style of the Tomoyo-Tomoyo Dynasty and home to the sovereign's state apartments. It was flanked by the similar-looking Imperial Court Hall on one side and the Imperial Library Hall on the other, with an unimpressive courtyard between them. In turn, the three buildings were surrounded by a rectangular moat, and a handful of narrow, rustic stone bridges patrolled by honor guards; beyond those walls, the rest of the "Imperial Palace" took on a decidedly more urban, grander appearance. Before crossing one such bridge, they'd seen what was stone-walled military armory and barracks building, unmistakable even after several centuries of alternative uses, with a pair of civilian flags hung in front and a few luxury automobiles parked outside; when Kalin asked, they were told it was the central building for the Imperial Household Agency. Both women shuddered.
Aisha Clan-Clan could still see the Kyukyuteino through a window in a changing room adjacent to the reception area in the Imperial Court Hall, which as its name suggested, normally housed the actual institution of the court, and featured a banquet hall and other convenient if old-fashioned amenities. She and her cousin were both accompanied by two young men from the Office of the Prime Minister, Rafe Sadono-Sadono and Georgy Koboro-Koboro, who awkwardly insisted their company wasn't strictly a requirement despite coming along anyway.
"Then why are you here?" Aisha demanded, smoothing the creases in her uniform greatcoat with white-gloved hands. "Last I checked, the Empress of all Ctarl-Ctarl didn't invite you to court. Aren't there some rules against that?" she demanded, head turning back to Rafe.
"She's…sort of your 'plus one'," he assured her.
"I'm here because, in case you forgot, you had your little freak-out in front of the prime minister, and to try and make sure you don't repeat the same thing in front of the Sovereign of the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire," Kalin snapped back as she painstakingly styled Aisha's long, white hair into a single thick braid. Kalin wore a very similar greatcoat, but over a freshly-issued pilot's formfitting flightsuit, sealed over her large body. To Aisha, the whole thing screamed Look at me, I'm a pilot.
"You know we share the same surname, right? You. Me. Your dad."
"Your mother, Lady Ayesha," Koboro-Koboro's genteel-looking son offered, half-helpfully, half-enjoying himself. "It's quite a storied name, actually." He was still smiling when Aisha gave him a particularly unkind look.
"Speaking of your storied name," the more businesslike Rafe interrupted. "I used this new technology called 'the telephone' and contacted your household about their absence. Davoud and Hiro are both still at their postings out-of-system."
"They're your brothers," Kalin teased her, tying the hair around the polished gold bell. Aisha hissed at her.
Rafe continued. "Your father is rushing back from the rest of the Hundred-Eighty-First Royal Taskforce, which is still on combined fleet exercises around the black hole Gorizont-503 on the edge of the Nochi-Nochi local cluster, and your mother is on the planet, but is on summer progress in the southern hemisphere." He pause. "By the way, in case your not aware, your family holds estates in the Barudaruda Archipelago in Home's southern hemisphere."
"Yeah, I knew that," Aisha retorted, sounding less than convinced, before jerking her head and head out of Kalin's grasp. "Fine. Let's all go meet Her Imperial Majesty the Empress of all Ctarl-Ctarl."
She grimaced and looked back at both young men. "What…what do I even call her?"
Georgy blinked. "Her Highness. Or 'Empress Kasara'. Perhaps don't call her 'Casey' or something, you know," he told her very earnestly.
Wow, one of you is really useless. "'Her Highness' then."
A civilian employee of the Imperial Household Agency, distinguished by his plain grey suit and uniform sash over one shoulder, stuck his head into the room. "Are you both ready, yet?"
"Wait, is that it?"
The household employee stared at their party blankly, as if expecting further query. "What do you mean, is that it? Your attending court, not launching a starship from a dockyard," he finally snapped. "Finish fixing your hair and move, please."
Damn, when did everyone in government get so mean and snappy? Aisha thought with a frown. Led by the employee of the Imperial Household Agency, the four of them took a rather unceremonious walk down a hallway towards the Imperial Court, or at least in the direction of speaking human voices that weren't coming from the silent sentinels lining the corridor, men and women in unusually fancy army uniforms.
Their group stopped in front of a pair large doors, which the Empress's Guard soldiers opened.
"So, the Crown Princess Fatima isn't in attendance, right?" Aisha asked quickly.
Rafe looked at her, visibly annoyed. "Yes," he chided her back. "I mean, no, she isn't. Just like the last time you asked. And the time before that. Why do you keep asking?" he demanded, knowing he wouldn't get an answer in time anyway.
At the entrance to the Imperial Court—to Aisha, a long, red-carpeted meeting hall with polished wooden walls and furniture that was much less extravagant than she'd been led to believe—a dark-haired army lieutenant stood at attention. "Lady Captain Kalin Clan-Clan and Lady Captain Aisha Clan-Clan, of Her Imperial Majesty's Naval Forces," he announced loudly.
"Thanks," Aisha squeaked unnecessarily as the four of them entered the hall.
"They didn't announce you two," Kalin noted, one dark eyebrow raised. "You two not coming in after all?"
"Oh, we are. We're just very common sights here," Rafe assured her dryly.
"Like furniture," Georgy added.
"Lady Aisha? Aisha Clan-Clan, please come over here!" a woman asked, her voice just barely rising over the crowd. The crowd itself—well-heeled young people around Kalin's age, for the most part, in a mix of dress uniforms and aristocratic civilian attire, excluding a handful of strangely-dressed women around Kalin's age, each clad in the same uniform of a solid white bodysuit, riding boots and white hoods pulled over their heads.
"So this is it?" she heard Kalin ask. Her cousin was looking back and forth around the room, an eyebrow raised. "This is looks like my grade school fieldtrip to the court fifteen years ago." Aisha could see her point: aside from its legendary reputation, it really did just seem like a crowd of people lingering around a large room with vaulted ceilings and opulently-painted murals on each wall.
"See, this is why we need to lie to children as a matter of policy. Lower their expectations," Rafe whispered to Georgy, who held back laughter.
"Lady Aisha, over here!" the voice repeated. The crowd had parted slightly and Aisha could now see at the end of the hall on a slightly raised dais, a trio of tall, ornate chairs arranged in a line in front of a wall-sized aquarium filled with shimmering outcrops of coral and some scant sea life. Three women sat in the chairs: two white-attired palace attendants, looking similar enough under their hoods to be sisters, and between them a woman with rosewood-red hair tied in a typical thick braid behind her head and long bangs framing her face, with the curvaceous, soft body of a civilian underneath a sleeveless gown of interwoven opaque and sheer blue-violet fabric that ended over her crossed legs. She wore no identifiable military insignia or badges, except for a royal tiara near her hairline, drawing attention her raised, excited-looking eyebrows.
"That's Empress Kasara Bakr Novo-Novo," Kalin whispered to her after elbowing her side. Aisha had lost track of how long she'd been standing there on the other side of the crowd, and her cousin jerked her head in the direction unsubtly.
Aisha looked in the direction of Her Imperial Highness, then at her cousin, back and forth. "Oh no. I've helped you more than enough," Kalin taunted her. Aisha sucked in all the air her lungs could manage, chest swelling under her uniform, before exhaling through her teeth over many seconds and strolling through the crowd, awkwardly managing the motions of her locked legs and swinging her rigid arms side to side as she did it.
Rafe watcher her with a sarcastic nod of appreciation. "She's doing great, really."
The woman in the middle chair, perhaps a half-decade older than Aisha, had gracefully uncrossed her legs and pressed them together under her gown in excitement, hands folded femininely in her lap and cerulean eyes opened wide under her dark red eyebrows. Her tapered ears twitched under her hair, and as she approached, Aisha realized she was still searching for some sort of military or civil insignia; probably because it would've at least offered a topic of conversation, but the sitting woman remained informally if lavishly dressed in her courtly setting. So instead, when she reached the three chairs, she did the only thing that came to mind: she rigidly fell to one knee, head bowed, and managed to squeak out, "Your Highness, ma'am."
There was some giggling laughter on either side of her, but by and large, the rest of the court hadn't paused their conversations for Aisha's sake, and seemed to be ignoring her. Belatedly, Kasara IV rose from her chair and stuck out a slender, bare arm, at the end of which was a large gold bracelet and three matching blue diamond rings. Aisha remembered enough of her officer's training to know the next step; she took her monarch's bare hand in her own dress gloves, kissed it, and then rose to her feet under her greatcoat; Kasara IV rose from her chair in response.
"I welcome you to my court, Lady Aisha." The sovereign beamed at her. "Now that those formalities are out of the way, please, sit down." She gestured to the chair on her right, which the woman in white had already vacated. Aisha's face betrayed more surprise, but she sat down anyway, trying to keep herself from leaning awkward on the felt-covered arm rest as the sovereign sat down again.
"I've been very much looking forward to meeting you in person, especially since Mr. Sadono-Sadono informed me of your difficulties crossing the border." Casually, Kasara IV looked over the crowd and gave a friendly wave in the direction of the door. Georgy and Rafe rendered a polite salutation to their monarch at a distance. "Obviously I didn't bring you here to regale us with stories of a Ctarl-Ctarl in the Terran Empires, but I'm sure they would still be quite interesting."
"Thanks," she sputtered out awkwardly.
The sovereign's eyebrows lifted in surprise, then she continued. "But I'm sure you've had a very long trip getting back to our homeland."
"Yeah. I mean, yes, Your Highness."
"If you have any immediate needs or concerns, of course you can bring them to Rafe. But as I understand, you have a family residence in the Imperial Capital where you'll be staying?"
She nodded dumbly.
"That's welcomed news. I know it's a cliché and all, but there really is nothing as important as your nation and your family. " she said, relaxing her posture a little. "I would hate to admit it in front of her, but I do very much miss my little Fatima since she's been on her diplomatic mission," she confessed with a girlish, self-deprecating laugh.
"Ah," Aisha managed. Even in her tense state, she could tell from the sovereign's unexpectedly open expression that she was about to launch into a favorite story regarding the crown princess, when the woman in white who'd given her seat returned to the dias and bowed her head. Aisha didn't even realize she'd left.
"Grand Admiral Badono-Badono has arrived at Ken-Kyukyuteino, and offers her apologies," the disciplined-looking woman explained shortly.
"Ah, elder sister Clara," Kasara IV mumbled with discernable sarcasm. "The image of punctuality."
As quickly as she'd conjured it up, the personal atmosphere of familial distaste had faded. She started elaborating in a business-like tone. "You may not know, but I grew up alongside Lady Clara, one of the few older girls at court. More than a few times, her antics nearly got her dismissed by request of my lady mother, her own kinswoman," sounded more and more aghast, as though even the broadest details of the story were somewhat scandalous. "Now that she's working for my aunt, the commander-in-chief of the navy, she's…"
The sovereign trailed off, then blushed briefly. "I'm sorry, that's not really something worth discussing, is it? Suffice to say, Lady Clara's done what she can for the navy, and the navy has done more or less all it can for Lady Clara."
Aisha just stared at her blankly, unsure how to process this information about one of the highest-ranking officers in the Imperial Navy. Kasara IV blinked but her kept restrained expression. "Perhaps you've met Lady Clara through your father, Grand Admiral Dawid Clan-Clan?"
"Hah?"
The sovereign smile looked slightly strained. "Aisha, would you like to introduce a topic? Perhaps about the almost two years you spent on naval reconnaissance in Ban Guild Space?" She visibly twitched, as if she regretted broaching the topic. "Or something else, of course."
Aisha's mouth snapped shut and she dutifully nodded her head before her eyes wandered across the hall. "Mr. Rafe and Mr. Georgy, who work for the court?" The sovereign gave the subtlest of nods confirming that was roughly accurate. "You know that really big woman next to them? That's my cousin, Kalin Clan-Clan. I'm sure she'd really…really love to come up here and meet you."
No Terran, up to and including the highest leaders of the Unified Space Forces Admiralty, would have seriously considered an armed crossing of the demilitarized zone between Terran sphere of influence, even before the Outlaw Star's little stunt days before. Ron MacDougall considered himself an experienced veteran of illegal border crossings across the Great Pirate Guilds, but he acknowledged the Ctar-Ctarl Empire presented a particular challenge; he'd never crossed in any group larger than himself and one or two other associates.
"Recon data from Hoburn's probe processed. Nothing reported in the area except the usual stellar gases and natural magnetic fields, including from the tidally-locked planet closest to the star. Just like you said, Ron." The voice was mildly annoyed, but not angry. "So, you said you'd tell me who he was?"
"Huh?" Despite himself, he turned in the direction of the speaker. "Oh, that. First time, I was younger than you are. He was a mentor of mine, an ex-monk and vassal of the Tendo King, the one that was. Rohang Len. He was a clansman of the short girl among the Kei Pirates we tangled with. You remember her?"
"We're coming up on RSC-8511-2005-1-7-3," Harry declared in a mechanical tone, and as promised, the Shangri-La dropped out of sub-ether space into a twinkling starfield, and to the naked eye, little else. To the uneducated observer, it might seem they had simply dropped out erroneously into interstellar medium between astrospheres; in actuality, the number code Harry had read referred to medium-sized red dwarf star, accompanied by two brown dwarfs. "Which, for the third time I'm saying this, is very empty and unoccupied."
"Perfect," Ron declared triumphantly. "Keep up scans, our contact should be arriving soon depending on their punctuality. But it is probably dead space."
"How, exactly?" Harry asked with what seemed like genuine curiosity.
In the last two years, one of the final large-scale modifications to the Shangri-La was the outfitting of a specialized long-range Munchausen drive that gave the large ship the needed sub-ether travel range to bypass the known legal and illegal sub-ether transit routes and insert with just a few solar radii of a small stellar object, at no small risk or expense. A holdover from the early decades of trailblazing at the start of the Toward Stars Era, the impractical propulsion and navigation systems were now almost exclusively the domain of particularly daring military forces, the sort that no longer existed since the end of the Freespace Wars, and ambitious criminal enterprises, the sort that still did. It was not without numerous disadvantages: the exacting computing demands, navigational requirements, and gross fuel inefficiency nearly guaranteed a short service life for any such system, making it useless for practical faster-than-light travel. Considerately, Hoburn had supplied a pair of smaller parasite ships capable of both conventional sub-ether travel and terrestrial landings to try and make up for this deficiency while the Shangri-La's original Munchausen drive remained inactive; ships that, according to the plan, Ron did not want to rely upon.
"Remember your astronomy, Harry? Red dwarves are the most common stars in the universe. They're also the hardest to observe even with instrumentation, thanks to their low energy emission and small size." A thought occurred to him. "Despite their name, black holes are detectable due to their gravitational wave effects, which they all have, not to mention ultra-bright accretion disks which is how we discover them in the first place. Also they're a lot less common."
"So you can't use a black hole," Harry correctly inferred.
"That's right. But what we can use is one of the hundreds of catalogued red dwarfs that is otherwise barely noticeable from the Ctarl-Ctarl side of the demilitarized zone."
"If we're so close to the DMZ, wouldn't they patrol them?"
"Who says they don't? It's not a perfect plan, Harry, just a very good one. Have the ship on standby in case we do need to beat a hasty retreat, would you?" Ron tried to look like he was relaxing.
"So, we've got our outpost in the field, somewhere where we wouldn't get massacred by random pair of Ctarl-Ctarl stumbling upon it. What's the next step?"
"The next step is making sure our good friend Hoburn still thinks I'm drooling at the mouth for revenge for that old bastard Chiong. The last thing we need is him getting wise to anything; so then, the first is getting him what we promised to find here in the Ctarl-Ctarl Outer Periphery."
"And in the meantime, maybe we can find out why he wants it?"
Ron laughed at that loudly, his voice echoing through the otherwise empty bridge. "Glad to see you haven't forgotten the whole of your career, Harry," he said, genuinely pleased. "Chiong? I haven't heard from him in at least four years, haven't worked with him in a decade. He was a good enough guy, reliable, not the sort you'd eagerly cross, but frankly I couldn't care less if he tangled with some Ctarl-Ctarl hustle on the side and got his skull caved in for it."
"You're not the least bit curious?"
"Harry, he was a Kei Pirate outpost captain. You remember what happened to all the other Kei Pirates we've worked with? They all died."
"They all died," Harry said in unison. "That's a good point, I guess."
"Not that I resented the man. In fact, now that I think about it…" He paused. "Really, I just remember the good times, though there were plenty of bad ones. I guess he had a way of bringing up good memories, probably why I gave him that other caster gun a few years back. A token of our friendship." By now, he knew he was sounding uncharacteristically nostalgic, but he continued with a chuckle.
"He was fun. Especially back in the outlaw days, before the Kei Pirates and their stupid oaths. You were still a kid. In the years after the war, when everyone made their own rules, we'd really mix things up along the commerce lines coming out of Earth. A lot of money and not a lot of security. Fresh pickings for me, and Chiong, and Hilde."
"Easy there, Big Brother. You're giving yourself away," Harry playfully chided him.
Ron frowned. "I am, aren't I? It's not my style. Maybe I did like Chiong a little." He laughed again.
"So Chiong didn't teach you everything you knew after all. I thought you said you were trained by what's-his-name. From Acid-B, those monks? No, wait, they weren't monks, they were..." Harry's jumbled train of thought was interrupted by a tone sounding, and when he spoke again, his voice had regained its earlier mechanical quality. "Ship arriving from sub-ether space, in the direction of galactic northeast."
"Is that it?" Ron shifted in his seat and leaned forward, checking the nearby data readout on the monitor. In the relative darkness and inactivity of the red dwarf's solar system, even a small-sized ship dropping into real space left a very obvious and detectable signature; a large ship like the Shangri-La had taken even more of a risk, hence the necessary precautions. What the readouts showed was a ship both Harry and Ron recognized immediately: a four-engine fast freighter, not a grappler ship, but a twenty-year-old design manufactured by Tri-Force, Inc., with a distinctive cylindrical drive core behind their trademark spherical cockpit compartment, and a large dorsal sensor array rising on a tower behind the neck.
Ron tried to contain the anger rising in his chest. "Harry, why I am looking at the Horus?"
"Ron…Ron, it's not the Horus. It can't be."
"Because the Horus was destroyed at Farfallus, where Hilde died," Ron said in stern agreement. "From now, I think we'll need a rule about any discussion of her." Like they say, speaking of the devil.
"Broadcasting I.F.F. confirmed, ship identified as the Force. You know, Tri-Force built them for a few years, after replacing the old military model…"
"Harry," Ron groaned, the irritation clear in his voice. "Just confirm the code from Hoburn, then tell them to dock." Today is just going to be a bad day.
The Force supplied the exact codes they were expecting from Hoburn's operative in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire; considering they had accomplished the same feat the Shangri-La had managed, but from the direction of the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire, in a significantly smaller craft, they were not to be underestimated. Opposite the dorsally-mounted sensor array, a small but still-armed landing craft detached and, upon the AI receiving permission, rendezvous with the Shangri-La, ending with a noisy mechanical clang.
"One passenger, organic, looks like a woman. She does not look like Hilde," Harry dutifully explained, as if hoping to put some unreasonable fear to rest. "She's a lot shorter, to start."
Ron reviewed the same CCTV feed he assumed Harry had. "Yeah, I'm seeing that. Different spacesuit too, as if people could never change that," he sighed with some relief.
"So, are you gonna' ask?"
"No, I'm not," he replied quickly as the door to the bridge behind him opened with a hydraulic hiss and their contact, Hoburn's operative in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire, entered. A petite but evidently shapely woman in a modern, formfitting pilot suit made of interlocking ash-colored materiel underneath a utility vest and life-support system, the kind unnecessary for a planetary landing shuttle, much less a deep space craft.
"Ron MacDougall?" a slightly-masked but still audibly female voice asked over the speakerbox underneath the opaque visor of the large, curved helmet. Ron leaned to his side and gave a gentle tilt of his head; her helmet featured a pair of feline-looking intake nodes towards the top, which somewhat undermined whatever intimidation value the suit might've had concealing her appearance otherwise.
"That's right. Before we go any further, I'd ask you to remove your helmet, if you'd please."
The woman twitched underneath her suit and straightened her posture, chest thrust out under her breastplate. "Why?"
"To confirm you're not a Ctarl-Ctarl, like Hoburn said," he replied sharply before leaning back into his seat. "I don't think that's unreasonable, given the circumstances." Curvy waist and chest through her spacesuit aside, the woman's build was slight; her height certainly didn't exclude her from the shorter-than-Terran stature of most Ctarl-Ctarl women.
After standing in silence for a few seconds, the woman circled towards the front of the bridge so she was facing Ron, the empty cockpit positions, and whether she realized it or not Harry's primary forward-facing cameras. She touched pair of switches on her helmet, deactivating both the polarized visor of her helmet, allowing her face to fade into view, but only until a hiss of air escaping her suit as she pulled the helmet off. A mop of waist-length, wavy red hair escaped, a deep shade of violent red, with her long bangs catching the bridge's lights; under them, a pair of large, blue eyes, more youthful than the rest a still young-looking, pale face with a small, symmetrical nose and a small blood-red mouth locked in an unamused grimace. Indeed, her whole expression seemed rather out-of-place combined with such youthful, pristine features. As if making a point, with a gloved hand she revealed her small, Terran ears from behind her hair briefly.
Harry continued to say nothing. Ron nodded. "All right. You know my name, but Hoburn didn't give me yours."
"Carver," she answered tersely.
Acid-B? USSA? In spite of the vividly blue eyes, she looked Asian as much as anything. Not, Ron reminded himself, that it excluded any possibility. Despite himself, he thought of Hilde again; she looked nothing the owner of the Horus, and indeed, nothing like an outlaw. She didn't sound the same either, with a Tenpa, almost Japanese accent. Though there was another explanation he could think of…
"You're a bio-gynoid."
She smirked, a response he found a little anticlimactically disappointing. "Good guess."
"It's something I have unique experience with," he replied calmly. "But it's not hard to tell you're a lot older than you look. You're a veteran of the Freespace War, aren't you? With the United Space Forces fleets, back when they still had them? It would explain what you're doing out here."
Instead of answering, Carver neatly pulled her helmet back over her red hair, accompanied by the click of magnetic seals locking into place and the hiss of her suit shrinking back over her body inside it; the visor remained transparent under its colored hue. "If you're done with 'Twenty Questions', we can go and do what Hoburn sent you out here for."
"Fine, I'll be ready in ten minutes," he promised civilly. "I think you have plenty of time after all."
"Don't be so certain," she replied as she left through the same door she'd entered through, leaving Ron sitting in the silence of the bridge.
"You think she's onto us?" Harry asked finally.
"I'm not certain her type is the kind to care if she was," Ron replied, watching her leave on the same video feed she'd appeared on earlier. "Though Hoburn kept his word, insofar as she's not a Ctarl-Ctarl."
"A hired gun?"
"By the looks of it." In the last few months, he'd become quite familiar with members of Hoburn's organization, particularly those he believed to be his most reliable. They were of a type: mostly ex-military, or military adjacent like private contractors, former-outlaws or disgraced pirates from the Kei and Ban Guilds, or drawn from the ranks of the millions of mercenaries that operated in Terran space. Even a small number of Silgrian and Corbano expatriates. Some women, but mostly men. And not a single one of them had resembled Carver, with her unblemished, unnaturally symmetrical face, computer-designed and laboratory-grown features and probably a physique to match under that expensive, custom-made spacesuit. Though, if she is a bio-gynoid, it may be more correct to think of her as the servant or property not of Hoburn, but whoever he's working for. Who I haven't met yet. After all, a bio-gynoid that costs as much as a military patrol ship isn't that practical in his line of work.
He climbed out of his seat and arched his back, flexing his back muscles and legs. "I'll be careful. I've had some experience dealing with her kind; if I do what was promised, there shouldn't be any issue. Who knows, maybe she can be useful to us. I don't see her being all that invested in Hoburn's mission to score more guns and materiel abandoned by the Ctarl-Ctarl navy for whatever little war he's preparing for against pirates or some small country out there."
"You sound like you know what you're getting yourself into, Ron. I guess you always do." A hint of admiration in Harry's voice.
"That's right." He looked in the direction of one of Harry's camera with undue seriousness. "So don't go trying anything untoward her if you get bored. I'm serious about that, Harry, even if she happens to have a nice body under that suit of hers." For emphasis, he tapped his temple with his right index finger twice, accompanied by a look of condescension.
"I really don't know what you mean, Ron, but fine, no hacking unless you say so." Harry's reply was conspicuously neutral.
"I'm sure you don't," he replied. Nowadays, I'm not even sure what you remember anyway. Though I wouldn't mind hearing the story behind that ship. "Unfortunate coincidences aside, I don't expect that much of a problem from her. But let's not advertise the fact that we're out here not to help with Hoburn's secret little war, but to find out exactly why he's been so eager to flash cash in front of me for these last months that I've been working for him." After smoothing out the creases left in his coat from sitting, he clenched his fists by his sides, arms straight. "I don't like being manipulated, you know that."
"I do know that," Harry replied.
"And what is it that we say, Harry?"
A bark of electronic laughter. "No one crosses a MacDougall."
Terms to Know:
Naval Reconnaissance – Among the most important duties both in war and peacetime for the Ctarl-Ctarl Imperial Navy; as Aisha did not belong to the Imperial Intelligence Bureau, her official (and technically secret) assignment after her demotion from the rank of ambassador plenipotentiary and removal from the cruiser Orta Honenhone was naval reconnaissance. In the original Outlaw Star manga, a substantial difference in Aisha's character was that she was not a naval commander, but a spy in Terran-occupied space, as an officer in some part of the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire.
Nochi-Nochi Star Cluster – A seven-part (as in seven distinct solar systems of more than a dozen main-sequence stars) cluster of stars, with the Ctarl-Ctarl planetary homeworld's own blue giant star being a noteworthy feature near its geography center. Just beyond its borders is an intermediate-mass black hole, dubbed Gorizont-503 by astronomers from the Pyotr Imperiya, which has long been exploited by the Ctarl-Ctarl military. Notably, while the Ctar-Ctarl have fought many invasions of the centuries of their sphere of influence, no alien space force has managed to breach the cluster into modern times.
Tri-Force (or Tri Force), Inc. – A formerly state-owned enterprise, now largely independent spaceship manufacturing concern, Tri-Force was created with the merger of three smaller USSA Space Forces shipbuilders amid the large restructuring the followed the end of the First Freespace War. In the glossary of the Outlaw Star manga, Tri-Force is the manufacturer for the unnamed class of spaceship to which Hilde's Horus belonged to.
- The Horus and the Force – Two examples of a twenty-year-old spaceship design from Tri-Force. In the Outlaw Star manga, Hilde's ship is curiously called the Force, which is almost certainly a transliteration error (as is referred to as the Horus in the index).
United Solar Systems Alliance – Better known by its acronym, U.S.S.A., one of the four imperial Terran powers (despite not featuring "Empire" in its name), the second largest, and the further north on the galactic plane. Jim Hawking is an U.S.S.A. national by birth.
