The Immortal Empire - Episode 2: Heifong, Pt. I
Year 160, Toward Stars Calendar
"A new ceasefire between the Social Democrats and provisional government forces of the Pyotr Imperiya seems guaranteed, as is its eventual failure leading to another round of talks between Sankt-Yekaterina and the rebel capital at Eisenteingrad, near the frontiers of the Einhorn Reich."
Gene didn't know what annoyed him more—that Melfina had taken to this habit of reading newspaper front page articles out loud, or the rapid, enunciated tone she took as she did so. He tried to be kind as he turned to her. "Melfina…"
"Oh, I'm sorry," she apologized immediately in that soft voice that replaced the stilted, machine-looking chatter of earlier. That was really what he wanted most anyway.
"It's fine. I just never pegged you for a news junkie."
She smiled. "It's just so fascinating and exciting to read about the rest of the world."
Must be a college thing, he thought. That was Melfina's occasionally-anachronistic speech patterns getting the better of her—'world' meant 'universe' in this case. He took the newspaper after she'd neatly folded it and set it down on the coffee table, peering at the front page. "Can't see why. All there ever is more bad news. 'Must have been like this during the war," he said, referencing the short war with the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire that concluded when he was still an infant, the one that brought the empires of humanity to their knees. "Experts hoping for a settlement between the Pyotr Imperiya and the Novo-...Novo-…"
"Novokhabarovsk Republic," Melfina finished for him, looking over her shoulder. Gene gave her a bemused smile.
"More Pyotrian names I can't pronounced," he chuckled.
"You better learn then," another voice warned. "If we want that job with Dr. Sputnik."
The owner of the other half of Starwind and Hawking Enterprise, James Hawking, gestured at the ceiling of their Heifong office as if to emphasize his point. Both he and Gene had discussed the good doctor extensively, always using his silly-sounding pseudonym since they lacked much less to go by.
"Good morning, Jim!"
Jim was all smiles for Melfina, as usual. "Good morning, Melfina. You don't have to go back to school today?"
"No, I still have another day before I really ought to get back," she admitted cheerily. Jim grinned back, apparently pleased at this mild degree of mischievousness. "Do you want breakfast?"
"You know it."
"He better—he's still a growing boy," Gene declared behind a mug of coffee. Jim gave him a look that he ignored.
"I'll learn Pyotrian if I have to," he lied. "But I want to know—are these morning company meetings going to become a thing?"
"Geeze, Gene," Jim said, his voice betraying his concerns about their companies future. He was about to express as much when the front door swung open and its attached bell jingled. "Suzuka, right on time!"
Of their group—the original crew of the cruiser Outlaw Star anyway—it was clear that Suzuka had changed the least, appropriate given her being a little older than Gene. The Twilight Assassin, as they knew her originally, entered in a white kimono and a wooden sword in her hand, as she always had. "Aren't I always?" she asked coolly before sitting down by an empty spot on the other couch Melfina had laid out for her. "Melfina, you're still here," she said, not sounding displeased.
"Yes, it's very nice to see you too Suzuka," she said, having taken it as a disguised compliment. "Would you like breakfast?"
"With tea please, yes."
Gene gave a dissatisfied grunt, unhappy with the direction the morning had taken, then tried to take charge. "So, that just leaves the latecomer, as usual," he said with a snort.
"Actually, from what I remember Aisha was always rather punctual," Melfina chirped.
Gene responded with a hand through his red hair before looking at Suzuka. "Long time no see. Where is she, by the way?" As in the past, Suzuka had been their contact with Aisha Clan-Clan oddly enough.
Before Suzuka could answer, Jim interrupted with a laugh. "Hah! Get a load of you! Two weeks ago, you didn't want anything to do with Aisha."
"Shut up, Jim, or I might change my mind."
"Then who's gonna' do all the heavy lifting?" Jim asked smugly, pleased at his own entendre. Gene reached out and nearly caught him by his shirt collar, Jim narrowly ducking behind the chair just in time. He stood just out of Gene's reach before looking at Suzuka. "By the way, Suzuka, where is Aisha?"
"About that…" she began slowly and quietly.
The others went silent. Even Melfina said nothing after bringing Suzuka her tea and some of the toast with jam they were eating, sitting down on the opposite couch and folding up her apron. Eyes closed, Suzuka turned her head very slowly as though in deliberation before opening her eyes and reaching into her kimono. She produced the last thing any of them expected, an envelope.
"This came for me, addressed to all of us," she confessed finally, clearly uncomfortable with the situation but otherwise returning to her monotone. Jim was about to take it when Gene snatched it from Suzuka, who rather than opening it inspected it warily.
"I don't think Aisha's ever written any of us a letter," Melfina pointed out.
"I don't think she has," Gene replied, his voice grim while holding the envelope as though it was laced with toxin. It'd already been opened, but Suzuka seemed unwilling to share its contents, so after a few seconds Gene emptied its contents on the table. The completely normal, yellow office envelope had a normal paper letter inside, folded twice. On it was Aisha's handwriting, that unfamiliar scrawl she left when hurriedly writing in what was to her an alien language generically called 'Terran'.
Gene stared at it. After reading the letter, he was no less confused. Looking over his shoulder, Jim read it out loud. "'I've gone home for important reasons. Don't come looking for me. Aisha.'"
"Oh my."
"Why am I even surprised?" Gene asked, tossing the letter and envelope over his shoulder and reaching for his food at the coffee table. "Three years ago we couldn't get rid of her. Now this. That's Aisha for you."
"Gene!"
"Oh, come on Jim, when you told me about the Doc you knew there was a fifty-fifty chance Aisha wouldn't even be on board for this. She never wanted to get involved with any political stuff, and for once, she's right," he announced, tapping a finger against the folded newspaper on the table.
"I suppose it was bound to happen," Suzuka muttered between sips of tea.
"Besides, we'll just make do without her."
Gene finished off the pieces of toast on his plate while Jim and Suzuka exchanged wary looks. They said nothing until Gene had finished his coffee. "What?" he growled, eyes darting back and forth.
"He doesn't know?" Suzuka asked Jim directly, causing him to put a hand over the back of his head.
"Jim…"
"If Aisha's gone home, she probably took her back pay with her," he pointed out innocuously, as though commenting on the weather.
Gene's eyes bugged out, getting a chuckle from Suzuka, who raised her kimono sleeve over her face. "Back pay?"
"This is why I'm always on you to actually pay attention to the books," Jim snapped back.
"What back pay Jim?" Gene yelled, reaching over the back of the couch in his direction angrily.
"I remember this," Melfina muttered, breaking her silence, her eyes lighting up. "The last time I saw Aisha, she asked me to look over these papers she had…receipts…"
"Well, they weren't exactly receipts," Jim confessed. "They were basically time sheets for all of Aisha's time on the Outlaw Star. You know, what we agreed to pay her!?"
"When did we agree to pay her?" Gene barked.
"When she had to give up her share of the Galactic Leyline because there was no Galactic Leyline, or there wasn't any material wealth from it anyway!" Jim retorted. "Remember that whole adventure? How Aisha was there too? Of course we had to pay at some point, she wasn't a volunteer! Or a slave!"
Gene buried his face in his hand and gave a deep, animalistic groan as Melfina put her arms on his shoulders.
"Remember the Grave of the Dragon? We needed her there! Or the Universal Strongman Tournament? The Heifong VII salvage mission? The Crackerjack Gang? The MacDougalls? She had to get paid for all those things, did you think she was doing out of the goodness of her heart?"
Gene didn't respond. "I mean, geeze, we did get paid for some of her work at least once. Remember Crackerjack's bounty? Would you have stopped grand theft posing as terrorism for free?" Jim fell down in a nearby armchair, arms crossed. "She didn't even ask for a percentage that time, just the negotiated rate for her labor, twenty wong an hour before taxes."
Jim's eyes darted back and forth eagerly. "Plus, you know, all the other normal stuff."
Gene grumbled something between his hands.
"What?"
"How much did you give her, Jim?" Gene asked after lowering his hands.
To his dismay, Jim's face turned red and he looked away. "The account included her hourly salary, as well as her share for the bounties Starwind and Hawking actually did collect of hers, plus a human healthcare plan she never used while paying into it…"
"Jim!"
"About eighty thousand wong."
What shocked Aisha more than anything was how much she owed in debt. The concept was almost completely foreign to her—debt was something that belonged to ministries and directorates of the government, often something accrued in wartime when the government had to bypass the normal channels to meet production quotas for extremely large military equipment, the sort that couldn't be easily stockpiled. Not small arms or missiles—production of those never ceased, and the government had enough stored up to fight a thousand wars, but things like extra corporate contractors for ships, hiring a civilian shipyard to help complete a dreadnought that was behind schedule, and so forth.
She'd never been in debt herself. During those shameful days busing tables in Blue Heaven or waitressing at the Annual Heifong Space Rally, she hadn't acquired debt—she either had money or she didn't, in which case, she owed her labor rather than nonexistent money for accidentally smashing a plate or a table or, more rarely, a grabby customer. Before that, the military paid all her living expenses. And before that, her family had always been wealthy, though it was more accurate to say they were caretakers rather than owners of their lands and estates.
She'd followed the dispatches to Heifong, especially those printed by the government. Nowadays, the Holy Empire's total national debt was roughly a third of the gross national product—an embarrassingly high amount to the Empire but still much, much less than its foreign counterparts, and almost all of it held by the public, with Corbono and Silgria holding small percentages. The last of the debt owned by Terrans, she heard, was paid off in T.S. 159 against the totals of the War Guilt Clause that stipulated the Terran nations owed more than forty trillion wong to the Empire when they assumed all responsibility for the war they'd lost. Apparently that wasn't even that much compared to the total debt of the four major nations, which she wasn't convinced anyone knew.
"That leaves me with…less than fifty thousand…" she mumbled, a pencil in one hand and her pocketbook in the other. She really didn't understand how much that was—she didn't know the conversion rate from Terran wong to Imperial notes—though given how long it'd taken to earn it, how much labor and suffering had been involved, it seemed like a great deal. Furthermore she had no way of accessing her military wages.
Still, skipping out of Heifong without paying her debts seemed worse. The way things looked, the wong might've been useless in the Empire anyway. "How did I even get this far into debt?" It was still a mystery to her, after all that hitchhiking and penny-pinching and scavenging…
Looking up from the table on the edge of the outdoor café, she glanced across the street. The Imperial Consulate on Heifong was located on the edge of the commercial district, by the Heifong Government's Supreme Court building at the end of Consulate Row. It was easy to pick out: it was a generally very Terran-looking building, but in the courtyard between the marble façade and the avenue that lined Consulate Row was a garden surrounding a modest but unmissable statue of the Empress of All Ctarl-Ctarl which was clearly much newer than the pedestal it stood on. When she finally worked up the nerve to enter through the main gate, she found a consular official sitting in the lobby behind the main desk eyeing her suspiciously.
The officer on duty was more than mildly surprised when a very fit Ctarl-Ctarl woman around the age of twenty—the diplomatic officer was the same age and immediately noticed the similarities in their build and complexion—meekly entered past the security checkpoint at the front door. The two guards actually hadn't paid her attention when she failed to set off the weapons scanner, but now all three of them scrutinized her closely, breaking her down into separate elements for threat assessment as they'd been trained to, mostly by her attire. Torn brown leggings hastily repaired with mismatched patches under a threadbare dark green long-sleeved minidress with dirty white lining. Worn-out black boots under white wraps. A chipped white breastplate and a stiff collar, with various bits of well-worn gold jewelry—a bell on the collar, bracelets, an officer's tiara under extremely long white hair that was braided into a gold ring at the end. Narrow shoulders hidden underneath scratched-up shoulder guards, and a long green scarf wrapped around her collarbone and draped over her shoulder. Every single article of clothing she wore was dilapidated, as though they'd been only been amateurishly maintained over the years, and she looked like the cross between an off-season athlete and a failed spy.
The diplomatic officer said nothing, squinting at her through her wireframe eyeglasses attached by a thin silver chain to her tunic. The Foreign Ministry's always scared me a little, Aisha thought, pressing her feet together nervously. It was one of the most powerful ministries in the Empire, right behind the War Ministry, and because of its responsibilities, often more secretive. Her mother had always told her they were never interested in honor and valor, only in what was practical and political. Eventually she worked up the nerve to open her mouth.
"I-I'm…"
"Speak up," she ordered the strange, frightened-looking woman while leaning over the counter.
"I'm…I'm the Empire's Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the Blue Heaven Region, Aisha Clan-Clan," she chanted in a single breath. She turned to find both guards standing right before her and visibly jumped with a cry.
The officer looked at her. This was by far the least convincing story she'd heard this month, considering how few Ctarl-Ctarl were actually living on Heifong, and even fewer who went to their consulate. She cocked her head and stared the white-haired woman down for a few more seconds.
"Put your hand out," she commanded finally. The woman complied with uncertainty, and she poked her with the tip of a biometric scanner she kept under the counter. The extremely accurate tool relied on a direct DNA sample, usually blood or skin. It took almost half a minute for the computer to check with the central database with the Foreign Affairs Ministry lightyears away in the Imperial Capital.
The officer stared at her screen—the very fit woman checked out. "You're quite far from your posting, Lady Ambassador," she announced, not bothering to soften her tone. "What are you doing on Heifong, ma'am?"
"I…uh…" she began as one of the guards raised her arms and quickly frisked her, passing his hands over her formfitting outfit. That didn't bother her in the least, but he stopped at the small military-style pouch hanging from a belt on her thin waist and inspected it. "Hey!"
"Lady Aisha!" the officer snapped, getting back her attention. "Before I can take you to the Consular-General, I have to ask you, why aren't you at your posting in Blue Heaven? And why are you here in Heifong?"
Aisha's jaw went slack and she cocked her to the side, raising both hands above the counter in a very dramatic expression of defeat. It was the same expression she'd found herself using when she'd been confused by Gene Starwind's antics, something that had not at all been a rarity.
"It's a really…really long story."
The official pushed her glasses up again and put her hands together, indicating she had no shortage of time to listen. So Aisha began from the only place she knew how: from the faithful day aboard the cruiser Orta Honehone in space around Blue Heaven, when she'd received a general alert concerning the infamous space outlaw 'Hot Ice' Hilde.
Terms To Know:
Pyotr Imperiya (Петр Империя) - Russian (or in this case, Pyotrian) for the Pyotr (lit. Petra, similar to 'Peter') Empire. One of the four great Earthling Empires alluded to in series reference materials, and was the homeland of Dr. Sputnik in the aborted sequel series.
- Sankt-Yekaterina (Санкт-Екатерина) - Pyotrian for Saint Catherine, the name of Pyotr Imperiya's capital, named for Catherine (the Second) the Great (Екатерина II Великая), the Eighteenth Century empress.
- Novokhabarovsk Republic (Новохабаровск Республика) - Pyotrian for the New (Neo-) Khabarovsk Republic, named after the city in eastern Russia. In A Terran for the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire, it was created by the Pyotrian Social Democratic Party after they overthrew the Pyotrian Emperor but fell out with the conservative Provisional Government which was left to rule. Located between the Pyotr Imperiya and its Germanic neighbor, the Einhorn Reich.
- Eisenteingrad (Эйнштейнград) - The capital of the Novokhabarovsk Republic, named for pioneering Soviet film director Sergey Mikhailovich Eisenstein (Сергей Михайлович Эйзенштейн).
War Guilt Clause - Article 231 of the Treaty of Homige, signed between the Earthling Empires and the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire and formally ending the war after the surrender of the Earthling space navies at Liberty Bell. It stipulated that all responsibility for the proceeding war fell upon the four Earthing powers, who thereby made legal commitment to pay reparations of tens of trillions of wong.