The Immortal Empire – Episode 4: The Demilitarized Zone
A full day since Aisha's disappearance, things at Starwind and Hawking Enterprises hadn't gotten any more relaxed. Since dawn, Jim had been packing luggage for what he feared was going to be a long trip. Gene claimed he was doing much the same, ensuring the Outlaw Star was ready to leave at a moment's notice from Heifong Starport. They didn't meet to discuss plans well into the afternoon.
"So, worst case scenario: Aisha makes it back to the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire before we reach her," Jim speculated, a pen in his hand.
Gene visibly shuddered. "If that happens, what's the plan?" He turned to Jim. "You do have a plan, right?" he asked, his voice clearly implying that it was his responsibility.
"Yes I have a plan!" he hissed. The two migrated towards the coffee table, clearing it off before Jim dropped a new stack of documents on it.
"It's actually not as bad as I first thought, the obvious disadvantages aside. I heard somewhere that years ago that a lot of humans used to live in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire. I'll need to do some research, check the normal sources, but I have a feeling most of the information available will be coming from the Space Forces."
"Is that a problem?"
Jim laughed, touching the back of his head. "Nah, not really."
"Well, racing across the DMZ does us no good anyway. We'll need to determine her course off-planet and start from there. The Empire's pretty damn big, we need at least some idea of her vector, what course she's taking."
Jim took a cheap paper map from one of his pockets, unfolded it onto the table and drew a line from Heifong, past its neighbors, towards the galactic center. Between Heifong and the Sagittarius A, the very bright and very compact complex radio source in the center of the galaxy, was the whole Ctarl-Ctarl Empire. For a few moments, Gene studied the map with an unusual intensity normally reserved for large amounts of wealth, dire life-or-death situations, or very prominent female secondary sexual characteristics.
"Well?"
"Well what?"
"Are you gonna' tell me about the job?" Jim snapped at him.
Gene sighed. The focus was lost. "So, remember Novo-whatsitsname?"
"No-vo-kha-ba-rovsk," Jim said, slowly and carefully sounding it out. "Gene, if we're gonna' go there for a job, even if it is just to chase down Aisha, you're really going to have to know how to say the name, people are gonna' think you're some sort of cretin."
He grinned at him. "That's the beauty of it: we don't! The job is just to deliver weapons from the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire to Novo-whatever, not the other way around. We head directly for the depot world, hopefully find Aisha long the way, squeeze my eighty-thousand out of her, and then head back to deliver the hardware. It couldn't be easier!"
"And who's paying for all this meandering exactly?" Jim asked skeptically.
"Who else? The Military HQ on Einsteingrad," Gene replied, having no trouble with the capital's name by comparison. "They've promised a pretty sweet C.O.D. too, apparently not many outlaws are keen on taking jobs from them.
"You know there's probably a reason for that, right?" Jim reminded him.
Gene ignored the comment. "All goes well, we ought to come out with a net gain even before we get that eighty-thousand back."
"Yeah, or whatever's left of it."
"What was that?"
"Nothing, nothing!"
Towards the front of the office, they could hear the door opening. Gene looked up, thinking it might be Suzuka having returned from her reconnaissance at the Ctarl-Ctarl embassy or whatever she felt like doing, but it was Melfina back from classes for the day. His mood improved further.
"Welcome back."
"Thank you!"
Jim folded up the paper map. "Hey Mel! How were classes?"
The young bio-gynoid smiled almost cunningly at him—she knew he wasn't asking about her studies. Melfina had gotten back from her classes at Dailong University, one of Heifong's best-known institutions and home to its largest databank, but what she'd brought was genuinely her own. Still wearing her school clothes, she came in holding a large binder of some kind.
"Thanks Melfina, we can actually get started now."
Gene looked confused. Jim sighed. "Geeze big bro, you remember how to track people, right? It's not like we weren't doing it for years on Sentinel III, for god sakes."
His older partner awkwardly laughed it off. "Sure, I was just playing with you. What have you got, Melfina?"
She beamed a little with pride, a rarity for her. "I went through all my photo albums and got every picture I had of Aisha," she explained, opening the book to a page selected at random. Sure enough, between two pages there were more than two dozen large photographs of the young Ctarl-Ctarl, though many were duplicates.
"Plus, these are all chemical photographs: high-resolution and hard to alter. We're lucky Melfina preserved them so well!" Jim added quickly.
"We're lucky that Melfina took photography on as a hobby," Gene countered, not hiding the skepticism in his voice. "Hey, I remember this one!" he said before pointing at a particular photo.
"You oughta', it was just in orbit above us: the Thirteenth Annual Heifong Space Race! This was the pre-race party I recall." Jim's expression hardened. "As I recall, Aisha was a waitress there again and tried to grab us again.
"Well, the food was good." A smile appeared over his face. "So was Aisha's butt in that striped minidress."
Jim and Melfina stared at him, and for once, even Gene turned red. It was apparent he hadn't intended to say that out loud. "Just kidding! That was a pretty fun night, huh?"
"Gene…" Jim began, shaking his head. Melfina giggled.
He was eager to change the subject. "Anyway, we've got to have enough here for potential witnesses."
"You have to remember, even out on the frontier, there are lots of people who've never seen a Ctarl-Ctarl before—and even if they had, they probably didn't realize it," Jim explained, alluding to the integration of Ctarl-Ctarl into mainstream human society, which was actually not that successful. He recalled his own first encounter with a Ctarl-Ctarl who wasn't an image in a history or a biology textbook—the waitresses at a party Gene held for something or another years ago, when they'd gotten their start, long before they met Aisha. "Not everyone remembers people just because they played grab-ass with them."
"And what does that mean?" Gene demanded, angry at the accusation.
"Nothing, nothing! The point is, even if Aisha were in disguise, this out to help once I compile it into a dossier." He took photo album and closed it. "Is Suzuka onboard?"
Gene sighed. That had been his responsibility. "Not yet."
Jim made his best 'serious situation' face. "Gene, we really need her in on this one. There were two people in this company with any tracking experience, and one of them just fled the planet."
"What about all that business about what we did on Sentinel III?" he fired back.
"Hanging out at the bars on a tiny Podunk planet, waiting for bounties to walk through the door isn't the same thing, Gene."
Gene looked almost hurt by the suggestion, but Jim's face made it clear he was committed. "Let's focus on the task at hand: you're not gonna' let Aisha keep the money that was clearly owed to her. And for the first time, you've actually got an economical way of stopping her, apparently. Aisha's not going to be an easy person to track down, especially not if she knows we're coming. Let's just hope that she doesn't yet, or your stubbornness is going to make our lives a lot harder."
Sitting at the commander's station on the small, simple bridge of a merchantman—a civilian trade vessel, in other words—Aisha Clan-Clan sneezed.
"Gesundheit, Lady Aisha."
Aisha scratcher her nose and sniffed. The sneeze caught her off guard almost as much as the navigator's response, sitting in front of her to her left.
"It means 'good health' in Einhorn, ma'am," the navigator explained preemptively.
"Oh." She checked the course displays on the primary monitor once more—they were still sitting at the Terran edge of the DMZ, just like they had been twenty minutes earlier, waiting for clearance to pass through. "Are they any closer to reviewing the ship yet?" she grumbled angrily.
"No, Lady Aisha, we're still waiting in line."
She grumbled a little more. The navigator went back to reading a paperback at his station. Aisha bristled—this sort of laxity was inexcusable in the Imperial Navy, but that really just meant that the officer would have had to stand at his station, looking board, until he was relieved before he could read a book to pass the time. And the freighter was not a military vessel—he wasn't even standing, but sitting at his station. She decided not to press the matter further, given the miserable expression on the face of the vessel's captain, one that had been there since Aisha boarded as a passenger for their return to the Holy Empire.
In contrast with the preoccupied navigator, it was difficult to convey just how unhappy Mr. Nubata Kunono, captain of the long-range trade vessel Niburu Boribori, was at encountering another Imperial official on Heifong. The fact that it was the same official, Lady Captain-Lieutenant Aisha Clan-Clan was just the finishing blow from the Ctarl-Ctarl Embassy on Heifong, who made it clear their orders were those of the state, and that a veteran officer of the Ctarl-Ctarl merchant marine, an employee of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, was in no position to reject them.
"This, this really can't be happening…" his first mate and navigator had sputtered upon hearing the news.
He held his head in his hands. "Like you said the first time around, we don't have any choice, do we? We can't disobey the Empire."
They probably shouldn't have been surprised that Lady Aisha didn't remember either of them when she boarded the Niburu Boribori, though she did recall the ship itself: the vessel had a twenty-year career under multiple captains, reliably transporting priority cargo speedily between Heifong and the Ctarl-Ctarl trade hub Outreach, in the Outer Periphery. She wasn't happy either once she saw the ship's name on the outside of its hull.
"I can't believe this…" she'd whimpered, her head bobbing back and forth. The whole Heifong Space Race incident was not one she cared to relive, even if, she felt, her successful stratagem to sneak aboard the Outlaw Star had been nothing short of brilliant. Naturally, she didn't remember the crew.
Back then, Gene told me the MacDougall Brothers were the key to finding the Galactic Leyline, the lying bastard, she thought now, long-suppressed memories from the back of her head raising the temperature of the blood. How miserable was it to have Gene Starwind, the least reliable Terran in the universe, as my only lead on a government assignment!
Another thought entered her mind. But it was how I joined his crew, wasn't it? She felt a little better, if only for a moment. Barely hours after she had snuck aboard, they were under missile attack by the MacDougalls, and had lost two of the Outlaw Star's four Newton Reactors—a pretty awful turn of events before the fourth checkpoint in a space race.
"Captain-Lieutenant, why are you smiling? Is something amusing you?" the captain demanded quietly but firmly.
"N-Nothing!" she stammered out, her military posture returning. She didn't realize it, but her behavior was almost indistinguishable from her last time aboard the Niburu Boribori, even if her objectives were different.
In the distance space beyond them stretched the Ctarl-Terran Demilitarized Zone: an uneven length of space that ran along areas of influence of three of the four Terran Great Guilds and their associated pirate clans, roughly 320 lightyears in length and varying in width between 25 and 50 lightyears. On the galactic west, it ended at the edge of Silgrian space, and the galactic east, the territories of Corbano. The Empire's borders with both species' areas of influence were normalized, then again, the Empire hadn't fought any wars with either of those people in recent memory. Aisha wasn't an academic genius, at least not anymore, but she understood the irony that the demilitarized border of the Empire was adjacent to some of the most militarized areas in the universe, while the normal borders of the Empire just had a nominal police presence.
It also meant that all the trade traffic between Terran and Ctarl-Ctarl space went through a series of choke-points, like the one they were waiting at for their vessel to be inspected and granted permission to cross. She impatiently wrapped her fingers against the instrumentation in front of her.
"Has there been any further notice from border control?" she asked.
"No, Lady Aisha," Mr. Kunono replied dutifully. "You would hear so if there was, ma'am." He had a tendency of repeating the obvious as a sort of polite rebuke.
She gave an impatient sigh. The navigator next to him shuffled slightly, returning to the paperback novel he'd had underneath his station momentarily and reading it in front of her.
"What are you reading?" she asked finally, trying not to sound too annoyed.
He looked up at her. "Oh, an ancient Terran history of the founding state of the Einhorn Reich, Germany, Lady Aisha."
"Ger-man-y?" Aisha pronounced it phonetically.
"Yes ma'am, though in Einhorn it is pronounced 'Deutschland'. How the two words are related, I don't know." Keeping his finger on a page, he closed the book so she could see the cover.
"That's one of those spaceport history novels that they sell for about four wong per hundred pages, isn't it?" she asked, more than a little patronizing.
"Yes ma'am. But it was recommended to me by a colleague, specifically the passages dealing with the country's flirtation with racial politics." He opened the book up again. "There was a time on ancient Terra, at the very beginning of the Atomic Age, where the German government pursued a policy of creating a 'racialist state', on the notion that the 'national people' or volk were spread across many borders. By uniting the so-called superior 'German blood', the people in charge at the time thought they could dominant all of Terra."
He gave a look like he had thought of something very clever. "Sound familiar?"
She glowered at him. "I was valedictorian of my high school. Of course I remember Imperial history." In short, when the first dynasty rose after more than five centuries of the Dashiyo Koto-Koto Nara, the Ctarl-Ctarl's Warring States Period, their ideology came to dominate the unified planet. One of their cornerstones was that Ctarl-Ctarl interstellar empire existed because of the superiority of the Ctarl-Ctarl, as a distinct mammalian species, over their neighbors. Since there was no distinction between the Ctarl-Ctarl mind—from which philosophical and eventually political thought was derived—and the Ctarl-Ctarl body—from which biological and eventually military prowess was derived—that meant the physical being of the Ctarl-Ctarl, blood included, was sacred. This was technically still true, centuries later. The navigator's theoretical comparison was fairly obvious to any high school graduate.
"The Germans, long before they founded the Einhorn Reich, thought this would make them the most powerful nation on Terra, like the ancient Roman empires before them: the physical essence of their race among the Terran species," the navigator noted. "That was apparently their future goal: a pan-German Empire spawned from their particular country, at least according to this book."
"And it didn't go that way, did it?" she sneered a little. Foreign history was a weakness of hers, even though she knew those years touched on the one subject every Ctarl-Ctarl student knew about Terran history, the Terran Atomic World War. I don't really know any more about the German Empire on Terra other than they lost that big war.
"No, it didn't. The German Reich appeared practically unstoppable for some time, but eventually they lost the war and were divided between the victors. This concept itself, this 'Nazi racial ideology' was consigned to history along with everything else, except what was useful to the victors, the United States and the Sov-e-yet Union," he explained. Whereas 'United States' was easily translate into Ctarl-Ctarl, he'd used the Terran loanword 'Soviet', which he had to say phonetically. "There were two things this German Reich did that the Einhorn Reich of today hasn't, most obviously: turned almost the whole world against it, and create an ideological dilemma between 'Germans' everywhere, and 'Germanic' peoples, and over the right to rule."
Even Aisha knew that for one reason or another, Ctarl-Ctarl history had ruled definitively on that subject. "There's the difference—all Ctarl-Ctarl everywhere, at least in the Empire, are biologically equal by virtue of being part of the same species, including those with a Terran parent. We may consider the physical body sacred, but we don't agonize about every drop of blood in our veins as to its origins like Terrans sometimes do, or whether your parents were from Home or the Outer Periphery. Every Ctarl-Ctarl, at some point, came from our homeworld." She crossed her arms triumphantly over her chest, as though she'd won some argument. It's true. We Clan-Clans are famous because name belongs to warriors going back centuries, not because we had the virtue of being born in a good place when others did not. On the contrary, we probably have that privilege of living in the Imperial capital because of our ancestors' valor, wherever they came from.
The navigator nodded in agreement. "That's true, we're not as heavy-handed as they were. We don't kidnap emigrants who left for Terran worlds, or their descendants, we just disapprove of their decisions strongly. And it's illegal to discriminate against someone because their parent was a Terran."
"So long as they have at least one Ctarl-Ctarl parent anyway," the captain announced abruptly, to their surprise. He'd remained silent until now.
"Please excuse the captain, Lady Aisha. His father-in-law is Terran."
Aisha gave him a sharp look. "So?" she asked, masking any awkwardness with aggression. Ever since she was a small child, the treatment of Terran in the Holy Empire, particularly Terrans with Ctarl-Ctarl children, the former whom very likely possessed full citizenship courtesy of their spouses, was a controversial issue. She hated thinking about issues that complex, she thought she'd stop having to do that sort of thing after she finished school.
She looked at the sensor readouts of the local Terran patrol ships, long, blue-grey affairs that looked more at home floating in the ocean than through space, to take her mind off the matter. Her suppressed naval officer's education rose to the surface. "These are the nicest Terran warships I've ever seen."
"That's the general consensus on it, Lady Aisha," the captain pointed out.
"Of course they'd their best ships out on the border, but why?" she speculated. "Our own fleet can't see them from fifty lightyears away across the DMZ."
Neither officer responded immediately. "I imagine they're for the ships that are passing through the zone, ma'am."
She blushed angrily. "I'm aware of that!" she snapped abruptly, feeling a little foolish. She was about to rant further when the speakers above her beeped.
"Merchantman Niburu Boribori, you are clear to submit for inspection. Proceed along the designated vector to platform nine-twenty-three and wait for docking clearance," a calm voice announced in Terran.
Finally! "Ahead one-third, Mr. Kunono," she commanded.
"Like I need to be told that," he mumbled back at her, noticing that she had begun preoccupying herself with the controls at the command station where she sat, humming to herself cheerfully.
"Whatever you are thinking of, Your Ladyship, I would remind you that, as in the past, this vessel is armed with a single machinecannon. No Guriguri missiles, no Gambagamba torpedoes, and certainly no Gagagan energy cannons," he explained, using the generic terms for familiar classes of warship armaments.
"We certainly aren't equipped with anything like that," the navigator repeated in kind.
"And you call this an Imperial vessel," she sneered, not taking her eyes off the instrumentation. "Besides, I'm not going to attack the border patrol, that's insane."
"Then what are you doing?"
She gave an unusual deep, unusually slow laugh, almost bellowing. "Oh, you'll see."
"That's profoundly worrying, Lady Aisha."
She slowed her laughing down to a chuckle. Actually, they probably wouldn't see—she was using the ship's computer to leave a little gift for the Outlaw Star in the rather improbable event that they came after her. Oh, I know it's a long shot, but if Gene Starwind turns out to be vengeful or stupid enough to come after me, I think I owe him a little gift. Aisha broke out in more raucous laughter as her hands danced over the computer interface.
The navigator gave a long sigh and looked back at his own instrumentation. "They're certainly taking their time with docking clearance." He glanced at his wristwatch. "We may have to put this off."
Aisha's head jerked up at him. "What?"
The captain cleared his throat. "What he means is that we may end up giving up for the day. The Terran side of the border runs on a planetary schedule, at this rate we may end up waiting till 'tomorrow' when they reopen for further business…"
"What?" she snarled at them. "Tomorrow? What the hell does 'tomorrow' mean? We're in bloody outer space-zona!" she lashed out.
"Lady Aisha, in this situation we're beholden to the schedule of the Terran border officials, not our own," the navigator began.
"This is supposed to be a fast merchantman! You call this fast? So we had to sit in line and wait for some customs agent to get off his ass, and now you're just going to give up? And you call yourself a Ctarl-Ctarl vessel with that attitude? It's all wrong and…"
She stopped short. Both officers turned back to see her frozen in place, one hand raised in a martial fist just over her shoulder, her eyes open wide.
"Lady Aisha?"
"Captain-Lieutenant, are you all right?"
She didn't hear their inquiries, instead a long-ago conversation replaying in her head. "What's the deal? You've given up? Somebody just blasted you with a couple of missiles, BANG, and you're going 'The ship's busted! We're stuck here!' So what's the deal? To a Ctarl-Ctarl, this attitude of yours is all wrong! To a Ctarl-Ctarl, it's about justice, courage, tenacity! With those three ideals, we'd never give up, we'd always do whatever it took to get the job done! You people don't have the tenacity or the guys to go swimming in the ether sea!"
That's what she'd told the crew of the Outlaw Star more than year ago. Despite the implication, that was not the motto of the Ctarl-Ctarl people, or even the Empire, but of the Ctarl-Ctarl Imperial Navy. THey were just some things she'd come up with on the spot. To the average Ctarl-Ctarl, the words didn't mean a great deal either. But the words had gotten through to them, somehow.
Even more than that, she remembered Gene's response.
"Have some faith in me and come along for the ride, people! I can do this!"
"Go for it! Don't lose to those bastards with missiles!" she'd cheered them on.
"Lady Aisha, is something amusing? You seem to be smiling a lot."
She blushed. "N-Nothing! You two keep your ears out for docking clearance zona!" she snapped.
Terms To Know:
Corbano (or Corbono) - The area of space (and likely home of a planet by the same name) in the influence of Corbonite species, galactic east of the Tenpa Empire and Kei Guild space.
Sagittarius A (Sgr A) - The trio of related objects in the centermost area of the galaxy, supernova remnant Sagittarius A East, the minispiral dust cloud Sagittarius A West, and the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. Their location and nature means they still remain observable exclusively by means of the radio detection. Alongside a few neighboring structures, they are claimed by the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire by virtue of mounting the most successful manned and unmanned expeditions into the Galactic Center during a pirate conflict known as the Third Succession War.
Silgrian Space - The territory belonging to the birdlike Silgrians, galactic west of the Ban Guild and the USSA.
The Warring States Period (Dashiyo Koto-Koto Nara) - An approximately six century-long period of unending warfare in Ctarl-Ctarl history, immediately proceeding the founding of the first planetary imperial dynasty, the Tomoyo-Tomoyo. Almost a fourth of all Ctarl-Ctarl perished as a consequence of war. The Tomoyo-Tomoyo nation, and its rivals, developed and used the most prolific pre-spaceflight military weapons and tactics, including the submarine, the armoured fighting vehicle and tank, the jet aircraft and the fission bomb, and shaped the future Ctarl-Ctarl Interstellar Empire.