The Immortal Empire – Episode 7: The Outer Periphery
As it had been two or three hundred years earlier, space travel remained a largely boring, tedious pastime, punctuated by terrifying excitement when things went wrong. Even someone as immature as Gene Starwind was prepared for that, with a painful memory of what happened when things went wrong for spacers left in his childhood. He might complain, but he wasn't opposed to boredom.
What he was opposed to was being taught.
"Come on, Gene, you're not doing anything else. We might as well try and be constructive." Jim Hawking glanced over his shoulder. "You too, Suzuka. Unless you can prove you took informative jobs in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire and didn't, you know, get killed."
Suzuka raised an eyebrow.
Nonetheless, leaving Melfina on the bridge the three of them congregated in the main hold, where Jim had assembled all his notes and persocoms, taping the former to the wall behind him.
"Jim, isn't this…a little much?"
"Oh, I'm not even started bro." Jim came around the corner, wheeling with him a small, dark green wooden board framed and installed into a wheeled rack.
Gene's eyes bugged out. "What...the hell…is that?"
"I'd like to know as well," Suzuka added, not bothering to disguise the surprise in her voice.
"What, none of you people ever seen a blackboard before?" Jim asked triumphantly, pushing the board back and forth on its squeaky hinges. With his other hand, he reached into his pocket and produced a handful of white chalk, set some of it down and used the remaining piece to begin writing from the top of the board downwards, standing on his tiptoes in the artificial gravity.
"So, what's the 'Sacred Realm of the Hashiyo-Hashiyo Nation'?" Gene asked.
Jim answered as he chalked. "That's the official name for the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire—apparently, the Ctarl-Ctarl have had three dynasties with different names. Hashiyo-Hashiyo is current one."
"So they change the country's name when the dynasty changes?" Gene asked, confusion creeping into his voice.
"There's probably a reason everyone, themselves included, just call it the 'Ctarl-Ctarl Empire'. You could probably think of that full name as more of a geographic title for specific purposes." He paused and moved slightly. "Speaking of which…"
Jim began sketching out a few amorphous blob-like shapes in the middle of the board, before making small dots with circles around them in the center and edges.
"So why doesn't Melfina have to go to this class too?" Gene asked impatiently.
"What makes you think she isn't?" Suzuka questioned quietly.
"Melfina?" Jim asked aloud.
"I'm here, Jim," her voice came over the speakers. Gene rolled his eyes.
"So, the empire controls a large portion of space directly that is smaller than what we would call 'human space', all those countries and the great guilds combined. Their sphere of influence, on the other hand, reaches from the local Orion Arm and through the Sagittarius Arm, into the Galactic Center, where the empire periodically patrols but doesn't actually have any colonized worlds. On our end, that includes Corbano space and some parts of the Silgrian frontier." He pointed at the middle of the blob. "Their capital is here, Ctarl-Ctarl Prime, which is just the human name for it."
He moved his finger towards the bottom edge. "New Avalon, a majority human world, is here, on the edge of their empire, what they call the 'Outer Periphery'." He gave a dejected look, he crossed out the world. "The system is also home to a military depot where the Ctarl-Ctarl have left a bunch of their obsolete guns and ammo, apparently. But there's no reason to think Aisha could go there."
"So we think she'll go to the capital?"
"We better hope so. Because the empire has more than a thousand populated worlds in it, and if she doesn't go to the capital, good luck finding her without some sort of press conference," Jim groaned and turned towards them, opening his eyes as wide as possible. "Hey, Outlaw Star, I'm over here! Come get me-zona!" he cried, poorly imitating Aisha's voice and inflection.
"Sarcasm really doesn't become you, James," Gene replied.
Suzuka nodded. "For once, I agree with Gene."
"The point is we're still in a lot of trouble potentially, which means we need to hedge our bets and take advantage of the most important organization there is."
"You mean the Ctarl-Ctarl government?"
"Bro! You've been paying attention!" Jim beamed, on the verge of crying. Gene shrugged and he continued. "The way I see it, and I hate to do this to Aisha but I don't see what choice we have, if we make it known that she was part of our crew, the Ctarl-Ctarl government will mediate and keep her from running from us to avoid some sort of embarrassing incident."
Jim paused. "That's what I'm guessing anyway. Have I mentioned what a stupid idea this was just over a couple wong and…GENE, PAY ATTENTION!"
"Huh, yeah, I'm listening!" Gene quickly explained as Jim taped a sheet to the edge of the blackboard.
"We have a printer?"
"I'm still surprised we have a blackboard," Gene confided in Suzuka.
Jim groaned. "See this? This is who I'm talking about: this is Tomas Koboro-Koboro, the prime minister of the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire." One the sheet was a printed portrait of a government official in civilian dress, and Jim rolled the blackboard up to the two of them, as if to compensate for the sheet's small size. "He was elected back in Hashiyo-Hashiyo 204, which roughly equals Toward Star 148, and he's been in office ever since."
Suzuka extended a figure. "I've heard of this man before."
Jim looked stunned. "Really? Wait, don't tell me it was a job, that someone took a hit out on him…" he began, whining towards the end.
Suzuka smirked. "Hardly. If I'd taken such a job, this prime minister would be dead. But I can say that he's also one of the most protected people in the universe, no less so than the Tendo King. Ergo, I wouldn't have taken such a job."
"I guess that makes sense," Jim conceded. "Even out of the reach of an ultra-class-A assassin, huh?"
She didn't answer and Gene continued. "Anyway, he was the socialist candidate for prime minister and served for the last three monarchs."
"Three of them?" Suzuka asked suspiciously.
"Nothing like that, you need to stop thinking like assassin, Suzuka," Jim teased her politely. "He was elected right before the sovereign before last, Empress Marianna IV, who abdicated. Then Emperor Anton I, her brother, was killed in an accident while on holiday. The current sovereign is his daughter, Empress Kasara IV."
He gave a nervous laugh. "I'm sure it's just been a run of bad luck. I doubt he's nefarious or anything, I mean, just look at him…GENE!" he snapped.
Gene jerkily looked back, pulling a finger out of either his ear or his nose, Jim just missed it. "I'm listening!"
"No you weren't!"
"I was too!"
Jim ineffectual punched the back of the blackboard. "Damn it, Gene! How about you try and stare at this picture with half the intensity you were staring at Empress Kasara's boobs with, huh?" Jim taunted him, pointing
"Oh, I don't think that's gonna' happen," Gene muttered skeptically, standing up and looking at the printout nonetheless. Though a little detail was lost by the whatever old second-hand printer Jim had dug up for the Outlaw Star, the image of Tomas Koboro-Koboro was adequately clear: an adult, older than Gene but not quite having reached middle age, that interminable age Gene always remembered his own father being the last time he'd seen him. He was rather thin and lean under his suit, not at all muscular like Aisha, who had a swimmer's physique at minimum, with a stern, tense-looking face and very well-defined wrinkles. His hair was a charcoal-grey, with moderately bushy eyebrows, and his nose was big by Ctarl-Ctarl standards but small for a human, with a few indentations that would've looked more at home on an older man, though his moderately-dark complexion helped hide them. A pair of small, grey, well-protected eyes stared out from under those eyebrows, no-nonsense but not necessarily threatening.
Like his monarch, he was very human-looking, though unlike her, exceptionally plain: his long tapered ears were his lone alien trait. When combined with his suit, a modest, dark-brown three-piece affair with a watch chain hanging from a pocket, he looked like he'd never had an amusing day in his life and about as interesting as the printout that bore his appearance. Above all, he looked quite harmless, like the sort of man you might see behind the desk of a hotel, or a modestly successful lawyer. Not even a mafia consigliere, he thought, reminded of a number of U.S.S.A. mobster movies he'd watched when he was younger.
"So this is the guy who actually runs the government, huh?" Gene asked thoughtfully.
Jim shrugged. "Yes and no. According to the Space Forces' unpublished reports, the prime minister is just a mechanism to execute the sovereign's will and handle the daily business of government. All the power is supposed to be either in parliament or in the sovereign. They've used that system for almost five-hundred years now."
Gene whistled. "That's a long time."
Jim nodded. "Probably why they call it the 'Immortal Empire', instead of, well, the other thing."
You really are an immortal Ctarl-Ctarl! Gene's words from almost two years ago rang in his head, told to Aisha the day they'd met, shortly after he'd shot her with a caster shell. "Well, if the Ctarl-Ctarl are anything like the everyday assassins that Aisha was, I can't imagine their emperors live that long, immortal or not."
"Empresses."
"Huh?"
"Usually the ruler, or 'sovereign' is a woman, like, more than sixty percent of the time, though there's nothing that prohibits males from inheriting the crown. And according to this, a Ctarl-Ctarl sovereign hasn't been assassinated in more than three hundred years."
Suzuka smirked. "I told you, but don't listen to the professional assassin."
"Three hundred years? What the hell are you reading anyway?"
"This? It's that unpublished naval manual from the Space Forces I keep telling you about, the one I hacked before our last jump. It was written by that Space Forces admiral, Chandrasekhar." He showed the two his persocom needlessly, as its small screen couldn't be read at that distance anyway. "He was some kind of military envoy who lived in the empire for many years and was supposed to write the latest manual, until…"
Jim trailed off and Gene stared at him impatiently. "Until what?"
"Well, uh…" he began awkwardly, putting his hand over his head. "…then he just stopped. The updates stopped coming in a few years ago. Which is a shame, because they were the best reports the Space Forces had I bet."
Gene and Suzuka regarded him with identical skeptical stares. "Come on, who cares about some dead admiral anyway! We're trying to figure out how to find Aisha after all!
Aisha Clan-Clan sneezed again.
"Gesundheit, Lady Aisha."
Aisha stared at the navigator of the Niburu Boribori and rolled her eyes. As it happened, crossing back into Imperial space from the demilitarized zone was no more exciting or life-changing than leaving the Tenpa Empire had been, to her disappointment. The daily life on the ship hadn't really changed either.
"I better not be getting a cold," Aisha complained to herself, scratching her nose for a second. She glanced around the bridge, empty except for herself, the navigator, and Captain Kunono. After a few seconds her mind was made up. "I'm going back to my room, if…"
"Lady Aisha, we're getting an incoming transmission, military priority."
"What?" Aisha snapped.
"It's for you, ma'am," the navigator said, his voice implying it was obvious.
"Put it on the main screen!" Aisha ordered, before immediately backpedaling. "Wait, no, I…"
"What, Lady Aisha?"
She stared at the two civilian merchant marine officers. Military protocol had taken over: unless specifically indicated, as in the case with confidential information, all military priority transmissions to a ship were taken in company of the bridge, and any officers and crew manning it—in the case of this rather pathetic vessel, two officers. But technically, Aisha was not obligated to obey military decorum on a civilian vessel, it was just what she was used to.
What if it's something embarrassing? What if I've been demoted again, and this is the whole point I was recalled. But that doesn't that seem a little extreme, calling me back to the empire after almost two years just to demote me again? I mean, how much lower could I go in the first place? They couldn't just make me to a sailor, could they? Can officers be demoted to enlisted women, is that even a thing? Oh no, oh no…
Aisha's compounding sense of dread manifested itself on her face. "Lady Aisha?" the skipper repeated.
"I'll take the message privately! No, wait, that wouldn't be proper! Wait, don't put it on the screen," she cried out. "Put it on the screen!"
"Excuse me, ma'am…?"
"I said put it on the screen!" Aisha snapped angrily. This time, the navigator began tapping his control console before she could change her mind again.
"Beginning message decryption!"
The forward viewscreen changed seamlessly from a field of twinkling stars in the Outer Periphery to a neutral dark blue computer screen, on which an unfilled white circle appeared as the decryption process began. Immediately, she slammed her right hand against console in front of her, a scan of her complete hand print serving as the key. The circle began to fill in a clockwise as the message decrypted.
One area where Terran technology hadn't lagged behind, even Aisha had to concede, was interstellar communications, especially the interception of them. The interception technology available to non-governmental private entities, in particular ships belonging to outlaws and pirates, was on par with the standard technology used by the Imperial Navy. That sort of equipment would've never been made available for private use in the Empire. Thus for long-range, sensitive communications that would pass through foreign space—like the order from the regional governor that had dismissed her from her post as military ambassador in the Blue Heaven Region for the humiliating rank of resident officer—an untraceable, secure alternative was used: comm cubes. Comm cubes were marginally cheaper, reasonably reliable, and most importantly, completely secure provided the physical cube itself remained in safe hands. It was also rather slow and tedious compared to FTL communications, and had to be sent by courier.
They were also one-way messages, something Aisha—used to person-to-person communication both on planet and in space, tended to forget. The screen flashed and a line of text in Ctarl-Ctarl appeared, underneath a modified version of the Hashiyo-Hashiyo Dynasty's coat-of-arms.
From the Office of Her Imperial Majesty's Prime Minister, the right honorable Lord Tomas Koboro-Koboro, MP
Even the two men in front of her looked a surprised by the message's origin. Aisha, on the other hand, snapped into military posture, arms flat at her side, chest stuck out, chin raised and jaw clenched. The blue screen immediately vanished, replaced by a man her father's age wearing a plain-looking suit in lieu of a military uniform.
"Your Excellency, sir!" she cried out, standing at attention. The prime minister was not the commander-in-chief, that was reserved for the sovereign, but he was the chair of the Imperial War Council—it was a distinction Aisha, even as a school valedictorian and a military officer, wasn't terribly clear on either. She assumed they were often largely interchangeable.
"I am speaking to Aisha Clan-Clan, formerly resident officer of the neutral settlement Blue Heaven in Terran space," he began, very carefully and calmly enunciating his words, as if to ensure there could be no confusion over who he meant to address. "As you have been recalled from that posting, I'll simply address you as Captain-Lieutenant Clan-Clan."
"Yes sir! It's an honor to meet you, Your Excellency!" Aisha shrieked.
"Lady Aisha, this isn't a communications channel, this is a one-way communique, like a comm cube," the skipper pointed out. As they spoke, the message continue naturally, uninterrupted, with the speaker's face taking on an almost passive but still sincere look.
"First, I would like to welcome you back to Imperial space, Captain-Lieutenant, for your long and difficult service across the border. You may not be aware that I am acquainted with both your mother, Lady Ayesha, at court and your father, Grand Admiral Clan-Clan, whom I have no doubt will be extremely grateful to have their daughter returned to them. Next, I would like to clarify your itinerary: now that you have returned to Imperial space, your cousin, Lady Kalin Clan-Clan, has been given permission by the Imperial Navy Fighter Corps to ferry you across our holy realm and back to the homeworld, which I'm sure you'll be happy to hear."
Aisha was literally trembling with excitement. "That's really wonderful news, Prime Minister, sir!"
"Again, Lady Aisha, it's not an open communications channel…"
"Finally, before I take up any more of your valuable time…" Though there was no trace of sarcasm in the minister's voice, this elicited a quiet snort from the navigator, whom Aisha shot daggers at from her eyes, "…I wanted to convey Her Imperial Majesty's invitation to come to court once you have returned to Home. Regardless of plans for when you return to the homeworld, I would strongly recommend you make yourself available to Her Imperial Majesty's company as immediately as possible. Her Highness is particularly curious about your activities in Terran space over the last year and would like the opportunity to discuss them in person."
Holding back the urge to roll his eyes further, the skipper glanced over his shoulder to see Aisha trembling at her station, ears twitching. One the screen, the minister casually glanced at someone off-camera. "Of course. Lady Aisha, please make your return to the capital as quickly as you can manage, put your affairs in order, and make yourself available to Her Imperial Majesty. Should you encounter any issues do not hesitate to contact my office. Good day."
The message ended abruptly. Aisha was still trembling, tears welling up in her eyes, making both merchant marine officers very uncomfortable. If they could leave the bridge then, they probably would have. The navigator cleared his throat loudly and spoke. "Lady Aisha, while our own course is set for Outreach, we will be able to drop you off at any of the military formations along the way, from where you can contact your, er, cousin in the Fighter Corps."
No response. "Lady Aisha?"
Aisha continued trembling, right hand balled up into a fist, still teary-eyed but starting to smile. For the first time, she knew why'd she'd been recalled, even the others could speculate that was the case despite doing their best to ignore her. She looked so overcome with emotion that neither of them wanted to interrupt her.
"Keep an eye out for any border patrol squadrons on our way to Outreach," the skipper whispered his navigator. The sooner they got Aisha Clan-Clan off their ship, the better.
Terms to Know:
The Clan-Clan Family – An ancient and storied military family in the empire that can allegedly trace its roots back to the Warring States Period.
- Ayesha Clan-Clan – The Clan-Clan family matriarch, as a youth she served in the military special forces before taking a place in court and starting a family. She has two sons and a daughter.
- Kalin Clan-Clan – Daughter of Lady Ayesha's younger sister, a naval fighter-bomber pilot.
Office of Her Majesty's Imperial Prime Minister – The head of the Imperial government whom, alongside the Imperial cabinet, are collectively accountable to the sovereign, parliament, and the empire itself. The head of government is without doubt the second most powerful leadership position in the empire, and the most influential elected office in the universe.
Socialist Party of the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire – One of the great many established political parties in the empire, which having entered into a coalition with two other leftist parties, earned a commanding majority in the lower house and a strong plurality in the upper house after the general election in Hashiyo-Hashiyo 204; as such, its candidate for prime minister was appointed to the office. Considered a radical rather than conservative party, its platform appealed to postwar Ctarl-Ctarl voters.