The Immortal Empire – Episode 17: The Inner Periphery

The immigration authorities—that's who Gene Starwind decided it was going to blame for this bureaucratic inconvenience, the same he usually did in life since Starwind & Hawking acquired its first interstellar spacecraft—did the most obvious thing, simultaneously the thing Gene feared the most: they paired them off.

"We're separating you by sex," the official in charge, announced sharply. He was beginning to notice a trend with their manners.

"Yeah, I see that." Jim Hawking sighed. "Melfina, Suzuka, don't worry, this won't take long!"

Gene gave Melfina a sad look, that she quickly recognized as not fear of any possible danger, but irritation at being separated in the first place. The two women, and the more attractive female custom officials in Gene's mind, turned one at the end of the corridor, while they turned at the other. The load groan that came from Gene confirmed it for Jim, and they came to an empty, sterile-looking office room with a lack of furniture and a blatantly obvious one-way mirror next to another door.

"Now what?" Gene asked after the glasses-wearing official after he stopped him a few steps through the entrance.

"This won't take long," he explained, before looking down at the short youth. "Young man, please come with me, I'll take you to an on-duty inspector." Jim looked alarmed.

He looked back up at Gene. "You. Strip down and prepare to be scanned."

"Huh?"

In a matching room, Melfina and Suzuka were undressing under apathetic but unflinching stare of a woman in the immigration and customs service's greatcoat, arms crossed over her chest and expression opaque. Finishing first, Suzuka looked at the official, then the mirror, before standing up straight, arms to her side. Melfina rushed to do the same, after which, the official touched a hand to her crown-like headset and said something short in Ctarl-Ctarl. There was a loud, mechanical click from the direction of the mirror, followed by the faint hum of unseen electric discharge. "You may redress. Someone will be with you shortly," the official declared, before leaving through the door next to the one-way mirror.

"Well, that wasn't so bad," Melfina announced loudly. Suzuka resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

Two rooms down from where he assumed Gene was still waiting naked, Jim did look bewildered by the sheer number of Ctarl-Ctarl officialdom: in every direction, some civil or military official was running about, in uniform, carrying something somewhere, or relaying some message to someone else, disappearing and reappearing from behind an office divider. Sitting at the desk in front of him was a single Ctarl-Ctarl man in a bleached white uniform and matching laboratory coat, rather than the dark-colored uniforms they'd seen earlier, and eyeglasses holding a large scanner gun with its emitter pointed in his direction, otherwise remaining very still. He'd never pictured Ctarl-Ctarl wearing eyeglasses, but it seemed obvious that was just the consequence of neither Aisha Clan-Clan, nor the exotic dancing Ctarl-Ctarl expatriate on Sentinel, wearing them; maybe it wasn't an uncommon thing for Ctarl-Ctarl to need prescription eyeglasses.

The scanner chimed and the Ctarl-Ctarl's posture relaxed. He sat the gun down on an empty spot on his desk and immediately producing a paper-wrapped cigarette, to Jim's surprise. He shifted his posture, maybe towards some unseen air vent, and lit it before using his free hand to scribble down something onto a sheet of paper with a pen.

"If you're a doctor, shouldn't you not be smoking?"

The alleged doctor looked at him. "Why do you think I'm a doctor?"

"What are you then?"

"Decontamination and delousing inspector."

"Oh. Of course," he replied sardonically as the inspector kept writing with his pen.

A few moments of uncomfortable silence. "Why'd you separate me and Gene?"

"Because we don't strip-search minors?" His tone suggested this ought to have been obvious.

More uncomfortable silence. Jim shifted on his chair, finding that he could make it squeak softly with shifts of his weight. Really cheap. "So, am I…free of lice and contamination?"

"Looks like it," he answered without looking up.

"Good, good." He began patting his knees with his palms randomly. "Is this gonna' take long?"

The official grunted. "Listen, son, I don't know how they do it over in Terra. Or wherever the hell you're from, where presumably the decontamination protocols are devised by the biggest chap with the most guns and swords until some other large chap knocks him down from his throne of skulls." He chewed the cigarette for a moment. "But in the empire, we have rules, which are things we're required to obey and laws, which are these complicated things that are written down in books that we're also required to obey."

Jim stared at him skeptically as he puffed again. This dude's probably ten years older than me, if that. "I'll have you know, that's not how it works, and I'm not even from Earth," he fired back. As he made the statement, the reminder that Gene himself had been born on Earth entered his mind, and by the end of the sentence he could already hear the wavering confidence in his voice. Down the side of the room, uniformed officers in greatcoats followed the tall, lean Ctarl-Ctarl woman called Clara Badono-Badono, as she strode through with an immediately obvious sense of importance and exited through a different door, which Jim suspected led into the dark room on the other side of the one-way mirror.

Inside the predictable room, Lady Clara watched a pair of mask-and-goggle wearing officials poke and prod a naked and impatient-looking Terran with plastic instruments and occasionally gloved hands. One of them was visibly counting the numerous scars across his chest and back.

"So this is what passes for a Terran outlaw nowadays, is it?" she asked, raising a blond eyebrow at the official waiting by the door. "And you say he was successful?"

The spaceport official was rubbing his hairline, where white hair met olive, wrinkled skin, before replacing his duty headset over his forehead and temple. To her, he looked tired and trying to hide it, like most civilians. "Yes, Lady Clara, according to the reports from Home." There was a soft chime from his headset and the official excused himself from the room, a younger naval officer in a dark green greatcoat taking his place. She continued to stare at the Terran as the occupants of his room instructed him to turn around and face the mirror, then continued over him with instruments. Eugene Starwind, as the computer called him, from Terra, was a moderately tall, lanky man with unexpectedly broad shoulders for his narrow waist. His deep crimson, short-cropped hair and matching eyebrows no longer distracted from the extensive pattern of scars visible across his body, diminishing in number from head to feet, unlike the more consistent lean musculature. Clara thought he was very muscular for a Terran, as though he were a swimmer or some other seasoned athlete, but the scars told another, obvious story: just another backroom brawler, maybe a bounty hunter on some remote frontier worlds in one of the Terran empires, who only the acquisition of an actual space ship—a space ship he didn't actually have presently—made him a so-called "Outlaw."

"Doesn't look like much," she concluded after a minute of staring, hand on her chin.

"He's more handsome than your husband, ma'am," her subordinate from the navy countered with a mischievous grin.

She enjoyed that. "Which one? No matter, I'm sure he is. But neither of my husbands looked like you'd catch something from them," Clara replied, flashing a tooth grin back. "How many times was the suitcase he was carrying opened?"

"Just the once. No signs of tampering with the counter either, so…probably when they crossed the border?"

Clara nodded in agreement. "Maybe they're more professional than they look."

"Well, I don't think they got to choose their guide when they stopped at Midway, Lady Grand Admiral." Arms under her greatcoat, she made a short but unnecessary gesture at her own chest with both hands, before dropping them at her sides again. Lady Clara barked a laugh as the official concluded his call over his headset and returned into the room.

"Your Excellency, they're finishing up with the two Terran woman right now. They're both clear."

"And their guide from Midway? With the jugs?"

The subordinate naval officer stifled a laugh. "Confirmation from the I.I.B. on Home. Bethany Cam, alias Duran, born Fourth of Shandhaha, Hashiyo-Hashiyo 190. On Harvest," the official explained.

"She's a Kata-Kata," he confirmed after a pause, before touching his headset following another beep. "Excuse me again, ma'am, we've just had a military arrival."

"And people say the government doesn't do anything." Another tooth grin from Clara as he left.

"Ms. Khann, Ms. Suzuka," a somewhat-apologetic facility official, also wearing glasses, told them upon entering the inspection room. "Thank you for your patience. You're free to rejoin your two male companions when they're finished on their end."

"That won't be long, will it?" Melfina asked, trying to mask the concern in her voice.

"Probably not."

Adjusting her kimono over her shoulders, Suzuka noted the lack of certainty in the reply. "I presume this isn't the normal arrangement for Earthlings entering the Inner Periphery of the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire?"

"No, it is not. But you'll have to understand your passage and credentials raised some…concern." Suzuka rolled her eyes at the explanation.

An unseen voice shouted something tinny over a P/A speaker along the ceiling, causing the official to glance upwards in its direction. "And it sounds like your compatriots are done. If you have any questions about this process, you can submit them in writing through the formal channels…" she began routinely.

Melfina interrupted her. "I'd like to ask a question, if you don't mind." A pause. "What happened to Ms. Bethany?"


"How do I look?"

Kalin Clan-Clan looked at her younger cousin wearing the formfitting spare pilot's flight suit she'd given her back on board the Niburu Boribori, now stained with protoplanet dust and covered with a few hasty repair patches. She made a so-so hand gesture and Aisha Clan-Clan grunted at her.

"It'll be fine. It's not like you're meeting the commander-in-chief of the navy. Or your dad." Kalin laughed. "Good thing they're not the same person, huh?"

"Shut up." In the shadow of the large Type 2 fighter trainer spacecraft, the two stood alone, helmets hanging from their backs, waiting for some acknowledgment of their arrival. Aisha swiveled her head around, looking left and right, and turned back to Kalin, disappointed.

"What, you were expecting a parade?"

Aisha's ears twitched. "Is it just my imagination, or were people friendlier when I left the empire?" she asked, her right index finger raised in emphasis.

"It's really just your imagination," Kalin insisted, taking her hand and forcing it back then, as their solitude was interrupted by the arrival of three customs officials arrived with a business-like air through an open bulkhead door before standing in a line a few meters head of them.

"Good afternoon, ladies," the eldest seemed to announce briskly. "I am facility commander Doron, welcome to Customs Station E-44. And I'm in a little bit of a rush, so if you don't mind, we'll dispense with the formalities."

Kalin lowered her arm from salute and produced the relevant paperwork, which the facility commander only looked at momentarily before passing them on the subordinate to his left in a matching dark greatcoat while watching them out of the corner of his eye. "So that would make you Navy Captain-Lieutenant Clan-Clan and Navy Fighter Corps Captain Clan-Clan. Cousins?"

"How'd you guess?" Kalin joked with a grin that immediately faded from her face as the facility commander's subordinate reviewed the documents with a more scrutinizing eye.

"You can relax, Captain, this isn't the navy," he explained, waiting for the subordinate to return the documents to him after signing one of them with a pen. "Very good. Lady Aisha, we've gone and processed your paperwork in advance per the request of the capital, so if you'll just join this young man to my right, who'll walk you through the last step of the medical inspections, we can get you planetside as soon as possible. Lady Kalin, as you're not returning from Terran space, you're free to leave this station at your earliest convenience."

"Uhh…" Kalin began quietly until Aisha stared at her with wide turquoise eyes. "Actually, if you don't mind, I'll just stay with my cousin."

"Do I mind?" the facility commander asked, rather routinely.

"You don't, sir," a subordinate assured him.

"I'm holding you to your word, Captain," the facility commander announced as he neatly tore a brightly colored sheet from the bottom of the stack, which he presented to Kalin, then returned the rest to his subordinate before rushing off without a further word. The young official left adjusted his glasses before leisurely putting both hands in the pockets of his long white coat.

"So, you're cousins, huh?" he asked casually.

"Yes, our mothers are sisters," Kalin muttered.

"Cool," he concluded.

"Wait, why aren't you in uniform?" Aisha asked him suspiciously.

"Oh, this?" He flapped his arms in the pockets of his white coat. "I was talking to a Terran boy earlier, he said this is how Terran doctors dress."

"Are you a doctor?"

"No, I am not. If you'll please follow me," he assured her before turning to the exit. Aisha put a hand to her forehead and groaned again, while Kalin held the colored piece of paper at her.

"Do you keep this, or should I?" Aisha gave a pleading look with the intent of reminding her which of them had been out of the country for two years.

"So, two years among the Terrans?" the customs official in the white coat asked amiably. "If I may say so, Lady Aisha, well done."

Kalin looked at her cousin, who didn't seem to hear the compliment initially. "Huh?" Aisha managed finally.

"I mean, well…" He stopped in the middle of the hallway, almost causing Kalin to bump into his smaller frame. "Just that they're really weird out there."

Kalin held back a snicker. "They're not that weird," Aisha muttered as they followed him out from the hangar and through the halls.

"Well, the ones that show up here certainly are. I've worked customs for three years now, and I still don't know why Terrans we get are so weird. They seem so…normal planet-side, you know?" He glanced over his shoulder. "I suppose you wouldn't, ma'am, what with the two years."

"Yeah, I guess I missed the latest citizenship crisis," Aisha grunted.

"What my cousin is trying to say is that perhaps your particular posting has exposed you to…atypical circumstances regarding Terran emigration," Kalin began carefully.

"Well what does that mean?" he asked indignantly.

"I think it's fairly self-explanatory," Kalin suggested as the official opened a swinging glass door and held it for them.

"It means you're probably an idiot," Aisha growled at him.

"Really, Lady Aisha? You spend how many years on overseas assignment, and I'm the idiot, here?" he retorted as they passed through the door.

"What was that?" she hissed back indignantly.

"Well, this conversation took a really unproductive turn," Kalin shouted loudly in both their faces, easily done when they had both locked eyes on the other side of the glass doors; to highlight her point further, she grabbed one by the collar of her suit and the other by the seam of the tunic under his white laboratory coat. "You, the bureaucrat dressed like a dentist, why don't you do your job so you don't need to ever see us again. And Aisha, maybe don't provoke the first government official you've seen in two years, how about that?"

Both offenders looked up at the tall woman glowering at them and scowled back at response.

"Well?" she growled.

"What's with the detail of armed clerks over there anyway?" Aisha snapped. "Gonna' go make war on a bunch of nurses?"

He looked back and gave a sigh. "It must be for the Kata-Kata."

"The what?"

"A Kata-Kata illegal was arrested crossing the border into the Inner Periphery, part of a legal Terran courier mission." The explanation came from a well-dressed lower-ranking naval officer in a dark green uniform coat with white trim. He'd arrived very discreetly through the same door they'd taken. "Apparently I.I.B. was expecting her and set up a sting at our expense."

"Yeah, that sounds like them," Kalin announced unconvincingly. Aisha scowled at her in response.

"Lady Kalin, Lady Aisha, on behalf of Her Imperial Majesty's Space Fleet, welcome back to Hokiyo." The blonde navy man smiled widely, his eyes flickering over the impatient customs official. "Can't you just bring your medical equipment here?"

"Uh, thanks, Master…" Kalin began, looking at the scowling customs official as he reluctantly walked off.

"Artem," he explained. "Or just Lieutenant Fom, from Grand Admiral Badono-Badono's staff. Don't worry, I'm not here for you, the grand admiral receiving an audience from the couriers, state business." He watched as the customs official returned from a nearby office, lugging a shoulder-bag full of scanning equipment after him.

"You wanna' see her?" he asked with a mischievous grin as the customs official pointed the handheld scanner device at Aisha and clicked a mechanical switch with exaggerated deliberateness, only moving his hand.

Neither Clan-Clan gave a clear answer, but a minute later both found themselves in another one of the facility's observation rooms, on the opposite side of the glass from a civilian woman around Kalin's age, her blond hair and makeup done in the Terran style and wearing undersized clothing that might've been taken off a Terran adolescent. In the way, more naval officers were setting up some sort of camera on a tripod.

"She looks so…average. You ever see a Kata-Kata before?" Kalin asked Aisha. "I mean in person, not a newspaper or a report."

"No," she confessed.

"I have, once."

"When?"

Kalin thought about it. "After the war. I was child, you weren't born yet. I think about fifty thousand expatriates were returning from Terran space on month, and the Bureau did a massive screening operation, detained about thirty of them. I was taken to one of the court hearing."

Aisha stared at her. "Thirty? Out of fifty thousand?"

Kalin shrugged. Between the bodies, they could see the Kata-Kata woman growl something inaudibly, causing one of the officers to animatedly gesture with his fingers. The other room's occupants continued in their silent theater as the lieutenant returned through a door behind them, holding an open paper folder that he was still holding.

"Well, that's been taken care of. The bureaucracy in the customs service could use some work, couldn't it? Lady Aisha, you'll just need to check out with the main desk and you'll be free to go planetside."

"That was it? The whole medical inspection?" a wide-eyed Aisha asked.

"That's right." Kalin wondered if Aisha would catch onto the lieutenant's rather patronizing tone, but instead she stared back through the glass panel at the actors on the other side.

"Fom, is there a secure room with a playback terminal I could use first?"

If the lieutenant was surprised by the request, he gave no indication of it. "I did pass an empty office with secure room markings at the end of the hall on the right. I don't see why you couldn't use that, ma'am?"

"That'll do!" Aisha declared, spinning on the heel of her suit's boots and sprinting through the door.

"If you find the restrooms at the end, you've taken the wrong hall!" he shouted at the door as it swung shut after her.

Kalin groaned, a hand against the band she wore around her forehead. "I see two years outside the empire hasn't changed her. Did she even think of asking someone for permission?"

"I'll have to take your word for it," the lieutenant replied from his folders as he fell into an empty chair.

"And you're being very helpful, Lieutenant," she told him with a note of suspicion.

After very carefully flipping a page in the folder, he looked up at her. "Well, we all have the same boss, don't we, Lady Captain?" he asked, before gesturing at the corner of the room with his eyes. Along the top edge of the wall, just below the ceiling, was a single large portrait hanging on a slight incline, giving it the appearance of looking down on the room's occupants. In her white royal regalia, the Empress of all the Ctarl-Ctarl stared down with large, blue eyes from behind the portrait's glass. A matching portrait, smaller and in grayscale, was hung near the ceiling in the small office Aisha wandered into, slamming the door shut behind her and drawing the heavy mechanical lock into place.

The office was modestly furnished, the kind used for interviews not intended to be beneficially stressful for the interviewer, with unoffending furniture and an overgrown potted plant in the corner. More distinguished was a large metal booth tall enough for a single occupant to sit inside the office chair convenient left inside and stare directly into the monitor, below which was the circular input interface for a variety of communications cubes. Aisha awkwardly took the seat and began feeling through the numerous pockets in the flight suit for the comm cube given to her by Kalin, patting down her hips, legs, arms, breasts, and back before fishing it out of a pocket by her waist. The cube went into the slot, shut under a plastic lid, and Aisha prodded the control keys with her index fingers as she attempted to remember how to use this particular piece of government equipment.

Come on, just work already, I didn't ask for this… Her struggle with the machine ended with the display flashing several colors before being replaced by the circular coat of arms of the Imperial House of Hashiyo-Hashiyo above a paragraph of stringent legal consequences. The image remained as Aisha tapped the screen with a fingernail before it flashed and changed, accompanied by a loud alarm tone and sending her shrinking back into office chair.

"This is an official communique from Crown Princess Fatima of the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire to ex-ambassador plenipotentiary for the navy, Aisha Clan-Clan." After a second, the female speaker backed away from the viewpoint of the recording device, revealing a lone woman in a luxurious battleship stateroom. Crown Princess Fatima, in long multilayered robes in dark blue and vibrant yellow, plopped onto the sitting couch behind her, keeping her eyes on the recording device.

"Hello, Aisha Clan-Clan. Obviously you know who I am, even if we've never met." Her Highness looked particularly self-satisfied, stretching out across the sitting couch, one arm extended at the shoulder. "Which is why I've arranged for you to hear this story from someone with someone you do know."


Terms To Know:

Ambassador Plenipotentiary - The highest rank of formal diplomatic representative, both for the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire and the Terran states, over envoys and lesser ambassadors. In the empire, ambassadors can be appointed by the Sovereign (from the Imperial court), from the professional ranks of the foreign ministry, or from the spacefaring military fleets. In the series, Aisha described herself as an ambassador plenipotentiary for the Tenpa stellar region, presumably alluding to the widest region of space claimed by the Tenpa Empire—for these purposes, she would've been one of a whole rank of ambassadors, alongside those appointed to the Empire's capital and major worlds.

The Inner Periphery of the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire – The "interior" border region of solar systems immediately surrounding the Ctarl-Ctarl homeworld, encompassing the oldest Ctarl-Ctarl space colonies. The worlds within the Inner Periphery are accordingly industrialized and affluent, rivaling the most ancient human colonies in the Terran empires.

- The Outer Periphery of the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire – The remainder (and majority) of systems directly ruled by the empire and considered to be sovereign territory, unlike the numerous extraterritorial claims made by the Ctarl-Ctarl.

Shandhaha – A summer month in the Ctarl-Ctarl calendar.