Chapter 1: Immigration Assistance

“Boss, we got a problem. CMP has a situation and is asking for Immigration Assistance to help.”

Jonathan Sawbuck looked at his office doorway, where his assistant, Janine Heartwell, was standing. That was unusual in itself, since on any sort of routine matter she would have simply messaged him. He eyed her curiously and replied, “The CMP? What in the world do the cops need with us?” The CMP was the Caradoc Municipal Police, the police department of the city of Caradoc. Caradoc was a city of approximately five million people, the largest city and the provincial seat of Caradoc Province. Caradoc Province had about twenty million people in it, not quite ten percent of the population of the planet Lupina.

“No clue, Jon, but it must be important. They are sending a tac flyer to pick you up. It will be on the roof in two minutes or less.”

“A tac flyer?” She nodded and he asked, “Did they ask for me specifically?”

“Pretty much. They wanted somebody senior, and not just one of the regular assholes around here.” Jonathan eyed her and she blushed. “No, they didn’t say that specifically.”

He rolled his eyes and smiled. “Well that blows the Friday mixer, doesn’t it?” He stood up and stepped into his shoes, a pair of canvas and rubber slip-ons.

“I’d be happy to give you a blowjob, but I don’t think we’ll even have the time for that,” she laughed.

“No, we won’t have time for that. I’ll just have to settle for a blowjob from my wife when I get home,” he said with a grin. Janine laughed at that.

The Friday mixer was a beloved end-of-the-week fixture at most government and corporate offices. Cold beer and hot sex were always a great start to the weekend. It started at 1800 and ran to 1900, after which people would go home happily sated, at least temporarily. Lupina had a day that was 26 hours, 23 minutes, and 14 seconds long, along with an orbital period of 412.7306 days; all system orbital platforms kept Lupina time. When Lupina was first colonized the joke had been that an extra hour would be tacked onto the daylight hours for work and study, but the remaining 1 hour, 23 minutes, and 14 seconds, were added onto the night for more time for sex.

At times it seemed even stranger than that. How can you have a galactic society when every planet has its own time system, every planet has its own rotational period and orbital period? The only way to do that was to standardize interstellar time based on the second, a thing that could be connected to a physical basis, the number of oscillations in an atom upon excitation. Old Earth’s solar day was 24 hours, which worked out to 86,000 seconds a day; the orbital period was 365.2425 days, which was 31,556,952 seconds a year. Lupina, however, had 38,632,978 seconds a year. The only way to standardize time across the galaxy was by counting seconds, so every macrolink had a connection to a planetary system of synchronized atomic clocks. When Jonathan turned forty-six, that simply meant he had lived 1,777,116,995 seconds; it did not mean he had gone around Lupina’s sun forty-six times.

It could be even more complicated. Practically all planetary societies divided their rotations into time zones, simply because dawn would occur at different times otherwise. Lupina had 26 time zones, assigning the extra minutes and seconds to a time zone in the middle of the ocean. The orbital habitats anywhere in the system all stayed at Lupina Standard Time, which was the time zone for Lupina City, the planetary capital. On the other hand, some systems, like Goldheart, had no inhabitable planets, so they used Old Earth time.

However, galactic time wasn’t on anybody’s mind in the Immigration Assistance Office. Instead, Janine had to get her boss to the roof. She said, “Now, grab your shit and get to the lift.”

Jonathan nodded. He checked his clothing, which was a simple beige cloth that wrapped around his waist and hung down to mid-thigh. It was similar to the wrap that Janine wore, though hers was brightly colored and about five centimeters shorter. They were both naked from the waist up, though she wore makeup, lip and nipple rouge. He then grabbed his shoulder bag and tossed in his gear before heading out of his office. Janine waved goodbye and went back to her desk.

From the office, Jonathan moved to the lift beams. He keyed in the override code, selected the roof-top level, and then stepped into what looked like a gigantic hole in the center of the building. A bright blue grav energy wave promptly shot him to the roof. There was a stiff but warm breeze on the roof of the ten-story building.

It was always warm on Lupina. The planet had an almost circular orbit around Lupina Star, and an orbital axis of less than one degree. That made the inhabitable region, the terraformed area plus/minus 25 degrees from the equator always warm. It rarely varied by more than a degree from 26 degrees Celsius.

He looked around and saw a CMP tac flyer, a tactical police transport, approaching. As soon as it touched down a doorway opened, and a CMP officer hopped out and waved him over. Jonathan trotted over.

“Mister Sawbuck?”

“That’s me.”

“Well, hop in and we can go.” Jonathan climbed in and the CMP officer put him in a seat and then assisted him in buckling in. Jonathan noted that even riding around in a tac flyer, the CMP officers wore full tactical gear. Rather than a waist wrap, they wore synthileather shorts, boots, gloves, and body armor. He thought it must have been too warm to wear in the near constant warmth of Lupina’s tropical zone. Still, it seemed that people could get used to anything.

The pilot lifted off from the roof and headed east, and the officer in back said, “Mister Sawbuck, you’ll need to access the CMP database. This is only for this incident, though, so it’s not full access.”

Jonathan nodded. “Understood.”

He tapped the macrolink and a CMP icon flashed. He connected to their system. Like everybody on Lupina, his macrolink was worn on the right ear and displayed a holographic screen in front of the user’s eye. Now he could hear conversations in his right ear and see a building on the holoscreen. As they flew east he listened to the conversation and called up the details of what was happening.

He quickly learned why he had been called out. A family that had immigrated from Vandevar 3 was holed up in their house and refusing to come out. Worse, it wasn’t clear if everybody inside was holed up or a hostage. They landed before he had a chance to access the IAO databases. He was hurried over to a ground van that was being used as a command vehicle. “Here’s the guy from the Immigration Assistance Office,” said the CMP officer.

They guy who seemed to be in charge said, “Thanks, Jerry. You guys can get back in the air, keep on the net.”

“Roger that.” The officer took off.

The commander turned to Jonathan. “Mister Sawbuck?” He didn’t wait for the IA boss to answer. “I need you to tell me who this family is and who’s in there.”

“What happened, uh ... officer?”

“I’m Sergeant Hooper. We got called out when a routine welfare check went bad. Somebody witnessed a man smacking around a woman and they called it in. A patrol officer found them and tried to ask what had happened but managed to get blindsided by the guy. We tracked them on traffic cameras to here. We called you because an address check says it’s an immigration temp house. Now a man is refusing to come out and a woman is asking us all to leave, but she sounds pretty shaky. I am getting ready to breach, but I want to know more.”

A second officer, one with a black eye and a bandage on his head, spoke up. “The weird thing, though, was how they were dressed. This is Lupina. Everybody runs around either in a wrap or naked. These guys were all bundled up like they were visiting the North Pole! He was wearing pants, sort of like ankle-length shorts...” He pointed at his own shorts and wiggled a foot. “ ... some sort of long tunic, or maybe even two, and some sort of hat. The woman was even worse, with several long tunics, like down to the ground, and her hat was made from a dark mesh that completely covered her head and face. Fucking weird!”

The sergeant said, “Call up the vids. You’re right, it’s weird.” The vid monitor showed the patrol officer approaching the weirdly dressed family, where even a little child was covered head-to-toe. The vid included the officer’s body camera vid showing the man cursing the officer and telling him to go away and leave him alone. His family was his property to do with. The officer ended up on the ground and the family went inside the house.