Editing Tytania:Volume 1 Chapter 6 (section)

=== III ===
20th of July. Fan Hyulick and his companions landed on the surface of planet Bargash.

Even back when he was a respectable merchant sailor, Fan Hyulick had never set foot on a planet. That was why he was feeling childlike curiosity about this unfamiliar land. But from the beginning, had he not stopped by Ementhal, he might have already been breathing this planet’s atmosphere.

Although this planet’s colonisation started five centuries ago, it still had a strong feeling of a newly opened land. Calling it the “capital of the star frontier” would be an overstatement, but it was still a place rough and yet brimming with vitality, a maelstrom where investment and speculation, adventure and exploration, success and failure, triumph and ruin, hope and despair, all swirled together.

This planet was Doctor Lee’s birthplace.

“I have a house. I don’t have any family in it.”

Doctor Lee somewhat worded it in a strange way, but he probably meant that while the house belonged to him, its occupants didn’t. Fan Hyulick guessed that maybe his house where he was born and raised had passed into someone else’s hands. Or maybe the circumstances were slightly different, but it wasn’t worth prying into them.

Procedures at the spaceport were quite formal and superficial. With a crew card for the ''Honest Old Man'' and a 100 dakar bill, Fan Hyulick was easily granted free entry. Half of the 100 dakar would be returned upon departure. It was apparently a guarantee against causing trouble, but it probably allowed some small official to make some extra cash.

However, Fan Hyulick’s movements weren’t that free. First, Tytania’s influence, or rather its fingertips, naturally extended to planet Bargash. Second, he had left behind on planet Ementhal what could have granted him material freedom. Miranda had given him 1,000 dakar as an advance on his salary, but if he spent it on alcohol and women to accompany his bed, it would be gone in three days. At the basis of Fan Hyulick’s mind was a faint, undercover bourgeois mentality that he should “use it wisely”, prickling at the collar of his desires.

But since Ementhal, he had lived a life bereft of women’s company, and he hadn’t had that kind of experience since his days in Tytania’s prison camp.

“Bah, money is meant to be spent; I’ll leave saving it to the miserly Mahdi.”

As he muttered that to himself, he headed towards the Latour district, famous for being an entertainment district.

While it was certainly crude and uncouth by Ementhal’s standards, Latour was supposed to be the most refined entertainment district in Bargash. Women, alcohol, gambling, drugs, and various street performers. Whatever human primal desires existed were unleashed together within the densely packed houses over a three-kilometre radius. It was said that some people would never leave, but that was hardly a problem. Someone who would enter such a place of his free will to seek pleasure should not expect absolute safety.

But the self-governing body of Latour understood well that customer safety was essential for their prosperity, and the actual crime rate in Latour was very low. Being stripped of one’s possessions was a matter of an individual’s lack of self-control and wasn’t considered a crime.

Having passed the gates of the Latour district and standing in the corner of a square, the young carrot-top was pondering which direction he should take. Suddenly, Fan Hyulick was grabbed by his right elbow, and his body and mind immediately tensed. “A Tytanian agent?” he wondered, which wouldn’t be impossible here. When he heard a voice calling out, “Admiral Fan Hyulick!” he turned his tall frame and swiftly and firmly thrust his free left hand out.

Had his opponent been of the same height as him, he would have been knocked back by a blow to the jaw. However, his attack was repelled by a bundle of thick muscles. A young and boyish giant looked at him with surprise. For a moment, as if to jog his memories, another man shouted:

“Admiral, that’s not how you’re supposed to greet someone upon reuniting, right?”

“What are you two doing here!?”

Fan Hyulick was unable to resist asking this very unoriginal question. The two men in front of him had been his staff officers back when he was part of the Euria City Fleet.

They were Lieutenant Mikhail Walenkov, who had been his ''aide-de-camp'' and bodyguard, and Lieutenant Louis Edmond Pagès, his intelligence officer. Walenkov was almost two metres tall, weighed 0.1 ton, and was like a kind teddy bear. Pagès was of medium height and agile, giving the impression of a cunning fox. The former was 27 years old. The latter, 26. They were almost friends with Fan Hyulick.

This is what they told him: After their unexpected victory at Cerberus, they returned home in triumph, drank heavily, and indulged in boisterous revelry. Then the next morning, as they were clutching their heads with a hangover, they got out of bed to watch the morning news, only to learn that Fan Hyulick, the hero of the Battle of Cerberus, was on the run.

“But we couldn’t believe it. Admiral Fan Hyulick, on the run? Was there any reason to be on the run to begin with?”

“Pagès is right. All we could conclude was that you hadn’t escaped but been forced to leave. A house arrest was immediately issued, and we ended up locked in our quarters.”

“What followed is a heartbreaking story that is heartbreaking to recount…”

After carefully crafting this sentence, Lieutenant Louis Edmond Pagès began to tell the subsequent events with remarkable ease. He gathered information, analysed it, selected what was useful, and submitted it to his commander. He was an exceptional intelligence officer, and it was said that he knew the contents of the love letters of the mayor to his mistress and even the size of the underwear of the city council’s chairman’s second daughter. Maybe he had the instincts of a journalist within him.

While he spoke, Walenkov, on the other hand, said very little, only nodding and making brief corrections when asked for confirmation. They had different personalities.

While the victors were confined to their quarters and forced to live on bread, water and sausages made from scraps of meat three times a day, the Tytanian fleet came into the port of Euria. There had apparently been a treaty of friendship and peace signed between Tytania and Euria. In itself, it was a very good thing. But they couldn’t understand why they were being confined to their quarters.

What the young officers could understand were the unbearable scenes of the celebratory party shown on TV, with foie gras, roast beef, and lobster, filling the screen with vibrant colours. Historically, resentment over food had always been the shortest path to revolution.

Right as they were about to explode with discontent, more oil was poured on the fire. Sixty officers who had participated in the Battle of Cerberus were declared to be war criminals and to be sent to a Tytanian prison camp. Pagès and Walenkov were among these sixty officers. At that point, the situation was quite clear. To sum it up, Fan Hyulick and his men had become the victims of their mother city’s diplomatic strategy. So there was no guarantee they’d ever come back alive from that Tytanian prison camp. Since they wouldn’t come back alive, they planned an escape.

Walenkov often sneaked into the food storage to distribute food for his comrades. In spite of his massive frame, he was agile and had a talent for thievery. One night, he stole a bag of flour from the storage, scattered it through a ventilation shaft, and threw in a makeshift match. It provoked a dust explosion that engulfed the barracks in flames and black smoke. Once their escape was successful, and their companions scattered, Walenkov and Pagès hid in an ore transportation ship and fled their mother city. With a thought process that was similar to that of Fan Hyulick’s, they headed for planet Bargash.

In the end, they managed to arrive on Bargash before him. Though Bargash was a vast planet, they didn’t go wandering around aimlessly and settled instead in a cheap inn in the Latour district. They believed in the fact that their commander would arrive here eventually. They carried on a penniless existence until they finally had an emotional reunion with their former commander.

“I see. Looks like I caused you a lot of trouble. I’m sorry.”

Fan Hyulick was nodding with a thoughtful expression, his arms crossed, but he inwardly felt the urge to click his tongue. Why did these guys spend their time hanging around the entertainment district rather than universities or libraries? Anyway, their judgement was certainly correct, and it was all fine and dandy that he would reunite with his comrades, but something didn’t quite sit right with him. If it were Doctor Lee’s men, they wouldn’t have come to a place like that to search for him. Maybe he was feeling jealous about that?

“So, what are you going to do now?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

Walenkov and Pagès had no choice but to accompany Fan Hyulick. He couldn’t abandon them. All he could do was to ask the princess if they could come aboard the ''Honest Old Man''.

“But we won’t head immediately for the ship. I came all the way to the Latour district. It would be an insult to this town’s history to back out now.”

“Well then, leave it to us. We can introduce you to cheap restaurants with good service.”

Pagès snapped his fingers and winked. He had become one of the most informed people about the Latour district in a very short period of time. Fan Hyulick shrugged and began to walk with his two former staff officers.