"Oh good. For a second I thought the galaxy was a just and fair place."
"Doctor Godera, we are not going to pump highly toxic and corrosive swamp water into my outpost." Seated at the control of the light freighter I had stolen from the now probably late Lord Grathan, one which I had improved upon by replacing the entire communications suite, it was all I could do to not physically react to the suggestion of my lead… researcher and advisor, for lack of a better term. Sure, the transmission was voice-only, but I needed to practice not reacting to news good or bad. My mask could only do so much. "Unless you suddenly got a doctorate in plumbing."
"I'll have you know there is no such thing," the man said, his voice thick with a poor imitation of indignation. "But I do have a doctorate in materials science, and I know what kind of coating will resist the effects of the noxious mixture."
"And where will we get that coating?" I asked, checking the updated communications board. The communications were still being re-routed, my proxies were holding steady, and the data links were not showing any unexpected corruption from unauthorized access. A secure connection, in other words, provided there were no bugs inside my ship. "Taris hardly has what one might a bustling marketplace."
"The same place I've been getting my lab equipment these past years," he answered. "We import it."
"Or we could focus on improving what we can do now," I countered. "Like expanding our network of moisture evaporators so we can increase the size of the hydroponics venture. Or another refinery crawler for the salvage operation."
"It would be less profitable than you expect," he warned. "Demand for foodstuffs is just barely being met. A boost in supply might just drive prices down enough to completely counter any profit you might have made. If we process the contaminated water, however…"
The doctor trailed off, the implication clear. He was appealing to my greed. A very good idea, in most situations, though there were exceptions. Like, say, idealists.
"The colony is not there to turn a profit, it's to reclaim a lost world," I reminded him. "More food could boost immigration, thus raising demand again. More construction materials could allow the colony to build more or strengthen the walls. Why are you so invested in refining swamp water, anyhow?"
"Ah, well, I ran some tests on it to try and figure out why it was so hazardous – which certainly keeps the rakghouls away – and I found out it is absolutely lousy with heavy metals like hfredium. Hfredium! With concentrations measurable in the parts per thousand!"
"That's primarily used in starship manufacturing," I observed, recalling half-remembered briefing from months ago and books from almost a year in the past. "But in far higher quantities than we could conceivably harvest. Why do you need it?"
"If you must know, I was in the middle of testing some new snubfighter-scale reactor shield plating before your horrendously inefficient arrangement of moisture evaporators caught my eye," he said. "Such incredible idiocy could hardly be allowed to exist uncorrected. And then your cave-man-style attempt to hook up a modern reactor to a centuries-old starship demanded my attention, as did your defense network- hooked up in series circuits instead of in parallel circuits! Next thing I know, I was elbow-deep in the planning of your little venture out of professional pride alone! Do you know how much research I could have gotten done in the time since I joined your little outpost? Let. Me. Have. This."
I let the silence hang in the air for a moment.
"I want a cost-benefit analysis," I eventually said. "And a fundamental financial analysis of hfredium securities and derivatives. I'll hold off on the previously planned expansion until then."
"Ha HA!" the doctor's jubilation was deafening. "I knew you'd see reason!"
"When do I not?" I asked, but made sure to keep talking before the man decided to actually answer the question. "Just try to remember I'll be unavailable for a week or two while I'm on some business, but I'll be in contact as soon as I finish up here."
"Of course, of course," the man said, his voice still full of amusement. "Oh, the things we shall accomplish…"
The channel went dead after that.
Right.
That was the last of my personal business.
Back to work it was.
I got to work swapping the communications board over to a second set of network settings. I yanked the twenty-pin connector and plugged a ten-pin ring connector into an adjacent network adapter. Beyond that, changing my systems from one network to another was as simple as flipping a switch. The lights on one side of my board went red, while the other side changed to green.
Really, it was the equivalent of swapping between VPNs for work and personal use, but less intuitive to use.
And with fewer tutorials.
Within moments, I was subjected to the chime of an incoming call. No, not a call, an incoming data package. Behind my master's encryption algorithms were three points of data: navigation coordinates on the frontier of imperial space. Towards the north of the galaxy, on the edge of the Outer Rim and Mid Rim. In the words of galactic politics, it was a neutral border system.
Part of me thought it was a trap, were it not for the message bearing my master's encryption. Darth Lega didn't have any reason to see me dead, and I had been more of a boon than a burden to him.
That meant I could trust this message. Probably.
I still programmed an escape vector out of the target system into my navigation computer before pulling the level for the hyperdrive. Simple precaution.
A few hours later, I was leaving hyperspace again. The tunnel of blue light and white clouds faded into starlines that became a field of stars as my ship reverted to real space. Instead of some out-of-the-way patch of deep space, this was simply an uninhabited system. No doubt there was a good reason it had never been colonized, but that rationale was not important right then and there.
No, the massive capital ship which hung about at the very edge of the sun's gravity well on the far side of the system was far more important to me. A Harrower-class dreadnought my sensors registered as the Inexpugnable Annihilator, currently assigned to the service of Darth Lega. My destination, clearly.
Yes, this was an excellent ambush, were my new master so inclined.
Flying a nonstandard ship in an uninhabited system with no witnesses beyond the crew of 2400 aboard the dreadnought. Well, the bridge crew, anyway. Good thing I was too valuable to kill.
For now.
Fighting my urge to jump to hyperspace and pretend that I had never been here, I instead chose to hail the massive warship.
"Inexpugnable Annihilator, this is Lord Nestor aboard the freighter Subsidy, please come in," I said calmly, my voice back to the clipped tones of an imperial accent.
"Subsidy, this is Inexpugnable Annihilator." The response was laced with static. No doubt a result of the military-grade short-range transmitter instead of the commercial long-range gear I had used to call Taris. Good enough was, well, good enough for the military. "We were told to expect you, my lord. Please proceed to landing bay Prow-1."
"Copy that," I said, setting a course for the big ship and its top landing bay. "Subsidy out."
Twisting the control yoke, I put my freighter on a direct course with the front of the ship. As expected, no lances of light lashed out to blast me out of the sky as I neared the great split prow of the dreadnought. Though the ship measured 800 meters long, it did not quite have the tonnage expected from a ship of that size, thanks to the split prow that provided access to the hangar bay.
I pulled my freighter into a looping turn that put me on a direct course with the top hangar bay. Through the magnetic containment field that kept the atmosphere inside the hangar, I could see a collection of figures standing in a cluster near the center of the hangar. In front of them, however, stood someone waving a pair of glowing batons at me, gesturing to one of the clear patches of decking.
Landing instructions. How kind of them.
Being the magnanimous soul that I was, I followed the given instructions and put down my freighter with reasonable grace and a minimum of protesting metal. As I powered down the ship's systems, I made sure to keep the security systems online and disembarked.
Pausing at the top of the boarding ramp, I took a moment to study who had chosen to greet me. High-ranking naval officers, including the captain of the vessel and a few of his direct subordinates with their subordinates. Members of the Imperial Diplomatic Service in their distinctive red uniforms, also fairly highly ranked. Then there was the inevitable gaggle of drones from Imperial Intelligence. Uniformed, for once, so that was nice.
I slowly descended the boarding ramp, each footfall echoing impressively through the hangar. Once at the bottom, I used the Force to retract the ramp and engage the security systems before addressing my welcoming committee.
"Quite the welcoming party," I commented after a brief moment. "I suppose my master already has a target for us?"
"Yes, my lord," answered the woman wearing the Diplomatic Service uniform with the most impressive rank insignia. "We are to meet with the Combine of Zyg."
That name meant nothing to me.
"Combine? More than a single planet, then," I guessed. "What's our current diplomatic status with them?"
"It's a trio of former Zygerrian colonies within the Zyg system that unified during a war for independence," the same woman said, confirming my initial guess. "Diplomatic relations exist, but primarily through back channels."
"Then we are not here to convince them to join the Empire as allies or vassals," I extrapolated. There was a procedure to it, a lot of groundwork that needed doing. And this was easily the biggest foreign polity I had dealt with in my brief career. "What's our goal for this trip?"
"Darth Lega would consider the establishment of a permanent imperial embassy to be a success," she revealed. Low expectations, then.
"Any major obstacles?"
"The Republic has sent envoys as well," one of the men from Imperial Intelligence chimed in, tapping away at a datapad. "We suspect their goal is to ensure Combine independence, to encourage trade ties with the Republic, or just to sabotage our efforts."
He handed me the datapad, with a file already opened. An intelligence briefing, no doubt. With a familiar Jedi's face rather prominently on display off to the side.
The Little Jedi.
"A Jedi Shadow," I commented, very glad that I was still wearing my mask. "How cute. I shall have to wear my armored undershirt. But why don't you think the Republic is courting the Combine to align with them?"
"The Combine of Zyg came about as a result of a civil war with the Zygerrian Empire about the expansion of slavery," the woman wearing the uniform of a diplomat revealed. Alright, that didn't sound so bad. Anti-slavery Zygerrians? Well, no doubt it was closer to less slavery instead of no slavery since we were bothering with them at all, but it was a start. That would also explain the actions of the Republic…
"So they aren't as heavily invested in slavery?" I asked. "That makes sense. The Republic has been quite staunch in its prohibition on slavery."
"The opposite actually," the man from intelligence revealed. "It's far more widespread than in the Zygerrian Empire."
What?
"What?"
"I had a similar reaction when I heard of it, my lord," the captain of the ship commented. He was an older, portly man. Though long since having lost the war of retaining a respectable hairline, he had an impressive set of steel-grey sideburns that made up for it. "It's awe-inspiring."
His eyes were gleaming.
Why were his eyes gleaming?
I was starting to remember why I hated this Empire.
...
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