Chapter 53: Reputation

I had a problem – I needed clients. Well, need may have been a strong word; my expenses were a rounding error on the combined income from my neural interfaces and precognitive droid traders. But it was sort of like playing SimCity, or Roller-Coaster Tycoon; I wanted customers because that was part of the game. Plus growing my company, keeping it in use, building a reputation - all of those were non-financial valuables.

Now, for some work, a company would put out a tender, in other words a list of objectives they wanted met. Then I, or more accurately some bidding specialists in GSD, would put together a bid to meet that tender. The company would look through the exact offer specifications and the cost, and pick whatever they liked best.

That was not my sweet spot. That was the sweet spot for rent-a-cop companies and generic security providers. Most tenders were for site security, low-moderate risk convoy protection, corporate executive protection and the like. Basically jobs that needed a modicum of performance, but where there wasn’t much differentiation between one group or another.

GSD was set up for full on fleet-borne military operations, the absolute top-tier of PMC activities. And even within that segment my forces fell into the “elite” bracket both in effectiveness, unit size, and in cost. Our sweet spot was being hired to win wars, smash pirates, slaughter rebels, and provide praetorian guard services for uneasy rulers. At our level, there was absolutely differentiation. There were some conflicts that basically had open contracts for privateers and mercenary forces; although messy and often underpaid (especially for units of GSD’s quality), those were (when available) a good place to build reputation and gain experience.

But for the really good gigs that I wanted, the client came to the company. Oh, they’d often shop around, compare prices, but at the end of the day they knew what they were interested in.

And a big part of that was reputation. Something GSD did not have.

So we needed to build some. Best way to do that, I figured, was to show off. Pick some known pirate system, or some slavers, or whatever, and go kick their shit in. Record a lot of it, and distribute it. Hire some media people to make a splash.

I was hoping that after a few successes, GSD would be hirable. After all, while Amidala’s re-election was pretty much irrelevant to knowing a government leader likely to hire my troops since she was such a bleeding heart liberal peacenik, Palpatine was much more pragmatic and had just been re-elected Chancellor. We’d had pretty mixed interactions previously, but with the state of the galaxy he could definitely use the manpower on any of a dozen hot-spots and the political optics of using Nabooian contractors to solve problems meant that the successes would be more attributed to the Chancellor’s actions than otherwise.

And I also just really wanted to fuck up some villainous assholes. I’d spent years building this great big toy system, and I wanted to use it (though only for good – I was a responsible warlord). Effectively, I was hiring my own company (since I was paying their paychecks and combat bonuses) to generate some PR and satisfy my sense of justice. Of course, I didn’t admit to that publicly; PMC’s were one thing, but when they started acting independently people saw them less as private military contractors, and more as private armies.

But first, I needed to figure out what I was bringing to the fight. That informed the sorts of targets I was looking at: how big, how well defended, etc.

I decided that wherever I hit, I was bringing the full first fleet, a total of sixty four frigate detachments with me. That left sixteen detachments for garrison/asteroid patrol duty for Naboo or available for hiring. It also meant I had over a million marines available for ground operations. That was roughly an over-strength star-division, the organizational level one step up from a full army, though without the dedicated corps level air assets that would normally be carried on cruisers. A million people was a lot, but compared to the typical sector population in the tens of billions, it was still only a drop in the bucket.

As for myself, I was taking along my own frigate group for my personal escort and headquarters. A single frigate with its corvette and patrol-boat escorts carrying a combined regiment of marines, it used the most advanced magical designs for equipment and the most experienced summoned specialists for personnel. After all, there was pretty much no-one (short of the strongest Force users) capable of killing me; I figured it would be good karma and good fun (sort of like a real life shooting game) to participate in the attack.

In the end, it was pretty easy to pick a target. Other than Nazis, what was more acceptable a target than slavers after all? The Hutts, Zygerrians, and Senex-Juvex were too large and populous for me to take on. I might win the fight, but I’d be like the proverbial dog that actually caught the car it was chasing, not knowing what to do next.

On the other hand, the Karazak Slavers Cooperative, based out of the Karazak system in the Sujimis sector was within reasonable striking distance (less than six days). Their twelve thousand or so “associate” ranked slavers and assorted underlings captured an estimated five hundred thousand to two million slaves every year, with a similar number estimated to be kept under yoke at Karazak for any given point in time.

To make things even better, the Karazak system also hosted the Slaver’s Syndicate, a Zygerrian-backed outfit.

Although many of the slavers would be out-of-system, it was far harder to operate that sort of business without a base. With any luck, seized records, documents, and drives could be passed along to Republic investigators who could then target the slavers I didn’t catch; if I was really lucky, they’d be able to go after the end users who bought the slaves too. I was also perfectly willing to allow the slaves to try the slavers and slavers’ families according to military tribunal. Any that were substantially abusive, raped the slaves, or participated in slaving other than using them as unpaid labor could end up in front of a firing squad for all I cared.

With the target picked, it was time to come up with a plan and brief my officers.

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I stood in front of a host of officers teleconferenced into a virtual lecture hall. I’d already had the command-level planning meeting earlier. This general briefing was more so that everyone, including those all unit commanders of lower rank, were on the same page as to the general approach and objectives of the upcoming mission.

“There are three main hyperdrive jump vectors into and out of Karazak,” I began. “This is actually pretty considerate of the damned slavers, because it nicely split our ships into four flotillas, each subdivided into four divisions of four frigate detachments.” My officers chuckled dutifully at the (honestly pretty shitty) joke; obviously the slavers had not had our convenience in mind when they settled in that location all those years ago. “Commanding officers are per standard rankings, and are listed in the documents.”

As a note, one may notice a lot of base-four math when discussing ship formations. The use of 4-point ship configurations was because it worked well.

Funnily enough, geometry matters a lot to combat doctrine. On the ground, if a unit is triangular, ie made up of three main subdivisions, then it is probably designed for maneuver warfare. For example, a battalion with three mechanized rifle companies is triangular; sometimes there are more than three units, but as long as they are support, like with the addition of an armor and/or weapons company, the overall formation is still triangular. If it’s based on fours, then it’s probably designed for more static engagements, optimized for leapfrogging assaults or enfilading fields of fire.

In space, there were not just two dimensions, but three, so those geometries changed. A tetrahedral (triangle based pyramidal) 4-point formation took the most basic three-dimensional shape (much like a triangle is for two dimensions). By orienting either one of the points or the planes towards the enemy, the whole formation could fire.

Orienting so that one of the straight edges was pointed towards the enemy allowed the formation to maintain that full formation fire while a ship located at the center of the tetrahedron can also fire. For example, a corvette escorted by four PB’s likely used a formation with one each forward and above or below the corvette, and one each of the rear and on the left or right of the corvette.

That was a fairly optimal formation. Shifting directions of advance and rapid flanking envelopments were relatively easy with a 4-point formation, even for large formations.

Compare that to the most common alternative, a six-point formation. Six-point formations were the three-dimensional formation equivalent to a ground-operations square. They were good for blockades, static defenses, and linear assaults. For blockades and static defenses, they tended to take a formation that looked like octahedral bonding sites, with an in-plane square centered around a central object they are defending or sieging, and another ship above and below that plane.

For assaults, they tended to look like a fairly short triangular prism, but where the rear plane has been rotated sixty degrees, or sometimes a flat hexagonal plane facing the enemy. That allowed every ship to fire forwards (or broadside) as desired. The problem was when there were a lot of ships; the linear focus could make it complicated to change direction, and the formations weren’t as efficient when splitting up into different groups.

“With three flotillas organized to block the three approach/escape vectors,” I continued speaking, “we’ll hopefully be pretty successful buttoning up the system. Oh, no doubt some of the slavers will escape, but try to keep that as low as possible.”

“Yes, my Lord!” the room rang out.

I motioned for calm with a smile. “Come on, people. I know you’re enthusiastic for GSD’s first real mission, but you’re out of the academies now! You don’t want future recruits reviewing this historical moment to see you failing to represent your élan, right?”

I got some more dutiful chuckles at this. It was a bit of a running joke that cadets had to be taught to respond in a ‘motivated’ fashion (lots of Sir-Yes-Sir!-ing), then graduates had to be taught not to.

“So, we’ll have each approach covered by sixty four frigates, two hundred and fifty six corvettes, over a thousand PB’s, and sixteen thousand hyper-capable fighters. All of those ships will be deployed when we jump into Karazak,” I stressed. “In the orders packets there are modified formation positions and a schedule of timed micro-jumps. Simulations indicate that will set up bands of interference, preventing slaver ships from jumping out. Make sure you’re ready to carry them out, and keep on the ball for any updates to those orders from your command as the simulations are refined by real-life results.”

I paused for a moment for people to process that. “Once in system, the plan is currently for those three flotillas to cover the assigned zones while the fourth flotilla is available to engage any enemy ship concentrations. If it doesn’t cut engines and power down, you make it. The overall goal is to achieve total space superiority. But the zones can change depending on the circumstances; especially if they have capital ships or organize their fleet, the blocking flotillas may be ordered to carry out an attack or envelopment.” A map of Kazarak was behind me now, the zones with arrows showing flotilla movements on them.

“Now when possible you’ll be using ion cannons to reduce accidental deaths among any captives on the slavers’ ships. Strike craft are being issued ion warheads for missiles and torpedos for that purpose. But at the end of the day, I want everyone coming home. So if it’s between killing a ship or taking casualties, I want that ship dead.”

Now the picture shifted to the best guess intelligence on positions of space-bases and orbital infrastructure. Defenses were highlighted. “This is intelligence’s best bet on where and what they’ve got that’s off planet. It’s only eighty five percent confidence though, so take it with a grain of salt. You’ll be taking out defenses with ship based strikes as reasonable, then conducting marine landings. Priority is on our safety, followed by that of the slaves. Significantly lower, but still priorities are information on slaving activities which can mean taking slavers prisoner, then minimizing damage to prize ships and bases, followed way, way down by protecting the slavers lives in general.”

Again, they chuckled. “After the areas have been cleared and secured, the mission will change entirely to relief and succor for the newly freed slaves. A number of droids have been loaded with medic-psychologist programs to assist in that process; they are marked with a green-white-green band. As for getting the slaves out, the marines gallantly suffering the horrors of tight-packing procedures for a week will give the fleet the capacity to evacuate up to three million freed slaves. If the estimates are wrong, we’ll secure the system for as long as it takes to get everyone out safely.”

I looked at them intensely, wanting to drive this next point home. “Now one thing I want to emphasize: we are not just there to free the slaves and help them physically and emotionally. We’re also there to take as many pounds of flesh from the slavers as possible. So before any of the freed slaves leave, do your best to get accurate accounts of how they ended up enslaved, and what happened during that time period. We want testimony and medical records for trials.”

This next bit was a bit dodgier. I may have gotten a relatively conservative and right-wing group of Nabooians as volunteers for my PMC, but that was relative to the fact that they were still Nabooians. I hoped their training had knocked enough of the pacifism out of them. “Any slave that passes the psychological screening will be allowed to volunteer for tribunals. The tribunals will be carried out according to our abbreviated code of justice, and overseen by droids with all appropriate legal regulations and programs installed. Priority of trying slavers will be done on a point-based approach to ensure maximum efficiency; the points are accounting for the surety of the case, the egregiousness of the violations, and the time required for the trial. Interrogation and prosecutor assistance droids are capable of making the calculation.”

I smiled sharply at them and clapped my hands. “Alright, let’s do some good work, and make history with our first mission of many. Dismissed!”

And with that, the conference was over.

It was time to go to war.