Chapter 57: Supersize

In 973 ARR, business continued to expand. GSD-protected convoys were highly desired, and it wasn’t uncommon for us to get hired to clean up the spacelanes, wipe out particularly elusive pirates or slavers, or provide naval support for Ailon Guard forces.

There were three more remarkable operations too. The first was actually pretty minor, simply a quarantine of Engebo V. That planet had been overtaken by skekfish, a hybrid carbon-silicon based lifeform also known as the “knife-fish”. Aggressive, deadly, equipped with razor sharp scales, and capable of burrowing through solid rock, skekfish grew from egg to adulthood in a day, had to eat meat once every 48 hours, bred prodigiously, and had eggs that could last centuries before reactivating. In short, they were an obviously engineered bio-form MWD designed to permanently depopulate entire worlds.

I, of course, made sure to get their pattern. Not out of any intent of using it, just… for the hell of it. Maybe someday I’d need them.

The other two operations were much more politically significant. One was a combination humanitarian/combat mission to Radnor. They had had one of their bioweapon programs sabotaged and had to quarantine one of their two capital cities. During the chaos the Avoni, natives of a different planet in the same system, invaded. GSD intervened in return for staging rights, weapons research, and outright ownership of many of the asteroids and even some of the system’s moons.

The Avoni found themselves seriously sanctioned, and my forces seized all of their space assets in the system. Jeeves, super-effective sprite that he was, even managed to get the Radnori populace so behind my company that they passed laws subcontracting their future military defense to GSD. We were obligated to provide a certain level of protection, but they now had a fixed percentage of their GDP set aside to pay us. In short, GSD was becoming even more legitimate in the eyes of the galaxy, even if Radnor was on the edge of Republic territory in the mid-rim.

But the reason I was happy to get involved in Radnor was mostly its location. It was directly on the Corellian Run hyperlane, and was located just one sector away from the lower regions of Hutt space, including that miserable dust-ball Tatooine. That made it a prime staging ground for any eventual operation against the Hutts. The Corellian Run was also one of the eight largest hyperlanes leading out of Hutt space. In fact, it was the largest hyperlane that the Hutts had direct access to, though the fact that it was on the galactic-southern Hutt border made fewer ne’er do-wells use it than might happen otherwise. But it was still a popular route for when Hutt-based pirates and slavers wanted to go towards the galactic core. I had eighty full frigate detachments based out of the system do “stop, search and seize” missions on suspected smugglers, pirates and slavers. By the time they wised up and started using other routes, mostly through Llanic (a nearby shadowport that only added a day or two to travel times), we’d reduced total traffic through Radnor by twenty percent, and were still catching morons who thought they could sneak past.

The Hutts were pretty incensed. Not only was I cutting into their bottom line (minimal as my effect was after they started moving along the Llanic Spice Route instead), but I’d definitely buttoned up any future Hutt expansion. They thought in centuries, after all, and given the Republic’s weakness and corruption assumed (rightly, I suspect) that they’d be able to swallow up many of the politically unimportant Outer-Rim sectors on their border. GSD basing a small fleet out of Radnor ended that possibility for decades if not centuries.

The retaliations weren’t unexpected.

At first, the Hutts sent assassins. But after the tenth time a courier showed up to the responsible party with a head in a box, that stopped. Honestly, that I didn’t mind at all. Removing criminal assassin/bounty-hunter types was a public service, and there was no chance they could take me. But then my intelligence forces intercepted a dozen little strike squads who meant to simultaneously remove my greatest supporters on Radnor, and that could not stand.

Among my forces were those who managed to qualify as “Daggers” (Direct Action Group), designed for classic deniable wetwork. Often Force-sensitive, somewhat sociopathic and highly capable to begin with, then further conditioned and trained, they were among the best of my forces. Among my fully magically enhanced Paragons I had created a regiment of summoned beings based on the best of the Daggers. I sent the entire regiment, and told them to make a point. The Desilijic cartel practically evaporated, and those Hutts who took over the power-vacuum afterwards never repeated those mistakes.

I also got involved on Mawan. A core world, Mawan had fallen, its people divided under the aegises of several semi-criminal factions. Mawan was an interesting case for my forces to deal with. As a core world, other polities’ interests prevented a true conquest; that was part of how the place became such a mess in the first place. Instead, we used sprite-derived intelligence-driven commando raids of the primary criminal actors and organizations, while supplying deniable weapons, overt training and intelligence for native factions that were both morally acceptable and pragmatically willing to deal with my company. In the aftermath, Gangari corporations stabilized the economy, largely taking it over in the process. By manipulating the new legal framework, and instituting a “meritocratic democracy” that allowed votes largely by financial power, I expected to have full de-facto and de-jure control of the system within three years.

Mawan was good for two things. First, it was practice in nation-building. While messy, it went much better than I had expected. It turned out sprites were great for the sort of mass administration combined with surveillance that was needed to turn around a society which had gotten used to criminal coercion and corruption. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it gave GSD a base and voice in the Core.

With that, GSD was rapidly transitioning from a small but important colonial mercenary organization, to a real player in galactic politics.

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The other important part of becoming a real player was having a real military. Prior to 973 ARR, GSD’s heaviest ship was a three hundred meters long frigate. While certainly a warship, and due to design, technological, and magical-material advantages about as capable as conventional ships twice its length (and thus, by the length-cube volume relation eight times its volume), there was a certain size effect in peoples’ minds. Sort of like judging an army based on how many people it has. In the same way that regardless of equipment and training disparities it was hard to imagine a hundred men beating off a thousand, or ten thousand, it was hard for people to think “oh, a three hundred meters long frigate, that’s a capital ship.”

After all, even relatively middling planetary defense forces had access to the (poorly named) Dreadnaught-class Heavy Cruiser by Rendili StarDrive, which was six hundred meters long. Never mind that due to the Dreadnaught’s relatively narrow profile compared to my ships’ golden-ratio derived cuboid that my three-hundred-meter-long frigate was still about two-thirds as massive as the longer Dreadnaught. And let’s just put aside the fact a GSD frigate could likely take a half dozen of those relatively aging beasts in a fight (and that’s before the frigate’s 192 strikecraft got involved).

It just didn’t have the same impact.

The GSD Cruiser (designation CA) that entered service in 973 definitely changed that. At a full six hundred meters, it was already at the upper edge of the cruiser-length classification. It kept the ratios that meant it was significantly heavier than other ships of similar length, being, for example, about five times as massive as a Dreadnaught cruiser.

Because I could have my troops float in their power-armor in null-gravity and exercise against the resistance of their suit motors in a special operation mode while using VR for training and relaxation, I could pack a lot of troops in a relatively little space, while still having oversized shields, armor, and weapons systems. While other states weren’t fully aware of a GSD Cruiser’s advantages, they were generally aware (we were, after all, mercenaries, and GSD ships were used in Gangari VR games even if they were slightly nerfed). That made people quite nervous. I had five hundred and twelve of the cruisers at year’s end, each with a full set of frigates, corvettes and patrol boats for escort. That was more navy than most sectors, let alone what most systems could scrape together.

That said, people weren’t too nervous. GSD was getting big and strong, true, but it was still sort of like being the best fighter out of all middle-school boxers. Impressive, but compared to the real big-boys we were a small fish. More militant core or mercantile powers had access to pretty heavy kit, after all.

For example, Kuat Drive Yards made the twenty-five hundred meter long Procurator-class battlecruiser. This was fully five times as massive as one of my cruisers, and the Kuati had various even larger derivative ships if purchasers thought the Procurator wasn’t enough. The Techno Union built thousand meter long Bulwark-class star-destroyers, and used a bulkier design philosophy somewhat similar to my own rather than Kuat’s preference for dagger-shaped ships. Although more armed merchantmen than true warships, the three kilometer diameter Lucrehulks, still produced by Hoersch-Kessel Drive, were also available and massed something like a hundred times what one of my cruisers did.

The Inter Galactic Banking Clan went a different direction, and kept a fleet of thousands of 825m long Munificent-class “star frigates”. A proper cruiser (or, at that length, a heavy cruiser) tended to have significantly more shields and armor than a frigate to survive main fleet battles and capital-ship engagements. In comparison, the “star frigate” was lightly shielded and almost unarmored, but even more heavily armed, especially with high yield weapons capable of threatening star-destroyer shields and armor. Despite their rather skeletal silhouette, a Munificent could carry up to a hundred and fifty thousand battle droids, and had external attachments for a couple squadrons of parasite droid starfighters. With a crew of just two-hundred sapients and significant automation, the Munificents were cheap, almost semi-disposable ships that nonetheless represented a serious threat to defense stations and capital ships.

Compared to these giants, my fleets were relatively minor. But much like having ships-of-the-line back on Earth during the age of sail, having a cruiser, especially one of my own design and manufacture, was a mark of being at the least a second-rate power. And while people knew the ships were in the pipeline, actually having them definitely improved GSD’s standing. Especially when that fact was combined with having practical control of a core world (Mawan), having a wealthy Mid-Rim Protectorate (Radnor), and an Outer-Rim colony (Karazak).

It was sort of like managing to make myself the autocrat of Belgium in the early 20th Century. Not really a first-rate power, but I could still hold my head up in the top political gatherings.