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16 BBY
Outer Rim
Aboard the Stark Harrow
Eight Week of Deployment
…Departing the Rhelgis System was that of fanfare.
Dockhands paused in their work as the Stark Harrow disengaged from the station clamps, the cruiser's mass gliding free with calculated certainty.
Signal beacons flashed their farewell codes. I watched it all from the observation gallery, hands clasped behind my back.
I had secured a deal with Maverick Karak, one that would quietly alter the economic gravity of the sector.
It was long term, structured not as a simple capital injection but as a layered partnership, designed to survive scrutiny should any auditor or rival come sniffing for anything illegal or search for any weaknesses to attack.
And so through a web of holding accounts, shell investment trusts registered in the Core, and a discretionary fund under my own control, I committed just over twelve million Imperial credits to the expansion of Karak Mining….
Almost all my ill gotten money…
By the time the paperwork was finalized and contingency reserves allocated, the figure edged closer to thirteen.
To put such a sum into perspective, a higher middle-class household might earn twenty to twenty-five thousand credits in a standard year. A capable light freighter something akin to a YT-1300 could be purchased outright for a mere minute fraction of this investment. With that kind of capital, one could buy land rights on a distant, underdeveloped planet and still have credits to spare for orbital infrastructure.
This was not money one 'risked' lightly.
And the agreement itself was elegant in its brutality.
Karak Mining was to be reconstituted as Karak Corporation, a vertically expanding industrial concern rather than a single focus extraction outfit.
The initial tranche of credits, five million was earmarked for the immediate construction of several automated strip-mining platforms and Six dozen massive unmanned ore haulers based on Karak's proprietary designs. These were lean, massive wheeled mechanical creatures, easy to build, and their operating costs were a third of standard subcontractor models from other mining conglomerates.
The second tranche funded research and refinement. Karak retained full creative control over his hardware and software teams, but all patents, algorithms, and engineering schematics were placed under a dual-key intellectual property arrangement. On paper, Karak Corporation owned them. In practice, I held veto authority over any sale, licensing agreement, or foreign transfer. Nothing would leave his workshops without my knowledge.
In return for my investment, I acquired a silent thirty-two percent equity stake, large enough to matter, yet small enough to avoid attention from local scrutiny whenever it began to grow larger. More importantly, I secured a permanent seat on the board. That seat would remain visibly vacant, its authority exercised through some proxies I had longed to assign somewhere else other than having them laze around on coruscant.
There were other clauses. There are always other clauses.
Karak Corporation agreed to prioritize Imperial contracts at preferential rates, particularly in sectors under naval jurisdiction. Ore, refined metals, fuel products and rare isotopes anything of strategic value would move first through channels I designated. In exchange, the Empire, unofficially and without documentation, would ensure Karak Corporation enjoyed a remarkable lack of interference from customs inspectors, labor regulators, and certain overzealous regional governors.
Security was another matter. The Rhelgis system's experiences with pirates had made him receptive to my insistence on internal protection. And recent events have proven a corrupt oligarchal society which the governor had to resolve on his own.
A small discreet but well-armed security wing was established, staffed largely by local veterans whose records made them undesirable to official service but perfectly suited to deniable enforcement.
I was, as the contract specified, a secret shareholder and executive authority. My duties with the Empire precluded open involvement, but I would maintain constant holo-communication, reviewing development progress, the expansion implementation plans, quarterly projections, financial targets, and redirecting assets when necessary.
Maverick Karak, for his part, flourished under the arrangement.
Freed from the desperation of constant cash flow crises, his mind turned fully to innovation. Within months, prototype modular mining arrays were being tested in low-yield asteroid belts, outperforming Imperial standards by margins that made procurement officers salivate. Costs dropped. Output rose. Profits followed with mechanical inevitability.
My expectations were that the initial investment would begin to cycle back within a year or so. Metals and ore were expensive in large sums, and were always in demand, it along with spice, bacta, tibanna gas and even coaxium.
Hopefully by the force and through other preparations things would go smoothly. And this would also add some increase in productivity and growth to the planet's economy.
The Governor had been happy for his daughter's return and he wasn't shy about thanking us.
And the perpetrators responsible for his daughter's kidnapping were apprehended. The man behind it all, a shipping magnate once counted among the governor's closest allies, had grown resentful of the Governor's political career and it had also cost him profits due to the changing policies.
But all was said and done, and the man was arrested his company still undergoing investigations and under threat of being shut down.
His networks were unraveled, his crews hunted down. Some surrendered. Others chose to die resisting boarding parties and they paid the price for their resistance.
The captain filed the report to Regional Command in fine details. Names. Evidence. Outcomes. Commendations were issued. And the matter was closed.
And so the Stark Harrow moved on once more.
A new sector. A new system. Another knot in the vast, tangled web of the Outer Rim. In a galaxy as expansive as ours, there was always something demanding attention, some border dispute simmering, some criminal syndicate metastasizing, some local leader begging for security favors and assistance.
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