Chapter 216 - My SI Stash #16 - Screw the force, I have money! by QuickDeath007 (Star Wars)

-The first ever Neimoidian SI? It's quite the Fix-It story with the SI solving all the problems with nothing more than shit ton of cash and of course balls of steel. Check it out!

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Posted on: forums.spacebattles.com/threads/screw-the-force-i-have-money-star-wars-si.649535/#post-47691096 (QuickDeath007)

PS: If you're not able to copy/paste the link, you have everything in here to find it, by simply searching the author and the story title. It sucks that you can't copy links on mobile (´ー｀)

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Chapter 0-3 (exceptional)

BECAUSE ENOUGH IS NEVER ENOUGH

-----

When I had first started remembering my past life, I had been seven years old. Or 29, from a certain point of view. Being seven years old, and thus fairly stupid, this had first resulted in amus.e.m.e.nt from my parents, followed by my uncle getting yelled at because they thought I had somehow gotten into his 'stash.' Once more of my memory returned, I wised up and shut up. The events leading up to me getting transplanted to a galaxy far, far away were fuzzy at best, I had no idea how my previous life had ended. Or even if it had ended, for that matter.

My parents put me through school, had me raised in the world of intragalactic commerce. I snuck a few courses in engineering and got tutored in the basics of using a blaster. I wasn't overly familiar with the timeline for Star Wars in my previous life, but the Republic was still a thing, and discrete holonot searches revealed that no Droid army had ever invaded Naboo, and the Ruusan reformation was a long time ago.

I wish I could say I had been born... reborn? Yes, reborn during the golden age of the Republic, and died of old age before Palpatine was born and everything was ruined forever, but I wasn't that lucky. Nor did I have the Force. Also, my memories had given me a gift in the form of psychosomatic leg pain and a limp. Nice cane though.

"Captain, pirate sh.i.p.s are demanding our immediate surrender," a droid's synthesized voice said.

Oh right, forgot that detail.

"Pick the largest ship and ram it. This will be an adequate test of our new shields."

"Roger roger."

Of all the species I could have been born as, I was a f.u.c.k.i.n.g Neimoidian.

Why would we work for you? There would be no hunts, no points! What honor would there be in the eyes of the Scorekeeper?!] The Trandoshan said, hissing dangerously.

"It is well paying work," I countered. "and while money may mean little to you, I would imagine having it would be useful for when you hunt on your own time. Get whatever supplies, weapons, or transportation you need after you save up. Yes, it may be less straightforward than some of the alternative careers your people are known for, but you will make far fewer enemies this way. Earn a few month's pay, take a week or two to yourselves to travel to another planet, get legal hunting permits, and earn all the points you can. No having to evade authorities, no having to hide your hunting parties, your sh.i.p.s. If you like, I can even have provisos in your contract to ensure you get enough time for your hunts. What you do on your time off matters little to me."

I was slowly working them around, I could see the thoughtful looks, the contemplation.

[You say we could have our hunts without fear of reprisal, but the greatest of prey resides on Kashyyyk, in the shadowlands. The Wookies would never simply allow us passage, and we will not plead with them. You would have us give up the greatest of prey?]

"Hardly. The Wookies are more than happy to allow offworlders to hunt on Kashyyyk, encourage it even. After all, every beast slain by an outworlder is one the Wookies do not have to risk their lives themselves to slay. It is one thing to seek glory fighting a Krayt Dragon on a distant planet far from home. It is another for that same Krayt Dragon to be threatening your homes, your young. You need only remain civil, that they do not refuse you out of spite."

The lead Trandoshan stared evenly at me. [You assume much.]

I spread my hands, smiling at them. "If all else fails, I am more than happy to speak to the wookies on your behalf. After all, Money is a language all its own."

The Trandoshan smiled knowingly.

-----

The Wookie stared at me as if I had grown a second head. To be fair, I might as well have.

{You would have us let the Trandoshans into our heartlands, right into our ports?!}

"That is one way of saying it, yes," I said, trying not to piss myself. Not a single movie, cartoon, or comic had ever done the sight of a angry Wookie justice. Not one.

{And how else would you say it?!} He roared.

I took a breath to calm myself. "You would be making the Trandoshans pay you to hunt dangerous beasts threatening your cities, your people, your young. They would pay fees to dock their sh.i.p.s in your ports, right out in the open, where you can keep track of them, and prevent them from leaving should they decide to hunt your people. Why, you'd even have them paying you to have a mandatory tracking beacon attached to their person. For their safety, of course. Every Trandoshan legally applying for a hunting license, where you can see them, is one not landing a ship on the beaches, setting up slaver camps. That is how I would say it, anyways."

The Wookie was slowly sitting down, taking my words in slowly.

{It does have a certain... poetic justice to it...}

I spread my arms smiling at him. "Indeed. The only real price to this, is remaining civil to them, that they not refuse you out of spite. Let them start any arguments. What's a few social niceties, some polite words, compared to becoming wealthy off of your enemies? After all, Money is a language all its own."

The Wookie smiled knowingly.

Chapter 1

With the lead pirate frigate smeered across the front of my Lucrehulk, and the rest suddenly very apologetic about the "misunderstanding," I took a moment to reflect on my current situation. I was hardly the wealthiest captain within the ranks of the Lucrehulk, but the mere fact that I commanded one of the massive titans gave me a great deal of authority, both official and otherwise. People that technically outranked me in the Trade Federation Hierarchy tended to be leery of offending a Lucrehulk captain, the competition for earning such a prestigious, and often lucrative position was fierce. Even if you held a position of authority over a captain, the fact that they had earned such a position meant that someone high up the ladder held their competency in high regard. More often than not, a Lucrehulk Captain had the unspoken backing of the Viceroy himself.

The massive sh.i.p.s were an equally massive expense. The Trade Federation wanted to make damn sure that the expense was worth it.

Unusually, I had not earned my captaincy for my prowess in commerce. Not that I was incompetent, I could turn a fair profit given a stable route, but my talents raised in more practical fields. For instance, engineering.

The OOM series of battledroids were a prime example of the fruits of the lowest-bidder mentality. They were cheap, and that was all that could be said about them. I had found a way to drastically improve upon the design without impacting the costs in the slightest. The hardware was still crap, but the software? Granted, the current iteration of OOM battledroids barely had the processing power to function as an autoturret. Maybe you could squeeze in a static, unchanging patrol route, and having it stand still while firing, but that was it. Everything else came from a centralized mainframe, and an admittedly impressive communications network.

While my memories of a past life were sometimes difficult to remember, after all, it had been a few decades since I had recovered said memories as a child, I was able to take inspiration from a video game I was pretty sure was called Mass Effect. Or possibly Ass Effect, but I was pretty sure it was the former, no matter how persistently the latter cropped up mentally. Namely, the idea of a distributed intelligence.

Despite my memories of the Star Wars galaxy as a media series, the Trade Federation was pretty even handed to it's employees, and had a vested interest in settling internal disputes fairly. It was people outside the Trade Federation it treated like shit and ripped off. They protected the patents of the OOM battledroids zealously, a few attempts to rip off the design had ended... poorly. However, when I had wiped a group of droids of their programming, and rewrote it from the ground up, the Federation was more than happy to give me a patent on the new code, since I could prove it wasn't derived in anyway from the original code. Hilariously, Republic copyright laws and digital rights in general were in excellent shape compared to what I remembered from my past life. I don't know whether that said good things about the Republic, or bad things about my previous life.

As a distributed intelligence, the OOM-series battledroids grew more intelligent the more of them there were. Given how easy they were to mass produce, while it took a lot of them to get competency out of them, once you got them up to a reasonable intelligence, that same flaw also meant it took a lot of causalities to dumb them back down. Even better, the central control mainframes still had a use with the new code. While they weren't necessary, they provided a massive boost to their available processing power. The OOM command variants also saw use as minor processing hubs, and had superior communications equipment that allowed them to network a larger amount of droids.

Sadly, not many within the Federation were willing to spend the extra expense to replace their factory default coding, and Baktoid Combat Automata was similarly unwilling to pay for a licensing agreement from me, as they'd judged the Trade Federation as a whole would be unhappy with the corresponding price increase. Fortunately for me, they didn't try ripping off my code, nor developing their own version. Since I worked for the Federation, there was no guarantee that the TF's internal arbitrators would side with them in any patent dispute, no matter how much money they threw at the problem. That was a precedent nobody, not even Baktoid themselves wanted. No telling when it'd come around and bite you in the ass, after all. Open season if one of the sides wasn't a Trade Federation member though.

Still, I made a fair amount of money, and even got companies outside the Federation interested in acquiring a license. A few droid manufacturers on Corellia, one of the major Kuati wanted a license for a custom built security contingent. Oh, and Sienar Fleet Systems was interested in applying the concept to starfighters. I liked them, their offer came with giving me a few wings of the "D-13 Coordinated Starfighters" they produced with it, so long as I forwarded them some data on how well they performed so they could make improvements.

Something about the arrangement niggled at the back of my mind, I felt like there was something I was forgetting about Sienar, but I'd given up on trying to remember. It'd either come to me, or it wouldn't.

I didn't quite have enough money to outright purchase my own private Lucrehulk, but I came close. Given how I had acquired the money, the Federation directorate had done a background check to ensure I was a competent ship captain, then offered me captaincy of a Federation-owned Lucrehulk, wanting to see what I'd do with the design as an engineer. They had been surprised when one of the first things I had done was take advantage of the massive internal volume to install more powerful shield generators; after all, the Lucrehulk was already one of the most heavily shielded sh.i.p.s in the galaxy. After the first time I had used my overpowered shields to ram a pirate ship without suffering any damage though... apparently the idea of being so heavily protected that you could get away with simply plowing through hostile sh.i.p.s and smearing their remains all over your shields appealed to fundamental parts of the Neimoidian mindset.

In other words, they were very happy with me. Enough so that when Nute Gunray took power as Viceroy and disbanded the Directorate, he had even sold the Lucrehulk I captained to me outright at a discount, provided I come up with something as equally as impressive.

When Gunray had contacted me, practically singing my praises to the stars, I had been surprised to learn that the Trandoshans had built a giant statue of me on Trandosha in recognition of me apparently giving their nonexistent economy a jump-start and making Trandoshans a byword for excellent, and reputable mercenary service. Said statue was matched by one on Kashyyyk, in recognition of not only outright killing the Wookie slave trade and convincing the Trandoshans that hunting slavers was more profitable and honorable than being slavers, but also incidentally kicking the Wookie economy into overdrive, as Kashyyyk became the destination for thrill seekers across the galaxy thanks to its reputation as the ultimate sporting destination for Trandoshans.

I mean, I was trying to do good in the Galaxy, don't get me wrong, but when I delved into that mess, I was just trying to fill my Lucrehulk with well trained, loyal Trandoshan soldiers. I figured they had just as much of a reputation as dangerous fighters as Wookies, but a lot easier to hire in large numbers. Damn.

Naturally, Nute Gunray was primarily impressed by the fact that both sides had agreed to contracts with the Trade Federation. The Federation had been trying to get an agreement for exporting Wroshyr wood for centuries, and I had apparently thrown open the door. The wookies had proven extremely savvy negotiators, and the Federation hadn't been able to set a quota; the wookies could export as little or as much as they felt like, but the TF did get exclusivity, and there was a huge demand for Wroshyr wood among the opulent elite of the Galaxy. The Trandoshan agreement was less impressive, Trandosha simply didn't have anything of value beyond the species itself, but they did get a mercenary company started as a Federation affiliate, which meant the Federation earned a cut of their profits.

I was, all in all, doing fairly well for myself. Naturally, my own success bit me in the ass, when I was selected as one of three Lucrehulk captains to participate in the blockade of Naboo.

F.u.c.k.

Chapter 2

I wish I could say I had some grand plan in mind when the invasion of Naboo had occurred. Something that would let me solve the problem and completely derail old Palpy's plans in one fell swoop. Unfortunately, that's not how anything works at all.

As it happened, in the eldritch abomination that was the Republic Law, Gunray's blockade was in fact quite legal, categorized as a low scale dispute between two members of the Republic. As long as we upheld ourselves to a certain standard, even a full scale war would be permitted, so long as we didn't involve anyone else. The Republic was intended to protect members against threats to the Galaxy as a whole, and enforce a code of law. Two members coming to blows had been seen as inevitable at the founding of the Republic, and attempting to prevent it would have merely put a lid on tensions until it exploded out of control. Technically speaking, Naboo was breaking the law by attempting to have the Senate intervene without the Trade Federation's agreement. They weren't allowed to ask for Republic intervention unless we landed troops, and even then, the Republic was not obligated to intervene unless there was evidence of war crimes.

Not that the idiots in the Senate cared.

All in all, I was firmly stuck enforcing the blockade until at least the Jedi stuck their noses into the whole affair.

Imagine my surprise then when I personally was hailed by the Naboo.

"Why, Queen Amidala! While not unwelcome, this is quite the surprise... were you intending to contact me? I can redirect you to the Viceroy, if you like."

As much as I knew better, I was still pleading she had simply dialed the wrong number, so to speak. No such luck.

"Captain Montoo. I have heard about you. What is the man who ended the millennia long feud between the Trandoshans and the Wookies practically overnight doing here? I would have thought such a famed diplomat would have nothing to do with something like this."

F.u.c.k. I schooled my face into a mask of regret, mostly to hide the slight annoyance I had. Padme Amidala was... naive, in my opinion. The Nubians as a whole were to be honest, she just happened to be the most well known of them. An entire government based on pacifism. Talking to them always somehow found a way to annoy me.

"While such an escalation in what should have been a simple trade negotiation is regrettable, ultimately, I was granted a lawful order by the Viceroy of the Trade Federation." I said, hoping that the damn teenager the Naboo put in charge of their planet had some subtlety.

"How can such a violation of my people's sovereignty be lawful? We are a member of the Republic, they cannot simply standby and watch as my people suffer under this unprovoked attack!"

I resisted the urge to sigh, and instead replied, "I am not going to be drawn into an argument with you over whether or I will follow my orders. I do not know who is giving you legal advice, Queen Amidala, but I suggest you fire them. So long as the Viceroy is the lawful leader of the Trade Federation, I will follow his command. If you are going to insist this blockade is illegal, I suggest you find some proof, Queen Amidala. I am loyal to the Trade Federation, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right."

She merely glared at me, and I cut the connection, refusing to continue the charade. I'd given her all I could. If she was too dense to follow through, it was on her.

Chapter 3

As expected, the when Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi arrived in a consular, everything rapidly went horribly wrong.

"Profiteer, this is the Indomitable, we've detected an explosion in your hangar bays. We are mobilizing teams to assist, please respond!"

There was a prolonged silence before they answered. "That won't be necessary, Indomitable. The Republic 'Mediators' attempted to attack the Viceroy and force an unfavorable settlement. They have been dealt with. The Trade Federation's hand has been forced, launch ground forces and seize your predesignated targets."

I felt my lips tighten at the response. I tried to think of a way out of this, but on such short notice, I had nothing. Yet, anyways.

"Acknowledged Profiteer."

-----

As I stared at the various screens on the bridge of the Indomitable, I couldn't help but note how... quiet everything was. I'd have expected a planetary invasion to be more... eventful, even with me staying on the ship. Instead, all I had were dry reports. It probably helped that the Naboo weren't really fighting back. That, and nobody really wanted to argue with a Trandoshan. And I had lots of Trandoshans.

It was almost a relief when sensors picked up the Queen's yacht. I was mildly surprised by the presence of several Naboo fighters flying in escort, but the memories of my past life were long ago, and there had never been any guarantee they'd be 100% accurate.

The Profiteer sent a standardized warning to the yacht and her escorts. Predictably, they did not turn back. Naturally, the Profiteer began firing on the sh.i.p.s, concentrating on the largest of them, the Yacht. It was exceedingly surreal, watching something like that and already knowing the outcome perfectly, knowing what was happening on board the blockade runner.

Then the Queen's Yacht exploded, a solid hit from the Profiteer's main guns hitting something important.

I felt an unbearable coldness take hold of my body. I tried to process what I had just seen, and simply couldn't.

One of the bridge security officers, a Twi`lek, noted my shock and shook my shoulder. Snapping out of it, I immediately hailed the first man I could think to blame.

"Captain Dofine, have you lost your kriffing mind?! You just killed the Queen of Naboo! What the kriff were you thinking?!"

The man on the opposite end of my screen seemed frozen in shock.

"W... what? But... What?! What is going on up there?! What?!"

I dimly noted the escort fighters jumping into hyperspace, but I was too furious to care.

"How can you not know what's going on with your own ship, you incompetent, chronic expense!"

Dofine's face was frozen in an expression of unthinking terror, and he cut the connection.

-----

Hours later, I was hailed by the Viceroy. I carefully schooled my face into a decidedly thin mask of calm.

"Captain Montoo, an internal investigation has revealed several programming errors within our battledroids' targeting software. It would appear the Queen's ship was misidentified. They were not supposed to fire on her ship if she somehow managed to reach it to attempt escape. They were supposed to engage their tractor beams."

"Programming errors, you called it? Might I presume the Queen is not the only casualty of these... errors?"

Gunray had the decency to look shamefaced, I gave him that much. "Unfortunately, you presume correctly. Several civilian targets have been mistakenly identified as combatants and... terminated. We are working on it now, but there is no turning back. We are committed... we cannot allow what has happened here to reach the Senate."

With a very false calm, I asked him, "What exactly are you suggesting, Viceroy?"

Gunray's face hardened with a grim resolve. "We must win. We can claim these casualties were during an initial, doomed resistance effort. For the good of the Trade Federation."

I smiled bitterly at Gunray, and mistaking my intention, he relaxed slightly.

"All batteries, target the Profiteer and fire. We will not go down with this madness. Comms, inform the ground teams they are to align with the Naboo, and protect them from the Trade Federation at all costs. Viceroy, consider this my resignation."

I cut the channel before he had a chance to respond, and the ship shook as turbolasers began firing in volleys at the other sh.i.p.s.