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***
* Three months later *
Boring as hell. That's how one might characterise my job. The job of emperor, as it turns out, is in places a boring, and in places a tedious and monotonous affair. Why did I get into it? I would have grabbed more money, rejoiced at every billion earned, fed my family and friends... but no, I was carried away to become an emperor. No concubines, no palace, not even a quiet and well-fed life. The same ship's rations...
As it turned out, travelling in the core on the hyperdrive of the eighth class is not so tiring in terms of tension, but... speed. Where it took me an hour to get here, it takes half a day. About everything in order. The assembly called "ministers" quickly got into work. Only Joy, Randy and Chris were quick. All three of them had already had a lot of experience in their tasks, Joy was the Minister of Finance of the central world, so he went to work without a sound, Chris Werner, like a professional builder, also loaded himself to the max... Randy... at first he spent more time on his work, but then I had to stop him - KMK was doing fine without him, but I needed money. So he had to forget his previous employer for a while and go into business. He managed it well - together we developed adequate ways of monitoring natural resources and methods of their exploration. I had to get involved in this case - very boring, by the way, and tedious. But I had to. I flew into hyperspace on a dreadnought converted into a reconnaissance vessel and went on a quest for adventure!
Two days into the journey, we came out in the system of some planet. Maps, as you can see, are inappropriate here - this area has never been mapped.
The crew of the dreadnought was only fifty people, and that included geological specialists. No weapons, no military systems, but it was packed to the brim with equipment for scanning deposits from orbit. As a last resort, we had a hundred and fifty geoscanner droids that could fly to a planet and take soil samples, analyse them, and relay the scanner signal. The first planet had four large deposits of iron, slightly smaller deposits of platinum and silver, and microscopic deposits of other useful metals and minerals. It would not be enough for KMK work, so we left the hyperspace beacon on the planet and went into space again...And so it happened time after time. The sector was really small, only five thousand light-years in diameter, but the difficulties with movement and a huge number of stars and planets made it no less saturated than the supersector. It would take several years to circumnavigate it all, thank goodness we could get a lead on minerals from powerful hyperspace scanners.
In just a month of wandering, we've visited a great many planets and asteroids, from huge to small, and from rich to useless. My theory, confirmed by my teacher, that the core is a rather rich region, was confirmed. True, the concept of "richness" is a stretch. A resource that yesterday was precious tomorrow may be worth pennies - there have been cases.
Several planets have become the main source of income for the future. A dozen, but you can see at once that the work here is not for a year and not even for a century ahead. Osmium, titanium, freak, singing steel, durasteel components - carvanium, zersium, lommite, neuranium and aluminium steel. The latter, of course, has nothing in common with either steel or aluminium, but they called it that... It looks like aluminium, but its strength is like high-grade steel, even higher.
A separate item was deposits of valuable minerals - in addition to the general list of more or less valuable industrial minerals, there were also rare ones - on one of the dwarf planets scanners showed deposits of... corusca. Corusca is a rare and very, very expensive stone. Much more expensive than diamonds - the price for some of them can reach tens of trillions of credits. And that, for a moment, is the price of building a large city, or the budget of Alderaan for ten years. The planet Coruscant was named after these crystals - not only was it similar to Coruscant in colour, but it also had the largest deposits in the galaxy. They have long been depleted, of course, but the memory of it is still alive, but as the planet Coruscant is usually called, I took with the help of force from under the surface of a dozen crystals and flew further. The most valuable were not the most expensive metals - such as singing steel or freak were used much less frequently and in exclusive pieces of equipment. The most highly liquid were titanium, osmium, aluminium steel and durasteel components. They were used for ship's plating and internals. And super expensive and super strong metals like freak or singing steel could be used only as special construction materials - for elite ships and rare use in ordinary ships. But these illiquid, i.e. hard-to-market metals could be manna from heaven for the military, which would definitely need light and strong metals for armour. Fighters and droids will also need such metals, so the priority of their mining is lower, and many deposits I've just looked at, marked, but I don't intend to let the clever Corellians in. The contract does not provide for unlimited mining - of course, I could limit the activities of KMC both in terms of the amount of mining and the number of mining colonies - I did not lease my land, and de jure I was the owner of mining, and I only sold finished metals to KMC. Actually, they didn't show any interest in such rare and expensive metals, so everything was fine without the use of direct orders and bans. Titanium and aluminium steel were plentiful. A lot of it. KMC had enough for a long time.
For my purposes, I immediately secured a freak-rich planet.
The mission of overflight lasted for a month, and during that month I was exhausted. But finally it was time to return.
The geologists, like me, were looking forward to returning to Koros. Back, purely for them, I flew on the second-class hyperdrive - the main one. So we arrived quickly.
It's to the credit of my techs that they took most of the work off me. I didn't have to stand over my head and show them how to do it. Koros looked very similar to Alderaan - a blue planet, with green continents, with a giant city on each of them. It was hard to see where the cities were now from orbit - everything was destroyed and overgrown, but it was temporary.
Descending down into the atmosphere, I handed over control to the crew, and went to get ready myself. The city was changing fast, very fast. It was a big injection of funds - there was a spaceport on its outskirts, about five kilometres from the edge of the ruins. Temporary - a site cleared by the builders, where they cut down the forest and paved a large area, several dozen square kilometres, with concrete slabs. Temporary housing, as I realised, was not much inferior to permanent housing on the ground - full-fledged large houses, with rooms, furniture, yards and everything you need. I would never have guessed that it was a temporary dwelling if I hadn't witnessed a dozen droids assembling such a settlement in an hour in an empty field.
The ship has landed on the concrete slabs. No one had come out to meet us yet - my shelter was, as always, on the yacht, which was located on the outskirts of the spaceport. Only this time it didn't look like the biggest - a couple of kilometres away from it there were giant shipping containers - about two hundred metres high and five hundred long. Each one could hold an entire cruiser and still have room to spare.
The view of the ruins was changing - the construction droids were giant, over a hundred metres tall, walking machines. They looked like insects - two long legs, a beetle-like body, two long manipulator arms with complex grippers. The giant was as tall as a skyscraper, moving slowly, but quickly grabbing whatever it saw in front of it with its claws and dragging it into the jaws behind which the molecular furnace was located. There, pieces of buildings were melted into new building materials. However, most of it went into the rubbish - that's the cost of production. New building materials, after full accumulation, were taken to the outskirts and stored in large piles. Half a hundred droids methodically, step by step, devoured the ruins and destroyed everything they could find. Anything that wasn't building material was incinerated in the droids' belly. According to Werner, the work was unique because usually these droids are slow and retarded, moving slowly and working slowly with their arms, because of the fact that you have to calculate each movement, so as not to damage the building accidentally. Here these monsters walked around the construction site briskly and did their work quickly - not counting on accidentally broken ruins. Every day, new droids joined the workforce. However, because of their work, the noise was incredible - the constant rumble of collapsing and breaking structures, the constant noise of molecular furnaces. And sometimes they also used acoustic cannons, which used sound vibrations to destroy the construction, turning large piles of concrete into dust underfoot. And that's not counting the huge plasma cutters. The droid car park looked like a spaceport - they'd built it themselves, from slabs of the same concrete-like ferrocrite and permacrite.
Running from the cruiser to the yacht, I stepped inside and immediately headed for my room. I was tired. The company of our working managers had settled down on my yacht - we'd given up the orbital location, but the whole idea remained - everything they needed was here, including hangars with shuttles and communication facilities. Julian was sitting in the living room, oddly enough, and he was glad to see me:
- Anakin? You're here already? Why didn't you warn us? We would have met...
- Yeah, forget it," I waved my hand, "I was tired, so I was in a hurry. Especially since the distance is ridiculous.
I walked on, and Ju, who had risen from the couch, followed me, talking as I went:
- Shiai is sleeping now. He missed you...
- Okay, I'll talk to him. So, tell me, did anything happen while I was away?
- No, nothing important. KMC's finished building the second colony. The second shipment will be here in three months.
- And the first? - I asked after a moment's thought.
- The first one is waiting to be shipped. By the way, you'll take care of that, won't you? Randy also said something about sending another transporter.
- All right, I'll do it tomorrow.
Julian left me alone and went back to his room. He was seldom on Coros, and almost always flew with me across the border of the exclusion zone. His work was mostly on the other side.
In the morning, having woken up in a rather bad mood because of the fact that I had to work on the shuttle again, I, without waking the others, went to the spaceport. It was easier to fly by shuttle - the first planet was relatively close to Koros.
By the way, I still kept the huge deposits in the system secret - I marked with common beacons only those that I was going to use in the future, and that was less than a quarter of the total amount. The rest won't be known to anyone but me - the beacons don't connect to the general network and only I can find them with the help of my power. But even so... no, I don't intend to mine everything at once - firstly, I just don't need that much money, not yet. And secondly, the market of valuable metals should not be sagging because of the infusion of large quantities of my goods. With a nomenclature of twenty-seven metals and an average price of five thousand per tonne, or five credits per kilogram, one batch of two hundred and fifty million tonnes will be worth a trillion and a quarter. A quarter is exactly twenty per cent, which is exactly a trillion. This is my average arithmetic - in reality the volume of shipments and the average price varied, from a hundred million tonnes to a billion, and from one credit per kilo to ten. Mining was mostly of common metals - iron, nickel, titanium. Steel was the cheapest - ten kilos of high-grade steel for one credit. Titanium cost five credits per kilo. The price was balanced by mining singing steel - two thousand per kilogram, freak - three thousand, neuranium - fifty credits, carvanium - eighty credits, lommite - two hundred and twenty credits per kilogram. And that's including discounts. That's two hundred and fifty million tonnes worth a trillion. That's a lot of money. I even promised an additional thirty per cent discount for the first time. The reason was simple - to develop and market new products, modify old ones, and just to run an advertising campaign. I didn't want KMC to reduce its production rates due to difficulties in sales, so within six months I was ready to give metals at half price, provided that KMC would use the cheap raw materials to take a part of the market from its competitors. We signed more contracts.
Of course, Ju looked at me like an idiot, but I was thinking not only about my own pocket, but also about my partners. If KMK couldn't sell the metal, I wouldn't be laughing at all.
After packing my things, I left early in the morning and headed for the neighbouring planet, Kuar. There was the first colony of the KMC, which had dozens of mining settlements, where droids worked mostly. Loading also took place in super-heavy transports, which hung in the planet's orbit and were loaded with finished metals. The journey to the neighbouring system took only half an hour on a lambda shuttle. The transport - a giant "worm" of a dozen transport units stretched in a string, hung in orbit, slowly drifting. Smaller shuttle-crawlers swarmed around it.
My shuttle was contacted:
- Lambda zero-one-one, identify yourself.
- Anakin Skywalker. I've received word that the big one is ready for departure.
- Acknowledged. There's a hangar near the cockpit. Get in.
- Acknowledged. - I disconnected and followed the dispatcher's instructions. The transport consisted of two units - the cockpit and the engines, with shipping containers in between. Both the cockpit and the engines were larger than the transporter unit. You could fit a thousand people in there, and still have room to spare. The hangar was right next to the bridge. Not a military layout, you could tell. With the lambda in the hangar, I shut down all systems and lowered the ramp.
I shipped the first batch straight to Correlia - it was an extra hour in hyperspace. Moreover, after leaving the exclusion zone, the ship was controlled by the crew. They looked at me, but shunned me - they probably knew who I was and what title I held. Many of them wanted to ask, at least, how I managed to steer the ship in hyperspace, but no one dared.
The unloading station was an old space shipyard. A large space station that looked like an incomprehensible mishmash of blocks, pillars, tunnels and passages. We slowed down near the station and shuttles from the station pulled towards the "big one". I got off the bridge and headed for my lambda, immediately heading back. The whole process took no more than five hours, which flew by quickly.
Back on Koros, I finally relaxed and went to my office. There was a secretary droid standing in front of the office.
- Get in touch with Jen Duursima, Joey Ostrander, and Sin Conot. Ask them to assemble in my office.
- Yes," the droid replied and stood still, apparently transmitting messages.
As a matter of fact, the funds had come from small-scale mining of particularly valuable metals before, but only now it was possible to count on something to spare.
Those named came quickly - within five minutes they were gathered in my office.
- Good morning, your majesty," Shin said, glancing at his colleagues, who said hello just as casually.
- And best of luck to you. So, I'm back. Yes, the sector, as I thought, has sufficient resources. I just got back from Correllia about an hour ago. I took the first shipment to them. Joy, I'd like you to take the appropriate funds from the KMC.
- Will do," the old minister nodded, "Anything else?
- Yes, just a moment, we'll get to that. Have a seat.
After waiting for the invitation, everyone sat down at the table. I looked round at them and continued:
- Jen. Yeah, Jen, you and I haven't talked much. So far your work was not urgent and not required, so I was dealing with other problems. Now the issue of communications is in full force. The colonies are built, they need holonet and government communication channels.
The woman nodded.
Funny. The subordinates had already divided themselves into several parties by their sympathies. The first party was the military and justice, that is, Shin and Kevin. They stuck together and judging from their emotions, Shin and Kevin had found common ground. They were counterbalanced by the civilian officials - Joy, Randy and Jen. Joy was the leader, as he was the most experienced in government affairs. Separate from them was Chris Warner, a hard working man, who had a lot of influence as head of construction, which was Koros's main activity at the moment. He was in charge of everything and anything. And Jen played on two camps - in Joey's group and with Chris at the same time - the woman, apparently, sympathised in the most intimate sense, our superprorator. But the main thing was that everyone was working together, and there didn't seem to be any underhanded games going on. And if they do, well, I'll suspend them before they can make a mess of things.
- In that case, I'm counting on you. To continue construction, we need an information infrastructure," I reminded her, "so that experts can monitor the construction. In the process, as Warner promised me, there will be a need to keep in touch with suppliers in the rest of the galaxy as well as with each other.
- It will be done, your majesty," the woman uploaded. It's understandable - I'm not that much of an authority to her, but she'll go out of her way for her Chris, just to get his attention.
- Joy... you'll allocate the funds. And don't skimp, I don't want the rest of us to be tight on funds. You can give as much as you want, anything at all, as long as it's for the good of the Empire.
- Radical, - the pensioner grinned, - I understand you, your majesty.
I switched from the pensioner to my second priority:
- 'Shin... let's do it this way, you on people now, and for technique you and I will talk later and in much more detail.'
The Mandalorian shrugged and stood up:
- The men are empty for now. Her Highness has promised up to ten per cent of the Mandalorian fleet. It's not much, considering the recent cutbacks, but it's still a lot on the scale of Mandalore itself.
- Don't worry," I interrupted him, "I'll only need officers.
- That's what I'm saying," Shin nodded, "only enough for officers. And I'll have to train a lot of them to get them into senior positions.
- I trust you on that," I nodded, "I'm not very good at the military. Thanks to Cassados, my son probably already knows more than I do about military matters, so....
- I understand, Your Majesty," Shin nodded, "Don't worry, we'll take care of the personnel issue. I have a good specialist in this field. And what did you say about technology?
- We'll talk about that later, in the next few days. By the way, I asked you to prepare for the task of creating a fleet... show me what you've done.
- Right," Shin nodded and sat back down.
- In that case, let's get to work," I smiled. Everyone got up and left my office.
I was finally able to stretch, tell the droid I wouldn't be in today, and go to my chambers, where Shiai usually worked. It was only a hundred metres.
Julian was a busy man now - the Minister-Managers needed something delivered every now and then, and Julian was doing it. In fact, all the transport went through him. I did the deliveries, of course, but the accumulation of all the cargo was under his careful control in rented warehouses in outer space, near Coruscant.
I found no one here, so I went down to the level below, where the servants' quarters were located. Quite large quarters, I'd say. There was one Makoi here, which I felt through the force - the others were lower down, working.
- May I come in? - I knocked on the door. The door opened immediately - the girl almost jumped up from the bed and assumed an upright position:
- Mr Skywalker? - She immediately blushed.
- Why are you so scared? - I raised an eyebrow, "I'm just looking for Shiai.
- Cassados took him for a training session. Outdoors.
- Oh, good. Sorry to interrupt," I smiled and left immediately. Makoya was looking at the not-so-decent pages of the holonet, by the looks of it. She's got a problem with that lady, so she'll find a man. As long as her personal life doesn't affect her performance.
I didn't interfere with Shia and Nyner's training. Instead, I decided to devote a spare moment to my experiments. My brains are used to working, and during experiments the nature of activity changes, and they usually give my brains a rest. You have to think, but it is more to do it yourself and observe the results than to solve routine tasks. I had a duplicator. A machine for moulding matter by force. The machine itself was imperfect, so I set about making a better one. First, I took the coruscans with me. The very same ten crystals I found on one planet.
The holonet was full of stories about these stones, but I only looked in the encyclopaedias. Corusca is a gemstone found on the planet Coruscant. Due to its unique appearance and rarity, it has become one of the most expensive natural stones in the galaxy. Their price depends on their colour, clarity, and the presence of defects. The largest coruscant crystal, the "neutron star" was discovered on Coruscant. Its weight reached two hundred and eighty grams. Sold in the twelfth millennium before the great resynchronisation, it was the cause of a massive intrigue and as a result was traded to the planet Fresia, then already one of the highly developed and very valuable central worlds. What a thing to happen in the galaxy! They would have played cards with the planet, then it would have been crazy. Koruska went to an oligarch, and the Koruskantian oligarch bought Freesia and founded a corporation there, which after many mergers, after a lot of hand-wringing, became known as Ink. One of the giants of the fighter and aerospider market. They are among my customers, by the way, as nowhere else are super strong and lightweight metals needed more than on fighter jets.
Funny story. Now the price of those crystals that I had was quite obscenely high. But, to discover the deposit is firstly irrational, and secondly - dangerous. So, after thinking about it, I decided to keep it a secret, just in case. The handful I took, I put in the locker. The lab is one of the most secure places on the cruiser, or even the most secure. Thick durasteel walls, double doors, and identification systems that shouldn't let an outsider in. Of course, any system could be hacked, but I hoped they wouldn't hunt me down just yet.
After studying the hardware, I began to work on the duplicator. This wonderful device required modifications. Sufficiently shown itself nodes could be miniaturised, including in the body, but I could not get rid of the geometry. The duplicator chamber was still a hermetically sealed cabinet the size of a microwave. Crystal grippers on top and on the side, and pumps that pumped out air before starting.
After an hour of work, the locker grew upwards - above the duplication chamber sat the feed crystal chamber. The second crystal, with the image, I could not put inside - during the work perturbations could disturb the integrity of the image. The second crystal, which is a cube-holocron took its place next to the duplicator, I only made it a more aesthetic and technological grip. Actually, for the duplication of small and expensive parts it is difficult to imagine a more suitable design. Anyway, the machine should be serviced by me, so why make it any interior, except functional?
Having finished with the apparatus, I examined it. It was now an angular cabinet the size of a safe with three doors - the feed crystal chamber, the duplication chamber, and the pseudoholocron chamber, or image storage. My little star forge. True, it was powered by my power, and the size of the created object was corresponding, but... it was already impressive.
Having checked the work of the second duplicator, which I called "Forge" by copying the first device that came to my eyes - a bioform scanner, I left the toy alone. There was no work for it yet - I needed giant ships, giant droids, giant systems, and the duplicator....
Leaving it alone, I decided to look for a purpose for it. It's not good, I've made a thing, a necessary thing, but I don't know where to put it.
While the trial was going on, I opened pages with all modern experimental technologies and applied scientific problems. Energy... it's a pity, it would be interesting to collect a microreactor, but I don't intend to do modelling. Then - weapons technologies, space scanner technologies... This was already much better suited and could solve mass production problems much more efficiently. But it's better to find out through KMK. I didn't linger on some articles for long - the development of a new heuristic processor was blocked by the government... the development of a new medical scanner was successful, new technologies were applied... all this was promising from the point of view of the duplicator owner.
The last article... this was the most interesting, here I stayed for two hours, digging through everything I had. Two hours later, I was on my way to my office. The secretary droid stood at his post in front of the door.
- Get me Lin Riekan. It's urgent.
- Yes," the droid went silent as usual, and I went into my office and sat down at my desk. The local Skype window appeared above the desk, but without an image.
- I'm listening," Lin's voice answered, "is something wrong?
- It's nothing. What are you doing?
- I'm working with the droids... We've been working with the VLS guys to make some improvements to the EVS, specifically for our mission.
- That's great," I nodded, forgetting that my interlocutor couldn't see me, "put everything aside, I have urgent work to do. Come to my office.
- I'll be right there," Lin switched off and I walked round the office. If the case works out, it can bring me not only money, but also solve the most important, one could say, fundamental problem for all such systems as my Empire. No, I don't think so, but at least we have a chance to get ahead in more than just resource extraction.