Chapter 85: Corporate Espionage |
Chapter 85 Corporate Espionage
Rayleigh adjusted his position in the ergonomically designed copilot's chair of the newly christened Vulpine Hunter. The seat was specifically designed for humans to sit for hours without issue at the current level of artificial gravity generated by the ship.
The flowing sea of lights around the tunnel the ship sped through reminded him of the Time Vortex from the Doctor Who TV show. The front windows were made of a material called Transparisteel that Rayleigh strengthened with Divine Script and beyond them was the scenery of the hyperspace that every ship saw as it traversed the distance between stars.
After Rayleigh had gotten access to the Holonet, he looked up how Hyperdrives and Hyperspace worked. None of it made any sense of course but he got the basics.
Normally, the faster a ship moves relative to the speed of light, the more energy it takes for further acceleration because the ship's mass essentially increases the faster it goes. Therefore, it takes an infinite amount of energy to propel matter to the speed of light since at that point, the mass is infinite as well.
A Hyperdrive is a system built into spaceship engines that used something called Hypermatter and Hypermatter Particle interactions to create a form of thrust that did not cause the ship's mass to increase. Enabling a Hyperdrive caused a ship's engines to to quickly accelerate to lightspeed. When a vessel being propelled by the physics breaking thrust of a Hyperdrive then accelerated past lightspeed, it transitioned into another dimension called Hyperspace.
Hyperspace has its own version of 'drag coefficient' unlike real empty space, so infinite acceleration was not possible within and if you turned off the Hyperdrive, the physics breaking momentum carrying the ship forward would vanish and the ship would immediately exit Hyperspace.
Also, the transition into and out of Hyperspace was not comfortable to those lacking in fortitude and repeated transitions, especially one after another, could cause health concerns.
Theoretically, Hyperspace should be empty, but any real space affected by strong gravity reflected a Mass Shadow in the mirroring area of Hyperspace that had the solidity of gas, water, or a solid wall depending on the strength of the gravity in real space. Crashing into a Mass Shadow in Hyperspace was only survivable if it was not caused by a particularly strong gravity field and the crew braced themselves prior to the impact. Even if the ship survived, it would usually get slowed down to the point that it was squeezed out of Hyperspace back into real space and often damaged the engine and ship itself.
Traveling through Hyperspace was simple in concept but trickier in practice. Even the closest habitable planets were dozens to thousands of light-years away from each other. You couldn't eyeball the route either because even if you didn't see any stars directly in your way, what you saw was the state of the stars dozens or thousands of years prior. Who knows if any of the ones closer to the route exploded and turned into Mass Shadow filled Nebulas several light-years across.
There were only two ways to travel from point A to point B. The first method was Jump to Jump. You traveled a short distance of a few hundred to a few thousand light years, checked the stars, did another short jump, checked the stars, over and over until you reached your destination. Crews lacking extremely resilient species would need long breaks of hours to days between jumps meaning the entire journey could take days to weeks to months.
The second method, the one everyone actually used, was to find very long corridors of pre-confirmed empty space in a straight line. It had to be straight because turning was not really an option due to the lack of relevant physics while traveling through Hyperspace. At best you could turn a bit before exiting Hyperspace to ensure your exit point was near the planet you were traveling to at the edge of the corridor instead of stopping in the middle or on the opposite side of the local star the planet was orbiting. The finer details of which were set by navigational computers before even entering Hyperspace. These corridors were called Hyperlanes or in the case of the biggest ones, Super Hyperlanes.
For escaping pursuit, traveling covertly, sightseeing, or mapping unexplored regions of space, Jump to Jump travel was perfectly fine on the small scale.
On the larger scale though, whether it was the movement of armies or the trade of goods, the ships had to travel through Hyperlanes. And not just any Hyperlane. It had to be whichever Hyperlane or series of Hyperlanes allowed cargo or troops to be delivered the fastest. In a war, whichever army arrived at the destination the fastest had the advantage. In commerce, whichever company took the shortest time to deliver the goods could charge the most and obtain the highest profits.
Hyperlanes themselves were also a source of revenue. Even when not counting the space stations that charged for parking, fuel and repairs, most Hyperlanes either required a permit or payment to use. This did not come with nothing though. After obtaining authorization to use the Hyperlane, the ship would transmit its destination to the station nearby. The station would use real-time data from monitors on the Hyperlane to calculate the perfect course that would exit Hyperspace close to their destination planet and transmit that data to the ship's navigation computer.
Expensive ships could calculate this on their own, but the course they internally calculated would not be as perfect as the one provided by the station due to the real-time updates. And if someone tried to navigate their own course through a Hyperlane without paying, their ship would be recorded and issued a ticket that brought far more hassle than it was worth unless you were flying a stolen ship you planned to blow up after reaching your destination.
Most companies had deals with their frequently used Hyperlanes and were unreasonably protective of their routes. There are legitimate records of large companies discovering that their rivals found small trade routes that allowed transportation faster than the Hyperlanes the companies already had deals with. Rather than make new deals with whoever had authority over those trade routes to use themselves, the companies actually paid pirates to harass those trade routes to ensure that their usage would never be profitable enough to use at a level that could threaten them.
At the moment, the ship was currently traveling through one of the largest Hyperlanes in the Galaxy, the Super Hyperlane known as the Corellian Trade Spine. It started at Corellia and passed near dozens of star systems containing inhabitable planets and intersected plenty of smaller Hyperlanes as well. Simple proximity to this Hyperlane brought life and wealth to the companies that shipped goods through these planets.
Many planets didn't even have the local resources to support their population and were completely dependent on the frequent trade to survive. Some planets weren't even survivable and lacked an atmosphere that could support life, but their resources and proximity to the Hyperlane turned them into Factory Worlds inhabited primarily by construction droids.
Tails sat in the pilot's chair next to Rayleigh. She was reading the hastily printed out Manual for this ship to learn all the secrets it possessed while also giving Rayleigh a crash-course in how to fly the ship in case it was needed.
Their destination was Aztubek, a planet covered in snowy forests and frozen valleys. It was practically adjacent to the planet Javin, capital planet of the Greater Javin Region. Up until a few hundred years ago, the Greater Javin Region was a key trading hub for that sector of space and trading through that space required going through Javin, allowing Javin to take a big cut of the profits. Republic traders didn't like that and tried to get around the middleman to trade directly, but Javin fought back fiercely and even started a war over it. Unsurprisingly, the war ended quickly and the Greater Javin Territory was assimilated into the Republic to become the Javin Sector.
The moment the war ended, the corporations moved in to set up local headquarters in that sector of space to coordinate their expansions into the new region. However, rather than build on the heavily populated planet itself, they chose the cheaper option to build upon a planet less than twenty parsecs away, Aztubek. The planet was not considered hospitable by the locals due to the below freezing temperatures but the corporations got around that by not building any residential areas and simply having every employee commute from Javin. Even the slowest transports could go from one to the other in an hour and each employee stayed for a week long shift before being cycled out to avoid health problems.
As for their little team's mission on Aztubek? Corporate Espionage of course. The process? Tails and Mechanic had yet to tell Rayleigh. In fact, Tails insisted that if he wanted her to be his Padawan, if he wanted her to call him Master, he had to prove he had a fox's cunning and figure out what their plan was on his own.
It wasn't that they were hiding anything from him. The plan was for him to carry a large backpack and escort Tails through a secure building to a secure room where Tails would plug a data pad into the room's computer. The room was so secure that if the building detected that something suspicious was going on, the power to the room would be turned off. Can't hack what you can't access. But that's where the backpack came in. It was a custom battery strong enough to power the room independently. Once powered, Tails would do something and then they would leave.
Rayleigh's task was to figure out what she was doing and how it would benefit Mechanic's company.
As for the prize, Rayleigh was certainly interested. Other than the obvious reasons, Rayleigh believed that the best usage of the Force was to Teach, therefore becoming a teacher would greatly strengthen his abilities in the Force. This was not some grand secret that he had figured out. Even among the Jedi, you would not be considered a Jedi Master unless you had successfully guided a padawan to Knighthood. It wasn't just the Padawan that benefited from being guided, even the Master benefited.
Several lights on the ship's console started flashing, accompanied by a light beeping. Tails pressed a few buttons to turn off the beeping and said, "We're coming out of Hyperspace now, get ready."
Rayleigh nodded without arguing. Regardless of the strength of his constitution, it wasn't a bad idea to sit tight when exiting hyperspace, especially on the maiden voyage of a ship carrying a unique Class .45 Hyperdrive engine. Although they slowed it down to the equivalent speed of a Class 1, they still had to be ready in case anything weird happened.
The reason that they traveled slower than the ship's top speed was that they were pretending to be a transport crew with a Class 1 Hyperdrive since a Class .45 Hyperdrive didn't exist elsewhere in the Galaxy. This was a legitimate transport job with cargo from Corellia to Aztubek.
Due to the average crew's need to wait and decompress before jumping back into Hyperspace, most transport crews were allowed to stay docked planet-side for a few hours before being forced to leave. This was their window of operation.
The ship felt as if it was being pulled backwards and stretched as it exited Hyperspace and the multicolor view transitioned into the dark void of space. Thanks to the navigational computer, they exited right in front of the planet.
The planet looked as if it were made of marble with grey and white striations throughout. The entire planet was ice and snow between rows of mountains and valleys. The vast forests were covered in snow, hiding any green that would have made their presence obvious even from space.
Tails pointed out the window to a specific spot over the planet. Rayleigh glanced over and saw several space stations with plenty of turrets. This planet was not welcoming to uninvited guests.
Tails stated, "Last time I had to come here, I needed to head to Javin, find an employee who worked at the building I needed to access, enchant him into letting me replace in for his shift, take his form, do his entire shift which took a whole week, and then break into that room before sneaking out and returning to the transport back to Javin. Compared to all of that, this is a walk in the park."
Rayleigh asked, "You've been here before?"
Tails smiled but didn't answer.
At least Rayleigh now had a clearer understanding of why Mechanic and Vash insisted on a Light Freighter rather than a shuttle or luxury yacht. It really did make it easier to get in and out of places you weren't supposed to be. And although some corporations or private military installations didn't allow for non-associated vehicles and crews to approach, that could be gotten around by getting permission to access a less secure region on the planet and taking a speeder the rest of the way.
Tails opened up the communications to contact the orbiting station and transmit the clearance codes. Said codes were provided by the ones who gave the cargo, so there was no need to pay for them. Instead, they paid you and even paid the fees needed to use the Hyperlane. As for their cargo? It was basically just a bunch of sophisticated water filters. Even melted, the snow water wasn't safe to drink so disposable water filters needed to be brought in every couple of weeks but weren't worth having a dedicated contract for.
Tails unbuckled and got up as Rayleigh followed her to the ship's hangar. She called out, "HK, the rest is up to you."
HK-47 took a place in the pilot's seat and voiced, [Statement. This is a trivial matter.]
Next to the cargo bay door were two heavily customized speeder bikes. Rayleigh had yet to learn to ride them so he'd sit with Tails on this run. Once the ship was in the atmosphere, the cargo bay door would open and they'd ride out to their destination. HK-47 would handle the delivery and at the relevant time, he'd meet them as he was leaving the planet to pick them back up. The Hunter Killer Model Assassin droid was not particularly pleased with his assignment due to the lack of violence, but he had been promised that there would be violence in the future for him to enjoy.
Rayleigh grabbed the giant glowing backpack he was set to bring. It weighed over a hundred and fifty kilos but that was nothing compared to the training weights he was used to. Tails was already wrapped in thermal insulation gear but Rayleigh hadn't bothered to wear any.
Once the ship descended far enough into the atmosphere, the pair hopped on the speeder bike and started it up. The cargo door opened up and with an impulse of acceleration, the speeder flew off into the open air and started hurtling down. A few seconds of falling later, the speeder's engines warmed up enough to propel them forward. Most of the distance they could fly above the tree line. It was only when they approached the main office building that they would have to travel through the trees to avoid sensor detection.
The speeder bike was essentially not built for normal humans. The acceleration it was capable of and pin-point turning were several times faster than a pod racer. Tails could manage thanks to the Force, her body being strengthened from the Devil Fruit, and Observation Haki. Most Jedi would not be able to handle what this bike was capable of.
Rayleigh enjoyed the flight and looked forward to learning how to fly one himself. The below freezing wind carrying endless snow bounced harmlessly off his body without changing its temperature thanks to his skill with internal Tutaminis. Otherwise, flying at this speed through this weather without protection would freeze him solid in minutes.
An hour of flight later and they finally started to slow down. Tails piloted it through the winding trees for another ten minutes before they stopped to park.
After getting up, Tails looked back at Rayleigh with skepticism. "I still can't believe you withstood that without thermal clothes. I'm wearing the best thermal suit credits can buy and I'm still cold!"
Rayleigh said, "Something doesn't have to be true for you to believe it and sometimes believing something makes it true. You need to remember that when it comes down to it, a lot of powers are basically just different flavors of reality warping powered by a combination of belief and willpower."
Tails sighed with a knowing exasperation. Even before she died and had to remake her character, her strength in the Force had never reached that of a Jedi Knight or whatever level Rayleigh had attained. She left the Order as a youngling and never got a master, mostly getting by with her Devil Fruit and what she could figure out herself. She didn't even have a Lightsaber since she couldn't afford the best Jedi Talent while also getting a Lightsaber during the Character Creation.
As they approached the building site, Rayleigh asked, "What's the plan?"
Tails replied, "Get as far in as possible without triggering the alarm. When the alarm does get triggered, improvise."
Rayleigh figured that meant she'd leave it to him.
Tails shifted her appearance into a young man wearing a distinctive uniform Rayleigh guessed was standard for this place. Once they passed the last set of trees, they saw the giant complex. It was larger than an average airport with even taller buildings. It lacked a fence though. This meant there was nothing stopping the pair from directly walking into the complex's open area.
The clothes Rayleigh wore made him look like a mechanic and the fancy looking backpack wasn't completely out of place with that outfit once he cleared off the snow. Thankfully the battery was built with the specific mission in mind so it wouldn't freeze on the way there.
Tails confidently walked through the base while Rayleigh followed a few steps behind her. Even if they received looks, no one suspected them to have broken in. Why not? Because breaking in here was illogical. Ships larger than a speeder bike attempting to approach would be spotted through the camera on the orbiting station and no alarms had gone off so no one was looking for anything.
Rayleigh followed Tails around a building where she started jumping up onto the building's wall, fingers clinging to the protruding edges. She pointed to the section that was on the third floor next to her and said, "Can you use your lightsaber to make an entrance for us right here?"
Rayleigh answered, "I don't have a lightsaber though."
Tails nearly screamed, "WHAT!? What kind of Jedi doesn't have a lightsaber?!"
Rayleigh shook his head, muttered his Force Code under his breath a few times, and conjured his Sword of Babylon. With a quick flick of the sword, four flying lines of sword aura flew off the blade's edge and arranged themselves into a square before flying seamlessly into the area Tails had motioned to.
Rayleigh then used the Force to pull out the square of perfectly cut wall. "I've said it before and I'll say it again. I'm not a Jedi."
Tails looked at the precisely cut entrance with approval and swung herself in. Despite carrying the heavy battery, Rayleigh easily jumped up the three stories and through the hole before using the Force to pull the cut section of wall back in. He would not have bothered normally, but the alarm hadn't gone off due to how delicate his cut was so putting it back would allow them to travel stealthily a bit longer.
Tails looked around and said, "Well, that was easy. The next door though will definitely set off the alarm though. Please protect my soft and frail young body with your own for the next part."
The hall was empty and ended in a door that required either access codes or a keycard and they didn't have either. Instead, they had Tails who had a data pad, wire cutting tools, and lots of adaptors.
The panel below the door's card-reader was removed quickly using a Hydrospanner, local equivalent of a socket wrench powered by internal hydraulics that can twist off bolts that have been welded in place. The removed panel revealed exposed wires and circuit boards that Tails started connecting into.
Moments later, the alarm sounded. Rayleigh could hear doors further down the hall opening on their own. Mechanic footsteps were closing in.
Plenty of companies didn't trust their employees with weapons and trained security guards were expensive, so most places used a variety of security droids.
Rather than wait for them to arrive, Rayleigh said, "I'll go meet our guests," and ran to the end of the hall.
[Intruder identified. Put down your weapon and surrender.]
[Wait, is that a sword?]
Rayleigh didn't recognize the models of security droids but they seemed quite surprised at his sword. Although conjured, it looked as if it were made of metal and the rotating lines of compressed sword aura cycling the blade were not visible to the optic sensors of most droid models.
[Is this guy serious? Should we just shoot him?]
Rayleigh didn't wait for the leading unit to respond. He vanished from their sights and re-appeared behind them
[Target lost.]
[Where'd he go? Wait, there he is.]
The stupider sounding one turned back to see Rayleigh standing behind them. The pair of droids turned around, but the moment they moved, their heads awkwardly tilted and fell off their bodies.
Before the lights dimmed, the stupider one voiced aloud, [Not again.]
Rayleigh took out three more groups of droids before Tails shouted, "Bring back the battery!"
Once he returned, Rayleigh saw that Tails had gotten the door open, but the lights in the room were completely out. She said, "This is a new feature they set up after the last time I was here."
She looked at a map on her datapad, pulled out a flashlight, and walked over to a computer panel within the room. As she had before, she removed the panel and then grabbed a wire within and pulled it out before plugging it into the battery.
The lights on the computer returned and Tails plugged her datapad back into it. She said, "Hold them for 3 more minutes and come back. We need to take the battery back when we're done so they don't know that we succeeded."
As requested, Rayleigh returned and began taking down more droids. There were even a few living guards. Instead of killing them, Rayleigh simply struck them with enough force to knock them out.
"I'm done, let's go!"
Rayleigh ran back to see that the panel below the computer had already been set back as if they had never been there. He put the backpack battery back on and they returned to the square section he'd cut earlier where Rayleigh pushed it off as they jumped through and set it back. The seams of the cut were so thin that unless someone put a lot of weight on it causing it to move, no one would even notice.
More guards entered the hallway but found no one there. At this point, the alarms were all over the base and security guards were everywhere. They definitely would not make it through the clearing back to the trees without being seen and shot at, so Rayleigh picked up Tails in a Princess carry and sped off. Not to the section of trees they had initially entered from, but a different area. Rayleigh's En and Observation Haki enhanced by Babylon gave him a radar of the entire area, so he wasn't going to get lost. Instead, he ran through an area where he knew he'd be observed, but ran so fast that no one could properly shoot at him before he reached the trees. Once he had run through enough of the forest to no longer be visible, he then circled around the base back through the forest back to their speeder.
All the security guards that saw him enter through that section of the Forest called out to follow him, but by the time they entered and started searching in that direction, he was already a long distance in the opposite direction.
After reaching the speeder, Rayleigh set Tails down who calmly stated, "You run pretty fast in the snow."
Rayleigh nodded, "I had lots of practice when I was younger." Rayleigh had spent a long time in Stav Kesh, the Temple of Martial Arts in the frozen mountains of Tython. It had an Ice Rink that Rayleigh used to practice martial forms to perfection without slipping.
Tails jumped on the pilot's seat and Rayleigh buckled in behind her as the speeder took off through the woods. Thanks to the heightened security, they stayed below the tree line for over an hour before rising above and accelerating to the meetup point with HK-47.
The local security would look through the woods and never find anything, assuming that the intruder had double backed into the base. Every member of personnel would be checked and detained for the slightest reason. Since no scanner detected the small speeder bike, they'd never guess that the intruder left or that they arrived from another location. The location HK dropped off the cargo would be completely free of suspicion since there was no way someone practically on another continent could break into the secure site.
Right on time, the speeder flew to the designated coordinates and found their ship flying at low altitude with the hangar bay door opened. Tails accelerated inside before hitting the breaks on entering and sliding to a stop.
[Statement. All proceeded as planned. Inquiry. How many meatbags did you kill?]
HK-47 wasn't interested in how the job went, just whether or not he missed anything good.
Rayleigh answered, "No one killed I'm afraid. Just a few droids disassembled."
[Statement. Then it appears I was not needed after all.] Which was his way of saying that even if he had come along, he would not have had any fun anyways.
Tails took her place back in the pilot's chair as the ship ascended through the atmosphere back into the void of space. As she typed into the computer to plot a course to their next destination, she asked Rayleigh, "So, did you figure out what we did?"
Rayleigh considered it for a few moments. He said aloud, trying to work it out, "This wasn't your first time here, but your second. They upgraded the security because you had been there before and done something. As for what you did, I can only imagine that you took something. But Mechanic wouldn't be caught dead using another company's inferior designs, so there's no point in taking them... Unless."
Rayleigh turned back to Tails and said, "Mechanic did something to the designs you took the first time, didn't she? Then you had to come back. Not to steal more, but to replace the originals with the modification that Mechanic made. This wasn't corporate theft, this was corporate sabotage."
Tails laughed, "Ha! You got it! I did give you enough clues, but you really got it. And yeah. You're right. Wanna guess what Mechanic did?"
Rayleigh shook his head. "No thank you. There are way too many possibilities and I'm not nearly business savvy enough to guess."
Tails nodded at Rayleigh's admission and answered, "I won't bore you with what the designs were for, but when I first nabbed them, the factories to make it weren't even built yet. The company didn't even really care that it was stolen because no one could legally mass produce the designs due to the Republic's Copyright laws. What Mechanic did was replace a core design within the piece with something better, something the factories can still make without anyone noticing the swap."
Rayleigh asked, "Mechanic improved the designs and had you put them back?"
Tails grinned mischievously and answered, "That's right. But that design is very specific. It's actually owned and copyrighted by another company of the same size. After the production begins and sales have started, Mechanic will release an anonymous tip that this product is using the copyrighted design from the other company."
Rayleigh asked, "What will that do?"
"Compared to the losses from something as pathetic as corporate sabotage, the losses from two companies siccing their lawyers at each other will be countless times greater! The company will either have to stop production and replace the product with the inferior original designed parts, pay the licensing fee to the other company, or sell itself entirely to the other company."
Rayleigh saw the appeal. Basically it was a way to get the two companies to waste each other's money in a way that didn't really harm the employees, just the bank accounts of the higher-ups which made them less of a threat to whatever Mechanic planned to do in the future. If this was the kind of mission that Mechanic needed him to do, he'd be willing as long as the compensation was good.
Speaking of compensation, Tails asked, "So now that the job's done, where do you want to go?"
Rayleigh smiled. He had a few ideas.
*Author's Note*
Sorry about the boring exposé part on hyperdrives and hyperlanes. Had to include them for two reasons. First, the logic behind how many conflicts occur don't make any sense unless you understand what Hyperlanes are and why they are important. Second, one of the reasons for this fanfic is to allow readers to understand the world better to make it easier to write your own fanfic using what you learn here, so I hope those whose eyes didn't glaze over at the descriptions can now wrap their heads around the basic infrastructure of the Galaxy.
I saw some comments that said they didn't really understand what Mechanic was getting out of this deal, so this is an example of Space Age Corporate Espionage with some original ideas I tried to come up with.
The basic plot of this arc will be, Training, Espionage, and Random Mission during the Clone Wars. Next chapter will show what I mean by Training.
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