Collection 57 (Patreon)

Collection

Chapter 57

-VB-

John Wu

Victoria, Arlaoskas System

3005 August 11

It took his noble house two weeks to set-up a new business and obtain the “Starfarer Merchant” license needed to travel through the stargates. 

His family was initially intent on selling the luxury goods that came from Victoria itself, but John asked them to hold off on it after he found out about two things. 

One, the stargates weren’t just a mode of transportation but relays for a new interstellar communication system called UNet. 

Two, according to the Clan Arlaoska’s own “website” on the UNet, each of their stations produced cheap fuel and supplies on top of their own unique commodities. And what did the Victoria Fortress Station produce? Computers.

… Yeah, he was less interested in those computers and more interested in those cheap fuels and supplies. 

Or so he thought. 

“Why the fuck is this computer running so fast?!” he asked incredulously as he kept running all sorts of programs on it. The operating system used by the computer was simple enough to use and intuitively easy to comprehend. No, what surprised him more was how smooth programs ran on it, how many pixels were on the screen, how light it was, and how much data it could keep on its basic hard drive! 

1 terabyte?!

For what would they even need this much data for? Maybe if someone worked in the entertainment industry, then they might have a need for it, because not even the bloody Star League in its heyday sold commercial computers with this much basic hard drive capacity. 

And it was only one thousand C-Bills for each computer. 

What’s great was that these computers also had half a dozen data ports for the half a dozen or so different connector types widely used in the Capellan Confederation (and of course, the Arlaoskas Union).

“Oh yeah,” he muttered to himself. “This is a great money maker.”

“Of course, it is.”

He jolted and whirled around, and found himself face to face with …

His heart lurched. 

“F-Fleetmaster Arlaoskas,” he stuttered out. 

The man who conquered a fifth of the Capellan Confederation stood before him. 

“Relax, Mister Wu,” the man smiled. “I simply wanted to meet the first person who took the chance to visit my fortress station for commercial reasons.”

John blinked. “I’m the first?” 

“Indeed. Aside from the fact that jumpships and dropships have been a bit scarce, people are wary about visiting the giant space station bristling with guns, even when I advertised that there was money to be made.”

He stared at the titleless king of the Union. 

“Why do you not sell these yourself?” he asked instead, and immediately regretted it. The Fleetmaster might take offense to his question, or worse, take his advice and John would lose out on profit. 

“Because money is not what I am after,” the fleetmaster replied with a smile. “After all, I can make these, which means I have the factories dedicated to their production. I make jumpships. I make dropships. I have my own hydroponics. So why would I even need to sell these?” 

Caught off guard by the fleetmaster’s verbose response, he found himself questioning the same thing. 

Because he was right. 

This was a man who conquered a fifth of the Capellan Confederation. For what use did he have in making high quality computers and selling them for cheap at clearly non-retail prices? 

“... information?” he tried. 

“Hmm. I suppose one can call it that, but no. Information is not what I want from selling these. Care to try again?”

What would a conqueror want? What would someone with the fleetmaster’s level of power want? 

… What would he do if he was in the fleetmaster’s position? What did he make so far and how did this commercially cheap supercomputer come into it? What kind of a puzzle piece was it? 

Then he had an idea.

“... Do you want the people of the … Union … to be more connected?” 

The fleetmaster… grinned. 

“I would certainly like that, yes.” 

After that, the fleetmaster left, leaving him to do his shopping. 

It wasn’t until he filled up the cargo hold and left that John realized something. 

The fleetmaster never said that he was right, merely that the connectedness was something he would like. And the question haunted him like a friendly but ultimately unwanted ghost. 

-VB-

Edward Arlaoskas

Victoria, Arlaoskas System

3005 October 1

It was working. 

My war of retaliation and conquest had dipped the economy, of course. That was expected. But after I began to put my “opinion” on the side of economic recovery via many means, the Union was seeing an economic upswing not just from internal trading but also from exports. 

See, I didn’t think about it then before but now that it was happening in front of me, I had to recognize that people were smarter than I was despite how much I had improved myself in a variety of ways. 

When I set up the stargate network, I did to boost internal trades and military defense. This did happen. Along with the reveal of the stargate and the existence of my non-shuttle warship fleet, trade picked up quickly because entrepreneurs of the Union began to utilize any and all service and investment to buy cheap jumpships from me and start trading. Food traveled this way and that. Ammunition moved, too. Materials. Mechs. Commodities. Intermediate products. Luxury goods. 

My data showed that the Union had not just recovered from the economic downturn suffered during the war but had grown by at least 10% on average across all industries. As great as that looked, the actual gains were mostly attained by a single industry: retail trade. That industry alone saw a growth of 86%, nearly doubling the pre-Union numbers. 

And how did it do that? 

While the sale of jumpships, dropships, and the like by yours truly contributed heavily to retail trade, the vast majority of the trade came from the people of Union buying things and selling them internally and abroad. A good example of this would be food. Despite how important food was to life itself, plenty of colonies simply didn’t produce enough food for themselves either because of hostile planetary conditions or due to industry specialization. 

For example, Victoria with its one point five billion people did not have farming. With only 9% surface water and supporting a mostly boreal climate, it was not capable of farming. Period. Most of its food, as such, came from Egress and Gunthar. However, even this was taxing because transporting food for that many people was ridiculously hard. 

That’s where the stargate network came in. With my stargates, dropships carrying hundreds of metric tons of foodstuff no longer needed to wait for a jumpship. They could use the stargate to travel to their destinations directly. 

So what happened was an increase in the rate of transportations and transactions. This then led to an increase in food sales as well as other commodities that were previously unprofitable to ship. 

And Victoria could now export commodities cheaply as well on those same dropships. 

In September alone, there were over a thousand dropship landings compared to just over a hundred from last year. 

And that was on Victoria alone. 

The other industry that saw a huge increase in growth was the transportation business. 

Why? 

Aside from dropships transporting goods internally, people realized I wasn’t exactly stopping them from transporting goods from one realm to another through the Union. 

This meant that the Federated Suns and the Taurian Concordat could ship whatever they wanted to sell to the Free Worlds League and the Magistracy of Canopus and vice versa by completely bypassing the Capellan Confederation and time. 

How?

Jacson.

It was a Capellan Confederation system that I hadn’t incorporated into the Arlaoskas Union because I didn’t blockade it, so it wasn’t signed over to me. However, as soon as I was done with the confederation, the Federated Suns jumped in and took Jacson.

It took them some time for them to get their hands on it, but ultimately, it was a system with just a company of mechs and a total of one regiment defending it. So it fell to the Davion hands, and this directly put them at my border…

And within jump range of Victoria. 

As such, Victoria became a hub of sorts for a new FedSun-FWL international trade route. 

This upswing in trade internally and internationally made people dependent on me.

And now I was just waiting for someone to try to disturb it. 

**COUGHCOUGHCOMSTARCOUGHCOUGH**