Mid 962 ARR (38 BBY)
I decided we would travel in style.
With the amount of money we were making, we could splash out and hire an older J-type Nubian yacht. Nubia stardrives had a longstanding collaboration with the Theed Palace Space Vessel Engineering Corps (a needlessly long name if you ask me) to produce luxury variants of their yacht line for use by the Royal Family and other important dignitaries, like Senator Palatine, on Naboo.
A number of brand-new J-type 327s had just been delivered to palace. The older type 217s were sold to a high-end travel agency, and I would be the first customer to hire what had once been one of the King's personal yachts. The chrome finish of official Royal Naboo craft had been painted over, but with a metallic blue colour that was no less classy. It looked to me like a kind of space sports car, which was an added excitement I couldn't really explain to my fellow travellers.
This wasn't extravagance and hubris, well not entirely. If we were going to go negotiate with a major galactic hyper-corporation, I wanted to make sure we looked the part. This was a departure from my earlier under-the-radar thinking, but we agreed it was the best way to make the most of the opportunity in front of us.
To that end, with much groaning and whining, I had even agreed to wear fancy business robes, so I looked the part of an important member of the Naboo elite. I had asked Cota to pick them out for me, not remotely trusting Kyla and Asherré on such a sensitive matter.
The yacht was also a truly comfortable option for a small group of people, which given how apprehensive Brihlalon seemed to be about space travel, made sense. It came complete with a small crew, captained by a veteran of the Naboo Security Services named Garne Jestos, which we found reassuring.
Okay, this trip would be costing me over 60,000 credits (not counting Tuls's considerable fee), a price at which you could buy a used freighter. Still, given the importance of the trip, it wasn't even a poor investment.
---
I had left Cota in charge in my absence, though I wasn't expecting much to come up in that time, we were only going to be away for a few weeks. Jaarl and the junior technicians were in the process of overhauling our little factory. They were installing droid assisted production lines, a small plasteel fab and other things we would need to fulfil our order.
We were also putting in place some more robust security. Panaka had given us some suggestions/demands to ensure that the intelligence droid they had leant us would be safe, and so that the SecuriPADs could not be tampered with by intruders before being handed over to the security forces.
We were getting settled into our take off seats on the yacht, appropriately named the Pride of Theed, peering out the windows to see the bustling spaceport. The captain's voice came across the intercomm advising us to make sure we were strapped in, as we were taking off.
The ship lifted off the pad quietly, smoothly rotating in the air before pointing its nose upwards and climbing up through the atmosphere. I had watched ships coming and going from the spaceport hundreds of times, but being on one for the first time was quite surreal.
This wasn't the space shuttle launches of Earth with clouds of smoke and roaring rocket engines. It wasn't even like an aeroplane jet racing along a runway. It wasn't even like a swan taking flight from a lake. It was smooth seamless travel through the air, with the sky slowly fading around us until before we knew it, we were in space, looking down at the planet below.
Naboo looked different from Earth. That shouldn't have surprised me, but in the moment it did. The vast swamps and jungles that covered large parts of the planet, giving it more of a green tinge when viewed from space. Theed with its waterfalls, surrounded by vast green meadows was not typical of the wider planet's environment and spoke to determined terraforming efforts in the distant past.
"We're about the enter hyperspace, please remain seated while we make the jump." said came Captain Jestos's brisk professional voice. Through the window I watched as the stars stretched into long streaks as the ship finally disregarded all the laws of physics and raced away across the galaxy.
---
It was an almost seven-day journey to Vulpter, which made me even more thankful for choosing to travel in our comfortable yacht. There was even a stewardess named Sevé, who would bring us food and drink throughout the journey. Having travelled in far less sophisticated cars and planes on Earth, it never felt to me like the ship was even moving, but somehow Brihlalon spent the first two nights in his fresher suffering from space sickness. "There's always one" Sevé had assured us.
You could describe Naboo, or at least Theed, as a futuristic utopia. Classical architecture merged seamlessly with cutting-edge technology, with an engineered environment that's perfect for human life.
Vulpter is the opposite of that, an industrial wasteland of ugly factories pouring pollutants into the air, interspersed with vast landfills and junkyards. A barely breathable atmosphere, providing a thick haze of smog over everything. Kyla and Asherré wisely decided to stay aboard the Pride, while Ona, Brihlalon and I braved the short disgusting walk from our landing pad into the corporate headquarters of Arakyd Industries. It was made all the worse how uncomfortable I felt, shuffling along in the expensive crimson business robe I wore to make an impression.
I suppose garish, yet miserable, would be the best description of the huge reception lobby we found ourselves in. There was lots of gold of course, gilding all sorts of joints and edges. Grand ugly sculptures were spaced in-between the dark stone columns. It was a space built to intimidate, rather than impress, which given Arakyd's early history of allegedly murdering its competitors seemed rather on brand.
We directed through to our pre-arranged meeting with Hordis Boil, a fairly senior executive in the labyrinthine organisation, who after some back and forth communication facilitated by Brihlalon, had agreed to meet with us. While our planned order was tiny for Arakyd, it was rather unusual and had caught the interest of the ambitious Vulptereen.
Sitting in Boil's office, across from the Vulptereen man and his protocol droid, was the most alien experience I had yet experienced in this galaxy. For one thing, Boil had a large shovel shaped snout, with vicious looking tusks sticking out at odd angles. Over his barrel shaped body he wore something resembling a waistcoat, covered in gold embellishments. The office was decorated much like the reception lobby had been, but with dark red accents, that simply made it even more sinister. Even the protocol droid was unsettling, an Arakyd made version in black casing with large insect-like eyes.
The droid translated Boil's welcoming pleasantries, or at least I assume it was translating. The grunts from Boil were completely unintelligible, he could have been swearing at us or singing us a lullaby for all I could tell. The droid asked us to explain why we had come. We had sent a list of our desired purchases, bulk quantities of various droid components, especially the D3-Scoutbrains, ahead of time, but it was clear they wanted context.
I explained that we were a small local business on Naboo that made electronic devices, and we had chosen their products for certain components of our devices. We had been using spare parts purchasable from local wholesalers, but we had grown to the point where we needed far more than could be provided by this.
It took a while, but I finally worked out Boil's concern. He thought we wanted to use their droid parts, to sell our own droids, competing with their models. I had been reluctant to show what it was we were making, for fear of them somehow attempting to produce their own version of the pad.
This wasn't how companies like Arakyd thought. Arakyd made droids, other Techno Union members made pads. Arakyd was not even a full status member and so was not concerned about undermining their partners either. Their number one priority was in maintaining their dominant position in the surveillance and scouting droid space.
I showed him the SecuriPAD, though politely deflected any serious questions about how it worked, beyond that it was a relatively unimpressive scanner, which used the droid-brain to process sensor data. I somehow neglected to mention the impressive part, that it was also an affordable holocomm capable of utilising military grade encryption. Who would imagine something so impossible?
Whenever the droid probed for some more technical questions, Brihlalon would politely interject that those details were subject to confidentiality agreements made with the Naboo security forces… agreements which we ourselves had insisted on for this reason.
I did explain that we were selling this first large batch to the Naboo security forces, and hoped that if it proved successful, other small local security forces might have similar interests. If so, that would lead to further orders from Arakyd in future. I expressed how helpful it was that Boil himself was interested, and that it might be useful for us if he were our go to person for these supplies in future. This of course being code for: this could help Boil personally within Arakyd.
Brihlalon took up the discussion from this point, as we moved into some legal issues, which strangely we thought would be a net positive in this case. The reason Vulpter is in such a horrific state, was that the Trade Federation had dominated the planet for hundreds of years and viewed it as nothing more than a factory.
Most Vulptereen hated the Trade Federation. Arakyd Industries as the only major corporation on the planet not under their control, hated the Trade Federation more so than anyone else.
The Trade Federation, have a monopoly on shipping newly made droids to Naboo. This was part of the much-maligned trade agreements made for the Federation to export Naboo's plasma. This essentially meant Naboo, like many other planets, were closed to Arakyd as a market. The monopoly does not however, cover components and spare parts. There was no need for it to, there wasn't a single droid foundry on Naboo, so the components trade was too small to include in the treaty.
We were giving Arakyd a way to get one over on the Trade Federation, by essentially selling some of the most valuable parts of their droids to us in pieces. The bragging rights this would give Boil within Arakyd, were probably worth more to him than the financial parts of the deal.
A further condition was that we would have to sign an agreement, not to produce our own surveillance droids, which could directly compete with Arakyd models for ten years. Since I had no intention of doing so anyway, it was an easy concession to make.
Ona then took over and haggled with the protocol droid over the costs of the parts. Our offer was rather than take any kind of bulk discount, we would pay the full price someone would buying a single spare part at retail. What we wanted instead was for Arakyd to be responsible for delivering the parts to Naboo for this initial order. Boil assured us he could deliver our whole order within a month. The profit margin on the SecuriPads was so big that we really didn't need to force down the component prices further.
Boil summoned an aide who brought a datapad contract for me to sign once Brihlalon had checked through it. We ended buying parts for 20,000 SecuriPads, deciding it would be good to have further inventory on hand for other potential buyers. Vulptereen don't shake hands, so once the agreement was signed, I bowed slightly, expressing my appreciation before we headed back to the yacht.
I was very satisfied, and more than a little relieved, to have concluded our business on Vulpter in just one meeting. I feared we would be going back and forth for days, and the planet really had nothing worth seeing. The moment the ship was refuelled, I had the captain set course for Corellia and continue with our journey.