The Six-eyed Beast

- Was there a D-9 among the items?

Nappa hesitated. The superior distributor for the sector had told her to keep the embarrassment down, but the milky-looking human on the other end of the comm had opened the conversation by sending her a CO ID, which bore the chance that someone was on the case, maybe even relieving some of her issues soon.

- There was.

- What was the original destination for this item?

- Let me see...

The larger barbs were hitting some holo keys circling around the feather.

- Iceni 36b. A research outpost.

- What does an outpost need a D-9 for?

- Says here they had some experiments planned.

Good. They wouldn’t pressure the fleet to give back the D-9 if he found it, likely patiently waiting for the next shipment, enjoying their time off.

- That’s all, thank you.

- Comm ... Captain, what is the purpose of your questions?

- Just getting an overview of what’s floating around in this sector. Thank you. Basil out.

Basil would soon have to stop using his CO ID in order to avoid issues with his former employer. But now he had a lead. He’d been in this sector before, 10 years earlier, back when he was with CO. He had been part of a team that was tasked with bringing down the Makaan Triangle, a criminal enterprise deeply engrained in the surrounding systems. CO was expecting a quick operation, effortlessly squatting a nuisance aside. But they soon found out that the Makaani had been operating in one form or the other for almost 80 years, and not without reason. What started as a simple protection racket soon evolved into running dozens of franchise locations, selling weapons, illicit drugs, and the occasional person under the cover of Makaani cuisine spreading. They had even built up a fleet of cargo vessels, skillfully evading League patrols. When CO arrived, the then leader, only known as “Blind Bird”, had transformed the violent and greedy showoffs that ran the organization earlier into civilian-looking, soft-spoken traders secretly engaging in profitable and dangerous business. They looked like your average neighbors but were capable of some of the most heinous disciplinary measures ever recorded within the League, mostly spacing people just until they were about to die, and then nursing them back to health, just to do the same all over again. Every single of these incidents had to be watched by the remainder of the local cell, as a warning. They were also organized on a strict non-interference basis, meaning everyone only ran their part of the business without knowing who else was in it, or above them.

CO tried for months getting a foot in the door. They did capture some freighters, but there never were any traces towards the rest of the organization. All the crew knew was that they were told to get freight A to place B. There were some people though that had to keep the whole machine together, they were known as “coaches”, the name being deliberately average. They went to a location, set up a group, made it clear what happened if anyone strayed too far from the instructions, asked questions or showed off their wealth, and then they disappeared. Any further communication was done via public mail services, simply telling them to disband, expect more work, or what to buy with the profits. The financial trail also went cold quickly, since each cell would simply invest their earnings into whatever entity they were told to invest, sometimes, CO had the suspicion it was to manipulate stock prices, sometimes, it was done to set up enterprises with new capital, and sometimes it had nothing to do with the Maakan Triangle, it was just a dead end or a ruse.

The only conclusion CO drew from it that whoever steered the path of the Triangle was already well-established in the higher echelons of the sector’s elite, being able to balloon their wealth indirectly by ownership of or partnership in the largest entities profiting from a multitude of small, but consistent income streams and the misfortune of foreign investments.

All of this had not been a large problem for the League, since it also meant some development for the sector, with new bases, outposts, mining stations, freight hubs and the like springing up. The League was not too interested in looking closer, until Chiq-Chi entered the scene. It was by far the most potent recreational substance ever invented within the known sectors. It had the downside that it had to be adapted to every single race and their biological brains ‒ and didn’t work at all on some, but if a brain had a pleasure system, it worked wonders on it. The effects were highly personal, but most agreed it gave them intense levels of contentedness with themselves and their existence, especially areas people usually disliked about themselves or their life. People on the planets in the area started to go about their days feeling nothing but peace, calm, and happiness, without suffering any side effects. The stupidest person suddenly felt very intelligent, traumatized people suddenly forgot their triggers, people who considered themselves unattractive stopped saving up for expensive body modifications and just felt confident and at peace with themselves. Basil had once tried it after they caught a freighter with several crates of the stuff aboard and for 3 full days, he forgot the war and found both the League as well as his position in it pretty okay. When he sobered up, there were no issues, no crash, he just went back to the driven, frustrated, and hungry man he had been before. He then knew how big the problem was.

In a way, the Makaan Triangle had itself opened the door for its own destruction. CO had gotten nowhere close to solving the issue, capturing only an estimated 6% of illegal trade in the sector over a span of 14 months, but the overall economic development first plateaued and then started declining sharply. This was a result of people being happy with the status quo as long as Chiq-Chi was cheaply and readily available. Once more, it had turned out that unhappiness was the driving factor behind life moving forward.

That’s when Basil suggested to his superiors to fight fire with fire. Those who were silently reaping the benefits of illicit trade in the sector were the ones most interested in getting Chiq-Chi off the streets, since what they had built over the preceding decades was crumbling in the economic downturn. Basil argued it would be possible to drive a wedge between the old criminal enterprise of the Makaani and the new drug enterprise of the Makaani. His superiors agreed and for a few months, CO was only hitting the drug trade and very clearly ignoring any other criminal activity. It wasn’t long before their efforts to reach out to the elites in the sector paid off, they finally had people willing to talk to them. They inched closer and closer along the distribution and production network that was woven into the system on ships, small stations, and asteroids. Unbeknownst to Basil’s team however (he was made Ltd. Commander for his success), the Senate had made Chiq-Chi a priority since it was already spreading to other systems and slowing down progress. Famously, it had reached the core systems where it had little effect on the League’s economy since most people there were already living happy, unproductive lives outside the League’s needs. CO had sent a second team, and they were keen on delivering fast results so whatever intel was fed up the chain was also passed to the second team. Their leader, a Nabui called Hepter, decided it was worth a shot to take out a group of coaches who had met to discuss the accumulating leaks from their leaders above them.