| Senator_Cynum | Date: Tuesday, 08 April 14, 3:58 AM | Message # 1 |
 Lieutenant colonel
Group: Users
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| Here's just one of thousands of examples where the Trade Federation has been nothing but benevolent for worlds. It's got no interest in doing evil things at the behest in a man in a black dress yet. It's be great if we could all stop and review our attitude.
Memoirs of Firmus Kett, Captain, Trade Defense Force
My great-great-great-grandfather Findal was the one who turned Kett Shipping into a Trade Federation subsidiary. He was glad to do it. And despite all that’s happened recently, I’m glad he did too.
My family has been running ore and nova crystals out of Cotellier for centuries — there isn’t much out our way in Rseik Sector, but there are credits to be made, if you work hard enough and learn from your mistakes. We run transports up the Sanrafsix Corridor to Kabal, where the ore and crystals get offloaded and sent to factories in the Inner Rim or the Expansion Region. Then back to Cotellier with grain, ag supplies, whatever we can turn around for a few credits more. We aren’t barons or anything, but we have our family holdings, investments on Ma’ar Shaddam and Rseik proper, and a retreat on Z’trop we always swear we’ll get to more often than we do.
Why do we have all that? Because of the Trade Federation.
By Findal’s time the Republic had basically ceased to exist beyond Kabal. Tamarin Sector was a joke — its Senator was a spice lord from Sevarcos who only traveled to Coruscant when his latest wife wanted to see the opera. Its sector fleet’s only concern was making sure the spice haulers delivered andris and carsunum to Kabal or Svivren. As long as that happened, they didn’t care what happened elsewhere in the sector. There were pirates everywhere — the Sanrafsix was a no-go zone beyond Dravian Station, and even there you went armed and kept your blaster loose in its holster. Our Planetary Security Forces weren’t much better; they weren’t pirates, but they were outgunned by them. They stuck close to port and hoped nothing would happen.
One year we ran six convoys to Kabal and had four of them taken by the pirates of Tertiary Fujar. We ransomed three of them; the Fujari took the fourth and sold the crew to Karazak slavers. The next year we ran five convoys and only one made it back. For a couple of years Findal ran convoys across the Little Minos Run instead, but then the Hajara gang showed up on Corva Yag and started taking transports there. What could Findal do? You never saw a Judicial hull past Kabal. Out here we had a government that couldn’t fight pirates; in Tamarin the government and the pirates were one and the same.
Then came the Bordal Contagion of 214 BBY. I don’t know what it was — some kind of plague that left people strangling on fluid in their lungs, awful stuff. I think it was the first time the Republic had thought about Rseik sector in a century or so. They figured out an antidote on Tauber and started sending holds full of it to Kabal. We sent transports to fetch it — everybody did. The Fujari raided the first convoy, stripped the engines and the hyperdrives and set the transports adrift without power – six million doses ruined. The Republic did nothing. Eventually the Rseikharhl set up their own labs to manufacture the stuff themselves, but the delay cost millions of Bordali lives.
That was when Findal, the Rseikharhl, the Ma’ar Shaddam Weaponsmiths Guild and a bunch of other interests got together and decided to approach the Trade Federation. They arranged a secret meeting with a Federation agent on Syned — Findal’s diary says he was a Balmorran half the size of a shipping container. The Balmorran pored over all the datacards they’d brought him — intel on pirate bands and craft, financial records, planetary profiles, the works. Took it all in fast as an accounting droid. He said yes the next day — Kett Shipping, Rseikharhl Hullspace, Cotellieri Transports Limited, we all became Trade Federation members.
The first thing the Federation did was bring in a flotilla of gunboats and system patrol craft via Svivren, backed up with a pair of Munifexes and aCaptor. First trip to Kabal, the convoy hit an ice-asteroid screen and reverted to realspace at Tertiary Fujar. Here came the pirates, only this time they were looking down the barrels of a couple of dozen TDF guns. An hour later the Fujari ships were space junk and their main asteroid base was a crater. Findal said it was the happiest day of his life. A week later the Hajaras got theirs, too. Within a decade the Trade Federation had upgraded spaceport facilities at Kirdo and Laria, established a depot for goods at Tyne Albamon, blazed a faster route to Svivren, and installed a TDF marine post at Dravian Station. By then we were running more than 20 convoys a year, and not losing a single one.
Senator Prentiss Cynum
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Senator for the Trade Federation
Chair of the Trade Commission
Chair of the Security Committee
Message edited by Senator_Cynum - Tuesday, 08 April 14, 3:58 AM |
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