The Martial Unity

While Secretary Claris searched for a suitable person to help Ria and her friends set up an LLC, the five of them began ironing out the details of their operations.

They spent their entire day in Ria’s room, noting their thoughts and ideas, while listing out things that they would need for their enterprise to succeed the way they wanted it to.

”The ideal set of business operations would be a highly equipped and independent ship and crew with a set of protocols that we have perfected for our very specialized set of operations,” Misha remarked. ”Such that once we complete a given operation, we will have with us the data that proves that a planet, or then destroyed planet, was an infected world and has a lot of esoteric matter.”

”Then we transmit that information and any related samples and materials needed to prove the veracity of the information,” Ria continued knowingly. ”And hopefully, our client management department will be able to sell this information to the mining industry without needing our input on the matter. The sale, the transaction, and any other management thingy relating to that will need to be handled smoothly, so it will need to be more than just your average customer support team.”

”Surely that would require them being familiar, to some extent, with the infected world information package and material, no?” Sternon raised an eyebrow. ”I assume this information is technical, and since our customer management team will need to be able to engage with clients and answer questions, they will need to have a decent grasp of the information package itself.”

”True,” Ria muttered. ”We might need to get them trained by a relevant specialist. A specialist in the field of exo-esoteric specialists. Oh, we could have them trained by the Esoterist himself; he’s the greatest specialist in the field of esoterics, right?”

”I wouldn’t recommend that,” Misha shook her head. ”Our engagements with the Esocline Federation are already quite deep; it is best we limit them to this extent. A man like that could very easily exert greater influence on our operation if we also let him. Speaking of which, we will need to have that ship we commissioned from him to be thoroughly debugged and scanned for bugs, backdoors, and other potential compromises. I do not trust the Esoterist not to try at least some mischief. Preferably…”

She directed a pointed gaze at Ria.

”I would like the Kandrian Empire to be responsible for this. I simply wouldn’t trust any other polity to vet the Esoterist’s work. It’s too risky to simply have faith in him, even if he is not incentivized to put us at harm.”

”He could try putting like a sneak tracking system in our ship so that he gets first access to all of our finds,” Runark muttered.

”That is actually quite plausible. Yeah, I’m with Misha on this one, Ria.”

Ria grimaced. She didn’t like relying on the Kandrian Empire, especially as her status as princess.

But while she could be stubborn, she wasn’t irrationally hard-headed to the point of extreme self-harm, either.

”Fine, I’ll have it vetted by the Kandrian Empire,” Ria muttered. ”I want the ship to be as well-kept a secret as possible. So I suppose it would be good to have the Kandrian Empire’s cybersecurity experts scour the entire ship’s software and hardware.”

”There are other requirements that the ship has. Beyond just the basic three-shift crew needed to run the frigate for extended periods of time away from human civilization, we will also need specialized operators for the highly advanced stealth systems, not to mention specialized technicians and scientists for the quantum entropy sensory technology that the stealth surveyor is going to be equipped with,” Misha remarked thoughtfully, adding it to the list of things that they would need for their business under a sub-section titled ’skilled labor.’ ”And in addition, these people will have intimate access to our operations, so these will also have to be high-skill people. We will need to conduct extensive background checks on virtually everybody work with, even vet them with the mind sense of a Martial Sage.”

”We’re also going to be ruffling a lot of feathers, so strict security measures and protocols will be very necessary too,” Sternon replied thoughtfully. ”If we’re not careful, we might just make some enemies who determine that they will need to destroy us because of how much of a threat we are to their profits.”

”We have Sayfeel, though,” Runark gestured to the silent and stoic Transcendent Candidate. ”He’s the best guard you can ask for.”

”No,” Ria shook her head, directing a glance at him and back. ”He’s tasked with protecting my identity. We will have to hire other pathwalkers for security. Very strong. And very reliable. Vetting all of these people is going to be a nightmare.”

”But if we get it right, then we will be able to create an enterprise that will run like clockwork and sell highly precious intelligence to the rest of human civilization about the location of infected worlds,” Runark noted, grinning. ”It will be fun watching everybody have a meltdown trying to understand how one small company is able to identify infected worlds one after another.”

Ria nodded. ”We need to ensure that they never find out how we’re actually doing it, which kind of sounds very difficult, now that I think about it.”

”I would recommend that we file a large number of patents regarding technologies that sound like they could be useful for finding infected worlds,” Misha offered an interesting idea. ”It would serve as the perfect decoy for people trying to investigate how and why we are so successful.”

Ria’s eyes lit up at those words. ”That’s a great idea. That’s right. We should have all kinds of decoys to throw them off the scent. Otherwise, they will have guessed that this is the result of a pathwalker’s special power.”

That would very quickly lead them to suspect Ria, which was the last thing that the princess wanted.