-Chapter 12-
A/N: In lieu of a beta reader, I update my old chapters as I find mistakes. This way I do not have to keep you away from much deserved updates, and still end up with a polished story. IF you notice major grammar or spelling mistakes or plot holes on chapters more than five from the most recent chapter, feel free to PM me and I will do my best to clarify!
'That no good piece of… Hanging up on me! Takes over a planet and suddenly doesn't have time for poor stupid Bellamere. Maybe I should take his planet and shove it up his ass! See how he likes that. I hope those Jedi burnt his beautiful house into the ground!' Bellamere was driving the deathtrap back to Anakin's compound. Maybe he'd just surrender to the Jedi and claim that Anakin had kidnapped and coerced him, that he droids were following Anakin's orders (To be fair, they were) and that the Jedi that had followed him had gotten lost, VERY lost. Yeah... that would work. He could taste the sarcasm in those notions. What he saw when he got back was nothing like what he was expecting, and cemented in his mind the absolute lack of forgiveness the Jedi would have for anyone who had ever been associated with Anakin.
With broken brown robed bodies and sliced up chassis surrounding them, Mace Windu was dueling against the General Droid, one with a purple lightsaber and the other with a wide greatsword made out of a Cortosis-Beskar alloy that had to weight five hundred pounds, easily six hundred. But the General, 'CM-MD, I think his designation was' thought Vos, was whipping the massive thing around like a reed wand. Mace had several huge, bleeding gashes where he had been caught by the tip attempting to dodge, and his right arm was dislocated, maybe broken. If Bellamere had to guess, Windu had tried to block the greatsword head on, thinking that he would simply slice right through, no big deal, and then had his world rocked by far upwards of five thousand pounds of pressure converging on his sword arm in an instant. Now Bellamere had heard that strength enhancement using the force is significant, but that kind of pressure without any kind of warning? He was probably lucky to still have the arm.
For obvious reasons, Vos did NOT want to get involved. He trusted Anakin to build death machines, so he would have to put his NCs on the General Droid and call in backup. Before leaving, Anakin had given him the command codes to activate his reserve force in case of attack. So that was exactly what he did. He ran inside the main building and punched the codes into the console just inside the door. A whirring ensued before metal footsteps started running up a hidden ramp in the courtyard. Through a nearby window, he saw one thousand cortosis plated K7 units pour into the courtyard, longswords drawn and striking at the Jedi Battlemaster in a coordinated manner, aiming to incapacitate. Mace lasted a long time, but eventually they gave the CM-MD the opening he needed to lop Mace's one still working hand off and then knocked him out with a powerful pommel strike. A few of the K7s carted the Jedi off to the medical center. He was a high value prisoner so he would be treated… Well. At least until Anakin got back that is. They hated each other with a passion, so nobody could really say at that point.
Flashback
On the day of the Flood, Bellamere had been going about his day, ordering around the droids building the track around, adding in little things that Anakin hadn't thought of. It wasn't a surprise, truly. While a nominally superb businessman, Anakin had far more experience on the track betting on himself or with a gun in someone's face telling them that a deal is good and that they should thank him, rather than in a lounge chair with a communicator and a handful of NCs just begging him for permission to multiply. Bellamere on the other hand was nearly seventy. He had attended over twenty years of higher education in business and infrastructure on worlds like Alderaan, Naboo and Coruscant. He also had lots of experience with the fine arts, with computers, with physical and digital design and had taken minor interest in nearly every available topic for study at all the universities he had attended. Bluntly, Anakin was a street rat from a backwater world who was nearly twenty. An amazingly talented and gifted street rat who was a savant in multiple fields, sure, but the nature of his education (Informal and fleeting at best) and his short span of years betrayed him when it came to the details in the fields that Bellamere thrived in. And Bellamere knew that Anakin was aware of his shortcomings. He had after all hired the best available talent, regardless of his personal feelings at the time.
He heard it first, Noise so pure and loud that he couldn't identify it. Then he saw a geyser shoot up not a mile away, seemingly straight into orbit. Vos knew it didn't and couldn't actually shoot into orbit, but from his perspective, it was significant. It continued on like that for nearly an hour, Then the rain started. For the longest time, it seemed like it would never stop. He was sure that the Tuskens were doing some sort of religious chant, this would seem like a doomsday scenario to them. And probably to many of the heavily superstitious moisture farmers too. Vos chuckled at that, Sure this kind of thing was startling, but Anakin had warned him about this so he wasn't caught too off guard. Vos looked over the edge of the canyon wall leading to beggar's canyon. A roaring river was already coursing through. The hardened rock walls were washed of all dirt and sediment and looked even more jagged than before. Vos had been hoping that the deluge from releasing that much water would be a little bit more gradual, but he couldn't say that he was surprised that Anakin decided to do it this way.
Anakin had simply set off a massive bomb inside the mountainside above the entrance to the pressurized reservoir. Something about a 'T.' So much for happy mediums.
The rain continued full steam for an entire day, then a week, after that the geyser seemed to become less and less powerful until Vos could barely see the top of it if he stood ten miles away. He was getting so sick of it that he almost wished that Tatooine was a desert agin. The lowest elevations were no longer land, and instead small seas had expanded outwards across the planet. Vos had even felt some cold and hot fronts moving around rapidly and put in an order for some meteorological equipment for future use. After a month, the rain finally stopped being fed by the geyser, now low enough that the water it shot up came straight back down and fed directly into Beggar's canyon, filling it to the brim and keeping it that way until it emptied to the northeast where the Northern Dune Sea was rapidly turning into the Northern Sea. That is not to say that the rain stopped, No the rain was still coming down from the geyser, but the water was on a multiple week long delay since the geyser had shot so much up there. Massive thunderclouds blotted out the horizon and Vos was scared to stand outside.
Vos stopped paying attention to the weather at that point and started paying more attention to Anakin's finances. Anakin hadn't locked anything from him but Vos didn't think for a second that it was because he was trusted. Anakin knew he was corrupt, but Anakin also knew that he was very aware of the fact that he wouldn't be leaving in any less than five years without saying hello to Anakin first. And if a single NC was unaccounted for it would be painfully obvious who had misplaced it.
First thing he did was buy twenty asteroid mining trawlers to take advantage of the ring of asteroids around both of the gas giants in the system as well as around the outer edges of the system. They belts had been scanned in the past and were rich in useful minerals, but they were so far from galactic industrial centers that mining them was written off as too expensive post-transportation. Now though there would be a local use for those minerals. Vos paid the significant fee to have them galactically recognized as claimed in Skywalker's name and when the trawlers arrived in a month, he would have them extracting many tons of minerals a day, many useful in construction and ship production while others were simply valuable such as one asteroid that was packed full of massive Vacuum gems and electrum that had been missed in the initial scans, a literal 'goldmine'. Another held an abandoned asteroid base cut into it that had cloaking technology that had only recently gone offline. It should be a great place to store part of the national treasury, or high profile prisoners once it was brought back online and armed to the teeth. A fleet placed around there could be explained away as an escort to the mining operations in the asteroid belt
Next, Vos ordered enough raw materials to have another twenty thousand cortosis K7s built. He also paid contractors to come and build a series of general purpose factories on a nearby island, as well as start building High Rises on the main continent that used to be The Great Mesra Plateau. After having the surface of Tatooine scanned from orbit, he was deeply disappointed in the mineral deposits, but pleasantly surprised that aside from being a bit harder than sandstone, the soil quality was relatively amazing on the tops of the plateaus after years of being a desert and then that massive rainfall probably washing away whatever it could get its grubby hands on.
On top of the massive shipyard being constructed in low orbit above Skywalker's residence, he ordered the K7s at his disposal to get to work on fourteen more of equal size placed close to the asteroid belt around Adriana as it had the most relevant materials for shipbuilding. Shipyards were great for building a military fleet and better for making profit. On top of those he ordered several orbital refineries built inside the belts as well for ease of turning their bounty into industry ready materials.
- (TBH, I can't remember why I placed this here but I can't think of a better spot ^^^)-
Bellamere started ordering the droids around him to clean up the Jedi and package them for shipment to Coruscant. He knew that Anakin would want to do that, and probably use this attack as an excuse for war while he was at it. He had done that before when he was younger, if Vos remembered correctly. 'Oh that fucker, THAT'S what he was saying before he hung up on me!' Vos realised with a start. 'Well I better get something drafted for him. Gotta pull my weight now that I'm in this for good.
'So how about like this' Thought Bel, then started talking.
"Questionably Honorable Jedi Council, I am Secretary of State Bellamere Vos of the Skywalker Barony. I can't help but sympathise with your plight. Not only did you get caught red handed trying to start a war, you also lost your entire force. Well, except for Battlemaster Windu. Unfortunately for him we aren't sure we want to part with him before finding out all the little secrets in his head. We will accept a payment of no less than 10 million tons of refined hypermatter delivered in a series of ten unmodified Tabder-Class superfreighters (That we will also be happy to relieve you of). We think that the national yearly budget of a large planet is equal in value to the life of one of your 'finest.' It should be no problem for you to shell out for good ol' Windy. Well, under normal circumstances that is. Considering he is a disgraced black operation task force leader, you might be too embarrassed to take him back at all. We understand him not being worth that much to you at the moment, and that's why we have taken the liberty of relieving the temple of all of your historic force artifacts, your holocrons, the entirety of your newest class of impressionable younglings, your archive and of course all of its backups. Surely you want a copy of those archives back, right? Maybe we will give you one dated say… 1000 years back if you play nice by trading for Windu and throw in publicly admitting your fault directly to the entire senate."
