4/25/2
"This is… the guy who does the numbers?" Kylo asks a moment before the meeting begins.
Kinear nods to him. "He got the reports done last night, and now we're here." There are a few things Kylo will completely toss a whole day's worth of stuff for, and a note from Kinear to him, Jon, and Schiff saying, "We need to meet, now, or tomorrow at the latest," is fairly close to the top of this list.
'We're' is Kylo, Kinear, Schiff, Jon, and Rey. "And we're the only people cleared to see these numbers," Schiff says, "And yes, General T3-4487 is absolutely on the kill immediately if it looks like he's going to retire list. With what he knows, he can't leave."
Fuck. Kylo mentally says to Rey and Jon. What he says out loud is, "And you honestly expect me to believe Ellie didn't read the report the second you got word it was done?"
Pat shrugs. "She got it before I did. I assume Thea's in on it, too?"
Schiff inclines his head. "Fine. You know those reports I send you about my 'bright boys' who figure out the right number for tolls and taxes? The ones who hunt down the number that gets us the most compliance for the least cost, thus netting us the most income?"
Kylo nods.
"She's the one who works those numbers. I've never put her name on a report for the same reason you now wish we hadn't asked General T3-4487 to put these numbers together for us. Worst comes to worst, I've got a few of my tactical ops who aren't on the books who'll fake being the bright boys if I need them to, but…" He's shaking his head. "At this level, to do it well, you have to have someone you absolutely trust who can watch your back, read your communications, keep eyes on what's going on around you, and if you're lucky, they're good at some of the things you aren't." He glances from Kylo to Rey to Jon, point made very eloquently, and silently.
"You run into someone who's good at this job, and their partner is an airhead, pay attention, something doesn't add up, and don't rest easy until you know what it is," Kinear says.
C8 opens the door to Kylo's office. "General T3-4487 is here for your 10:30 appointment," and ushers the man in.
Kylo tends not to like this part of meetings. People come to him, which is vastly more convenient for him, but then he and his people sit there doing not much at all, waiting around, while they set up whatever it is, and generally they're nervous while doing it.
This is the first one of these Rey's sat in on, and that's further off-footing General T3-4487, who knows he's got something very big, very sensitive, and very dangerous, and now he's giving it to the high command and the Master's Lady.
He looks about to pass out, and the only reason he hasn't visibly sweated through his uniform is that it's already black.
Once he's ready, he sits down. He's shivering with… It's not exactly fear, though fear is part of it. There's shame. And… something Kylo doesn't have a name for… Almost the sense of a job poorly done… And a level of fear… not… the usual flavor of it, but… fear that he's going to lose everything for this, even though it's the right thing to do.
There, under all of it. The right thing to do.
Rey squeezes his hand. This is the man looking at a mission that will likely kill him, but might save the whole, so he's doing it.
It's been a long time since anyone who's met with Kylo has been terrified to his bones, and deeper. He's looking at Kylo, but seeing him standing over the maimed corpse of his trainer, lightsaber burning bright in his hand.
Kylo blinks and breathes slowly to calm himself. If this man is this scared to tell him what's in this report, it's abundantly clear he is not going to like what's in it.
Jon doesn't have great thought command, so it comes across as a scream in his head, but YOU'VE GOT TO GET HIM CALMED DOWN is very clear. And if this poor bastard is so scared Jon's picking it up…
Kylo stuffs his own nerves down, and smiles, and says, "General T3-4487, would you like a cup of coffee? Tea?"
That's thrown him for a loop, and unfortunately having done so, the man's not anymore comfortable about this than he was before. He shakes his head minutely, and steels himself. He knows this is the thing that must be done, and he's resigned to not enjoying the consequences. Vivid images of Kylo slashing the hell out of him with a lightsaber spring to mind.
Kylo stands up, hopefully making it clear that he's not wearing his saber, (It's in his desk, behind the drawer that doesn't have a face. It could be in his hand in about three seconds with a little concerted thought, but… it's not on his hip.) and then fetches himself another cup of coffee. He looks to the rest of the table and gestures to the snacks, and tries to keep his voice soft and easy as he says, "Gentlemen? Rey?"
Rey leaps onto that. "A cup of tea and two of the sweet biscuits. Ostrae makes them, and they're lovely. You'd probably really like them," she says to the general.
By this point they've set the general so far off foot he's about to start hyperventilating, and apparently, he'd almost rather go up against the lightsaber. Kylo makes a mental note to try and figure out how to make the Numbers relax in his presence when they've got bad news, because clearly this isn't doing it.
"Go ahead, then," Kylo says as he sits back down, with snacks, and he does put a plate with a cup of tea and some biscuits on it in front of the General. He knows he feels better when he's got something to fidgit with (which is a big part of getting himself another cup of coffee) so maybe it'll help.
"Sir…" General T3-4487 takes a steadying breath. "We're… getting low on funds."
Kylo nods. That's been true the entire time he's been in charge. "And… I assume this is different than the low-on-funds we've been before."
T3 nods. He swallows. "We have an operating budget of 48.7 trillion credits and growing, per year. We are currently bringing in 40.2 trillion credits and growing, but more slowly than our expenses, per year."
Kylo swallows. He knew he was low on cash. He didn't realize every day he was in charge he'd been losing ground.
"And…" T3 grinds his teeth. "Due to the… unpleasantness with the Raclan Bank, no one, in the entire galaxy, will offer us credit, on any terms."
Kylo feels his teeth grind together, too. Rey lays her hand on his thigh, under the table, and he squeezes it. "Ah." He can almost imagine how Darth Tantrum would take this news, and decides that fear of getting up close and personal with his lightsaber is a rational response. And there is a little part in the back of his mind, that's very much trying to rush the front, that thinks that right now taking apart a lot of equipment with his lightsaber would be very, very satisfying.
Rey squeezes his hand harder.
"We've been… able to stay afloat because…" his voice goes lower and a bit faster, "the destruction of the Hosnian system meant there was a wide array of creditors we didn't have to pay back, and we could shift funds to paying off our other creditors. And, after the… unpleasantness… our other creditors are, of course, willing to take payment on whatever terms we offer, so we were able to renegotiate our interest rate, but… They won't extend us any new credit."
Kylo feels his eyelid twitch. Well, it had seemed like a good idea at the time. "And we need new credit?"
"We need more income. It doesn't have to be credit, but that's generally the easiest way to get it." He has a holoprojector, and puts a graph up. It's a fairly basic graph. There are four lines. At the top, there's a black one, that's fairly horizontal, though it is minutely trending upward, away from the other three lines. There's a red one a bit below it, also almost horizontal but barely nudging upwards. There's a gray one that's trending upward fast, and a green one heading up in leaps and bounds.
"The gray line is our current expenses. The green one is the current influx of new people. As you can see, the green line pushes the gray line up. As long as the green one keeps going up, the gray one has to go up, too."
Kylo nods at that.
"The red line is our critical limit. When we hit that, we can no longer afford to feed our men."
Kylo nods, not liking the space between those lines getting smaller and smaller. "And the black one?"
"That's our mechanical operating expense budget. We hit that point, and we don't have money for fuel."
Kylo looks at the black line. "So, you're saying, hit that line and the Order is, literally, adrift?"
The General shakes his head. "Hit that line and we die because we can't keep life support going on the ships any longer."
Kylo swallows, hard. "Ah…" He nods, trying to stay calm. Rey's squeezing his hand even harder, which is when he realizes that he's bruising his leg he's got such a death grip on it under the table. He lets his hand loosen, and she pats the back of it.
"Now, as I'm sure you can see, there are two ways to keep these lines from meeting. Either more credits come in, which raises the black and red lines, or our expenses get lower, which pushes down the gray one. But, if the gray line intersects the red line we are in real danger. And if it crosses the black one, we start to die as our ships shut down."
Kylo makes a little 'mrph' sound and then begins to take a sip of his coffee, but decides not to because his hands are shaking badly enough he's in danger of spilling it. He's sure there's a question to ask here, probably a lot of them, but it takes him a few moments to locate one beyond just screaming panic.
Rey's still holding his hand, and he's very glad she is.
Finally, though, his brain flails around enough to locate something.
"At the current projection, when do the gray and red lines meet?" After all, it'd likely be good to know how much time he's got to try and avert his doom.
"Six months."
Kylo takes a deep breath. That's better than he was hoping. He notices that he's no longer feeling his heartbeat in his ears. "Tell me about the gray line."
"That's all of the credits going out."
"And, where, primarily, are our credits going?"
"Our expenses break into two primary categories, physical plant, and personnel. Personnel is increasing in leaps and bounds as we increase both the number of people, the training they receive, and are revamping their equipment."
It's very clear from the look on General T3's face that to him this is a problem that is very easily fixed. Stop bringing in new people. Stabilize the green line, and they're fine.
That's also, at least according to Kylo, the one thing that they cannot bend on, until they're a hair away from the red line, which if he can't come up with a miracle, is apparently six months from now.
A thought niggles around in the back of his mind. "The Citykiller fleet is done, right?"
Schiff answers that. "Yes, sir. Been done for months."
So much for that way to trim expenses.
"Good. General, how much of the gray line is us paying for droids to replace slaves?" After all, he doesn't have to do that. He's probably in a strong enough position now that he can forego it.
T3 takes a moment to go looking through his notes. "Some. It's an expense. Enough to matter, not so much that it's on our top ten."
"If we stopped doing it, how far off does that push the gray and red lines intersecting?"
T3's surprised by that. "If you'll give me a moment." He starts to do the calculations.
"Master," Schiff says, it's only here, in meetings with others, that Kinear or Schiff call him Master. "A reminder. Just like with the free trade routes, if we make things too expensive for people, they will start to go around them."
"You mean fire on the recruiting stations?" Jon says, seeing how people who just lost an entire work force worth of slaves, with no chance of replacing them, are likely to respond to the people who took said slaves.
"Possibly, Grand Marshall," Schiff says, "And that makes them more expensive."
"Possibly more so than paying for the droids?" Rey asks.
"Possibly, My Lady," Schiff says. "After this, the General can send me a full report on the numbers, and I'll have my bright lads see where the pain point is."
T3 looks up from his numbers. "Assuming the rest of expenses stay the same, which, of course, is what you're going to have the 'bright lads' check out, not paying for droids decreases our personnel expenses by three percent. Most of the people we're getting in right now do not appear to be slaves, and the ones that were, in many cases their owners cannot prove they lost the slave to us, so that cuts down on the number of droids we've got to offer up."
Kylo wants to say, 'We make them prove it?' but decides not to. He probably doesn't need to show off how far out of the chain of command on these things he is. He will bring it up with Kinear privately. Then he blinks, remembering. Right. Some idiots were claiming farm animals were slave to get droids. Some of them were trying to offload old and sick slaves to get droids. Some of them were just claiming they had slaves run off to get droids… Kinear had someone… handle that. Apparently, it's handled.
"For personnel expenses, right now the biggest expenditures are in training, equipping, and caring for them. We have space. In the sense of a physical place to put people. Right now, our personnel is increasing faster than anticipated, so we are at 14.3 million people. Housing them isn't a problem. Everything else, is. Training is a… pain point… right now. We have first-year training capacity for 8 million, and—"
Kylo knows this. The last time he looked at his total numbers they were at six million, and most of them were new recruits, so… "We've got something along the lines of twelve million somewhere in the basic first three years training routine?"
"Exactly, Master. As of this point, we are actually warehousing people because we just do not have enough trained… trainers to take care of them," Schiff replies.
"That's something throwing money at the problem won't fix." He looks to Kinear. "We can't get experienced trainers any faster than we already are, correct?"
Kinear nods. "Yes, Master. We have to train them first, and that takes a minimum of three years, longer in some specialties."
General T3 says. "Keeping people just sitting around, doing nothing, while we feed, clothe, and house them is a huge waste of resources. If we were to modify our current recruiting plans-"
Kylo blinks, angry, so angry at T3 for completely missing the point of doing this. It must be on his face because T3 physically winces at him, moving slightly back, waiting for the strike. Kylo makes himself pull back, makes his face clear.
Rey's thought in his head: This is a Number. He's been trained since babyhood to feel this way.
Kylo takes a breath. "No, General, it's not. Think of it as… waiting for your crops to grow. Seeds in the ground do not appear to be doing anything, and even once they sprout, they are still sitting there, sucking up resources, doing, apparently, nothing. But, if you don't plant them, there's no harvest, and you starve."
T3 is not impressed. He's thinking that they've got every available inch of ground filled with seeds, and then more seeds in the barn, and seeds on top of that in the house, and more coming out of the silo, and the damn things are going to rot before they'll ever see a speck of dirt.
Kylo decides not to respond to that. "Tell me about our other expenses."
"Aside from personnel, our main set of expenses is physical plant, which is also increasing. Between capital improvements in the Supremacy, capital improvements in our new colonies, capital expansion to our training locations, and the standing order we have placed for four new Dreadnoughts, money is bleeding out of the Order."
Kylo nods at that, too. The first thought he has is a basic one. "Can we put off some of the Dreadnoughts to loosen up our cash flow?"
"Ish." Schiff replies. "In the short term, the penalty for cancelling the contract is high enough it'll hurt. Longer term, it might be a good idea." He's staring at those lines.
"How long?"
T3 takes a moment, and then runs more numbers. "The penalty for cancelling two of them will push us to the edge of the redline for the next three months. If nothing goes wrong, we'll stay, just on the right side of it. Once the penalty is paid off, we'll drop back to a safe buffer, and stay there for an additional year and a half."
"Ah…" Kylo can feel Jon thinking And when has nothing ever gone wrong? "Don't we usually build ships in house?"
Schiff glances to Jon. And Jon finally has something to say. "We designed the specs for the dreadnoughts, and we'll certainly do most of the technical work for them, but because they're supposed to be capital ships, and not warships, we hired a company that makes ships attractive, livable… pretty. To take care of the exterior and most of the visible-to-the-public interior. The final bits, where we give her some teeth and claws to go with the pretty smile, we'll do in house."
Kylo nods at that, and then says, "What's our income situation?"
T3 replies, "A third of our income is our tax base. That's coming in from the planets that were conquered by the First Order."
"And if I attempt to raise that enough to matter, they'll revolt."
Schiff nods at that. "Maybe. Or they'll start to cheat enough that our revenues will drop. Or—"
Kylo nods again. "I know, your bright boys found the sweet spot, so I shouldn't mess with it."
"As best we can tell, yes, Master Ren."
T3 continues, "Half is coming from fees levied on ships moving across our border with the Unknown Regions."
"And if I raise that much, it'll encourage smuggling. Schiff's sweet spot again."
Schiff nods at that.
"And the last twenty percent?" Kylo asks.
"Myriad sources. Tens of millions of them. Rents for shops on the Supremacy. The few protection contracts we have. Most of them are too small to be worth fussing over."
Kylo purses his lips, and looks to Jon, who says, "We have people looking into using our services as neutral space. If ten percent of them take us up on it, that will pay for the most recent round of 'capital improvements' to the diplomacy wing of the Supremacy. If we can get all of them, that'll pay for the Dreadnoughts."
"If," T3 says. "If you can get a steady income from that, it would be beyond welcome, but as of yet, it's not worked into my projections, because as of yet, the number of signed contracts that are actually producing income is too small to matter." Kylo feels Rey mentally blink at that. She knows that she personally got a contract that's bringing in, over ten years, eight billion credits, and the idea that that's 'too small to matter' is staggering. "Likewise, when the colonies we have collected get to the point of actually producing something worth having, they too will be valuable, but right now we're putting more into them than we're getting out."
Kylo looks to Jon, and Jon nods.
Kylo sighs. He nods. "Okay." He sighs. "Let's start with this. I want a real audit. I want to know where we're getting money from and where it's going. There's got to be some places we can tighten things up." He takes a sip of his coffee as he says that, and feels T3's eyes burning him.
Not him. His cup. Of coffee…
He can feel a wave of annoyance aimed at him. A sense of trimming off the bits and bobs that make life worth living, for everyone but him.
Kylo's eyes narrow a little. He does not have expensive habits… Then he glances at the coffee in his hand. And remembers how shocked Poe was by it. And… Well, he knows coffee is rare and expensive, but… Shit…
He swallows, hard, again. "How much does this cost?"
T3 eyes his cup. "Sixty-two thousand credits per kilo, give or take."
A long time ago, when Kylo was young, and had first gotten Luke to agree to letting him fight with the other Padawan, he was sparring with M'Gll. It was before he had his height, so they were both about the same size, and she'd bull rushed him, got her shoulder right into his chest, elbow into his sternum, and he went down on his back, with her on top of him, and everything in his body just froze when she knocked the air and light out of him. He couldn't think or breathe or anything.
Eventually, his body came back online and a huge, shuddering gasp filled his body with air.
And that's more or less what happened as soon as the words 'give or take' hit his ears.
C8, deciding to be helpful, adds, "And as of this month, you're drinking about two and a half kilos a month worth."
Technically speaking, he, Rey, anyone he entertains in his office, Poe (and Jacen, sometimes) are drinking two and a half kilos a month worth, still, the idea that he's going through more than a million credits a year in coffee is staggering.
After a moment, he gets his breath back, and says, "I didn't know."
The other people at the table stare at him in stupefaction.
"I knew it was expensive, but… A hundred credits a kilo? Two hundred? Something like that."
The rest of them blink.
"Why did no one say anything?"
Jon quietly says, "What do you think happened to anyone who suggested that maybe Snoke was spending a tad too much on golden slippers and silk robes?"
"Shit!" He inhales again, hard, the Last Night party, shit, everyone had coffee with dessert. Tiny cups, but 500 tiny cups and… His eyes go wider, if they didn't tell him about the coffee… "Do I have any other horrendously expensive habits?"
Jon shakes his head. "Nah. Rey's Order of the Maji medallion wasn't cheap, but it wasn't a kilo of coffee, either."
Kylo spends a moment just sitting there, feeling stunned. He knows, rationally that a million a year on coffee is not even the margin of error on a rounding mistake in his budget. He still feels like the most wasteful human in existence, though.
He reaches out, looks for what Rey's thinking, but apparently sixty-two thousand credits per kilo has so effectively short circuited her brain, she's not back online, yet.
He glances at Jon and thinks at him, Next time I'm embarking on a horrendously expensive endeavor, let me know, okay?
Jon nods. He's about to respond when Kylo thinks at him. Just think it normally at me, I'll get it.
Jon nods again. I had no idea you didn't know. Everyone knows this.
How many other times have you seen me run head first into something everyone knows without a clue at all?
Jon has the grace to look embarrassed at that.
"Gentlemen," Kinear says, stopping the mental conversation. He nudges Kylo's cup. "Drink it or not, as you see fit. To the extent that people watch your consumption of things like this, it makes us look richer than we are. In that we go through the kind of money you spend on coffee in less than a second, every single second of every day, foregoing it doesn't matter beyond, of course, if you start asking people to forego their little pleasures, too."
That makes sense to Kylo.
"Get me a full audit. I still want to see where our money is going. Schiff, have the bright boys give me options that don't involve shutting down recruiting. That's the main value we bring to the bloody galaxy, so we're not stopping that. Jon, go chat with Ellie about… how we bring money in on those contracts of yours."
Kinear says, quietly, "It's possible that we don't have to warehouse people, Master."
It's clear by the look on his face that he doesn't want to talk about this in front of T3, though.
"General?" Kylo says.
"Nothing else to report, Master."
"Good. Uh… Set me up with a live display of those lines. I want to be able to monitor them as I see fit."
He gestures to the chart that's glowing above the table. "It already is a live feed, sir."
"Excellent, dismissed."
A palpable wave of relief washes over T3 as he grabs his things and hot foots it out.
Once he's gone, Kinear says, "We're… obviously aware of the current personnel crunch."
Kylo raises a brow.
"My best… option for what to do with them is… Imperial, and I didn't think you'd be immediately welcoming to it."
"So, you just don't tell me about the problem?" Kylo asks, feeling a flush of annoyance.
There's some challenge in Kinear's gaze, and also a sense of the history of Darth Tantrum, and gingerly handling the fragile, broken but mended, and unpredictable explosive that's in his hands. "I prefer to come to you with solutions, and me and mine are still… working on them. If we hit you with every problem as soon as it's on the horizon, we'd do nothing but talk about the things that aren't working, and honestly, none of us are better off with that."
Kylo grits his teeth and sighs, mostly because Kinear's right about that. He's not sure how much everything is falling apart all the time he can handle. "Fine. Talk."
"You remember asking for a report on all of the planets under the Order?" Kinear asks.
Kylo nods. And then feels a flush of embarrassment. "I didn't get through that report." He'd read a bunch of it. Probably a good five thousand planets worth, but other things kept popping up, and there's really only so many times you can run your eyes over the word 'liquidated' and not want to scream.
Kinear offers a soft smile. "Technically speaking, I didn't either. That's what adjutants are for. I did get a full report on the report. Basically, under Snoke, we had four million planets. Then you pulled us back to a manageable number given our troop compliment. Then we had sixty-thousand planets. Those were the sixty-thousand most central to our empire, and the ones we'd actually been… active… on. Now we have 18,000 inhabited planets that we've left in somewhat functional shape. We have an additional twenty-two hundred that are in good shape."
"Most of the tax base," Rey says, her brain finally lurching off the fact that Kylo's coffee habit has cost more than her entire settlement on Lirium. Times two.
"Yes, Rey," Schiff says. "The other 18,000 of them range from minimally profitable to places we're losing credits in droves."
"Okay," Kylo doesn't like the sound of losing credits in droves, but he doesn't know why that's happening, yet, so there might be a purpose for it.
"And we've got a lot of people who left places that weren't very good for them to come here," Kinear says.
"I'm still following," Kylo replies.
"And we have another six thousand planets that are currently not inhabited that we can, probably, fix up some. Granted, it's not like we're low on things we could do to improve the 18,000 with people already on them, too."
Kylo blinks. "The most valuable thing in the galaxy is people."
"Yes." Kinear sips his coffee. "We've got labor. We've got things that need to be done. Maybe…" He pauses to think, and starts again with, "Our current training program turns everyone into soldiers, fliers, or some piece in a military machine. But we have a huge space for civilian populations we just aren't using."
"And places we actively damaged," Kylo's starting to think he knows where this is going.
"That said, since billet space is tight in our training program, we're only taking the people who test at the highest range for each empty spot, and putting them immediately into training, and the rest are cooling their heels."
"But they don't have to be," Kylo replies. "They could be… off making improvements to the planets that pay us taxes and maybe get us more taxes that way?"
Kinear nods. "That was… part of what the Empire did. Conscript troops were conscripts who tested well on combat-oriented things. But not everyone did or could be troops, so they'd get shunted into farming or construction or mining or… street sweeping if need be. The Empire didn't waste men. They sent them wherever there was an open job."
Schiff clears his throat.
"You're going to hit me with another sweet spot thing again, aren't you?" Kylo says.
Schiff nods. "Local construction companies get very irked when they suddenly don't have contracts for construction because the Empire showed up and built the damn things instead."
Kylo sips his coffee without thinking, and then does think, and feels his hand shake. What was that? A thousand credits? Fifteen hundred. FUCK!
Rey gently squeezes his free hand. About six hundred credits per cup. At least, when I make it, I use ten grams per cup. He nods at her. Understanding that now isn't the time to panic about this.
He refocuses on the task at hand. "And the Empire just… shot people who mouthed off about being irked and built the thing anyway?"
Schiff nods. "Local politicians tended to like that. The Empire would offer labor. They'd see extra room in their improvements budgets because they didn't have to pay for labor. They'd bow to the Empire, and often offer up their own prison populations to pad out the labor force, as well. The job would get done. Meanwhile, the local construction team, or refuse removal, or miners, or… whatever it was, would grumble and die, or the smart ones quietly closed up shop and joined the Rebellion."
"So, we don't just march them on in and start work," Kylo says.
"Not if you want to stay popular," Rey says, starting to feel like she's getting the shape of some of the problems.
Jon's thinking. He takes a sip of his tea, almost says something, then shakes his head, and thinks a bit more. Finally, he does say, "We demand five years service. We never said what kind. And… well… I know Mum's shop would get swamped sometimes. Too much work, not enough hands. And… we're low on trainers. But we've got planets with people on them who have to have businesses that do stuff."
"And we've got labor," Kylo says. "All sorts, right? People who leave wherever it is and come here. They have to know how to do things, right?"
Kinear shrugs a bit. "On the most basic level that's true. But we do get a good number of families, or young people on their own. And… It's not a huge problem, yet, because no one's had the bright idea to try it en masse, but… Not everyone is functional, you know?"
Kylo blinks again. "Functional, how?"
"A whole slew of ways," Schiff says. "So far, we're just… warehousing them, too, until someone can figure out a 'humane' way to deal with them."
Kylo blinks one more time, and then says, "I need you to spell out functional, because all I'm thinking of is my temper issues, but I don't think that's what you mean."
Schiff and Kinear look at each other.
Kinear takes a sip of his coffee. Then he pulls out a flask and doctors it. Then he takes another sip. "Kylo, because we accept anyone, many people have taken advantage of that as a way to get rid of inconvenient people."
"I know Long and her system are using us as a way to ease the pressure on their prisons. So far, that's not fussing me too much." Apparently, everyone in her system who gets convicted of a non-capital crime gets the option of joining the Order or jail. Shockingly enough, a lot of them are not interested in jail.
"We'll get to that, and why that's another hiccough in the road to resettlement, later," Schiff says.
"But that's not who you mean by functional?" Rey asks.
"No, it's not. We are being given…"
Kylo raises a brow, given is not a word he's looking for in this context.
"Many of these people cannot really… offer up an opinion one way or the other," Schiff says, nodding to Kinear who passes his flask over.
Kylo exhales low and slow, finally starting to understand functional.
"They're either very physically damaged, or very mentally damaged, and sometimes both," Kinear says. "Some of them are very old. Many of them are sick and the kind of sick that doesn't get cured."
"So, we have people who just offload their vulnerable?" Kylo's got ideas for how to deal with them.
"That's a way to look at it. Some reports indicate that we're given them because we're the best shot at an okay life for them. Some of the sick ones we actually can cure. Some of these families are so close to the edge of survival that the resources necessary to take care of someone who can't contribute will be the difference between starving or not."
That rolls over Rey in a long, depressing swell of bad memories. "If you got too sick, too hurt to work… The draught of kindness… That's what they'd call it. Better than starving." She sounds listless as she says it, feeling trapped by situations with no good answers. This time, it's Kylo gently squeezing her hand.
Kinear and Schiff both nod.
Kylo gestures for the flask and takes a sip of it himself. He offers it to Rey, but she shakes her head. She doesn't remember it, not as images, but she has the feeling that drinking to numb pain is a trap, one she shouldn't go near. Jon takes the flask, and a long sip, though, and then hands it back, nodding to Kinear.
Kylo hates running into things like that. Rage is his friend, and he can righteously aim it at people like Rey's parents, but… If feeding the person who can't work starves the group as a whole… Who's he going to rage against there? The Force?
An officer is the person who makes the hard choice so the whole survives.
And in these cases… Now he's got the person who can't work, but he's also got to figure out how to feed him, and…
"Fuck," it's a soft, tired defeated sort of sound.
"Exactly," Kinear says.
Kylo takes another sip of his coffee and another sigh. "You said en masse?"
"It's just a matter of time before some society that has rules about these things decides to offload a few hundred thousand of them on us," Schiff replies.
"Shit. Uh… Okay." He rubs his forehead. The whole has to survive, and those lines are moving toward each other, and how many people can he afford to warehouse… "Put it in the regs that anyone who wants to join the Order has to be able to articulate, for themselves, by themselves, a reason for why they want to. Anyone who can't answer that question, give back to their people."
"That'll cut down on the number of children," Jon says.
Kylo drops his head to the desk.
Rey lays her hand on his back and says, "Children with parents get to come. Children with older siblings, cousins, other children, get to come. Unaccompanied children have to be old enough to say they want to join, on their own."
Kylo mutters to himself. "Parents leaving children who don't want to be left get shot on sight," but he doesn't put much voice to it, and the others pretend not to hear it. Pulling his head up, and with his full voice, he says, "And let me guess, Josh, no one wants a pile of petty criminals invading their home planet, especially if they joined us to get out of going to jail somewhere else."
"Exactly." He sighs. "Uh… we execute a lot of them, too. They get here, we put them in the holding camps, and they start robbing and raping and getting into fights, so the MPs take care of them."
"Shoot first, ask questions never?" Kylo asks.
"Pretty much," Kinear replies. "We catch you in the act, you die. We catch you after the act, you die."
"Do we have laws?"
Schiff, Kinear, and Jon all sort of look at each other.
"There's a code of military conduct that all officers have to sign," Jon says.
"Great. Do we show it to the new people? Before they join?" Kylo asks.
"No," Schiff replies.
Kylo glances at Jon, and can see that there's something in there he's not going to like. "Get someone who can produce a legal document that won't make me want to hit him with a lightsaber. Have them pare the laws down to three pages. Anyone over the age of 12 has to read and sign it to join up. Then if they start breaking those laws… Shoot the rapists and murders. Put the thieves and batterers at some form of extremely unpleasant hard labor. I assume we've got to have something, somewhere that's astonishingly awful and dangerous, too."
Schiff nods. "We do."
"Excellent. Everyone else… Can we… I don't know. Get the people on our planets to offer up apprenticeships or something? We give them free labor. They give training room and board."
"And displace the people currently on those planets who would take those jobs," Schiff says.
"Fuck. Why is this so damn hard!" Rey squeezes his hand again, but this time she's doing it because she's echoing his feelings. "Uh… The planets we broke. The things we broke on those planets. They need labor to fix them, right?" Kylo tries.
"They usually use the people already on the planet to do that," Schiff says.
"Yeah, but could they do it faster if they had more people?" Kylo asks.
"Probably."
"Good. Let's see if we can find places, people… who don't have enough people where they are. Where they need… shit… settlers. That's what I'm talking about, right?"
Schiff and Kinear nod. "Sounds like it."
"Can we just… do that? Take families and just plop them onto a new planet?" Kylo says.
"I'd imagine that would work better if they were coming with something more than the clothes on their backs," Jon says.
He grits his teeth. "Probably. Which makes it more expensive."
"But possibly not as expensive as full-time taking care of a family for five years," Schiff replies. "We can work with this. We test everyone when they come in. Take the most… attuned to our needs for our training plan. Not everyone needs to be ready, willing, or able to work a military job.
"We can build up a jobs bank. Anywhere under our control that needs people can list jobs. For people who have work but don't have people. People in our holding camps… They can apply to those jobs, and we'll get them where they need to go. That way we're not displacing the local economy."
"Think bigger," Jon says. "This is just a matter of matching jobs with people. Everyone on those planets is supposedly an Order Citizen. We can get the computer hub up and working, like the ID register. People put up jobs, and apprenticeships, and whatever that needs to be done. We've got everyone's test results. Jobs go in, search for people who meet the basic criteria, job offers go out. And anyone, from anywhere, in the Order is an option. Local doesn't matter. Everywhere in the Order, everyone wearing the Hexagon, is local. The computer matches them up, and if they come to terms, great, we provide transportation, and off they go to become happy little taxpaying citizens of the Order."
Kylo likes that. He's smiling. "That's the idea. We're the… lubrication that keeps the machine moving. We get people where they need to go, and let them figure out, more or less, where that is." He thinks about the list of planets under his control. "But citizenship requires service. Five years just… living… making a home and businesses and clawing a life out of the wreckage we left behind on some of those planets. That'd be worth citizenship, right?"
Kinear nods at that. "A reclamation program… Especially for people who know how to terraform, that'd be something we could do. The worst planets of the bunch are naked bedrock right now. But we've got some we didn't destroy that thoroughly." He laughs dryly. "We're going to colonize our own planets."
Kylo sips his coffee. And then he really looks at it. Really looks at it.
Rey catches what he's thinking, and she looks at the vase on the conference table. The vase holding the flowers from Alderaan. She pulls it to them, and hands him the dried spray of coffee flowers, with a few dull red coffee cherries on it. "We get farmers, right?"
"Some. We mostly pull out of urban areas, but that's because most of our recruiting stations are in urban areas, because that's where people are," Kinear says.
"Some…" Kylo keeps looking at the withered branch in his hand. "C8, coffee isn't the only plant going for thousands per kilo, right?"
"Not at all, sir."
"Huh…" He looks at Kinear and Schiff and Jon. "We've got dirt, and we've got farmers, and I'm sure we've got some sort of solar energy. That's the ingredients to a farm. C8, I want a list of every plant you can find that fetches more than twenty-five thousand credits per kilo."
The other three are starting to get where he's going.
Kinear looks pleased. "Ellie tells me New Alderaan, famous for farming technologies, wants our support in certain internal matters."
"Agronomists… That's what we're talking about needing, right?" Rey says.
Kylo and Kinear nod.
Schiff's got the beginning of a smile. "Usually, if something is that sort of expensive, it's either very hard to grow, or there's a cartel controlling the production of it."
Kylo nods. "Probably can't do much about hard to grow. I very much doubt there's a cartel we can't beat into doing business with us. Say… offering up a few kilos of seeds."
"A little exuberant involuntary patriotism?" Jon says with a straight face.
"A gift to ensure ongoing goodwill," Schiff replies, eyes glowing, face straight.
Kinear settles back, and stretches. "You know, it's been a while since Drogan the Hutt and I had a chat."
"They're into recreational pharmaceuticals, gambling, and prostitution. I don't think that's what Kylo's talking about," Schiff says. He looks to Kylo, who shrugs. They could be talking about that, right? If the price were high enough. "And honestly, even if he were, since we dropped the prohibition on the pharmaceuticals, the price for them dropped like a rock in any territory we control. I doubt any of the raw plants are over 10K per kilo."
"No, not anymore," Kinear replies, "and also not how I'm thinking of this. They know who is in the kind of markets we want to move into. And where the weak points are. And… not to put too fine a point on it, they've been a trifle miffed at us since we legalized moving… well… everything they're into, through our space, and, as you said, the prices dropped like a rock, so offering up a nice gesture in their direction will go away to preventing knives coming for our backs."
"And… finding out who runs the sort of thing we'd like to get into, and then… having a chat about goodwill gestures…" Kylo says.
"Will go a ways toward not ending up in a situation where the largest organized crime family on the rim decides that our border patrols are getting tiresome," Kinear says.
"And that's a good thing?" Kylo asks, thinking he could probably take the Hutts, and then realizing the Empire, who were willing to fight a hell of a lot dirtier than he is, didn't. And the New Republic, or for that matter the Old one, didn't even try.
"At least for the time being," Schiff replies. "If that damned gray line ever drops low enough, maybe that'll shift, but for now…"
For now. They all look at the chart still glowing over the table.
Kylo nods. "Jon, you and Ellie get Rey and I invites to… Anywhere and everywhere that looks like it'll put the right people in our orbit. People with money and problems."
Jon's clearly thinking something.
"Just say it."
"I think for right now, especially since you haven't done any of them yet, we've got you booked at max capacity. You've got to be fun and fresh and charming at these things, in addition to just showing up, so…"
Kylo waves that away, and feels Rey's relief at it. "Yeah, great, fine."
"Once we have a better idea of how this works though," Rey says.
Jon nods.
Schiff settles back in his chair. "To sum up, we're changing up our policy for how we take people. You've got to be capable of articulating a reason for why you're joining up, or in the company of someone who can do it for you who is also joining up. We need some sort of basic laws of the land, and people who join have to agree to follow them.
"We're going to build some sort of jobs bank, and anyone, anywhere in the Order, has access to it, and we'll provide transport to get our people from one place to the other.
"Five years service is still necessary for citizenship, but those five years may be terraforming, or settling on one of our less desirable planets, or working a job somewhere that needs people."
Jon breaks in. "How do we do our taxes?" At least, as best he knows, he's never paid them, and now he's starting to wonder if he should have been.
"Income, usually. Though if you work directly for us, or sell to us, you either don't pay or minimize what you pay," Schiff says. "We don't pay taxes on our income because it'd be stupid. We're already getting paid out of the main fund. Likewise, if you're on a planet of ours, and say, one of the farmers keeping us in food, you don't pay income tax on anything you made selling to us. We offer lower prices for what we buy, but we don't make you pay tax on them. It's just cleaner that way."
"But if you're the guy who sells the farmer his seeds?" Rey asks.
"You'll pay taxes on all your income."
Jon's nodding. "That works. Five years service, or five years of paid taxes, you get your citizenship." Jon's eyes light up. "That'd make most of the adjuncts on the C, D, E and F decks citizens, too. They'd like that."
Kylo thinks about working on Luke's farm, and what they did to make it work. "Five hectares of reclaimed land?"
Josh thinks that sounds good, but he's got an idea for better. "Ten, but for every ten you reclaim, you get to keep five, free and clear. That should get us settlers. They'll cherry pick the bits that are easy to reclaim at first, but we can sell the half we keep to people who want to settle and don't want to put the really hard work in, or use it for things like roads and trading outposts, and they'll pay taxes on whatever it is they do with the parts they keep."
"C8, are you recording this?" Kylo asks, because he knows it won't all stay fresh in his mind.
"Certainly, sir. I'll have notes ready before the Grand Admiral and Marshalls are back to their offices."
"Thank you. Uh… Pause production on one of the Dreadnoughts?" Kylo says.
"That'll likely free up some cash without killing us when whatever blows up blows up in the next few months," Kinear says.
"C8…"
"I've already sent the communique requesting the pause on the one ship. And we've also already—" And they see the gray line leap up, "paid the penalty for not keeping up with our contract."
They all stare at the graph.
"I already hate this thing," Kylo says, looking at his coffee, thinking about sipping it. Looking at it gets him thinking again. "New Alderaan… What do we have that they want? We need to give them something to get a few agronomists, here? Right?"
"I think that's going to be something we'll talk with Heloise and Samanth about, without the recorders going," Rey says.
"Okay… Uh…" Kylo looks at the stars spinning around them. "Was that all?"
They share a look, but Jon's the one who says it, "All?"
"Yeah, I know. Uh… Droids for slaves, that was on there, too," Kylo says to Schiff.
Schiff nods. "My bright boys will run the numbers and get back to you. It's entirely possible that that may be the sort of thing where we assess local threat levels and act accordingly. Assuming you approve of that."
Kylo sighs at that. He'd made a big deal of not letting rumors of another Starkiller out to keep people in line, so he can see why Schiff may not be sure if the threat of violence is something he wants here.
"I'm fine with this. People come to us. And if we've got to point guns at them to stop their owners from grousing about it, I'm okay."
"And if we have to shoot?" Kinear says.
"Shoot," Rey's the one who says it, but Kylo doesn't disagree.
"That will make things more expensive," Schiff says.
Kylo grits his teeth, and then stops when Rey says, "Poe."
He blinks. "Right. We're working around that." He looks around again. "Are we… good?"
Kinear stands up. "For now. We'll start bouncing it around with our seconds and thirds and fourths, and then you'll get more reports, and we'll keep tweaking from there."
"And pray those two lines don't cross," Schiff says.