Set one Month after Harry met Moloch
Netan would never have believed that a human was capable of amassing the degree of wealth and power to which he had access. It was beyond belief, but he'd managed to beg, borrow, steal or Shanghai a fleet comparable to a Goa'uld sub lord. He'd even managed to subvert a number of Jaffa who'd been unwilling to recognize the divinity of any of Hell's current leadership, quite likely making the Lucien Alliance the only non-Goa'uld government to employ the armies of the gods other than the Tau'ri.
It was Netan's dream made manifest, the labor of a slave who would be king. The Lucien Alliance had started as an impossible idea, the dreams of slaves forced to labor beneath the surface of Delmak while living in fear of their masters above and the monsters below. Netan had united the families under his rule out of simple practicality. Living without some degree of unity of action on Delmak was a prescription to die a horrible death.
Netan had lived like most slaves beneath Delmak's surface, scrounging for scraps in those times when he wasn't forced into back-breaking labor to keep the industry of Sokar churning out war materials and consumer goods for the surface worlders. He'd lived most of his childhood in abject terror that he might earn the ire of his Jaffa masters and find himself on a one-way trip to Netu like so many others before him. He knew that his lot in life was better than those slaves on the lower levels, who would be guaranteed a lifetime of suffering in service of Sokar's eternal war to keep the subsurface creatures of Delmak under control. There were things at Delmak's heart that defied description, horrible formless entities of alien designs and malevolent goals.
Netan couldn't hope to buy his way to the surface, he was forever branded by the ancient shame of a family member so far in the distant past that nobody seemed able to even remember the precise crime he'd committed. But he could keep himself within the relative comfort of the immediate subsurface with access to sufficient funds. Delmak's immediate subsurface had always been a haven for those clever enough to capitalize on the greed of its residents.
Netan was very, very clever.
It had started simply enough, the Necropolis Guardsmen weren't without their vices and Netan had been able to track down the luxury items for them that weren't strictly legal. He'd started by limiting himself to "grey" markets, things that weren't explicitly prohibited by Sokar's law, but were the sort of thing that would earn him time in the stocks were it to come to the attention of a Jaffa of less flexible moral character than those in his customer base.
Prostitution was the first industry he'd capitalized upon, it required a relatively minimal degree of overhead and had the ancillary benefit of allowing him a network of people invested in keeping the client list for his brothels a secret. Once he had Jaffa effectively on his payroll, it required little effort to expand his interests into more esoteric items that were entirely illegal.
Truth be told, as a child who'd grown up on Delmak, Netan hadn't ever had an abundance of respect for the idea of Laws. They were often arbitrary pronouncements, prescribed by creatures who neither knew nor cared how they were imposed upon the people living in their borders.
His own internal rules and codes of behavior for the members of the Alliance were as brutal as the rules of the Goa'uld System Lords, but he'd taken great care to ensure that they were enforced for the sake of practicality and functionality rather than capricious bouts of self-interested vindictiveness.
So when he shoved a pain stick into the man's open wound, he made sure to take minimal satisfaction from the act as the man squirmed on the ground before him. Netan kicked the bleeding man hard, turning to his best friend and confidant and asking, "You're sure this is the one?"
"Sure as I can be." Replied Kefflin, adjusting the straps to his leather jacket. The practice of having uniforms for the leadership was a relatively new one, and they were all having to get accustomed to the leather garments as they broke in. "His records were sanitized, but he did a shit job of it. I'm reasonably certain that he's the one who did it and even if he didn't, he was doing something in Gehenna. Far as I'm concerned that's enough to space him."
Gehenna was over of the few places that Netan had unambiguously forbidden his organization to go. Unfortunately the Jaffa and humans of Moloch's realm were both wealthy and unconcerned with the legality of the items for sale. Those brave enough or stupid enough to actually engage in forbidden commerce soon found themselves discovering just how serious Netan was about his embargo.
"I'm very disappointed in you Farze." Netan, lifted the broken man to his feet, hanging his manacles from the hook in the ceiling with Kefflin's help. "We don't have a lot of rules in the Alliance. But those few that we do are sacrosanct to our brotherhood. They are the ties that bind us."
Netan shoved the pain stick into the gasping man's side, the glowing agony from the weapon shimmering out from his eyes and mouth. "And you go and do a fool thing like selling merchandize to Moloch's Jaffa."
"Not just Merchandise either." Kefflin snarled, his scarred and craggy face twisting up in disgust. "You misappropriated persons who'd paid for passage into the Warden's territory. They had a contract with us."
"I didn't – I would never…" The man blubbered as Kefflin grabbed his face, hard, and twisted the man to face the altar sitting in the corner of the room. "Don't lie, Lad. Not where he can see you."
The man squeezed his eyes shut, too terrified to make eye contact with the bust of the lord Warden. Netan had spared no expense in having it made, paying an artisan from Nekheb a small fortune to carve a life-size replica of the man's facial features from ivory inlaid with obsidian for the eyes and hair. The firelight glimmered on the bust's eyes like the starlight that shimmered in those of the Warden after his ascension.
It was not the face that Netan remembered, and would always remember, with the perfect and impossible clarity that had been imprinted on his very soul but he knew that it was the Warden's true face, the face of what the infant god had become. Netan hadn't been able to speak of what he'd seen in the man's eyes – the hordes of monsters, the darkness that slavered at the edges of reality, and the beautiful Angel clad in purest white – but his quiet worship of the Lord Warden and respect for the man's creed of duty, action, and righteousness had spread through his senior leadership like wildfire.
It was believed that Netan held some special connection to the Lord Warden, and he was horrified that they might be right. His dreams were haunted by the blonde specter, an imprint of beauty beyond compare. She never said anything to him, only looking through him with a smirk and a predatory gimmer of amusement in her eyes.
Kefflin hadn't shared in Netan's experience, but his fondness for the Lord Warden's doctrines was enough that he didn't much care if there was any actual truth to the Warden's divinity. Any god who eschewed worship, praised strength, demanded action, and didn't tolerate betrayal was sufficient to work its way into Kefflin's litany of prayers alongside Pelops and Ares. That the Lord Warden held a special degree of fear for anyone who might betray the alliance's "special relationship" with him only sweetened Kefflin's love of the God of Thieves.
"No, you don't!" Kefflin shoved the man's face back to looking towards the bust, prying the man's eyes open and forcing him to look into the obsidian orbs on the bust. "You lie, and you lie to him directly! You know what happens to the ones who lie to the Warden? Those who betray his will end up fed to the Eater of Sin! You will never reach the afterlife."
The man broke down utterly, shivering and sobbing. It had been days since they'd allowed him to sleep or eat a proper meal. "Please – please don't, I didn't mean anything by it. It was just a trade. He wanted a wife, they all wanted wives. I figured that living as a wife wouldn't be so bad… even on Gehenna. It wasn't till after that I saw."
"The Jaffa of Moloch don't buy their wives. They definitely don't buy human wives." Netan smashed the pain-stick across the man's back, whipping him with the bar rather than prodding him with the pain-maker. "They only buy chattel for sacrifices or worse."
"I didn't know!" The man blubbered. "I couldn't!"
"Well, you do now." Kefflin chuckled darkly, crooking his fingers and summoning the two Alliance Enforcers standing at the door. "We're done with him. He's guilty."
"No – no!" The man screamed and kicked against his bonds as the Enforcers grabbed him, lifting him off the hook and dragging him from the cell. Kefflin grinned in amusement at the man's piteous howling as the door shut, basking in the man's final moments as the enforcers dragged him to the nearest airlock.
"Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy." Kefflin grinned to Netan.
Netan snorted, Kefflin's brutality was refreshingly honest. Kefflin wasn't a complex man, he really only cared for three things in life, money, power, and people to be impressed by how much if it he had. But he was, for all his greed, a loyal man. As long as one dealt with him directly and honestly, one could trust in the man's word to the ends of the galaxy. Unfortunately, as of late, Kefflin was the only man Netan felt confident that the term "loyal" could be applied.
"He didn't work alone." Netan spoke firmly, walking over to the statue of the warden and wiping a smudge of blood from the marble forehead with his sleeve. He wet his finger in annoyance when the leather garment proved insufficient rubbing at the smear until he was certain that the white surface was clean again. "He wasn't clever enough to have purged his records and he wasn't inventive enough to have sought out the Jaffa of Moloch."
"You want me to call back the Enforcers before they space him?" Kefflin queried in mild disappointment.
"No – no, if he didn't squeal on his compatriots after a week of torture he wasn't going to." Netan replied in irritation. It seemed unlikely that the man would electively give the names of his compatriots. A certain degree of discretion was near obligatory in even the most cowardly and incompetent members of the Alliance.
It was generally accepted that one would die before snitching and largely unnecessary for Netan to force the information from the hapless subordinate – not when he had Kefflin's resources at hand. "I want you to go through every scrap of data from his transport ship. I want to know who in our organization is making deals with Moloch's people. I want them dead, do you understand me? I want their families, dead. I want their children dead. I want you to kill everyone who has even so much as smiled at them so that nobody in our organization even begins to dream of having anything to do with Moloch and then I want you to set their pets on fire just to make doubly sure that people get the message."
"Sure thing, boss." Kefflin chuckled, leaning up against the wall next to the shrine. His eyes shone with poorly contained glee. The man's reputation for bloodlust was remarkably well earned, by the time Kefflin was done there wouldn't be a scrap left of anyone who'd dared to even begin to associate with Moloch, even by accidental association. "When do you need this by?"
"We need to have these people rooted out of our organization before the second stage of expansion." Netan stopped cleaning the bust of the Lord Warden, turning to his closest friend and confidant as he spoke in a near whisper. "Before we risk drawing his attention and ire."
"Boss, it's just a statue. It can't hear you." Kefflin shook his head. "They're not omniscient. If they were we wouldn't be able to operate. I mean, don't get me wrong. The recordings on the battlefield taken of him are very impressive, but even the gods have their limits."
"You haven't seen what I've seen Kefflin." Netan nervously placed his palm against the forehead of the bust and willed prayers of supplication to it, apologies that his people had dared to ally with the enemies of the Lord Warden. "And he doesn't need to be omniscient for one of his border patrols to catch an Alliance transport heading across the border. If he thinks that we're aiding his enemies, he'll stop turning a blind eye to our feet."
Kefflin grunted in assent, forced to concede the point. The Lord Warden's fleet wasn't huge, but it was competent and extremely well equipped. The Alliance fleet of cargo ships and pilfered Goa'uld warships had thus far been tolerated by the Lord Warden's forces. Nekheb had few enough trading partners that they didn't have the luxury of turning down smugglers, and the Lord Wardens forces were inclined to allow anyone smuggling refugees from the war-torn outer sectors into the annexed portions of Moloch's and Chronos' territories. Not to Nekheb prime, of course, but nobody had seen the crown system of Nekheb in over a year.
The Lord Warden was tolerant of many things, but providing sacrifices to Moloch would immediately brand the Alliance as heretics. He would bring the full might of his fleets and armies down upon them – including Furlings. Netan didn't dare enrage the Furlings.
There were some things that sane men just didn't do. Netan took his hand from the statue. "Phase one expansion went well. We have lines of supply and communication spread through the territories of Lord Yu, the various Kingdoms of Hell, and the Hellenic States. We can't get greedy. Getting greedy gets us dead."
"Kassa production is optimal and our customer base is growing exponentially." Kefflin replied, shrugging. "We'll soon be at the point where we can afford to outright buy warships from some of the more advanced people not under Goa'uld rule rather than having to steal from the Goa'uld."
"Not till phase three." Netan disagreed adamantly. "Not without an established supply line."
"Netan, there is already dissent over your plan. I will back you but this foray into trading with Moloch is only going to be the beginning of our problems if you don't share the full scope of your eventual goals with the others as you have shared it with me." Kefflin exhaled in exasperation. "If I have to keep killing people who doubt what you're doing we're going to work through most of our senior leadership."
"And they'll be replaced by people who aren't dumb enough to defy me." Netan replied firmly. "They don't need to understand my goals, only obey them."
"Even I would be nervous to enact phase two." Rejoined Kefflin. "Are you sure there is no other route?"
"Not if we are to move to phase three." Netan shook his head. "No, we need a broader customer base for our product. It's worth risking the attention."
Kefflin laughed. "If you insist."
"I do." Netan replied, leaning down to blow out the candles in his shrine one by one before placing his forehead against the forehead of the bust of the Lord Warden and whispering a parting prayer for success. "We are defined by our actions, not our wishes. And I will succeed in founding the greatest criminal empire to ever existed so that even the gods must bow before us."
He smiled at the bust. "For if we are marked as the equals of the gods, why then should we not strive to surpass them?"