Chapter 14 Pt 2

Coruscant, Mandalorian Tower, Guard Barracks

Struc Ordack

Thank Manda for lazy Judicial officers. It hadn't taken very much talking to get the cops to not look too deeply into the whole situation, simply pointing out that she was a Political Representative had been enough for them. Oh sure, Tanya now had a quote unquote record with the police which was probably not what anyone in the government would like to hear, but it was as an incident of being attacked, and as long as no one went looking the whole situation should blow over in a couple years it's not like she was going to get into more fights. Manda, I hope she does not get into more fights, she'd at least severely hurt three of the people who came at her, which they deserved but it was not a good look for a politician ambassador type to assault people and get off pretty much scot-free.

And she would get off scot free, unfortunately I told her that she was under house arrest for the next 3 weeks but this was a Royal Guard issued house arrest, the Senatorial Guards were more than willing to just look the other way. I would guess that this was not an infrequent incident as some of the galaxy would hope, just something they attempted to cover up.

But for now Tanya was under house arrest and besides her diplomatic duties and maybe visits to the Jedi Temple she was not allowed to pull anything like this again.

As for the two di'kuts, who thought it was a great idea to pull this stunt. They were standing at attention in front of me, with the hope that by staying motionless they would become invisible. On one hand they should never have gone through with this whole operation to begin with, on the other hand the princess is unharmed but that was mainly due to her own training rather than these two's competence, thus a punishment is required to even the score and discourage scenarios like this from happening again.

"I have half a mind to do my job and report this incident to Duchess Satine and have her transfer the both of you back to Mandalore and replace you." the two winced, as that would be the end of their careers as well as bringing dishonor to their families. "The only reason I am not in a holocall with the Duchess right now is the fact that Ms. Kryze is unhurt and the incident ended relatively quickly in a way that could be swept under the rug as a case of self-defense."

The two release a sigh of relief as they aren't given a ticket straight to Mandalore. "This whole incident could have been avoided if you made a request to me. We could have worked something out, made a cover, and minimized the risk to prevent stuff like this from endangering our charge. When Duchess Satine assigned us to be her guards we became part of Ms. Kryze's retinue to whom we swore oaths to protect and serve to the best of our abilities. Her wishes are only second to her safety, your wishes are not even on the list for consideration. If she doesn't want to go to a club, you will obey. Ms. Kryze is old enough to be considered a Mando, that means she is mature enough to make her own decisions and be responsible for those decisions and you will respect them like it came from the Duchess herself. This will never happen again, are we clear?"

The two nodded their heads but I needed to drive the point home. "I said. Are. We. Clear?"

"Sir, yes sir!"

I gave the two time to stew for a bit before moving on to inform them of what will happen next. "While Ms. Kryze and Ms. Vizla are under house arrest, you two will have something more physically demanding. After seeing your performance on the security cameras, I deemed your unarmed combat ability to be wholly inadequate, barely enough to protect the princess while in civilian disguise. And so, for the next three weeks you're to go through additional unarmed combat training, where I'll personally train you to be able to defend Ms. Kryze effectively, even with only your civilian gear."

The two looked at each other in trepidation, sensing something is not right. "We'll get started immediately, follow me." I smiled at them before exiting the room toward the Tower's gym. Their steps followed mine as all three of us entered the gym. Inside the gym is a wide open area designated as the dueling circle, various workout equipment at the sides of the room, and a couple of doors leading to showers and a storage room for practice weapons.

I walked over toward the sparring circle before turning to face my subordinates. "As a warm up, you have 10 minutes to take me down. This will give me a general idea of what I have to work with."

They would not accomplish that 10 minute goal. They didn't have the decades of experience I had which I could tell by them flinching a second too long, blinking reflexively when I aimed for their faces, and both of them limiting themselves to the basic style the Royal Guard taught to recruits which did not make full use the humanoid body like the elbows and knees. I thought it would give me a good idea of what section was lacking, that they'd let a bunch of cyborgs in suits allow them to get separated from the princess. But it looks like I have my work cut out for me. I would have to start from scratch and build them up brick by brick. Starting with basic footwork and a stable foundation.

Coruscant, Mandalorian Tower

Tanya Kryze

'Well last night could have gone much better.' I thought as I sat in my chair looking out at the skyline of Coruscant. I had not planned for the whole disastrous fight to happen. I had not planned on a lot of things last night but I certainly did not plan on ending up on house arrest for the next little while. Although it didn't affect me too greatly since I was still allowed to do my work. If anything this would prevent Vai from dragging me on another one of those escapades. Or at least give me time to make sure that if it ever happened again the situation would be much better planned out so we didn't end up accidentally walking into a gang war between corporations. Why does this planet have to be a cyberpunk dystopia? Well of course I knew why, it was the core of an intergalactic civilization and an economic hub. Of course it would become like this, frankly it was a bit curious why the line between human and droid being gray as it were with those mechanically modded folks walking around hadn't started debate on the issue of droid rights.

I wasn't going to be pushing that myself that was a bit too much of a boat rocker in my opinion, though I did see issue with the whole enslavement of sentient beings. Even though it was recommended to wipe X4's memories every couple of months, I was just going to ignore that and rely on the economy to do the job. I paid him a good wage in my mind, I gave him 20% of my income for investment and then the last 10% that I gave him was filed as investment as well was actually the wage I was paying him. I figure that he would find out sooner or later that he could do whatever he wanted with that money.

I also suspected the moment he figured it out would be the moment he would be completely sentient so I was interested in when he would do that. Oh, I know there were fears of droid revolts and such going back millennia in this galaxy, but I simply thought it was the same issue with slavery or wage slavery. If you don't pay someone what they're worth, they're going to become angry with you eventually. And that's usually led to rebellion and communism which would fail which is probably why the droid revolts kept failing.

However that was off topic, as I was still just recovering from the night of excess we had involved ourselves in. Vai hadn't come out of her room so I assume she had drunk a bit too much last night. And I would probably see her in a couple hours when she came out to start sobering up.

For myself I was simply going to enjoy the afternoon and read over the latest debates on the Silver Codex. See what was going on with that little work to try and shift the aggression of the mandoline culture from fighting for conquest to fighting for defense.

Most of the articles I saw were just positing ways of looking at the theory I provide in the codex. I didn't quite enjoy the one person who called me out for the obvious historical revisionism of the early years of the Mandalorians but was ultimately agreeing with the general ideas I had provided. It was a good thing I decided to not put my name on this piece of work. Not only did it maintain the neutrality of the work but it allowed people to attempt to try and understand and fill the gaps in the areas instead of depending on me to show up and fill them for them.

I had considered creating a Silver Codex volume 2, to increase the things I should talk about now that I have a better understanding of some cultural elements of the Mandalorian people and the Galaxy as a whole. I might get around to doing that eventually but for now it was enjoyable just to read what the other people are coming up with to give me ideas that I might use in the future.

I had a smile on my face as I flipped from the 5th document looking at the economical components of the theory and the proposed things that could create more economic growth for the Mandalore sector, when I saw the title of the document I was looking at in front of me and felt my smile die on my face.

The Silver Codex Volume 2

"The Hell is this!?" I said out loud sitting up in my chair, now either time travel existed and somehow I'd sent back a document from the future or someone was attempting to grow the Codex, my Codex, without my consent. That was thoroughly concerning because I didn't know what they were trying to say, I guess I could read it to find out.

Opening the document, I quickly started to look through it and noted that most of it was just a rehash of what I had originally proposed in different words but then I found a section that was thoroughly new.

A Mandalorian does not stand alone. A single mandalorian defender stands upon the shoulders of thousands, from artisans, technicians, miners, slicers, bureaucrats, farmers, chemists, armorers, logistics workers and countless more. Every aspect of society is responsible in some way to the deployment of our honored fighters.

Well, they weren't wrong though and I would say it would be the free market that the Mandalorians need to rely on. The way this was worded reminded me of something, a collectivist expression of Mandalorian culture. It hits the right cultural beats to strike a Mandalorian's pride but what exactly is this meant to prelude? It gave me a bad feeling.

Indeed, it does not matter if you are working in a public body or in a private organization you are contributing to the glory of Mandalore. But for too long we have allowed perverse ideals of separation between our common government and our privately owned expressions of infrastructure and value from a corrupt republic to weaken us.

Oh oh no, this right here was a worrying sign calling for a fusion of the private and public sector. I personally cannot think of a more terrifying thing than a government and a private organization being in lockstep agreement. They are meant to hold different interests and be regulated by the separation of power and responsibility they both hold. And outright claiming the problems in the sector are because of the Republic. Which is kind of true but not to the extent that this was implying. This was a trying to create a crisis narrative that the situation was desperate and needed to be dealt with immediately. This couldn't get any worse could it…

Our government officials promote Republic style regulations that cripple loyal Mandalorian corporate entities giving advantage to unscrupulous and dishonorable trade unions who sap wealth from the common Mandalorian to enrich the parasites in the core worlds. In turn private Mandalorian entities have fled from the heavy regulation of Mandalore to establish themselves elsewhere, developing and enriching people who do not follow our creed.

Oh… to be fair the regulations in Mandalore were heavier than they were in the Republic so yes this was technically true. It has, however, been improving in the last few years in my opinion. This could imply that this person was not someone from the Core sector of Mandalore, perhaps one of the periphery planets. They were talking about being loyal to the planet of Mandalore so perhaps someone who used to live on Mandalore before the Clan Wars or had ties to the ghost of the past coming to haunt the future.

This is a disgraceful state of affairs that can only be rectified by a re-examination of what is private and what is public.

Oh hell there it is again, questioning what should be outside the state and what should be inside the state and a separation of Mandalore from anyone who is outside the state.

A public-private partnership in true Mandalorian style is a contract between the Mandalorian Government and Mandalorian Private organizations to act only in the interests of the Mandalorian people. Drawing wealth into our deprived systems and away from the dishonorable and parasitic. A Mandalorian Public-Private Partnership (MPPP) brings together both sectors expertise and resources with the sole intention of providing infrastructure, wealth creation, goods and services to the Mandalorian people.

Someone is trying to turn my Codex into a fascist document. Space Corporate fascism… this wouldn't take off right? There's no way this would take off. The Republic was too strong even in its influences outside of Mandalore Sector for something like this to take off and inside Mandalore Sector therewas a quite a bit of what could be basically called ancient Libertarianism, 'Get off my property and stay off my property or I'll use the guns that I own as my property to make you off my property or feed my property crops'.

You would need to find a literal hell hole inside the Mandalore Sector for this to even work to any extent. Right? Then again I'm sure a large majority of Mandalorian worlds have been orbitaly bombed at some point, there could be up to half of them still in a state where a document like this could fester, there's still more to read hopefully this didn't get any worse.

Even if it was some form of Corporate fascism, this is obviously some corporation pushing for fascism, just by reading the seven layers of corporate kung fu painted across this paragraph told me that. Not to mention this was obviously attempting to appeal to the egotistical Mandalorians mind, playing some cultural supremacy was in the future if they sided with them…

This would typically express itself as private agencies owning and operating facilities or equipment to deliver necessary public services while making use of a sympathetic public organization to remove restrictions and regulations that only serve to prevent prosperity and growth.

Congratulations, corporate monopolies running everything. Not only would this allow stagnant monopolies to take much of the government's money, it would increase the amount of waste as regulations meant to prevent kickbacks would be gone. Oh we have enough fighters, guess we need to continue to subsidize the fighters. wink keep getting people voting for me and you keep that subsidy going, this had to be a nightmare right there was no way this was real.

Indeed the MPPP is only truly possible when created by Mandalorians as we have the unique benefit of our shared codes and common interest that will help to establish trust that such a partnership would never be abused.

That was a false statement, quite a lie, in fact if I had had to guess. A corporation was trying to use the Silver Codex to set up a political party to get itself more freedom to create monopolies. This was outrageous, this was ticking me off a little. I don't think I'd been ticked off in this life. Oh well at least I made my way through the document there's nothing worse… there all the way at the bottom it was signed.

-White Silver

I saw red, one moment I was in my chair holding the pad in my hands, the next moment the pad was across the room, broken in half and I was out of my chair grinding my teeth. I felt like a fire was running through my system, pure utter rage as I realized that this corporate asshole who was trying to create a corporate fascist state was trying to steal my identity or at least the identity I had created to prevent a possible conflict in this life.

My attempt to create a self-defense variant of the Mandalorian culture in order to prevent conflict was being hijacked to create space corpo fascism.

And there wasn't much I could do about it, oh sure I could go out there and publish the second volume of the Silver Codex all I want, all it would do is cause a bit of confusion and people would just choose whichever one they liked better, assuming that both were fake instead of one was more real than the other. In fact because one had been put out first and would be claiming to be the real one if I put out a second volume and claimed I was a real one people would just chuckle and ignore it.

I needed to learn who was behind the identity of this False Silver and expose them before this became a thing.

Taking a few deep breaths I calmed myself and tried to let my brain work. There were already key points of evidence given to me by the damn document itself. I just need to get another copy of the document to read over it again to make sure I wasn't mistaken in my assumptions. A corporation on the edges of Mandalorian space could be anything, perhaps military based most likely if you're going to stroke the egos of the supremacists you're going to want the supremacists to be thinking about war so it's most likely a military based company, couldn't be that many of them.

Turning to X4 who had been standing there dutifully I said, "I need documents on every military based corporation within the Mandalore sector as well as any information on a Silver Codex volume 2 that can be found."

"Yes, mistress," X4 said, bowing a bit before asking, "is there anything else you need?"

Chuckling, I said, "An identity theft lawyer, but you can get me a company that will deliver a letter to the Mandalore sector with no questions asked. That would be useful and I have two or three people I need to talk to about some things that need to be handled."

"Of course, mistress." X4 said, bowing again before stepping away.

Turning back to the window I let out a sigh, I need to just wrap this up quickly before Aunt Satine found out, if something like this came to her attention as a political issue she would have to come down hard on all the Silver Codex work I've been doing over the years just to maintain control of the sector which could be just as dangerous as letting this False Silver gain followers.

Which means I needed someone on the ground to be my eyes and ears, hopefully Bo-Katan could help me with that. I knew she had contacts with a lot of Mandalorian Traditionalists so hopefully her contacts had some idea who this False Silver was and could point me in the right direction.