What does one usually do when they get a large windfall of cash? Find good reasons to use it, of course!
"The procedure is complete," Doc announced as he finished installing Echo's new arm. "Installation was as quick and easy as calculated, due to your already heavily modified body, and I imagine that given your experience with cybernetics already, the adjustment period should be relatively short as well. Still, please consult a medical specialist should you notice anything abnormal."
"So, what do you think?" I asked curiously from where I stood near the entrance to the medical bay along with the rest of the Bad Batch.
"Almost forgot what it felt like to grip something in my right hand," Echo commented as he looked at and flexed his brand new multi-tool hand, 650 credits, including activating the various tools installed within the fingers, hand, and lower arm, including a scomp link so he could still plug into computer systems as needed.
Ever since their discussion on Bracca, I've been wanting to get Echo an upgrade that gave him access to both hands again. After going over the specs for the arm with his team, and sweetening the deal by offering a discount on it, the clone cyborg had jumped on the opportunity.
"And now you can actually use a proper rifle!" Wrecker laughed while waving around his own weapon, which had me slightly nervous since he had the grenade launcher attachment currently on it.
"And it should make you roughly 25% more efficient in various technical related tasks without limiting your overall combat ability," Tech noted.
"And you still can't get your own," Hunter reminded Tech with a groan. "Getting cybernetics for anything that isn't health related goes too far. We've talked about this."
"Of course, and I agree it would be illogical to partake in such an operation while having a healthy and fully functioning arm," Tech agreed. "However, it is good to know that, given any traumatic injuries, we have options for efficient replacements."
"Speaking from experience, suffering a traumatic enough injury to warrant it is not fun, so best to avoid it," Echo grumbled as he got off the cot he was resting on during the surgery. "Thanks for the arm, Nick, I'll put it to good use."
"I'm sure you will," I nodded. "I did promise to be your guys' supplier, after all, which naturally includes body mods when needed!"
"Thanks, Nick!" Omega smiled as she examined Echo's new arm.
"You've certainly been generous, lately," Hunter noted.
"Good business will do that to a guy," I smirked under my helmet. "And I plan to keep it up!"
I said that, but it ended up being harder than I expected.
After the huge sale of the sc'raths, I made sure to return to Togoria to pay back the Togorians for their investment with another trade deal. Namely, luxuries for the females, weapons in general for self defense, and some ships for them to use for anything they want. The Margravine was particularly happy when I brought in said goods within the cargo holds of three used Gozanti-class cruisers, worth about 200k in credits between the ships and goods.
It took some work to get them transported, mainly stepping into the vacuum with my power suit on and purchasing the ships while in space, but after that it was relatively easy to load them up and fly them using skeleton crews made up of my crew to transport them to the planet itself. We didn't even need to enter hyperspace with them, just show up in the Togoria system space and make use of the plentiful empty space.
Sadly, while the Margravine was able to purchase everything for 250k, she admitted after the sale that it would be some time before her people could partake in such a large trade deal for a while. Due to Torgoria not exploiting most of their world's untapped resources, being pretty self-sufficient, and mostly running off a cottage industry, they didn't have many trade goods to freely sell off, and thus didn't have a huge amount of credits coming in.
Heck, the crate of sc'raths they traded me earlier for the salvaged military equipment represented most of their surplus of the things, the rest going to their warriors.
Sure, their swordsmiths could make more, but they were few and far between, most of their blades went to the local warriors, it naturally took time to make acceptable blades, and were only willing to sell off the 'lesser' ones to offworlders, if at all. I'd have to settle for only getting a few every once in a while rather than getting any more crate-fulls. Likely for the best, really, I didn't want to flood the collector market with things and drive down the price.
Still though, that basically meant that if I wanted to continue helping the Togorians build themselves up for eventual rebellion down the line that either means they need to up their industry, which they were unlikely to do, accept only trading them a little bit of stuff, or allow myself to operate at a loss. I didn't mind doing the latter, my money was mostly a means to an end after all, but I still needed an income stream if I planned to supply more than just them with enough gear to combat the Empire.
Adding to this, I ironically had so much money and was unsure what to do with most of it.
Oh sure, I had ideas, but I had doubts in my actual ability to actually follow them through and make something of them. I didn't have enough cash for some of the more outlandish ideas, buy a droid army and fleet to wage war on my own, and I didn't have any rich enough clients to really purchase anything to sell off to them. What I lacked most of all right now, was contacts.
Sadly, there were few early rebel groups with creds at this time, but I hoped I could help prop them up once I could meet with them.
Cid still hooked me up with smuggling jobs, but they were small potatoes compared to future plans, even if I still took them for income, something to do, and having a reason to stay close to help out Bad Batch where I could since I knew they were running into some big events. But other than that, it was a matter of playing a waiting game since given this early in the Imperial Era, what little I knew about Legends/Canon events met there was little I could directly interfere with.
Well… that wasn't entirely true, but I was waiting for opportune times to address certain things, such as Kaz being less than willing to check up on the Arkinnea temple at this time for personal reasons. Honestly, there was so much to keep track of I had to constantly check my secret journal to keep track of everything with no convenient wiki on hand.
Other than lazing around on holonet consuming media most of the time, I had to figure out how to be productive with my time.
Didn't want to touch the galactic stock market, even with droid support, since the Empire centralized and monitored the hell out of that. Couldn't really build a real company for the same reason. I wasn't really a planetary ruler on some frontier planet material either… and besides, I preferred the freedom of flying around the galaxy in my ship.
Then it hit me. I had all this cash, but I hadn't spread the love out to the Sleipnir yet!
I knew what I needed to do!
Thank goodness I had Kaz and the droids, because otherwise pimping out my ship like this would've taken a lot longer and been much harder to do. As it is, it was consistent but rewarding work to make my ship way better than she used to be. It certainly helped that the Kazellis-class was specifically designed to take on upgrades easily.
First off, were her engines. While she was sporting a brand new Class 1 hyperdrive, and I didn't want to deal with anything faster since it would be hard to maintain as Han's future ship proved, I could upgrade her sublight engines. Not only would this make her faster in space to outrun most threats, baring some of the fattest snubfighters around, I was also taking steps to upgrade her in-atmosphere speed.
Most starships, and even airspeeders, weren't really designed with aerodynamics in mind, relying on repulsorlifts for the most part to lift and push usually blocky vehicles through the air. This meant the average atmosphere speed even for dedicated starfighters was less than even jet planes back home! Sure, most dogfights happened in space, but not all of them. The Kazellis-class's flying wing design was better shaped than most ships for atmospheric flight, but it could be better.
So with that in mind, I was taking a trick used by the Porax-38 and modifying my deflector shields so that while I was in-atmosphere I could use them to push air away from the ship while in flight and reduce friction. This would allow the Sleipnir to go crazy fast, and more than likely seriously surprise whoever was trying to chase me.
Granted, at such speeds, I had to also upgrade the inertial dampeners and would have to rely on Launchpad or some crazy pilot, like a certain Jawa I knew, to handle the ship.
Second, came the armor and shields, reinforcing the former and upgrading the second. The former was nothing special, but I did take the time to install some sensorbafflers under it so that I could prevent certain scanners from getting a good read on the ship when I wanted to. As for the shields, I once again stole a concept from Porax by installing my own deflector shield projector web and additional heat sink cells.
This all would make the Sleipnir a tough bitch to take down, and ideally prevent any future crash landings due to being shot out the sky.
Third came the countermeasures. Building off what Tech had helped install already, I was installing as many support systems that I could, short of a very expensive cloaking system. In place of that, however, I got the next best things.
A Shroud to help throw off hostile tractor beam targeting, chaff, flares, and even microrockets to throw off guided weapons, the bafflers mentioned earlier, powerful jammers, stronger and encrypted communication systems, and things of that nature. Heck, I even added some magnetic docking clamps on the landing gear, just in case I ever had the chance to pull a Han, and upgraded the navicomputer.
Wouldn't cover everything, but it covered most things and I always had the option for future upgrades later.
Fourth included weapons, naturally, and I may have gone a little nuts there. Nothing too crazy or exotic, yet, I did cover my basics and take inspiration from a certain freighter that wasn't invented yet. Two front facing and retractable turbo laser cannons, ion cannons, four ST2 concussion missile tubes and two proton torpedo tubes, both retractable, and a minelayer to leave behind some extra surprises. All of which would make my ship capable of punching way above its weight class, if need be.
All of this, naturally, took a lot of work to install so everything worked properly, but Kaz truly was a miracle worker as he helped craft this ship into a masterpiece while directing the droids like a conductor.
It would make maintenance and power draw jump up a great deal, but thanks to my crew we could handle that. And if nothing else, I would never have to worry about running out of ammo in a prolonged fight.
Finally, I spent a good amount on improving creature comforts in the ship itself for myself and my crew, just in general making it more homey and comfortable for most of them, even if Rowv and Kaz weren't overly needed. It wasn't a luxury yacht, but it was certainly starting to feel much more like a mobile home rather than just a ship.
All told, all these upgrades set me back a little over 100k, over twice what it was worth, but that was mostly in parts as working at them ourselves certainly made it way cheaper than getting actual yard time would have cost. As said before, Kaz was an artist.
"She's fucking beatiful…" I muttered as I gazed over the upgraded vessel, not looking much different on the outside compared to before, but under the hood I knew she was a different beast all together.
"It was certainly a worthy project," Kaz mentioned as he walked along by his rig.
"I almost want to run into trouble and find an excuse to use her new toys," I admitted.
"And why wouldn't you?" Rowv stated, some oil and grease stains on her fur. "There is nothing a crafter wishes more than to see their creation be put to use!"
"I believe that such thoughts should be avoided for now, else they come about," Kaz pointed out. "Best to think of it as a precaution, more than anything else."
"Fair enough, don't want to tempt the Force, after all."
"The Force does not work that way."
"I'll believe that when I'm not dragged into some deadly adventure every other week," I before before my communicator went off and I activated it. "Talk to me."
"Buckethead, I got a job for you," Cid's ever patient and friendly voice came over the line. "Get your butt over to the bar, pronto."
"Cid, I told you I would be upgrading my ship for at least a week or so-"
"Is your ship all finished up?"
"Well, yes, but-"
"Then get over here!" she demanded before ending the call.
"What a thoroughly unpleasant woman," Kaz commented.
"Your people used her.
"An unfortunate necessity, I assure you."
"Whelp, we're in the same boat," I pointed out as I put down my tools and made my way to the bar. "You guys hang back here and I will let you know what the job is. Be back soon."
I quickly made my way over to Cid's Palor, walking inside to find more than just the woman in question waiting for me.
"You guys got a job too?" I asked as I took in the Bad Batch.
"You all do," Cid declared as she stepped up to a holotable and pressed some numbers before a holograph of a planet was projected. "This here, is Ryloth-"
"The homeworld of the Twi'lek," Tech helpfully added, getting himself an annoyed look from Cid for interrupting her briefing.
"Yes, thank you, Goggles," Cid said sarcastically. "Your client is a couple members of the Twi'lek Resistance."
"I heard of them," Hunter commented. "They helped the GAR expel the Separatists after they took the planet during the war."
"Yup, but now that the war is over, apparently the Empire is taking over security of the planet and asking all its former members to turn in their weapons," Cid explained. "And that doesn't sit right with some of them, which is why they hired me to get them new ones delivered to them."
"The Empire is taking away their guns?" Wrecker asked in shock. "Those monsters!"
"That's what you have an issue with?" Echo eyed his teammate in disbelief.
"If this is a simple smuggling run, why involve us?" Hunter asked curiously. "This seems more up Nick's alley rather than ours."
"Because, Bandana, Ryloth is absolutely crawling with Imperials," Cid explained as she pressed another button and showed Imperial movement patterns all over the planet. "They are setting up lots of refineries on the planet to harvest its resources, and they have lots of security set up for it since Ryloth has a bad habit of being pushed around by stronger groups across the Outer Rim."
"The planet and its people's whole history is filled with nothing but accounts of them being exploited," I commented. "Not enough that they live on a death world, the rest of the galaxy needs to just add to their suffering."
"Really?" Omega asked, morbidly curious. "What happened to them?"
"What didn't happen to them, is the better question," I stated. "I'll give you a holonovel on its history to help prep you for the mission."
"Not important right now," Cid stated. "What is important is that while Buckethead can get and transport the goods, ideally without being spotted, I'd rather he have backup in case the situation gets hot at all."
"Ahhh, I didn't know you cared," I said sarcastically.
"I care about being paid," Cid corrected me. "I don't get that if you don't come back with the credits."
"With the Sleipnir's recent modifications, the right codes, and proper flying, it should be capable of slipping past the system's security without raising any alarms," Tech noted. "And it can certainly hold more weapons in its cargo hold than the Marauder."
"Exactly, which is why I'm assigning you both to this job, and splitting the pay three ways," Cid said as he turned off the hologram and handed me a datadisc. "These are the coordinates and time for the drop off point, along with a list of what they want."
I pulled out my datapad from my satchel and inserted the disc, looking over the displayed data.
"Hmm, they want enough to supply at least a couple dozen people…" I noted.
"That gonna be a problem?" Cid arched an eye ridge.
"No, most of this stuff is pretty standard. I'll get what we need, come back to pick you guys up, and we'll be on our way."
"We'll get prepared while waiting for you to come back," Hunter assured me.
"Best get going then," Cid stated. "The sooner you get this done, the sooner we all get paid."
"Be back soon," I told everyone as I left the parlor, a smile spreading underneath my helmet.
While mostly limited to Ryloth, the local Twi'lek resistance movement would become a big thorn in the Empire's side for years to come, which meant they would need all the equipment they could possibly get in order to even the playing field against them.
That is to say, I'm pretty sure I found my next big client!
AN: Nick is suffering from success here a little bit, mainly because while he has cash now, he has few places to invest it in at the moment since few rebel groups active around this time period, and those who are he hasn't been able to really contact with. So while he waits for oppertunities to act on, I figured his ship could do with a proper smuggler's upgrade.