“I’m not in the meth business. I’m in the empire business.”
(Walter White)
In the Gallente Federation, if you’re looking for shady backroom deals, corporate backstabbing and a good dose of otherwise banned activities, two names usually come up: the Intaki Syndicate and the Sarpatis (today Serpentis) Corporation. Both are entities too big and diverse to sum up in one sentence or paragraph. Both have massive stories to tell. So let’s focus on the Serpentis, or specifically one of their chief operations, shall we?
Although considered a “pirate faction” by authorities and a good chunk of the Empires’ populations, the Sarpatis Corporation indeed has its roots in the Gallente corporate sector as a firm investing heavily in research of high-tech commodities and the development and manufacture of neural boosters (i.e. “drugs”). At some point they started stepping on other big players’ toes and when the Gallente Federation banned most boosters because of their wild side effects, Sarpatis was all but finished - so it seemed.
However, it was the founder’s adopted son Virge Salvador Sarpati who managed to avert his father’s business bankruptcy. He reformed the company as the Serpentis Corporation and started to move large chunks of his father’s holdings into nullsec space where neither the Federation nor CONCORD could monitor or sanction his activities.
Years passed in which Sarpati managed to expand on his father’s old booster formulas and to create a vast network of contacts throughout the Empire and lawless space. He recruited a fair number of disgraced - but very eager - Caldari scientists and with their aid raised a new biochemical research empire nearly from scratch.
One of the main pillars for the Serpentis’ new route to success and a cornerstone of their “biochemical” endeavours is a cosmic substance called Cytoserocin. When you ask around in the shady circles among Lowsec pirates and Syndicate smugglers you will eventually hear the name “Assilot”.
Assilot is not a person’s name or the name of a planet. Rather, it’s the name for an entire star constellation in the supernova remnant known as Cloud Ring. So in Nullsec space where Capsuleers usually take matters in their own hands. The name hints to Gallentean origins and indeed Assilot is also famous for other activities that are banned in the Federation: The Legends Trial Arena. Named after a famous Gallente Federation holovideo series, the Arena is a dueling place among aspiring combat pilots and Capsuleers. The cheering crowds are the bored and the social outcasts and this proved to be Sarpati’s first market for his new drugs. It’s also the start of an intricate web of distribution facilities and distributors, many coming from the not so far Intaki Syndicate.
Now, Cytoserocin, also known as “Cyto” or “Big C”, is a strange crystalline substance that is found in interplanetary clouds. Its existence is a miracle in itself: The tiny crystals form only under extreme pressure and are believed to have been catalysed when the Ring’s parent star exploded some 50,000 years ago. They were then dispersed with other debris into small, thin clouds of dust and gas and have been slowly moving through the constellation on the waves of the supernova blast ever since. And nowhere else in Cloud Ring will you find more wisps of these clouds than in the Assilot constellation.
The Serpentis Corporation of course knows this and that’s why you will also find numerous installations where Cyto is refined into a powder and used for their booster production. They maintain a vast array of production facilities, supply depots, warehouses and hidden deadspace rally points.
With their boosters Serpentis are mainly targeting the black markets of the Gallente Federation but their products have also appeared on the other side of the New Eden Cluster. Not very coincidentally Serpentis has solid agreements with the Intaki Syndicate (which is led by a close friend of the Sarpati family) for distribution and the Angel Cartel for protection.
Harvesting Cyto isn’t very difficult: Specially refitted mining ships are mostly used to extract the substance from those wispy clouds by means of a so-called Gas Harvester or Gas Scoop. The module works pretty much like an ionizer and a tractor beam, splitting the tiny crystals from the rest of the dust cloud’s material and drawing them into special tanks in the refitted mining holds.
Capsuleers casually call this “gas huffing” and they have steadily been encroaching on Serpentis turf for years now, eliminating production facility guards and taking over entire distribution complexes in their search for those precious booster reaction blueprints. Although the Serpentis Corporation has many assets at their disposal, including a protection agreement with the Guardian Angels of the Angel Cartel, they lost many battles against the enhanced combat prowess of their Capsuleer corporation counterparts. For the first time in decades the Serpentis Corporation is maybe facing a serious challenge that’s threatening their heart of operations and chief source of income.
It’s unlikely Serpentis CEO V. Salvador Sarpati didn’t notice and it’s even more unlikely he won’t react in force to this with more force projection. Consequently, Cloud Ring has seen an increase of refitted Moros-class Dreadnoughts bearing the Serpentis Corporation logo and patrolling Serpentis territory in recent months. Furthermore, the Guristas - with whom the Serpentis have collaborated on occasion in the past - have even been sighted in the Ring, trying to establish clandestine bases of operations from which they then launch their feared “Diamond”-class roaming fleets.
All these assets that are thrown into the field ARE a deterrent to be reckoned with but of course Capsuleer creativity and ingenuity should never be underestimated.
Make no mistake, there is a “War On Drugs” going on in Cloud Ring and it may just be the beginning…
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