MOD:WCU:Lynch

Background:

• At the beginning of the Privateer timeline (early 2669), he controls:
  • Bronte in New Detroit
  • Lynch Mining
  • Lynch Shipping
  • Lynch Enterprises
  • Quite likely, Corcoran Corporation in Liverpool, New Castle
  • The New Detroit militias ("a mere entry in his payroll")
• Is a VIP customer of the Mercenaries Guild
• Sells dcomissioned ships and weapons to pirates at Oakham through Tayla
• His Territory probably extends over the Potter and Humboldt quadrants.

Privateer:

At the start of Privateer Part 1, Lynch has a mighty empire; a near monopoli of illegal trade. Probably it includes cheap food production and metal ore mining at "Grey Zone" hidden planets using slave labor, and refining, in addition to his serving as middleman between corrupt Confed officials in charge of decomissioning old fighters (primarily Talons), who instead sell them to him, -- then pocket some of the money, and send the rest "up the chain of command" where it ends up at the disposal of secret conspiracies--; and pirate bases' ship dealers. And similar arms deals.

At that time his main rivals are Damien Lang in the food business, and another, unnamed operator in the metal ore mining biz in Hyades.

Some time during Privateer Part 1, a new kid comes to town: former governor Menesch, who has contacts within the Confeds, Kilrathis and the Church of Man.

While Lynch's ships and arms sales were mostly to pirate groups, Menesch deals primarily with the retros. Non-the-less, this cuts into Lynch's business deeply, if indirectly: The prices of talons are affected by the buyers' perception of worth, which is affected by re-sale value. While retros could only obtain Talons in the second hand market, before Menesch, --boosting prices up the chain--; now they can obtain them directly.

Presumably, Lynch deals with this by filing a complaint with his Confed suppliers. His suppliers have reasons besides pleasing Lynch to cut off Menesch: They don't like retros much either. Menesch suddenly finds himself without a supplier ...

At the same time, another player gets Menesch's and Lynch's attention: Damien Lang. He's a food business mob boss. The way he operates is he draws a steady revenue from the Merchants' Guild, and he helps coordinate safe food deliveries, as well as prices, to prevent price wars --particularly between legit and slave labor producers. Lang, however, becomes interested in the story of the Steltek, specially since Confeds closed down Mars Sita. He reads about Dr. Monkhouse having a map in his posession, and arranges for one of the corporations he does business with, Rondell, in Palan, to try and get this map.

Rondell kidnaps Monkhouse, and they soon find out that the Kilrathi knew about Monkhouse and the Steltek before they even did. But they also find out that this is only half of the map, and the other half...

Meanwhile, Lynch had acquired the other half of the map from a treasure hunter and assassin named Sandoval, who wasn't aware of the true value of it at the time; --he knew what it was, roughly, but not the fact that it contained valuable information. Lynch had the Steltec piece safely stored at Bronte Corporation HQ in New Detroit.

Rondell contact Sandoval and promise him a large sum of money if he manages to retrieve the piece. Sandoval figures that Lynch probably knows its true value and won't let go of it, so he steals it from Bronte HQ. But Sandoval was not aware of the extent of Lynch's power in New Detroit, which included almost full control of the local militias, and a preferencial status with the Merceneries Guild. Sandoval is trapped in New Detroit, and trying to keep the artifact away from himself, out of fear for his life; contracting privateers for bogus cargo runs and handing them the object as collateral.

One of these privateers happens to be Grayson Burrows. But after Burrows leaves, Sandoval gets caught by Lynch's people, taken somewhere, and interrogated by Lynch's cousin Regis. Sandoval spills the beans about Rondell, Monkhouse and Burrows, avoiding further torture and earning himself a painless death from a gunshot in the head. But militias arrive responding to a call from a neigbor hearing Sandoval's screams, and find Regis with a smoking gun, literally.

Lynch contacts the militias and has them release Regis and make Burrows be the suspect, instead; but Confed militias get involved, in subsequent days, and they charge Regis with murder.

Meanwhile, Lynch already has a holo of his part of the Steltek map. He does not care for the piece as much as he does for that it not end up in the hands of Rondell. So he instructs his pirate contact, Tayla, to take Burrows out of the picture, and if possible have him meet with death; while, at the same time, he moves against Rondell. He has his closely controlled corporation, Bronte, hire mercenaries to lay siege to Palan and Rondell. They will surrender their half of the map to him, or else.

Damien Lang cannot hire mercenaries to defend Rondell for two reasons: The Mercenaries Guild has policies to prevent its members fighting one another; plus the fact that he works closely with the Merchants Guild, who do no business with the Mercenaries Guild, as a rule. But the Merchants Guild send their Chief of Shipping Lanes Safety, Lynn Murphy, to try and help with the situation. She travels to the Basra refinery in the Palan system and begins to organize a resistance.

Tayla fails to have Burrows "meet with death", or perhaps she kind of likes him...; so she takes a holo of the artifact for herself, while having a special compartment installed in Burrows' ship, and sends him back to Lynch. Lynch also fails at having Burrows "meet with death", and ends up losing his right hand man, Miggs, in the process. His worst nightmare almost comes to happen: Burrows goes precisely to Palan with the artefact. However, the artefact doesn't end up in the hands of Rondell, as he feared. Rather, both pieces of the map end up in the cargo hold of Burrows' ship.

Damien Lang's plans foiled. Lynch's plans foiled. The Kilrathis' plans foiled. Only Menesch's plans aren't foiled, if only because he's late to the show. Menesch informs Jones of the situation. Jones has contacts pretty high up in the Exploratory Service; --as confessed later by the Retro Informant, when he says that their contacts in the ES help keep the jumps to Eden off the records for them. So, Jones has the Exploratory Service begin to explore systems in the general direction of what the piece of the map Rondell has a holo of, seems to indicate. Unfortunately for him, Burrows arrives at the ES base in Rygannon just in time to get hired to do that very exploration; and he gets the cherry (or the kiwi, rather).

Menesch is following Burrows' moves closely. When Burrows stops at Jolson to vacation, Menesch wastes no time. First he has his agents find out everything they can about Burrows. They find an alien-looking gun. Menesch pays some pretty steep bribes and has Jolson's security people remove the gun. Having old contacts with the Kilrathi, who showed some interest by sending a whole fleet to bomb Palan; and being that his biggest customer, Jones, wants the gun, he makes a deal with the kats, whereby he buys fighters from them at production cost, and guarantees to the kats he won't let the gun end up with the Confed.

Menesch has now re-established his arms dealing busines, bypassing former Confed suppliers.

Meanwhile, the confrontation in Palan cost Lynch a fortune; and the Merceneries Guild lost close to 100 members because of it, and so they tell Lynch he can't count on their services ever again. New Detroit's local militias have also lost face with Confed, due to their handling of Regis, and also want to distance themselves from Lynch. So does Bronte, who've by now made a sworn enemy out of a mere business rival.

The same thing happens to Damien Lang with Rondell. Rondell want to buy weapons above all else, now; and they know they can't obtain them from Lang, least of all Lynch, so they go to Menesch. Menesch basically says to them "You want a vendetta against Bronte? No problem; just kick Damien Lang in the butt; do business with me from now on, and I'll have Bronte, Lynch, and all of New Detroit in a pincer in no time."

Menesch goes a step further and he takes control over the arms supply routes to Oakham, and blockades another of Lynch's interests at the Liverpool refinery in New Castle. Out of money, and unable to count on mercenaries, Lynch has no way to defend his territory against the hordes of fanatical retros doing Menesch's bidding for free. He is forced to pack his bags and retreat to an ugly mine in an asteroid field in Pyrenees. Tayla also leaves Oakham, and moves to Sherwood.

Menesch's and Lynch's previous suppliers at Confed Decomissions are completely screwed. They fired one of their customers, Menesch; and now lost thir other customer, Lynch. The Confed conspiracies see their revenue go down. They want Menesch dead and can't go as far as mobilizing a fleet while remaining secret, but they do post a hefty bounty on Menesch. So does the Merchants Guild, who see Lang losing territory to Menesch.

Lynch wastes the last of his once great fortune in putting a bounty on Menesch's head. Menesch had collected enough enemies and bounties already that his days were counted. In any case, Burrows' killing Menesch does little to bring back Lynch's glory days. Kroiz replaces Menesch. And Lynch barely has enough money to keep his addiction to brilliance satisfied.

After Privateer

Lynch: At the end of Privateer he's at Pyrenees. He's not as rich as he was, anymore; he *sells* you a wipe of your records for 100,000 credits; like small time business for a guy that probably used to deal with millions of credits per day. He's lost the quest for Steltek technology, he lost his bodyguard, and he lost Tayla. And he seems to have lost his former home-base: New Constantinople. And maybe he would have moved to Bronte HQ in New Detroit, but he seems to have lost them too. Now, his biggest problem in life, the way HE saw it, was Menesch. Now Menesch is dead, he should be prospering, shouldn't he?

There's a new kid in town, I say.

Kroiz, will seize the oppertunity in the chaos he has created to start to obliterate his rivals, Daemian Lang, and especially Lynch.