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External Security was Barter's military arm, for lack of a better term. A necessity in a galaxy brimming with pirates, warlords, and corrupt planetary governors who'd love nothing more than to take the station as a prize. And what a prize it is, brimming with hundreds of billions of cred worth of valuable goods, rare materials, and various exotic, often unique items. While at the same time possessing the combat maneuverability of a hurling asteroid and a turn radius measured in orbital circumferences.
And so, to protect Barter's wealth and its inhabitants' ability to make a profit, no expense was spared to turn the station into a fortress. Bristling with enough guns and missile bays to qualify as a warfleet all on its own, and housing strong enough shields to endure a sustained torpedo barrage, Barter has successfully fought off or scared off any and all pirate attacks and "forceful requisition" attempts in living history. And then, more often than not, went on to establish trade relations with the attackers.
All those armaments naturally required power and lots of it. And, having been declared a Critical Resource vital to the well-being of the station, ExtSec was guaranteed to get what it needed. In practical terms, this meant that all of Barter's weapons and shields existed on a completely separate energy grid with its own reactors, capacitors, generators, battery banks and by and large sanely and cleanly laid out power cables with proper safeties, well-maintained transformer stations and multiple redundancies.
Their techs got higher base wages too, the bastards. Despite having to do, at most, a quarter of the work than Energy Management did. It was a dream for more a few of your fellow techs to land a cushy position in ExtSec's energy section. You once considered it too, at least until you realized the sheer amount of ass-kissing you'd need to do.
All that said, Barter's structure being what it is, sometimes a simple lack of space prevented ExtSec's power lines from getting their own dedicated ducts, forcing them to share space with the ones belonging to the general grid. And whenever that happened, what usually happened was that some idiot would try and lower his power bill by hooking himself up to the military grid, while willfully ignoring the clear and unambiguous warnings posted every ten meters forbidding doing that very thing.
Since ExtSec's grid wasn't a hot mess of patchwork cables, decades-old wiring, splits leading to nowhere, and rusting junction boxes, they were able to easily catch the energy fluctuations caused by these kinds of shenanigans and even pinpoint their origin with relative accuracy. Which inevitably led to the idiot in question getting a reinforced boot up the ass and a ruinous fine to pay off.
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