The Iron Cartel

While the Board of Directors is the official ruling body of the S'aue Empire, the majority of actual, exertable power lies in the hands of the Iron Cartel, a widespread merchants guild whose members are involved in the vast majority of trade deals made between the empire and its allies, as well as being the invisible hand pulling at the strings of the members of the board.

Organization

To date, there are only a handful of business ventures within the empire that are not under the wing of the Iron Cartel. An up and coming business in the S'aue Empire will inevitably be approached by representatives of the cartel and given a strong recommendation to join. Those who do not will often face hardships in the form of problems with deliveries, difficulty retaining customers and vandalism. These problems of course vanish when the business is assimilated into the cartel and begins to pay dividends to the guild.

The guild itself consists of the member businesses, a phoney corporate entity under which all the member businesses are signed for purposes of taxation and the administrative wing which handles all the bureaucratic proceedings involved in running a business conglomerate.

Goals

What does one want when further wealth becomes meaningless? Influence and power come to mind. And so it is with the Iron Cartel, the members of which ever seek new ways to influence the world around themselves, and what could be more instantly gratifying than financial success?

To this end, higher ranking members of the cartel seek to dominate markets through attempts at establishing monopolies, shorting the stocks of proxy businesses before cashing out and ditching them, along with other similarly underhanded business tactics. Personal gain is the name of the game, and these S'aue know how to play it.

Oil Flotillas

Recently, the Iron Cartel has made efforts to strongarm their way into the lucrative field of locating and extracting oil for the empire. They've increased membership fees to pay for the upkeep of three separate Oil Flotillas and hired mercenaries to act as the crews of the flying fleets. As competition in the field is incredibly fierce, talks of trying to outright buy the opposition out of the industry are not uncommon during cartel meetings.

Another proposed solution is to win the arms race, which would assert dominance and allow for plundering of rival flotillas and oil fields. The cartel has taken a head-start in this matter by outfitting their mercenary crews with the experimental Pressure Lancers, which have proven to be very effective in the field.

All sales are final

Only a fool accepts the asking price.

–An adage favored by the cartel

by Midjourney

_{An Iron Cartel enforcer making the rounds in a member business}