Department 77

With the SSU deploying millions of peacekeeper droids and soldiers to all colonies in the solar system (and installing massive sanctions against any company that is caught in war intentions), mining companies had to become creative in order to continue the conflict.

The most common method among the companies was to set up vague branches and divisions under the veil of bureaucracy so often found in multi-trillion organisations. Black Ocean's such vague division is called Department 77, and it has the ominous official purpose of "investigation, security & retrieval of company property".

The SSU tracks all full-time employees across the system, so Black Ocean had to set up Department 77 as a franchise model, incentivising civilians to start bureaus as private sub-contractors instead of being employed. This meant Black Ocean could hide their true number of affiliates.

State Of The System

Right now, any private civilian can submit an application form to start a bureau in Department 77. The bureaus are mostly located in scrappy backwater buildings, run by a single operator and a small crew of androids for different purposes - mainly bounty hunting of course, but also things like bookkeeping or vehicle maintenance.

Field agents for Black Ocean (in a division so secretive no one knows its name) do recon and fact-finding missions that result in bounty missions being posted on the company's private and internal super-encrypted bounty board.

Bureau operators across the solar system review these bounty missions and send one or more of their bounty hunter droids to complete the bounty. If they succeed they get a monetary reward from Black Ocean.

This has now been the status quo for decades.