Im generally skeptical when people cavalierly talk about settimg up organizations to be milked for X purpose.
Organizations, they need to be run. They have bureaucratic overhead and require ongoing management.
Cant just fire and forget or you'll receive an unpleasant surprise
Or when Alratan was suggesting that we usurp Winter's job of guarding the Outer Gates so we can kill Mab.
Which would involve putting at least half a million combat troops and an indeterminate number of support troops on permanent deployment(and I mean permanent, because none of them get to go home according to Winter Lady Molly in Cold Case) at the Outer Gates, hundreds or thousands of daily casualties and Molly being on permanent call on the Outer Walls 24/7, like Mab is now.
None of this shit is free. All of it has costs and consequences, personal and otherwise.
Edit: Nevermind I just realized something. The White King is under a curse. Exactly the sort of thing that service to us suppresses. We don't want to make an open ended way to serves us without our consent or knowledge. Also we might be able to take over the White Court with a single conversation with the current figurehead White king.
I dont think you have actually read the books. If you had, you wouldnt even mention the White King as an option.
Papa Raith is a purulent sore of a human being, even by the standards of the worst vampires in the setting.
He has a recorded history of killing all his male kids to eliminate potential rivals. He has raped all eight of his living adult daughters into compliance, and its implied he killed the rebellious ones. By his own count, he's broken thousands of women.
He did deals with Outsiders for magic immunity.
For Molly personally, he killed Dresden's mother.
Tried to enthrall Lt Murphy. And tried to kill both Thomas and Dresden.
There is literally negative likelhood of Molly doing him any favor other than cutting his head off.
That curse you mentioned is literally Dresden's mother's death curse, which prevents him from feeding and growing his power.
Its anchored by the existence of her descendants, like Harry and Thomas and Maggie.
And its probably a moot point anyway, because at the end of Blood Rites, Lara Raith raped him (mentally, possibly physically) in order to break him and make him her puppet. Which he still is today.
Good chance there isnt enough left there to fix even if we wanted to.
You mean relay nodes. Satellites are for satellite phones. You can also setup a shortwave radio network in principle. You'll need to work on encoding so the transmissions aren't intercepted, but in principle it's absolutely doable. cellphone signal amplifiers are available commercially and aren't even all that expensive. It's absolutely possible to equip underground with cellphone connectivity.
So yes, from engineering perspective, it's absolutely a solvable problem.
Like you said, satellites require satellite phones.
Cellphones would work in Last Station with some support infrastructure, because it is a relatively open cavern whose characteristics can be mapped and designed around, and where there is going to be line of sight between any repeaters and cellphones. As you'll note, establishing cell service there is part of the plans for refurbing Last Station.
However.
Its not going to work in the tunnels, where radio reflectivity is unclear, rock and earth absorb radio waves, and where random magic interference is a thing, at least in Undertown
Furthermore, there is no repeater service down there, nor is it something you establish with five minutes work.
And in other underground tunnels, its probably worse absent the use of specialty undergound radios, and those have limited range.
So yeah, I stand by my statement.
Its not a solvable problem given our current tech.
Let alone 2006 tech.
