>>6126753“I see, and what kind of designs can you build?”
Jack brought up the JHIS catalogue.
“Warships mostly. I started this business because I wanted to sell warships. My old colleagues encouraged me to diversify but… they’re not here anymore.”
“You do realise that’s an incredibly risky business plan? Depending on who you sell to you risk making powerful enemies.”
“Oh that already happened.”
“Emperor’s blood Horner, who did you piss off!?”
“The Solar Union.”
Your eyes widened and your jaw almost dropped.
“You made an enemy of one of the most powerful stellar nations in the local cluster and the current rulers of humanity’s homeworld!?”
“Eh… it’s not so bad. I still have access to the Union Materials Index. As long as I don’t do anything else to piss them off we should be fine… probably.”
You scroll through the catalogue, it was limited but some of these designs had potential. One of them looked oddly familiar.
“What’s Project Sovereign?”
“If you don’t know, then I’m not at liberty to tell you. The client was very strict about the NDA on that one.”
“Another powerful enemy?”
“Only if I break the NDA.”
You sigh. One day you will have to pry this man open and get him to tell you about every one of his little fuck ups before they started complicating your life. For now you turned your attention to more immediate problems.
“I think we should start with a complete rebrand. I want to rename the company to Horned Princess Shipworks; I think it combines a sense of elegance and menace. JH Independent just sounds a bit… plebeian.”
“Err… I don’t think-”
You shoot him a withering glare.
“<span class="mu-i">We’re calling it Horned Princess Shipworks, I like that name; so we’re changing it.</span>”
“Yes your majesty.”
“Good, now the next order of business should be to…”
>We need to get more work crews so we can actually build capital ships again.>Put together a new R&D department. Without one, researching new technologies would be impossible and it would be hard to design new ships using existing ones.>Try to secure a client, you need to make some sales before you could begin to remedy the other issues.>Write-In 