Episode 86

Taro suddenly started bellowing at the top of his lungs. Marl clapped her hands over her ears, shooting him a look that suggested she was questioning his sanity. Taro noticed her reproachful glare, but he didn't care—his brain was currently a mosh pit of new product ideas.

"That's it! There’s no law saying we have to bolt this thing onto a ship. We just mount it on space stations or fortresses! If you ask which is easier to use—this or a Large-caliber Beam Cannon—it’s a toss-up, but with the current cannon shortage, this thing is a gold mine!"

Marl finally seemed to catch the drift of Taro’s frantic monologue. Her expression shifted to one of "Oh, I see," and she gave a slow nod.

"I get it now... The firepower is definitely there, so it might actually work. Though, unlike a beam, the fact that it needs constant refills of warheads and rails is a bit of a snag, isn't it?"

"Yeah. Plus, there’s the price of the unit itself... Looking at it, this thing is gonna be stupidly expensive."

Taro looked up at the towering, gargantuan apparatus once more. When he glanced back down, the BB Makina development team was awkwardly whistling and looking at their shoes.

"I mean, look, the demand is so high that it’s bound to sell. We want to stop being 'The Electric Kokeshi Company' as soon as possible, so let’s just go for it!"

With the President’s seal of approval, the development team’s gloom vanished instantly. "Yes!" "We did it!" they cheered, pumping their fists in the air.

Marl, however, walked toward them with a silence that screamed danger.

"By the way... how much does this actually cost?"

A short, simple question. It was enough to flash-freeze the air. Makina swallowed hard, took a single, trembling step forward, and squeaked it out.

"...Approximately four times the price of a Standard Fortress Cannon."

"Rejected."

The denial was instantaneous. Makina hit the floor on his knees, defeated.

Four times, huh... even with the wartime price hikes, it’s still triple the cost of the competition. That’s a bit... okay, that’s a massive problem.

Taro felt a pang of pity for the despondent Makina, who was currently trying to merge with the floor tiles, but the numbers just didn't add up. If a buyer was willing to pay four times the market rate, they could just bribe their way to the front of the line for a standard cannon, even with the shortages.

"And that’s not the only issue," Marl pointed out. "Even if we mass-produce this, where is the factory? Are you planning to just ghost the Imperial Military on our 5,000-unit contract?"

"Oh, right... forgot about that," Taro muttered, rubbing his temples. The development team visibly winced at the words "Imperial Military." The weight of government contracts started to settle back over them like a lead blanket.

"Doing both at once is... probably impossible. We’d just screw up both jobs. Besides, I have no idea how many factories we can even get our hands on right now."

"In this economy? Good luck finding any," Marl sighed. "If we used the production lines for those... uh, 'toys,' we might make a dent, but those are still flying off the shelves, right?"

"Selling like absolute crazy."

"Then we can't stop those lines either. If we suddenly halted production, we’d have a riot on our hands from the wholesalers all the way down to the lonely end-users."

"Is it really a dead end? Isn't there anything we can do? You guys worked your asses off on this, didn't you?" Taro asked.

The development team nodded in unison, their smiles looking more like grimaces. Their faces were a roadmap of every all-nighter they’d pulled.

"Is the price just a matter of the part count? It’s so big that shipping alone must be a nightmare... Tell me, does this use any rare resources?" Marl asked, looking up at the machine.

"No, only the bare minimum," Makina answered. "We couldn't do anything about the BISHOP, so we used an excessive amount of Drive Detection Elements instead. The mechanism to suppress the repulsion between the elements just wouldn’t shrink, which is why it ended up this big."

It was clearly his masterpiece, and the realization that it might never see the light of day was crushing him. Makina gazed up at the Prototype Large-scale Railgun with the eyes of a man watching his child get rejected from preschool.

A heavy silence fell. Taro crossed his arms, his brain gears grinding as he desperately searched for a loophole.

Suddenly, a voice chimed in from behind. "Excuse me."

Everyone turned to see Koume with one hand raised to face height.

"Mr. Teiro. Printer ink cartridges. Mobile phones. Do you recall the specific sales model common to these items?"

Confused looks were exchanged across the room. But Taro? Taro’s eyes lit up like a supernova.

"I see... the rails and the ammo... the maintenance..." Taro began mumbling to himself, a grin slowly spreading across his face. "It’ll work... it’ll totally work! We can fix the price issue. Now it’s just the factory problem. Honestly, I want to prioritize this thing. But I know that snubbing the Empire would be... bad."

Taro looked up, addressing the group.

"Can I ask why?" Marl cut in. "Even if you can make it cheap, I don't get why you’d pick this over the Imperial contract. They’re both products of the same team, but for the company's future, the Empire is the obvious choice."

"Hmm. Yeah, you're right," Taro admitted. He walked over to the massive device and peered into its exposed guts. It was a labyrinth of complex structures and densely packed wiring. He understood what most of it did, but some parts were total mysteries.

"Look at this thing. Just at a glance, it uses hundreds of times more types of parts than the ship-mounted Railgun."

Taro reached out and poked a tiny, rubbery buffer sitting on a joint. It was a cheap part, probably worth a few Credits, but it was something Rising Sun couldn't manufacture on its own. Metal was easy to manipulate, but organic materials and precision-molded parts were a different beast.

"That means hundreds of different companies and factories can get a piece of the action. With the ship railguns, a handful of big corporations just get richer."

Taro tilted his head as if to say, See? Marl opened her mouth to argue, hesitated, and then closed it. After a long moment, she sighed.

"So, you're saying you can't go back on your word."

"Yeah. I just promised that if we make money, everyone makes money. I want to contribute to the star system’s economy if I can, you know?"

"Well, if that's your reason, I guess I can't stop you... It’s a shame, but let's find another way. Realistically, we could just license out the blueprints? Though finding someone to take the risk would be tough."

"No. We’re keeping the blueprints. I don't care how far away the factories are—we’ll have them manufacture the parts, and we’ll do the final assembly here. Fortress orders won't come in all at once, so we’ll just mass-produce these railguns as fast as we can in the meantime."

Taro’s tone was firm, but Marl still looked skeptical.

"If you expand the search to distant star systems, sure, you'll find factories. But the shipping costs alone will be astronomical. We might actually lose money."

"That’s fine. I mean, losing money sucks, but if we have to, we have to. I’m hoping we can at least break even."

"Wait, are you serious?!"

"Dead serious. Look, doing both at once is the dream, but we can't pull that off right now. So, instead of half-assing two things, I’m whole-assing one. Even if we’re in the red, this is going to buy us something way more valuable than Credits. Right, Koume?"

"Indeed, Mr. Teiro. Establishing a network of connections—whether they be tiny manufacturers or intermediary firms—within the Empire is a massive strategic gain. Furthermore, Mr. Dean’s behavior at the previous meeting was... uncharacteristically forward. Military intelligence officers do not typically reveal their identities so casually."

Marl went quiet, processing Koume’s analysis.

"So you're saying... he's decided to build a real connection with us? Or specifically with Taro? Like, a 'deep state' kind of connection?"

Koume nodded. "It is the most logical conclusion, Miss Marl. Even the 'souvenir' he requested was likely a way to create a bond of mutual complicity. It may not be public, but you can be certain it was recorded. A man who plays power games for a living does not risk his career for a few petty bribes unless there is a secondary purpose."

Marl groaned, crossing her arms. "Ugh, now that you mention it, that sounds like him. He doesn't seem like the type to throw away his future for a quick buck. He’s an arrogant prick, but he’s smart... Wait. Does that mean the current contract was also...?"

Marl looked at Taro, eyes wide.

"I can't be 100% sure, but it was probably a 'nice to meet you' gift," Taro said. "The guys we negotiated with were too professional to be that sloppy with the budget. Giving us whatever price we wanted was a message."

A professional negotiation team doesn't just throw money around by accident. They were ironclad on the details but loose on the purse strings—a classic move by someone who wanted to be liked.

"I hate that he’s playing 4D chess behind our backs... but fine, if that's the play, we can make it work," Marl said with an exasperated laugh.

The development team breathed a collective sigh of relief, which turned into a series of pained smiles when Marl added, "But even if we’re just doing assembly for one of them, we’re still doing two massive jobs. You guys are going to be exhausted."

"Doesn't matter! Our own product is finally seeing the light of day! We’ll make it happen even if we have to puke blood!" Makina declared, looking more like a wide-eyed scientist than a CEO. "This is our chance to show the world we’re more than just 'The Dildo People'!"

The rest of the team nodded fervently.

"Alright! Time to find some factories!" Taro shouted, clapping his hands together to psych himself up.

"Easier said than done," Marl teased. "That's the most annoying part of the job."

Taro just gave her a confident thumbs-up.

"I just have to scrape the network for factory capacity and cross-reference it with shipping costs, right? It’s no harder than mapping an info-net. I don't care if there are 100,000 parts or 200,000—once I have the list and the prices, I’ll have the whole thing solved in five minutes."