As it turned out, the military didn't approach me for anything. Bu Fan was right. With the evidence of Justin Han's collaboration with Michael Miller and Country A's vaunted Central Intelligence in plain sight, they were more focused on rooting out the traitors.
The case was closed before I knew it, with Justin Han denounced as a traitor. Overnight, the stocks of Han Industries fell. The company went bankrupt, with its partners pulling out and cancelling contracts. None of them wanted to be tainted with the stigma of being associated with traitors. It would be another week or so before Han Industries officially ceased to exist.
No, I didn't buy out the shares of Han Industries. What, did you think this was a CEO novel or something? Where the CEO male lead bought out companies or shares like a teenage girl buying clothes at the mall? Businesses were a lot more complex than what those CEO novels would have you believe. There were a lot of steps and complications to a takeover or owning shares of another company. It wasn't a matter of simply throwing money, signing a document, and voila, the shares suddenly belonged to the buyer.
The way those CEO characters bought out companies and shares through a single phone call was as unrealistic as hell.
Besides, I had better things to do with my funds than to waste them on buying a company that was on the verge of disintegration. I needed them for my new project. But for now, I oversaw the construction of my newest battleship, which I had term the Poseidon class.
"Are you sure about this?" William Wang asked when he saw me supervising the battleship in the naval shipyard we were working in. "This is going to cost us a lot."
"It'll be worth it," I replied confidently. "And the military will be purchasing the battleship anyway. So the costs are all covered. I daresay we might even make a profit."
"I don't mean to pour rain on your parade, but aren't carriers the actual capital ships these days? Wouldn't you be better off constructing carriers instead?"
"Nah." A battleship was a man's dream, just like giant robots. I knew how everyone criticized my dreams for being unrealistic or impractical. After all, bipedal walkers were impractical, especially when compared to tanks. And William was right – most naval commanders believed in the superiority of carriers while declaring battleships obsolete.
But a man could dream, couldn't he? I had dreamed of building giant robots and commanding fleets of battleships when I was a kid, especially since I was exposed to a colossal collection of science fiction books, animation and films. I had been intrigued by such stories and wanted to see them come true.
And now I was on the verge of completing those dreams. Well, these were simply the first step. My ambitions were larger than that. After creating the battleships, I wanted to go one step further and go into the frontier.
For now, I had to address the threat that this country was facing. Despite the appearance of the Bulwark class shield boats, Country A had not backed off. Their navy was still floating offshore, their cannons pointed toward inland. Of course, this country's navy was positioned between them and the shore, shimmering shield domes extending outward to protect as much territory as they could.
However, the only advantage that this country's navy held was in defense and the commanders of Country A knew it. That was why they wanted a stalemate.
In order to break the deadlock, I needed to introduce a new element – one that would change the tides of the cold war brewing over the sea.
"Honestly, though, I wasn't worried about us making money or losing money." William shook his head before glaring at me. "I'm more concerned about you. Being targeted by assassins and all that. Are you sure you should be running around like this? You ought to be more careful."
"I haven't been targeted by assassins ever since Justin Han was killed."
While that was true, it had only been a couple of weeks since his death, so my declaration might be premature. The people's military had covered up as much as they could, but all that mattered was that the main culprit was dead and exposed for the traitor that he was. Unfortunately, Brad Biao and Alan Shou remained my bodyguards. A precautionary measure, General Gary Goh claimed. I couldn't refute him, especially because it was still so soon after Justin Han's demise. And there were no guarantees that Justin Han and the Central Intelligence operatives he was in contact with were the only ones after my life. There might still be other foreign agents lurking around in this country.
The military was taking no risks. I was too valuable an asset for them to risk anything.
Speaking of foreign agents, I heard that the sniper, Kevin Kan, was still in captivity. They were interrogating him, without much success. Country A had demanded their operative back, but they couldn't put up much of a strong case because the bastard was caught red-handed trying to snipe one of the citizens here. Me, specifically.
As such, all they could do was make some noise, but they couldn't do anything beyond complaining. The international court would be on our side. Extraterritoriality and all that bullshit had died along with colonialism back then. Perhaps they could have still pushed their case a couple of hundred years ago, but Hua Xia had grown too strong and powerful for the International Country of Justice to simply dismiss and rule in favor of Country A. They knew this country wasn't so easy to bully.
Also, the government of Country A wasn't stupid. They denied involvement and eventually cast poor Kevin off, claiming that he was rogue and they didn't order a hit on me. That any assassination attempt was carried out by private parties, for example Justin Han who hired these assassins as well as a whole bunch of overseas mercenaries.
Now that he was dead, the truth was beginning to surface after extensive investigation. Justin Han had indeed employed foreign mercenaries and paramilitary organizations to kill me, even arming and equipping them with his own personal supply of exosuits and weapons. Evidence of his deals manifested in documents and cloud server data that the military forcibly obtained through raiding the many subsidiaries and branches of the now defunct Han Industries.
Like I said earlier, Han Industries was becoming quite the pariah in the nation now, having been viewed as traitors, all thanks to their murderous CEO. It was one thing to order an assassination on me, but it was quite another to work with foreign forces.
Of course, I didn't buy all this patriotic or nationalist bullshit. I couldn't care less if Justin Han was hiring foreign mercenaries or local thugs to assassinate me. The fact was that he tried to have me killed was all that mattered. Whether it was a local or a foreigner who tried to murder me, the end result was that I would have lost my life, and that bothered me more than the nationality of my would-be killer.
"Don't worry about it," I assured William. "Bu Fan has also carried out his own investigations and all traces lead to Justin Han. With him dead, there shouldn't be any other enemies. I will still be careful, and I have bodyguards to protect me, so it's not as if I'll be letting my guard down just because one foe has been taken down."
"That's a promise then," my vice-president said. "Don't you ever let your guard down."
"Okay." I grinned and shrugged helplessly. Meanwhile, I decided not to tell him that I was about to pull another dangerous stunt in the near future. Particularly because I intended to command this new battleship myself.
Looking from over the railings, I watched as they pieced together the new Poseidon-class battleship. Hydraulic arms lifted massive barrels and brought them to the stern, where crews tirelessly worked and welded metal together. When that was done, they would line the insides with wires and install the systems before test-firing.
The new plasma railguns, which had a range of over a thousand kilometers. As I said, I was designing these ships to be mobile artillery platforms, capable of shore bombardment and razing cities from a distance.
"Well, I had better go inside to supervise the installation of the shield generators." I turned away and began to descend the stairs. William accompanied me, but I didn't pay him much attention. My mind was drifting to the plasma reactor that I had designed specifically for this ship.
No, I didn't make use of plasma. Instead, I had designed a fusion reactor while trying to make it as clean as possible. Unlike fission reactors, fusion reactors worked by combining atoms together and left very little radioactive waste behind. Furthermore, they were far more efficient and produced a lot more power than fission reactors. That made sense, considering that the reactions that took place within our sun and other stars were nuclear fusion, the combination of hydrogen atoms into helium atoms in order to unleash incredible amounts of light and heat energies.
That should be able to power both the shield generator and the plasma weapons, both of which were a massive drain on the reactor.
On the other hand, I already had one eye on the future. I wasn't satisfied with fusion reactors. I wanted to create a reactor that could theoretically produce unlimited amounts of energy. While that sounded fantastic, I had read a lot about them in science fiction novels and I wanted to make them a reality.
Zero point energy. If I could just find a way to achieve that, then perhaps I might even be able to succeed in creating a faster than light spacecraft…
Well, right now these were all dreams and speculation. For now, I had best check on the fusion reactor and whether it held up to the demands of the ravenous shield generator and plasma weaponry. Oh, not to mention the anti-air turrets, but those relied on more conventional ballistic projectiles and smart missiles than pure energy.
"How long until the ship is completed?" I wondered out loud.
"Uh, they should be done by next month," William said as he consulted his smartphone, evidently mistaking my rhetorical question for a serious inquiry. I smiled at that and nodded.
However, inwardly I knew that I had asked the question because I simply couldn't wait to stand on its bridge and command it as it sailed out into the seas to take the fight to the enemy fleet floating a couple of hundred kilometers off our shores.
It was time for a reckoning, and I was going to turn the tables on them with my very own hands.