What Do You Mean I'm The Captain Of A Yandere Mercenary Company?

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After checking that the tea was indeed where Lea said it was, I decided to go and check on Ries to see how she was settling in.

I haven’t gone to her workshop ever since she had received her drones so I was a little curious on what she might be doing back here when she isn’t on the bridge.

The door slid open and I stepped inside to see Ries hunched over her workstation, presumably working on her drones.

I was about to call out to her when I paused.

I’ve seen how she acts when she’s handling guns and even talking about them, I’ve also seen how she acts when she’s talking to me. Now I realised that this was a different side of Ries that I have not seen before.

She had a really serene look on her face and since the lights in the room had been intentionally dimmed while the workstation lights were brightened, it gave her a bit of an ethereal look.

Ries was typing at a virtual keyboard and the lines of code were scrolling upwards on the holographic screen in front of her at an incredibly fast speed. Heck, even the speed of her fingers dancing on the keyboard was a sight to behold.

It was such a surreal sight that I was actually afraid to disturb it.

She didn’t seem to have noticed my presence yet so I moved behind her to watch her work out of curiosity.

Despite me moving right behind her, she still continued her work with silent concentration, not even showing any signs that she even noticed there was someone else in the room with her.

I took that opportunity to look around the room.

Back then, this was set aside as Ries’s workshop and her maintenance area but it was pretty much empty aside from the power generator, the shield generator and the engines.

Now it seems like Ries had been busy as she had carved out an actual workshop as there were several worktables that had various machines and tools on them as well as some other complicated looking machinery that I had no idea the purpose of.

The worktable she was at seemed to have a computer, some precision tools and even a drawing board stuck to the back which was already filled with quite a number of scribbles and digital notes.

She definitely did not put the money I gave her to waste.

I peeked over her shoulder and found that she had one of the drones disassembled on the table and she had a wire connected from a disassembled part of the drone to the edge of the table.

The holographic window in front of her must be some kind of software she’s currently editing to control the drone or something.

I’m not a programmer so I wouldn’t know what she’s doing exactly anyway.

And even if I was… I doubt I would be able to understand anything either because of the speed she was typing on that keyboard which made the window in front of her scroll downwards at a rather ridiculous speed.

Then, without warning, she suddenly stopped and she let out a breath.

I thought that was the best time to let my presence known so I cleared my throat.

Ries jumped in her seat and she spun around, ”Wha-- Oh! Hey Boss! Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in.”

”Mmhmm, you look really focused on what you were doing just now and I didn’t want to interrupt you.”

Ries drooped her head and even her ears and tail drooped with her, ”Ah… Umm… Sorry.”

I raised an eyebrow, ”Hmm? Why are you apologising?”

Her ear twitched and she peeked at me, ”Umm… That… Did not bother you?”

”Bother me? What would bother me?”

She hesitated for a moment, ”That… I didn’t even notice you entering the room because I was too occupied with my work?”

”Ok? Why would that even bother me?”

”That’s… Err… Disrespectful?”

I blinked for a good second or two after she said that and I instantly put two and two together on why she even had that idea.

”Whichever idiot ship captain told you that is an absolute loser. You’re doing work that is literally keeping this ship together so if you’re working, I won’t interrupt you for no reason. Unless the ship is on fire or we’re being boarded then I would definitely interrupt you.”

She giggled, ”Ehehe… It’s alright, Boss. I don’t mind you interrupting me just to let me know you’re here. You’re more important than whatever I have in my workshop.”

I chuckled, ”Any particular reason that you would want to know why I’m here?”

Her tail actually curled around my thigh while she poked her fingers together shyly, ”Be… Because I like being near you…”

Well… I couldn’t help myself so I leaned forward to give her a kiss.

She purred and I felt her hands grip on my shirt shyly while we kissed.

When I separated from her, her face was visibly flushed and I don’t think she even realised she was still purring.

Unfortunately, she eventually caught herself and she coughed to hide her embarrassment.

I decided to throw her a lifeline by nodding at her work table, ”So what are you working on then?”

She quickly recovered, ”I’m making some changes to the AI I made. After doing some practical tests with the drones, I figured some things that I could change to improve the AI.”

”Is there a problem with the current AI?” I asked.

Ries turned back to the drone and tapped on the table to bring up another window which I realised was a video feed of a drone that was inside the cargo hold.

”There’s no problem with it and it’s working perfectly, actually. I just thought that it could do with an upgrade. Since we already have drones that would be going around the ship anyway, I figured they could be used for something else other than just looking for defects and transporting stuff for us.”

She pulled up another window and it looked like some kind of flowchart leading to different boxes.

”What am I looking at?” I asked.

She pointed at the flowchart, ”Right now I’m putting in a pretty simple alarm system where the drones would also patrol the ship and look for intruders both physical and digital.”

I raised an eyebrow, ”Ok… I can guess the physical part but the digital part?”

Ries’s tail tightened its grip on my thigh, ”Oh, in a ship to ship battle, you not only need to worry about the guns they have but also the hackers too. Smaller ships are less susceptible since they rely less on computers to run the ship. By that, I mean you could manually control most of your ship from the cockpit itself. But for bigger ships like this, a lot of things are automated which also means that it’s susceptible to cyber attacks.”

I looked around the room, ”Err… What could they do?”

She turned around and pointed at the shield generator, ”If you have no cyber protection, a good hacker could get through your ship’s computers and disable your shields. So you would find yourself without any shields until you manage to get your cyber defences back up.”

I tilted my head, ”I don’t understand that… Why would it be harder to hack a smaller ship than a bigger ship?”

”For a bigger ship, the computational power would be spread out more unless you get a really good computer to defend the ship’s electronics. In other words… You need to have a really good AI to protect your ship.”

I frowned, ”I thought that humans don’t like AI?”

”Oh that’s only on the surface level. I’m very, very sure that the people who is a somebody in the government are still using AI. I wouldn’t even be surprised if you went on board some of the military ships and then found that there’s a Class Six AI on board those ships. In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s a number of supposed Class Five AIs in the government that are actually Class Six AIs that they’re just pretending that it’s Class Five.”

You know what? I wouldn’t even be surprised if that was the case.

”So what did you do with the drones?” I asked.

”Obviously we don’t really have a high class AI with us and it’ll be quite expensive to get an AI for this, so I got an idea to link up all the AIs of the individual drones to pour their computational power together to defend against a hack in the event such a thing happens. With this, we could even protect ourselves against a Class Two AI and if I get more drones and I am also part of the defence… A Class Three AI.”

”That’s cool. So what about the physical intruders?”

Her lips curled up to a smile and her tail released from my thigh to swish behind her mischievously, ”Do you want to see what they can do for yourself?”

…

You know what? Why not?