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

After what felt like a long time, we were back on our ship again.

Lea immediately went to check on her plants as we cruised towards the shipyard that was conveniently located within this system.

"Why would they even make a shipyard here? Isn't this like in the middle of nowhere?" I asked.

Amber chuckled from her seat, "The answer is simple, Tera~ Cheap labour and resources~"

I raised an eyebrow, "Seriously?"

"Seriously."

Ries added in from the other seat, "There's a lot of companies who would do that actually. They will set up branches in these types of places where they know the standard and cost of living is low so that they can pay low wages."

I turned to her, "Were you one of those workers?"

"Mnnggh… Yes…"

I thought so.

"I get the wages part but wouldn't it be more expensive for them to buy the materials since they will need to deliver it all the way here anyway?" I pointed out.

Amber nodded, "If they require specialised materials, yes. But for ship building businesses like these… They can actually source most of their materials either from asteroid fields or factories that were also set up around here to make use of the cheap labour to produce the materials."

Damn… So everyone wants a slice of the cake too I see.

Oh well, that's all capitalistic and economic stuff that I don't really care about anyway.

As long as I have Credits in my Codex and a way to earn more, I'm not gonna complain… Much.

What? Can't expect me to change an entire system by myself can I? Plus I'm also benefiting from it anyway and I'll freely admit that I'm a hypocrite.

Putting that aside…

I brought up my Codex and started typing in the newest entry on my log.

Ries noticed immediately, "Are you noting down designs for the new ship, Boss?"

"Hmm? Oh, no. I'm writing in my log."

"Your log, boss?"

Amber turned to face her, "Oh yeah, we haven't told you yet. We keep personal logs where we record our daily life stuff. Wanna see mine?"

"Eh? Err… Ok?"

Amber skipped over to Ries and leaned against the backrest of her chair to show the catgirl her personal terminal.

I've already seen a few of her personal logs where she wrote about her thoughts on our quests and even her praises for my food so I wasn't surprised that she went to show Ries her logs.

"Err… Isn't all this just you praising about Boss's butt--"

"Wawawawa! No, no! Swipe to the next one!"

Hmm? Praising my what? I think I heard something weird but I was too busy making sure we were on course to listen properly.

"Is… Is Lea doing this as well?" Ries asked.

Amber grinned, "Yep! And if you think mine was bad, hers is worse."

"Ah… Cool… But what's the point though? Like why are you girls keeping logs?"

"It's more just for memories if I'm being honest. You know… I think it's nice that we'll have some record of what we've done in the past and what we've experienced. Sometimes we can even record down our thoughts during those times."

I saw Ries give Amber a pointed look and she just shrugged.

Our catgirl then turned back to me, "If I want to join as well… How do I start?"

Amber giggled, "Oh that's easy! I'll add you to the group and you can just start today!"

That's nice, we have another one joining our little group of loggers. Is that even the right term for it?

Whatever.

Ries then came over to me, her ears twitching cutely while her tail swished behind her.

"Could I see your logs too, Boss? I wanna know what I should be writing!"

I tapped on my Codex, "Sure."

I made sure to open up the logs where I only recorded the less embarrassing stuff which was pretty much mostly just either a summary of what I experienced that day or my feelings on what had happened on said day. There were also some notes I had written down like the plans for the new ship.

When she saw the plans, the catgirl understandably got really excited.

"Boss! Are these the plans you have for your new ship?"

I shrugged, "It's our new ship but yeah. I thought writing down the ideas that came to mind was better than forgetting about later on."

"I see! This is certainly good! Oh wow… Wait… Boss? You want to… Add a… A swimming pool to it as well?"

Ah…

About that…

Remember how I said that I will try to teach them how to swim that day?

Yeah… It didn't really go as well as I thought it would.

You know… I thought that it might be easy for them to adapt since… Well… We're in space, right? And all of them had told me they had experience floating around in zero G environments before.

So I thought that they would easily adapt to floating in water which is kind of similar to it, right?

Turns out that wasn't the case at all.

Precisely because they were more used to floating around in zero G, they had a lot of trouble acclimating themselves to floating in a liquid that was not completely zero G.

Ries was especially bad at it which honestly didn't really surprise me considering she was a cat girl…

As for Amber, she spent more time clinging on to me than actually trying to swim which I felt was more because she wanted to cling to me than her being scared of the water.

On the other hand, Lea also clung to me a lot but I believe it was actually out of fear of sinking into the water.

Needless to say, we didn't really get very far with the swimming lessons.

I nodded at her, "I mean, if we can afford it. I think it would be nice to have one. Even if a swimming pool is not possible, I would actually like to have a bath at least. Something big enough to immerse our entire body in."

Showers are nice but baths are also nice… Especially when it's big enough that everyone could get in at once you know? The showers I have on this ship are barely big enough to fit two people inside and whenever Amber wants to have some fun there, there's not a lot of room to move around if you get my meaning…

So yeah, I do want to have a large body of water where we could have some fun.

Amber came over to my side and looked over my shoulder, "Do we even have enough space for one?"

Ries thought for a moment, "The living area for the ship is actually pretty big. The ship was designed to have the standard pilot crew, the maintenance crew, security team, and even space for transporting additional passengers. Since we don't have that many people on our crew, we could convert one of the rooms to house that if we really wanted to."

I swivelled to face her, "Wait a minute… If it's designed for that many people, do we even have enough people to crew it?"

Ries nodded energetically, "Oh, of course, boss! Most of the duties can be filled up with drones anyway and I can make them! Ah… That is… If you allow me to, of course, boss?"

"Eh? That sounds like a good idea. Why would I say no?"

"I… I'll probably be building them from scratch so… It might be a little inconvenient at the start. Plus… Err… Are you comfortable with having AI on board? They'll only be Class One AI at the most!"

I raised an eyebrow, "Why would I not be ok with that?"

Amber nudged me, "Humanity lost the location of Earth and a lot of our history, technology, culture and worlds to the AI Rebellion. There's a significant number of humans who despise AI and wouldn't even want to associate themselves with one if they could help it. Sure, it's not as serious now and most are fine with rudimentary AI but there's still some extremists out there."

"Oh… Well, I have no problems with it so yeah. But what about you, Amber?"

She shrugged, "I don't really care to be honest. In fact, if an AI could just do all the chores and then we can spend the entire day in bed where you rail me while filling me up with your love… All the better, right?"

I… Actually will agree with the fact that it's better if they help us with all the mundane tasks so I'll just keep my mouth shut here.

A beep then came from my console and I turned to see that we were approaching a large station on the map.

Looking ahead, I saw the biggest structure that I have seen since coming to this universe where the thing looked more like the skeleton of some unknown giant monster than a station.

Seems like we've arrived.