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The opening ceremony ran three and a half hours and ended with the audience still wanting more.
When the program finally concluded, Ethan declined to leave by the executive exit. Instead, he walked himself out to the main entrance of the Larkspur Avenue tower, took up a position beside the front doors, and personally bid farewell to the departing guests as they filed out.
It was an old-fashioned gesture. The founder of a major company did not, by modern protocol, personally see off each attendee at a corporate event. Senior figures of his standing typically delegated the courtesy to subordinates. But Ethan, who had spent the morning in front of several hundred industry executives, cabinet officials, and senior reporters, understood the value of one final personal contact at the door.
More friends meant more paths. Whatever his current position in the public eye, treating the room dismissively at the exit was the kind of small failure of grace that people remembered for decades.
The departing guests, sensing the unusual courtesy, were visibly affected.
In two or three months, once the seabed reactor array came online and began feeding the Eastern Region's grid, New Future Technology Energy's daily cash flow would be measured in billions of marks. The guests filing past Ethan on the front step were among the first witnesses to the company that was about to become one of the most consequential commercial entities on the planet, and the founder of that company was personally shaking each of their hands, asking their names, and thanking them for coming. The story they would tell, in years to come, would be a story they were proud of telling.
Ethan greeted them all. He shook hands. He smiled at names he did not recognize.
The flow of departures was steady and unremarkable, until two specific faces appeared in line.
Liam Rouse's eyes were everywhere except on Ethan.
He had spent the last twenty minutes attempting, through positioning and patient maneuvering, to get out of the building without being noticed by the man at the door. His best hope had been that Ethan, in the busy rhythm of saying goodbye to hundreds of people, would simply miss him in the crowd. New Future had just announced a generational national project. Ethan would, by any reasonable accounting, be too busy to fixate on a single parking-lot disagreement from the morning.
That had been the hope.
The hope was not realized.
"Mr. Harris. President Rouse."
Ethan's voice was warm and friendly. He had not missed them. He had spotted them in the line several positions ahead and had calibrated his greeting to be deliberately, conspicuously, enthusiastic.
Rouse could not pretend not to see him. He turned and produced what was supposed to be a polite smile, though the muscles of his face did not entirely cooperate.
Pieter Harris, beside him, was less affected. Maha Energy's standing in the global industry was not diminished by anything that had occurred at New Future Technology Energy's opening ceremony, regardless of how impressive the morning had been. Harris was perfectly capable of greeting a young man at a doorway without appearing intimidated.
"Mr. Mercer. Today's ceremony was, I will say without exaggeration, the most educational morning of my recent career."
Ethan offered Harris a small, polite smile and did not reply directly to the compliment.
Beside Harris, Liam Rouse rubbed his hands together and stepped forward, his entire posture composing itself into the careful obsequious shape of a man attempting damage control.
"Director Mercer. Truly young and promising. To have reached the absolute peak of the global scientific community is one thing. To, in addition, demonstrate this caliber of commercial and operational skill is something else entirely. I want to say, openly, that Sterling Energy is genuinely impressed. I am personally impressed. Today I have learned a great deal."
Ethan did not respond.
He simply held the smile, his face polite, his eyes calm and entirely without warmth, and looked at Liam Rouse.
The look lasted longer than was comfortable.
Since the parking structure, Rouse had developed a small psychological complex around Ethan Mercer. The events of the morning, taken in aggregate, had now reinforced that complex by an additional substantial margin. The teenager who could shoulder-check an armored sedan and who had just been publicly endorsed by the National Energy Ministry was looking at Rouse with the patient attention of someone deciding what to do with a small, irritating insect.
Rouse's skin began to itch. Not metaphorically. He felt, with sudden and entirely unwelcome physical clarity, as though his entire body had been covered in fine biting ants. He could not stand still. His weight shifted from foot to foot. His hand, which had not been shaking when he started speaking, began very slightly to tremble.
The silence stretched.
It was Pieter Harris who finally broke it.
"Mr. Mercer."
Harris's tone was, as always, courteous and unhurried.
"Building a new company is never easy. I imagine you would be unwilling to see something you have built with your own hands subjected to unnecessary hardship."
Ethan's eyes shifted from Rouse to Harris with no visible transition of mood.
"Mr. Harris. There seems to be a subtext in that remark."
He let the words sit calmly.
"On the soil of the Republic of Valoria, I can't think of any power that is in a position to bring meaningful hardship to New Future Technology Energy."
Harris received the response without any visible reaction. He had spent decades being on the receiving end of confident young men's claims, and his professional smile did not flicker.
"Inside the Republic, certainly. The state's support gives you considerable insulation from domestic threats. I will not dispute the point."
He paused, the way a careful chess player pauses before placing a piece.
"But the Republic is not the world, Mr. Mercer. And I do not believe a man of your evident ambition intends to keep New Future Technology Energy's operations confined within the Republic's borders. The moment you begin to extend into international markets, the state's support, however generous, will not travel with you. Your insulation ends at the Republic's customs houses. And the wider world is, I am sorry to say, a less hospitable environment than the one you are accustomed to."
Ethan listened without expression. When Harris had finished, a small flicker of impatience moved across Ethan's face.
"Mr. Harris. With respect, would you like to come to the point of your visit, or would you prefer to continue circling it for another few minutes."
Harris's smile broadened by a fraction. He had clearly been waiting for the prompt.
"Of course, Mr. Mercer. I appreciate your directness."
He inclined his head.
"My visit to the Republic of Valoria has, from the beginning, had a specific purpose. The purpose is to repair the relationship between you and Maha Energy."
The hall sounds, the departing guests, the murmurs of conversation, all seemed to fade slightly into the background.
"Several months ago, the former chief executive of Maha Energy, Mr. Garrison Pike, conducted himself foolishly in a private encounter with you in the capital. The encounter left you with a poor impression of our company. For that, I apologize to you, personally, on behalf of the firm's executive leadership."
Harris's tone was sincere. The apology was, in form, a senior executive performing the appropriate gesture.
"Mr. Pike, of course, was relieved of his position the moment the incident was reported to the board. He no longer represents Maha Energy in any capacity."
A small pause.
"That was the company's position as of this morning. After the events of this opening ceremony, however, Maha's headquarters has taken a fresh view of the situation."
He spoke the next sentence very carefully.
"By the latest valuation, the total market capitalization of Maha Energy is seven and a half trillion Aurelian dollars. If you would entertain the possibility, the firm is prepared to offer thirty percent of its corporate equity in exchange for a participating stake in your seabed reactor program and the mercerium synthesis program."
Liam Rouse, standing beside Harris, very nearly tripped on his own feet.
Thirty percent.
Two point two five trillion Aurelian dollars.
The figure did not fit comfortably inside any commercial transaction Rouse had ever participated in. To put the number in any kind of context, the latest-generation fighter aircraft of the Aurelian Republic cost approximately twenty million Aurelian dollars per unit. A nuclear-powered aircraft carrier cost approximately ten billion. The sum Harris had just quoted, sitting casually in his calm and avuncular voice, was an amount that, in the hands of a sufficiently determined geopolitical actor, would have been sufficient to fund a continental war.
And Harris had named it without raising his voice.
Ethan listened to the offer in silence.
Externally, his expression remained polite. Internally, he was running an entirely different evaluation than the one Harris's words were meant to provoke.
The offer, on its face, was generous to the point of absurdity. Thirty percent of Maha Energy's equity, payable in shares, was the kind of transaction that should have constituted the largest single deal in the history of corporate energy.
But Ethan understood, with the cold clarity of a man who had been studying his opponents carefully, what the offer actually was.
The value of any currency depended, ultimately, on productive output. Money was a claim on goods and services, and the worth of any given claim was a function of how much was being produced. The yield of rice per acre in the modern Republic was vastly higher than the yield in the same fields a century earlier, and the price of rice had fallen accordingly. The two facts were the same fact, viewed from different angles.
Maha Energy's seven-and-a-half-trillion-dollar market capitalization rested entirely on a single foundational assumption: that the global energy market would continue to operate, more or less, on its current technological basis. Conventional reactors. Conventional fossil supply chains. Conventional transmission infrastructure. The slow incremental improvement of generation efficiency. The slow incremental decline of fossil dependency. Decades of comfortable mid-margin operation.
The moment New Future Technology Energy deployed seabed reactors at scale, the foundational assumption stopped being true.
Mercerium-based seabed reactors would, within a few years, render conventional generation economically obsolete. Maha Energy's seven-and-a-half-trillion market capitalization was not durable through that transition. By Ethan's honest estimate, if Maha's corporate position passed through the seabed reactor era unchanged, the firm would be lucky to retain one trillion dollars of valuation by the end of the decade.
So the thirty-percent offer was not, as Harris was framing it, a generous recognition of Ethan's contribution. It was an attempted lockup.
Maha Energy was not offering to acquire New Future's technology because Maha wanted to deploy the technology. Maha was offering to acquire the technology in order to prevent its deployment. Lock the seabed reactor program inside the Maha corporate structure, slow its rollout to a controlled trickle, license selectively, and protect the existing global energy order, and Maha's seven-and-a-half-trillion market capitalization remained intact for decades.
The thirty percent was not generosity.
It was a bribe to prevent the future from happening.
Ethan let the offer sit in the air for a moment, allowing Harris to believe that the figure had been registered with appropriate weight.
Then he gave Pieter Harris a slow, polite, slightly tired shake of the head.
"Mr. Harris."
"Yes, Mr. Mercer."
"I think Maha Energy's executive leadership has not, in honest terms, understood the situation they are presently in."