Chapter 367
Grady Briggs sat in front of his team of lawyers along with the rest of his C-suite and Board of Directors, not wanting to believe that there was nothing they could do to stop the dissolution of Briggs Inc.
In the first weeks of the integration, he and his family had, like everyone else, feared for their lives, afraid they would be crushed by their nigh omnipotent gods that could fly around and do actual magic.
Once that initial fear had worn off, Noricum, and to a lesser extent, Soerilia, had taken to the new technologies with gusto. Or at least her companies had. Briggs Inc. had used the publicly available patents to update or outright replace several of their products and expand their market share.
The company and Grady himself had been worried about being bullied by planet-spanning companies run by immortals, which could simply undercut them until they were bankrupt. But just as it became clear this new Empire wouldn’t allow that and they started to settle down, they got bad news.
Baron Hastra, in his role as local lord, was breaking up several of the largest corporations on Soerilia that had ‘spread too far from their roots’.
That term had thrown them all for a loop, but apparently the Empire and its feudal governments didn’t like overly powerful conglomerates, and it limited companies to a single line of business. A food chain could only sell food, a media company could only make and sell media, and a tech company could only design and produce tech.
Grady could understand the logic, but from what the company lawyers had told them in the first weeks, such laws were rarely implemented on low-Tier worlds like theirs because they simply didn’t matter on a grand scale. That had hurt to hear, and had resulted in some bruised egos, but the company had no choice but to accept that they were ultimately very small cogs in an incomprehensibly large machine.
The problem was that Baron Hastra was breaking precedent and enforcing those laws, and Briggs Inc. had long since strayed from their roots as a simple textile manufacturer to a multinational conglomerate that had its fingers in every pie. Before the unveiling, they had operated in nearly every sector because that meant, unless a global recession happened, they could survive any swings in local economies or trends that would have shuttered smaller businesses.
Now they were being told that the company needed to pick a lane and split the rest of their branches off, or have the baron do it for them.