Jacob settled into the drone being held by the US, only moments before a woman in her mid-forties with dark brown hair and a messy ponytail strode in wearing a lab coat. She looked annoyed.
“Hello,” Jacob replied.
He tried to wave as well, but the cuffs they put on his arms prevented most movement, so the attempt was even more awkward, given the drone’s already clumsy movements while wearing the suit. The drone could break the chains at any time, but he found it amusing to let them shackle it after they had moved him to the new room. The whole process of extracting him from that pit had been rather less eventful. The room he had arrived in had just been a massive elevator.
The scientist sat on the opposite end of the comically long table from him. His sensors were registering the table as three meters long. Large enough to fit an entire extended family for a holiday meal.
The unnamed woman opened a folder and started asking questions. “What is your name?”
Jacob sighed. “Is this really necessary? You already know my name.”
She didn’t respond; she just stared at him, pen in hand, waiting for an answer.
“It’s Jacob,” he finally relented, hoping he could move these questions along to get to something of substance.
“Last name?”
“Beats me,” Jacob replied.
The woman stared at him again, but Jacob continued. “Really, I don’t know what it is. My memory was damaged when I was abducted.”
She continued to stare for a bit before deciding he was telling the truth. As she wrote his statement down, Jacob decided to ask a question of his own. “You know my name, it’s only polite to tell me yours.”
Once again, he was ignored, but Jacob wasn’t finished. “Is this any way to treat a guest?” he asked, shaking the chains holding him in place.
“A guest?” she asked. “Is that what you think you are?”
“What else would I be?” Jacob asked in amusement. “I came willingly, didn’t I?”
“That’s debatable,” she muttered under her breath as she went back to writing.
“If I’m not a guest, that could be problematic.”
That halted her writing instantly, and she looked up at him. “Is that a threat, Jacob?”
“I don’t see how that could be a threat, science lady. For it to be a threat, I would have to have the ability to back it up, wouldn’t I?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. Each of them knew his words were a threat, but how much of one was the question. He decided to leave that up to her and whoever else was listening on the other end of her earpiece to puzzle out.
Considering they hadn’t taken him apart yet, they knew his ship could return at any moment and appear pretty much anywhere on the globe without notice.
A decision must have been made higher up, because the science lady looked like she had bitten into a lemon. “Of course, you are a guest. We just need to ensure our safety. Why exactly are you here? You told the president that you were here to recover someone. Is it the other robotic lifeform like yourself?”
“So you did recover the majority of the ship. Fantastic.”
The woman’s heart rate shot through the roof as she realized her mistake, but she kept her outward features cool as ice. Maybe he should stop referring to her as the science lady and start calling her the ice queen? She probably would have gotten along fantastically with the stone-faced Xing’che. Then again, the eiraxin woman might just murder her, too. It was hard to tell with that individual.
“What can you tell us about that ship and robot?” she asked, quickly pivoting away from her mistake.
“Pretty much everything,” Jacob lied. “Before I tell you anything, however, I’m going to need some reciprocation and promises—in writing—about what I get out of this deal.”
“You are a US citizen, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Then your reward will be ensuring the safety of your country.”
The woman said the statement with such conviction that Jacob had to pause and replay the scene a few times in the virtual space to see if he had heard her correctly. Then he broke out in a booming laugh.
Science lady was both startled and angered by his reaction, but Jacob didn’t care.
“Yeah, that’s not going to cut it, lady. I’m not some soldier you can order around, nor am I a government employee. I respect the former for doing what they believe in, but I certainly don’t respect politicians, nor do I trust them. Even what little faith I had in the president is gone after he lied to my face and prepared a trap for my arrival. So, no deal unless I see something signed by the president, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. To show that I’m not unreasonable, I’ll give you a bit of knowledge. That body you recovered was just a remotely operated drone. So is this body,” he added, waving to himself. “So are the bodies I dropped off in Russia and China. I’m also still aboard my ship, so make sure the president and whoever else decided that I should be chained up knows that. We wouldn’t want a misunderstanding.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Jacob made himself a virtual bowl of popcorn and eagerly ate it inside his apartment while he watched the emergency sessions in the US government take place after his little ultimatum. If they hadn’t wasted his time, they could have come to a quiet arrangement, but no, they had to throw their weight around. The only problem was that their galactic weight was that of a premature toddler.
His new approach had a secondary effect as well, forcing China and Russia to drop any pretense.
Jacob shook his head as he stared at the dead Russian guard, a thirty-centimeter chunk of his chest just missing. Jacob hadn’t wanted to do it, but they came rushing into the room, guns raised and fingers already pulling the triggers. The other shot hit the second guard’s rifle, and the man took one look at the remaining piece and bolted.
He could tell the moment they entered his sensor range that they were ordered to kill him. It made no sense unless they wanted to cause any sort of deal the US made to collapse before it could get established.
It was such short-sighted behavior that Jacob had a hard time believing it, but then the base alarm went off, and a Russian voice stated that the self-destruct had been initiated. Jacob didn’t feel like waiting around for that, so he triggered the overloads in the void cannons hidden inside his arm and jumped to the Chinese drone. He would have to fly the ship over the other storage site, but that could happen later.
“It’s just over here,” the Chinese interrogator said through thinned lips.
“You’re annoyed that I made a deal with the US?” Jacob asked as they walked.
Twelve armed soldiers flanked them, ready to fire at a moment’s notice, but they didn’t have the same physical signs showing they were going to open fire, like the Russians.
“It is not my place to comment on your choices,” the interrogator replied. “We are here.”
The man pushed open the door, and they piled into the warehouse. Jacob immediately focused on the pile of familiar colored material on the floor. It was all laid out, with tags labeling each piece, making his job super simple. There weren’t any data cores or anything of real importance. Most of the parts lying on the floor looked like they had been ripped from the outer hull very violently.
“Thank you for this,” Jacob said sincerely. “Tell your leaders I appreciate their cooperation in this matter, and I will repay that trust.”
From the stiff head nod the man gave, it seemed like he didn’t believe Jacob, but that was fine. He didn’t plan on giving the US unilateral access to what he knew. He didn’t trust them any more than he trusted Russia or China; he was just forced to deal with those nations first, because they had the stolen components from the ship.
They weren’t the only nations Jacob had been communicating with, either. He had quietly reached out to quite a few nations. Some he had excluded because they were simply too small, while others were left out of the secret discussions because of how they had treated their people in the past, and still treated them.
While he knew he had to make some allowances because no nation was without guilt, some of the stuff leaders did was so egregious that he couldn’t see anything good in allowing them access to space or advanced technology. Not that he was foolish enough to believe they wouldn’t get their hands on it eventually, either through theft, illicit trade, or just their allies deciding that they should have it too.
The deal he was making should hopefully limit that, but Jacob held no illusions that it would be ironclad; if one of the countries he was negotiating with decided to give the technology to some despot, it wouldn’t be on his conscience.
Speaking of, he switched his focus to the Prime Minister of Sweden.
“Thank you for the offer to host a summit on your soil, Prime Minister. While I am aware of your country’s long-standing neutrality, I must decline such an offer.”
“May I ask why?” the older man asked.
“Because,” Jacob continued. “Such a meeting would benefit you to the exclusion of all others. Unless you wish to be left out of the scientific research I am planning to provide.”
“Let’s not be hasty,” the man laughed nervously. “I merely wished to know. If you do not plan to host it here, where will you host this summit?”
Jacob displayed a map showing twelve locations across the globe. Each icon was the location of a prestigious university. He would have had more, but that was the extent of his remaining drones, excluding Katherine’s or the ones Barry designed.
“I don’t follow,” the Prime Minister replied. “I thought this was going to be a meeting to discuss what sort of technical advancements you could offer.”
“A meeting? Yes, but this is the 21st century, Prime Minister. There is such a thing as telecommuting. There is no reason to drag people across half the world to discuss what I have to offer.”
“I see. That is acceptable,” the man eventually concluded.
Jacob was having similar conversations across the globe, which was stretching even his ability, but he was making it work. Most leaders were similarly unhappy with his choices, which only reaffirmed that it had been the right one.
He briefly thought about hosting them aboard an ocean liner in international waters or a remote island, but decided those weren’t neutral enough. The only truly neutral location was aboard Abyss Pearl, but there was no way he was letting a bunch of politicians get their grubby little mitts on the ship.
Another reason he had wanted to host across the globe is that one of those campuses was conveniently close to the tech firm, housing the other alien artifacts. He only needed to get within a few kilometers of the site to get a proper scan, and nobody would be the wiser if he was already nearby for a summit. He despised even the thought of having to speak in front of a crowd, but it needed to happen, so he sucked up his feelings on the matter.
He really hoped that the US stockpile of alien tech held the important bits, but he suspected that wasn’t the case. He had been given plenty of time to snoop through unsecured files and emails while he was being detained, and what he learned was rather troubling, even if it was only bits and pieces of the story. It suggested the tech firm hadn’t come across their horde of alien tech legally, which would complicate matters.
Jacob would decide on a course of action once he learned whether or not they had the data storage cubes. Until then, he was just speculating.