Jacob had handed over the technologies he had brought with him for the Earth scientists to study. After that, he finished all the political rigamarole and recruited another dozen retired service members, including Major Guiterrez, who had arrived the previous day. He could have departed then, but he decided to wait an extra day in case the President managed to convince Congress to approve his new budget proposal. If they did, he wouldn’t need to use Melody as a cargo transport. That turned out to be one of the worst mistakes Jacob ever made.
Around seven in the morning, a fuel truck rolled across the airport runway. That wasn’t unusual; it was an active international airport after all. What was unusual was its destination: the cordon around Abyss Pearl. The soldiers at the checkpoint attempted to stop the driver, but the truck crashed through the blockade and accelerated. Shots were fired, but those quickly stopped as the soldiers didn’t want to accidentally set off the massive tank of jet fuel it was carrying. It didn’t save them.
Jacob was alerted to the approach after the truck entered the cordon, and before he could even transition the vessel away, the truck detonated.
Abyss Pearl appeared in orbit around Earth, a haze of fire captured by their transition rolling away in the void, as multiple alerts screamed at him.
“Shields offline!”
“Damage detected!”
“Atmospheric breach!”
Jacob quickly turned off the alerts and sent a drone to repair the crack in the hull caused by the blast wave.
“What just happened?” Barry asked as he hurried onto the bridge.
“Someone just tried to blow up the ship,” Jacob yelled. He took a moment to calm himself. “Can you check on our passengers and make sure everyone is okay?”
Barry nodded and hurried off.
Once the bridge was empty again, Jacob pulled up the sensors and zoomed in on the airport. There was a massive crater where the ship had once been. Jacob hadn’t been able to modify Abyss Pearl’s phase coils yet. If the FTL blockers had still been on, the ship would have been blown to pieces. It almost had been, even with his quick reaction time.
Emergency service vehicles were still racing toward the scene, but Jacob knew that none of the soldiers who had been manning the cordon survived. The blast was so wide it had taken out the hangar nearby, and that was over a hundred meters away from where he landed.
The attack had come out of nowhere. Jacob had been monitoring possible threats; he had even installed the shield generator inside the SUV he rode in for the same reason. He hadn’t detected any chatter of a possible threat, leaving two possibilities. Either it was a spur-of-the-moment opportunity or the people behind it had hidden the planning stage so well that even he didn’t detect it. The fact that there was a crater and not just a burning fuel truck told him that it hadn’t been filled with only fuel. That spoke of planning. He wasn’t omniscient by any stretch of the imagination, but that was an impressive feat that would have required vast resources and knowledge to pull off.
“Let’s see how thorough these bastards were,” he growled as he retraced the truck’s path using satellite images and networked security cameras. Once he identified the driver, he dug through the man’s entire history.
He was a nobody, some strung-out loser who had no family, no connection, and was likely paid in cash to get the truck close, not even realizing what he was doing. That didn’t mean Jacob hit a dead end. Someone had to have remotely triggered the truck.
His resources were vast, and he abandoned all his work on the station and devoted himself entirely to finding the people responsible for this attack. It took him no time at all to scrape the pings from the local cell network. Jacob hijacked some of the US spy satellites and located where the call had been made. The phone in question was no longer pinging the network, but that was fine.
Jacob rolled back security footage from every networked camera in the area that he could access and eventually found the person who detonated the truck. He even linked the phone to that user and the truck by going back a few more days and watching the man purchase the phone from a local store and retrieve the truck from some abandoned warehouse downtown.
Scrubbing the video in that area for the last month showed no movement to and from the warehouse, so the truck had been in position for quite some time. He could continue digging into that path, but the farther back he went, the more footage he would have to go through. He put that on the back burner as he refocused on the one who detonated the truck.
The caller was dead, just another link cut from the chain to try to protect the true perpetrators. If they wanted to remain anonymous, they shouldn’t have struck at all. Jacob found the person responsible for the caller’s death by triangulating the sound of the gunshot that ended him. He gave the authorities enough evidence to arrest the man. The contract hitman was linked to the deep web and a site for hiring contract killers.
The whole website operation was designed and built for anonymity. Jacob scoffed at that. There was no such thing when an AI was on the trail. Jacob may not be an AI, but he was the next closest thing. And he had something an AI didn’t: a thirst for revenge. He stripped every single IP record from the site, VPN records, and then every ISP around the world until he got a positive match.
It led to a location he was very familiar with.
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“I should have killed those scammers when I had the chance.”
He kept digging into the people responsible, because something still felt off. How had they even managed to buy a hit man, let alone prepare to target him months in advance? He hadn’t even known about them before arriving, and his efforts to shut them down had taken away any sort of monetary resources they had. At least he thought he had.
The answer turned out to be gold. They had a lot of it stashed away. Jacob only knew this because the organization responsible had created a new bank account and deposited the gold in it after he had deleted all their previous bank accounts. They hadn’t even attempted to argue with the last bank about the missing funds. That should have been a huge red flag for him, but he had put it out of his mind after making off with all of their money. That’s a mistake he wouldn’t make a second time.
That wasn’t the only thing Jacob had missed during his initial inspection of their finances. When he dug through their social media accounts, he found an unexpected connection to the Redline Dynamics board of directors. And it wasn’t just a random connection. It appeared that the head of the scammers was good friends with multiple Redline board members.
With that connection, Jacob realized the scam had been part of a larger operation to discredit his name and get revenge for what he had done.
Jacob’s anger settled into a cold fury. He booted up the combat drone. He had given them a warning, but they had taken that mercy and used it against him. That wasn’t going to happen a third time. It was time to deal with the problem once and for all. He positioned the ship farther out into space to avoid detection. With any luck, they would think their plan had succeeded, and their doom would come as a complete surprise.
He would like to say he was surprised by their shortsightedness, but he wasn’t. The Redline executives and board probably weren’t aware of the looming threat posed by the t’uk. That didn’t excuse their actions, but it might help explain them.
Finding all of the targets proved to be difficult. The Redline people had gone to ground the moment he returned to Earth, adding further proof that they were involved and that the plan had been in motion for some time. Once again, they underestimated his ability. He traced all but one of the people to out-of-the-way vacation homes.
The last on the list, the former CEO of Redline, had remained in his penthouse apartment in New York. Getting to him without involving civilians was going to be tricky, but not impossible.
Jacob targeted the scam ring leaders first. He wanted the Redline folks to think they had gotten away with their plan until it was too late to run and hide again. Not that they could truly hide from anyone now that he was using military satellites to track their every move.
Once the ship’s shields were back online, he transitioned over to the target in India. The criminal syndicate’s headquarters was a walled three-story compound, with hundreds of people patrolling. There was no stealth approach here, so Jacob didn’t bother trying.
He just appeared, dropped the drone from the open cargo bay ramp, then vanished.
The drone crashed to the dusty ground with a boom, surprising everyone. It rose from the cloud of dust, and Jacob surveyed the frozen people.
Survival instinct must have kicked in for some, because most chose to run rather than fight. The rest he cut down with his void cannons as he blasted his way through the doors and into the main building. He didn’t stop or give quarter; he simply pushed through every obstacle sent against him. It would have been a one-sided fight even if those on patrol hadn’t only had machetes and bats.
It reminded him of that weird Illuminati attack at the White House, and Jacob dug into that group as he cleared the compound. By the time he located the head of the criminal syndicate, he was able to link the Illuminati group to Redline as well.
They were responsible for every attack.
After less than ten minutes, the combat drone emerged from the burning headquarters, a little worse for wear as the guards protecting the bosses had actual guns, but fully operational thanks to the defensive upgrades. Abyss Pearl appeared once more, and the drone hovered into the air and flew up to the open ramp.
That little trick of gravitics was added after they realized the panels could be made really small. It also emptied the entire power core during the fifty-meter climb, so it wasn’t exactly efficient.
Jacob swapped the power core out, and they appeared at their next target.
His ruse was discovered after he hit the second executive. The rest were in a full-blown panic by that point, trying to flee or use their connections to get him to back off. Jacob ignored anyone who contacted him from Earth and put those people on his shit list. If they wanted to curry favor for people who had no qualms about detonating a truck bomb at a public airport, they could join them.
Those who fled by vehicle, he blasted with the ship’s cannons, even if they had their families along. He hesitated a moment at that, but he thought back to all the dead soldiers and civilians at the airport. They had families as well.
It wasn’t long before the news agencies started to portray him as a danger and urged the governments to take action to stop him. By the end of the day, his shit list had grown faster than he was clearing it. He could have continued until there was nobody left on the list, but Jacob decided to stop venting his ire after those directly responsible for the bombing were gone. That left one more person.
The drone smashed into the roof of the skyscraper, and Jacob looked over at the small door leading into the building. There was no way the drone would fit through there, so he found the least structurally important section of the roof and made it vanish. Then he dropped through the opening, landing on top of what had to be a very expensive grand piano.
The musical instrument made a racket as it was smashed to pieces, and Jacob turned to the only occupant of the large open room. The silver-haired man was sitting at the end of an elegant table, eating dinner as if nothing was going on. He set his fork and knife down and wiped his mouth.
“So you’re finally here for me. I won—”
That was all the man had time to say before Jacob removed the top of his head from existence.
He didn’t give a shit about whatever excuses or pleas the man had come up with; he just wanted him gone.
His fury had been spent earlier in the day, replaced by the cold logic that certain people had to go for the sake of everyone else. He didn’t feel bad about killing all those people, nor did it make him feel good. It was just something that needed to happen. Like having to tie your shoes or brush your teeth. That’s where these people ranked in his eyes. They were a necessary chore.
Once the combat drone was back aboard the ship, Jacob sent warnings to all of those who had reached out on behalf of the Redline board and executives. It was the only warning he would give. A lot of those people were in political positions, which wasn’t going to earn him any goodwill, but he didn’t care. If they wanted to support terrorists, they could fuck right off. That included the Vice President.
Abyss Pearl transitioned away from Earth before the true ramifications of his actions could be known, and honestly, he wasn’t sure if he ever wanted to come back. The only thing that convinced him to carry through with Barry’s plan to help protect Earth was the fact that there were still good people on the planet. They didn’t deserve to die because a minority of their government was fucking idiots.