The first time Edgar Shall laid eyes on the towering black robot, he knew there was something alien about it. Maybe it was the rumors from people even more traveled and paranoid than him, but he hadn’t survived pirates, criminals, the STO, and other smugglers to get to his ripe old age without trusting his gut.
The problem was trying to prove it to his boneheaded nephews. One of his sister’s kids was playing cop while the other got sucked in by the lure of fancy tech. Edgar couldn’t blame him, he’d seen some of the printers and robotic assemblers as he kept an eye on the robot. A cargo load of those would easily fetch a hundred million to the right buyer.
Edgar had long ago learned that money wasn't everything though, and oftentimes it got you killed. When he did runs like this, he preferred smaller items that were easier to sell than big-ticket items.
His plan to expose this pretender had been simple. He acted like he was scared of flying back to STO space with how busy the area was with pirates, and then he would wait. Nobody even questioned him about it. With that done, he needed to gather information.
So he watched, listened to rumors, and learned. Edgar heard about the man’s so-called disease. It wasn’t hard to get that information. He knew most of the people here, and drifters were quick to gossip with people they knew. Edgar chalked it up to their isolation and wanting to hear stories from other worlds. He obliged them.
The run-in with the Marine had been a bit of a surprise. That nearly got him tossed into a cell when he lost his head and lashed out at the man. Edgar thought he had put that past behind him, but it seemed he’d been wrong.
If Damien’s security people hadn’t been there, it would have gotten ugly.
He laid low for a few weeks after that, simply spending time with Lucas, Damien, and his girlfriend Gabriella. How a sourpuss like his nephew had ever managed to land a woman like that, he would never know.
Eventually, an opportunity presented itself when the robot left for STO space with those Navy goons that they rescued. Edgar wasn’t stupid, he knew he was being recorded and watched. Damien had also warned him to stay out of trouble. With such an upfront attitude, his nephew would never make it as a detective.
Even though he knew he was under surveillance, that didn’t stop him. Edgar used a code cracker to bypass the storage lock, a week after the robot was gone. Then he spent hours searching through the stacks of supplies for something to prove to his nephews that it wasn’t just a crazy theory. When he came up empty, he was left frustrated.
The closest thing he could find as evidence were two containers. One had a few small black flecks in it, while the other had a much larger chunk of a similar-looking material. Seeing as the robot didn’t have a large chunk missing from it, he assumed the piece had come from the STO stealth ship that was all the buzz around the facility.
They looked identical but it wasn’t enough, and now he had blown his only chance to figure out what this alien robot or ‘man within the machine’ was up to. He knew he couldn’t stick around after that, so he made a hasty exit.
Edgar must have tripped some alarm on his way out. Before he made it halfway across the landing pad, he heard something whirr to life behind him. He froze, thinking his life had finally come to an end, only for the turrets to spit out hypersonic projectiles at his poor ship.
He screamed in outrage and rushed toward his vessel, hoping they would stop if he was onboard. They did, but that was little consolation as he was effectively grounded because of the damage. From past experience, he knew what came next.
Security people rushed out of the facility, looking unsure of what to do. That was until Damien stormed out, red-faced and upset.
The boy was angry, but he wasn’t dumb. His nephew had a six-legged robot cut through the hydraulic struts holding Edgar’s ramp closed. Up until that point, he thought he might have time to quickly patch some holes and take off. Once they started slicing through the ramp cylinders, he didn’t fight the inevitable. Edgar pulled out an old folding chair and sat inside the cargo hold to wait. Just because he wasn’t going to fight it, didn’t mean he wasn’t going to be stubborn about getting caught.
Edgar was curious what his nephew would say when he realized he hadn’t taken anything.
The cargo ramp fell to the ground with a loud boom, sending up a cloud of dust that obscured the outside. Damien stormed up the ramp, waving his pulse rifle about like someone fresh out of the academy. His nephew's eyes eventually settled on him in the gloom of the hangar and the pulse rifle barrel was only a moment behind.
The man glared at him. “You going to come quietly?”
Edgar chewed on the question for a moment. He may not have Damien’s skill in hand-to-hand combat, but he knew how to fight dirty. The fact that he didn’t want to fight his own nephew was what tipped it for him. He held out his hands and waited while the rest of Damien’s people tromped aboard his ship. Edgar had already deactivated the explosives, so there was no concern about them accidentally tripping something and sending them all to the great beyond.
Two of the men roughly grabbed him and pulled his hands behind his back as they slapped mag restraints on him. They searched him, then dragged him off the ship while the rest searched the ship for what he might have taken.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
He spent the next month or so in a small cell until a shadow darkened the doorway. He peeked out from under his arm and saw the robot standing there, next to Damien.
Edgar had wondered when his time would come, it seemed that day was today.
***
“He didn’t take anything?” Alexander asked in confusion as he inspected the contents of his storage room.
“I didn’t say that,” Damien grunted in annoyance. “I said we didn’t find anything on his ship. We couldn’t exactly tell what was in your storage room so we had to wait for you to return to verify if anything was missing.”
“And your uncle?” Alexander asked. Their familial connection wasn’t much of a secret, Lucas had told him about it the day the man arrived.
Damien grimaced at the question. “Shall is in lockup awaiting evidence of his crimes. Right now all we have to charge him with is breaking and entering, vandalism, and fleeing the scene.”
As far as Alexander could tell, nothing was missing. Some materials were moved around, but that could have been done by his robots or the automated carts that came and went pretty much all day.
Even the samples from the STO ship and himself were still there. Those were probably the easiest to steal and if the smuggler knew their worth, probably the ideal choice to take. But he hadn’t taken them. If he hadn’t taken anything, what was he after then?
The learning modules seemed like the next likely target, but Alexander had stored all of them on a terminal inside the facility computer room. The one that Lucas had rebuilt. You had to go through three guard checkpoints and two bio-locks just to get to the room that led to the mainframe. And you couldn’t even open the final blast door unless the computer had your identity on file.
Alexander kept a few of the library cards on hand and in his workshop, but they were blank and required a trip to the computer room to load the proper bio-markers on them to make them functional, so stealing those was pointless.
He sighed and turned to face Damien. “As far as I can tell, nothing is missing. What is the punishment for the crimes you listed off so far?”
The former mixed martial artist looked like he bit into a lemon at Alexander’s announcement. From his expression, Alexander gathered the man didn’t much like his uncle.
“A month in lockup for the first offense,” he ground out in annoyance.
“It seems he’s served his time, and then some. I would like to speak to the man before we release him.” As much as Alexander would like to keep the uncle locked up, if he started making up his own rules people wouldn’t have much reason to follow the laws.
After resecuring the storage room, the pair made their way to the holding cells. The cells had been in place when the facility was first constructed, so it seemed even the people who originally built Eden’s End knew they might need a place to hold troublemakers. They passed the security room and entered a long hall that contained twelve identical rooms. Alexander and Damien stopped outside the last door on the right.
Shall lounged in the bed, his face covered by his arm. They could both tell the man wasn’t sleeping, but he also didn’t acknowledge them other than to glance their way.
Alexander was the first to break the silence. “Mr. Shall, can I ask what you hoped to accomplish by breaking into my storage area, and then trying to flee the planet?”
“I got nothing to say to you,” the man replied lazily.
“You just contradicted yourself by responding. That leads me to believe you want to tell someone what you were up to.”
“It won’t matter. They won’t believe me anyway.”
Breaking into Alexander’s storage area, followed by the refusal to speak to him along with the admission that they wouldn’t believe him finally made something click for him. “You don’t trust me,” Alexander blurted out.
The man finally turned toward the door. “Hard to trust something alien.”
You could hear a pin drop in the silence that followed until Alexander started laughing. “Well, you’re not wrong.” There was no point denying the truth. He knew it was only a matter of time until someone figured it out, again. However, he didn’t expect the crusty old spacer to be the one to put it together.
Both Damien and Shall looked at him in surprise but Damien didn’t move away or shift into a more aggressive stance, meaning he already had an inkling of the truth. Alexander was curious to know what the man had figured out. He wouldn’t have been the first to put the pieces together.
The first person to confront Alexander was Jasper, although he didn’t accuse him of being an alien. Eva knew something was off about his story, but not what. She would probably figure it out at some point as well. Then came Captain Krieger. That man had only needed a glance to put two and two together, but the man did have an unfair advantage. With him came Vice Admiral Fletcher, who absolutely knew what Alexander’s body represented and wanted to use that to his advantage. And now he had two- make that four more people to add. Lucas and Gabriella obviously knew if Damien did.
“What? It’s not like I can hide this,” Alexander said, gesturing to his body. “I’ve spent years trying to figure out where this damn body came from. Going by the lack of surprise from you, Damien, I can assume you’ve realized something was off about my story for some time?”
The man grunted noncommittally, which made Alexander chuckle.
“So, yes, this body is almost certainly alien in origin, but I’m still human where it counts,” he said, tapping on his torso.
Shall stood from his bed. “Yeah, and how can we be sure of that?”
The man’s tone suggested he was trying to convince Damien to side with him. If that was the case, Shall didn’t know his nephew as well as he thought he did. Alexander didn’t know Damien all that well either, but he knew him enough to know that once the guy made a choice, good luck trying to get him to change his mind about it.
Alexander shrugged. “Your feelings aren’t my concern so believe what you want. I don’t care. Just stop breaking into places until you can fix your ship and leave.”
“You’re going to let me leave, just like that? What if I tell people about you?”
Alexander rolled his eyes in his mind space. This dude really was trying to provoke him into lashing out. Alexander could respect that, even if the man was barking up the wrong tree. If the man knew him at all, he would know provoking him to violence was not something easily accomplished. Now if he threatened Yulia, they were going to have a problem. It seemed like the man only had an issue with him though, which was fine.
He decided to take a page out of his memories concerning alien abduction movies from his time on Earth.
“So what if you do? Who’s going to believe you? It’s your word against mine, and you’re a smuggler and an outlaw. As for keeping you here? I don't like you nearly enough to allow that, which leaves the other option of simply getting rid of you. We aren’t pirates, and you’re simply not important enough for me to care. So do me a favor, run along, tell everyone you can, and muddy the waters for when the truth does come out about me.”
Alexander turned to the silent man next to him. “Damien, I’ll let you handle your uncle's release. Once you're done, come find me in my workshop and we can discuss the questions I can see you itching to ask. You might as well bring Lucas and Gabriella too because I’m only going to do this Q and A session one time.”