InterCons Story Book I (WoF)

3. Coffee, Drones, and... Dragons? Maybe Not Enough Coffee.

On June 8, 2039 at 9:30 in the morning, the George Bush Center for Intelligence was, for the most part, quiet. One particular meeting room, however, was the exception. 

It was filled with personnel from the Directorate of Operations (DO), Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T), and even the CIA Director and his staff. 

They were discussing a recent tragedy of utmost detriment to the continued operations of the CIA: the break room circuit breaker had tripped, causing everyone to arrive to no coffee. 

Oh, a major asset had also seemingly disappeared without a trace along with high value cargo. That was also being discussed. The lack of coffee, however, did not help with this discussion. 

To compound the confusion, the president had recently appointed a new CIA director. He had previously worked in the State Department, so he didn't have much in-depth knowledge of the subject at hand. 

"So let me get this straight. Your favorite band of crazy libertarians, along with their entire fleet of... what exactly did they do on there again?" the director inquired. 

"That's a lot to explain," a senior contract manager from the DO responded. 

"Go on then." 

"Okay, so uhm... publicly, one of the purposes of the fleet was 'seasteading.' That's where people live in international waters to avoid being under government jurisdiction. I a big part of it may have had to do with tax avoidance for a lot of people there. If I remember correctly, a lot of people had crypto mining rigs there too, or maybe they were trading it. I can't quite remember that detail. I think it also just served as a marketing thing for the company, y'know. Having a 'small city' on the ocean definitely gets people's attention. Anyway, they had that in addition to the work they did for us." 

"Which was?" 

"Normally they'd make weapons deliveries for us. They had the ability to assemble the weapons onboard some of their ships, many of which they also sold outside of our contracts as well. They would also accept and deliver or store other cargo for us on occasion. Nobody would reasonably suspect that the 'crazy libertarians' were working for us on anything, which made them kind of perfect to work for us, and they were more than willing to help destabilize and topple socialist governments.

"Recently, we had to cancel one of their weapons moves. The plan was to have them dock a RoRo ship at the Sinuiju SAR to smuggle in the product via the vehicles they would be selling. Unfortunately, the North Koreans were somehow tipped off to this, so they've been stuck with the product--at our expense, mind you. Luckily, whoever the North Koreans got their information from didn't know the identities of the dissidents the arms were for.

"Of course, now all of that is gone and I think it's their fault!" he said, pointing accusingly at the personnel from the DS&T. 

"Oh, now we're playing the blame game again," an officer from the DS&T retorted. 

"Yeah, because it's your fault. I want to know exactly what that was and why you felt the need to use our asset to store it." 

"We did what we believed was the safest. We found an unidentified object randomly on American soil, and we didn't want it to stay there." 

"Why did you have to use our asset?" 

"You recommended them." 

"You didn't tell me you were storing some piece of shit straight out of a sci-fi movie when I did!" 

"Enough!" the Director interrupted. "Whatever happened has happened and is no reason to be unprofessional here. Is there anything we can do now?" 

"I don't believe so. Wherever they are, they have the device. If it was the reason for their disappearance, which seems quite likely, we can't do anything about it."