The Apocalypse Contract

CHAPTER 36 - MEL

The USB drive landed in her hand.

"Feel free to reformat it if you need to," Sydney told her, "Oh wait, that was dumb. You probably don't even have a laptop. We should just set up a ship to ship file sharing network."

"Yeah, that's a good idea." She looked at the drive in her hand, the requested data already on it.

"You want to toss that back?"

"Sure, here you go." She threw the drive. Sydney snatched it from the air and pocketed it.

Roger laid a hand on the notebooks spread before him. "In the meantime, I'll continue working with what I have. It may tell us something about this mysterious enemy, though what relationship a dead language from ages past can have to all that, I couldn't hazard a guess."

"Maybe it's like a Stargate thing," Mel suggested. "You find any gate addresses in that stuff?"

"I don't really follow."

"She's joking," Sydney explained, "It's a television show. Ancient aliens kidnapped humans from Earth as slaves and scattered them around the universe. An archaeologist deciphers the alien writings to save the day."

"She may be joking, but that does not sound all that dissimilar to our situation. How long do we presume these blighters have been visiting our planet?"

Sydney seemed to consider it. "We know it's been at least a century, but there's no reason it couldn't be longer. They travel between stars, so they're already used to working on long timescales."

"So that settles it," Mel declared, "the Egyptian gods were aliens. They built the pyramids. The moon landing was faked." She smiled and stuffed a banana nut cluster in her mouth.

"I fail to see what the moon has to do with this." Roger looked adorably confused.

Sydney spoiled the fun by explaining, "It's another joke. I see her point, though. In a lot of ways this is like an overused science fiction trope."

"Maybe that's why it's a trope in the first place," Mel said around a mouth full of cookie, "it's the truth that's been in front of us all along. Aliens have always been with us, manipulating us, affecting history, pushing us forward. It would explain a lot."

"I'll need to see more evidence before I accept such a hypothesis." Roger rapped on the book of cuneiform images. "You could start by printing the rest of these."

Mel stuffed another cookie in her mouth, then set to work at the printer.

Sydney grabbed a notebook and opened it to a blank page. "We should try to be organized about this. We don't know diddly about our enemy's mysterious enemy. What do we know about the aliens that grabbed us?"

Roger held up a hand and began counting off items on his fingers. "They have been around for at least a century. They are concealing themselves from most of humanity. They seem obsessed with certain ancient writings related to cuneiform. They are at war with an unknown enemy. They have our form, or something near to it, but can change their appearance. Have I missed anything?"

Mel set a stack of books next to Roger. "They don't look anything like us. Not really."

Roger turned to her. "Really? Have you actually seen one in its true form."

"I think so. Mostly I learned about them from poking around in their computer systems, but I think I've seen their young on an internal sensor feed. That big research ship I was on, it had a pretty big crew. There was actually life support systems of some kind. The central chamber of the ship was a massive tank of mucky water. My best guess is that it was a spawning pool."