The Apocalypse Contract

CHAPTER 50 - GWYNETH

Professor Gwyneth DeGrassi stared at the map they had hung on the conference room wall. Over the last two days they had painstakingly added thumbtacks, colored yarn, and post-it notes to paint a picture of a global conspiracy. She was not happy about that.

"It's a thing of beauty," Felix observed.

"You would say that," Gwyneth responded.

He laughed. "Oh, come on Gwen, everyone loves a good conspiracy board."

"Please don't call me Gwen. It's Gwyneth. Not even my own family calls me Gwen."

"Hey, first name basis," Felix enthused. "I do think you're warming up to me, though I still don't understand what you had against me in the first place."

"You can say that after the way you treated her on Twitter?" Christoph interjected.

Felix looked from the Vatican astronomer back to the professor. "Really? I tweeted at you?"

"Yes. You called me a 'deep state tool of the science cabal cover-up', or words to that effect. Then you sicced your flying monkeys on me."

He put his hands up. "Hey, I can't be blamed for what my Twitter followers decide to do. Social media is just like that, you know."

Elizabeth gave an audible sigh. "The straight white male of the Internet has spoken."

Gwyneth felt a moment of kinship with the executive despite her distrust of the defense industry corporate behemoth she worked for.

Corporal Lisa Bolokowski entered the room carrying a pot of coffee and several bottles of water. "As requested, a caffeine booster followed by a water chaser. I've requisitioned you a coffee maker, but any time you want to bring something with a power cord into one of these secure rooms, there are a bunch of hoops to jump through." She set the beverages down and looked at the map. "OK, so where are we at?"

Felix jumped up. "We've expanded on the web of shell companies by cross referencing my notes on recent UFO activity with your list of suspicious money transfers. Gwen noticed a geographic regularity to where these companies were based, and we used that to chase down a few more candidates. We are still spinning our tires on what their game plan is though."

The corporal took out a small notebook and jotted notes while staring at their map. "I'll get these updates to the nerds at Langley and see what they make of it. Here is the latest on the objects' trajectory." She deposited a sheaf of papers on the table. "They've altered course again. Current estimates have them arriving in three days. What we really need at this point is anything you can surmise about their intentions, their capabilities, hell I think the President would be happy to know their favorite Netflix show at this point. We are pretty much grasping at straws."

Gwyneth flipped through her own notes. "Christoph and I have been working on some of those questions. They've been burning their engines at 20 gravities for days at a time. Based on that and the spectrum of the exhaust energy, they have some sort of highly efficient fusion drive, we think. With that sort of technology, they could bomb us into oblivion without much effort, but like I've said before I can't imagine why they would. A race that advanced would have easy access to all the resources they need without ever visiting our planet." She slid several pages over to the corporal. "Sorry, nothing in there about their Neflix preferences."

Lisa took the papers. "I'll get these to the General. He'll make sure it makes it into the President's daily brief."

"Ask the General to give her my regards," Gwyneth added, "I haven't seen her since the inauguration."

"Will do. Anything else the General should know?"

Christoph raised his hand. "I've been taking another look at that signal from Ross 154. Something about it seems familiar to me, though I couldn't tell you what. I would like to run it past a friend of mine that works with the Vatican archivist. Cyphers and codes are something of a hobby of his."

"I'll have to get that cleared, but as long as your friend will sign an NDA, we can make it happen. Maybe he will see something a room full of people at the NSA haven't. OK, if you've got nothing else, here is the latest dump from the field teams." She dropped a stack of documents on the table. Felix grabbed for them and began passing copies on to the others.

Gwyneth flipped through a stack of photographs. "What am I looking at here?"

"We were hoping you could tell us," the corporal confessed. "Those were taken at the bottom of a mine shaft in Peru. Those surfaces are a polymer like plastic but with a lattice structure that makes it incredibly strong. The ropy things appear to be conduits with some sort of wires inside. There wasn't anything attached to them, though some of them disappear into solid rock, so no telling what is on the other end without a lot of digging."

"Were any of these wires carrying any current? Any signals emanating from any of them?"

The corporal shook her head. "I don't think anyone thought to check. It will be in the accompanying debrief docs if they did."

"I feel like I'm working with my hands tied behind my back," Gwyneth mumbled as she flipped through the documents. She looked up. "What I would really like is to actually go to one of these sites. Take a team of scientists and equipment and get my own hands dirty. This constant shuffling of documents back and forth is slowing the process down, and we obviously can't afford that right now."

Corporal Bolokowsky considered her words. She stepped up to the map and gazed at it, then stabbed her finger at one of the thumbtacks piercing it. "There. Bergbau Mining, a little north of Boston. We just inserted a team there earlier today, and I'm told they are finding a lot of 'weird stuff'. There is probably a document dump already on its way here, but I could req us a chopper and have us there in just a few hours." She turned to the team. "What do you think? You feel like taking a field trip?"