THEM: RAPTURE (Book Two)

Chapter Four

     The scientists and Jason poured over the information, desperate to find the ship and some hope that would come with it. However, the planet being in the shape it was it was hard to make sense of much out there. There was just so much space, so much wreckage, so many ruins that nothing in the area seemed like anything much of anything. The scientists went over different ways to scan, some of the military officials sent out scouts, planes and drones, few of which came back. Day after day it seemed that there was hope of much of any value still out there was waning.

     One night while Bock sat near the edge of the compound Jason walked out. He carried a tablet and seemed to have a look of excitement about him.

"Did you find anything?" Brock asked. "I am very much in need of some good news."

"Well yes and no," Jason replied. "I found something, but it might just be another avenue to look."

"I don't understand," Brock admitted. "So, you may of found something but also may have found nothing?"

"Well, I got amateur video," Jason admitted. "Of ships entering the atmosphere."

"I thought that most of that stuff was lost when everything went to crap," Brock admitted. "How did you find it."

"The military are nothing if not hoarders," Jason admitted. "They were monitoring and archiving everything from that time. I managed to find a backup on one of the servers they brought here. Thy got it all, every amateur video posted before everything went down."

"How does this help us?" Brock asked. "We are trying to find things in the here in now in a continent that is basically a giant scrap heap."

"Well, I figured that like most vessels they carry more than they need to," Jason admitted. "What if when the ships came in the atmosphere they just junked something that would be considered unimportant to them but just the kind of thing they were looking for?"

Brock looked at all the archived footage. "There are hours of it here. How could anyone make sense of it all?"

"You forget both on how good I am and how much time I have on my hands," Jason admitted. "I put all the footage together and made a timeline. There are hundreds of ships that were recorded and I was able to separate everything that fell off one of the sops by three categories. The first being weapon drops. 

"Things that came off these ships that blew stuff on the ground or also in the air up. Second is damage. Stuff from air to air or surface to air that took chunks off of the incoming ships. The third is what we are interested in. These are drops. Some of them are fuel canisters that likely are empty, infrastructure, and some are unexplained."

"Unexplained?" Brock asked. "Like them dropping off tech that they don't necessarily need now but want to leave here for further use?"

"Exactly!" Jason explained. "I have eliminated all of the first two and am not going through the last of it."

     The pair set up a workstation inside and started going through the footage. Jason would go through some and Brock would double-check it. The hours seemed to blend together until Jason looked confused. "I think I might have something."

"What is it?" Brock said as he came over. He looked at the screen as the replay had a large vessel dropping a strange triangular mass from the ship and placing it on the ground. "That thing looks unlike everything else. That has to be it."

"Well, we have gone through pretty much everything else," Jason admitted. "If this is not it then what we want is not out there."

"Can you find that position?" Brock asked. "Where they dropped that thing?"