Foster was pleased to see Pierce had donned a nice fresh, clean uniform to match his newly clean-shaven face and new haircut in the wake of his imprisonment. That was the limit of her being pleased to see him as his presence on the bridge caused her to sigh. “Dr. Pierce, I thought I told you to take time off to rest.”
“Captain, this is important,” Pierce said as he and Nereid approached her. “Can I see you in your office?” He faced Williams and Rivera. “Hell, you two as well. Everyone come!”
“Pierce, from your point of view you were in prison for two years and were convinced we’d died,” Foster said. “You really need to take time off to recover mentally and physically.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” he said, and pushed his way down the stairs into her office. “And if you don’t let me help out, then we’re all going to be doing that.”
Foster returned to her office chair at her desk. Pierce, Nereid, Williams, and Rivera were later joined by Chang, Dr. Kostelecky, Chevallier, and Tolukei, essentially the entire senior crew. They all began to spread out within her spacious office turned briefing room, and all eyes were on Dr. Pierce as he fidgeted with his holo pad. It looked as though he was preparing to launch a holographic slide show presentation, much like ones he used to show during his lectures at UBC.
“You have our undivided attention, egghead,” Chevallier said with her arms crossed.
Pierce nodded and waved his hands across the projection, the action enlarged the display on his holo pad for everyone to clearly see. “Our time in decontamination gave me the chance to think clearly for once, in regard to everything that has transpired since our arrival in the system. Marduk, Tiamat, Undine, the connections to Earth. Then it hit me.” His holographic slide switched to the cover of his poor-selling book back on Earth. “Have any of you read my book on the legend of the Dogan tribes of Africa?” The crew gave their answers via silence, a few heads shaking ‘no’ and blank stares by Nereid who no doubt didn’t know what a book was unless of course that part of McDowell’s memories had been unlocked. “Didn’t think so, it was laughed at by the science community on Earth. Well, for those that don’t know, the Dogan believed they were visited by travelers from another planet thousands of years ago, they called them the Nommo, a species that was described as, half-fish, half-man.”
“The Undine . . .” Foster said.
“Exactly. They claimed to have been told about celestial objects in the skies. Like that Saturn had rings and that Sirius, the system they claimed to have travelled from, was not a single star but a triple star system. The Dogan knew all this information before the invention of the telescope and modern science. I think there’s some truth to Marduk coming to Earth and the religion of the ancient Babylonians,” Pierce said as he continued his holographic presentation. “Here’s what I think happened. According to Babylonian myth, Tiamat and her husband Abzu created the universe and the lesser gods, including Marduk. Tiamat was the goddess of the salt seas while her husband was the god of the fresh seas. Two seas, two oceans . . . like two ocean worlds.”
Nereid clued in right away. “Meroien . . .”
“And the original Undine home world . . . wherever in the galaxy that lays.” Pierce directed everyone’s attention to the new hologram that manifested, a map of the known side of the galaxy. “So, Tiamat and Abzu take the Undine to Sirius, encounter the Lyonria, and then travel to the Javnis home world. They create and uplift the Muodiry, teach them how to build and operate starships. Then they travel to Earth, make contact with the Dogan in Africa, and allowed a small number of Undine to populate the oceans of Earth, giving rise to the myth of Sirens when ancient Greek sailors discovered them.”
Pierce continued. “And then something happens, something that causes the Lyonria to vanish except for a few, living in Sirius. During which according to myth, the lesser gods plot to overthrow Tiamat and Abzu’s reign. Abzu is killed, Tiamat gets upset, and goes to war with Marduk, the leader of the lesser gods uprising. Tiamat is killed by him and he becomes ruler of all the gods, travels to Earth and tells the ancient humans there he’s in charge. From there he starts hunting down Undine and Nereids, as they are still loyal to Tiamat. He grabs a bunch of them on his ship including human slaves, returns to Sirius, and forces the Nereids to unlock tech left behind from Tiamat. Then a trap that had been placed by Tiamat engages, keeping him stuck in the Sirius system.”
“The humans then are forced to live with the Lyonria,” Kostelecky said.
“Enter the first generation of Linl explorers,” Pierce said. “They travelled here to set up a colony and were wiped out by Marduk. The survivors were then forced to live with the now enslaved human and Lyonria populations, which over time lead to the evolution of the Poniga. Also, EVE you detected traces of Arabic and Hebrew in the Poniga language, right?”
“That is correct, Doctor,” EVE’s voice echoed throughout the office like an omnipotent force listening in.
“That was the language the Babylonians had used,” Pierce said. “And with Marduk trapped, he forced the Poniga and Undine to study the Lyonria ruins in hopes of finding clues on how to escape.”
Williams faced away from the projection, and asked Pierce. “So, who is Tiamat then? Clearly not a Lyonria.”
“I’m not sure; in the legends she was always described as being a dragon. Javnis are at heart a reptilian species, maybe she was one of them, or perhaps a different faction within the Lyonria civilization.”
“Marduk in the legends had four eyes . . .” Foster said referring back to her high school classes of studying Mesopotamian mythology.
Pierce nodded to her. “Four eyes and four ears, but I’d imagine his appearance had been exaggerated slightly to make him appear more humanlike and Tiamat more serpent like. In any case, the Lyonria were here before Tiamat, it’s probably how she discovered Sirius in the first place. Since Marduk is obsessed with learning about Lyonria technology, and not Tiamat’s, even though its Tiamat’s drones that are keeping him trapped in the system, it’s safe to assume Tiamat’s technology has a basis in Lyonria technology.”
Williams asked Foster. “Captain, according to your engram trance, the Lyonria ruins, rather Lyonria travel hub, we found has a wormhole powerful enough to travel to other systems, right?”
“Yeah, somethin’ like that.”
“Wonder why he didn’t just use that to leave?”
“He didn’t know how to use it to connect to gates beyond the system, only local ones, and that weird alternate existence, which required psionic powers to reach rather than the gate itself. He was close to figuring it out until a lockdown halted him ten years ago and set him back.”
“Another reason why he enslaved the two races,” Rivera said. “He was searching to rebuild it to suit him. It’s what I would have done; if I was an evil and lazy dictator, with an engineering degree.”
“Sounds more like he was searching for an instruction manual,” Williams said.
“He’d have to leave his ship behind, anyways,” Foster said. “A ship that hasn’t had its navigational computers updated in over four thousand years. He was truly stranded here in every sense.”
“Stellar drift.” Pierce snapped his fingers at the revelation. “Of course, that’s why he needs the location of Earth from us. Every planet and star system travels throughout the galaxy at varying speeds. Sol and Sirius are not in the same place as they were five thousand years ago. If you don’t know the proper motion of stars and its planets, you could end up spending years flying through space trying to find a particular system unless your navigation systems kept that data up-to-date.”