Maria loved the idea of spending the next weeks coming and going from this lodge. That sounded heavenly after the year she had just spent on board her ship.
Chairman Ray and Tacita stood, forcing all of them to their feet out of respect.
“We meet back here tomorrow for breakfast at 8 a.m. planet time,” Ray said. “That is sixteen hours from now exactly.”
Maria nodded, as did everyone else.
“Keep your ships shielded and cloaked,” he said. “The locals on this planet will detect it otherwise.”
Then Ray turned to Roscoe. “Chairman Mundy, come with me and I’ll give you a tour of your new command.”
With a quick nod, Roscoe smiled at her and then the three of them vanished.
That smile almost took her breath away. Wow, he was something.
Maria turned to Fisher and Callie. “Thank you for your hospitality. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
“You are more than welcome,” Callie said. “This is our home we’re trying to save so glad this is being taken so seriously.”
Maria nodded. “We’ll save it.”
With that she transported back to her ship, hoping that they actually could.
And hoping beyond hope that she could find time with Chairman Mundy. Private time.
FOUR
ROSCOE FINISHED THE quick tour of his ship in the Command Center of The Huntington. The big Command Center felt at home to him instantly and scared him to death at the same time.
The ship was huge and had firepower that could take down an entire planet if it needed to. Roscoe hoped it would never come to that.
Ever.
But from what he had seen of the big ship coming into the galaxy, nothing The Huntington had in firepower would even dent it.
The ship already had a full engineering crew and some basic officers who had gotten it here, but they were not as trained as he would like.
“I have dinner to eat, and you have some core crew in the mess,” Ray said, smiling, after he gave him the quick rundown of the Command Center. “They all will head certain areas of your ship and one is your second-in-command. Might want to go meet them to help you get started.”
Then smiling, Ray vanished, leaving Roscoe stunned at not only being in charge of such an amazing warship, but that he already had some command crew. He knew the ship needed a basic crew of a hundred to just limp along, which it had now, mostly in engineering and communications, but three hundred would be better.
He had a couple of weeks to get that many in place and no idea how to do that. Now it sounded like he had some help.
He took a deep breath and looked around at the three-level Command Center. His station was in the center of the second level. One entire wall was a giant screen in front of his station. It didn’t feel right to go sit in the chair just yet. Maybe tomorrow.
So instead, he took a deep breath and transported to the mess.
Four people were sitting there on the far side of the huge room, around a table near the kitchen door. They were all eating and laughing. Two were men, two women.
The place smelled wonderfully of hamburgers and fries. And they all seemed to have milkshakes in front of them. Clearly the ship had some kitchen crew already. One more detail to not worry about.
Roscoe’s stomach rumbled, making him realize he needed to try to eat as well.
He started through the sea of empty tables toward the group of four when he suddenly realized he knew one of them. He would know that shaved head and long nose anywhere.
Jonas Craig, his second-in-command at Sector Justice, the police force that watched over different parts of the Milky Way, sector by sector. Sector Justice knew nothing about Seeders being in their midst. They still believed that all Seeders had done their work and just moved on. Which was mostly true, but not completely.
Jonas was one of the best fighters Sector Justice had and could kill a man with a single finger. They had worked together now for ten years and Roscoe had trusted him with his life. How was that possible that Jonas was a Seeder as well?
“Jonas, you’re kidding me, right?” Roscoe said as he moved toward them.
Jonas turned from the others, staring and clearly stunned, his mouth open showing a half-chewed hamburger. Then Jonas blinked twice and closed his mouth.
So Jonas hadn’t known Roscoe was a Seeder either. Amazing.
The other three turned and Roscoe recognized them all, even though he didn’t know their names. All were from different branches of the Sector Justice force.
It seemed the Seeders were in just about everything when it came to keeping the peace and making sure human populations they had planted progressed in a peaceful way.
Jonas finally gathered himself enough to finish chewing, stand and face Roscoe. “Damn, I’m glad to see you,” he said, smiling.
“Not half as much as I am to see you,” Roscoe said, smiling. “I didn’t know you were a Seeder.”
Jonas laughed. “I didn’t know the same about you. Go figure.”
They both laughed.
The others stood to greet him and with that, Jonas turned to introduce him to the other three. And he started with “Folks, this is Chairman Mundy.”
And that once again just shocked Roscoe more than he wanted to admit.
FIVE
BY THE TIME she finished a quick dinner in her office, alone, Maria managed to somehow get her mind away from Roscoe Mundy and back on the task at hand.
The guy was amazing and she couldn’t believe a military type had caught her attention like that.
Yet she so wanted to just get to know him, and maybe a few other things with that incredible body of his as well. It had been far too long since she had a man in her life. She didn’t want to think about exactly how long.
Using three-dimensional images projected into the air in her office, she had the big ship’s course in a dotted line as it headed for the Milky Way.
In the research on the ship on the way back to the Milky Way, what she noticed about that dotted line was that on short distances, it seemed straight, but over much, much larger distances, it had a very, very slight continuous curve that could be projected backwards.
Every day the course shifted in a slight amount that over hundreds and hundreds of years mounted up to about one percent.
So shrinking down the known area of space to galaxies being nothing more than points in the air in her office, she extended the past course of the big ship.
It would take, at the ship’s speed, about three million years for the ship to make a complete circle return to where it started.
Her only problem was that she wasn’t sure how long the ship had been going. Any point on the circle could have been its launch point.
So starting with a hundred years ago, she had her computer show her the path of the ship through space.
It didn’t come close to any galaxy or even small star cluster at that point, allowing for the speed and direction of the galaxies movements.
She repeated the same over and over and over, taking her time to make sure she didn’t miss any detail.
It seemed to always go between star clusters and galaxies as if the course had been carefully planned to have nothing run into the big ship.
It became clear as she went that the big ship’s encounter with the two galaxies so far in the Local Group was almost a fluke.
Or planned, one or the other.
She was starting to bet on planned.
In sixty thousand years, the big ship hadn’t come close to any group of stars or galaxies at all.
Nothing.
It had traveled in the big expanse between galaxies, missing everything as it went.
That just seemed wrong and almost impossible, so maybe at some point the big ship had changed course. She couldn’t imagine the scale she was looking at, yet she knew that the Seeders had been in the Local Group galaxies for about five hundred thousand years that it took to do the twelve small galaxies and the Milky Way.
It had taken the Seeders an amazingly short period of only fifty thousand years to do most of the seeding in the Milky Way. But at around fifty thousand years per large galaxy, and over thirty galaxies in the Local Group, it was going to take over a million years to work through them all and head on outside the Local Group.
No way her brain could grasp living that long, but she assumed it was possible. She just couldn’t imagine it.
She had heard that some of the Seeders working the frontlines of the Seeding were older than Chairman Ray if that was possible.
Seeding entire galaxies was such an immense project, she just couldn’t grasp it all, even though she was a Seeder and understood every step in the process. Her perspective was still on hundreds of years, which felt stunningly long. A thousand years seemed impossible, and three hundred thousand just wasn’t possible to understand, just like the distances of space she was staring at.
So she kept going, trying to change her perspective on time. She tried to make herself believe she understood the scale of space just fine. Time, on the other hand, was difficult for her to grasp.
At eight hundred thousand years back, the big ship was finally in a position to brush past the side of a small satellite galaxy of a larger cloud of galaxies.
But it was only a brush and the ship would have had no reason to leave that galaxy in the direction it had started. So she was pretty sure that wasn’t its starting point.
At one million, four hundred thousand years, she finally found what she thought might make sense. The ship went through the edge of a smaller satellite galaxy coming from solidly inside an even larger spiral galaxy.
The ship had completed just under one half of its circle managing to miss everything along the way.
She had the Local Group including the Milky Way galaxy floating on one side of her office in very tiny scale, then she put up this large spiral galaxy in another corner in small scale as well.
Then she had her computer put up all the galaxy formations between the two. Then she asked the computer to show the closest path from the one spiral galaxy to the Local Group and the Milky Way.
She sat back, stunned. There were six major galaxy clusters that consisted of about thirty-five galaxies that formed almost a clear pathway like rocks crossing a pond between the two. Of course there were a lot of other galaxies along the way, but that was the closest route jumping like the leading edge of Seeders expansion did.
The line of the big ship went out and circled back to cross that path here in the Milky Way.
Could that have been the trail the Seeders used? If so, there were billions and billions and billions of Earth-like planets seeded with humans in those galaxies.
Was this big ship sent fourteen hundred thousand years ago as a message through time to the leading edge of the expansion?
And if so, why?
And why wasn’t it stopping.
Clearly, if it was meant to come here, something had gone wrong in its braking plans after all those years.
But nothing about any of this made any sense at all.
She recorded everything and then glanced at the time. She only had seven hours before she needed to be on the planet below for a meeting.
She needed to show all of them the data. It might not be right, but if it was, they needed to approach this ship very, very differently than they would approach a ghost ship.
But one thing she was sure of. This Seeder ship was at least one-point-four million years old.
At least.
But from a very, very advanced Seeder culture.
SIX
ROSCOE COULDN’T BELIEVE how good a cook Fisher was, and how stunningly beautiful Maria looked in the morning.
He was sitting across from her and eating breakfast in the wonderful café that seemed to fill the basement of the old lodge.
The café had been perfectly preserved over the years and had two u-shaped counters that stuck out into the room with thirty or so bar stools with cloth seats along the counters. The person waiting on them, in this case, Fisher, walked down the center of the counters.
The room had low log ceilings and huge windows that looked out into a vast forest of very old pine trees. The sun was sending rays of light down into the dense underbrush and forest floor that slanted away from the lodge.
Since the end of the counter was curved, all six of them could see each other fine. Ray and Tacita sat on the two chairs at the end of the counter. Roscoe and Fisher on one side, when Fisher stopped serving and sat down.
Maria sat across from Roscoe near Callie, clearly enjoying her eggs and ham as much as he was. She had smiled at him when they arrived and said hello, but nothing else.
Luckily she hadn’t said much else. He would have had a hard time talking, since she affected him so much. He really needed to get past that problem if they all were going to work together.
There was an amazing attraction between them, and if they weren’t trying to save a few billion lives, he might be trying to get close to her right now. If they did save these planets, there would be time. They were both Seeders, they had lots of time.
But that didn’t mean he didn’t want to get to know her better. Much, much better.
He had spent most of the time since their last meeting with his start-up crew, working to figure out his new ship and build plans on recruiting.
Since they were all from the Sector Force that consisted mostly of trained fighters that guarded the Milky Way sector by sector, they all felt comfortable recruiting top staff from that. But they would not take so many as to leave Sector Justice depleted.
Some of the most advanced cultures in the first sector, meaning the first sector of the Milky Way seeded, had some top militaries as well. That would be good recruiting grounds as well.
They might not have The Huntington fully staffed in three weeks, but they would be able to fly and fight if they had to.
So after only six hours of uneasy sleep in his new command cabin, which was huge and had no personal touches at all yet, he had managed to be on time to the meeting with Chairman Ray and the others.
Roscoe was almost done eating the fantastic eggs, soft toast, and melt-in-his mouth ham when Maria pushed her plate away and turned slightly to face Chairman Ray, who we also just finishing.
“I have something I think we all need to talk about.”
Roscoe loved the sound of her voice. It was firm and solid and slightly deeper than he would have expected coming from someone only about five-four and with so many freckles.
“Start us off, Chairman Boone,” Ray said, nodding.
Maria set up a small device on the counter in front of her and Fisher, who was standing inside the u-shape of the counter eating, quickly moved to take her plate and dirty silverware.
She touched the top of the device. In the air over the counter between them and the kitchen, an image of the Local Group of galaxies appeared. Roscoe recognized it at once and even knew where in the spiral arms of the Milky Way they were now located and the area of his home world in a small satellite galaxy near to, and almost touching, the Milky Way.
At times he had trouble grasping the size and scale of the entire Milky Way, but he was slowly, over the last centuries, coming to realize how impressive the Seeders were. And how lucky he had been to be recruited into their ranks.
“There are theories that are pretty solid that the leading edge of the Seeders entered the Local Group of galaxies here,” Maria said.
She had one of the small cloud galaxies in the group near one side brighten.
Roscoe nodded to himself. That was the theory he had heard as well.
“That was about five hundred thousand years ago,” Maria said.
Roscoe noticed that both Ray and Tacita nodded, but said nothing.
Maria went on. “If we follow the pattern of Seeders, we tend to jump as we move forward to the closest next galaxy or star cluster and then move on, like we are doing now into Andromeda and its satellite galaxies, leaving behind
many of us to help and protect and guide the forming seeded civilizations.”
Everyone again nodded. All basic stuff that Roscoe understood. Clearly Maria was trying to put down a foundation of what she was going to say.
“It takes around fifty thousand years to just do the initial seeding of each normal galaxy, give or take depending on size and numbers of suitable planets.”
Roscoe knew that as well, but always had a hard time imagining covering an entire galaxy such as the Milky Way in only fifty thousand years.
“So I extended out the pattern outside the Local Cluster,” Maria said, “going from closest to closest galaxy and this is what I got over a one-point-eight million year period of time, assuming the pace of Seeding remained about the same as it has through the Local Group.”
The scale of the image of Local Group floating in the air in the diner came down slightly as other galaxies and galaxy groups were added like steps ending in a large spiral galaxy that looked a lot like the Milky Way and Andromeda.
Roscoe had no idea how far that was away and he didn’t want to ask. Even if someone said the number, he wouldn’t be able to grasp what it meant. He just knew it was a very, very long distance, but yet that galaxy was in the relative neighborhood of the Milky Way in comparison to the entire universe.
Still, the number of years she was talking about just stunned him. Did he really belong to an organization that started almost two million years before?
Chairman Ray was nodding, so Maria went on.
“This is the track of the big ship.”
She put a dotted yellow line showing the track of the big ship entering the local cluster.
“The ship is actually turning slightly, but at such a small amount that it takes just at one thousand years to make a one degree shift in course.”
“It’s turning?” Fisher asked, clearly as surprised as Roscoe felt.
“Not enough to be noticeable over a year, but over one hundred years, yes.”
Roscoe looked over at Chairman Ray and Tacita, but both just sat listening.
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