CAREY WATCHED AS the four science ships, four scout ships, and four military ships from Star Mist all approached the very large artificial moon above the spinning rings of the Center.
The artificial moon seemed to have an atmosphere and was covered in lush vegetation, some deserts, and a large ocean. Carey would bet anything those deserts and oceans were for the Gray and Cirrata.
From all scans as they approached, the center seemed to be shielded at the edge of the surface, so nothing inside the artificial moon could be seen.
Carey had a bad feeling about this and Matt had said the same thing earlier. If anything was going to be protected in this massive construction, it would be the control area.
And who knew what kind of protections the ancients had left. But the six of them had agreed that the only way to find out was to send in scout and science ships.
Suddenly a shield appeared between all twelve ships and the artificial moon. The shield glowed orange and gold and shimmered like oil on water.
All ships stopped.
“No damage,” the lead military ship reported back to Star Mist and Angie and Gage, who were running this investigation since Star Mist was the closest Starburst ship to what they all were assuming was the command center.
The lead military ship had come the closest to hitting the shield. Carey was glad that hadn’t happened.
“All three Starburst ships are being hailed by unknown,” Star Fall said. “The signal seems to be originating from the artificial moon.”
Carey and Matt quickly stood and faced the large screen. “Please put it through when the other ships are ready as well.”
Carey’s stomach was twisting more than she could ever remember happening before. They had all talked about the possibility that the ancients would have left behind a message of some sort. And approaching the artificial moon must have triggered it while also triggering the shield.
After a moment a man appeared on the large screen. He was dressed in what looked to be a comfortable pair of cloth pants, a dress shirt, and his hair was gray. To Carey he looked perfectly human and more than likely was.
Behind him she could see dozens of other humans working in a large, but standard command room.
Benny and Gina appeared below him on the right and Angie and Gage appeared below him on the left.
“Welcome, Seeders,” the man said, bowing slightly. “My name is Chairman Cannard. We are very happy you have made it. I am contacting you to request an in-person meeting with you six chairmen of the Starburst ships and Chairmen Ray and Tacita. Would that be possible?”
Carey nodded and Matt said, “Yes, we would welcome that.”
Cannard could clearly see all of them, so he nodded to Matt’s response.
“It would be an honor,” Angie said.
“A pleasure,” Benny said. “And I am sure Ray and Tacita wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
The man laughed. “I am sure they would not. We could meet here on the command center. We will drop the screens enough for the eight of you to jump on board. One hour?”
“One hour would be fine,” Angie said.
Carey felt her stomach twist down into a knot even tighter.
“I look forward to the discussion,” Cannard said.
His image vanished from the screen.
The other four chairmen were still on the screen. “We’ll get Ray and Tacita headed this way,” Gage said and they vanished.
A moment later Benny and Gina vanished as well.
Carey just stood there staring at the screen that now showed the small group of scout and science ships in space near the shielded artificial moon. She was feeling stunned, completely stunned.
Behind them their command center was totally silent.
They had just spent over a year exploring a completely dead ancient society, and now, suddenly, they found someone at home.
And Cannard, knew who they were and who Ray and Tacita were.
“Looks like we might finally get some answers,” Matt said.
Carey could only nod to that.
But she wasn’t completely sure she was going to like the answers.
THIRTY-THREE
MATT SUGGESTED THAT he and Carey jump back to their apartment to grab a quick snack. Carey agreed. There was just no telling how long this coming meeting might last.
After the initial shock had worn off, Matt was feeling excited about the meeting. Since they had discovered that the center was completely working and kept clean, it made sense that someone would be here still to do that.
In fact, over the last weeks of their scientists studying the massive structure, one theory had emerged that if the rings ever stopped moving, they would quickly fall apart as well as lose any atmosphere they had almost instantly.
Matt had no idea why the ancients would want to keep the structure maintained and moving, but he had a hunch that they would know the answer to that question shortly.
They split a ham sandwich and a bottle of water, not really talking as they stood in their kitchen and ate. Not much they could talk about. The entire thinking had changed when they found this massive sphere of galaxies and the spinning bands in the center. Matt had a hunch, this next meeting might change it again.
Fifteen minutes ahead of the meeting they jumped back to the command center and checked out all the reports coming in from their ships out studying the center ring.
Nothing unusual at all.
So when Chairman Cannard appeared on the screen and asked if they were ready, Matt and Carey nodded.
“Just jump to my location,” he said.
Matt took Carey’s hand and they did as the Chairman asked.
They found themselves in a large meeting room with a large oak-looking table and comfortable-looking padded chairs around it. The walls were painted an off-white with large photos of the Center from different angles on the wall, framed nicely.
Nothing at all about the room screamed ancient, powerful, advanced society. It looked perfectly human and normal. Matt actually felt disappointed.
Chairman Cannard stepped forward and shook their hands, saying he was glad to finally meet them. At that moment Angie and Gage appeared and looked around and Cannard stepped to meet them.
Cannard was about Matt’s height and seemed totally human.
A moment later Benny and Gina arrived with Ray and Tacita.
Cannard greeted Benny and Gina, saying he was glad to finally meet them, then turned to the shocked Ray and Tacita.
“Great seeing you again, old friends,” Cannard said.
Finally, Matt got to be shocked because at that moment Tacita broke into a massive smile and moved forward and hugged Cannard. She actually looked like she might cry.
Ray stepped forward, his smile beaming. “It’s been far too long,” he said, shaking Cannard’s hand, barely refraining from hugging him as well.
Matt glanced at Benny, who just shook his head and shrugged.
“Everyone take a chair,” Cannard said, indicating the table. “Any kind of beverage?”
“Water would be wonderful,” Carey said and Matt nodded.
As they sat down a pitcher of ice water and two glasses appeared in front of their two seats.
“Now that’s nifty,” Benny said as water appeared in front of him and Gina as well.
“So,” Ray said as he and Tacita sat down next to Cannard. “You’ve always been an ancient, as we are now calling the races who lived in this sphere.”
Cannard laughed, which made Matt relax even more. “I was noticing that new name. I don’t feel ancient, but I guess by most measurements I might be.”
“So what name do you call yourself?” Benny asked.
Matt loved how Benny could sometimes just get right to the point.
“Humans,” Cannard said. “And those of us humans who are lucky enough to have the right genes and can live a long time call ourselves Seeders, just as you do, because of our stated goal of helping humanity spread out over the universe.”
Matt nodded to that. He liked that and he could tell that Carey liked it as well.
“First off,” Cannard said, “I want to say how honored I am to meet you six. The fantastic work you did to stop the alien infestation saved more lives than I could ever imagine.”
Matt and Carey both nodded. Angie said, “Thank you.”
Matt was stunned that this ancient Seeder knew about their work.
“Were you and your people and the Gray and the Cirrata watching that fight?” Benny asked.
“Very closely,” Cannard said, nodding. “We had no solution to the problem either, but we planned on being there if you could not contain it as you ended up doing.”
Cannard turned to Ray and Tacita. “Turns out we sure made a mess of that, didn’t we?”
Both Ray and Tacita nodded.
“Our solution seemed like a valid plan at the time,” Tacita said.
“It did,” Cannard said. “And here at the Sphere we agreed as well.”
“So you all started our branch of humanity and Seeders?” Matt asked. “And clearly did as we do on planets, stick around and help us get going. “Why?”
“We are Seeders,” Cannard said simply.
Matt sat back, trying to get a grasp of that simple but very complex statement. But beside him Carey seemed to see instantly what he meant.
“You did this not only for our branch of humanity,” Carey said, “but for many, many others in the universe. Am I correct?”
Cannard smiled and nodded. “The humans, the Gray, and the Cirrata have spread far wider than you can ever imagine.”
“The Cirrata don’t seem to be in most of our worlds,” Gage said.
“They are there,” Cannard said. “You just don’t see them.”
Silence filled the conference room, so Cannard said simply, “How about I run you through a history of humans, Gray, and Cirrata in the known universe. Then I can answer questions after that on anything you might need to know.
All eight of them nodded.
Matt felt like a kid back in school finally getting to a subject that really really interested him. It was everything he could do to not sit forward in his chair.
THIRTY-FOUR
CAREY JUST FELT stunned and yet relieved at what she had heard so far from Chairman Cannard. And having Ray and Tacita actually be happy to see him reassured her as well.
So now they were going to get a history lesson. A desperately needed history lesson.
Cannard started into the history
“Just under five-hundred-million years ago humanity managed to survive and crawl out of its own solar system and start to explore its own galaxy. As humans tend to do, it stabilized as it filled the galaxy and would have just stayed there if the Cirrata had not visited.”
Cannard looked around for a second, then went on.
“The Cirrata, after some initial conflict, managed to convince a group of humans that the universe was a very large place. It was at that point that the special Seeder genes, as we call them, were discovered. When the Seeder genes were activated, it allowed some humans to transport over distances, not age or get sick, and remember just about everything.”
Carey had always wondered how the Seeder gene had been discovered. Now she knew.
Cannard went on. “The group of humans in contact with the Cirrata realized that the only types of humans who could really explore the vastness of space were Seeders, so they searched that first galaxy and found about seven million Seeders among the trillions and trillions of human population. And it was on large ships that first groups of Seeders left their own galaxy.”
“And discovered the universe was pretty empty,” Benny said.
Cannard nodded. “Very empty. So it was during this first half million years of exploration that the Seeders figured out that their main driving force would be to seed humans in all the empty galaxies. It took almost a million years more of trying and failing many times to get to the system you still use now with terra-forming and then seeding and then staying with each culture to help them over the roadblocks.”
Ray and Tacita just shook their heads, clearly more stunned than Carey was feeling.
“So why did you let us just go on without telling us the origins?” Tacita asked.
Cannard held up his hand and smiled. “Still got a little more of the story before I get to that.”
Tacita nodded and sat back.
“For millions more years the Seeders spread humanity through galaxy after galaxy. At one point along in there they met the Gray, who were out exploring galaxies and also putting their people on new planets. At that point the Seeders, the Gray, and the Cirrata all agreed to work together and keep the Gray cultures and the Cirrata cultures secret from the human cultures developing on the land.”
Carey noticed that all of them were nodding.
Cannard went on. “This seeding continued for another ten million years before it became clear that Seeders needed a home area of their own. So many humans with the Seeder genes were just not being found on the billions of developing worlds.”
“So you built this sphere?” Benny said.
“The construction of the Center, which was to be the home world, only took over two million years and pushed our skills to new levels,” Cannard said. “We realized it was good for us, just as the war with the aliens advanced your technology.”
Carey nodded to that as well. Just discovering the plague of a runaway human experiment sent Seeders scattering to invent entire new levels of technology to help in the war. And it also pushed them to find Seeders on planets where before they would have just been left to live a human life.
So she completely understood a major construction challenge doing that as well, especially something as large as this Center.
“We shielded all the galaxies for power,” Cannard said, “and Seeders from all over human-occupied space came here to live in the wonderful society of the rings.”
“But you kept expanding,” Matt said.
Carey had been thinking the same thought.
“More millions of years went by, more areas of the universe were being seeded, thus millions more Seeders were found and came here to learn and live. At one point in time we had seven hundred galaxies being seeded at any given time.”
“Are the Starburst ships going to run into those already seeded human areas anytime soon?” Ray asked.
“Not in your planned five hundred year missions at the speeds you are traveling,” Cannard said. “That covers not even a measurable fraction of the universe we know about. And the universe just continues on far beyond what we can see.”
Carey just shook her head at that. Sometimes simply understanding space and the vastness of space was just too much to try to grasp.
“So everyone who lived here were Seeders?” Gina asked.
“Yes,” Cannard said. “Any Seeder couple who got pregnant moved to a human planet to have the child just in case the child didn’t have the Seeder genes. Most children were Seeders and the family returned after the child was born.”
Carey understood that. Star Fall had many, many families on it, but all the children were Seeders as well.
“So what happened?” Gage asked. “Where did you all go?”
“Getting ahead of my story again,” Cannard said, smiling. “After the rings started to slowly fill up, which took millions and millions of years, the desire to seed new galaxies fell off. Living here was just very, very pleasant and fewer and fewer wanted to leave. Eventually groups started to settle on planets in the shielded galaxies and those over millions of years also started to fill up.
“The largest traffic we had in and out of here wasn’t the ships leaving on seeding missions, but the massive ships bringing millions and millions of new Seeders here. You all know that every generation on every human planet creates more humans with the Seeder genes. We believed that every Seeder should be found.”
“So the desire to create new galaxies full of billions of human worlds faded,” Mat
t said, “as the population continued to grow here?”
“Yes,” Cannard answered. “So about ten million years ago we realized we needed a much bigger and better home. So we started the planning.”
“And this is where we come in, isn’t it?” Ray said.
Cannard nodded. “While the new home was being designed and built, challenging us yet again, all seeding had basically stopped. Many of us thought that against the very nature of who we were. And the Gray and Cirrata were not pleased as well. They needed places to put their growing populations and our terra-formed planets were perfect locations for their populations.”
“So you started one planet in one galaxy,” Ray said, “and nurtured us to take up the task.”
Cannard smiled. “Actually, we started six hundred single planets and did the same thing. All scattered vast distances apart in our known space. There are six hundred different Seeder groups that know nothing of this Seeder home world area.”
“We were simply the closest,” Matt said.
Cannard nodded. “We hoped you would find this and we helped you where we could.”
“Why would you want us to find this?” Matt asked.
Cannard smiled. “Seemed like waste of a perfectly good home to not have someone living in it.”
All Carey could do was stare at him.
THIRTY-FIVE
MATT JUST FELT stunned at how much longer the Seeders had been around than any of them thought. He had sort of assumed that Seeders like Ray and Tacita were rare because of how old they were, but clearly they were not.
Cannard clearly had been around long before Ray and Tacita were born.
And the fact that this place had been saved to be a home for a second generation of Seeders stunned Matt as well.
“So how about we get some dinner and then I’ll give you all a tour of this base and the command center,” Cannard said.
“Can we tell our ships we are fine?” Gage asked.
“Be my guest,” Cannard said. “Third shield down.”
Carey told Star Fall they were fine and the meeting was going to continue. Benny did the same for Star Rain and Gage did the same for Star Mist.
Star Fall: A Seeders Universe Novel Page 10