“How many decades have we been together?” he asked. “You ever seen me in a tux?”
“That’s going to change tonight,” she said, kissing him. “And I’m looking forward to it.”
He laughed. She knew he didn’t really mind. But he had to pretend to complain.
She took his hand and then turned him so they could face the command crew that had backed them so well for so long.
“Everyone,” she said, “time to go get dressed for the party.”
“Star Rain,” Benny said. “Take care of things until we get back.”
“I will,” Star Rain said. “Enjoy your party. You have earned it.”
“We have all earned it,” Benny said. “And that includes you.”
“Thank you,” Star Rain said after an uncharacteristically long pause. “The honor has been all mine.”
Read the novel that launched the series:
Against Time: A Seeders Universe Novel
Turn the page for an excerpt.
CHAPTER ONE
CALLIE SHERIDAN felt a sense of relief that she could finally see the light ahead. More than she imagined she would feel, considering she had enjoyed the three days down in the Oregon Caves. A real change and a relief from her normal grind of research and teaching undergrad classes in Paleontology at the University of Oregon in Eugene.
But after three days completely in the dark and damp of the cave, she was ready to see some natural light once again, even if it was just a rainy Oregon day.
She and the two graduate students with her had gotten permission from the Forest Service to go into a special area of the Oregon Caves complex, far off the normal tourist trails. It had taken them almost four of hours of hiking just to get to the tiny room. There they had been allowed to dig for signs of fish skeletons preserved in the rocks of the cave.
One of the students, Jim Williams, was in his final year, working on his thesis, married, with a child in Eugene. He stood no more than five six, shorter than Callie by a couple of inches, and had bright red hair. From the pictures Callie had seen of his new child, the red hair had moved on a generation.
Barb Hillcrest still had over a year in school to get to her thesis. Barb was a solid woman and towered over Callie at over six feet. Barb lived alone with three cats and was worried about getting back to them.
Callie liked them both, and both had turned out to be hard, hard workers during the entire time in the cave. Both had focused their studies in vertebrate paleontology, which was Callie’s specialty.
The Oregon Caves had been formed out of granite instead of normal limestone and was a gold mine for fossils from various times in history. It had taken her almost a year to get the permission from the Forest Service for the short surface dig. A cave specialist and park ranger named Dave had gone with them to make sure that they wouldn’t disturb anything in the cave with their dig except around one small area tucked in the back of a small cave.
Dave was a middle-aged guy with a gut and gray hair and had a fantastic sense of humor that kept them laughing, even though he must have been bored to tears with their conversations at times and the excitements over finds of tiny fossils.
On the way in he had kept them entertained with his stories of the cave and the names of the different rooms and how they had been named. For a pretty long distance into the cave the path had been covered with asphalt and was an easy walk, with some stair climbing and one bridge over a stream called The River Styx.
Now they were all carrying out some great samples in their backpacks that would keep them busy for months at school. The trip was a great success and she honestly had no idea what they might have found.
Dave had decided that instead of having them climb out the tourist exit where the tours left, he’d have them just backtrack to the way they had come in. As they neared the front entrance to the cave, Dave suddenly shouted “Karen!” and ran forward.
He had been leading the group up the incline on the asphalt trail that wound through some rock fall, so Callie couldn’t see what he had seen.
The light from the small cave opening was bright, even though it had an airlock on it. So someone must have left the door open.
Callie shielded her eyes, carefully watching her step as she went forward to make sure she stayed on the asphalt.
Suddenly both Barb and Jim ran up behind Dave, who was now kneeling over a woman who looked to be Dave’s age. She also wore a park ranger uniform like Dave’s. Her gray hair had been cut short and she looked like she had been beautiful in her day.
But now she was sprawled on the ground in the middle of the asphalt trail and to Callie she looked very dead.
And smelled dead as well.
Behind Karen, scattered along the trail were a dozen more people, all sprawled in various positions and all very dead. Clearly this Karen had been leading a walking tour into the cave with a bunch of tourists when something really awful happened.
Callie quickly checked out a couple of other bodies, an older couple wearing heavy coats. There were no obvious marks on them and no blood.
Callie stepped back and just stood, staring at the bodies, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
He stomach was twisted into a knot and she wanted to just get sick. Never had she seen so much death in one place. Seeing something like this on television was something, standing here staring at the dead bodies and smelling the rot starting to take over was another matter completely.
Was this some sort of elaborate practical joke?
She looked around the rocks scattered through the cave mouth, but saw nothing that looked out of place.
Could someone have been this sick to do this sort of joke?
She moved back a few more steps closer to her two students and Dave where he now held Karen in his lap and was sobbing.
Callie had been around dead animals and a couple dead humans in her time, and this smell was very, very real and going to get worse, much worse, very soon. These people had been laying here dead for at least a day, maybe slightly longer.
How was that even possible, in the middle of a tourist attraction during a busy season?
As Callie looked along the group of dead, eleven men, women and one teenage boy, she could tell a few animals had worked at ones closest to the cave entrance, since it was braced open by the body of a man laying face down on the asphalt.
More than anything she wanted to be sick. This was not a pretty sight. But she had to stay clear in her thoughts for the moment. There would be time for reacting later.
She just couldn’t imagine what might have caused this and why no one had come for these people and bodies.
This made no sense at all.
None.
She covered her nose with her sleeve and tried to think.
Then suddenly one very ugly word popped into her head.
Gas.
“We need to get out of here now!” she shouted to her students and Dave. “Move past the bodies quickly, don’t look at them. Get up the trail to the parking lot.”
“What do you think caused this?” Barb asked, clearly stunned, but moving.
“Might be gas,” Callie said. “Jim, help me with Dave.”
They both went to pull Dave away from the body of a woman named Karen, but he brushed them aside, angry.
“No, I’m staying with her.”
“Dave,” Callie said, “there’s nothing you can do for her.”
“I don’t care,” he said, looking up at Callie, his eyes full of tears. “She’s my wife. I’m staying.”
“We’ll send help,” Jim said.
Callie nodded, but doubted that they would find help as quickly as Jim made it sound. Something here was very, very wrong.
Callie motioned for Jim to follow Barb up the trail and past the bodies.
Without a look back at the man holding his very dead wife or at the bodies she passed, Callie followed her two graduate students up and into the light.
Outside the big trees looked
normal, the day was beautiful, a slight breeze blowing among the pine.
It felt normal.
And that scared Callie even more.
All three of them took off running up the paved path through the trees, following the signs that said “Parking Lot.”
It took them only a minute at full run for the three of them to reach the wide, paved parking lot.
Callie expected police and everything else to be there, but instead the lot felt deserted.
Two bodies lay sprawled near one car.
Around them the towering mountains stretched upwards, leaving most of the parking lot tucked into the side of the hill in shadow.
Callie made herself stop, take a deep breath to clear her mind, and then look around for anything that seemed wrong or out of place.
Nothing.
A beautiful afternoon in the Oregon Mountains.
Except for the two bodies sprawled in the parking lot.
“What happened?” Barb asked, her voice shaking.
It was clear Barb was barely holding it together. But Callie had no answers for her. All Callie could do was stand there on the edge of the parking lot, staring at the bodies and shaking her head.
She had no idea what had happened.
But she had no doubt now that this was a lot bigger than some poison gas in the mouth of a cave.
A lot bigger.
CHAPTER TWO
VARDIS FISHER sat in his big black inertia chair, holding on for dear life as his ship, The Lady, came from deep space way too hot and directly into orbit insertion around a big, green-and-blue planet they had named N-21-7.
He had no doubt his fingers were going to have to be pried from the soft foam of the armrests and it tasted like his stomach might revolt from the sharp garlic on artichoke pizza he had baked them for lunch.
Doc, sitting to his right in his inertia chair, had them braking like crazy to hold the orbit as the features of the planet flashed by far, far too fast for Fisher to even catch a glimpse. You would have thought they had someone with damn big guns on their ass.
Doc was skinny and over six foot, with a wide grin and blue eyes that seemed to almost twinkle at times. Fisher, on the other hand, stood about four inches shorter than Doc with a body one person in a gym called a perfect V-shape. Wide shoulders, narrow waist and he kept his brown hair cut very short and no beard or moustache, while Doc wore a wide moustache that seemed to just be expanding on his skinny face.
Doc’s fingers were flying over his control panel. Fisher’s job was to watch for anything in front of them in orbit, but as fast as Doc had them braking, their orbital trajectory just kept changing, so Fisher had no clue what was coming up, let alone be able to watch for anything.
They might hit something before they even had time to blink, and if the object they plowed into was too large, their screens might not block it.
This stunt was all his skinny partner’s idea. Doc wanted to test out a new theory. He wanted to see how close to a planet they could drop out of a trans-tunnel and still control slowing into an orbit.
He had convinced Fisher to give it a try by saying, “Just never know when it might come in handy in the future.”
Fisher was big on being prepared for just damn near anything, and they had been chased more than once in the last few years of roaming around through space. And more than likely it would happen again.
Besides, he figured that if they didn’t plow into something large, the worst that would happen was that they would just sling off the orbit like a flea off a dog’s back and then have to backtrack.
Doc was convinced that wasn’t going to happen, and he tried to show Fisher the math. Fisher had just nodded like he always did when Doc got into the math on anything concerning orbits and trans-tunnel speeds and finally Doc just stopped and said, “You’ll see. It will work.”
“Just don’t hit the damn planet square on.”
“No worries, Skip,” he had said.
And that always made Fisher worry. Especially when he called him “Skip” which was short for “Skipper.” Doc never did that unless he was worried as well. Fisher got called Skip because he owned The Lady, as he called this deep space exploration ship.
Most of the time Doc just called her “The Ship.”
They had built her in two years in a huge warehouse on Fisher’s parent’s estate just north of their hometown, right after they both finally finished with far too many advanced degrees in college.
Fisher had family money in a trust, more than enough, actually, to build a couple ships. And he had patents on a dozen devices he had invented that drew energy from dark matter.
Doc had the idea for the gravity drive that allowed them to not only just float out of a gravity well, but jump long distances very quickly in what Doc called “Trans-Tunnel Flight.”
Basically Trans-Tunnel Flight was a form of time-bending warp drive, but when they were in it, space looked like it had become a tunnel, so Doc named it the “Trans-Tunnel Drive.”
“Better than Warp Drive,” he had said.
In the planning stage, they had decided to make the ship really huge and really cool, right out of a 1950’s science fiction movie. They even had painted it silver and put fins like a nifty plane and a pointed nose on it so it looked like a cross between a very fast plane and an old rocket ship. The fins were worthless unless in the atmosphere if the drive went out, and the pointed nose housed nothing but sensors.
They each had huge five-room suites on board, since the ship was the size of a hotel that flew. It was so big, there were parts of this ship Fisher hadn’t been in for over a year.
It actually didn’t need to be this big, but both of them had figured they never knew what they might run into out in space, or how much room they might need, or who might be riding along.
The actual engine itself took up the size of a small closet and a large warehouse area in a lower deck was filled with many, many spare parts. The rest of the ship had a game room, an exercise room, a small gym, a massive kitchen with a dozen freezers, and numbers of spare bedroom suites for a future crew or guests.
So far, those guest suites had not been used.
Before they took off, they had stocked more food than they would be able to eat in five years, even though from darned-near-anywhere in this area of the galaxy, they could jump back to Earth in a matter of a day or two.
Food was Fisher’s passion.
Somewhere back in college, after getting his first doctorate, he had allowed himself to get close to three hundred pounds on his five-foot-ten inch frame. Back then people said he and Doc looked like the old comedy team of Laurel and Hardy, but he was larger back then than Hardy ever got.
And Fisher loved cooking.
And eating.
Especially really rich foods. But a couple doctors told him that if he didn’t lose some weight, he was going to have to cut down on many of the dishes he loved to cook if he wanted to live much longer.
He had been only twenty-six when they told him that. It had gotten through.
He had gone exercise crazy.
Right before they left on this trip, he had run in his tenth marathon and he had been training for an Iron Man competition. He now weighed just under one-seventy and that was all muscle. And he could eat anything he damn well wanted.
Somehow, Doc ate everything Fisher served him with relish and never gained a pound and spent only a minor amount of time in the gym, usually when he wanted to talk to Fisher about something and knew Fisher was a captive audience while in an exercise routine.
Fisher didn’t feel right if he didn’t exercise, just as he didn’t feel right when he didn’t eat decent food.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of this exploring around space was discovering new types of food and ways of cooking it. He was stockpiling the recipes with hopes of doing a number of cookbooks when they got back home.
He could spend two or three hours a day in the kitchen just testing new foods and writing it all down
. And often did.
He doubted anyone would give his books any credit, just as they didn’t give his energy inventions even a second look. The power for everything on this ship and Doc’s drive came from the energy floating around between matter and dark matter.
For some reason Fisher had the ability to understand when something hidden was between two obvious things.
He had perfected the idea of using the energy between the two states of matter while in school and applied for patents, but no professor would let him write it as a thesis. No one really gave his ideas any credit at all, actually, just as they didn’t give Doc’s trans-tunnel drive and anti-gravity work anything but laughter.
If they could only see them now.
Finally, Doc had them slowed enough that the orbit they had settled into seemed stable, even though they were still braking.
“Told you it would work,” Doc said, smiling at Fisher, his thin face twisted into mostly bright white teeth and wide blue eyes.
Fisher just shook his head and worked his fingers off the armrests of his chair. “Only emergencies,” he said as his stomach started to settle.
“Exactly,” Doc said, nodding and going back to continuing to brake them into a stable orbit. “At some point I hope to figure out how we can come out of a trans-tunnel without forward speed. It should be possible.”
“Make that a priority,” Fisher said.
Suddenly the warning lights on Fisher’s heads-up panel flashed into a display that would do a Christmas tree proud.
The orbit they had dropped into had them hitting a large orbiting object in about five seconds.
Fisher kicked off Doc’s controls and cut the braking, which allowed them to move out higher away from the planet. On his screen their orbit around the planet changed from a nice circular pattern into a big egg-shaped elliptical orbit.
They flashed past what looked like an orbiting station far too fast to get a good look at it.
And far too close for Fisher’s stomach to be happy. He had long ago lost the desire for near-misses on anything.
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