He shook his head. How was this even possible?
No alien race in thousands and thousands of galaxies had ever managed to survive long enough to build even a galaxy-wide civilization, let alone a ship that could travel the vast distances between galaxies. When the Seeder scout ships discover an alien race growing on any planet in a galaxy, at any level, the Seeders would just go around that galaxy.
Over the centuries, Seeder research ships would watch the alien development, but never interfere. It was one of their most scared laws, learned out of bad experience a long, long time ago.
Very few alien races even survived long enough to make it off their own planet. And even fewer found trans-tunnel drive to jump to other close stars. And for as long as humans had been seeding galaxies with more humans, no alien race had found the refinements to trans-tunnel drives to get the standard speeds to break out of their own limited galaxies.
Yet somehow, he was looking at an alien ship that was between galaxies.
And moving at standard trans-tunnel drive speeds.
“Any life signs at all of any type?” Tacita asked.
“Nothing,” Commander Chain said. “We also checked for any form of stasis. Nothing.”
Chain was their most trusted second in command on any ship and had been with them thousands of years. He looked, as most Seeders looked, to be about thirty. He had dark brown hair and never was seen out of jeans and a sweatshirt.
“How large is that ship?” Ray asked.
“The size of a Seeder mother ship,” Chain said.
Seeder mother ships were the largest ships Seeder’s built. Mother ships were the size of small moons and shaped like birds gliding. They could hold a thousand other ships and upwards of a million people comfortably.
“Any equipment at all active?” Tacita asked.
“Except for the trans-tunnel drive still powering it forward,” Chain said. “Nothing is active. No atmosphere of any kind, no readings other than the drive. And honestly, it looks like the drive is about to fail as well.”
“Can you get a reading on the age?” Ray asked.
“At least two hundred thousand standard years,” Chase said. “And from the looks of the damage from impacts of small particles and such after its shields failed, it has been dead for a good hundred thousand of those years.”
“Trace back its flight path and put up on the screen where it came from,” Tacita said.
Ray was surprised when the image appeared of a thousand galaxies in all their various groupings. Right now they were in the middle of what was called the “Local Cluster” by humans in this galaxy. About thirty galaxies of different sizes and shapes. On the scale on the map on the screen, the local cluster barely showed up as a dot.
The alien ship had originated, or passed through a galaxy that was a vast distance away. Ray guessed there were four hundred galaxies between where it started and where it was now.
“I’ve accounted for galactic movement on the rough track,” Chase said. “That ship never got near another galaxy of any size since it left that galaxy.”
“At its speed,” Ray asked, “was the ship still functioning when it left that galaxy?”
“Yes,” Chase said. “From what we can gather on preliminary scans, it appears it left that galaxy very much alive and functioning.”
A dot appeared about halfway along the line of travel on the big screen. “The ship went dead about at this point, from what we can tell so far.”
“We need a massive amount of study of this ship,” Tacita said. “To find out who this race was and what happened to this ship.”
She looked at Ray and he nodded.
Ray agreed completely. They did need a massive amount of study on this ship. And they were going to have to do it carefully and not miss anything.
But his eye went back along the line the ship had taken from that original galaxy. They also needed to know what was happening there and in the galaxies around it.
Two hundred thousand years had passed. Were these aliens expanding as humans did?
And were they warlike?
In space where very, very few advanced civilizations ever emerged from planets, what would the aliens even think if they knew humans were here and spread over hundreds of thousands of galaxies in this area?
Ray kept staring at the image of the ship’s path on the wall screen.
Even by the galaxy-spanning scale Seeders worked and thought at, the alien original galaxy was a very, very long distance away.
ONE
ANGIE PARK LET the sounds of her motorcycle die off into the silence of the forest and the ruins around her. Nothing moved, not even a slight breeze among the tall pines and the deserted general store and gas station tucked back into the trees.
The building had been cute at one point in the past, almost like a cottage, but now the paint was peeling, the windows were covered in grime, and weeds were growing thick between the building and the useless gas pump. On one side blackberries were starting to crawl up a wall and in a few years would bury the old building.
She had parked on the edge of the two-lane road that wound up through the Cascade Mountains. The road in this area had been still in good shape and very few car wrecks had blocked her for the last twenty miles since she had left I-5.
She pulled off her helmet and let her long black hair fall over her shoulders as she dismounted and set the helmet on her leather supply pack. She was thin and tall and had no trouble at all on the large road bikes.
She had a small saddle rifle in a sling on her back and a small caliber gun hidden in a holster on her leg under her jeans.
Her light jacket covered a T-shirt and she unzipped the jacket to let in the fresh mountain air. It was early summer and the heat today was predicted to be around ninety by the middle of the afternoon, even this high in the mountains.
Around her the silence of the Oregon forest seemed to press in, but after all the years of being alone, she was used to silence more than the noise of being around other people. That’s why she had volunteered for this task, to go out and tell others about Portland.
Plus she really believed in what Portland was building and wanted everyone to know.
Up a small dirt road in front of her that wound through the tall pine trees, she knew a compound sat at the top of that road with six people living in it. Six survivors of the Event, as it was now being called.
The Event had been a wave of electromagnetic energy that swept over the Earth just over three years ago. It hadn’t hurt equipment, but it had killed any exposed humans and dogs and horses and a few other animals. Thankfully it spared cats because she didn’t know what she would have done the first few years of being alone without her cats to keep her company.
Humans who had survived were like her. They happened to be underground or in a vault of some type and were protected from the invisible but deadly wave. She had been a Professor of Physics at the University of Oregon and had been three stories down in a lab under the physics department when the Event happened. Millions like her had survived worldwide, and now civilization was working to rebuild.
After the Event, she had moved far up the Columbia Gorge in a home overlooking the river to get away from all the smell of decaying bodies. She had discovered that civilization was rebuilding when convoy after convoy of motorcycles went down the freeway below her home headed for Portland in the spring of the second year. Men, women, and children.
Because of its climate and natural resources, Portland had been picked as one of the five cities to be the center of the new world in this country. She had followed the convoys after a time and saw and listened to what they were doing and trying to build. A month later she had packed up her cats and moved to Portland to try to help.
Now she was doing what they called “outreach” to those who hadn’t heard yet about building the new world. It was dangerous, but she had wanted to do it. A couple of her friends had insisted she not go alone, but she had felt that a woman alone would b
e more convincing than a bunch of people. So far, she had been right about that.
Since so many of the military had survived on ships, submarines, underground compounds, all the top science had survived as well and was being used in the rebuild. She had seen satellite photos of the compound at the end of the dirt road that was her next stop for the day.
She knew that six were living there. They had set up electrical and had running water to most of their buildings and had a pretty decent surveillance system set up that more than likely was watching her now.
That’s why she had stopped here, to let them watch her. Last thing she needed to do was surprise anyone who had been surviving and living off of nature for three years. Doing that could get a person really dead really quickly.
Over the years, it seemed that a lot of people had gone completely insane thinking that civilization was gone and that they were left alone.
She had thought at one point she might go insane as well because death was just everywhere. The very reason she had found a place on the top of a hill was for protection from the nut cases roaming around, and to avoid the smell of death that first year. But she had set that home up so she could protect it. Luckily, she never had had to.
She looked up the dirt road that wound into the tall pines. It looked far cooler than where she was standing now near the highway in the sun. She needed to get moving.
She knew the names of four of the six people who were living there. And knew that two of them had surviving family members.
Of the thirty compounds like this one she had approached over the last six months, most had come into the city later on their own terms to see what was going on, and after that, many had moved into town just as she had done.
But others were happy where they were and she respected that.
Her job wasn’t to convince them to join humanity again, but to just let them know what was happening.
She took a long cool drink from her canteen, put it back on her bike, then with her hands in the air, started up the road toward the compound. Walking like that told the people watching she knew she was being watched and only wanted to talk.
At least she hoped that’s what it told them.
TWO
“OH, NO, ANGIE,” Gage Teal said to himself from his apartment living room computer station. “Don’t go in there alone. Those folks are whack jobs.”
On the screen he saw Angie Park raise her hands above her head and start up the dirt road toward the compound.
“Shit, just shit,” Gage said, jamming his feet into his shoes and using his comm link to call his three-member team. She had talked herself out of other tough spots, but from his recon on the people in this compound, there was no talking her way out of this one. The people there were nut jobs and cold-blooded killers.
“Situation,” he said to his team when all three answered. “Emergency. Meet me in the staging room in one minute max.”
This was what they had all trained for and had done a few times. But his sole person to take care of was Angie Park and right now she was within minutes of being shot.
He finished getting on his shoes and then looked back at the screen. She was almost up the dirt road to the compound.
He had watched her for six months from one of the many shielded Seeder ships in orbit, making sure that she was safe. She was a very special person and the more he had watched her, the more he had come to realize that.
She was special to the Seeders for some reason he didn’t know. And she was sometimes foolishly brave. He had fallen for her.
And he had never even met her.
Looked like that was about to change very quickly.
He teleported to the staging room and was the second one there. Only Drake, his second in command for the unit, had arrived ahead of Gage.
Drake looked almost square, with a thick neck and a very wide forehead. He was married to the nicest woman on the planet who was so tiny, Drake could have snapped her in half with his bare hands. Gage didn’t want to think about how they had managed two kids.
The staging room was a small room with a wall of weapons that looked like United States military weapons but were actually a bunch more. A large computer screen and a command console filled the other wall.
“Angie?” Drake asked as both of them grabbed their weapons of choice. Both carried what looked like standard issue military rifles and both strapped another gun on their hips in a holster. The rifles were actually laser and could kill or stun a person from a half mile away.
“She’s about to walk into a mess,” Gage said, pulling up the large screen as Jean Marsh and Rollie King appeared and moved to the gun wall. They were a couple and looked like twins instead of being married. Both were as tall as Gage at six foot, both wore body-shirts that made their intense muscle training show clearly. Both wore their brown hair short and only Marsh pretended to break the mold with an earring on one ear.
But they loved to dress exactly the same to mess with people’s minds at times. Clearly they had just come directly from a workout.
“What’s Angie’s walking into this time?” Drake asked.
They had jumped for Angie three times before and hadn’t had to show themselves. But this time was bad, real bad.
Gage showed them the compound and the six people as they gathered around the big screen.
One person was staying in a cabin with a rifle, one was getting set as a sniper in a tree near the road, and the other three were waiting for Angie to come to them.
A sixth man had already gone down to the road and taken Angie’s motorcycle and was pushing it up the dirt road.
“She’s in deep this time,” Marsh said, shaking her head.
“We stun and relocate,” Gage said. “I’ll clear the sniper and the guy with the bike, Marsh and King, you two take the three that will face Angie on the road. Drake, you take the one in the cabin. Wait for my mark.”
All three of them nodded and each pointed to a spot they would jump to.
“Let’s get into positions,” Gage said.
Then he touched a key on the command table and said, “Four transporting to the surface.”
“Clear,” the answer came back.
They all teleported at once and a moment later Gage found himself in a small hidden area behind Angie where he could see the sniper and hear the conversation Angie was about to have.
The air felt warm, almost hot, and the smell of pine filled the air.
As he got ready and made sure his rifle was on stun, his team checked in that they were in position.
This wasn’t the way he had hoped to meet Angie. But it looked like it was going to have to do.
If something didn’t go wrong and she got killed. He would never forgive himself if that happened.
THREE
IT TOOK HER seven minutes to walk up the dirt road before she crested over a slight ridge. She was sweating and now wished she had brought along her canteen instead of leaving it on the bike. It wasn’t much after ten in the morning and it was already getting hot.
And walking with her hands in the air was never an easy task, especially going uphill as she had been doing.
Ahead she could see the five buildings of the compound, all well-maintained. Three single-story houses and two tall-peaked barns sat in a cluster with some fenced-in chicken areas to one side. The fence on those were tall and strung between solid poles, more than likely in an attempt to keep out mountain lions that roamed these hills.
She kept her hands in the air and kept walking toward the compound.
After another hundred paces, a man and two women stepped out of one house and moved to meet her. All three carried rifles, but had them cradled in their arms or down in one hand.
The woman on the right Angie recognized as Bettie Collins from photos. The woman on the left was her sister LeAnne. They had both lived in a small town to the east of here. She had no idea how they survived the Event. They must have been in a deep basement or something at the time as Angi
e had been.
The tall, very thin man in the middle Angie didn’t recognize, but he looked to be about her age at thirty and had intelligence in his eyes that didn’t seem to miss anything.
She instantly had a bad feeling about him.
Instantly.
That was unusual.
None of them seemed at all worried about meeting a stranger. That wasn’t normal in these situations either.
All three of them were dressed in jeans, light shirts, and work boots and all their clothing looked new and clean.
As they got within ten steps, the three stopped and Bettie signaled for Angie to stop and she did.
She was about ten yards from the tree line and very much out in the open.
“Put your arms down,” Bettie said. “That had to be hard walking like that.”
Angie did, smiling and rubbing her shoulders. “I’ve done it numbers of times, but it never gets that much easier. I’m Angela Park, but everyone just calls me Angie.”
“Everyone,” the man asked, clearly puzzled and not introducing himself at all.
Angie nodded. “That’s what I’m here to tell you about. Civilization is slowly rebuilding. Portland is one of the five cities picked to be one of the centers. I’m just out trying to inform everyone about what is happening.”
“How many people are in Portland?” Bettie asked.
Angie shrugged. “Last count about forty thousand.”
“Forty thousand,” LeAnne said, breathlessly.
The man didn’t even flinch.
Angie nodded. “And your Aunt Carol is there and knew I was coming out this way and told me to send her best wishes. She survived as well.”
Angie thought both Bettie and LeAnne were going to collapse right there, but both managed to take deep breaths and then look at each other.
Angie was starting to feel that something was off here. She wasn’t sure, but her little voice was starting to get worried. These people were not reacting in the way that survivors on their own normally reacted, which was usually with fear and then relief that civilization was rebuilding.
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