Taft Ranch: A Thunder Mountain Novel

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  “I am,” Joan said.

  “And you might want to go home for a time?” Bonnie asked.

  Joan actually shrugged at that. She wasn’t sure if she did or didn’t. She knew Lee couldn’t go back there, so doing so without Lee at this point didn’t feel right. But she really missed Steph and she felt like her work was left unfinished.

  “Well,” Bonnie said, glancing at Duster, who nodded that she should go on, “Let me tell you what happened when you two vanished out of thin air. Basically, we covered it up.”

  “How did you do that?” Lee asked.

  Joan felt completely surprised at that. She couldn’t imagine how they could have explained away two people vanishing from a clinic room.

  “Craig was there, one of our people, on your staff,” Duster said.

  Joan smiled at Lee who smiled back. “He said he thought Craig was a traveler,” Joan said, “which is how he knew we couldn’t just tell anyone we were back until this moment.”

  Bonnie nodded. “We faked Lee’s death and then had you go on a long research trip. We added in extra funding to your lab and got in some new doctors and let it grow. Your clinic is now doing some cutting-edge research on the brain.”

  Joan didn’t know what to say. She sort of shuddered, doing her best to not cry, and nodded a thank you. Lee put his arm around her, clearly understanding how important that was to her.

  “Can I ask what happened to Steph? Did she ever recover from me vanishing?”

  At that moment, behind them, the door to the dining room opened.

  “You can ask her yourself,” Bonnie said, smiling.

  Lee glanced back and then said, “I’ll be go to hell.”

  Joan turned around and there stood both Craig, the nurse, and Joan’s best friend Steph.

  Joan knocked over her chair to get to the wonderful hug from Steph.

  And for a minute both women just cried and laughed and hugged as the rest of the room applauded and smiled.

  Her clinic was fine, Steph was here, and Lee was here. There was no reason to go back now.

  This was her new home.

  FORTY-ONE

  August 7th, 2018

  Central, Idaho

  HAND-IN-HAND, LEE WALKED Joan out into the cool air on the deck overlooking the now dark Monumental Valley. The stars in the clear sky seemed to light up everything. And the air helped clear his mind.

  With her at his side, he seemed to see everything differently.

  Clearer.

  For the past three hours they had enjoyed the company of friends. Lee couldn’t believe that Joan’s best friend who she had mentioned a few times was a traveler as well.

  It seems that Steph had gone back to college as her cover, even though she had two doctorate degrees in areas of history in 2018. Both she and Craig hadn’t been born yet in 1986, so when another scout sent back discovered that Lee would be taken to the Failor Center, Craig and Steph went back and put themselves on paths to get to the Failor Center.

  Steph had never planned to become such good friends with Joan. And had been shocked when Joan disappeared with Lee.

  So the fact that Joan had been taken when Lee vanished had changed their plans completely

  She and Craig had decided to stay on at the clinic for another five years to make sure the center kept going with Bonnie and Duster’s help. Steph said those five years not knowing what had happened and if Joan would survive were the hardest years she ever spent.

  Joan felt bad about putting Steph through that.

  Joan was really looking forward to finding out more about Steph’s life in the morning. Her real life.

  “So now what are we going to do?” Lee asked as they stood in the cold air.

  Joan turned to him. “You said it yourself about six hundred years in the future.”

  Lee frowned. “You mean we head the effort to see what we can do to save humanity?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But only if we do it together.”

  He let go of her hand and then put his arm around her. “You actually think we can do that?”

  She laughed softly. “I didn’t think we could make it back here. So who knows what we can do when we set our minds to it.”

  He looked down at her face, lit up only by the faint lights from inside the lodge and the stars overhead. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever met and also the smartest.

  He kissed her lightly, then looked back out over the darkness of the valley and the faint outlines in the starlight of the mountains beyond.

  “We have six hundred years of brain power to recruit from,” he said. “And that means we are going to have to learn how people just before the event lived.”

  “Sounds like a challenge,” she said. “You think Bonnie and Duster and the institute would be up for the challenge as well, the change of focus?”

  Lee nodded. “I do. Bonnie and Duster love the past, love mathematics, love people. I can’t imagine how they feel about their future being cut off suddenly.”

  Joan nodded.

  “But we would need to ask them in the morning. Think Steph and Craig would be willing to help us?”

  “I’m betting they would,” Joan said, smiling at him.

  They stood there staring into the beautiful night air. Lee had known his life had changed the moment he realized what had happened to all of humanity.

  He knew that he would never again be satisfied just going to his ranch back in history and spending the time alone studying patterns in time. That seemed so small now.

  “You know,” he said to Joan. “I really love the past.”

  “I know, she said, hugging him.

  “But the past, even now, this present time, seems pointless knowing there is no future.”

  “So we save the future,” she said.

  “I like that,” he said. “We do that and we bring the value back to the past.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  They stood in silence staring out over the wilderness and all the stars.

  “If you don’t mind,” she said, “right now I want to crawl into a nice warm bed with you and just hold you. And let you hold me.”

  “That idea I like a great deal,” he said. “We can start all the planning tomorrow.”

  “Because there will be a tomorrow,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said as they turned back into the lodge to head to their room. “Now there will be.”

  If you enjoyed The Taft Ranch, you might want to check out Star Mist, available now from your favorite bookseller. Turn the page for a sample.

  SECTION ONE

  The Beginning Before the Beginning

  PROLOGUE

  THE ALIEN SHIP looked more like a large pile of black and gray garbage smashed together into a large ball than a spaceship hanging there in the blackness of space just beyond the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy.

  Yet Chairman Wade Ray knew it was a ship.

  And that ship was the most important discovery in hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of human history.

  Chairman Wade Ray stood, his hands behind his back, in the command center of his ship, staring at the image of the alien ship on the huge monitor that filled one wall of the command center. Ray had his long, silver-gray hair pulled back as always and wore a dark-silk dress shirt and dark slacks and soft leather shoes.

  He could feel the tension around him in the huge room like a heavy blanket on a warm night.

  Sixteen people manned stations behind him and not a one could be heard. They all felt as he felt, that what they were seeing couldn’t be possible.

  Tacita, his wife and partner and co-chairman of this ship, stood beside him, also just studying the strange shape of the alien ship. She had her hair extremely short and wore a black silk pantsuit.

  To Ray, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and he had been in love with her for more years than he wanted to think about.

  He couldn’t imagine ever not having her brilliant mind and sharp wit work
ing beside him.

  Especially now, when they faced an alien ship.

  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 f
riends had insisted she not go alone, but she had felt that a woman alone would be 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.