Morning Song: A Seeders Universe Novel (2 page)

The chairs and the coffee table were covered in data pads and the walls of the office were completely covered with two-dimensional maps of certain areas of space.

Today, she had her long red hair loose down her back and a pink tee-shirt on with the saying, “Don’t Mess with the Redhead” on the front below a very large gun. She had a sports bra under the t-shirt and nylon shorts. At some point she planned on doing some exercise in the ship’s big gym.

At least when she exercised, her freckles seemed to fade a little.

She was from a cold planet originally, where her light skin, golden eyes, and red hair had become almost the norm.

She hadn’t been back there in a couple of centuries, but she kept thinking it might be fun, after all this time, to see how her world was progressing.

But at the moment, she was a couple galaxies away from her home world in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. For over five years now, she and her crew and her ship had been backtracking the Seeders’ route through what was called the Local Group of galaxies.

Over thirty galaxies were in the Local Group, including the three huge ones; the Milky Way Galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Triangulum Spiral Galaxy. Over thirty satellite galaxies were gravitationally connected to one of the big three galaxies and the entire Local Group seemed to hold together as well.

Her goal was to find out if the Seeders had come into the Local Group or originated in it at some point in the distant past. That discovery would be worth a fortune to everyone on board. She was known as the top authority on Seeder history, which was why she had been able to organize this business and ship.

Everyone on board was a Seeder, but not one of them had started out that way. She sure hadn’t. All six hundred souls on her ship had been recruited to the cause of spreading humanity through all of space at one point or another.

Of course, when someone joined on, they also got the gift of long life and health and a few other great gifts that came in handy at times. She was over four hundred years old now and still looked thirty, if that. Her long red hair still shined and the freckles that covered her face and shoulders never seemed to go away no matter what she did.

She kept wondering why Seeders could start millions of worlds with humans on them, solve the aging and sickness problem, and yet not find a solution for freckles.

All the information she and her crew had gathered in the last few months had seemed to conflict. Some data seemed to suggest that the Seeders had just come into the Local Sector, other data seemed to point to a single home planet where everything started out near the edge of the Local Group.

The problem was that the human planets in these smaller edge galaxies were all very mature and had little or no interest in Seeder history. She got help from them, but not much.

Now her ship was between galaxies, moving farther away from the Milky Way toward the edge of the Local Group. There was a small cluster of about a million stars there that might hold clues.

She was about to call it an afternoon in frustration when Dannie from Communications paged her.

She clicked off the images of the floating galaxies and said, “Yes.”

“Chairman, I have a message from Chairman Wade Ray marked critical and for your eyes only.”

“Thanks, Dannie,” Maria said. “Put it through.”

Maria brought the message up on her screen floating in the air in front of her before she even gave herself a moment to worry. She had no idea why Chairman Wade Ray would contact her. If the Seeders had an operating council, which they really did not, he would be the head of it. One of the most powerful of all the Seeders. And one of the oldest humans she knew about.

She couldn’t imagine why he would even take notice of her.

The image came up and she could see the famous Chairman Ray smiling at her, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. His classic long, gray hair flowed down over his shirt and he looked thin and young, just as all Seeders did, even with the gray hair.

“Chairman Boone, I am sorry to have to pull you from your mission,” he said. “But we have a situation developing in the Milky Way that needs your expertise.”

She wished like hell this was an actual conversation so she could ask questions, but alas, it wasn’t.

An image of a Seeder ship came up on the screen. It looked old, as some of the early Seeder ships she had studied. And there was something else wrong about the image.

Ray’s voice came over the image. “Please note the small dot against the lower right portion of the right wing of this ship.”

She leaned forward, staring at what looked like a dot against the hull of the old ship.

Then the image started to zoom in and it took her mind a moment to realize just what she was seeing. That just wasn’t possible.

“That dot is my ship, one of the largest ships we have at this time, in comparison to the large ship behind it,” Ray said, confirming what she knew couldn’t be possible. Space allowed for the building of huge ships, but that huge ship could hold an entire planet’s population and have room left over, it was so big.

“The big ship seems to be out of control and it has extremely powerful screens,” Ray said. “It will plow through many inhabited planets in the Milky Way, killing billions, if it can’t be stopped.”

Ray’s face appeared again. “I have sent all the data we have gathered about this ship and its path. We are going to try to board the ship to gain control of it, since we fear it is a ghost ship. We need your expertise on this coming mission.”

Then Chairman Wade Ray nodded. “Please help us. Billions of lives are at stake.”

At that the message ended.

She sat and listened to it one more time, then did a quick glance at all the data. Maybe, just maybe, she didn’t have to backtrack any more to find the path of the original Seeders. Maybe the knowledge had come to them.

She had Dannie send back a short message to Chairman Ray. “Message received. We are on the way.”

Then she paged her five senior staff and told them to meet her in the Command Center. At top trans-tunnel speed it would take them almost two weeks to reach The Milky Way and the location where Chairman Ray had asked for them to go.

In that two weeks they had a lot of planning to go.

And research, since that ship’s path might point back to the solution they have been looking for on this entire mission as to where the Seeders started from.

But first she wanted to have her senior staff all see the message from Chairman Ray at the same time. She wanted to see their reactions.

And then eventually everyone on board would see the message and data as well. After all, they were all in this together.

But with so many lives at stake, she couldn’t imagine a single member of her crew having an issue with returning to the Milky Way and trying to help.

They were all Seeders, after all. Starting, protecting, and nurturing human life was their job.

TWO

ROSCOE MUNDY BRUSHED the long brown hair from off his face and looked around, stunned at what he saw. He was alone and he stood in the center of the huge main room of an old lodge. He had been in some pretty impressive structures over the last few hundred years, especially the last twenty years working implanted as an enforcer with Sector Justice in the third sector of the Milky Way Galaxy, but this building was close to the top in impressiveness of pure comfort of all the places he had seen.

He dropped his small leather pack on the wooden plank floor and took a deep breath of the clean air. He had on a long-sleeved black shirt with a black leather vest over the top of it and the sleeves rolled up. He had on cowboy boots and jeans and a wide, black-leather belt. The belt buckle was two pistols crossed like swords.

He stood in one place in the big room, just looking around, trying to take in the details.

The walls, posts, and beams were peeled and polished logs that had to be ten feet around in places. A giant, smooth-rock fireplace filled one side of the immense room, a natural crackling fire going in it, giving the room a wonderful, wood-smoke smell.

What looked like a check-in desk, all made out of polished wood, filled the right side of the room near a grand, wood staircase that wound up to a floor above.

To the right of where he had transported in were brown cloth couches and chairs, all facing the huge fireplace and looking very comfortable and deep, with quilts tossed over the backs of a few of them.

He could see pine trees outside the huge windows in a neighboring dining room area that had a good twenty tables with four chairs each. None of the tables were set.

This lodge was very high up in some coastal mountains on a planet that had had a major accident. A stray electromagnetic pulse from a distant nova had wiped out all but about a million of its population. That disaster had happened just over three hundred years before, just after he joined the Seeders and came to the Milky Way to help out.

The population of the planet was recovering nicely, especially in such a short time. In fact, they were almost back into space. They did not know anything about the huge galaxy-wide society of humans growing beyond their system, but eventually they would and join in.

Clearly, this lodge was from the period before the accident, and had been amazingly preserved by someone.

But this planet seemed to be jinxed in more ways than just a freak electromagnetic pulse storm. Now this planet was in a direct line of a speeding monster ghost ship that would destroy it as if nothing were there.

He had been recruited by Chairman Wade Ray to help stop the ghost ship. That’s why he was here.

He picked up his leather overnight bag and moved over to one of the big, overstuffed chairs near the left side of the fireplace. He dropped into the chair, enjoying how it felt completely comfortable and natural.

He leaned back and just stared up at the ceiling and the large, wooden logs over his head.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” a man said as he came down the staircase.

“Completely,” Roscoe said, looking over at the man.

Roscoe had a sudden moment of surprise looking at the smiling, thin guy who looked like a scientist in a brown, pullover sweater and cloth pants and loafers. They guy even wore glasses, even though no Seeder he had ever met needed them.

All Seeder health was perfect. A benefit of the job.

Roscoe couldn’t remember the guy’s name, but they had met once before about a hundred years ago, trying to stop a war in the first sector. Roscoe hadn’t realized the guy was a Seeder at the time.

“Nice seeing you again, Mr. Mundy,” the guy said, extending his hand as he got close. “My name is Vardis Fisher. Everyone just calls me Fisher.”

Roscoe stood and shook his head. “Just call me Roscoe. Didn’t know you were a part of all this when we were back in Sector One.”

“I didn’t know you were either,” Fisher said, smiling and dropping into a chair across from Roscoe. “Maybe they should put bells on us or something.”

“Name tags,” Roscoe said, smiling. “Never was good with names and after a couple of centuries, that’s gotten worse.”

Fisher laughed and indicated the big lodge around them. “Like the old place?”

“I sure do,” Roscoe said. “All yours?”

“My wife and I sort of met here about three hundred years ago,” Fisher said. “This lodge saved her and we were recruited by the Seeders at that point to help out. We’ve kept the lodge as our home and base ever since.”

“Nice,” Roscoe said. He had thought of finding a home base at some point, but so far it just hadn’t come up since he moved around so much. The longest he had stayed in any one place was with Sector Justice, and he knew that was almost over as well, since he couldn’t explain not aging.

But a big lodge like this one with extreme privacy was certainly something he could enjoy. Someday he would find a permanent home.

At that moment, Chairman Wade Ray, his wife Tacita, and two other women materialized in the open area in the center of the room.

Every time Roscoe saw Wade Ray, he was impressed and stunned. Ray was extremely old and powerful among the Seeders. Roscoe had no idea how old he really was and had never had the chance to actually ask. He didn’t look old except for the long, gray hair that hung down over his expensive silk shirt.

Both of the other women were stunningly good looking. One had dark, short hair and the other long red hair. The dark-haired one went over and kissed Fisher, so that had to be his wife, Callie.

The redhead just stood there wearing a t-shirt that left little to the imagination and tight jeans and running shoes. Clearly the woman was in amazing shape and her face and neck and arms were covered in freckles that made her look cute and very alluring.

And she had large golden eyes that were amazing. So far they hadn’t looked at him, as she was too busy looking around at the lodge. He felt lucky because if she did look at him, he wasn’t sure he would be able to turn away.

He hadn’t felt that attracted to someone else in a long, long time. He would have to be very careful around her because all he really wanted to do was play connect the dots with his tongue on those freckles.