Morning Song: A Seeders Universe Novel

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  About the Author

  Other Titles from Dean Wesley Smith

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  For Kris

  Because she likes this series for some strange reason

  Section One:

  IMPOSSIBLE MISSION

  PROLOGUE

  WADE RAY STOOD calmly, waiting, his hands grasped behind his back as he stared at the huge view screen in front of him. His long gray hair flowed over his shoulders and covered the top of his casual gray silk shirt. He wore comfortable dark slacks and dark leather shoes. He never wore anything else.

  He stood only six foot tall, had thin shoulders, and looked fairly young, but his mere presence in the ship’s command center kept the other scientists behind him silent, staring at their individual control areas, some using screens, others using holographic heads-up displays.

  The command center had three levels. The top level along the back had four stations, all diagnostic stations. The next level one step down had three major stations. Two were ship controls and operations, since the ship was huge, carrying over two thousand people.

  The third and center chair was for the chairman of the ship, a term used by many to designate the captain of the ship. Most large Seeder ships like this one, with so many people and families, were for-profit businesses. So chairman was a better title for Wade Ray. Over the centuries, it had always been the standard designation on all Seeder ships.

  Ray had stepped down to the area in front of his major control chair to try to get even slightly closer to the empty, black space staring at him on the screen.

  Every human on this ship was a Seeder, working to spread the human race over every habitable planet in every galaxy they could reach.

  The youngest scientist with him in the command center was only five hundred years old. Ray had told a few who asked that he had lived for just over three hundred thousand years, long enough to see humanity spread over six galaxies, including the Milky Way and its smaller satellite galaxies and now working into the Andromeda Galaxy and all its satellite galaxies.

  But he was far older than even that.

  He hoped to live long enough to see many more galaxies seeded as well, but he had no idea how long he would live. As far as he knew, barring accidents, Seeders could live forever, their bodies constantly renewing. Only boredom or accidents or violence cost Seeders their lives. That’s why the mission of continuing to spread humanity from one galaxy to another was so important.

  It kept them all sane. And challenged.

  From what he understood, there were over fifty thousand major Seeder ships like his, mostly all working in the Andromeda Galaxy on the front lines of the Seeding. There were many, many other Seeders embedded in cultures without ship support working to help newborn human civilizations grow into stable cultures.

  Seeders not only planted the human race, but spent centuries with each culture guiding each planet to maturity.

  And not only could Seeders live a long time, but many had teleportation powers over short interstellar distances. It helped those without ships to get around between systems.

  He had been embedded in cultures for many, many thousands of years, more than he could ever begin to remember, before taking command of his own ship. Now here, in this galaxy, his ship was one of the trouble-shooting ships who jumped around to where they were needed. He had no more desire to work the frontline of the Seeders. His interests lay with helping the cultures that the front line seeded grow.

  Right now, he and his ship were back in the Larger Magellanic Cloud Galaxy, a very long way from the Andromeda Galaxy and all its many satellite galaxies.

  There was a problem here.

  This Milky Way satellite galaxy had been seeded for a hundred thousand years now and had a stable and growing interstellar culture from which many had been recruited to become Seeders and help out in the Andromeda seeding.

  The problem hadn’t started here, but right now the problem was here and that’s also why he was back across so much space.

  Finally, a scientist to his left said, “Now.”

  As he had expected, a huge ship, thousands and thousands of times larger than his ship, almost unimaginable in size, dropped out of Trans-Tunnel flight, but didn’t slow in the slightest as it flashed near the Parson’s system near the outer edge of the Larger Magellanic Cloud Galaxy.

  The ship was a perfectly proportioned winged ship, shaped like a glider, yet Ray could never imagine it entering any atmosphere since it was larger than most moons. It was normal older-Seeder-ship design, with a command bump near the front and the top of the pointed nose.

  It was gray, without a mark or viewpoint or access port on it that anyone on his ship could find. It was as if the surface of the thing was one piece.

  There didn’t seem to be any engines or thruster ports or anything. Everything on the inside of that ship was hidden.

  The huge ship was moving at an impossible real-space speed of over ninety-eight percent the speed of light.

  If it followed its pattern as it had the numbers of times before, Ray knew it would remain in real space for two weeks real time, not ship time, and then jump back into trans-tunnel drive. It would appear again a hundred light years away, remain in real space for two real-time weeks again, then jump again.

  Due to time and relativity problems, ship time on that ship was only about two days before it jumped. That was a problem with anything traveling that fast outside a trans-tunnel flight.

  The ship had followed the exact same pattern since it was first discovered entering the Larger Magellanic Cloud Galaxy. He had watched it now for weeks.

  Luckily, there had been no inhabited planets or systems in its way. It had plowed through a number of red dwarf systems, simply knocking anything aside that got it in its way with force screens of immense power.

  Even a collision with a large moon had simply shattered the moon and hadn’t even seemed to slow down or alter the big ship’s course. That horrified him more than he wanted to let on and he felt responsible.

  He knew it should be slowing. It wasn’t.

  Something was clearly wrong on that big ship and he had to figure out a way to stop it.

  Beside him Tacita shook her head. She was feeling the same about this big ship as he was. They had to stop it.

  Tacita had been at his side now for more years than he wanted to think about. They were partners in every sense of the word. It seems like they always had been.

  She had long black hair that she always wore down and loose and dark black eyes that seemed to see everything.

  She was also the smartest human on this ship by far. How she put up with him, he never understood and always questioned.

  He could never imagine not having her with him, as his partner in life.

  “Has it shifted course at all?” Ray asked, hoping something was changing as he stared at the huge ship on the screen in front of him.

  The more his crew and others studied the ship, the more they all became convinced it was Seeder built, but long before any of their time with the Seeders.

  He knew it was.

  Many wondered if this ship might be from the original Seeders.

  That possibility had many on this ship and other ships excited.

  He and Tacita kept their silence. At this point they needed to.

  “It has not shifted course,” Tacita said, her voice clearly not happy with that. “Something is very wrong.”

  Ray could feel the knot in his stomach tighten even more.

  The giant ship was on course for the Milky Way. And in a very short time it would plow through so
me of the most inhabited systems in the Milky Way Galaxy.

  That was assuming it did not alter course, or if he couldn’t find a way to alter its course or stop it.

  Considering the shields that big ship had, the only way to alter that ship’s course was to get inside of it. And at the speed it was going, with the shields it had, he had no idea how to do that.

  None.

  This was not supposed to be this way.

  And none of his smartest scientists seemed to know what to do either.

  Standing on the outside looking in was not something he liked or often did.

  “Everyone have all the records you need?” he asked, turning to Tacita and the other scientists sitting at stations behind him.

  Tacita nodded without looking up at him. He knew that she was scared to death of what the big ship would do when it reached the Milky Way Galaxy, the damage it would cause without ever meaning to.

  “We have everything we need,” Tacita said, again not looking up, but instead scanning the data on the screens in front of her station.

  “Make sure we have two ships taking readings of that ship every time it appears and have them forward that data to us.”

  He hoped the big ship would start braking, but it should have before now if it was going to avoid disaster ahead.

  “They are confirmed and will comply,” Tacita said.

  Ray nodded and stepped up and sat in his large chair, double-checking all the readings. Then with a glance at Tacita to his right, he said, “Get us to the Milky Way, on the predicted path ahead of this ship.”

  “Trans-tunnel jump in twenty seconds,” Tacita said.

  Staring at that big ship one more time, he said, “We got to go find some help. And maybe warn a few billion people to get out of the way.”

  This entire situation made him sick to his stomach.

  “We have candidates that should be able to help,” Tacita said.

  He nodded.

  Then as if he needed just one more look to really make his nightmares even more real, he kept staring at the huge glider-shaped ship until his ship jumped to trans-tunnel flight.

  It would take them two days to cross the distance to the Milky Way. It would take the big ship six months.

  Six very short months.

  Before then they had better have some answers and some help, or billions of humans were going to die.

  He was a Seeder. His job was to help start new human life and protect it and nurture it where he could.

  There was just no way he was going to let a runaway ship destroy entire civilizations he had helped build.

  ONE

  CHAIRMAN MARIA BOONE sat in her office, a dozen images of galaxies and possible paths through them marked in different colors floated in the air around her.

  She had a cup of fresh green tea on her wood desk and the remains of a lunch consisting of fried chicken and fries shoved to one side, half eaten. The smell of chicken still filled the space, fighting with the smell of freshly brewing tea.

  Beside the desk and comfortable desk chair that molded around her back and gave her perfect support, the other furniture in the room consisted of two chairs so people could sit facing her desk, a soft couch with a quilt tossed up over the back, and a coffee table in front of the couch.

  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 t
o 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.