High Edge: A Seeders Universe Novel Read online

  Copyright Information

  The High Edge

  Copyright © 2015 by Dean Wesley Smith

  Published in a different form in Smith’s Monthly #11, August, 2014

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover and Layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing

  Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Philcold/Dreamstime

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

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  For Kris

  THE DISASTER

  CHAPTER ONE

  SOMEHOW BENNY SLADE survived almost everyone else in the world dying.

  One minute he went into his old steel vault that filled the back room at Benny’s Personal Loans to get some cash for his next loan and when he came out, both Madge and Maggie, his two right hands, were laying face down on his newly installed brown carpet in the front office.

  Madge, who looked more like his old mother used to look before she got hit by that cab, had fallen next to her always-neat and clean desk while Maggie, about two years younger than Benny’s twenty-eight years, had sprawled in the middle of the floor, her short skirt riding up and showing him a little of those wonderful white panties of hers that he liked so much.

  He had just come out of the vault with the two hundred and sixty in cash for Mrs. Tenny’s loan. He dropped the money on his desk and just acted, not thinking.

  First he called out to Maggie and kneeled beside her and checked her first. He couldn’t find a pulse and she wasn’t breathing.

  Then he jumped over beside Madge. Same thing.

  No pulse, no breathing.

  Both were dead.

  He sat back on his heels, still beside Madge.

  He could feel that cold, hard feeling coming over him like it did when he had been in a firefight in Iraq.

  He hadn’t felt that in four long years.

  He had hoped he would never feel it again.

  With that cold, hard feeling, emotions got shoved back. He had needed that to happen in the gulf and it happened now.

  He just stared at the two bodies in front of him.

  What had happened? No one had come in or out because the bell hadn’t rung on the door. And he had only been in the vault for less than thirty seconds.

  It took him a good twenty seconds of staring at his two dead friends to figure out what was different, what was wrong besides two healthy women being suddenly dead.

  He just kept kneeling there, staring until he finally saw it.

  There was no blood.

  Nothing.

  They just lay face up, eyes wide open, completely dead.

  “Move, Benny,” he said out loud. That finally got himself into motion.

  He stood and went to the phone and called 911, staring at the two women on the floor while he waited.

  But no one answered.

  With the phone to his ear, he went back and checked both of them again.

  Very dead.

  Very.

  The phone was still ringing at the emergency center.

  What had happened?

  His first thought was gas attack, which got him moving even faster.

  He took the phone and scrambled back into the vault.

  He had left the vault door slightly open when he came out, so if it was some sort of terrorist gas attack, he was as good as dead as well.

  Besides, he had stayed out in that front office for a good minute staring at his two friends and trying to call for help.

  After fifteen seconds of standing in the dark working slowly to control his breathing, he got disgusted at himself.

  “Come on, Benny, get it together. Do a little thinking. Use your damn head.”

  Madge had always complained he talked to himself too much, but Maggie thought it cute.

  Maggie had thought anything he did cute, and he had thought she was cute.

  They had flirted since the first day he hired her six months before. She was as sharp as they came and knew money and books and computers, even though she hadn’t finished more than a year of high school. He was attracted but had managed to keep the relationship on only flirt level.

  She had been fun, just not his type.

  Even though he came across as the military type, he had two degrees from the City University of New York, including one in math. He liked women to be much, much smarter than Maggie. But she had still been fun to flirt with.

  He went back out and stared at the two women on the floor. The phone to the emergency center was still ringing.

  He hung it up and tried again.

  It just kept ringing.

  911 was slow at times in New York, but not that slow.

  He didn’t hang it up, just sat it on the desk and stared at Maggie there on the carpet for a moment. He was going to miss those white panties she flashed at him all day.

  He was also going to miss her laugh and her smile and that wonderful blonde hair.

  The coldness inside him whelmed upwards and he pushed those thoughts away. As his sergeant used to say, “Time to fight, time to think later if you survive the fight.”

  His sergeants over the years, all of them, had always been annoyed that he thought too much and didn’t react quick enough when needed.

  Clearly, this was some sort of strange fight he was in. He needed to get moving.

  He turned away from Maggie and headed for the door.

  At first, he opened the door slowly, not sure what to expect.

  The moment the door cracked open, the wave of sound hit him like a hammer. He hadn’t noticed that before because he always just blocked out any sounds from a New York street. Anyone living in the city needed that ability or otherwise go stark raving crazy.

  He opened the door completely and stepped outside, going down the four small steps to the sidewalk.

  The day was comfortable for an early summer day, with high overcast clouds that threatened rain. It wasn’t very warm at all and wasn’t supposed to turn hot for over a week. He hadn’t been looking forward to the heat because he normally wore jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and a sports coat over his shirt. Today he had on a tan shirt and dark-brown sports jacket.

  But when the city turned into a giant sweat-box, he couldn’t dress the way he liked and that just irked him.

  He stood and took a deep breath of the cool afternoon air. Then he made himself really look at what was around him.

  Up and down the street and on all the side streets hundreds and hundreds of car alarms and sirens were all going off at the same time.

  Drivers were still in their cars, either slumped over, or head rolled to one side, held up by their seat belts. Cars had piled into intersections, had smashed into parked cars, or run up and against buildings.

  Most car engines were still running, some racing as if their occupant still had a foot on the gas. Up Lexington Avenue he could see a fire starting to take hold of a building.

  But what he didn’t hear through all the noise were police and ambulance sirens.

  And no one around him in the cars or on the sidewalk was moving.

  No one.

  This was some bad shit. Of that he had no doubt.

  He quickly checked a couple of young girls on the sidewa
lk near his office front door to be sure they were dead. One had on a short blue skirt that had ridden up when she fell to show no underwear and he covered her up before checking her.

  They were as gone as Madge and Maggie, eyes open.

  He stared at their faces. They had not died in pain, that much he could tell.

  No wonder no one had answered his call at the emergency number. From the looks of this, they were dead as well.

  Then, up the street, he saw some movement as people came up out of the subway and sort of stopped and stared.

  “So I’m not the only one,” he said, feeling fantastically relieved.

  He started toward the other people, then saw a couple of them panic and flee back down into the subway, followed by the others.

  “Won’t help,” he shouted. But no one was going to hear anything over the noise of the car alarms and engines.

  But they were doing exactly as he had done when he ran back into his old vault.

  He glanced around at the buildings towering over the canyon of Lexington Ave. He couldn’t see one window opening, or anyone even peaking out at all the noise.

  And as far as he could see in both directions, everything was stopped and bodies covered the sidewalks.

  He walked up to the corner of 54th,, carefully walking around the bodies. He looked both directions.

  Same thing along the tree-lined street.

  Everyone was dead, knocked down by some sort of giant killer in an instant.

  From what he could tell, not a one knew what hit them. None of them looked shocked or panicked or were showing any fear at all.

  Just normal expressions on very dead people.

  “What happened?” he asked out loud, but the words barely made it to his own ears in the noise of alarms and running cars.

  Who knew that the end of the world was going to be so damned loud.

  “I need to find out how far this spreads,” he said into the noise.

  He could feel the panic he had learned to hold down when he was a kid in fights on the street and when in the Iraq war start to ease up into his gut. He hadn’t felt that in many years. It wasn’t the dead bodies that bothered him.

  He had seen worse.

  Much worse.

  Dead bodies after the first few months in Iraq had stopped bothering him, at least on the surface. His counselor at the VA said he had a lot of buried anger and that the only way to get healthy was to let out some of the anger and tell the counselor what he had seen.

  He didn’t want to tell anyone, so he and counselor hadn’t gotten too far in the last few years.

  Death didn’t really scare Benny, but there were dead bodies on his street, in his own business, and he was still alive.

  Now that scared hell out of him.

  He started to head back to lock up his vault, then laughed and looked around. Unless this was the second coming and everyone was going to suddenly spring back to life, locking up his money was the least of his worries.

  But he went in and locked the vault anyway, tossing the money back inside that he had taken out to loan Mrs. Tenny for her grandkid’s operation. More than likely Mrs. Tenny and her grandkid weren’t going to be needing much of anything anymore.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “WHAT A MESS,” Gina Helm said, her voice soft, the shock she was feeling making her voice a whisper that didn’t carry very far in the almost empty banquet room.

  The hotel-like banquet room was large enough to hold five hundred people, but only she and ten others were in the room, staring at a large screen on the wall. Some were almost not breathing, a few were covering their mouths and crying silently.

  The image panned over the area of the planet below where in ten days they would rescue the survivors from that last deadly pulse of electromagnetic energy from an exploding neighboring star. The images they were getting were from about five hundred feet in the air. The bodies of the dead littered the ground seemingly everywhere along the streets of one of the planet’s largest cities.

  In places, a few people moved among the bodies, but mostly all she could see was a sea of death.

  How was a disaster like this even possible? The scope of it just stunned her.

  She covered her mouth because she wanted to be sick, finally making herself turn away from the images of the dead for a moment. She strode for a few paces in the large, empty room, trying to clear her mind a little.

  She was the tallest in the group at six foot, so her strides were long and covered distance across the hard, tan-carpeted floor. She had very short, black hair and she kept herself in perfect shape. Her steps were almost silent. She had on white tennis shoes, jeans, and a long-sleeved white blouse with the sleeves rolled up.

  Her normal working clothes.

  Today was not a normal working day.

  She didn’t like the feeling of being sick, of feeling helpless in any situation. She had learned to always be in top shape and never feel helpless on her home planet a few hundred years before, when as a young woman she had needed to become a survivor.

  And she had.

  Now she was here to try to help the survivors below.

  She needed to pull herself together.

  She turned and instead of looking at the large screen panning over the streets of death, she just stared out the huge wall of viewport that covered one side of the big room.

  The beautiful planet drifted below, whites and blues swirling over the large oceans. It seemed so calm and peaceful and reminded her a lot of her home world. Looking at the planet through the wall-sized viewport, you could never tell the billions of humans who had thrived on that beautiful planet were now dead. Only a few million survivors remained.

  She forced herself to take a few deep breaths to calm herself.

  There were almost a thousand humans on this huge spaceship called Star Conscious that now orbited the planet. The crew and people like her on board were from over four hundred planets in three different galaxies near the Milky Way. Her home planet was in the Lesser Maganelic cluster of stars.

  Everyone on this ship was a Seeder, part of an ancient organization of humans that seeded human culture on all Earth-like planets and then helped the human cultures survive and mature.

  The planet below had been seeded.

  She had been recruited to be a Seeder off her home world when she was twenty-five and now a few hundred years later she still looked the same, since once a person became a Seeder, all aging and disease was cured from the body.

  The Milky Way had been completely seeded and the front edge of the Seeders had moved on to the Andromeda Galaxy and its surrounding satellite galaxies before she had become a Seeder. She had joined in with the social services branch and in two hundred years had been embedded on nine different worlds at different levels of development to help move the culture of that planet forward.

  The planet below had been seeded in the third sector, so it was in the early space-age period of growth, one of the most dangerous periods for any culture. Only the humans on the planet below would now have to start over and build again.

  She had no idea how long it would take them to get back to where they had been in development. Or if they ever would.

  The mission below would be her tenth, and so far the most challenging. She had no idea how to help survivors just live and start to rebuild a civilization taken from them without warning in an instant.

  The Seeders, even with all their ships and skills, hadn’t been able to do anything to help rescue the billions of humans on the planet below from instant death, but they could rescue and help the survivors.

  The Star Conscious had just arrived in orbit less than ten minutes ago, right after the first big death pulse. If that pulse would have been allowed to hit this ship, some inside would have died as well.

  The Seeders who had been embedded on the planet below had escaped on one ship and would be returning to also help with the survivors.

  Helping the survivors was why she was here. She and at lea
st a thousand others covering the planet were going to help the survivors move forward as fast as possible, start to rebuild over the next twenty or thirty years.

  But first they had to rescue as many as they could of the survivors from a second coming disaster. This planet wasn’t going to be struck with just one electromagnetic deadly pulse, but two, the second one coming in just ten days.

  Right now, from another more advanced part of the Milky Way Galaxy, ships were speeding here to try to pull off the planet the almost two million survivors and move them out of harm’s way when the second huge pulse washed over the planet.

  Then they would put everyone back to start the rebuilding process.

  All of those ships from the Milky Way Sector One had Seeders embedded secretly in the crews. Every planet eventually discovered that they had been seeded at a distant time in their past, but the common knowledge was that the Seeders were long gone. In reality, Seeders were everywhere, secretly helping every culture advance and survive. Only the main wave of Seeder ships had moved on out of the Milky Way.

  This ship was only one of four completely Seeder-run ships on this rescue mission.

  She looked around. The large room looked like it could hold a banquet with a hundred tables. It had lights recessed in the ceiling and tan walls. In ten days this room would be full of at least three hundred survivors from below.

  And thousands and thousands of other rooms like it on this ship and a thousand other ships would be full as well.

  Staring out at the beautiful blue planet below, she just hoped enough of the other ships would make it in time to save every survivor from the second pulse.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BENNY HEADED DOWNTOWN along Lexington, stepping over and around the dead bodies on the sidewalks. He thought these sidewalks used to be crowded when people were alive. When the same people were sprawled all over the place, not moving, the sidewalks got even smaller.

  A number of places he had had to walk out in the street to get around cars smashed up on the sidewalk. And in two places he had to actually climb over the hood of a car to even get up the street.