Star Fall: A Seeders Universe Novel Read online

  For Kris

  SECTION ONE

  Lost

  PROLOGUE

  CHAIRMAN RAY STOOD beside his wife, Chairman Tacita on the massive bridge of their mother ship, staring at the day’s battle reports coming in from hundreds of thousands of light-years of space. Around them the three tiers of stations were all filled with fifty command crew. The noise in the room was low, only a few conversations.

  Ray knew they would win this war. He and Tacita both knew that now. It would take a little more time, but they would win.

  The fight had gone on now for over three hundred years. It would take another hundred years to mop it all up. A short time in the life of Seeders like them.

  Ray’s long gray hair hung down his back as he stood staring at the large screen filling one wall that scrolled all the reports. He had on his normal jeans and dress shirt. Tacita had short black hair that seemed to shine and she dressed as she normally did, with dark dress slacks and a silk blouse.

  “We can’t let this happen again,” Tacita said, her voice her normal calm and level tone as she studied the reports.

  Ray glanced at his wife, his partner for more hundreds of thousands of years than he wanted to think about. Her short black hair shaped her face, often giving her a stern look he knew didn’t usually match her personality. She was still beautiful by any measure. He couldn’t imagine living a moment without her.

  He stood over six feet tall and didn’t really tower over her. They made the perfect couple as far as he was concerned.

  “I know we can’t,” he said. “We can never be caught off guard again by anything going on near human space. Or anywhere in the universe, for that matter.”

  The alien experiment they had been fighting for the centuries had threatened to overwhelm human space, destroy millions of galaxies full of human life. Only luck and the sheer brilliance of the six chairmen of three ships had saved them.

  But now the battle was nearing its end and victory was at hand.

  “Do you have any suggestions?” Tacita asked.

  “I do,” he said. “Please bring up the Starburst image.”

  The battle map on the big screen in front of them was replaced by what looked like a point of light with lines radiating in three dimensions from it.

  “You are going to have to explain this,” Tacita said.

  “The center point is the Milky Way Galaxy, since that is where we have major construction facilities to build new ships for the war effort.”

  She nodded to that.

  “Each line represents one massive ship,” Ray said, “a combination battle ship and scout ship, but far larger than any of our mother ships.”

  “How much larger?” Tacita asked.

  “Each ship should be able to hold over three million souls,” Ray said. “And many thousands of scout ships and battleships.”

  “And their use?” Tacita asked. “I assume you intend for them to go out along these lines. Where do those lines stop?”

  “We give every ship the new trans-tunnel drives and they go out five hundred years before moving over and returning on a new course back.”

  “Five hundred years at those speeds will take all those ships beyond any edge of space we have been able to see,” Tacita said, turning to look at her husband.

  He nodded. “We need to know what exists in the universe before something like the aliens finds human space.”

  He pointed to the starburst illustration on the screen. “All of the known universe and far beyond. And that’s how we find out.”

  ONE

  CHAIRMAN CAREY NOACK stood beside the large chairmen’s chairs in the command center of Star Fall. On the massive wall screen in front of her the daily reports were coming in from all the scout ships. She knew that if anything was abnormal, Star Fall would report it to her. But she still liked to scan the reports every day. Habit built out of hundreds of years now of doing the same thing.

  At least now the reports weren’t about war, but about exploring galaxies. She liked this a lot better.

  Carey stood not much over five-four, had long brown hair she kept pulled back, and always wore jeans, a light blouse, and tennis shoes. Even though she had lived now for a very long time, she still looked not a day over thirty. And was still in as good of shape as she had been when she met Matt Ladel all those years ago in the dead Earth city of Portland.

  Living seemingly forever was a real bonus about being a Seeder.

  Around her the other twenty members of the main command crew were all busy working as well. The command center was exactly the same as the old Star Fall command center had been, even though the new ship was ten times the size of the older ship.

  She was glad she and Matt had decided to keep the command center looking the same on the new ship. Over the centuries she had grown used to the old size of the command center, having the chairmen’s chairs down on the lower level in front of the big screen, then a half-circle of stations behind her, up two steps, then another half-circle of stations around the back wall, up two more steps.

  It made the big room feel like a college amphitheater she had classes in back at the University of Oregon. The room was big and impressive, sure, yet small enough that the entire command crew could work as a team.

  After they had finished the war with the aliens, which had taken them over three hundred years on the original Star Fall, Chairman Ray and Chairman Tacita, the founders of the Seeders, had asked her and Matt if they would be interested in having Star Fall shifted to a new and much larger ship for an exploration mission.

  A mission that might take them a thousand years to complete. But a critical one to make sure the human galaxies were never threatened again as they had been with the alien infestation.

  Both she and Matt, her co-chairman and partner for life, had agreed, and when Star Fall agreed to move to the newer, bigger ship, everything had been set.

  The construction of the new ship had taken almost twenty years. And now, at fifty years into the new mission, Carey still enjoyed the challenge of every day.

  She couldn’t imagine ever getting tired of it, actually.

  They were going to explore beyond the edge of known space.

  She was halfway finished with the morning’s reports from the thousand scout ships they had out at the moment when Matt appeared at her side. He was sweating and had just come from doing five miles on one of the many tracks on Star Fall.

  She didn’t even glance at the handsome man she was more in love with now than the day she met him. She knew he would be sweaty and his short brown hair would be going in all directions. It seemed to always do that, even when he tried to comb it.

  “Don’t even think about hugging me,” she said without looking away from the reports scanning past on the big screen.

  “Would never think of it,” he said, laughing.

  A couple of other command crew behind them chuckled. It was almost a standing joke that he would show up after exercise in the command center and try to give her a sweaty hug.

  “You know you and your team don’t stand a chance this year,” he said.

  She turned and looked at his sweating face and his grin. “Seems to me that your team has lost to my team every year now for six years.”

  “Seven,” one of the command crew said.

  “Seven,” she said, smiling.

  “This is our year,” he said, frowning past her at whoever had corrected her.

  “I think this year you should just work on finishing,” she said, glancing back up at the screen and all the reports, trying not to smile.

  He snorted and said nothing. The last two years his teams hadn’t even finished the Tip-to-Tip race,
although she had to admit they had given it a good try both years.

  The Tip-to-Tip race had been Matt’s brainchild about twenty years into the new mission. The new Star Fall was so massive, holding over three million people, that Matt had thought it would be fun to have a relay race with ten member teams starting at the bow of the ship and running through the entire ship to the stern, then back to the front.

  Tip-to-Tip was born.

  It wasn’t until the two of them, in their apartment one night, working with Star Fall, had discovered just how far that race would be.

  Both she and Matt were from an Earth with a country called the United States. The length of the new Star Fall was from coast-to-coast. Two-thousand, eight-hundred miles from the front to the back of the ship, about four-thousand, five hundred kilometers.

  So Tip-to-Tip would be over nine-thousand kilometers. Or about nine-hundred ten-kilometer races, all linked.

  Without a break.

  Last year the winning team had done the relay race in just under thirty-eight days. Each member had to run or walk ten kilometers before passing the monitored armband to the next team member.

  There were ship hangars on Star Fall that were larger than some of the old states in the United States. The ship had been built in space to explore for a thousand years with three million men, women, and children. The ship had been built to go beyond any known space and explore along the way as it went.

  It was long, shaped in ways like a long bird, and was the size of a decent moon. Its shields were so powerful that on trans-tunnel drive it could plow through a planet and not even notice it had hit something.

  So at first, because of the size of Star Fall, Matt’s idea of a Tip-to-Tip relay race seemed impossible. But the more they thought about it, the more fun it sounded and now it was a major yearly event for the ship.

  Also, it would give a lot of the people living on Star Fall some reason to exercise.

  Last year over eight-hundred teams had signed up. And Carey had to admit the race was grueling and a lot more fun than she had ever imagined it to be.

  This year’s Tip-to-Tip race started in ten days. And she and her team were ready. They wouldn’t win it, but all that mattered to her was beating Matt’s team.

  Bragging rights for a full year were wonderful.

  TWO

  AFTER HIS WORKOUT, Chairman Matt Ladel climbed out of the shower, finished dressing in his normal dress shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes, and then checked in with the other nine members of his relay team. All of them were feeling healthy and ready to go.

  And so was he. And in three team meetings over the last few months, they had a pretty good plan worked out on how they were going to run the race this year. And barring injuries that had happened the last two years, they would make it.

  Last year four of the ten of them had been forced to drop out around day twenty. Running a ten-kilometer leg every ten hours could really stress the body. And most teams didn’t finish with all ten of their members still running.

  But when they lost four team members, Matt and the others found it almost impossible to run a ten-kilometer leg every six hours. They managed to give it a try, but after three more days, they finally had tossed it in.

  Matt couldn’t remember being that sore or that tired before.

  They had still been in the top three hundred teams, since most teams every year drop out much sooner. Last year only one-hundred-and-forty of the eight-hundred-plus teams that started actually finished.

  Carey’s team had been one of the finishers and he hadn’t heard the end of it all year.

  He was in their apartment kitchen, working on getting himself a small snack of cheese and crackers when Carey paged him from the command center.

  “Matt. Got an issue.”

  He knew that tone and those words. When Carey said they had an issue, it wasn’t something he waited around for.

  He popped a piece of cheese in his mouth and jumped to her side in the command center. Every Seeder could teleport, the only way it was possible to get around on a ship this size.

  “We have a scout ship missing,” she said as he appeared beside her. “The Bee.”

  He studied the report on the big screen in front of their chair. He knew the chairman of The Bee. Chairman Reed, a good man, an experienced chairman.

  Reed liked to smile a lot and drink his beer on off hours. For a Seeder, he was stout and solid. In fact, he was known as a superb brewer and a number of the pubs he liked served his beer at times.

  The Bee carried almost two thousand in crew and families and was on a standard one-week mission with a small military ship shadowing it.

  All scout ships went out on rotation for one week, then returned for three weeks so the families and such could have some stability on Star Fall. In fact, most families stayed home instead of going along on the week-long missions, even though every person or family on a scout ship had a home both on the scout ship and on Star Fall.

  The mission of a scout ship was to jump ahead of Star Fall and scout galaxies along the route for any signs of alien life.

  Seeders had discovered that the universe was mostly empty. Only two races had ever developed the technology to go between galaxies. Humans and the Gray, and the Gray had been first.

  Seeders were the branch of humanity that lived a long time and seeded human culture in new galaxies. The aliens they had had to fight were a runaway human experiment.

  So the mission Matt and Carey and Star Fall was on now was to explore outward beyond the edge of the known universe in search of other advanced civilizations, if any existed.

  There were now fourteen ships the size of Star Fall moving outward in a starburst pattern, exploring. So far, no ship had come across anything more than a few emerging alien races in a galaxy. And sadly, most of those races would never develop far enough to get off their home planet, let alone survive long enough to expand out into their own galaxy.

  But Seeders stayed away from even those low-level alien civilizations, making note of them and then never entering the galaxy again. Space was big enough and empty enough to not need to.

  Sometimes Matt found it stunning the scale Seeders worked at. The speeds of the scout ships and of Star Fall were such that entire galaxies with billions of stars could go past like signposts on a road.

  And right now Star Fall was only at half speed, allowing the scout ships to fan out in all directions, scan entire galaxies and report back in. Over a thousand scout ships were out at any given time.

  But in fifty years now of this mission, they had not had a scout ship go missing.

  Matt didn’t like the feeling of this at all.

  THREE

  CAREY GLANCED AT Matt when he appeared beside her. She let him get his bearings and see the problem, then the two of them moved to their command chairs.

  The two chairs were molded together and when in the chairs the two of them could almost be a part of Star Fall and absorb so much more data.

  Matt took her hand and they sat down. They always held hands when in the chair. It allowed them to feel more in contact with each other as well as Star Fall.

  The chair formed in around them, a familiar feeling that Carey had grown to love over the centuries.

  “Star Fall, show us the last images coming in from The Bee,” Carey said.

  In front of their eyes the image appeared as if they were looking at an approaching galaxy from the perspective of The Bee. It seemed like a normal spiral galaxy, small, but nothing unusual. And it had no reading coming from it.

  The Bee planned on holding just at the edge and scanning, then if finding no immediate signs of civilization, doing a complete circuit of the outer edge of the galaxy, then if still clear, The Bee would make a pass through the galaxy before moving on to the next galaxy in their week-long mission.

  Everything looked perfectly normal until suddenly all data and the image simply cut off.

  “Star Fall,” Matt said, “any sign of failure on The Bee in an
y way.”

  “No,” Star Fall said. “Up until the instant of cut-off, all systems were functioning in normal ranges.”

  “Theories?” Carey asked.

  “I have no explanation for this occurrence,” Star Fall said.

  Carey did not like the sound of that in the slightest.

  “Empty space bubble they missed?” Matt asked.

  Carey nodded. That would account for such a sudden vanishing, but all empty space bubbles were tracked by all ships carefully and the Seeders had actually used empty space bubbles as a weapon in the war against the aliens.

  “No,” Star Fall said simply.

  Matt glanced at Carey and she turned slightly to look at him. She could tell he was worried, more worried than she had seen him since the early days of the war.

  “I assume the military escort ship with The Bee recorded the same thing?” Matt asked.

  The military escort ship was the Sinclair, with Commander Tulo in charge. Every scout ship had a much smaller military ship shadowing it, usually screened.

  “It did,” Star Fall said. “Commander Tulo reported the missing ship the moment it happened and took up a standby position near where The Bee vanished.”

  “We need to stop and bring in all scout ships,” Matt said.

  Carey nodded. “I agree. And then send a dozen more scout ships with military escorts to surround the galaxy, but not approach.”

  “Agreed,” Matt said.

  They both stood.

  Carey turned to the command crew, many of them she had worked with for centuries. Worry covered all their faces.

  “We’re going to a full stop and bring in all scout ships,” Carey said.

  No one said a word. A couple of them nodded.

  Beside her Matt said, “Star Fall, please drop out of trans-tunnel flight.”

  “Emergency recall all scout ships,” Carey said. “Including The Bee. See if they can hear us and we just can’t see or hear them.”